Night's Edge
October 2004
HQN
ISBN 0-373-77010-3
Reprint
August 2009
HQN
ISBN 978-0-373-77428-9
2005
RITA© Winner for Best Novella
2004 Best Book of the Year from Romance Reviews Today
Read an Excerpt
A special collection of
Halloween chillers for your reading delight. Authors Maggie
Shayne, Barbara Hambly, and Charlaine Harris serve up nothing but treats
in this one.
Maggie's story is "Her Best Enemy"
A female reporter delights in exposing fraudulent psychics and
phony ghost busters, but the worst fraud of all is the one man so slick
even she can't trip him up. But when it turns out her house is
haunted, there's only one person she can think of who might be able to
help her.
He has little choice. Either pretend to bust his worst
enemy's ghosts or admit to her that he's a fake and see his business
ruined. She has him in a corner. The funny thing is, he
doesn't even mind.
Links:
http://www.charlaineharris.com
http://www.barbarahambly.com
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Reviews
"HQN
jumps into the paranormal genre with an amazing
anthology by three of today's hottest talents.
Perennial favorite Shayne dishes up some delicious
conflict in "Her Best Enemy." Powerful paranormal
drama abounds in this stellar anthology." --
Romantic Times
Excerpt
Chapter One
In the time it took Kiley Brigham to
submerge her head, rinse out the shampoo and sit up again, the
temperature in the bathroom had plummeted from “steamy-sauna” to
somewhere around “clutch-your-arms-and-shiver.” Sitting up straighter,
with rivulets fleeing her skin for warmer climes, Kiley frowned. Her
skin sprouted goosebumps. She muttered, “Well, what the hell is this?”
and then frowned harder because she could see her breath when she
spoke.
Had late Halloween week in
Burnt Hills, New York turned suddenly, bitterly cold? There hadn’t been
any warning on the weather report. And even if there had been a sudden
cold snap, the furnace would have kicked on. According to the
overall-wearing, toolbox-carrying guy she’d hired to inspect the hundred
year old house before agreeing to buy it, the heating system was in
great shape. True, she hadn’t needed to run it much in the three days
since she’d moved in to her dream house; once or twice during the late
October nights when the mercury dipped outside. It had been working
fine.
She tilted her head,
listening for the telltale rattle of hot water being forced through
aging radiators, but she heard nothing. The furnace wasn’t running.
Sighing, she rose from the
water, stepped over the side of the tub onto the plush powder blue bath
mat and reached for the matching towel. Her new shell pink and white
ceramic tiles might look great, but they definitely added to the chill,
she decided, frowning at the completely fogged up mirror and then
scurrying quickly through the door and into her bedroom for the biggest,
warmest robe she could find.
As soon as she stepped into
the bedroom, the chill was gone. She stood there, frowning, wondering
what the hell to make of that. Leaning backward, through the bathroom
door, she felt that iciness hanging in the air. It was like stepping
into a meat cooler, she thought. Leaning back out, into the bedroom,
she felt the same cozy warmth she always felt there.
Kiley shrugged, pulled the
bathroom door closed, and battled a delayed-reaction shiver. She closed
her eyes briefly, just to tamp down the notion that the shiver was
caused by something beyond the temperature, then turned to face her
bedroom with its hardwood wainscoting so dark it looked like ebony, its
crown molding the same, with freshly applied antique ivory paint in
between. Her bedroom suite came close to matching; deep black cherry
wood that bore a hint of blood-red. The tall narrow windows had creamy
lace curtains. The bedding matched, and the dark hardwood floor bore a
cream colored throw rugs in various sizes and shapes. Ebony and ivory
had been her notion for this room, and it worked.
“I love my new house,” she
said aloud, even as she sent a troubled glance back toward the
bathroom. “And I’m going to stop looking for deep, dark secrets to
explain the bargain basement asking price. So my bathroom has a draft.
So what?”
Nodding in resolve, she
moved to the closet, opened the door, and then paused, still, staring.
One of the dresses was moving, just slightly, the hanger rocking back
and forth mere millimeters, as if someone had jostled it.
Only, no one had.
She could have kicked
herself for the little shiver that ran up her spine. She didn’t even
believe in the sorts of things that were whispering through her brain
right now. And had been ever since she’d moved in.
I jerked open the door,
it caused a breeze, the dress moved a little. Big deal.
In spite of her internal
scolding, her eyes felt wider than she would have liked as she perused
the closet’s interior. Her handy-man-slash-house-inspector had asked if
she’d like a light installed in there. She’d said no. Now she was
thinking about calling him tomorrow morning to change her answer.
Meanwhile, she spotted her robe and snatched it off its hanger with the
speed of a cobra snatching a fieldmouse. She back-stepped, slammed the
closet door, and felt her heart start to pound in her chest.
