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ruins.

Four
    I t was midmorning and I’d already been cleaning headstones for hours. The police had arrived sometime earlier to search the area surrounding the mortsafes. Other than an occasional shout as they scoured the woods, the day had been quiet. I was surprised that the curious hadn’t come yet, but maybe word was just now getting out about the murder. In any case, I welcomed the solitude because I had a lot on my mind. I did not welcome Darius Goodwine.
    He stood so deeply in the shade of the church ruins that I thought at first I had imagined him. After a restless night, perhaps exhaustion and my subconscious had decided to play a cruel trick on me. The longer I stared, though, the more substantial he became, like a fully manifested ghost.
    But Darius Goodwine was no ghost, even though there was a fantastical element to his sudden appearance. He seemed so dreamlike against the backdrop of crumbling brick arches that I found myself biting down hard on my bottom lip to make certain I was fully awake.
    Nearly two years had passed since our last living-world encounter, and in the ensuing months I’d prayed that I would never see him again. I’d hoped he wouldn’t come back to collect on the bargain that I’d foolishly and desperately struck with him. At the time, my only concern had been to save Devlin’s life, but Darius Goodwine was not the type of man who granted altruistic favors. I’d always known there would be a price to pay for bringing Devlin back from the other side. Now, as I felt Darius’s gaze upon me, I shuddered to think what dark compensation he’d come to extract.
    A breeze blew across the graves, billowing his loose clothing. Where his shirt parted, I could see an amulet resting in the hollow of his chest and another hanging from a leather cord wound around his wrist. He was a very tall man, nearly six and a half feet. His height alone commanded attention, but it was the magnetic quality of his presence that kept my gaze riveted.
    Devlin had once insisted that Darius Goodwine’s ability to manipulate and control his followers stemmed from the power of suggestion rather than the magic he claimed to have divined from his time studying with a powerful shaman in Africa. But Devlin was wrong. I’d learned the hard way that Darius Goodwine not only had the ability to cross over to the other side and converse with the dead, but he could also enter the dreams of the living and influence their thoughts.
    Once a respected professor of ethnobotony, he’d let his greed and obsession transform him from healer to tagati , a dangerous witch doctor who used his knowledge and power to bring harm to others. I knew better than to underestimate him. Unlike Detective Kendrick, whose character I had yet to discern, I was all too aware of Darius Goodwine’s treachery and so I steeled myself against his insidious magnetism.
    Turning back to the headstone, I continued to scrape away at the layers of moss and lichen while tracking him from my periphery as he wove his way through the headstones. Despite his height, he moved with an uncanny grace. If I hadn’t known he was a flesh-and-blood man, I might still have thought him a specter, so ephemeral and floating was his presence.
    As he neared, a faint trace of ozone wafted on the breeze, leaving me to wonder if a sudden storm had sprung up or if the scent came from the man himself. A moment earlier, the day had been clear and sunny, but now a shadow fell across the landscape. I shivered in the premature twilight, keeping my gaze averted because I didn’t dare look up into those hypnotic eyes.
    â€œAmelia Gray.” Despite his cultured manner of speaking, there was something in the low timber of his voice that reminded me of a tribal drumbeat. Amelia Gray. Amelia Gray. Amelia Gray. “It’s been a while since last we met.”
    I inclined my head slightly, slanting a glance up through my lashes into those