Sam took the laptop away to study the screen. Her head spun from the champagne, but she could comprehend the lines well enough. Geoffrey Kennedy, late husband of Carmel, father of Montague, Hillvale mayor, and Kurt Kennedy, lodge owner, was her grandfather?

“Or are Montgomery and Kurt Kennedy my half-uncles? Do they know that?” she asked tentatively. “I’ve never had family. I don’t know how the relationships work.”

“Looks like Zachary would have been their older half-brother, so yeah, I guess you can go with half-uncle,” he acknowledged, still studying the screen. “Looks like your grandfather had Kurt and Monty late in life. It’s possible they know nothing about Zach.”

Sam shuddered, realizing her uncles ran the town—and may never have known about her existence. She stared wordlessly at the screen, trying to absorb the hot mess that was her real, very mixed-up birth family. Jade and Wolf were much easier to handle in comparison. She had a longing for the sanity of the university and the office waiting for her back there.

Walker took the laptop back and scrolled around. “Even better, Cass and Geoffrey seem to be half-siblings, so I guess Cass is. . .” He scrunched up his nose to figure it out. “She’d be Zach’s half-aunt and your great-aunt. She essentially raised her nephew because Geoffrey wouldn’t claim him.”

“I remember her telling me that she was like a grandmother to me. I guess, since she raised my father, that was truth of a sort too.” She curled up against his side to study the screen, but her head couldn’t take in much more.

“Cass sent you up to Hillvale for a reason. And given your relationship to Kurt and Monty, I’m guessing it’s not one Carmel will be happy about.”

“I still can’t recall how Cass sent me up there. If I’m remembering right, I think I refused to go. I didn’t want any part of a family that didn’t want me.” That hurt as much now as it had since she was a kid and learned what adopted meant. “Geoffrey Kennedy or my birth parents essentially paid Wolf and Jade to keep me away.”

“Don’t be so hasty to jump to conclusions. We still don’t have all the data on your mother. Where did she hook up with Zack? In Hillvale? Frisco? Did she know the Lucys? The Kennedys? Did they pay her to leave too?”

“Is she even alive?” Forgetting about Walker’s search for people who might have met his father, she spun the laptop screen again. “Susannah Ingersson Kennedy. Zack married my mother.”

“He also used his birth father’s name and not Tolliver, which is why your genealogist was running into difficulty,” Walker pointed out, as if that might be significant.

“That’s rude. I’m Samantha Moon because my parents adopted me. I don’t want to be a Kennedy or whatever. My birth parents gave me up. Why would my father cut out Cass’s married name if she raised him as a Tolliver?”

“To taunt his father and his father’s new family would be my guess. Looks like he wasn’t more than twenty when he married. That’s not always a real bright age, especially for a troubled addict. Since Cass was a Kennedy before she married, he wasn’t completely disrespecting her.”

She wrinkled her nose. “But when I was born, they used Tolliver on my birth certificate. None of this makes sense, unless they deliberately wanted to confuse me.”

“I don’t have answers,” Walker said with a shrug. “Cass can tell us more tomorrow. But look at the Ingersson.”

“Why does that sound familiar?” Were there still holes in her memory?

“Valdis,” he replied curtly. “Her real name is Valerie Ingersson, and her real hair color is blond, just like yours.”

Sam snapped the laptop shut. “That’s it. I can’t take any more. I’m related to a witch, a death goddess, and the owners of half the town. I never had any idea that family could be such a headache.”

Walker dropped the computer on the coffee table and hugged her at the same time.

She knew he only meant to comfort her, but she needed more than that. She needed out of her head and back to basic human touch. Walker smelled of delicious masculine musk and the remnants of aftershave, and he’d opened the top button of his shirt so she could just. . .

Glimpsing a tattoo on the brown skin beneath the V of his shirt, she leaned over and kissed it.

He grabbed her hair and pulled her head up so he could meet her eyes. “You are no longer a missing person and no longer my case.”

