by Kay Hooper
It was almost impossible to recognize that comatose patient in this woman, whose rioting emotions were the very definition of chaotic life. But suddenly he was sure. “You’re Faith, aren’t you? Dinah’s friend.”
Her eyes searched his face, but whatever she was looking for she apparently didn’t find. A little sigh escaped her, and she said, “Yes. I’m Faith.”
TWO
He didn’t know her.
There hadn’t been a flicker of recognition in those first seconds.
They hadn’t been lovers.
And since they hadn’t been lovers, her dreams could not be memories of a relationship.
As Kane MacGregor led her into his apartment, that realization swirled in Faith’s mind, baffling, frightening. What could it possibly mean?
He didn’t know her, yet her response to him had been immediate and intense. She knew he could feel her shaking, and she was afraid the heat in her skin would also betray her. His voice, his touch, his face, all were utterly, painfully familiar, a small pool of bright, clear certainty in the ocean of blackness all around her, and she feared it would kill her if she had to turn away from that, from him, and plunge alone into the dark unknown.
But she would have to. There was only one explanation she could think of to account for the dreams, one thing that made a certain kind of sense to her, and if what she suspected was true, then those dreams, that connection she felt so vividly between her and Kane MacGregor, were yet another thing someone else had given her. Not hers at all.
She had no sense of herself, and it was terrifying.
He introduced Noah Bishop as his friend, and she vaguely recognized him as the man who had been with Kane on television. The angry scar down his left cheek didn’t bother her, but his pale, watchful eyes made her uneasy; they were more silver than gray, and peculiarly reflective. She had the disturbing notion that he could see all the way to her soul.
“Some security building you’ve got here,” Bishop said dryly to Kane.
“It’s just electronic security on the front door at night,” Kane replied. “Easy enough to get into the building if one of the neighbors is buzzing in a visitor.”
“That’s how I came in,” Faith confessed, not needing to explain that she’d been unsure of her welcome.
Bishop sighed. “An armed guard or two would probably be a good idea.”
“I’ll add that to my list of things to do,” Kane said. “Sit down, Faith.”
She did, at one end of the couch, grateful to be off her feet. She still tired easily, and just getting up the nerve to come here had been exhausting.
Kane frowned down at her. “You’re frozen. How do you take your coffee?”
She had no idea, and tried to choke back the bubble of hysterical laughter trying to escape her throat. “I—just any way. It doesn’t matter.” At least he’d misread her shaking and her flushed cheeks, assuming both to be due to the chilly evening.
“I’ll get it,” Bishop said, and went around the corner into the kitchen.
Kane joined her on the couch, no more than a foot away and half-turning so he could watch her. “I’m glad you came, Faith.” He added almost apologetically, “Do you mind my using your first name? It’s the way Dinah spoke of you, and—”
Faith shook her head. “No, I don’t mind.” Maybe it’ll start to sound familiar.
“Good. Thank you. I’m Kane. As for my friend, most people call him Bishop.”
“Everybody but you,” Bishop called from the kitchen, proving that either he had very good ears or the walls were thin.
Kane smiled slightly, then repeated to Faith, “I am glad you came. We wanted to talk to you, even though Dr. Burnett said you couldn’t remember anything.” There was the faintest questioning lift to the statement.
“Nothing of my life,” she confessed. “Nothing … personal. Not who I am or where I came from. I’m still not used to the name, the face I see in the mirror. It’s … disconcerting.”
“I’d think it would be scary as hell,” he said bluntly.
“That too.”
Bishop returned to the room with coffee and handed her a cup. Their hands touched as she accepted it, and she was suddenly conscious of a moment of intense stillness. His eyes seemed to bore into hers, and she was acutely aware of his warm fingers touching hers. The connection was so powerful, it was as if he held her physically in an inescapable grip.
Then, even as she became aware of it, the moment passed. His fingers drew away and he straightened, his gaze calm and cool once more. Shaken, Faith sipped the coffee and tried to think only of the drink. He had fixed it with plenty of cream and sugar, and since it tasted pleasant she assumed this was indeed how she took her coffee. “Thank you.”
He nodded and chose a chair across from the couch. Very conscious that he was watching her closely, she turned to Kane.
“I was obviously Dinah’s friend,” she said to him. “I didn’t know you?”
“We never met. I—went to the hospital after Dinah disappeared, to talk to the staff about her visits, and saw you briefly, but that was all.”
She was afraid her hands would shake and betray her growing weariness and fear, so she set her cup on the coffee table and laced the fingers together in her lap. “Do you have any idea how long I’d known Dinah, or where we’d met? Anything like that?”
He shook his head. “Dinah and I didn’t meet until about seven months ago. I know a lot about her, but certainly not everything. And if you were in any way connected with her work, I’d be even less likely to know about you.”
Bishop said quietly, “Were you connected with her work?”
“From what I gathered from news reports, she’s a journalist?”
“Right.”
“Then I don’t see how. According to the pay stubs I found in my apartment,” she said wryly, “I worked for the city. I called and spoke to my supervisor. Apparently, I was a small cog in a very big wheel. I did routine office work.”
