1. Chapter 1: The Woman Who Dreamed Her Death

The body was still warm when Damien Voss arrived. That was the worst kind. The ones still warm meant the heat hadn't fully left yet — meant there was still something clinging to the flesh, some residue of what had been a person an hour ago. Damien stood at the threshold of the alley and breathed through his mouth, which helped with the smell but did nothing for the dread. Detective Reyes was already there, crouched beside the victim, not touching anything. She looked up when Damien approached and her expression did what it always did: a careful, practiced neutrality that meant she was watching him and trying not to let him see it. "Male, mid-forties," she said. "No ID. Blunt force to the back of the head. No witnesses." "Any cameras?" "One. Facing the wrong direction." Of course it was. Damien put on his gloves — always the gloves first, a ritual from the early days when he hadn't understood what bare skin would do to him. Then he crouched beside the body, steadied his breathing, and pressed two fingers to the dead man's wrist. The world went white. Then it came back — but wrong. The colors too saturated, the sounds too sharp. He was seeing through someone else's eyes in the last seconds before those eyes stopped seeing anything. The dead man had been running. The alley walls had blurred past him, brick and shadow, and there had been footsteps behind him, very close, and he had been too slow— And then a face. Just a fraction of a second, a smear of features in bad light: pale, angular, a slash of dark hair across one cheekbone. Then nothing. Damien sat back and pulled his hand away. The vision collapsed like a building with its foundations removed. He was in the alley again, crouched beside a dead man, and Reyes was watching him with that careful face. "Anything?" she asked. "He was running," Damien said. "One person behind him. Couldn't see clearly." He paused. "Male or female, hard to tell. Dark hair." Reyes wrote it down without asking how he knew. After four years working together, she had stopped asking. Damien stood up. His knees ached the way they always did after a vision — some side effect of the body trying to reconcile two different sets of physical experience at once, his therapist had theorized. His therapist had also theorized that what Damien experienced wasn't real, that it was a sophisticated form of trauma response, that his brain was constructing narratives from sensory data collected at crime scenes. His therapist had a degree from a very good university and Damien had solved forty-seven murders, so they had come to a comfortable agreement to disagree. He was halfway to the precinct exit when the desk officer called after him. "Voss. Someone's been waiting for you. About an hour." He found her in interview room three. She was sitting with her hands folded on the table — very still, the way people sat when they had been still for a long time and had gotten used to it. Dark hair, pale skin, a face that was striking rather than beautiful, composed into an expression of calm that looked like it had cost her something to maintain. She was wearing a coat too warm for the season. Her knuckles, Damien noticed, were white. "Detective Voss," she said, before he could introduce himself. "My name is Seraphine Cole. I need to report a murder." "When did it happen?" "It hasn't," she said. "Not yet." A pause, measured and deliberate. "It's going to happen in seven days. To me." Damien sat down across from her. He set his notepad on the table and looked at her steadily. In his experience, people who came in claiming foreknowledge of their own deaths were one of three things: deeply traumatized, mentally unwell, or — very occasionally — right. "Tell me what you know," he said. "I dreamed it." She held his gaze without flinching. "I know how that sounds." "It sounds like a dream." "It was different. I've had these dreams before — specific, detailed, and they always happen." She unfolded her hands and laid them flat on the table, an unconscious gesture of openness, or perhaps proof that they weren't shaking anymore. "Three years ago I dreamed my father's car accident the night before it happened. Two years ago I dreamed a fire in my building four days before the electrical fault was found. Each time, every detail was exact." Damien was quiet for a moment. "And in this dream." "I'm in my apartment. It's night. Someone gets in — I don't see how. I don't see who, not until the end." She paused. "At the end, I see a face. Before the dream goes dark." Her eyes met his and didn't look away. "It's your face, Detective Voss." The room was very quiet. "You understand," Damien said carefully, "how that sounds." "I do." She didn't move. "That's why I came to you instead of away from you. Either you're going to kill me, in which case sitting across a desk in a police precinct is somewhat protective. Or you're going to be the last person to see me alive, which means you're also the most likely person to find out who does." A fractional pause. "Or the dream means something else entirely and you're the only person who can help me understand what." Damien looked at her for a long time. The vision from the alley was still fading at the edges of his mind — the running man, the dark hair, the blow that came from nowhere. "I'll need your address," he said. "And a full account of the dream. Every detail." Something in her shoulders loosened, barely perceptibly. "I was hoping you'd say that." Outside, the city hummed along in its ordinary way, indifferent to the fact that in interview room three, a detective who saw the last moments of dead people had just agreed to keep a woman alive through the seven days that stood between her and her own vision of the end. He didn't know yet that she was already in his.