“Don’t light too many,” Felix said from behind her, his hands coming to rest on her shoulders. “You’ll risk a fire.”

Enjoying the press of his strong fingers on her bare shoulders, Camille lit another candle and still one more, pleased with the effect, excited by the danger. If the draperies caught on fire, it would only be fitting. Conjuring the dead deserved drama.

“I want to be sure it works,” she told him. She wanted that more than anything.

She knew that Felix didn’t understand her drive, her need, but then she knew he was using her, the same as she was using him. He wanted her wealth, and perhaps her body, while she wanted—needed—his power. His magic.

“It will work,” he said, leaning around her and snuffing the last two candles she had lit by squeezing the flames between the tips of his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t perform any ritual that isn’t successful.”

It was easy to believe such confidence, and Camille studied his profile, pleased with her choice of hoodoo practitioner. Daring, bold, and successful, Felix was also singularly beautiful, with the thick dark hair and rich skin tone that revealed the African heritage of his mother’s family, along with the narrow, aquiline nose of his French father.

At some point soon he would take her virginity, along with the vast amounts of her money he had already acquired. She knew that. Perhaps even tonight. Regardless of when it happened, it was inevitable, given the course she had set them upon, and she could not regret it. The future had been altered irrevocably when her entire family had perished in the fever four months earlier, and every day, every decision had led her here to this moment.

This was the night she would call forth her mother and father and sisters from the grave.

Felix stared at her, and she stared back, a smile playing about her lips. There was a question in his brilliant blue eyes, a doubt that she could see the ritual through to the end, and it made her laugh out loud. She had no doubts, none whatsoever, and she would do whatever was necessary to speak to them, to express her love, her loneliness, her grief and desperation.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Perhaps he thought she was mad. Perhaps she was. Certainly twelve months earlier she would never have imagined that she would be standing in her parent’s bedroom en chemise with a man such as Felix, the expensive chest of drawers from France converted to an altar for his implements to aid in the ritual. A year ago, Camille had been a pleasant, content young woman of wealthy means, her days busy with embroidery, playing her instrument, receiving callers with her mother, and doing acts of charity in the hospitals of less salubrious neighborhoods.