Wren Loughty hadn’t bothered to lock her bedroom door. She had come to accept that it was rather pointless to pretend that secured locks and protective wards would make a difference. There was simply no avoiding the inevitable. So when she awoke to a set of hands clamped over her mouth, the familiar scent of peppermint and sandalwood wafting up her nose, she wasn’t all that surprised.

In fact, she’d been expecting it.

What disconcerted her was the strange dream of her mother she’d been having only moments earlier. She always found it odd that they still held the ability to sleep and dream. The dead weren’t meant to dream. Though she supposed they weren’t dead—­not really. They existed in the place between. The place parallel to life and death, the one right on the cusp of birth and the dawn of the afterlife.

Whatever that meant.

She tried not to give the transitory nature of purgatory too much thought.

Pale light pooled in through the sheer drapes, illuminating the ivy-­speckled ceiling in a crescent shape. Wren blinked, her vision adjusting to the darkness, and refocused her attention on her intruder.

Augustine Hughes’s familiar slate-­gray eyes hovered above her with smug amusement, the right side of his mouth curled into a smirk.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for the rude awakening, Loughty.” His gaze snaked over her face with careful precision. “Had to be sure you wouldn’t scream and blow my cover. You know . . . given your track record.”