FOR THE FIRST TEN YEARS of his life, Travis Stoll had thought she was his guardian angel.

He had started seeing her in his dreams as early as he could remember. She had been tiny the first time she'd appeared in his dream, with brown hair that shone like copper and fell to her collarbones, hazel eyes, and a freckled nose. She was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and this strange feeling of knowing and not knowing her wouldn't make sense for almost a decade.

She always seemed startled to see him, no matter how many times they'd met. She never spoke—instead, she stared at him like he was something she'd dreamed up and not the other way around.

"Who are you?" He'd asked once, when he was nine years old. She'd grown with him, grown at the same pace as him. She was taller now, hair impossibly longer, cheeks and nose more freckled.

She just smiled impishly, showing off a missing front tooth, and shook her head. She never spoke in his dreams, but when he talked, she listened.

By the time they were twelve years old, she knew everything about him, and he knew absolutely nothing about her.

He was convinced that he'd made her up, conjured her up in his mind to visit him in his dreams and give him someone to talk to, other than his brother. He was so incredibly sure that this strange dream girl was nothing more than a figment of his imagination.

Until he saw her, in the light of day, across the ampitheater from him. And she was speaking, laughing animatedly at something the girl next to her said.

Travis Stoll nearly had a heart attack when he saw his guardian angel in the flesh.

But when Valerie Greenwood met his gaze, and an expression of pure mischief crossed her face, it was his first hint that she was the devil in disguise.