B-r-e-a-t-h-e, she
thought. And then she did it, a long, deep, slow inhale that filled her
lungs to bursting, a brief delay while she counted to four, and a
thorough, cleansing exhale that emptied her lungs entirely. She
repeated it several times, got a grip on herself, and then she felt
stupid.
She did not believe in
closet dwelling boogie men. Hell, she’d made her career debunking
nonsense like that. More precisely, putting phony psychics, gurus and
ghost busters out of business in this spooky little tourist town. And
no one liked it. Not the town supervisor, the town council, the tourism
bureau, and least of all, the phony psychics, gurus and ghost busters.
But thanks to the
Constitution, freedom of the press couldn’t be banned on the grounds
that it was bad for tourism.
She pulled her bathrobe on,
relishing the soft plush fabric on her skin, and then drew a breath of
courage and turned to face the bathroom again. Her hairbrush was in
there, along with her skin lotions, cuticle trimmer, and toothbrush.
And she still had to tug the plug and let the water run out of the
bathtub. She was going back in. A cold draft was nothing to be afraid
of.
Crossing the room, one foot
in front of the other, she moved firmly to the door, closed her hand on
its oval, antique porcelain doorknob, and opened it. The air that
greeted her was no longer icy. In fact it was as warm as the air in the
bedroom.
She sighed in relief as she
stepped into the room. But her relief died, and the chill returned to
her soul when she saw the mirror, no longer coated in fog, but something
else. Something far, far worse.
Written across the damp
glass surface, in something scarlet that trickled in streams from the
bottom of each letter, were the words, “House of Death.”
Someone screamed. It wasn’t
until she was down the stairs, out the door, and about fifteen yards up
the heaving, cracked sidewalk, that Kiley realized the scream had been
her own.
She stood there in the dead
of night, barefoot, clutching her robe against the whipping October
wind, and staring back at her dream house with its turrets and gables
and its widow’s walk at the top. Such a beautiful place, old, and
solid. And framed right now by the scarlet and shimmering yellow of the
sugar maples and poplar trees at the peak of their fall color.
Swallowing hard, she lowered
her gaze, focusing on her car in the driveway beside the house. Leaping
Lana was an ‘87 Buick Regal–a four door sedan in rust brown that ate gas
like M&Ms and sounded like a tank.
Drawing herself up to her
full height, Kiley forced herself to march over there-- even though it
meant moving toward her house when every cell in her body was
itching to move away from it instead. She did it. Then opened
Lana’s door and climb in. She couldn’t quite keep herself from checking
the back seat first, though, the second the interior light came on. It
was clear. The keys were in the switch, because if someone were brave
enough to steal Kiley Brigham’s car, she had always thought she would
enjoy the vengeance she’d be forced to wreak on their pathetic asses,
and besides, who would steal an ‘87 Buick anyway?
She turned the key. Lana
growled in protest at being bothered at such an ungodly hour, but
finally came around, and cooperatively backed her boat-sized backside
out into the street. As Kiley shifted into Drive, she glanced up at her
house again.
There was someone standing
in her bedroom window looking back at her.
And then, there wasn’t. She
squinted, rubbed her eyes. They hadn’t moved, hadn’t turned away. The
dark silhouette she knew she had seen, simply vanished. Faded. Like
mist.
“Fuck this,” she muttered,
and she stomped on Lana’s pedal, and didn’t let off until they’d reached
the offices of the Burnt Hills Gazette, which held three things Kiley
dearly needed just then; her own office, a change of clothes, and a
telephone.
#
She was so together by the
time the police arrived, that they actually seemed skeptical. At least,
until they headed back to her recently acquired house, and saw the
message on the mirror for themselves. Kiley preferred to stay out in
the bedroom, and even that gave her the creeps, while the cops clustered
around her bathroom sink debating whether the substance on her mirror
was blood. One opined that it looked like barbecue sauce, and another
said it was cherry syrup. At that point the conversation turned to
previous cases where what was thought to be blood turned out to be
something else entirely, like corn syrup with red food coloring added–a
tale that the officers found laugh-worthy.
She interrupted their fun by
standing as close to her bathroom door as she wanted to get, and
clearing her throat. The laughter stopped, the cops looked up.
“Excuse me, but shouldn’t
one of you be taking a sample of that? And maybe checking my house for
signs of forced entry?”
“Did that, ma’am,” one cop
said, sending a longsuffering look toward another. “No signs of a break
in. You sure the place was locked?”
“Of course I’m sure the
place was . . . . ” She stopped, pursed her lips, thought it over with
brutal honesty. “Actually, I forget to lock up as often as I remember.”
“Mmm-hmm. Well at least
you’re aware this was the work of an intruder.”
She frowned at him. “Well
of course it was an intruder. What else could it have been?”
“You know how folks get
around here. Half the time we get a call like this, the homeowner
insists some kind of ghost was responsible.”
