I sat back on my butt and gave him a wink. “Oh, that was nothing.” Mind you, I didn’t push to my feet. My legs were too jellified.

Eammon chuckled. “One vote for.”

From my butt, I looked at the remaining two people. Both men. One was whip thin, his body all angles and points, but other than that, I could barely see his features given the way his long dark hair fell forward, hiding his eyes . . .

“Hey, you must be related to Robert!” I did push to my feet then, so I could get a better look at him. He slowly raised his chin until he was looking down his nose at me. His face was as angular as the rest of him. He wore black skinny jeans and a black T-shirt which made him seem thinner than he probably was.

“Who. Is. Robert?” His thick French accent was even snobbier than the whole look-down-his-nose move.

I looked at Eammon and then Corb for help, but they both shook their heads. Corb, of course, added a set of crossed arms that said it all. He was not helping me get through this.

“Robert,” I repeated the name, “the skeleton you left near the gate. He’s built similarly to you, but . . . well, he’s dead, so there is that.” I wiped a hand across my face. Slick, I was totally slick with sweat and it wasn’t just from the exertion.

French dude shook his head. “There is no one named Robert here; skeletons do not have names. They are dead.”

Eammon thumbed at him. “He’s a necro, so he has a bit of affinity with the dead.”

Before I could respond, a scrabbling sound turned my head and the world seemed to go into slow motion as the big bad wolf burst onto the top of the hill, snarling, blood dripping from where his ear had been torn off by good old Robert.

The animal’s huge head swung my way, amber eyes narrowed, and I found myself staring into the teeth of the thing. The men did nothing as the wolf advanced on me.

I didn’t understand. I’d thought their test was over. But I didn’t need to understand. I just needed to make it out of this alive.

“Bad dog!” I swung a right hook, not to punch the wolf in the nose, but to jam my fingers into the nostrils. The soft flesh was cold and wet, just like it would be with a dog, and I clenched my hand into a fist around it.

The wolf cried out, yelping, and fell back, which yanked me with him right to the edge of the mountain top we were on. I had to get control of this now, or we were both going over the lip.

“Bad dog!” I yelled at the wolf again. “Sit!”

Insanity. This. Was. Insanity.

Gran, you did not prep me for this!

Crazier yet, because the wolf sat. Whimpering. I let go immediately and stared it right in the eye. “Down.”

The wolf flattened itself to the ground and coughed out a gunked-up chunk of paper. I bent and picked it up by a corner. What was left of my résumé, I presume? And what looked like Eric’s card. I blew out a breath. I kept the wolf in my line of sight as I did a partial turn toward the interviewers and held out the résumé. “All my credentials are here.” Take that, boys. Eammon carefully took my résumé, or what was left of it. “And a fellow named Eric wanted to hire you. His card is stuck to it with wolf spit by the looks of it.”

Four sets of eyes rested on me, their perusal more interested than before. Even Corb’s.

Eammon shook the paper. “Eric is nothing more than a paranoid pain in the ass. We have better jobs than his, jobs that pay more.”

The French dude rolled his eyes and sighed. “He is an idiot.”

That wasn’t the impression I’d gotten off the lanky fellow at the front gate, but what did I know? Eric wasn’t my concern.

“Did I pass the interview?” I put my hands on my hips and raised my chin just a little.

“I vote for her, reluctantly. I cannot deny she passed the tests,” the Frenchman said.

“Already said I’d vote for her,” Eammon drawled. “And I brought her, so she’s mine to train.”

Corb shook his head. “No. Even with this, it’s still no.”

The last man pursed his lips. I finally got a good look at him. Dark skin, dark eyes, salt-and-pepper hair shaved closed to his skull, and an unreadable face. He’d make an excellent gambler.

“I say yes.” His voice was a baritone that cascaded down my spine. Like magic.

“That’s only three yeses.” Corb gave me a slow grin. “And I highly doubt that Sarge is going to say yes after you ripped his ear off and jammed your fingers in his nose.”

The wolf at my feet grumbled something under his breath, something that sounded a lot like “agreed.” But that wasn’t possible. Was it?

Not usually one for hyperventilating, or freaking out, or passing out, I figured if there was any time that it would be warranted, this was it. I couldn’t get enough air as the wolf curled its lips up.

“I agree,” it repeated.

The wolf. Agreed.