“I hope that means something significant.” She unbuttoned the next button to see the tattoo. It was a Chinese symbol she couldn’t interpret.

“It means I may regret this in the morning, but at least I won’t feel guilty preying on a victim.” He growled and bent to capture her mouth.

Selfishly deciding to believe that his comment about regret was his problem and not hers, Sam climbed across his thighs. Alcohol had a lovely effect on inhibitions, but she would have done this without the champagne. As if starved, she devoured Walker’s mouth. He had flexible lips that plied hers with expertise, authoritative, demanding, and as hungry as hers. She absorbed his male scent, the rough texture of his jaw, and his strength. She wriggled downward until she could feel his hard thighs and the long ridge lengthening beneath her bottom.

“Your duty is to serve and protect?” she asked teasingly, coming up for air. “I’m not a victim, you know. I’ve been taking care of myself these past six years.”

“You and your trust fund in your ivory tower,” he corrected. But then he ran his hand under her shirt and released her bra and everything was all right.

“Broaden my world,” she murmured some minutes later when he lifted her and carried her toward the bedroom.

“No promises,” he muttered back. “One night, that’s all this is.”

“One night is all I need,” she taunted, tugging his shirt from his pants as he laid her across the largest bed she’d ever seen. “Drive my family out of my head.”

Walker was all gorgeous male. The purple tattoo emphasized his admirable pecs. Another cryptic tattoo circled his muscled biceps and stretched when he leaned over her. He was tougher than her grad student boyfriends, a man who had lived a real life, not the sheltered one of academia.

A man who knew luxury suites supplied condoms and had the sense to grab one.

She needed to absorb some of his toughness and experience if she was to survive this next phase. She needed to know she could withstand that toughness.

But the kisses he used to arouse her were tender, so tender she nearly cried at the need welling up inside her. And the need was more than physical. Alone and adrift, she clung to him as a sturdy mast in the storm. And when they joined, he set her free.

“Fruit is not breakfast,” Walker scolded as his tousled bedmate placed her order with room service the next day. “Fruit is dessert.”

“Fresh fruit is nirvana,” she countered, almost drooling over the picture on the desk menu. “Fresh fruit is nectar of the gods. Manly men can crunch baby chickens and three kinds of grease on an empty stomach. This goddess can’t.”

She looked like a veritable goddess with all that moonlight hair tumbling into her sunlit face and down her robe. Last night, she’d awakened him in ways that must have been magic. He’d been dead inside for too long. He wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to return to the living, but her delight was not only irresistible but ego-inflating.

“Goddess, huh?” He lifted her against him. “Mystical, mythical, or comic book?”

“Tarot card.” She wrapped her fine legs around his hips and kissed his neck. “Does that count?”

“Works for me.” And he carried her back to bed to fill in time before room service arrived. A year was a damned long time to go without sex. He had a lot to catch up on, and Sam was no shy virgin. She was a natural earth goddess. He didn’t need to worry she would take their encounter seriously. Maybe sex without considering commitment and babies could keep him going. He blessed the hotel’s box of condoms.

They’d showered and dressed by the time breakfast arrived. Walker had sent yesterday’s clothes to be express laundered. That had earned him extra hugs and kisses. At least Sam knew how to do appreciation. Must have been that small-town upbringing.

Watching her salivate over berries, yogurt, and honey tickled him more than anything in his life lately. He’d have to watch himself once they returned to the real world, but for now, maybe his weary soul needed a fresh perspective.

After he finished his three kinds of grease, and she’d practically licked her bowl, they used hotel toothbrushes and checked out. Walker grabbed the champagne bottle on the way. It might not be bubbly, but it was his, and a good memory for the lonely nights ahead.

“So first thing we do after we pick up my backpack is ask Cass who lived in Hillvale twenty years ago?” Sam asked as they drove back to the restaurant where she had first met Cass. “She may still not be strong, so let’s line up the important things first.”

