Chapter
1
COLIN WOKE LYING ON ONE OF THE LEATHER sofas in his second-floor library, heart rabbiting in his chest, a thin film of icy sweat on his skin.
Dreaming. Again.
He'd been having too many of those lately, and, like all the others, this one did nothing to edify—only terrify. There were no discernible omens, no prescient revelations. It was simply a dream of frustration, of loss…of condemnation.
Too late.
Its very meaninglessness scared him so much that he allowed himself to pretend there must be meaning, if only he could divine it.
He sat up, swung his legs off the sofa, planted his feet firmly on the floor, and ran long, thin fingers through his riotous hair, trying to force sense into the dream.
The Scholomance had appeared out-of-proportion. Well, of course it had. It assumed terrifying proportions in all his dreams—as it did in waking memory.
He and Lilith had been trapped in its labyrinthine bowels. And why not? The Scholomance had devoured them in their time, just as it devoured a new "class" of students every seven years. In its long history, only Colin had come to it out-of-season, fetching up nameless and alone on its forbidding shores, malnourished and speaking a language no one understood.
The sense of pursuit was a horrific dose of reality in Colin's dreamscape. Then, he had been pursued by the Scholomance's Headmaster. Now…God, now he wasn't being pursued so much as he was being stalked. Stalked by a predator far more devious than the Headmaster and infinitely more merciless…and whose motives were impenetrable. At least he'd known what the Headmaster wanted with him.
He rubbed bleary eyes and looked up. The walls that surrounded him now were familiar, comforting, and covered with mahogany shelving, up to what had been the ceiling of the second floor. It had been cut back to form a mezzanine, reachable by a spiral staircase. More bookshelves rose from the mezzanine almost to the third-story skylight, upon which a soft rain was falling.
Colin let his gaze range over the crowded shelves. At last inventory he had over fifteen thousand volumes: folios, scrolls, codices, opuscules, enchiridions, incunables, and other works, both fiction and nonfiction, ancient and modern.
And in none of them was the answer to the riddle of his own self.
Find the Trine and use it to rescue me, Lilith had pleaded. Well, he'd found it, hadn't he? Twice. But that was then and this was now, and Lilith was irrevocably gone. Beyond any hope of rescue.
While he had lost Lilith, he still had the Trine—a triune artifact of such power that the Headmaster had disassembled it and hidden the elements separately about his "school" of the arcane. Colin doubted that he had expected a nameless, teenage waif to spend a year of his life tracking those elements down and using them to escape.
The Book, the Stone, and the Flame.
Deep within Colin—now a young man, now free of the Scholomance and its insidious Headmaster—was a bereft boy who would have traded the entire unholy trinity to bring Lilith back.
"Do you realize how often you fall asleep wherever you happen to be out of sheer exhaustion? You really ought to plan for sleep, Colin. You are still human, after all."
The voice sent chills coursing down Colin's spine and brought his mind into sharp focus.
The angel reclined, in profile, on the matching leather couch directly across from where he sat. She appeared to be reading; at least, she held a leather-bound volume open in her pale hands. She was momentarily dazzling in the semidarkness of the room—as if she sat in a spotlight—and Colin's synesthesia caused bright chips of radiance to dance in the fringes of her aura. He looked away from her, seeking her reflection in the front of a long glass display case that ran at right angles to the sofas and in which he kept mementos of his various "adventures."
She was beautiful, of course; even her eyes, which were blank silver discs bright as newly minted dimes, enhanced rather than detracted from her appearance. She was wearing white jeans, a long-sleeve peach T-shirt, and gray running shoes. Her hair was strawberry blond today, cut short and spiked. A Mogen David, a tiny gold cross, and a star-and-crescent dangled from the earlobe he could see. A five-pointed star hung from a silver chain about her neck.
He could see his own semitransparent reflection in the glass as well: tall, lean almost to the point of cadaverousness, wearing faded black jeans and a charcoal gray T-shirt. His skin was pale, made more so by contrast to his unruly black hair. The reflection of his face was superimposed over an ancient humanoid horned skull. Compared to the angel's reflection, his seemed ephemeral, as if she were the flesh and blood being and he a mere phantom.
Copyright © 2006 by Slockingstone, Ent., Inc., FSO
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In a bookshop specializing in rare volumes, an avid fan of horror fiction seizes a tome too valuable and too incredible to fathom. In the end, the man was too curious to live.... A few miles away, in a Manhattan brownstone, another man learns about the explosion that left a gaping hole in the fabric of reality. Colin--he has no other name--has been an unrelenting warrior against the dark, the demonic, and the damned. A man who has angels at his side and hell staring him in the face, he has devoted his life to solving magical crimes and tracking down--and neutralizing--the perpetrators of those crimes, human and nonhuman alike. Now Colin is about to team up with a beautiful Native American a long way from home and a tough NYPD detective who seems to be immune to magic. Together, in a funhouse of evidence and apparitions, they are chasing a killer and untangling a tale that leads from the infamous Vlad the Impaler to a dead twentieth-century occult author and his gorgeous daughter--who is as seductive as the devil himself. Mr. Twilight combines the mystical and the mysterious, the supernatural and the primitive, in a rich, steamy brew of otherworldly adventure.
