The Dalen estate sat on a hill above the valley like an old crow on a fencepost — black-roofed, sharp-eaved, and watching.
Serai had grown up in that house. She knew every creak of its floors, every chill of its long corridors, every whisper of its old, watching portraits. She knew that the third stair from the bottom of the east staircase groaned if you stepped on it wrong, and she knew that her grandfather's study door, on the second floor, never quite latched shut, no matter how firmly you closed it.
And she knew, the moment her car came to a stop at the bottom of the wide stone steps, that the elder was waiting for her.
She killed the engine.
For a long moment, she just sat there, both hands curled lightly on the steering wheel, looking up at the house through the windshield. The a
