LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1

      In Ireland, two thousand people vanish every year.

       The Irish countryside was quiet and the darkness was absolute, as it could only be far from the lights of a city. Here, beside the narrow road that led to Westport, the night felt empty, but for the squares of lamplight in the distance, marking the places where farmhouses stood in silence.

       In the grassy field, ancient tombstones tipped and tilted crazily as if they’d been dropped from heaven and left to stand as they fell. Trees bent in the wind, and their bare limbs clattered like a muttered conversation. A fairy mound rose from the ground and lay littered with wildflowers that looked black and white in the starlight. A sigh of something ancient whispered in the darkness, and far away, a dog moaned into the quiet.

       A young woman stood in the center of the stones, as she’d been told. She waited, impatiently checking her wristwatch and shrugging away the superstitious twitch at the base of her spine. The stones were eerie enough during the day, but at night, when the sky was black but for the stars, the woman half expected ghosts to rise up and chase her out of their graveyard.

       The woman shivered again at the thoughts jostling through her mind and shrugged deeper into her coat. There was nothing to fear, after all. Hadn’t she grown up here? Didn’t she know this road to Westport well enough to travel it in her sleep?

       No, the only thing to worry her was that maybe the man she waited for had forgotten his promise to meet her. Maybe he was with someone else. Maybe…

       “Darlin’,” a deep voice whispered from close by. “I knew you’d come. I’ve been waiting for you.”

       She whirled around, a smile of welcome on her face. Something blacker than the darkness rushed at her. She screamed as a howl lifted into the air, and a moment later the cemetery lay empty in the night.

      “What was that?” Alison Blair stopped dead and felt the small hairs at the back of her neck stand straight up.

      The long, undulating howl still quavered in the air as she stared back down the road into the darkness.

      “A dog, no doubt,” the guard at the wrought-iron gate muttered in an Irish accent so thick it almost sounded as though he were speaking Gaelic.

      “Scary dog,” Aly muttered, turning back to watch as the big man studied her ID card. Frowning, she said, “It’s not a forgery, you know.”

      He flicked a glance at her from under thick black brows, and she deliberately lifted her chin and met that stony stare with one of her own.

      The man nodded in approval, then said, “There’ll be hell to pay when the boss hears you’ve come.”

      “I know.” As a member of the Guardian Society, Aly knew she would be as welcome here

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