I’d been right. He was something else, not just a wolf.

“Gawd in heaven.” I spun on my heel and stared down at the wolf at my feet. Only his ear was back in place as if it had never been pulled off. I shook my head hard and held up both hands. “You can talk?”

“All werewolves can talk,” he grumbled, his voice deep and gravelly, just the way Gmork sounded in The Never Ending Story, and damn it if it didn’t do the same thing to my legs, turning them right back to jelly. I had to lock my knees to keep upright.

“See?” Corb strode around to stand beside the wolf sitting up now. “He agrees with me. You don’t pass the interview. You’re out. Get the whiskey for her.”

There was movement behind me, and then a glass was pressed into my shaking and all-too-pale hand.

The dark-skinned man nodded to me. “Drink it down, girl. It will erase this night; you won’t remember a thing.”

The golden liquid beckoned to me to drown myself in it, to forget the adventures—yes, let’s call them that. But I didn’t want to forget again, no matter how much it shocked me that I was living in the shadow world. I moved to turn the drink upside down.

The wolf stood on his hind legs, and with one swift move knocked the drink from my hand. “I agree with the others, not with you, Corb. She stays.”

5

All the way down the other side of the mountain that shouldn’t exist, down to the graveyard I’d never heard of, Corb tried to convince his weird buddies I shouldn’t get the job.

“. . . too old. And slow. You saw how slow she was coming up the mountain.”

“. . . and she won’t listen. She’s unteachable because she’s so set in her ways.”

“. . . doesn’t have what it takes.”

Which was about all it took to keep me moving forward even though every damn part of me hurt like I’d been pulled through a knothole backward. A few strands of my strawberry blond hair fell forward, and when I went to brush them back, they came off on my fingers. I’d lost a chunk of hair somewhere along the line. So now I was old and balding? Awesome, that was what my already fragile ego needed.

“Rogaine,” I muttered under my breath.

“She’s too old! That alone should keep her from training!” Corb threw at Eammon, and I could feel him losing it as he lost his argument. “It’s your fault she’s here in the first place. Why the . . . why the fu . . . ? Why did you give her the card?”

Part of me was totally gratified that he was so upset, because I’d proved him wrong just by finishing the “interview.” Part of me was astounded and hurt that he was still pulling the “she’s too old” card among other things.

“She’s got the Irish in her blood, lad,” Eammon said, brushing Corb off with a wave of his hand. “I saw it in her the second I met her. And it’s about time we diversified. Experience and craftiness often outwit youth and vigor. We need more brains than brawn right now, and you know it. There is too much afoot to keep on doing as we have been and expecting different results.”

Corb’s jaw seemed to lock shut after that, and he didn’t utter another word. Maybe Eammon outranked him in this company? That seemed plausible given not only their age difference—Corb was easily thirty years Eammon’s junior—but the way that Eammon led the group along.

They took me to the east side of the graveyard where there were conspicuously fewer graves. The big trees hung heavy with Spanish moss that blew in the breeze, floating back and forth, adding to the overall creepy feeling of hanging out in a graveyard after dark.

We stopped in front of a fence surrounding a single oversized grave, and for a minute I thought maybe we were there to admire the elaborate gravestone. “Stunning” was the word that came to mind.

The tomb was made of marble, if the gray and white veining were legit, and it was easily over six feet tall and wide, a perfect square with a human-sized weeping angel perched on the very top. One wing of the angel spread wide, showing every beautifully carved feather, and the other wing looked like it had been broken off. I squinted up at the statue. No, that wasn’t right, it had been made to look that way. The broken wing hung limply behind the angel, dragging past the back of the tomb.

In one hand, the angel held a spray of flowers, and in the other, a tiny flame curled up from the palm. I don’t mean a carved flame either. I mean a literal flame burned in the angel’s palm, flickering in the night, casting shadows across the angel.

The weather had dragged darkness down the lines of the eyes, streaking the face as though the angel were crying, and had been for a long time.

I found my feet taking me forward to read the name of the person buried here.

Lily. Carved lilies wrapped around her name and the scrolling words that said she’d died in 1879, at the age of eighteen, beloved daughter, may she find peace in death that she could not find in life.

I’d read the message softly to myself without realizing it.

The dark-skinned man held out his hand to me, palm up, pulling me out of my staring match with the stunning grave marker. “My name is Tomas; friends call me Tom.”