Under any other circumstances her melodramatic hypocrisy would have made me indignant—she hadn’t shown any such concern while I was in the hospital after having my head knocked in—but right then I was too stunned. “How many times has this shit happened to me?” I muttered.

My mother stared back at me with tear-reddened eyes, her makeup running down her face. “Just the once, honey.”

I grabbed the photo. She tried to resist my pulling for a moment. Then she gave up. I stared at the picture, studying it closer than I had the first time.

The spots and smears weren’t all just dirt. Some of them looked like tiny blurred faces. Ghosts.

Cameras sometimes caught the images of ghosts as they literally passed through the thick material of the glass lens. Some odd property of glass slowed them down enough to make a kind of shadow on the film beyond. I’d learned this on a case almost two years earlier. The picture was busy with phantoms—although it was also just a plain crappy photo full of dust and sunspots.

I started pawing through the photos we’d already looked at, searching for more signs of ghosts. In the cowboy hat photo, I saw more of them, but they were clustered around my dad. The photo of Dad and Uncle Ron didn’t have a wayward column of cigarette smoke: It had a ghost. Picture after picture showed something weird hanging around the Blaine family—mostly around my father and me. Or rather, I realized as I looked again, it hung around my father and only incidentally around me until after he died. Then it was all mine. Was my Greywalking ability some kind of. legacy? It still just didn’t make sense, but it sent a chill through me.

I needed confirmation, evidence. “Do you have more pictures of me after Dad died? I mean just ordinary photos, not the pro headshots from my resume.”

“Well, of course, sweetie.” She seemed happier that I wanted to indulge in some vanity and move off the subject of dead cousins.

We dug through the second box in haste, unearthing every photo we could find of me after age twelve. Every one had a spot, a smear, or an impossible streak of light at the least. Several had unexplainable faces peering from the edges. They had become more common as I’d gotten older. I felt sick. Only the professional photos were clear and I’d have bet large sums the photographers had spent a good deal of time in their darkrooms or computer suites removing inexplicable anomalies from my headshots and dance poses. Even candid photos of me at rehearsals and in shows had odd blurs and “tricks of the light” near my figure.

I’d been unwittingly haunted most of my life, and now those things from long ago—forcibly forgotten—were coming back.

CHAPTER 14

As if someone had drawn a cork from the bottle of memory, things flooded back. I did remember long-haired Jill,A smiling and yelling and urging me into all sorts of trouble. Not that much urging had been needed. Rare holidays at Uncle Ron’s had been some of the few times I’d spent whole days goofing off with other kids. During the school year my life had been nonstop classes—at school or dance studios—rehearsals, and performances, or exhaustion and hiding in my room to steal an hour reading my precious mystery novels.

In the midst of memory, there came a rising nausea, and a sharp pain cut through my left hand. The slicing sensation brought on a bright instant of vision, like a single frame of film flashed on a rough white wall: Will Novak, his left hand severed at the wrist, blood bright scarlet on plaster walls. I gasped and jerked reflexively toward the vision as if I could stop him bleeding.

“Sweetie? What? Are you OK?” my mother asked, startled.

“Fine,” I snapped. Then I caught my breath properly and replied in a quieter voice, “It’s nothing. Just some kind of muscle spasm. In my hand. Cramp, I guess.”

She glanced at my hand clenched in my lap. “Are you sure? I have some warming gel if you want it. ”

I shuddered at the thought of the smelly companion of so many casual injuries in my youth. “No, thanks, Mother. I’ll be fine. Really.”

I was as startled by the vision as by the content. It wasn’t quite identical to the previous night’s bad dream, but it was close enough to be of the same moment. But I wasn’t sleeping, and Michael had said there was nothing wrong with Will. Was this what had happened to my father? No. His visions seemed to come only after paranoia. I wasn’t paranoid—just cynical. And I couldn’t stop wondering what was happening to Will. Was this some kind of portent or just a fabulation? The logical part of my brain said he was fine, just as he’d been fine when I’d called before, but some terrified monkey part was screeching that he was dismembered and stuffed in trash bins spread across half of central London.

I forced the thought away, clenching my teeth at the mental effort. The horror wanted to stay. I’d never had visions before, and I’d been assured over and over that I wasn’t psychic and didn’t have the power to see anything beyond what was actually present in the Grey. Still, it gave me the creeps.

“Mother, have there been other. deaths in this family, like Dad’s and Jill’s?”

“Good heavens, sweetie, how ghoulish of you!”

“No, Mother, I just wonder if we have some. curse.”

She tossed her head so her glossy hair flipped and swung. “No! We’re not some family from a Southern Gothic novel, for goodness’ sake!”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure if I should believe her, but surely she wouldn’t start hiding things now. She hadn’t needed a lot of prompting to tell me about my father’s suicide or Jill’s accidental death. The frustrated actress in my mother relished the recitation of tragedy.

I’d have asked more questions, but my phone rang and without thinking, I answered it. I could see a message icon from earlier and reminded myself to check it when I was done with the current call.

“Harper Blaine.”

“This is Carol, Mr. Kammerling’s secretary. We’re very anxious to have a meeting with you as soon as possible. Would you be available tonight?”

I wasn’t sure if I was being ordered around or begged. I’d talked to Edward’s various secretaries and assistants—both the mortal ones and the vampiric—and the tone from this one was a bit less imperious than usual. Of course, she might just be new and not yet used to being the daytime minion of Seattle’s top vampire.

“I’m in Los Angeles at the moment,” I replied. “Edward will have to wait until I get back. What is he so eager to meet with me about, anyhow?”

“I’m sorry; Mr. Kammerling’s instructions don’t say. It is extremely urgent, though. I can have a corporate jet bring you to Seattle this afternoon and return you to LA tomorrow, if you like.”

Corporate jets aren’t that big a deal to someone with Edward’s fiscal standing, but the urgency was a bit unusual. Time has a different scale when you’re three hundred years old, and while Edward Kammerling isn’t known for his patience, he’s gotten cagier since he’s known me. Things in the vampire world rarely need to move at the speed of sound, but if his problem were a corporate, daylight-world one, he had a stable full of lawyers, assistants, runners, and two-legged sharks to deal with it. This must have been something of the nightsider kind, but putting his cards on the table was definitely not Edward’s standard operating procedure in either realm.

I thought I’d test the waters before I committed to anything. “I should be done with my business here tomorrow,” I told Carol. “Can’t he wait that long?”

“No. He could come to you if it’s necessary. ”

“He must be desperate.”

She didn’t reply to that.

I sighed. “All right. I’ll wrap this up and come home today. If you can have the plane ready to go at Burbank airport by eight, I can be on it.”