Hollis wasn’t a woman who hesitated much, not when it counted and these days especially, but she felt unusually adrift in uncertainty. This wasn’t her world, her realm, even though she’d been warned, they both had, that the first experimental trip Hollis had taken into Diana Hayes’s gray time had formed a connection between her and this . . . place. A connection that allowed, perhaps demanded, her to walk here.

Because only spirits walked here. Hollis was a medium as Diana was a medium, and she could be drawn here, especially whenever Diana opened a door into this place or time or whatever it was. Still, it had never happened suddenly, unexpectedly, when they weren’t on a case.

Thinking about it, Hollis wasn’t even sure where Diana and her husband and partner, seer Quentin Hayes, were at the moment. In the real world. She and Reese had completed a difficult case successfully, one for the good guys, had returned late on Friday, and had been given a rare long weekend off. They had fled Quantico before Bishop could change his mind or another case popped up. Even Reese had been tired; they’d needed a break. And had thoroughly enjoyed their rest and recreation for two days. (Friday night and well into Saturday morning had been pure exhausted sleep.) But they still had one day to go, which was why there had been no reason to get up early today, Monday.

Not that Hollis knew if it was early or late. Here it was just gray, without light or shadow or time, without night or day. As she moved out of the bedroom, she took care not to look at a clock because they would all be featureless and that was one of the creepier aspects of the gray time.

She stepped through the bedroom doorway into what should have been a short hallway that led to the open-concept living area of the condo, with the kitchen, breakfast nook, and a comfortable den, and another short hallway beyond that with a half bath and an extra room they had decided to use as a studio/office rather than a second bedroom.

Only that wasn’t where she found herself.

She was standing on what appeared to be the slope of a cold gray mountain, slightly unbalanced for a moment as the surface beneath her feet slanted suddenly. She was looking down on what she assumed was a town in the distance.

Blinking away a momentary dizziness and disorientation, she looked harder. Not that the spider senses worked here, she had learned that, but she could see what there was to see. A fairly small mountain town in a fairly large valley, she decided, holding on to calm with an effort as she studied the scene. Gray. Varying shades of gray, but gray all the same, like some creepy eternal twilight. No lights, no people, no cars moving. Just gray squarish shapes that were probably houses and businesses, and gray streets that might have been only lines drawn on paper, and beyond them a valley vaguely marked with squares that must have been pastures and fields, and slashes and squiggles that were roads. And all around hulking gray mountains reared against an ugly grayish sky.