Fade To Midnight. Shannon McKenna

felt bad for lying like a rug, but give a girl some privacy. The redheaded girl subsided, looking unsatisfied. Edie’s publicist made a brisk wrap-it-up gesture. They’d run twenty minutes over for the question and answer session, and she hadn’t even started signing yet.

      The book signing was the easiest part, though she felt silly repeating the same scrawled sentiments on the flyleafs of each book. She made an effort to chat, but it was going to feel good, to sprawl on her couch with a cold beer and a rented movie. Mutants taking over Los Angeles. She loved mutant movies. Couldn’t imagine why. Hah hah.

      The line was almost finished, and the redheaded girl was coming up next. Edie smiled as she took the girl’s battered copy of Midnight’s Curse. A compliment if she’d ever had one. Out less than a month, and already dog-eared. A generous impulse spurred her to open it to the blank page after the title page. “What’s your name?” she asked

      “Vicky,” the girl said excitedly. “Vicky Sobel.”

      Edie wrote, Thanks, Vicky! Here’s hoping for Fade and Mahlia, and the triumph of true love. Best wishes, Edie Parrish. Then she sketched a quick drawing of Fade, with his arm around a woman. For the face, she glanced up to sketch the redheaded girl’s pretty, wide-eyed face.

      The eye didn’t usually open up so quickly. Usually she had a minute or so of grace, but when she looked up from scribbling the flourishes of the girl’s curly hair and up into her eyes—she saw it.

      Something else. A flash of double vision. Another embrace, except that the girl wasn’t embracing a man. She was wrapped in the coils of an enormous, strangling snake. Edie saw the dead girl’s face, superimposed over the smiling, live face. Blue eyes staring and empty.

      Edie opened her mouth to speak, but her voice stopped. Her heart kicked up, a sick, vertiginous feeling, and she opened her mouth—

      “Stay away from Craig,” she burst out, her voice shaking.

      The girl’s face went stiff. “What do you know about Craig?”

      “N-n-nothing,” Edie stammered. “It just came to me, to say that.”

      “Why?” The girl leaned over the table. “Why did it come to you? Are you sleeping with him? Do you know somebody who is?”

      “No,” Edie said quietly. “I have no idea who this Craig person is. Just that he’s poison for you. Drop him. Run away.”

      “I love Craig!” The girl’s blue eyes bulged. “And he loves me! So just…stay away from him! Shut your mouth! Don’t talk about him!”

      Why, oh why, did she do this to herself? Why didn’t her psychic gift come with a protective mechanism attached that would let her know if there was any point in giving a warning or not?

      “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “It wasn’t my business.”

      “Shut up,” the girl said, her voice wobbling. “You…you nosy bitch.” She grabbed her book, and ran, shoving people out of her way.

      Edie shuddered, seeing the empty, bulging eyes. Dark marks on her throat. Strangled. God forbid. But maybe, just maybe, being warned might make a difference for her. She could only hope. It made her feel raw, helpless. A mass of antennae, and no off switch.

      Except the meds. If she preferred dead calm. No pencils, charcoal, ink. That was her off switch, if she could swallow it. But she couldn’t.

      She pasted a smile on and looked up—

      And forgot the redheaded girl, her deadly lover, and everything else she’d ever thought, or known. Including her own name.

      Fade Shadowseeker stood right before her.

      CHAPTER

       6

      Edie rubbed her eyes, looked again. Still there. Still him. He was extravagantly tall, broad, built. His face was thin, his cheeks carved deep under jutting cheekbones. The spiky hair, the flat, grim mouth. The scars. The invisible mantle of controlled power humming around him, brushing against her body like a million tiny tickling fingers, though he was a yard away, across the table.

      His eyes wiped her mind blank. That piercing green that laid bare everything it looked upon. She knew that face, though she’d only seen it once. She couldn’t mistake those eyes. Those scars. She’d seen the wounds that caused them. She wished that she had not.

      She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink. Their eyes were locked. His eyes glowed with some intense emotion. There was an angry crimson spot in one of them. It made the green seem even more intense.

      The person behind him in line began to clear her throat. Fade stepped forward and laid down his books. He held out his hand.

      She took it, and dragged in a breath at the shivery feeling. It flashed across her skin, like wind rippling grass, rustling leaves. The ringing and dinging of a hundred tiny bells and chimes inside her.

      She stared at her hand, swallowed up inside of his. Her publicist approached, coughing discreetly. “Edie? They need to wrap this up.”

      Edit tried to reply, but a dry squeak came out of her throat. The guy gazed down, unmoving. A monument, a mountain. So silent, and intense. So beautiful. Like glacial lakes, like thundering waves, piled up banks of clouds. Wild animals. The uncontrollable power of nature.

      She cleared her throat. “I sign with my right,” she told him, her voice thin. “You have to let go, if you want me to, um, sign your books.”

      He let go. She took her hand back, peeking at it as if expecting it to be somehow changed by that momentous contact, but it was just her usual thin, inkstained paw. She opened his first book, struggling to remember what she was supposed to do. Um. Yes. Signing books. She paused, pen poised over the paper. “Your name?”

      Something flashed in his eyes. “You don’t know it?”

      She stared up at him. How could she? Was she supposed to know it? She shook her head, mutely.

      “My name is Kev,” he said quietly. “Kev Larsen.”

      She scrawled something unintelligible to Kev on all four books, and pushed them back. He took them, moved aside politely for the next person, but didn’t go away. Oh, God. He was waiting for her. Oh, God.

      Excitement bubbled inside her. She was so aware of his presence, looming by the table while she chatted with the last few die-hard fans.

      Julie, her publicist, came marching over, and gave the guy a cold look. “Can I help you with anything?” she asked him.

      The man ignored Julie. “I was wondering if you would have a cup of coffee with me,” he asked Edie. His low, quiet voice was wonderfully resonant. Full of sparkling harmonics that made her body tingle.

      Edie hesitated, and Julie chimed in. “Have you two met?”

      “Yes,” he said. The certainty in his voice brooked no argument.

      Julie gave her a sharp look. “Is this true? Do you know this guy?”

      Know him? As if she could be said to know him. But she couldn’t explain anything so improbable to the practical, nuts-and-bolts Julie. She hadn’t even grasped it herself, yet.

      She nodded, jerkily. Yeah. She, uh, knew him. Close enough.

      “Well, then. I gotta run. Tell me what’s going on later, OK?” She shot the man a suspicious look. “You sure you’ll be OK?”

      OK? Such a bland state of existence, to describe standing five feet from her ultimate fantasy, Fade Shadowseeker, inexplicably made flesh and inviting her out to coffee. She managed to nod.

      After Julie’s heels clicked purposefully into the distance, Edie shrugged on her coat, grabbed her art bag, and risked another peek.

      Sure enough, he got her again. She went blank, wordless, staring stupidly up into those eyes. Frozen by his outsized charisma.