Page 1 of Immortal Unveiled

Prologue

Closing her eyes, Kim turned her face into the spray of the shower and allowed the warm water to rinse away the soap. The water pressure wasn’t quite as strong as she was used to from her own condo. After all, her childhood home, which Kim’s mother now occupied alone, was an old house with aging pipes, creaking stairs, and oodles of character. Her own place in a turn-of-the-century warehouse-turned-condo-building was currently undergoing some minor renovations after her upstairs neighbor’s negligence had caused water damage to several floors in the building.

Kim had opted for staying with her mother while the work to her condo was being done rather than staying with her fiancé, Todd. He’d been taken aback by her decision to stay with her mother. Her excuse that the commute from his suburban home to the internet news blog she worked for as an investigative journalist was too long hadn’t quite convinced him.

“You work remotely half the time anyway,” Todd had said.

He had a point. A good one.

Still, she hadn’t let him talk her into staying with him and instead taken up residence in her childhood bedroom. Maybe it was a sign that their relationship had moved into a direction she wasn’t ready for. Though they were engaged, no date for the wedding had been set. The fact that she was fine with that didn’t exactly make her a model fiancée. She should be browsing bridal magazines and planning her dream wedding, but she couldn’t get into the mood for it.

To Kim’s surprise, her mother had brought up the matter only a few nights earlier over a late glass of wine.

“Maybe Todd isn’t the right guy for you.”

“Mom? Are you drunk? You adore Todd.”

“Of course, I do, but do you?” her mother had retorted so quickly that Kim had been stunned into silence.

She’d been unable to give an answer to that question. And even now, several days later, the question remained unanswered. Not that her mother had pressed her for a response. Maybe the question had been simply meant as a thought-provoking exercise, part of a game her mother had played with her when Kim had been a teenager. A game that had fueled her inquisitive nature and taught her never to accept anything at face value.

Kim sighed and turned off the water. She pushed the curtain back and reached for the towel when she heard a loud thud from downstairs. Had her mother come home?

Instinctively she ripped the towel from the rack and pressed it to her front.

“Mom?”

She didn’t expect an answer. If her mother was downstairs, she wouldn’t be able to hear her calling out from the upstairs bathroom. Not with the door closed. Kim shook her head. She was used to her condo, where everything was open plan, and the partitions in the loft-like space weren’t soundproof.

Another thud followed by shattering porcelain or glass sent her heartbeat racing. She tossed the towel on the hamper, snatched her bathrobe from the hook on the door, and slipped it on quickly, already opening the door.

“Mom, what’s going on?” she called out toward the stairs, hurrying toward them.

Grunting sounds drifted upstairs, then a high-pitched yelp.

Panic flooded her now. Was her mother having a seizure of some sort?

“Mom, hold on, I’m coming.”

Kim flew down the stairs, having to hold on to the railing so she wouldn’t slip with her wet bare feet. She missed the last step, slipping on the landing, and would have slammed into the front door had she not been gripping the old mahogany rail.

A whooshing sound made her snap her head to the right, where an open arch led into the living room. Kim froze. The area of the living room she could see from her vantage point was in disarray. Broken porcelain was strewn over the carpet, a lamp lay on the ground, the coffee table was turned over. But while she noticed those things, her focus was drawn to something else.

At the spot where the coffee table had stood, a mass of smoke was swirling in a circle. But there was no fire. No heat. No smell. Just smoke or black fog swirling around as if it were a tornado or a black hole. Only it wasn’t a vertical tornado but a horizontal one. And in the middle of it she noticed a leg disappearing, as if a person had stepped into the fog hole.

Kim gasped and shivered at the same time, suddenly feeling the cold from the odd phenomenon. She took a step toward it, and the swirling mass shrank. Another step, and it shrank even more as if it was being sucked into nothingness. A second later it was gone completely, leaving no traces of its existence behind, except that it now revealed what it had hidden.

Her mother.

She lay several feet behind the spot where the mysterious tornado-like mass had manifested.

Kim barreled toward her and crouched down. “Mom! Mom!”

There was no response.

“No! No, please no!”

She looked into her mother’s pale face, felt her skin, searched for her pulse.