She shut her eyes and tried to quiet her breathing as the footsteps crept closer to her hiding place. She heard an evil chuckle, the sound thick with anticipation, as a broken table leg skidded across the floor next to her hiding place. Was that what Mr. Calhoun had heard just before his heart attack? The first of her clients to die. And Mrs. Lindsey, now with a gaping hole where her throat should have been. They’d been vandalized too.
Shay forced her eyes open, terrified she would find his face inches away, but only his boot was there, the square toe so close she could have touched it. She clamped her lips together and listened to him breathe while her own lungs screamed, until nothing mattered but the next breath of air.
Chapter 1
She wasn’t in Scotland. That was the first thing Shay registered when she smashed her foot against the wall. She sat up, disoriented. This bedroom hadn’t been hers for nine years. Rubbing her toe, she tilted her head, trying to pinpoint the sound that had woken her. Was it the strange dream? This one was always the same, a place that glowed, a man she couldn’t see, speaking a language she couldn’t understand. It was better than the one where she was buried alive in a casket, listening as dirt fell on the lid. The only twist in her dreams these past weeks was that Cody haunted them. Shay hoped this impromptu trip would exorcise at least one ghost from her life.
The scuttling noise came again. Probably just mice. Aunt Nina said they’d become a problem with the house empty.