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  “KAREN CHANCE WILL ENTHRALL YOU.”

  —­USA Today bestselling author Rebecca York

  Praise for the Cassie Palmer Novels

  “A grab-­you-­by-­the-­throat-­and-­suck-­you-­in sort of book with a tough, smart heroine and sexy-­scary vampires. I loved it.”

  —­#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs

  “A really exciting book with great pace and a huge cast of vivid characters.”

  —­#1 New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris

  “A wonderfully entertaining romp with an engaging heroine.”

  —­New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong

  “Karen Chance takes her place along[side] . . . Lau­rell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, MaryJanice Davidson, and J. D. Robb to give us a strong woman who doesn’t wait to be rescued. . . . The action never stops . . . engrossing.”

  —­SFRevu

  “The urban fantasy equivalent of a summer blockbuster.”

  —­SF Site

  “Cassie is the ultimate poster child for heroines having to learn to roll with the punches and stay on their feet. Per usual, you can count on the awesome Chance delivering a story that hits the ground running and never looks back.”

  —­RT Book Reviews

  “Exciting and inventive.”

  —­Booklist

  “Quick pacing and imaginative use of some old myth­ologies blend into a captivating read that will leave readers clamoring for more.”

  —­Monsters and Critics

  “A fascinating world. . . . The author has reinvented her writing style for the series and raised the bar of expectations high. Her story transcends mere urban fantasy and veers toward epic fantasy.”

  —­Love Vampires

  “Outstanding. The characters pull you into their world and won’t let you go. . . . The dialogue is funny; the story is fast paced, full of intrigue with really hot sex scenes.”

  —­The Romance Readers Connection

  “Cassie is a well-­rounded character, and the intensity and complexity of the plot put her through her paces physically, emotionally, and psychically.”

  —­Publishers Weekly

  “Ms. Chance continues to expand her well-­built world with time travel, fantastical beings, steamy romance, and the nonstop action her wonderful series provides.”

  —­Darque Reviews

  “Ms. Chance is a master . . . a series well worth getting hooked on.”

  —­Fresh Fiction

  Books by Karen Chance

  THE CASSIE PALMER SERIES

  Touch the Dark

  Claimed by Shadow

  Embrace the Night

  Curse the Dawn

  Hunt the Moon

  Tempt the Stars

  Reap the Wind

  Ride the Storm

  Brave the Tempest

  THE MIDNIGHT’S DAUGHTER SERIES

  Midnight’s Daughter

  Death’s Mistress

  Fury’s Kiss

  Shadow’s Bane

  THE MIRCEA BASARAB SERIES

  Masks

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Karen Chance

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781101990018

  First Edition: July 2019

  Cover design by Adam Auerbach

  Cover art by Larry Rostant

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Praise for the Cassie Palmer Novels

  Books by Karen Chance

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The small pouf was a little overly excited. It was jade green velvet, and a bit worn in the center, where years of feet had left a permanent divot. But the gold silk tassels at the corners were still fat and sassy, and the little round feet were polished to a high shine.

  Not to mention the personality, which was, um, happy.

  “I think it’s trying to hump your leg,” Billy told me.

  “It is not!”

  “Okay,” he said, eyeing the little thing warily. It was currently up on its back two feet, jumping up and down like an overly emotional puppy. Probably because nobody used poufs these days and it wanted out of the small shop we were in.

  “It’s jumping,” I told him. “It’s excited.”

  “Oh, it’s excited all right.”

  “Billy!” I whispered, and glanced around. “There are children in here!”

  Normally, that wouldn’t have mattered, since Bi
lly Joe had been among the life-­challenged for something like a century and a half now, and ghosts didn’t have to watch what they said. But the children in question were part of the Pythian Court and were all seers of one variety or another. Not that all of them could see Billy—­gifts differ—­but some could, and more could hear him.

  “I’m just saying, maybe a perverted footstool ain’t the best thing to have around the palace.”

  I frowned. Our current living arrangements were a sore spot. “It’s not a palace. We don’t live in a palace. It’s a penthouse—­”

  “Which covers a whole floor and is full of marble and shit.”

