“Rowan.” She cocked her head and shot me a frown as she paused-effectively impaling me with her I’m serious look. “I’m half asleep, but I’m not blind. You’ve coffee on, and you’ve been playing solitaire on your computer. Quit screwing with me, then.”

“Okay,” I answered with a defeated sigh. “I’m waiting for Ben to call.”

As absurd as it sounded, it was the truth.

It may be the middle of the night, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the telephone was going to ring, and Detective Benjamin Storm was going to be at the other end. For me, very simply, this was a foregone conclusion.

What’s more, it was not because he happened to be my best friend and that he just felt like talking at an odd hour. It was going to be something I didn’t want to hear but probably already knew. In any case, I knew it would be something that I had no choice but to deal with.

Felicity closed her eyes and let her head tilt forward, dropping her forehead into her hand.

“Nightmare?” she asked softly as she began massaging her brow. She was intimately familiar with the forms my precognitive intuition would sometimes take.

“Headache.”

“Humph,” she grunted, then asked hopefully, “Did you take anything just in case?”

“Not that kind of headache,” I replied.

“You’re certain, then?”

Her question was answered by the grating peal of the telephone vibrating against the walls of the small room before I could even utter the “yes” that now lodged itself in my throat.

My wife looked up at me with sadness in her jade-green eyes and then gave a slight nod to the coffeepot. “Aye, I’ll go put on some clothes. Best pour me a cup of that as well.”

I started to protest. “I don’t think…”

“…That I should go?” she shot back, filling in my sentence and cutting me off. “Are you planning to stay out of it?”

I sighed and fidgeted at the sudden tension. She already knew what my answer would be.