“I want to know how in hell she put a hex on you for days while she lay in a coma,” he grumbled, pulling into the storage facility next door to the restaurant.

A cloud crossed Sam’s usually sunny face, but she held back her feelings and shrugged. “She’ll just say drugs. Focus. Have you ever asked her if she knew your father?”

She punched her birthday into the keyboard, and the gates opened. She produced the key on her key chain with the locker number on it, and he drove down the aisle until he found it.

“I didn’t know he was here for sure until this past week, so no. I’ve kept his name on the down low while I snooped.”

“Snooping while learning about everyone, letting them trust you—you’re sneaky but good.” She climbed out, distancing herself literally as well as verbally.

Walker thought he should be good with that. He kept an eye on their surroundings as Sam applied the key to the designated box lock and twisted. They both sighed in relief when it opened, revealing a backpack. She rummaged around inside the pack until she found a small leather cash purse and opened it. Smiling triumphantly, she climbed back in with her treasures and waved her driver’s license and credit card at him. “I’m real again.”

“That relieves you of cartoon goddess status then. You’ll have to be normal like the rest of us.” Forcing her back into his mental closed case file, he drove out of the storage unit and headed for the hospital.

Cass had planned this whole damned expedition, right down to a restaurant and hotel near storage lockers and a hospital. He ought to strangle the old lady.

As they circled the hospital parking lot looking for a space, Sam stiffened. Walker hit the brake and followed her gaze. “Effing shit.”

He eased the car down the next aisle and over to a construction dumpster where a tall, slender, gray-haired female wrapped in shawls waited. Cass let herself in the back door of the SUV before he could even turn off the engine. “Home, Jeeves,” she ordered.

“What are you doing out of bed?” Sam asked with what sounded like horror. “Did the doctors say you could go?”

“They want to run a battery of tests and bill Medicare a fortune. I’m fine. Let’s go. We have work to do.”

Walker didn’t let up on the brake. He glanced at Sam. Her fingers were balled in fists. Remembering how she’d nearly broken his finger in her fury, he waited to see if he needed to intervene.

“That’s all you have to say to me?” Sam demanded, still sounding horrified. “You medicate me, send me into the void, leave me helpless—and all you can do is order us to take you home? Do I get an apology? An explanation? Or do we need to haul you back into the hospital and tell them you’re insane?”

Walker winced. But he stayed out of it. It wasn’t his head the old witch had played with. In his rearview mirror, he saw Cass lift her bony chin and glare out the window.

“You were bent on rejecting us without valid reason. You needed to meet us with open eyes, using that observational mind of yours and not childish emotion. And now that you’ve had time to study Hillvale, do you still want to walk away?”

“That justifies whatever you did to me?” Sam cried, although some of her fury had deflated. Walker suspected she’d already recognized why the old woman had done what she had.

How she had done it was another mystery entirely.

“Hillvale is special,” Cass said quietly. “We could change the world, if the world doesn’t destroy us first. I was willing to die if it meant you would return to help us.”

Shit, the old lady had hit Sam’s sympathy buttons. Sam frowned in thought. He really didn’t want to fight the old woman and carry her back inside. But he didn’t want her dropping dead on him either.

“I’m fine,. Let’s go,” Cass said with a wave of her thin hand. “They could be up there bulldozing the vortex if we don’t go back now.”

“Bulldozing the vortex? Is that what this is all about?” Sam asked, nodding at him in an unspoken command.

Walker took it as an okay to move on. The hospital would already have Cass’s information. He’d have his assistant double check to make certain they knew she was okay and that they didn’t need more. He was all for interrogating the crazy old bat all the way back to town.

“Are you prepared to tell me what you did to Sam?” he asked before leaving the lot. “Otherwise, I’m hauling you back inside.”

“Drugs, dear. It’s all in knowing your pharmaceuticals. Well, and a little hypnosis, perhaps. Did that work?”

