Despair is a funny thing, and it has the tendency to bring out the believer in anyone. The logical part of my head said I was being crazy, but that logical side sounded a lot like Himself. Anger snapped through me and I muttered under my breath.

If I’d been texting, the typo would have looked something like “Duck off.”

Coming home to Savannah, I was ready to face the past. To see what I had to see.

And maybe, just maybe I could figure out who I was. Yeah, I know. You’d think I should've known that by my age.

Wrapping my fingers around the wrought iron, I whispered a prayer my gran taught me, oh so long ago. A prayer for help. Though maybe not the kind of prayer the normal populace would whisper at the edge of a graveyard.

“Sky above me, earth below me, fire within me, let my spirit see thee and the shadows that walk at my side.” The metal under my hand trembled suddenly, and I lifted my head off the gate.

“That’s lovely.”

I spun around, my back against the gate, to see one of the tallest men I’d ever come across in my life. Well over seven feet tall, he was slim as a stick and moved carefully as if he knew he was a big guy who could scare people if he moved too fast. He wore big thick glasses that made his eyes seem larger than they probably were. Owl-like was my first thought.

He wore tan pants and a white button-down shirt with a dark green bow tie, of all things, which all only added to the look of a nutty professor. He touched the middle of his glasses, adjusting them on his face with fingers that looked way too long even for a big guy like him.

“I’m sorry, are you here for the interviews?” I arched a brow or made my best attempt at it. I couldn’t raise them independently no matter how hard I tried.

He shook his head. “No, no, I’m here to hire Hollows Group. But they aren’t answering my emails.” He made a typing motion with both hands as if I wouldn’t otherwise understand what an email was. “I thought I’d come and speak to them in person. They can be a bit difficult to track down.”

“Sounds like a bad business practice to me,” I said.

He clasped both hands in front of him and rocked on his heels. “I’m not high on their priority list.”

Staring at him, I knew he wasn’t quite human. There was a sense of other about him. I didn’t have a better word for it, but it felt undeniable, and the realization that he was part of the shadow world did something funny to my heart.