I shivered again. The women hadn’t looked like mind-sucked idiots. My imagination was running away with me, and no wonder. Somewhere along the way I’d fallen down the rabbit hole, and nothing made sense anymore.

The hallway was as deserted as the rooms, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be shepherded back to the bedroom with a bunch of platitudes. On the other, I didn’t know where the hell I was going, or whether Freddy Krueger was about to appear.

I looked around me. The interior of the house was interesting—it look like an old California lodge from long ago, with bronze art-deco sconces on the wall that made me think of Hollywood in the 1930s. There were overstuffed leather chairs and mission-style tables at various intervals down the long hall, with an ancient Persian runner in the center of the highly buffed floor, and a sudden horrifying suspicion came to me.

Things were bizarre enough already—if I’d somehow managed to travel through time, back eighty years to the early part of the last century, I would be extremely annoyed. That was the problem with time travel—no one ever asked if you’d be interested. Just a flash of lightning and you were gone.

I remembered a flash of lightning, on a New York street. The vision was swift and fleeting, and then I was back in this weird old house, looking for serial killers.

No, time travel was out of the question. I simply refused to consider the possibility. It was as absurd as some of the half-remembered fantasies that played in the back of my mind. Wings? A body with fire beneath the skin? A vampire?

I became aware of a sound, quiet, muffled, a soft chanting not unlike the voices I’d heard on the beach—the sound those men had made as they’d tried to drown my rescuer and I’d gone splashing into the surf like a complete idiot to save him. I listened carefully, trying to make out the words. It bore no resemblance to any language I’d ever heard, just a strange, almost melodic thread of noise.

Well, if they were getting ready for a virgin sacrifice, at least they weren’t planning to slice and dice me. Besides, there was something infinitely soothing about those voices, something that drew me toward them.

I began to move down the halls, silent on my bare feet, and at each juncture I took a turn unerringly. Me, who could never find my way through the haphazard streets of the Village no matter how long I’d lived there. I didn’t stop to question it—I just kept going. Maybe I’d been given superpowers, like a decent sense of direction. Anything was possible.

The sound never grew louder, never softened. I could hear it inside my head, feel it underneath my skin; and when I finally stopped outside an ornately carved set of double doors, I knew I’d found answers.

I paused. Something stopped me from going farther, just for the moment. So unlike me—I was a woman who always wanted straight answers, no matter how painful, and I knew that answers lay beyond those heavy doors, beneath the steady, almost musical chant that emanated from behind them. I had never been the type to hesitate—what the hell was wrong with me?

I pushed open the doors and froze.

It looked like some strange sort of temple, though clearly not for any religion I was familiar with. There was no cross, no ark to hold the Torah. Only the cluster of people in the center of the cavernous room lit by a strange, unearthly glow.

My eyes focused on Sarah, sitting in a chair that seemed like a cross between a throne and a La-Z-Boy. Sarah’s calm blue eyes had been closed in a look of meditation, but they opened and turned to mine, almost as if she’d heard my clumsy entrance above the soft chanting.

She smiled gently that serene, sweet smile that seemed to bestow a blessing on everyone around her, and the others must have realized that I was there, for the chanting stopped abruptly and the men moved back.

He knelt beside Sarah. I knew who he was immediately, even in the candlelight. I knew the sun-shot hair, the rough grace. His head was bent over Sarah’s outstretched wrist, but I must have made some kind of noise, and he lifted his face to stare at me.

I could see the blood at his mouth, the elongated fangs, the pulsing veins at Sarah’s slender wrist, and I know I let out the most girly shriek of horror.

And then I ran, letting the heavy doors slam shut behind me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I MADE IT AS FAR AS THE GRASS IN front of the house before I went sprawling face-first. I hit the rough sand on my knees and elbows, sliding, and ended up at the very edge of the water, breathless, my arms over my head as if I were ducking from a hurricane. It was impossible. Flat-out impossible.

Someone must have drugged me. That was the only reasonable explanation for what I thought I’d just seen, for the craziness that shot such holes in my memory. But if I was still drugged, who and what could I trust? I rolled onto my back, still gasping for breath as I stared up at the house. Parts of it stuck out at strange angles, like a bureau with the drawers pulled out at varying degrees. The sun was setting behind me, reflecting off the windows, rendering them golden and opaque. Someone inside was looking down at me. If the house even existed, if the ocean existed, if I existed.

It was the oddest feeling: I couldn’t trust anything, my eyes, my ears—even the rich salty smell of the ocean could be part of some bizarre hallucination that had started God knows when. I stared up at the darkening sky, trying to pull in what few things I remembered. I could still feel the man’s hands on me as he’d tried to throw me into some deep, bottomless hole. So, serial killer, right? But he’d pulled me back. Serial killer with a conscience?

But maybe he hadn’t pulled me back after all. Maybe this was what death was like—a long, strange, trippy hallucination with vampires and men with wings—Men with wings? Where had that come from? I briefly considered sitting up, then decided against it. I was just fine where I was. Sprawled on the rocky beach, I kept a lower profile. I could just stay this way, listening to the soft hush of the ocean, until the drugs wore off or I woke up or whatever.

Or discovered I was in hell, or heaven, or somewhere in between. Sitting up meant I’d have to do something, and right then I just didn’t have the energy.

The setting sun was blotted out for a moment, and I looked up to see the man standing over me. Raziel, had they called him? Strange name, just another part of the nightmare that had started with his hands on me.

“How long are you going to lie there?” He had such a beautiful voice, the kind that could lure angels to their doom; yet the words were calm and emotionless. “It’s cold and the tide’s coming in, plus there’s a nasty riptide that could pull you out to sea before anyone realized what had happened. You may as well get up—running isn’t going to change things.”

The sunset was gilding him, a nimbus of color around his tall body. I made myself relax. Not a vampire, then. I knew the rules—they couldn’t be in the sun.