Page 1 of Dead to Rites

Chapter 1

Back from the Dead

Something was beeping above my head. I frowned, trying to identify the annoying sound and coming up with nothing. It didn’t sound like my alarm clock, which was an Elvis Hunk-a-Skunk clock I’d found on eBay that crooned, “Wake up, baby, if you snooze, you lose!”

Everyone I knew hated that clock.

So I opened my eyes.

A plain white ceiling glared down at me, and that wasn’t right, either. I’d been staying at my Great-Aunt Hazel’s house in Prescott, trying to process the reality of being her sole heir and wondering if I really wanted to keep the house and the business she’d left me.

But this wasn’t the ten-foot ceiling in one of the guest rooms, with its mahogany moldings and the antique five-arm brass lamp that hung from the center of a plaster medallion.

This looked…wrong.

“You’re awake,” said an unfamiliar voice to my right. I turned my head on the pillow, noting vaguely that I was lying in a narrow bed and that my body felt heavy and strange, as if it belonged to someone else entirely and I was just borrowing it for a few minutes.

Standing next to me was a woman I’d never seen before, probably in her late forties, with short-cropped brown hair and a permanent frown line worn into the skin between her brows. She was wearing pale pink scrubs.

Before I could begin to analyze that particular detail, she said briskly, “I’ll go get the doctor,” and then disappeared out the door, which stood partway open.

Through it, I caught a glimpse of what looked like a nurse’s station, and people in scrubs and white lab coats moving around.

So…I was in the hospital?

I frowned again. Why in the world would I be in the hospital? As far as I knew, I was healthy as a horse, and other than having my tonsils out when I was eleven and my appendix removed when I was twenty-three — good thing I was still on my parents’ insurance then, or I’d probably still be paying the bill six years later — I couldn’t think of a single reason why I would be lying here with that annoying beep still sounding in my ears and all kinds of tubes running out of my arm.

Before I could ponder that question for much longer, a man came into the room. My somewhat fuzzy brain recognized that he must be the doctor the nurse had mentioned, since he was wearing a white lab coat. He was also tall and broad-shouldered, maybe five or six years older than I was, with light brown hair and clear gray eyes that met mine as he offered me a friendly smile.

Hello, Doctor Hottie.

“Hi, there,” he said as he approached the hospital bed where I lay. “I’m Adam — Dr. Emerson. I’m glad to see you’re back with us. We thought we’d almost lost you.”

Well, that didn’t sound good. Part of me wanted to push up on my arms so I could conduct this conversation like a civilized human being, but my strangely weak body didn’t want to cooperate. So I just lay there and hoped I didn’t look as bad as I felt.

“What happened?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound like mine, either — it was a hoarse croak rather than its normal husky contralto, a voice several men over the years had said was pure sex.

Or words to that effect, anyway.

“Severe anaphylactic shock following a bee sting,” Dr. Emerson replied. His gaze seemed to sharpen a little as he added, “Did you know you were allergic?”

I tried to shake my head, but that hurt too much, so I only replied, “No.”

How could I have known? I’d grown up in Scottsdale, where temperatures between June and October pretty much stayed above a hundred degrees. When you lived in a place like that, you basically went from one air-conditioned place to another, and when you were outside, most places were arid landscapes of decorative rocks and cacti and maybe a few other native plants if someone wanted to get creative. It wasn’t the kind of environment where you typically had to worry about bee stings.

“Do you remember anything?” the doctor asked next.

A good question. I started to frown again and stopped, mainly because I’d just realized it made my head ache too much.

All right, time to hit rewind.

My Great-Aunt Hazel had passed away two weeks ago. I’d driven up from Scottsdale for the funeral and was blown away by how many people attended the service. Sure, I’d known that she’d lived in Prescott most of her life, except for one notable span in the 1960s when she’d been married to husband number two, who’d been some kind of big-shot Hollywood producer. But she’d come back to Arizona after he passed away and had stayed there ever since, living in the huge Victorian house that her own great-grandfather had built back in the 1890s.

Anyway, I’d gone to the funeral and then returned to Scottsdale the same day. I was living in the house that belonged to my parents, who’d died in a plane crash almost exactly a year earlier. That whole time, I’d been sort of drifting, not sure if I should sell the place — it was a big, modern Southwest monstrosity that wasn’t my style at all, but it was paid off and a much better option than the cramped studio where I’d been living before my parents’ passing — and although I was sad to lose my great-aunt, it wasn’t as if we’d been close.

Sure, when I was a little kid, I’d thought she was the coolest person in the world, with her enormous old house and her big black Cadillac and apparently unending cache of jewelry. I’d always been mesmerized by the oversized diamond she wore on her left hand — that was her engagement ring from husband number three — and her massive collection of vintage clothing.

But sometime when I was around thirteen or fourteen, we’d stopped visiting in Prescott so much. My parents had claimed they were just too busy, and since they had a very successful husband-and-wife personal injury law firm, the kind of place that had billboards all up and down Highway 51 and the 101 Loop, I hadn’t thought too much about it.