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spoken many times, and every Tuesday I make you all your favorite things to eat. Roast corn, peppers, coffee laced with rum and chicory.”
    The atmosphere in the room changed, grew close and heavy. Callie’s breath tightened as the room seemed to move around her. Her head gave a shallow, dull throb. She pressed her boot soles into the floor.
    Sulie poured a third and final measure of rum and flung it around Liam, completing the circle. “We seek guidance at this, the Crossroads, for a soul that has been lost.”
    Callie clenched her fists as the room spun once, one hundred eighty degrees of tilt-o-whirl violence. It snapped into place with a finality that took her breath away.
    She found herself thrust into the firestorm of Liam’s dreams, the heat searing through her veins and erupting from every pore. Thousands upon thousands of pinpricks beyond her capacity to feel. A distant cry was lost in a rush of wind. She couldn’t tell if the cry was hers or someone else’s.
    Callie stumbled and almost fell. Liam, already on his hands and knees, stared at her with unseeing black eyes. The fabric of his shirt rippled with his shifting of his muscles beneath the surface. She looked around. Everything, including Sulie, had receded into the middle distance, leaving the circle and patterns surrounding her floating in a void that wasn’t quite anchored to the room.
    She caught her breath. She was between , but not the hollow between space and time familiar to her. This was something else altogether—a dream state existing on another plane.
    Liam stood, unfolding gracefully until he tried to straighten his spine. He caught up in unbending his lower back, and seemed to favor one leg. His black eyes regarded her with onyx iridescence and no whites, and he smiled a slow, Big Easy smile. His low laugh was almost a purr.
    “One champion lost,” he said, resonant voice reverberating in all her dark, secret places. “Another found.”
    Callie located her voice, hiding somewhere down in her gut. She dragged it back. “You know me.”
    Liam-Legba took a hobbling step toward her. “I know what you be.”
    “So if I were to say I am one of the nineteen…”
    “I would call you a liar, for there are nineteen no longer.”
    “Our Eva is lost to us.” Callie tried not to stumble over the words. “Has her soul passed through to your realm?”
    A shake of the head, another step closer. One more and he would be standing on her toes. “There is more lost than you know. But not enough yet for the demon to gain its freedom.”
    “What is this demon? What is its name?”
    “To have a name is to have power. It is not of our realm.” The final step was taken, small but telling, in a dance close enough to bend his spine so his mouth whispered along the curve of her neck. She stood very still, tilting her head as his fingers brushed the curls away, and his lips feathered her lobe. “It is unrequited, made of fire, and passion born of jealousy. We cannot touch it ourselves.”
    She turned her face toward his. “Who summoned it?” she wanted to know. “Why?”
    “Answers can only be had at the Crossroads of the dead and damned.” Then he turned her head that last quarter inch, and kissed her in a way that made her spine soften, her toes curl, as the felt-but-silent wind of between howled around them.

Chapter Three
    “This is just creepy, if you ask me.” Donal stumbled on an exposed tree root, making the light from the lantern he carried spin crazily about.
    “You think everything’s creepy,” Chase observed, arms tight around a crate of supplies necessary for the summoning ritual they were about to perform.
    “Well, things generally are, in my experience. I mean, okra? What is that?”
    “A vegetable, I think.”
    “So you say.” Donal looked over his shoulder at Callie. “Don’t you think this is creepy?”
    Callie smiled, squelching behind her bickering friends through one of New Orleans’s oldest cities of the dead.