Here is the unedited version of the opening scene of the new book, For Love or Magic, which doesn’t have a release date yet, but if I had to guess… I’d put it at February of 2016. Enjoy!

“Let’s be clear about one thing, Seamus,” I said, giving the bullmastiff the French fry he had been whining about since I pulled it out of the bag. “Just because I’m feeding you doesn’t mean you’re my dog.”

I wasn’t trying to be mean, but I didn’t want him to start getting all attached just because I gave him a stupid French fry, either. In truth, there didn’t seem to be much danger of that; he inhaled the fry and continued to remain indifferent to me, which was really best for everyone.

I drove along in the ratty old sky-blue Chevy pickup truck that was only technically mine. Much like Seamus, I hadn’t chosen it and I didn’t like it.

“Hey,” Judd admonished from the spot between me and Seamus where he crouched. “This truck is awesome. Perfect to haul home all those garage sale chairs and tables. I’m gonna refinish them, baby, sell ’em at a yuge profit, and we’ll be livin’ like kings.”

“It’s huge, not yuge, and you never did bring home a single piece of furniture. You couldn’t keep your word if it was sewn into your underwear, and I hate this stupid truck.” To make my point, I downshifted from fifth gear to fourth, letting the gears grind and sticking my elbow into Judd’s gut as I did.

Not that Judd had a gut anymore. He was dead.

“You hear that, Judd?” I said. “Dead. Gone. Finito. I’m a widow. Move on already, would you? Go toward the light.”

“I’ve moved on,” he said, his South Boston accent just as thick as ever. Even in death, he talked like he had a mouth full of mashed potatoes. “I’m dead. It’s you who’s keeping me here.”

He pronounced here with two syllables. He-ah. You’d think if I had to be haunted by the imagined ghost of my dead ex-husband, I’d at least give him a reasonable accent. British, maybe. I shot him a sideways look.

“Say ‘jolly good,’” I commanded.

He laughed. “You got a wicked sense of yumor, Ellie.”

“It’s humor. Hu-mor. With an ‘h’. Jesus.” I stuffed a fry in my mouth. Seamus whined again.

“I don’t care what you say,” Judd said, and shot me a sidelong glance, his eyes glinting with yumor. You had to give Judd that; no matter what he was doing, he was always having a great time. “You still love me, and you know it.”

I glanced in the rearview and saw his cocky smile, the very smile I’d fallen for way back in the day when I was too young and stupid to know better.

“Shut up.” I gave Seamus another fry, and he wolfed it down with such enthusiasm that I had to check my hand quickly to be sure all my fingers were still there. They were. They were covered in slobber, but they were still there. With the luck I’d had lately, I guessed I should be grateful. I wiped my hands on my jeans and took the left onto Wildwood Lane, which sounded like it should be really nice, but in reality it looked like the kind of abandoned dirt road where they shoot the the-missing-girl-was-last-seen-here pieces for the local news.

“Are you kidding me with this, Judd?” I said, my heart starting to race in response to the panic rushing through my veins. “What the hell kind of place did you buy, anyway?”

Judd leaned forward, grinning like the charming asshole he’d been in life. “Wait for it, baby. You’re gonna love it.”

“I doubt that,” I said, but when I looked to Judd, he was gone, and I was alone in his stupid truck with her goddamned dog, on my way to the only thing I had left to my name, thanks to him.

“Typical,” I muttered. “You couldn’t have bought a shack on a paved road, at least?”

I hit my foot to the gas, a move which had little actual effect on how fast that old rust heap moved, while Seamus stuffed his massive nose into the fast food bag. When I didn’t immediately object, he ripped it to shreds and ate my burger, wrapper and all, in two bites.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, but Seamus, as usual, ignored me.

The mailbox was not “rust-colored” as the real estate paperwork had claimed, but rather rust-covered, which I’d like to state for the record, is different. I wanted to drive past it, but unfortunately, the number 144 was painted onto the wooden stake it was impaled upon, and I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen it.

“Home, sweet home,” I muttered, and turned down the dirt driveway. Well, it wasn’t a driveway so much as a visible suggestion that once or twice some sort of vehicle had gone this way. The branches and leaves slapped at Judd’s stupid truck and eventually cleared away to reveal the glorified shack that turned out to be the only thing my dead husband owned that his debt hadn’t eaten.

Well, that and his dumb truck.

I stopped the truck, turned it off, and stared at my future, such as it was.