“Which office?” Kane asked.
“Building Inspections and Zoning.” She grimaced. “About which I know nothing. Or at least nothing I remember. My job involved typing and filing.” She considered for a moment. “I think I know how to type.”
There was something forlorn in her voice, and Kane acted instinctively. He reached over and covered her tightly clasped hands with one of his own. “The doctor said your memory will eventually come back to you, Faith. You have to believe that.”
She looked down at his hand, her eyes wide; and Bishop, watching her, was reminded of a deer frozen in a car’s headlights, paralyzed and unable to save itself from certain death.
In a constricted voice, she said, “Something has been coming to me, but—not my memories. I thought they were at first, but now I see they weren’t mine at all.”
Kane released her hands and leaned back, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“They started when I was still in the hospital. Just dreams, but maybe memories too, I thought. Dreams like … like little vignettes, brief scenes of someone’s life.”
“Whose life?” Kane asked slowly.
She drew a breath. “Yours. And—and Dinah’s.”
Out of the coma.
Christ. From everything he’d been able to find out, that was the last thing he’d expected, that she’d wake up. Ever.
He paced for a few minutes, then went to the phone and called a familiar number. Barely waiting for the answer at the other end, he said, “Faith Parker is out of the hospital.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
There was a long silence, and then, “It doesn’t have to change anything. Even if she remembers what happened before the accident, the drug would’ve scrambled everything, left her confused at the very least—and possibly psychotic.”
“After so many weeks?”
“Look, don’t panic, all right?”
“Dammit, I told you we shouldn’t have stopped looking. I told you we needed to fi
nd it—”
“I said don’t panic. The first thing we have to do is find out if she’s even a threat.”
“And if she is?”
“Then we’ll take care of it.”
“You dreamed about us?”
Faith winced at the disbelief in Kane’s voice. “Oh, I know it sounds absurd. I’ve told myself that. But the dreams were too vivid, too real, to be something my own imagination conjured up. I think—” She swallowed hard. “The only answer I can think of is that somehow, in some way I can’t explain and don’t understand, I’ve … tapped in to Dinah’s memories.”
Coolly matter-of-fact, Bishop said, “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I was psychic before the accident.” Her hands lifted and fell in a brief, helpless gesture. “Or maybe I am now because of the accident. I went to the library yesterday and looked up coma. According to what I read, a few people have come out of comas demonstrating unusual abilities—especially if there was a head injury involved.” She reached up and pushed her hair off her forehead, showing them a small square of adhesive bandage.
Kane remained silent, staring at her. It was Bishop who spoke.
“It’s easy enough to claim you’ve … dreamed something. How do we know you really have?”
She bit her lip again. “I don’t know how to convince you. What I dreamed were ordinary little scenes. Things anyone could guess would happen between two people. Fixing meals together. Driving in a car.” She blushed suddenly and looked down. “Taking a shower together.”
“Any birthmarks or distinguishing features?” Bishop asked dryly.
“He has a small scar low down on his left side. It—it’s shaped like a triangle,” Faith replied, almost inaudibly.
Bishop looked at Kane with lifted brows. “Do you?”
Kane nodded slowly. “I was thrown from a horse a few years ago and landed on a pile of rusty tin pieces torn off an old barn. Took a chunk out of me.”
Reflectively, Bishop said, “I suppose someone else could have known about it?”
“My doctor. A few women. Dinah.”
Still flushed, Faith said to Kane, “I dreamed about the two of you at a beach house somewhere. It has a screened-in porch with a funny-shaped chair, like something from the sixties. It sticks out from all the wicker furniture out there. The house has a fireplace and a spa tub. Lots of books on built-in shelves. And at the end of the walkway to the beach, there’s a flag that says, ‘Just one more day, please!’ The house is sort of isolated, with dunes all around it.”
Again Bishop looked at Kane questioningly.
Kane met his friend’s gaze. “All correct. The house has never been photographed, and we never had guests there. It was redecorated a couple of months before Dinah disappeared, the porch screened in, the fireplace installed. She had the flag made our last trip out. It was a joke between us, because we always wanted just one more day there.”
Faith looked back and forth between the two men and said, “Maybe I’m psychic. Does that make sense?”
Still looking at Bishop, Kane said, “You can’t tell?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Bishop shrugged. “Maybe because of the lack of identity. The lack of self. That sort of emptiness throws up its own barriers. And she’s panicked by the memory loss. Trying to protect herself from losing anything else—that’s probably blocking me as well. Completely reasonable on her part, but not very helpful.”
“I don’t understand,” Faith said.
“Noah has a knack,” Kane explained. “He calls it a bullshit detector. I call it something more.”
Before Faith could ask for more clarification, Kane addressed his friend again, and she forgot all about Bishop’s knack.
“It has to be Dinah,” Kane said, his voice tight.
“We can’t know that,” Bishop insisted. “It could just as easily be Faith. People have come out of comas with new and inexplicable abilities.”
“Maybe, but we know Dinah is psychic.”
