The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

was the same. Did she remember him? He thought that in some part of her mind and heart she did recognize him. Certainly she’d given herself to him willingly, eagerly. He’d found her, his Isabel, and if life was fair they could remain together forever.
    But as he knew all too well, life wasn’t fair. The Sorceress had kept her promise and now he must keep his, and it would more than likely end in his death. Only this time there would be no coming back.
    By the time Izzy woke it was early afternoon. She was late. As she rushed about, showering and dressing, she tried to suspend her thoughts. Zek had come to her and she’d held him in her arms and loved him. Her dream man was real - or was he? Was the whole experience some sort of bizarre fantasy with a long medical name attached to it? There were so many unanswered questions in her head, but there was no time now to try to sort them out.
    She had her job to go to and it was safer for her sanity to concentrate on that.
    The job had been a real windfall for Izzy. There wasn’t a great deal of employment to be found in a small town like Neptune’s Bay - not out of the tourist season, anyway. Izzy had lived here for two years now, eighteen months on her own. Marriages didn’t always work out, she knew that, but hers must have been one of the shortest in living history. Six months and he was gone, back to the city, and Izzy was left in the rundown weatherboard cottage in which, together, they’d planned to grow old.
    When he left, Izzy had a choice: she could follow him back to the city, where her friends and family would have welcomed her warmly, or strike out on her own in Neptune’s Bay. She’d chosen the latter option and, although since then there had been bad days, dark days, she’d never really regretted it. From the moment she saw this place she’d known she belonged here.
    And soon after her husband had left, the dreams had begun. They weren’t always exactly the same but they were always about the lighthouse and the storm, and Zek Cole and her need of him. It was as if she had been drawn to this little town for a reason.
    Neptune’s Bay was a holiday village, and in summer it swelled tenfold, only returning to normality when winter began to blast. The old lighthouse stood on the western point of the bay, high on the rocky cliffs that dropped dizzyingly to the heaving waters below. There was a new lighthouse now, further along the coast, its light automated but no less crucial to the well-being of ships passing out to sea. There had been a great many wrecks over the years.
    The most infamous was in 1864. The Maggie Mackenzie, a steamship carrying nearly 200 passengers - emigrants from the Old World to the New - had been on her way around the point in a storm. She was seeking shelter in Neptune’s Bay when she struck the jagged line of rocks beyond the point, and sank with the loss of all aboard.
    Izzy knew the story well because she had to repeat it every Sunday as part of her new job as official tour guide. The old lighthouse and its adjacent buildings were retained under a heritage classification, and the tourists were lining up to visit the place. Izzy entertained them each Sunday, and she was good at it. Every time she told the dreadful tale of the Maggie Mackenzie she would find herself adding to it, embellishing the storm, the cries of the drowning, the horror of those who watched from the shore. It was so tangible it was almost as if she’d been there herself. Sometimes she felt as if she had, so often did she dream about that storm and the lighthouse and Zek Cole.
    Captain Ezekiel Cole was the keeper of the lighthouse when the Maggie Mackenzie struck the rocks in 1864. Izzy knew what he looked like because there was a portrait of him, and because of her dreams — although she didn’t know which had come first. The portrait hung inside the lighthouse, so that when she opened the door and walked into the chilly interior, there he was, staring straight at her.
    The sight of his face took her breath away every time.
    His black eyepatch made him look like a pirate, while his remaining eye stared out at her, dark and brooding. His mouth was a thin line, as if he was keeping whatever he wanted to say to himself, and there was a taut, anguished look to his face which made Izzy think he must be tormented by what had happened. And, of course, he had a reason to suffer. History had laid the tragedy at his door and made his name poison. When the