At least you’ll have a place to live, the estate lawyer had told me last month as he closed his leather briefcase and lifted it off the table in the diner where we’d met up. In cases where a husband leaves this kind of debt behind, I’ve seen widows left without anything. Or worse, with nothing, and bills left to pay. Considering how things could have gone, you’re actually pretty lucky.

Yeah, that was me. Lucky.

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, staring through the windshield and thinking.

“You don’t suppose…” I said to Seamus. “I mean… you don’t think Judd was running some kind of scam out here, do you?”

The dog, apparently uninterested in the why behind Judd’s real estate ventures, ignored me, but my mind kept picking at the problem. Judd had traveled a bit, and like most wives of small-time conmen, I hadn’t asked a lot of questions for fear of getting the truth. Had he been out here, working a scam during some of those absences? But why? Nodaway Falls, despite the name, had no real falls to boast of; there was little to no tourist traffic, and even less local industry. It was an hour and a half from Buffalo and a whisper away from the Pennsylvania border; the land itself was worth little more than Judd’s stupid truck. Not to mention that there was plenty of easy pickins on the one-hour route between Taunton, the small town in southwestern Massachusetts where he’d parked me after we got married, and Boston, where the rich and stupid came to get fleeced by the smart and lazy. The drive to Nodaway Falls, which was obviously not a super-wealthy community, was eight and a half hours. If Judd had been out here working a scam, it had been for something other than money, because nothing he’d get out here would have covered the gas.

I looked at Seamus and he panted at me, sated and slobbery in the mid-summer heat. I wondered if he had eaten Christy McNagle’s lunches, too.

“Dumb dog,” I said, and kicked open the driver’s side door. I stepped out onto patchy clearing that passed for a front yard, and stared at the run-down shack that was now all mine. It had shutters that were actual shutters, not just decoration, covered in peeling green paint. They might not be terrible with an updated color, maybe. The multi-paned front windows that looked original to the house, and sported the subtle variations in thickness as a result of the glass-making of the time. It gave the windows a textured, interesting look, but were also probably hell on energy efficiency. Well, the place didn’t have air conditioning, so that would be a problem for the winter. The place was small, about nine hundred square feet, with two bedrooms and one full bath. Not grand by any standards, but hell, it had a roof and a fenced side yard for Seamus, and I wasn’t exactly in a position to be picky.

Seamus lumbered out of the truck and stood by my side. His head came up well past my hips. The monstrous canine was a hundred and fifty pounds, more horse than dog. What kind of woman would buy a dog like that, anyway?

Of course, I knew exactly what kind of woman. The Christy McNagle kind of woman, the kind of woman who gets her blond from a bottle and her sexual ya-yas from my husband.

Former husband, I thought. Dead husband.

I looked down at Seamus and contemplated him for a bit. It was nicer to think about the stupid dog than it was to think about Christy McNagle and Judd doing whatever it was they were doing together while they were still alive and I was still oblivious and stupid.

“Go on, dog. Run around. Get some exercise.”

He looked up at me, licked his slobbering jaws, retrieving a sesame seed that had stuck to his nose. He let out a little huff of impatience and laid down in the dirt, settling his big dumb boulder of a head on his front paws.

“Yeah,” I said on a sigh. “I know how you feel.”

I stared at the house. I didn’t want to open that door, didn’t want to see what was inside, but I didn’t want to sleep outside, either. My dusty, used-to-be-white Keds moved forward step by step, and eventually, I found myself putting the key in the lock. Before I turned it, I looked back at Seamus, who was still lying on the dirt, watching me.

“Coward,” I said, and turned the knob.

I had taken a chunk out of my dwindling checking account to hire someone to clean the place. I’d started accounts with the gas and electric companies while staying at Judd’s sister’s house in Providence, so at least there would be lights and hot water. It was dark inside and I flicked on the switch. To my utter surprise, it didn’t set off a fire, and the ceiling dome light actually turned on, if a little reluctantly.

“See, what’d I tell you?” Judd said from over my shoulder. “It’s not so bad, right? I got the furniture and appliances included in the deal.”

I ignored him. He was dead. And, according to Dr. Fliegel, he was just my imagination anyway, a hallucination I made up to work through the grief. He wasn’t even a real ghost. A real ghost could tell you why, could explain, could apologize. All fake-ghost Judd did was the same stuff he did when he was alive; smile, charm, and lie.