“We know.” Bishop’s voice was patient and careful, the tone of a man unwilling to assume anything or to raise false hopes. “But her abilities worked a different way, Kane. She wasn’t a telepath, wasn’t able to touch someone else’s mind. She was precognitive, able to … tune in to future events, to predict the turn of a card or the throw of dice. And it wasn’t something she could control with any reliability. Maybe she could tell you the phone was about to ring, even who was calling, but she couldn’t project memories into someone else’s mind. Even the strongest psychic would find that virtually impossible.”
“If she were desperate enough, she might be able to. If it mattered, if it meant the difference between life and—and death. She’d find a way, Noah. Dinah would find a way.”
“It isn’t that simple. Psychic ability has its own kind of rules, Kane. And a seer doesn’t become a telepath. Not one psychic in a thousand has dual abilities.”
Listening in fascination, Faith began to understand just what Bishop’s “bullshit detector” was.
Kane said, “So tell me where Faith’s memories are coming from. Either Dinah is sending them, or Faith is somehow tapping in to them. No matter which way you look at it, it means Dinah’s alive, Noah. Alive.” His voice was exultant.
At that moment, Faith realized that deep down inside himself, Kane had believed Dinah was dead—and hated himself for giving up hope.
There was a brief silence, and then, with obvious reluctance, Bishop said, “Dinah visited Faith in the hospital a dozen times. Sat by her bed, read to her, talked to her for hours. We can’t deny the possibility that she talked about her past with enough detail to plant those images in Faith’s mind, even though she was unconscious.”
“But—”
“Kane. It’s possible Dinah is somehow able to transmit images to Faith. It’s possible Faith came out of the coma with psychic ability, and that, combined with their friendship, is enabling her to reach out to Dinah telepathically. But the most likely explanation is that Faith’s subconscious retained everything Dinah said to her with unusual vividness and in remarkable detail.”
Kane shook his head and opened his mouth to dispute, deny, refuse to believe—but then Bishop cut in, speaking very softly.
“Past, Kane. All those scenes are from the past. If Dinah was in direct communication with Faith, don’t you think she’d be trying to tell us where she is?”
His shoulders slumped, but Kane struggled to hold on to the newfound hope. “Dinah wouldn’t have told her about the scar, dammit. How could she know that?”
“It’s possible that happened in the hospital. Trying to wake up, and with psychic ability she perhaps didn’t know she had, Faith could have reached out telepathically and touched Dinah’s mind. She could have gotten all the details and images that way. It’s possible.”
“Possible,” Kane said savagely. “Everything is possible—except that Dinah is still alive. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I’m telling you we can’t take anything at face value.” And then, even softer, “Goddammit, Kane, don’t you think I want her to be alive too?”
Faith, watching them in silence, realized with a stab of loneliness and envy that Dinah Leighton must have been a remarkable woman to inspire such strong emotions in these men.
She didn’t want to intrude on so naked a moment but was agonizingly aware that she had to. “There’s … something else,” she said as steadily as she could.
Kane turned his head slowly, as if the effort took nearly everything he had. His face was white, his eyes dark. “What?”
She didn’t flinch from the harsh question, but her voice began to shake. “It’s … what made me come looking for you. I fell asleep late this afternoon, and I—I had another dream. Only you weren’t in this one. But Dinah was. I’m not sure, but I think it was a basement or … or maybe a warehouse. Walls made of cement blocks, and they looked old, damp. It was cold.”
Bishop
said, “What was happening?”
Faith shivered; she really didn’t want to say what she had to say. “Dinah was in a chair, I think tied to it somehow. She could barely move. There was more than one person in the room with her, she knew that. Somebody was watching, silently, from the shadows or just out of her sight. And somebody else, a man, was asking her questions, over and over. I didn’t see his face and I don’t remember what the questions were. I’ve tried, but—but it’s like there was a roaring in my ears and I couldn’t hear him clearly. Maybe she couldn’t either, I don’t know. All I know is that he—he hit her. Again and again.”
As though her hand were on him, she could feel Kane tense, all his muscles knotting in a blind, instinctive response, and her voice shook even harder as she finished. “Then everything went black … and I—woke up.”
Bishop drew a breath. “You’re saying she is, or was, being tortured?”
“I think so. No. I’m sure. It was too real, too horribly vivid, to be anything but the truth. They … want her to tell them something, and whatever it is, she won’t tell them.” Faith swallowed hard. “And it’s gone on a long time. The questions. The … punishment. I could feel how exhausted she was. And her pain … She’s hurting so terribly.…”
Kane was staring at her with the expression of a man dealt a mortal blow, and she found it easier at that moment to meet Bishop’s clearer—if slightly less human—gaze.
“That entire scene,” he said, “could have come from some movie or book.”
Faith shook her head. “It didn’t. You don’t understand. I wasn’t observing. I was there. I was Dinah, was inside her body, her mind and spirit. I felt her pain and her fear and—and her determination.” She lifted her chin and met Bishop’s eyes. “There’s something I’m absolutely sure of. Dinah won’t tell them what they want to know because she’s protecting somebody, or believes she is. It’s more important to her than her own life.”
