Waking The Serpent. Jane Kindred

Chapter 1

      Hello vertigo and free-floating anxiety, my old friends. Phoebe let the familiar nausea-inducing miasma wash over her as the lights in her Sedona ranch house flickered and went out. The latter might be reasonably explained by the summer storm rolling over the desert, downed power lines, the fact that the old house had bad wiring, maybe—if it were anyone but Phoebe. But she’d driven around the bend of reasonable and onto the unimproved county road of completely certifiable a long time ago.

      The dead and Phoebe had an uneasy truce. She’d given up trying to ignore them, because looking like the crazy lady who occasionally talked to herself was infinitely preferable to public outbursts worthy of an exorcist. She agreed to help them find justice, or closure, or peace—as long as they backed off when she told them to.

      The electrical activity of a rainstorm actually brought them out. Or gave them energy to manifest, anyway. They’d been mumbling about her all day, the spectral aura of a migraine telling her somebody wanted in.

      The shade trying to step in right now was new at it, making the room swim around Phoebe in gut-churning waves.

      Phoebe stood over the couch with a death grip on the back of it, teeth clenched to keep from losing her lunch on the faux leather upholstery, trying to focus on the room through the dark bob of her ponytail swinging in front of her eyes. “For the love of Mike. Just step in already. The damn door’s open.”

      As if in contradiction to her statement, the kitchen door slammed behind her, yanked by the air being sucked through the house in the wind tunnel created between the front entrance and the screen door opening onto the back porch. There was nothing better than the smell of petrichor stirred up by an oncoming storm. Phoebe had left the doors open to let it clean out the house and freshen things up. Given her housekeeping habits—and Puddleglum’s litter box habits—any little bit helped.

      The storm-dark sky visible through the windows in front of her lit up for an instant with a horizontal bolt of lightning, and the answering crack of thunder came swiftly.

      “I think he set me up.” The uncertain murmur had come from her own lips. The shade was in.

      “It’s okay.” Phoebe spoke aloud, though it wasn’t necessary. Someone else talking through her was bad enough without answering in her head. She had some mental dignity left. “You can talk to me. You’re safe here.”

      “Here?” The answering voice seemed youngish but Phoebe couldn’t get a handle on the gender. “Where’s here? I don’t know where I am.”

      From experience, Phoebe knew it was better to prevaricate a bit. Especially with the newly dead. “You’re at the hospital. Do you remember what happened to you?”

      Her heart began to hammer—the shade’s fear—as the answer came. “I was supposed to meet someone. But I... Something went wrong. Oh, God. Why is he here?”

      Phoebe had to center the shade in the present before panic took over and it got stuck on a loop at the moment of its death. “Why don’t we start at the beginning, hon? Can you tell me your name?”

      “I...I can’t... I think... I’m not sure.”

      “That’s okay. Don’t worry about that right now. Do you remember who you were meeting? Where were you supposed to meet?”

      “I got a message, and I... He isn’t supposed to be here. Oh, my God. He set me up.”

      Before Phoebe could bring the shade back to center, her throat began to tighten as though a pair of strong, gloved hands had closed around it. Fantastic. A violent murder and the shade was going to relive it inside her. There was no use fighting. She had to let the shade go through it—let it make Phoebe go through it—before it would release her.

      Her lungs, however, were harder to convince. They fought like hell. Adrenaline shot through her bloodstream, a last-ditch, futile attempt at fight-or-flight, as Phoebe stumbled backward, hands convulsing at her throat. Before she could lose consciousness from the air being squeezed out of her, however, the back of her head hit the hardwood floor, beating it to the punch.

      * * *

      Rain spattered the entryway through the screen door as the storm broke at last. Phoebe lay and listened to it for a moment without moving. She hadn’t felt the shade go. But, like being blackout drunk, it had left her with a serious hangover. The ungrateful little wretch.

      Howling at her like a Klaxon from the coffee table, her cell phone announced there wouldn’t be time to indulge her headache.

      Phoebe crawled around the couch and jabbed the speaker button to let it know who was boss. “This had better be good.” Her voice sounded like she’d been gargling kitty litter.

      “Ms. Carlisle? Phoebe Carlisle?”

      Phoebe cringed at the booming, deep baritone. “Yeah, you got her. Who’s this?”

      “I was given your name for representation.”

      Her stomach gave a little lurch of protest at his volume and Phoebe pressed her fingers to her temples. “I’m a public defender. If you need an attorney and you can’t afford legal assistance—”

      “Jesus. I don’t need a fucking Miranda recitation.” Wow. Charming. “I need a lawyer. Now. I’ll pay your standard hourly rate.”

      Despite his rudeness, Phoebe’s ears perked up at the sound of money. Being an assistant public defender wasn’t exactly a high-paying gig. But she wasn’t about to let this jerk get the upper hand. She needed to be the one in control of any potential client relationship. She’d refused clients before when she knew their anger issues—or their woman issues—were going to prevent that. Which didn’t help the pay situation any, but it was where she drew the line.

      “How about you stop swearing at me and tell me what kind of lawyer you—”

      “I don’t have time for sweet talk. I’m at the Yavapai County Jail. Rafael Diamante.”

      The line went dead while Phoebe’s mouth worked, poised on a pointless rebuke of her potential client. Rafael Diamante. Why was that name familiar? She’d seen it somewhere in her newsfeed this morning.

      Phoebe pulled up the browser on her tablet and thumbed through her feed until she found the post from the Sedona Red Rock News.

      Local Businessman Brought in for

      Questioning in Mystic Murder.

      Barbara Fisher, a self-described psychic medium who offered palm and tarot readings from her residence on Cedar Road, was found strangled in her home early this morning. An anonymous Sedona PD source confirmed entrepreneur Rafael “Rafe” Diamante was discovered at the scene—apparently intoxicated.

      Unless two people had been strangled in Sedona this morning, the victim had to be Phoebe’s step-in. And Rafe Diamante—Phoebe had seen his name on signs all over town: Diamante Construction and Excavation. He owned half of Yavapai County. Why he would want Phoebe to represent him, she couldn’t fathom. Was this some kind of joke? Common sense and her conscience told her to stay far away from this one. Representing the accused killer of someone whose shade she had just hosted had to be a pretty big conflict of interest. But neither common sense nor her conscience was in the driver’s seat of her Jeep as she headed to the county lockup in Camp Verde.

       Chapter 2

      Rafe Diamante wasn’t at all what she’d expected. Waiting for him in an interrogation room, Phoebe had been picturing a man in his sixties with a beer belly and a receding hairline. Apparently she was thinking of his father. This Rafe Diamante was perhaps thirty, tall, hard and lean—a fact accentuated by the white T-shirt hugging his abs—his skin a deep coppery brown, as though he worked the construction sites himself. Far from a receding hairline, he had a rich, dark head of hair with a wavy