Lips compressed, face tight with fury, he dragged me up off the couch with a hand in my hair, grabbed my throat with the other, and began walking me backward toward the wall.

"Oh, go ahead," I hissed. "Just kill me and get it over with. Put me out of my misery!" Missing Alina was worse than a terminal illness. At least when you were terminal you knew the pain was going to end eventually. But there was no light at the end of my tunnel. Grief was going to devour me, day into night, night into day, and although I might feel like I was dying from it, might even wish I was, I never would. I was going to have to walk around with a hole in my heart forever. I was going to hurt for my sister until the day I died. If you don't know what I mean or you think I'm being melodramatic, then you've never really loved anyone.

"You don't mean that."

"Like I said, you don't know me."

He laughed. "Look at your hands."

I looked. They were both wrapped around his forearm. Beautifully manicured pink nails with frosted tips were curled like talons into his suit, trying to loosen his grip. I hadn't even realized I'd lifted them.

"I know people, Ms. Lane. They think they want to die, sometimes even say they want to die. But they never mean it. At the last minute they squeal like pigs and fight like hell." He sounded bitter, as if he knew from personal experience. I was suddenly no longer quite so sure Jericho Barrons wasn't a murderer.

He thrust me against the wall and held me there, a hand at my throat, his dark gaze moving restlessly over my face, my neck, the rise and fall of my breasts beneath my lace camisole. Moving majorly over my breasts. I might have snorted if oxygen had been in plentiful supply. There was no way Jericho Barrons thought I was a hottie. We couldn't have been less each other's type. If he was Antarctica, I was the Sahara. What was his deal? Was this some new tactic he was going to threaten me with—rape instead of murder? Or was he upping the ante to both?

"I am going to ask you one more time, Ms. Lane, and I suggest you not trifle with me. My patience is exceedingly thin this evening. I've matters far more pressing than you to attend. What did you see out there?"

I closed my eyes and considered my options. I have a pride problem. Mom says it's my special little challenge. Since I'd initially taken such a strong defiant stance, any cooperation now would be caving. I opened my eyes. "Nothing."

"What a shame," he said. "If you saw nothing, I have no use for you. If you saw something, I do. If you saw nothing, your life means nothing. If you saw something, your life—"

"I get the point," I gritted. "You're being redundant."

"So? What did you see?"

"Let go of my throat." I needed to win something.

He released me and I staggered. I hadn't realized he was holding me on my tiptoes by my neck until my heels weren't touching the floor and suddenly needed to be. I rubbed my throat and said irritably, "Shadows, Barrons. That's all I saw."

"Describe these shadows for me."

I did, and he listened intently until I'd finished, his dark gaze boring into my face. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?" he demanded.

"No."

"Never?"

I shrugged. "Not really." I paused, then added, "I did have a kind of weird moment in a pub the other night."

"Tell me," he commanded.

I was still standing between him and the wall and I needed more space. Physical proximity to Barrons was disturbing, like standing next to a highly charged magnetic field. I slipped past him, taking great pains not to touch him—a fact that seemed to amuse him greatly—and moved toward the sofa. I began recounting the strange dual vision I'd had, the hostile old woman, what she'd said. He asked me many questions, pressing for minute details. I wasn't nearly as observant as Barrons, and I couldn't answer half of what he asked. He made no attempt to hide his disgust with my failure to be more investigative with either the odd vision or the old woman. When at last he finished his interrogation, he gave a sharp laugh of disbelief. "I never thought there might be one like you out there. Unaware, untrained. Unbelievable. You have no idea what you are, do you?"

"Crazy?" I tried to make a joke of it.

He shook his head and began walking toward me. When I instinctively backed up, he stopped, a faint smile playing at his lips. "Do I frighten you, Ms. Lane?"

"Hardly. I just don't like being bruised."

"Bruises heal. There are worse things in the night than I."

I opened my mouth to make a smart-aleck comment, but he silenced me with a wave of his hand. "Spare me your bluster, Ms. Lane. I see through it. No, you're not crazy. You are, however, a walking impossibility. I have no notion how you survived. I suspect you must have lived in a borough so provincial and uninteresting that you never encountered one of them. A cloistered town so utterly lacking distinction that it was never visited and never will be."

I had no idea who his 'them' were that had or hadn't visited, but I couldn't argue with the rest of it. I was pretty sure Ashford was registered with the State of Georgia under P for provincial, and I seriously doubted our annual fried chicken cook-off or Christmas walk featuring the same half-dozen stately antebellums each year distinguished my town from any other scattered throughout the Deep South. "Yeah, well," I said defensively. I loved my hometown. "Point?"

"You, Ms. Lane, are a sidhe-seer."

"Huh?" What was a she-seer?

"A sidhe-seer. You see the Fae."

I burst out laughing.

"This is no laughing matter," he said roughly. "This is about life and death, you imbecile."

I laughed harder. "What, some pesky little fairy's going to get me?"

His eyes narrowed. "Just what do you think those shadows were, Ms. Lane?"

"Shadows," I retorted, my amusement fading. I was getting angry myself. I would not be made a fool of. There was no way those dark shapes had been anything more substantive. Fairies didn't exist, people didn't see them, and there were no books about magic that had been written a million years ago.

"The Shades would have sucked you dry and left a husk of skin scuttling down the sidewalk on the night breeze," he said coldly. "No body for your parents to claim. They would never know what happened to you. One more tourist gone missing abroad."

"Yeah, right," I snapped. "And how many other lines of bull are you going to try to feed me? That the shi-sadu really is a book of dark magic? That it really was written a million years ago by some Dark King? How stupid do you think I am? I just wanted to know what the word meant so I could maybe help the police find who killed my sister—"

"How did she die, Ms. Lane?" Barrons asked the question soft as silk, but it slammed into me like a sledgehammer.

I clenched my jaw and turned away. After a moment I said, "I don't want to talk about it. It's none of your business."

"Was it abnormal? Horrific, Ms. Lane? Tell me, did her body look as if animals had gone at her? Hard?"

I whirled back around. "ShutupIhateyou," I hissed.

Impatience blazed in his eyes. "Do you want to die like that too?"

I glared at him. I would not cry in front of him. I would not think about what I'd seen the day I'd had to identify Alina's body. Not in my worst nightmares did I want to die like that.

He peeled my answer from my face and half his mouth drew back in a smirk. "I didn't think so, Ms. Lane. Listen to me and learn, and I will help you."

"Why would you do that?" I scoffed. "You're hardly the Good Samaritan type. In fact, I think the word 'mercenary' has a little picture of you beside it in the dictionary. I don't have any money."

Both sides of his mouth drew back this time—in a snarl—before he quickly recomposed his face into a mask of smooth European urbanity. Wow, I'd sure struck a nerve. Something I'd said had pierced his thick hide and it seemed to have been the word "mercenary."