Before she could respond there came another crack of wood and then a splintering noise, accompanied by the hiss of the fire. Julianna spun to see the church roof give way and the steeple start to fall. It snapped in two, part of it crashing down inside the blazing ruin. But the top of the steeple struck the ground only a few feet from where she had been standing, the fire sending up tendrils of steam as it hit the snow.

For a moment she could only stare at the ground, then she let out a shuddering breath and glanced at Halliwell. “Thank you.”

The detective replied with an almost imperceptible shrug, then turned to survey the village, as though he was back in Maine and this was just another case. Halliwell was thus far doing an excellent job of pretending he was undisturbed by what they had seen as they arrived at Canna Island. They’d come halfway around the world in search of Oliver Bascombe on a journey financed by the law firm of Bascombe amp; Cox. Halliwell was a homicide detective, moonlighting for the firm because Oliver was wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of his father. Julianna was an attorney working full time as a case investigator for the firm.

Oliver Bascombe was her fiance.

He had disappeared shortly before his father’s murder-gone missing in the middle of the night, in a snowstorm far worse than the one currently assailing Canna Island. Then, on the night of Max Bascombe’s murder, Oliver’s sister, Collette, had gone missing as well. There was so much more-theories that Halliwell had, imagined connections to the mutilation murders of dozens of children around the world-but there could be no answers to any of those questions until Oliver was found. The murder of one of its founders had been ugly enough; if there was to be more bad publicity, the firm wanted to be in a position to do some spin control.

Julianna and Halliwell had tracked Oliver here and paid a local man an absurd sum of money to take them out to the island in the midst of the storm. On their arrival, they had been rewarded with a brief glimpse of Oliver as he strode toward them-toward the dock-with the fires beginning to burn in the village behind him. But Oliver had not been alone. He had been accompanied by a man with blue feathers in his hair, an Asian woman wearing a copper-red fur cloak, and a man made entirely of ice.