Walker checked his rearview mirror. Cass had a too academic, sophisticated air to look like an innocent old lady, no matter how she tried. He knew she lied, at least partially. She’d probably used mushrooms, all right, but the Lucys did weird inexplicable things. He needed to figure out how before they did it again.

“You scared the heck out of me,” Sam said angrily. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to not know who you are?”

“My friends took care of you, didn’t they? They only had to look at you to know who you are. That’s the reason Susannah insisted you be sent away. The girl is paranoid.”

Diverted, Sam’s anger turned to interest. “You know my mother?”

Walker recognized the old lady’s tactic. Cass had no intention of accepting responsibility for these last days of horror. And since he wasn’t even certain a crime had been committed, he grudgingly accepted her change of subject only because it was one Sam needed to hear.

“So Sam’s mother is still alive?” He had already done the math and knew her father had been dead and her mother had moved on before his father had gone to Hillvale, but he knew Sam’s curiosity burned.

“As far as I’m aware,” Cass said airily. “Susannah ran the opposite direction to Jade. She could be in China by now. They were good friends.”

“My birth mother is alive?” Sam almost shouted. Walker was afraid to glance over to see her expression.

“Happily remarried and mother of three, last I heard, which has been a while,” Cass admitted, apparently oblivious to her effect on Sam.

“Cassandra,” Walker said warningly. “Sam is just learning all this. There’s no need to hit her over the head with a baseball bat.”

Sam gave an ungraceful snort but didn’t argue.

“It’s all old news, dear,” Cass replied with a wave of her bony hand. “The important part is that we have you back. You’ll complete the circle, and we can begin turning things around.”

“No,” Sam said quietly. “The important part is that my mother thought it necessary to send me far away from Hillvale to an environment exactly opposite of the one I was born in. And then she ran the reverse direction. That doesn’t sound as if I belong in Hillvale or that she wants me there. Do my uncles even know I exist?”

Silence from the back seat was damning. The Kennedys knew nothing of Sam. Walker could almost feel her pain as she took up where Cass’s silence left off.

“I’m damned tired of not belonging,” she said. “But first, we need to know more about the skeleton buried on the mountain. How much do you know about that?”

Walker wanted to pump his fist and cheer. Cass was an intimidating old hag, almost as bad as Carmel, but she had met her match in Sam.

He would have preferred to have had this conversation where he could study Cass’s body language, but an occasional glance in his mirror would have to suffice. He had to take this brief interval of captivity before Cass disappeared inside her weird mansion again.

“A skeleton?” Cass sounded alarmed, but a glance in the mirror showed sadness. “We knew the vortex was drawing on negativity, but a skeleton?”

Sam left the opening to him.

“Do you remember a Michael Walker from almost eighteen years ago? He would have been staying at the lodge and asking questions around town.” Walker knew how ludicrous the question sounded. Cass had no reason to know about lodge guests. But she was his only connection to that period.

“The year Geoff died, I vaguely remember the sheriff asking after a missing tourist. But we had no reason to believe the tourist had died in Hillvale.” She sat there sadly, gathering her thoughts. “It must have been his spirit who spoke to us on Zack’s birthday a year or so later. He didn’t give his name. We were trying to contact Zack, to see if he was in a happier place.”

Walker gritted his teeth. He handed his phone to Sam so she could look up the genealogy he’d downloaded. She poked through it, apparently understanding his need to confirm dates.

“What did the spirit say?” Sam asked as she scrolled.

“Mostly, the stranger wanted to express love for his family, but he was too furious to be clear. And we were too afraid to listen. We were expecting Zach’s gentle presence, and this one was just too forceful. We could try again, I suppose.”

“We tried that. Tullah claims he is too far out of reach to speak to us, but her spirit guide warned of evil and fire and said to tell his son to beware.” Sam sent him a guilty look. “I didn’t know she meant you.”