I turned away from Judd, focusing my attention on the place. It really wasn’t that bad. To my right was the living room; it was small, but it had a woodstove in the center of the far wall and what looked like usable, if old, hardwood floors.

“You just buff those up, seal ’em, stain ’em, they’re good as new,” Judd said.

“Where did you even get that money?” I asked. “You paid a hundred thousand dollars in cash for this place, but can’t buy a decent truck. What the hell is that about, Judd?”

He grinned at me, and dodged the question. “I’m a man of mystery, baby.”

“Shut up,” I said absently as I surveyed the place. To one side of the woodstove was an overstuffed chair next to a standing lamp; a reading area. To the other side was a writing desk. In front was a beige La-Z-Boy that had seen better days, and a floral Victorian couch that made your back hurt just to look at it. No television, but that didn’t matter much. As soon as I got the wi-fi hooked up, I could watch movies on my laptop.

“What do you think, Seamus?” I asked the dog. “You think it’ll work?”

He ignored me.

I looked to the left; there was an eat-in kitchen, also small, but kind of quaint, separated from the cooking area by a peninsula counter that cut the space in half. The dining half had a small farmhouse table with four wooden chairs, no seat cushions. Lace curtains hung over the windows, unmoving in the stilted summer air. I walked to the window, and with a significant amount of effort and cursing, got it open. It didn’t get much fresh air in, but it was a start.

I moved further into the kitchen. The lumbering yellow appliances looked like they were straight off the set of I Love Lucy, with a big double-oven gas stove, and a yellow refrigerator with soft, rounded edges.

“Coldspot,” I said, reading the script logo written in metal on the door, and noticed that Seamus was suddenly at my heels. Of course he’d be here now; I was about to open a fridge, and the opportunity to eat more of my food was apparently too big to resist.

“It’s an antique,” Judd said, leaning one ghostly hip against the counter. “I bet it even works. Go on, open it.”

I pulled the large silver lever, half expecting it to fall off in my hand, but the door opened easily. I stuck my hand inside the fridge; it was legitimately cold in there. The freezer chest—I knew what to call it because it had Freezer Chest written in scripty metal on the plastic door—was a separate compartment tucked away up top, but when I pulled the plastic door down and peered inside, I saw that someone had put in modern ice cube trays, and the cubes were frozen solid.

Huh, I thought, closing the fridge. Must have been the cleaning service. My eyes teared up suddenly, and my throat tightened with emotion. It was a small kindness, but when things were bad, it was the small kindnesses that did you in.

“A little work,” Judd said, moving into the living room, “a little elbow grease, a little TLC, and this place is going to be our dream, Ellie.”

I wiped my eyes, leaned against the oven and looked out the front windows. In my imagination, I saw pale yellow curtains flowing in the breeze, and fresh cushions on the chairs.

Yeah, maybe, I thought.

I headed down the hallway. The bathroom had mint green walls with white ceramic tile halfway up, and was oddly large considering the dimensions in the rest of the house. The floor was white honeycomb tiles with dark blue ones marking out little daisy shapes at regular intervals, and I’ll admit it; my breath caught in my throat a little bit.

“Look at that,” Judd said over my shoulder. “A claw foot tub. Just like you always wanted. Do I know you or do I know you, huh?”

Seamus pushed himself past me into the bathroom, hitting the backs of my knees and making them buckle a bit. I checked the faucet and the hand-held shower head that was attached to the side of the tub; they were old, but they worked. It took the hot water a little while to come to the party, but hell, I was grateful there was hot water at all. There was no standing shower, but I liked baths well enough.

I could work with this.

I poked my head into the tiny back bedroom, which was empty except for the built-in bookshelves and the plain metal radiator under the window. I would have to paint that white, and the faded pink floral wallpaper wasn’t long for this world, but that could make a decent home office. Emotion bloomed in my chest, so powerful and unfamiliar that I had to lean against the wall to hold myself up as it rippled through my being. I recognized the emotion, but just barely.

It was hope.

“See?” Judd said, grinning like a fool. “I knew you’d like it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I crossed the hallway, put my hand on the old metal doorknob that presumably led to what the paperwork had described as “the big bedroom,” and turned. The knob rolled loosely from side to side, but didn’t open.

Crap.

I jiggled it; I could hear the metal bits clinking around inside. I yanked at the doorknob, cursing and kicking at the door. No joy. Seamus sat a few feet back, watching me dispassionately. I leaned my forehead against the door and let out a breath, my entire body vibrating with nerves as the thought occurred to me.

