LITMIR.BIZ

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wide range of colors from soft pink to deep midnight, depending on the angle she held it. Even more curious, every now and then it seemed to emit a small electrical charge. A little zap that made her fingers tingle.

      Unable to resist the urge, she plucked it up one last time and ran her fingertip over the surface. The colors shimmered as she stroked it. The effect was almost mesmerizing. She stared at it a moment until Tim’s voice broke the spell.

      “What’s that?” he asked.

      “I was hoping you might have an idea. You know a little about everything. What do you think? Is it a fish scale?” She set it in her palm and lifted her flattened hand so he could get a better look.

      His eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead as he picked it up and examined it. “Wow, this is amazing. Truly amazing. Where’d you get it?”

      “A friend’s house. It was on the floor.”

      “Does your friend have a pet snake?” he asked as he flipped it over to look at the other side.

      “Pet snake? Heck no! He hates snakes. Why?”

      “Looks like a piece of shed snake skin to me. I’d have to get a look at it under the microscope to be sure. Be right back.” He walked back to his office-slash-lab, where he kept all his electronic gadgets and gizmos, and disappeared behind the closed door.

      Sophie stayed put, despite her growing curiosity about the strange scale—skin—whatever, and tried to imagine how a piece of snake skin would end up on Dao’s floor. She came up with absolutely nothing. That was, indeed, a mystery all in itself.

      Tim returned several minutes later with the most bizarre look on his face. It was something between awe and terror. “I need to meet her. I must meet her—”

      “Meet whom? Slow down, would you? What would a snake scale—”

      “Skin. Definitely shed skin.”

      “Fine. Snake skin. What would a snake skin have to do with…her? It’s a female snake? How can you tell? Did you get a little piece of nipple there? And how does one ‘meet’ a snake? Do you need a formal introduction?”

      Tim rolled his eyes and looked at Sophie as if she were an absolute twit—which she was not, thank you very much.

      “Don’t look at me that way,” she said. “I wasn’t privy to whatever you saw under the microscope. I’m not a moron. Fill me in.”

      “Is your friend a male?” Tim asked as he continued to study the skin.

      “Yes. A male human, that is. Just to clarify.”

      “Yes. Of course he’s a human. Is this friend of yours dating someone…or married?”

      “Yes. He’s married but not to a snake.”

      Tim shook his head. “Poor guy,” he murmured.

      “What poor guy?” Sophie yanked on Tim’s sleeve. “Poor guy because he isn’t married to a snake?”

      “No, poor guy because he’s married to her already.”

      “What’s Dao’s marital status have to do with anything? Besides, what’s wrong with marriage? I never imagined you to be one of those ‘marriage sucks’ kind of guys.”

      “I’m not, unless the wife happens to be a lamia.”

      “What the heck is a lamia?”

      “A muse. A female vampire. Is your friend by any chance a writer?”

      “Yes, but what’s—”

      “And since he’s been married has he been more obsessed with his writing? Has he become ill yet?”

      “Yes, on the writing. And yet?”

      Tim looked into her eyes and again shook his head. “Poor guy. He’s doomed.”

      “Doomed? Why?”

      “She’s destroying him.”

      “Who? Lisse? She’s a quiet little thing. Maybe a tad demanding in bed from what I surmise, but hardly the kind one would expect to be a vampire. She doesn’t even have a widow’s peak. Don’t real vampires have widow’s peaks? And her teeth all look normal.” Despite all the things Tim seemed to know about Dao, for which there was no reasonable explanation—he couldn’t have been listening in to her conversation with Lisse—she wasn’t buying the whole lamia thing. There was no such thing as vampires. Or ghosts. Or monsters. Nuh-uh.

      Tim’s work as a paranormal researcher was a joke. She’d seen nothing to convince her of the existence of anything paranormal. His so-called proof consisted of hazy photographs and less than credible eyewitnesses.

      “Yes. She’s a lamia. Half woman, half snake.”

      “I’ve seen her. She’s no snake. In fact, she’s very beautiful. And she definitely has two legs. Couldn’t speak for her tongue, though. Could be forked. I’m not about to go ask her to open wide and say ‘ahhhh.’”

      “She wouldn’t show her true self to anyone but her lover.”

      “If there’s one thing I can be certain of it’s that Dao wouldn’t find a woman covered in scales sexy, even if the scales were rather pretty.”

      “He would if he was under her spell. The lamiae are extremely powerful vampires. They find their mates and slowly, over many weeks, seduce them until they are completely under their spell. Once a man marries a lamia, he’s doomed to die a swift, miserable death. He’ll grow weaker and weaker, his life drained from him by his wife.”

      “Swift? How swift?”

      Tim shrugged. “I’m not sure of the time line. A couple of months, maybe.”

      “A couple? Like two? Because he’s been married that long already.” She fought the urge to panic. This was a bunch of baloney. There was no such thing as a lamia. And Dao wasn’t about to die. Dao couldn’t die. He just couldn’t.

      Unfortunately, Tim didn’t seem to know that. “Sounds like he’s near the end. Sorry.”

      She didn’t like what she was hearing. Not one bit. Which was why she preferred to look for another reason for Dao’s illness. And his strange behavior. And the snake skin in his living room. Okay, there were a number of coincidences here. “There must be another explanation. That skin is from a…a python or something. Who knows, maybe he went to a zoo—”

      “It’s not the skin of most common varieties of snakes. I snapped a quick photograph and e-mailed it to my buddy who works in the zoo’s reptile house. He’s assured me it’s not from any snake they have there. That rules out several varieties of pythons and boa constrictors. Just to make sure, he’s forwarding the image to a friend of his who identifies shed snake skins for a living.”

      “Ick. There are people who do that for a living?”

      “Sure. Out west especially. Think about it. If you found a shed skin under your porch, wouldn’t you want to know if you had a venomous snake living under your house?”

      “Yes, I suppose so.”

      Tim set the piece of skin on the desk and stared into Sophie’s eyes. “Look, when I hired you, I told you I didn’t require you to actually believe in what I study here. So I accept that you’re doubtful. But this is your friend, and if you truly care about him, I suggest you reconsider your position on a few things. Vampires do exist. And they do kill.”

      A lump the size of Tim’s SUV formed in Sophie’s throat as she let his words pass through the baloney filter in her brain and really sink in. Even if she still didn’t believe in vampires, didn’t she owe it to Dao to check out all the possibilities? “So, what’s the next step? Do you need to go scan Lisse with one of your gadgets? Shoot her with an ionizing ray? How do I know she’s in fact one of those lamia things and if she is, how do I get her to leave

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