Walker wanted to rage about the non-validity of spirit guides and voodoo and schizophrenic voices, but Sam and Cass were the public he was currently serving, not his family. He bit his tongue and played along. “It sounds like Tullah knows something. Was she here eighteen years ago?” He might not believe in spirits, but he’d learned there was a kernel of truth behind every mystery the Lucys produced.

“No, Tullah joined us a year or more after Katrina wiped out her home. She’s the one who told Dinah the café was available. Natural disasters bring out the best and worst in people, and Dinah had been having a hard time in New Orleans.”

Walker was afraid the old woman was wearing out and starting to ramble, but all information was useful. “Who else was there back then?”

Cass hesitated. He had no way of knowing if she was gathering memories or choosing her lies. A little of both, he suspected. “Daisy, of course. She walked through time and found us when she ran away from home. Susan McQueen was part of the commune. She was at the séance, but she doesn’t participate much in the town otherwise. Marta Josephine was probably there. She’s been with us since she left Berkley.”

“What about Valdis?” Sam asked.

“Valdis and your mother are sisters, dear. Their parents owned the commune’s farm, and they grew up in Hillvale. But Valdis left for college, and Susannah left after Zach died. Valdis only recently returned after some tragedy she won’t tell us about.”

“Harvey and Aaron?” Walker asked impatiently. He couldn’t imagine any of those unworldly women hitting his father over the head. Harvey, the long-haired musician, and fastidious Aaron, the antique dealer, were probably too young, but he had to try.

“Oh Harvey is a friend of Monty’s. He’s not been around long. I’m not certain what brought Aaron up, but it was long after that particular séance. He doesn’t participate in them anyway.”

“So the circle consisted of you, Daisy, Susan, and Marta?” Sam asked. She appeared to be typing notes into his phone.

“Yes, that sounds about right. It probably would have been better if we could have had some men, if the spirit was male, but we didn’t.”

Walker seriously doubted that four irrational women had any idea of what happened to his father. But he had only straws to grasp, so he tried to keep them sorted. “Once you knew there was a spirit floating around, did you even attempt to figure out why?”

“Evil has inhabited the land around the lodge for as long as we know,” Cass said as pragmatically as if she claimed the lodge had termites. “We avoid going there. All we could do was try to reach out for the spirit and lay him to rest. If Tullah couldn’t reach him, then we may have at least partially succeeded.”

“Valdis goes up on the mountain,” Sam pointed out.

“Valdis walks with death. She must learn to be strong. But this is why we need you, Sam. The evil must be eradicated before any more are hurt. Daisy sees disaster in the future if we don’t act.”

Cass was so insistent, that Walker would almost have listened—had she said an arsonist was on the loose or tree beetles were destroying the pines. But evil and spirits did not compute. Maybe they were metaphors.

Before the old lady could lay a guilt trip on Sam, Walker intervened. “You drugged Sam and sent her blindly up an unfamiliar mountain into the arms of strangers. I’m thinking she’s better off going far, far away, maybe looking for her mother to get the real story.”

In the mirror, he read a flicker of panic on Cass’s face. Good. Mushrooms had been a damned dangerous trick.

“He’s right, Cass,” Sam said. “It was a horrifying experience. If I have no guarantee that it won’t happen again, I can’t stay in Hillvale.”

“You needed to see it with clear eyes,” Cass repeated, almost angrily. “Your mother sent you to be brainwashed by the most deadly Nulls she could imagine. You would never have opened your eyes to possibilities if I hadn’t interfered. Did you feel the earth? Could you not sense what was happening? Can you understand that Mariah and the others aren’t freaks?”

Sam waited so long to reply that Walker almost missed his turn in anticipation of her answer. When it came, it wasn’t the one he wanted.

“Misguided, perhaps, but not freaks,” Sam said so quietly he almost didn’t hear her. “There’s a difference in the earth energy between one side of the vortex and the other.”