  “—­and I told the girls they could pick out their own stuff.”

  It was the least I could do, considering that their former furniture had gone up in a fireball, like their former house. Now that had been a palace, an old charmer of a mansion in London full of priceless antiques and crystal chandeliers, a fit home for the Pythian Court. Unlike a still mostly empty penthouse in a tacky Vegas hotel.

  Some days—­all right, most days—­I wondered if I’d ever get the hang of this Pythia stuff. “Chief Seer of the supernatural world” sounded like a great title, until you saw the job description. Not that I had.

  I think they were afraid to show it to me.

  My name is Cassie Palmer, and I’d been Pythia for four months. Four very long months. You’d think by now that I’d have some kind of a grip, and I did—­sort of. I was still alive, which lately felt like an accomplishment in itself. But elegant? Imposing? One of the awesome Pythias of legend who decided the fates of kings and never blinked?

  I caught sight of myself in a large standing mirror that wasn’t standing so much as mincing by, reflecting back a wobbly image of a young blonde with flyaway curls, worried blue eyes, and a ­T-­shirt and jeans combo. The ­T-­shirt was pretty cool, being red with black crossed swords on the front and a caption that read, “As You Can See, the Assassins Failed.” But there was a spaghetti sauce stain from lunch on the jeans. I tried to pull down the tee to hide it, but it wasn’t long enough and bounced back up.

  I sighed. The little pouf humped my leg some more. There was probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but I didn’t get a chance to look for it.

  Because a small girl of maybe five had come up and started tugging on Billy’s jeans.

  He jumped—­not surprisingly, since the “jeans” were just a projection. It was all Billy, like the red ruffled shirt and the cowboy hat that completed the ensemble, and the cigarettes he smoked because lung cancer wasn’t an issue for him anymore. So she’d basically just grabbed part of his spirit and started tugging on it, which, yeah.

  I’d probably jump, too.

  But Billy was surprisingly good with kids, maybe because he’d come from a large Irish family back in the day. Or maybe because it was fun to have someone to interact with besides me. He went down on one knee to see what the child was trying to show him.

  “Emily, right?” Billy said, and she nodded. There were so many kids around these days, I kept getting their names confused, but he always knew.

  “For you.” She held up a book so big that she needed two hands to lift it.

  “For me?” Billy smiled and ruffled her hair. Some of it even moved, so he was exerting some power. “And why would you want me to have that, sweetheart?”

  “Look.” She tried putting the massive tome down on the pouf, but the little thing was going ballistic. It didn’t seem to like the book, maybe because it was a rival in the get-­out-­of-­dodge camp and the pouf was going home with us, goddamn it. Or maybe it was something else, I thought, getting a bad feeling suddenly.

  “Uh, Emily—­” I began, but it was too late. She must have worked the heavy buckles on the sides open before she came over, so all she had to do was drop the thing on the floor and flip up the cover—­

  “Oh, shit!” I said, earning me a disapproving glance.

  “Rhea says you have to say ‘poo,’” Emily told me seriously.

  “Oh, poo,” I said, and pulled her behind me, because that—­

  Was a seriously messed-­up book.

  “Ghost,” Emily said happily, peering around my legs.

  “Yes, there’s a ghost in there,” I agreed, looking around for something—­anything—­to use to shut the damned thing. I couldn’t use my hands, because the boiling mass of magic—­dark, by the feel of it—­swirling around in there was not a good thing to touch. Not for anyone, but especially not for me.

  Touch clairvoyance is a bitch, and while I wasn’t sensitive enough for everything to trigger it like some poor people, that . . .

  Would probably do it.

  “Oh, poo!” I said, a little more forcefully, because the ghost had just noticed us. What looked like black smoke started to leak out of the book’s pages, and Billy predictably freaked. Vengeful ghosts were not something to play around with.

  “Shut it! Shut it!”

  “With what?” There was nothing within reach.

  “With your shoe! Take off your shoe!”

  “I’m trying!” And I was. But instead of my usual Keds, I’d decided to be fancy today and was wearing cute little open-­toed sandals with a buckled strap. One that was stubbornly not. Coming. Off.

