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“Is that Margo?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I thought she went home.”

“I thought so too. Hey, girl,” she said as the banshee moved into the doorway.

Margo was tall and a fragile kind of thin, with long white-blonde hair, pale skin, and almost see-through blue eyes.

“What happened?” she asked when Margo finally stopped screaming.

“I’ve been trying to work on that chapter for three hours. I hate every word.”

It was a myth that banshees only screamed to warn of imminent death. They could scream over any major (or minor) emotional reaction. And it was largely out of their control. No matter how many snake oil salesmen tried to peddle ‘miracle cures’ to vulnerable banshees.

“Okay. Let’s go triage it and see what isn’t working,” Tess said, leaving the carton on my desk and following her partner to the door. “See you at home later. Take a nap here,” she suggested. “No one is going to know.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, lying through my teeth.

Because as soon as she was gone, my plan was to grab my radio, my phone, and a tablet to keep an eye on the views online and hide out in the storage room to listen until Silas said something offensive so I could call in.

It would probably only take roughly sixty seconds.

I was a mix of anxious and excited a few minutes later as I ducked behind a shelving unit that featured no fewer than twenty fifty-pound bags of table sand, a thousand white candles, and sealed packages of sage.

On the one hand, I was not a confrontational person, so the idea of calling in simply to argue with someone was foreign to me. On the other, though, I wanted to save the show. And, you know, my book.

I set up the radio, opened my tablet up to the station’s dashboard on my thigh, and kept my finger hovered over the call button to Silas’s studio.

I caught the tail end of something actually kind of insightful about the death of physical media.

But it wasn’t long until someone else called in and asked Silas what he would say to someone who was getting fed up with looking for love.

“Here we go,” I mumbled.

“Love,” Silas said, leaning closer to the mic with the confidence of a man who felt he would never be incorrect, “is a chemical reaction masquerading as a greeting card. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Stop chasing it.”

That’ll do it.

I hit the call button, waited until I heard Jack’s voice, and exhaled. “This is Madison again. I want to tell him what an idiot he is.”

There was a huff of laughter at that.

“We have Madison on the line. She has something she needs to say to you.”

“Madison,” Silas said, his name sliding deliciously over the arches of the fake name. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would sound like over the curves of my real one. “What is it you have to say?”

“Oh, well, just that you’re wrong.”

“Unlikely. But go ahead.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I?” he asked, and I could almost hear the smirk on his lips.

“Yes.”

“That’s doubtful. But I’ll humor you. How am I wrong?”