Prologue

Once upon a time... No, that's not quite right. The phrase, "once upon a time", typically denoted the beginning of a story. Once upon a time, a boy and a girl were lost in the woods, and they came upon a house made of candy. Once upon a time, a girl went walking carrying a basket of goodies to Grandma's house. This is more of what one would call an epic saga: a story that transcends "once upon a time", and becomes a lifetime of romance and adventure. A story of how a young, troubled girl stumbled into something she could nave never imagined. A story of how a young woman struggled to right the wrongs of her past and discovered something greater than herself and of how the lives of strangers in suburbia can become secretly intertwined. This is my story.

I was born in Kentucky in the late 1970s. My parents were both professors in the history department at the nearby university, and for all I knew, they loved each other very much. I had many friends, when I was a child, but none of my friendships stood the test of time. I struggled through high school, and with the prodding help of both my parents, I was able to graduate on time with less-than-stellar grades that were good enough to get me into college out of state and away from my parents.

College was my time. My time to start life over out the shadow of my very loving, yet very overbearing parents. But as interesting as my time at the university was, my story doesn't start there. The good part starts a few years later when -- for reasons that I'm sure will become clear when I get to that part of the story -- I found myself in suburban Las Vegas.

Actually, as I look back on it now -- many, many years removed from the situation -- a crucial event took place in my live at the tender age of sixteen. This would be during that trying time of my life when my parents were pushing me hard to survive high school, when I was trying not to stand out in school, and when my live was the same as any any normal sixteen year old girl living in the early 1990s. One day after school, I was snooping around my father's study. This was the one day that I knew he would be at the university late, because he taught his class on the Roman Empire in the evening. Many weeks leading up to that day, I had fantasized about what was behind that old, oak door. The shiny brass knob and the warnings from my father to stay out of his study tantalized me. That day, I decided to risk it and open the door.

Inside was pretty much what I expected to see, but not what I had hoped. What I had hoped to see upon opening the door was something interesting: a treasure map to the Pharaoh's lost fortune, a diamond found while looting the pirate's booty in Bermuda, or even just a stack of dirty men's magazines that my father didn't want me to know about. What I saw was none of those thigns, merely an apparently normal office-style room. One entire wall was bookshelves filled with row upon row of historical texts, some about Ancient Rome, other about Nazi Germany, and a whole shelf-full devoted to the American Civil War.

I had decided to leave and has actually turned toward the door when something peculiar caught my eye. A very large, very old book laid open on the side table next to one of my father's sitting chairs. This seemed odd to me, considering the respect for books that he had ingrained in me for as long as I could remember. I looked at the book, and I discovered what had entranced my father so much. The book was a hefty, leather bound tome that had to be well over a hundred years old, perhaps even two or three hundred. The pages were thick and their edges were rough from over use. Carefully, I closed the book enough to glimpse the title: Mystical Objects of the Ancient World. I flipped through the pages and nothing seemed to jump out at me. Just another one of his history books, I thought. I returned the book to the page my father had left open and turned to leave. That's when it happened. A cold, no make that frigid (it was much colder than simply cold), a frigid breeze ripped through my father's study, and I heard my name whispered on it. It lasted only a second, but it was powerful enough to stay in my memory all these years.

i didn't know it then, but that moment was one of what they call "defining moments" in a person's life. For a few nights after that incident, I had nightmares. Cold hands caressing me in my sleep, creepy old men whispering my name on their deathbeds, you know, standard nightmare fare. And being the sixteen-year-old that I was, within a week the whole thing -- the book, the frigid breeze, the voice, my father's study, everything -- had slipped my mind, and I was back to wondering (more worrying really) if some boy was going to ask me to the homecoming dance.

That was until the day, many years later, that I made a phone call. My story doesn't start there either. But don't worry. You'll hear the whole thing in due time. Just remember like in every good story, this story has lots of characters. Some come and go just as quickly as a frigid breeze. Some linger in your life like a scab on your shin that you keep knocking off every time you walk past the coffee table. And some you wish would never leave. My story is full of such people, and you'll get to know all of them at least as well as I did. So, have patience my friend, and settle in, because as I have learned, my live was quite the adventure.