Chapter One

After another night filled with nightmares, Sophie overslept. When she finally woke and looked blearily around her bedroom, she could tell by the angle of the light along the edges of the blinds that the day was no longer new.

The day had, in fact, not been new for some time. Her stomach took a nosedive as she snatched up her alarm clock. Damn it. Her technology curse had struck again. Resorting to an old-fashioned windup clock hadn’t helped in the slightest, and the clock’s hands had stopped at 4:26.

Ignoring the flare of aches in her shoulder, abdomen, and right thigh, she shoved upright and limped into the living room to check her cell phone. The screen confirmed what she already knew. She was horribly late.

Now she was faced with a choice that no coffee-drinking witch ever wanted to face. She could either fix coffee or throw her runes for a quick reading before she showered and left for her meeting.

A good night’s sleep had become a thing of the past, and she really needed that caffeine. But leaving her apartment without doing a reading had become unthinkable. Not since the shooting. She never missed throwing the runes in the morning for whatever message, good or bad, the reading might be able to tell her about the day.

She could cancel the meeting, and for a moment temptation tugged at her. Part of her wanted to drink coffee in the dark with the curtains shut while listening to the distant sounds of LA traffic, but that was how she had spent most of her time since being released from the hospital.

She needed a new game plan for how to approach life, and she wasn’t going to find one in the shadows of her apartment. The only things lurking here were memories, second-guessing past actions, and regrets.

Getting out in the fresh air and talking to someone she didn’t know might not solve any of her problems, but it would be a step outside her door. A step somewhere else. Maybe even a step in the right direction.

So. Coffee or reading.

Choosing was painful, but after leaping into the shower, dressing, and taking five precious minutes to put on makeup and capture her long, curling hair in a loose knot at the nape of her neck, she sat at the small kitchen table with a folded, embroidered tablecloth and the worn velvet bag that held her rune stones.

She paused only for a moment to glare at the stupid, time-consuming percolator sitting on her stove. She had bought the pot to replace the stupid Keurig that had stopped working a few months back.

Turning to the business at hand, she unfolded the small tablecloth. She had stitched the gold thread embroidery on the royal blue cloth herself. The project had taken her weeks. As she didn’t embroider as a regular hobby, the symbols didn’t look professional or even, but the detail was meticulous, and every stitch was imbued with the invocations she had whispered as she worked on the cloth.

She used the small tablecloth for only one thing. As she carefully spread it flat, magic unfurled, changing the air above it where it lay. Holding the bag of runes in her right hand, she placed her left palm at the center of the cloth and centered herself.

Before the shooting, she would have just left the apartment without throwing the runes. The thought caused her to hesitate. It was not the best idea to rush through a reading, and she was going to be late as it was.

But no. Sometimes things change irrevocably. You turn a corner, hear a new song, read a book, fall in or out of love, or look at a painting in a different light.

Or you get shot several times.

Then no matter how you try, you can’t unsee or unexperience something to make life what it used to be. The river always flowed downstream.

She poured the runes into her hand, concentrated on her near future, and tossed them gently onto the cloth. They were pretty, made of polished rose quartz with the runes etched into the stone and painted gold, and they showed brilliantly against the rich blue cloth.

She preferred Nordic rune stones over divination cards with painted pictures because the stones opened the right mental pathways for her. The images that came were true divination, not images created by some unknown commercial artist.

Concepts tumbled and shifted in her mind as she watched the stones roll to a stop. Raidho, for travel. Thurisaz, destruction and defense. Hagalaz, destructive, uncontrollable forces. Dagaz, the stone for breakthrough. Then she let her gaze go unfocused as she stared at the pattern they made.

That was when the visions came, when her attention to the rune patterns created windows into fate.

Silence in her small apartment. Distantly she heard the dead clock begin to tick again.

She listened to the breath she took. Let her eyelids fall in a blink.

As she opened her eyes, she caught a glimpse of a strange landscape. A new wind blew through the apartment, ruffling her hair and bringing with it a faint, acrid scent like smoke.

The scent meant violence and danger. Like other messages the wind brought to her from time to time, it wasn’t a physical scent but intuitive and all too familiar.

Adrenaline spiked, causing a ghost of fiery pain to ripple through her body, localized in three places—her left shoulder, right thigh, and just under her ribs on the right side. As she pressed her hand to her abdomen, the figure of a man appeared.

He was turned away so that she looked at dark hair, the long, strong line of his neck, and broad shoulders.

He stood so close she felt like she could reach out to touch him and, oh my gods, all that Power he carried. How could one physical body contain it all? It was as if his skin thinly veiled a lightning bolt. He wasn’t human. He couldn’t be. He had to be one of the Elder Races.

The man was so vivid he made everything else around her pale by comparison. Even though she knew better, she lifted one of her hands and reached toward him. He was only a vision. He wasn’t really here in her apartment.