Epilogue

The attic rooms he’d rented in the Stewart’s bed-and-breakfast were roomier than the apartment he would now have to sublet in Georgetown. Marcus Wildes folded the deputy uniform he’d worn for the past year and placed it in a dry cleaning bag for pick up. He’d have it delivered to the sheriff’s office once it had been cleaned.

But he didn’t change into any of the dark suits that waited in the back of the dusty closet under the eaves. Instead, he pushed them farther back and pulled out a leather jacket to shrug over a casual shirt and jeans.

Sabbatical.

He was long overdue for a vacation. Amelia Glass had picked the time and place.

Scarlet Falls.

His instincts had started buzzing before he’d even crossed the county line. He’d fought the hum of warning for almost 365 days. For her. He didn’t know if he could fight it much longer but he had to try.

For as long as he’d known Glass she’d been in danger. Hell, she doggedly hunted danger, drawn to it like a mouse to cheese in a trap. She’d escaped the deadly snap time and again.

But not this time.

The itch under his skin—the same one that had pointed him toward Tom McCall as a prime suspect when others would never have believed it—said that this time Amelia Glass would die. He wasn’t fond of what his heightened instinct said about his unusual ancestry. He’d spent his life with his back strongly turned against the idea of anything remotely associated with the occult. But he didn’t turn his back on the skill itself. His ability to feel the right way to go in an investigation had saved lives and brought killers to justice.

What Amelia Glass saw when she looked at him through the lens of the battered old camera she wielded in her work was something he tried not to think about at all.

∗ ∗ ∗

Outside, the old Victorian bed-and-breakfast, a solitary large crow with faded, ruffled wings perched on the ledge of a mullioned attic window. The crow worried and pecked the wavy vintage pane making no other sound but the hollow thump and sliding shriek of its beak against glass.

Again and again, the crow doggedly attacked the glass as if it tried to tear its way into the attic rooms beyond. Each failing impact was too far from the ground to be heard by anyone passing below.

If someone had noticed, if someone had braved an approach to the seemingly mad creature with ladder or open window, they would have seen deep scratches pitted in the pane from the crow’s force and persistence. They would have seen that the window was smeared with the crow’s blood, but that it didn’t seem bothered by the injury it had caused to itself. Its feathers were damp and matted around its beak from its constant, useless effort.

Weeks upon weeks of effort.

∗ ∗ ∗

Marcus left his attic rooms without noticing the bird who seemed determined to join him inside and went in search of the woman he would either damn or save in Scarlet Falls.