LITMIR.BIZ

      Much love and thanks to:

      The FNMS. Michele, for eye rolls and encouragement. Chris, for loving my characters (and me) enough to read revised scenes for the nth time. Cheryl, for your advice on shameless self-promotion. Marti, for the [expletive deleted] advice from that [expletive deleted] book. You know which one. Derek, for keeping the adverbs and alliteration at bay. And Mary, even though you weren’t part of the crowd then, you deserve a mention for being Cyrus’s biggest fan.

      Peggy, who let me pretend to be a writer on her typewriter when I was four years old.

      Shannon, for still liking the book after viewing my lame attempt at dancing.

      My editor, Sasha Bogin, and my agent, Kelly Harms, for being enthusiastic about this book and me.

      Joe, for believing I could do this and subjecting yourself to the ups and downs of living with a writer.

      Prologue

       Welcome Back

      He didn’t know how long he’d been dead. There was no time, no season, no change, only eternity.

      Shadows stumbled around him on the other side of the veil. Two in particular caught his attention. He knew what they were. He’d been one of them.

      The life he craved was accessible to them. Now, as in his living death, he wanted to leech it from the mortals who couldn’t protect themselves. If he could envy this undead pair, he would, but there was no time. They had no life, so they were none of his concern.

      On the other side, they couldn’t see him. When he was of the world but not alive, he couldn’t see the ones who’d gone before him, either. Despite their sightlessness, they appeared to follow him. He moved away. He wanted life.

      It was a fool’s errand, his never-ceasing search for that mortal energy. It throbbed in the people and animals he passed every day, but he could not touch it. Thin though the veil was, it separated him from what he craved. He could reach for it, hold it in his hands, but the film of the shadow curtain always kept him from it.

       Jennifer Armintrout

      Color, alien to this existence, would have shocked his senses, if he’d had any. The lifeless pair held something between them, shimmering and frightening like the fiery sword the angel held at the gates of Eden. It drew shadows to it like moths to the flame, though he hated such cliché description. He hated more that the thing drew him, as well. The shining rift split wider, and a hand, not full of life but real nonetheless, thrust through.

      The other shadows clamored for it, sliding over it. Like water on oil, they rolled off the corporeal skin. As if searching specifically for him, the intruder pushed the others aside and grasped him. He stuck.

      He hadn’t felt panic since he’d died. Hadn’t felt despair since her betrayal. He felt it now as the rough, real fingers pulled him through the rift.

      Thick and heavy, feelings he’d almost forgotten happened all at once. Slippery and hot, sensations he remembered being pleasant at one time engulfed him. His formless being squeezed and conformed into a shape at once familiar and horrifyingly foreign.

      Too bright. Too cold. Too real.

      Too loud.

      One of the pair laughed like jagged glass. “We fucking did it! I can’t believe we fucking did it!”

      The light stung his eyes. He blinked, but his vision didn’t clear. In his chest, he felt a thump that hadn’t been a part of him for centuries—the beating of a human heart.

      Alive. He was alive.

      He dropped to the floor, screaming and clawing at his mortal prison.

      The one who’d done it leaned over him and slapped him on the back. The connection of flesh against flesh drove needles of sensation to the bone.

      “Welcome back, Cyrus.”

       One

       The End

      I read a poll in the newspaper once that said the number one fear of Americans aged eighteen to sixty-five is public speaking. Spiders are second, and death a distant third. I’m afraid of all these things. But most of all, I’m afraid of failure.

      I’m no coward. I want to make that perfectly clear. But my life turned from nearly perfect to a horror movie in a matter of days, so I take fear a lot more seriously now.

      I’d followed my life plan almost to the letter, with very few detours. I’d gone from plain old Ms. Carrie Ames to Dr. Carrie Ames just eight months prior to the night I now refer to as “The Big Change.” I’d broken away from the sleepy, East Coast town I’d grown up in, only to find myself in a sleepy, mid-Michigan city. I had a great residency in the E.R. of the public hospital there. The city and surrounding rural communities provided endless opportunity to study and treat injuries inflicted by both urban warfare and treacherous farm equipment. Living my dream, I’d never been more certain that I’d found the success and control over my destiny that had always seemed to elude me in my tumultuous college years.

      Of course, sleepy mid-Michigan towns get boring, especially on frozen winter nights when even the snow won’t venture out. And on a night exactly like this, after only having been home for four hours from a grueling twelve-hour shift, I was back at the hospital to help deal with a sudden influx of patients. The E.R. was surprisingly busy for such a forbidding evening, but the approaching holiday season seemed to affect everyone with a pulse. Thanks to my rotten luck, I was charged with attending trauma cases that night, patients with serious injuries and illnesses that put them in imminent danger of death. Or, more specifically, carloads of mall-hoppers who showed up in pieces after hitting black ice on 131 South.

      After I’d admitted three patients, I found myself in great need of a nicotine fix. While I felt guilty for sticking the other doctors with a few extra cases, I didn’t feel guilty enough to forgo a quick cigarette break.

      I was heading for the ambulance bay doors when John Doe arrived.

      Dr. Fuller, the attending physician and most senior M.D. in the hospital, ran alongside the gurney, barking instructions and demanding information from the EMTs in his nononsense Texan accent.

      Distracted by the fact that Dr. Fuller’s smooth, Southern speech had been replaced by an urgent, clipped tone, I didn’t notice the patient on the gurney. I had never seen my superior lose his unflappable calm before. It scared me.

      “Carrie, you gonna give us a hand here or are you on a one-way trip to Marlboro country?” he barked, startling me. The cigarette between my fingers snapped in half when I jumped, reduced to a fluttering shower of dry tobacco. My break had been officially canceled.

      I brushed my hands clean on my lab coat and fell into

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