  “Just rip it!” Billy yelled.

  “It’s elastic!” I told him, hopping around on one foot.

  “If it’s elastic, then just pull it off!”

  “It’s tough elastic!”

  And then somebody slammed the book closed for us.

  I looked up, shoe in hand, to see the shop owner holding a heavy wooden walking stick. He had muttonchops; jowls; small, piercing blue eyes; and incongruously pink cheeks that would have been perfect on Santa, only he didn’t look like Santa. He looked like what he was: a guy who ran a magical secondhand shop and intended to make a sale.

  “Gaylord!” he told me, on a little explosion of air.

  “Uh. What?”

  “Gaylord. That’s what we call him. He’s a rotter.” He bent over the book and buckled the buckles. “I can show you some much finer tomes, Lady, including several first editions.”

  “What’s wrong with that one?” I asked, because I’d never seen anything like it. I knew ghosts could haunt things as well as places—­I was wearing proof of that around my neck—­but that . . . hadn’t felt like a haunting.

  At least, not a normal one.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said, waving it away. “They get like that when you leave them in too long.”

  “Leave them in . . . where?”

  He looked at me through little half-­moon spectacles that, again, would have looked good on Santa. Only the eyes behind them weren’t nearly so nice. And neither was the oily smile that he clearly thought was charming.

  “Sorcerers sometimes imprison ghosts in books, to use their souls to power an enchantment,” he informed me. “They typically let them free after a while, once they no longer need a perfect lock or an unbreakable cypher or what have you. But sometimes they forget.”

  I swallowed hard and stared at the book. “You’re saying that somebody didn’t let Gaylord . . . out?”

  “No. The mage died, y’see, quite unexpectedly, and his relatives inherited the house. Only they had no use for the contents and sold the lot to me. Some good items—­most went fast, as the better sort usually does. But Gaylord here—­”

  “But if the sorcerer died,” I interrupted, because I didn’t care about his stock issues. “Shouldn’t that have broken the enchantment?”

  “For a regular spell, certainly,” he agreed. “Once there was no more magic being funneled into it. But Gaylord isn’t a spell. He’s a power source, bound to the book with no one to set him free, since the only one who could have done it is dead.”

  I stared. “That’s horrible!”

  “Yes, in
deed,” the shop owner agreed. “Ruins the resale value.”

  Billy Joe whispered something rude and stared at the book, probably remembering his time in a necklace at the bottom of the Mississippi.

  Even unbound ghosts could only go so far from their resting places. For most, that was a graveyard, where the life energy shed by visitors kept the hungry ghosts going. But for some, like Billy, it was an enchanted item, like a talisman, that collected enough power to let a ghost survive. Although survival kind of loses its luster when you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, buried underneath a river.

  Billy had been lucky; some fishermen had trawled up the gaudy ruby necklace he lived in, which had eventually ended up in the magical junk shop where I’d stumbled across it. But what if they hadn’t? And what if, instead of being able to explore the area for fifty miles or so around his home—­his usual range when I wasn’t topping him up—­Billy had been trapped inside, all alone, for who knew how long? Only to slowly realize that the person who had put him there was dead, and that he’d never get out?

  I felt a hard shiver go down my spine.

  I guessed Billy did, too, because he rippled all over, just once, like a gust of wind had blown through him.

  “Cassie—­”

  “I’ll take it,” I told the salesman, who had started toward a large bookcase, the tome under his arm, but at that he turned around.

  And, suddenly, I was looking at Santa Claus after all. The man was positively beaming. “Oh, of course, of course. So useful for . . . any number of things. I’ll add it to the pile, shall I?”

  He looked at the counter, which a delighted bunch of little girls had already piled high. I nodded, and he started off again, only to have me call him back a second time. Because the pouf was losing its tiny cotton mind.

  “And that,” I said. What the hell. I’d gift it to one of my bodyguards if it was too much of a nuisance.

  “Excellent choice,” the salesman said, his eyes gleaming, and hurried off before I changed my mind.

  “Thanks,” Billy told me quietly.

  I nodded and bent down to pat the little hassock, which started running around in circles excitedly, as if it somehow knew it had found a home.