The knob is made of metal.

A painful jolt of fear ran through me, and I stepped back from the door. My magic was gone. It was gone-gone, had been gone for sixteen years and it wasn’t coming back. I’d made sure of that.

“Then what’s it gonna hurt to try?” Judd asked from over my shoulder.

I turned and looked at him. “What the hell do you know about it? You don’t even know about magic.”

“I didn’t know about it when I was alive,” he said, raising one eyebrow at me in gleeful encouragement. “But seeing as that doc said I’m just a projection of your imagination, that means I’m not really me, I’m really you, so I know what you know, and all I’m saying is… it can’t hurt to try.”

He grinned at me, and my heart soared a bit, but whether it was the memory of Judd’s smile or the wild fantasy of having my magic back again that was causing the flutter, I didn’t know.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll try. But it’s not going to work.”

I shook out my hands, released a sharp breath, and closed my eyes. The magic was still there. I knew where it was, lying in a box in my mind, but the box was locked, and that was that. I’d lived my life making sure that I never risked coming close to those things again. Instead, I’d engaged in other risky behaviors, like majoring in philosophy and marrying a man who had to lie the way most people had to breathe.

“You shoulda told me about the magic,” Judd said, leaning against the door jamb. “We could have done some amazing things if I’da known about that.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you. Shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.”

I could feel the workings inside the knob. I’d locked up my ability to manipulate the metal, but I hadn’t lost my connection to it. A piece had broken loose inside the mortise latch; I could turn that knob all day and it wouldn’t do a damn thing. It happened sometimes with old lock assemblies; probably the cleaning people had just shut the door too hard when they’d left, and it had finally broken down in protest. Or maybe the house had already made up its mind about me, and the verdict wasn’t good. I put my hand over the knob, wrapped my fingers around it, and reached for the locked box of magic inside, willing for it to open, while at the same time knowing it was shut for good. Still, it didn’t hurt to test it from time to time. To be absolutely sure.

I opened my eyes. There was no blue electric light dancing around my hands, no tingling in my palms and arms. No movement in the metal.

No magic.

“Aw, that’s too bad,” Judd said, disappointment thick in his voice. “I really wanted to see that.”

I stared down at the knob, feeling both sad and relieved. As much as part of me felt missing without the magic, the rest of me knew that it was for the best. I’d made my non-magical bed, and I’d been lying in it for sixteen years.

I went out to the truck, got the mini toolkit from the glove compartment, and spent the next fifteen minutes dismantling the old door assembly while Seamus slobbered over my shoulder and I pushed him away.

I got the door open, pushed through it, and my breath caught. The room had white beadboard wainscoting and yellow walls and gleaming wood floors and it was…

“Beautiful,” I breathed.

Right in the middle of the back wall was the refurbished white-painted cast-iron bed I’d had delivered from the local antique shop. I’d been charmed by the picture on the website, by the shiny exposed metal springs, by the idea that I could love it even after everyone else had abandoned it. I’d spent way more money than I should have on an old-fashioned feather mattress to go with it, which had also been delivered and was leaned up against the wall, still in its plastic wrapping.

I walked over to it and ripped off the plastic in a frenzy, then hauled the mattress over and, with some effort, got it onto the bed.

“What do you think, Seamus?” I said, looking back at the dog who had finally found his way to the room. “It’s great, right?”

Seamus walked over to the bed, sniffed the mattress, then curled up on the floor next to the bed.

“I don’t care what you say,” I said, “it’s gonna be…”

“…great, baby,” Judd said from behind me, hijacking the last of my sentence. “You and me, on an adventure, the way it was supposed to be.”

I turned and there he was, leaning against the door jamb, looking sexy as hell, his black hair ruffled and his smile just as crooked and bent as his soul. And stupid me, I wanted him back. I wanted his arms around me and I wanted him in my bed and I wanted to believe in the beautiful lies he spun for me, my own corrupted Rumplestiltskin spinning gold from bullshit. I missed him so much it hurt, and I hated him so much that I wished he could come back to life just so I could kill him.

“You’re not allowed in here,” I said, and shut the door in his face while his mouth was opening to form a reply. I kicked off my shoes, stepped over Seamus and settled down onto my new old bed, groaning with exhausted delight before falling into a dead sleep.