I saw a pale break in the darkness ahead, where the trees thinned. There was a part of me that wanted to turn and go back. I didn’t want to see this secret place and what was hiding there.

Somehow I knew. I just knew.

I heard water tap-tapping on wet sand. I emerged from the woods into a clearing eighty feet across, a notch in the forest where the lake swooshed onto a ribbon of beach that bubbled toward the trees in a half-moon. Gold streaks were wavy on the lake. I could see very clearly after the darkness of the trail.

My hand shot to my mouth and I caught myself in midscream.

I ran.

“Laura,” I whispered, my voice strangled.

It was worse than anything I could have imagined. I saw the aluminum baseball bat beside her body, shiny and glistening and sticky. I smelled copper. I sank to my knees, my arms outstretched, my hands quivering in the air. My lips murmured like I was saying a prayer, and a whimper rumbled out of my chest.

“Oh, no, no, no.”

She was all red. Red everywhere. Like she was drowned in wine. Her beautiful golden hair was the color of garish lipstick. Crimson fangs dripped from the wings of the butterfly tattoo on her naked back. Mosquitoes littered her skin, some living, some dead, trapped in the pool and unable to fly from the feast. Her face was toward me, cheek in the mud, but there was no face anymore, no smile, no soft brown eyes, nothing that had ever been my sister. Life had been hammered out of her blow by blow. I tried to imagine the fury that had done this and couldn’t conceive of a heart so black.

I put a tentative hand on her arm. Her skin was already unnaturally cold. My hand came away like I had dipped it in finger paints.

That was when I heard it. Branches snapping. Movement. Breathing. Not from Laura, but from the black forest. I scooped up the baseball bat and scrambled to my feet. My fingernails dug into the leather grip. I wound up fiercely, ready to swing.

Someone was behind me . . .

PART ONE
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Independence Day

1
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Lieutenant Jonathan Stride shielded his eyes as the glass door shot a laser beam of sunlight at his face, and when he could see again, he realized that the woman who had stepped out onto the patio was his late wife, Cindy.

For an instant, time slowed down the way it does on a long fall, while the buzz of conversation continued around him. He forgot how to breathe. The enigmatic smile he remembered from years ago was the same. When she lifted her sunglasses, her brown eyes stared back at him with a familiar glint over the heads of the others in the restaurant. She was in her late forties, as she would have been if she had lived. Small, like a fairy, but athletic and strong. Suntanned skin. An aura of intensity.