“Especially at this time of
year,” another cop said, and they all nodded, or shook their heads or
rolled their eyes with “isn’t that ridiculous” looks at one another.
“Well, I don’t believe in
ghosts,” she managed to say, rubbing her arms against the chill that
came from within. “As to how the intruder got in, I’m not even sure
it’s all that important. The fact is that he did get in. And I know
that because I saw him.”
“You saw him? Excellent.”
Cop number one–his nameplate said “Hanlon”-- pulled out a notepad and
pen. “Okay, where and when did you see the intruder?”
“He was standing right
there, in that window, looking down at me when I backed the car out.”
“So you didn’t see anyone
while you were inside. Only after you’d left?”
“Right.”
“And can you describe him?”
She licked her lips,
recalling the misty silhouette behind the veil of her curtains. “Uh,
no.”
“But you’re sure it was a
male,” Hanlon said.
She narrowed her eyes and
searched her memory. “No. No, I can’t even be sure of that much. It
was dark. It was just a shadow, a dark silhouette in the window.” She
sighed in frustration. “Has there been a rash of break-ins that I
should know about, anything like this at all?” she asked, almost hoping
the answer would be yes.
Hanlon shook his head.
“We’ve got hardly any crime around here, Ms. Brigham. Little enough so
you’d be reading about it, or writing about it in that paper of yours if
there had been anything like that.”
She nodded. “We’re so
hungry for stories we’ve been covering the missing prostitutes from
Albany.”
He nodded. More people came
in. Suits, instead of uniforms. They carried cases and headed for her
bathroom. She watched them, her gaze unfocused. One swabbed a sample
of the stuff from the mirror, dropped it into a vial and capped it.
Another snapped photos. A third started coating her pretty shell pink
and white bathroom in what looked like fireplace soot in search of
fingerprints.
The guy with the swabs took
out an aerosol can of something–the label read “Luminol”--and sprayed it
at the mirror, then he turned off the lights.
Kiley sucked in a breath
when the grisly message glowed in the darkness.
“It’s blood, all right,” the
guy said, flipping the light back on.
The Officer Hanlon moved up
beside Kiley and put a hand on her shoulder, almost as if he thought she
might be close to losing it. “We’d probably better start thinking about
who your enemies are, Ms. Brigham.”
She swallowed hard. “It
would be easier to tell you who they aren’t, and it would make a far
shorter list.”
The cop frowned. Another
one nodded, coming out of the bathroom. “That’s probably true.”
Hanlon sent him a
questioning look and he went on. “Don’t you recognize the name? She’s
the chick who writes those columns discrediting all the mumbo-jumbo
types in town.”
“Ahh, right. Kiley
Brigham. It didn’t click at first.” Hanlon eyed her. “Is this the
first death threat you’ve received Ms. Brigham?”
“You think that’s what it
is? A threat?”
He shrugged. “Reads that
way to me.”
Kiley sighed. “Yeah, it
would be my first.”
“Wow.” His brows arched
high, as if he were surprised she didn’t get threatened on a daily
basis.
“Look, I’m not a demon here,
I don’t eat babies or kick puppies. I just tell the truth.” She
shrugged. “Can I help it if that makes the liars of the world angry?”
“Can you think of anyone in
particular who may have taken their anger this far?”
“Yeah, I can think of
several. Most of them hold public office though.”
Hanlon looked alarmed by
that. “I hope you’re kidding.”
“Maybe. Half. So what
should I do?”
“Get yourself a security
system,” the officer said. “Something that’s not going to let you get
away with forgetting to lock up. In the meantime, is there someone who
could stay with you tonight? A friend, relative, something like that?”
The question made her
stomach ache, though she didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she gave a
damn that she didn’t have any friends or family, was, in fact, utterly
alone in the world. She could care less. Hell, if friends were what
she wanted, she’d be out making them, instead of pissing off as many
people as possible on a weekly basis. Screw friends.
“Ma’am?”
She shrugged. “I’ll spend
the night at my office. There’s security there. Tomorrow I’ll see
about that system. Thanks for coming out.”
He nodded. “We’ll be
another hour here,” he told her. “You can go, if you want. We’ll lock
up when we leave.”
“Yeah, like that’s
gonna do any good,” she muttered as she headed out of the room. And
then she stopped in the hallway, and wondered just what the hell she had
meant by that. She shook it off, told herself it didn’t matter.
She had a major day
tomorrow. Major.
Tomorrow she was going to bust the one new age fraud who
had eluded her ever since she’d begun her weekly series of exposés.
She’d planned for this, prepared for it, set up an elaborate scheme to
make it happen. And nothing as mundane as a death threat written in
blood on her bathroom mirror while she was standing a few feet away
wearing nothing but a towel, was going to stop her from seeing it
through.
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