Walker had gone silent after Sam’s admission about feeling earth energy. She didn’t blame him. She’s always been aware of good and bad energies. It helped her know where to plant. But Jade and Wolf had made it understood that this wasn’t normal. They’d said she was imagining things. So she’d quit telling anyone—until now.

Letting Walker work it out for himself, Sam continued adding names to his phone as she dragged them out of Cass. Casting aside her whirling emotions, she focused on the here and now, aware of a subtle connection to her great-aunt beneath what was said aloud. If she believed that link—Cass was not telling all she knew.

Given what she already understood about the wily woman, Sam was inclined to believe this odd bond. To Cass, Walker was an outsider. In Cass’s mind, that kept him off the need-to-know list.

But in many ways—despite her hereditary status—Sam was also an outsider. She knew how that felt too well, and her shoulders twitched in discomfort. But in this case, maybe being an outsider was a good thing.

Once Cass insisted she didn’t know any other names for Walker’s list, Sam turned to face her and remonstrated, “You brought me to Hillvale for a reason, Cass. If you want me to be objective about the town’s problems, you have to tell the truth.”

“You are young,” she said with a weary wave of dismissal. “When you reach my age, you realize there are layers of truth, and the world consists of shades of gray. I tell you what I know, not what I suspect.”

Unexpectedly, Walker agreed with her. “I don’t want speculation. Like Sam, I need to be objective. If you didn’t know my father, I believe you. He would have appeared to be any regular tourist. The question becomes—do you have any idea why a fraud investigator would have been in Hillvale?”

Sam raised her eyebrows at Cass’s silence. Walker slowed down to check the rearview mirror. But Cass was alert—and pensive.

“Eighteen years is almost a generation ago, dear,” she said at last. “We can’t bring your father back. But we can release the evil energy if we stir things up. We have enough trouble without adding to it.”

Can, not may. Sam shuddered. If she believed Cass. . . “The evil has already been stirred,” Sam corrected, before Walker could object. “The security manager at the lodge was killed a couple of days ago.”

“Juan? Oh, that’s dreadful.” Cass gave a heartfelt sigh. “His poor mother. She had fourteen children. She was so proud of her son when he took the job at the lodge. I didn’t have the heart to warn her that he would be surrounded by evil.”

“He was here eighteen years ago?” Walker asked immediately.

“Yes. Many of the lodge employees have been,” she conceded. “I don’t know most of them. I really didn’t know Juan that well. Juan’s parents moved down the mountain when the bank foreclosed on their little house.”

Cass waved a dismissive hand at Sam’s look. “I know, give me a minute. My memory isn’t what it used to be.” She sat silent, watching out the window as she gathered her thoughts. “The foreclosures started around twenty years ago. That’s about the time that Geoff began talking ski resorts and development and started buying up land his neighbors lost.”

Sam heard her bitterness. “Why did everyone start losing their homes?”

“The usual reasons—recession, the mill closing, a rockslide took out the road for nearly a year so tourists couldn’t get in, an avalanche of bad luck.”

“It happens,” Walker said curtly, keeping his eyes on the narrow switchback up the mountain. “California real estate is a shell game. Mortgage companies, developers, real estate agents promise the American dream. People overextend their finances to buy a piece of that dream in belief that they’re on the way up in the world. First economic downturn, they’re out on the street. The rich developers sweep in, buy the foreclosed land for peanuts, build a new development, and resell at higher prices to the next fool.”

“Capitalism, dearest,” Cass said with a smile. “The biggest wolf wins.”

“And the sheep get eaten,” Walker countered. “If that’s the evil you’re battling, it’s pretty much worldwide.”

“Which doesn’t make it less evil, but no, this evil is innate. It feeds on souls.”

Before Sam could question this insane conclusion, Walker cursed. She turned back to glance out the windshield. Smoke billowed high above the trees.

The mountain was on fire.