“So I saw your girlfriend left,” the redhead was saying as she sidled up to him. “You want some company?”

Hands with blood-colored nails as long as talons reached out and drifted up his stained lapel.

He brushed her off him with a sloppy palm. “Stop it….”

“You sure?”

Oh, God, he was even hotter on the outside, even colder on the inside. He had to stop this…because he didn’t want to know the message that was coming to him. He didn’t want the vision, the communication, the look-see into the future, but he was the telegraph who was powerless to deny receipt of the letters sent to him.

First the man in the elevator, then the two outside…now this.

He’d exorcised the dark side from himself years ago. Why was it back now?

The redhead rubbed herself against his arm and leaned into his ear. “Let me take care of you—”

“Gina, give it a rest, would you?”

Vin’s eyes moved toward Marie-Terese’s voice and he opened his mouth to try and speak. Nothing came out. Worse, as he stared at her, she became a vortex into which his sight was sucked, everything but her going blurry. He braced himself for what was coming next—and sure enough, the trembling started at his feet, just as the fog had, and moved up his body, taking over his knees and his stomach and his shoulders….

“Whatever, I don’t need to beg,” Gina said as she headed for the door. “Have fun with him—he looks too strung out to party anyway.”

“Vin?” Marie-Terese came over. “Vin, can you hear me? Are you all right—”

The words bubbled up out of him, the voice not his own, the possession overcoming everything such that he knew not what he spoke because the message was not for him, but for the one he was addressing.

His ears heard only nonsense: “Theio th lskow…Theio th lskow…”

She blanched and stepped back, hand lifting up to her throat. “Who.”

“Theio…th…lskow…

Vin’s voice was deep and dark and senseless to him, even as he tried to hear the syllables correctly, tried to unscramble in his head what he was telling her: This was the very worst part of his curse—he could do nothing to affect the future, because he didn’t know what he foretold.

Marie-Terese backed away from him until she smacked against the door, her face pale and her eyes popping wide. With shaking hands, she fumbled to open the thing and then burst out of the locker room, desperate to get away from him.