He’d left a note on the dresser. When I picked it up, cash tumbled out. I was going to kill him again when I caught up to him.
He awakened my vampire nature, Lizzy. I’m not sure I can put it back. you’re not safe with me. No one is.
Ah, hell. I hadn’t thought of that. I’d figured that once the Strega was dead, his influence was too. But fact was fact, and Jimmy was part vampire.
Someone knocked on the door. I wrapped the sheet around me and checked the peephole. Bellboy with a package.
I tipped him a five—just because I was pissed about the money didn’t mean I wasn’t going to use it—then checked the return name.
Sawyer. My gaze went to the turquoise I’d placed on the dresser last night along with the crucifix and the stolen photo. Figured.
I tore open the wrapping and a gorgeous silk robe tumbled out. All the shades of midnight: blue, purple, black with sparkles of silver. I held it up and blinked in shock as the image of a wolf shimmered—there and then gone and then there again.
A piece of paper fell to the floor. Today seemed to be my day for notes.
Summer says trouble’s coming. You’ll need this.
Trust Sawyer to remind me that though we’d won this battle, the war still raged. Casualties on both sides were enormous. They’d regroup, but we would too. Jimmy had been wrong when he said he’d ruined our chance to win. He’d handicapped us, sure, but I wasn’t going to throw in the towel quite yet.
I stared at the robe, so beautiful, so deadly. Trouble was coming; I could feel it, a storm hovering just out of sight, ready to rain hail and thunder and lightning down on the world.
But first things first.
I needed Jimmy, and I’d find him. Finding the missing was what I’d always done best.
I shoved the robe back into the box.
For now, doomsday could wait.
Road on For an excerpt from Lori Handeland’s next book
DOOMSDAY CAN WAIT
Coming in May 2009 from St. Martin’s Paperbacks
A month ago I put a stake through the heart of the only man I’ve ever loved. Luckily, or not, depending on the day and my mood, that wasn’t enough to kill him.
I found myself the leader of a band of seers and demon killers at the dawn of the Apocalypse. Turns out a lot of that Biblical prophecy crap is true.
I consider it both strange and frightening that I was chosen to lead the final battle between the forces of good and evil. Until last month I’d been nothing more than a former cop turned bartender.
Oh, and I was psychic. Always had been.
Not that being psychic had done anything for me except lose me the only job I wanted—being a cop—and the only man too, the aforementioned extremely-hard-to-kill Jimmy Sanducci. It had also gotten my partner killed, something I had yet to get over despite his wife’s insistence that it hadn’t been my fault.
In an attempt to pay a debt I could never truly pay, I’d taken a job as the first-shift bartender in a tavern owned by the widow, Megan Murphy. I also found myself best friends with the woman. I’m not quite sure how.
After last month’s free-for-all of death and destruction, I’d come home to Milwaukee to try and figure out what to do next. Three-quarters of my doomsday soldiers were dead and the rest were in hiding. I had no way of finding them, no way of even knowing who in hell they were. Unless I found Jimmy. That was proving more difficult than I’d thought.
So while I hung out and waited for the psychic flash that would make all things clear, I went back to work at Murphy’s. A girl had to eat and pay the mortgage. Amazingly, being the leader of the supernatural forces of sunshine—I’m kidding, we’re actually called the federation—didn’t pay jack shit.
On the night all hell broke loose—again—I was actually working a double shift. The evening bartender had come down with a case of the “I’d rather be at Summerfest” blues, and I couldn’t walk out at the end of my scheduled hours and leave Megan alone to deal with the dinner rush.
Not that there was much of one. Summerfest, Milwaukee’s famous music festival on the lake, drew most of the party crowd. A few off-duty cops drifted in now and then—they were the mainstay of Megan’s business—but in truth, Murphy’s was the deadest I’d ever seen it. Hell, the place was empty. Which made it easy for the woman who appeared at dusk to draw my attention.
She strolled in on dangerously high heels—tall and slim and dark. Her hair was up in a fancy twist I’d never have been able to manage, even if my own was longer than the nape of my neck. Her white suit made her bronze skin and the copper pendant revealed by the plunging neckline of her jacket gleam in the half-light.