Jim’s first thought was that the vast, open place was like some kind of fucked-up furniture liquidator’s store. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clocks, all grouped by type, but otherwise unorganized: Grandfathers stood in a messy circle in the far corner, like they had been milling around and had frozen in place as soon as the door opened. Circular wall hangers were nailed to the thick wooden support beams that ran vertically from floor to ceiling. Mantel showpieces sat scattered on shelves and so did alarm clocks and metronomes.

But the pocket watches were the freakiest.

Suspended from the lofty I-beamed ceiling, like spiders on tendrils, pocket watches of all ages and makes dangled from black strings.

“Time keeps on…slippin’…slippin’…slippin’ into the future,” Adrian drawled as he walked around.

Except actually, it didn’t. Every one of the clocks and watches was stopped. Hell, more than stopped—the pendulums in those grandfathers were frozen in space, at the top of their arcs.

Jim shifted his eyes away from the time-keeping mélange and found another collection.

Devina had one and only one kind of furniture: bureaus. There must have been twenty to thirty of them, and they were crowded in a disorganized huddle, like the one in the middle had called a quick meeting and they had just rushed over. As with the clocks, there were all different kinds—antique ones that looked like they belonged in museums, new ones with sleek lines, cheapos that had to have been made in China and sold at Target.

“Shit, I’ll bet she put it in one of these,” Adrian said as he and Eddie went up to the jumbled assembly.

“What is that smell?” Jim asked, rubbing his nose.

“You don’t want to know.”

The fuck he didn’t. Something was very wrong, and not just because she had some serious OCD issues when it came to decorating: The air was tainted with a scent that made Jim’s flesh crawl. Sweet…way too sweet.

Leaving Eddie and Adrian to their needle-in-a-haystack routine, Jim went exploring. Like all lofts, there were no divisions of the space except for the one in the corner that had to demarcate the bathroom.

Which meant the knives in the kitchen were on full display.

On the granite counter, there were all sorts of blades: hunting ones and Swiss armies and steaks and butchers and prison-made roughies and cooks’ delights and box cutters. The business ends were long and short, smooth and serrated, rusted and shiny. And like the bureaus and the clocks, they were in a hodgepodge of disorder, the handles and the tips facing all which ways.

For a man who had found himself in a lot of nasty-ass situations, this was a new one.

Jim felt as if he’d walked into All-wrong Land.