Death doesn’t frighten me. We are old friends by now. But just knowing death doesn’t mean I seek it. Some people do. Some even reside there, but that’s not for me. For me, it’s an occupational hazard. I’m a Greywalker. I dance along the high wire between the realms of the living and the dead, in the strange intersection called “the Grey,” where ghosts dwell and monsters are real and the fire of magic sings in hot lines of power, gleaming like neon in rain-slicked night that continues all the way to the bottom of the well of the world.
But that’s not what my business card says—HAVE GHOST; WILL TRAVEL. No, mine just reads HARPER BLAINE, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. I wanted that job and I worked to get it. The other . . . That just happened one day when an angry man beat my head in. It would have happened anyway; he just accelerated the process. I’ve died and come back three times and each brings me closer to the last, and each time I wake changed. I have no control over it—it just is. I suspect that my next tango with death will be my last.
So I work for ghosts and monsters and sometimes for the people I love. And that’s where things get weird. Because a little more than a year ago I wouldn’t have expected my lover to leave me within the next six months to pursue his father across Europe, and I wouldn’t have expected to get a mysterious message in another eight months summoning me to join him, or that I would bring a vampire along with me when I did.