Charlaine Harris

by Night's Edge

  His eyes flashed open then. So suddenly, with such an unnatural look in them that she jerked away from him.

  Blinking, calming herself, she leaned closer again. “Jack?”

  She was dizzy as she studied his face. He wasn’t responding, but at least he’d stopped shaking. God, she had to sit down. She sank onto the step again, let her head fall forward. If she could just rest her eyes for a moment.

  But when she lifted her head again she wasn’t in the basement anymore. She was upstairs, running herself a hot bath, alone again, and sad at being always so alone.

  Her husband was always going on business trips, and he must think she was pretty stupid if he thought she didn’t realize something more than business was going on. She felt tears hot on her cheeks and glanced into the mirror.

  The face of a beautiful woman looked back at her. Buttery blond hair, piercing, sad eyes. “He doesn’t love me anymore,” Sharon Miller whispered through Kiley’s lips. “He never touches me. Something’s terribly wrong. There’s a coldness in his eyes that wasn’t there before.”

  She turned at the sound of an engine in the driveway. Phil was home early. He would expect her to be asleep, not up weeping. But she had to confront him, now, tonight, before she lost her courage.

  She padded downstairs in her nightgown. Only—he didn’t come inside. Why wasn’t he coming inside?

  She moved to the window to peer out at his car in the driveway, and then she noticed that the hatchway door was open. “What is he doing in the cellar?” she asked herself.

  Turning from the window, Sharon went down into the basement. There was a trapdoor in the floor. One she never knew was there. Oh, God, she could hear a woman crying. Distant, echoing.

  Sharon’s heart was beating fast. Somewhere deep inside, Kiley was begging her not to go down there. But she went. She knew she was Kiley, not Sharon, and she knew this was something like being trapped in someone else’s nightmare. But she couldn’t wake up and she couldn’t make it stop.

  Turning, she walked the length of the tunnel, ending in the room of horror, where the young wife of long ago had no doubt ended up. And then Kiley saw them, through Sharon’s eyes, or was it Sharon reliving it through Kiley’s? Women, beautiful young women, chained to the walls. They were dirty, their hair in tangles. They were naked. One hung limply, dead or close to it, but the others were alive and terrified. And her husband, the man she had loved, was forcing the new one to her knees, fastening the chains around her wrists, hitting her when she whimpered and pleaded. “God, what is this?”

  Jack—no, not Jack—Phil spun around and saw her there.

  “Help me,” the girl he’d been chaining up begged. “Please, get out and help me!”

  Sharon turned to run, but Phil was too fast for her. He caught her before she made it out, flung her to the floor.

  She was frightened. God, she had never been frightened like this. She couldn’t believe this was her husband.

  He bent over her, clutched her head between his palms. “You have to understand, Sharon. I have needs. Dirty, secret needs. You’re too fine a woman for me. I could never use you the way I can these filthy sluts.”

  “Phillip, they’re girls! They’re only girls!”

  “Whores. I pick them up in the city, bring them here to satisfy my needs. No one misses them, Sharon. It’s just as well I take them out of the world.”

  “You…kill them?”

  “They don’t last well, those whores. Get sickly, weak. Eventually they die on their own, or I take mercy on them, put them out of their misery.”

  She clutched her stomach, doubling over and fighting the urge to vomit. When she got it under control, she tried to straighten again. “How—m-many?” Tears were flowing from her eyes now, she could barely see, despite the lights he had strung through the place, trouble lights like they used on construction sites.

  He smiled slowly. “Oh, many. Lots and lots of them.” He drew a breath, sighed. “Come on, my love. I promise, nothing so unpleasant is going to happen to you.”

  He slid his arm around her shoulders. She shivered, wondering what he would do to her now.

  “I…won’t tell your secret, darling. I would wish things were different. I would ask that you stop this and let them go, but I would never betray you.”

  “No, of course you wouldn’t. Not to your mother, nor your priest. Good Christian that you are. You’ll stay with me, continue loving me, though you think me a rapist and murderer.”

  The trapdoor was open as he led her up the stairs. Somewhere down deep inside her, Kiley thought that was odd. It had been closed before. Somehow, she was aware that she and Jack were being used as puppets, as the play unfurled again. And she wondered how far it would go.

  But then the other overtook her again. Behind her she could hear the moans and weeping, pleading voices. “Get away from him. Run. Tell someone!”

  Ahead of her, she saw light. Her husband yanked the plug from the wall, and the trouble lights went black. The women sobbed, growing hysterical as they were plunged into darkness, but he didn’t care. He slammed the steel door down again, never releasing the death grip he had on her arm.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Not for much longer, love. I promise. Come along now.” He took her up the stairs. She felt his grip on her arm relax and she pulled free, racing as fast as she could through the house, toward the door. But he beat her there, blocking her escape. Turning, her heart pounding in her chest, she ran upstairs, seeking the safety of a room with a door she could bolt against him, and a telephone. She went into the bedroom, pushing the door shut.

  He slammed into it, but she braced with all her strength, then slid the bolt home. Slowly, she backed away. But he was pounding the door, howling with rage. Bang! Bang! Bang!

  “Stay away!” she cried, grabbing the telephone, dialing O.

  The door crashed open, and he surged toward her. She heard the line ringing, but he was too close. She dropped the phone, racing into the bathroom and slamming the door.

  He kicked it in so fast and hard it hit her full in the chest, knocking her off balance, and she hit the floor. Her head cracked against the porcelain tub. And then it swam. She was dizzy, darkness creeping in around the edges of her vision.

  “There, now. You won’t die dirty, buried alive, as they do. No, nothing so horrible for my lady.” He smiled down at her as he bent over her. “And you’ve already run the water. That was thoughtful of you.” He picked her up, lowered her into the bathtub. His palm to her face, he pushed it beneath the water.

  She couldn’t breathe! Her arms flailed, legs kicked, but he held firm. And then the water rushed into her lungs. It was gentle, cleansing, soothing. Her body calmed, relaxed. And darkness crept over her.

  And then she was standing there, in the bathroom, watching him. He was still leaning over the tub, she realized, puzzled. Then she looked past him and saw her own face in the water.

  “He’s killed you,” a woman said. “He killed us, too.”

  Sharon turned and saw them. Women, beautiful women, all around her. So many faces and soulful eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “We have to tell someone. He’ll keep on doing it until we make someone stop him.”

  She nodded and turned to look at her husband again.

  He was sitting on the floor beside the tub, his head lowered, sobbing.

  And then he wasn’t her husband, and they weren’t in the bathroom. He was Jack McCain, sitting on the bottom steps in the hidden basement bunker, his head in his hands.

  Kiley went to him, knelt in front of him. “Jack, it’s okay. It’s okay, it wasn’t real.”

  He lifted his head slowly, blinked the confusion from his eyes. “Kiley?”

  She nodded, and he pressed her face between his palms, pulled her to his face, kissed her lips over and over. “Jesus, you’re okay. I thought I—I thought I’d—”

  “I’m okay. So are you, and you’re not Phillip Miller. You’re Jac
k. All that was—I don’t know, it was…it was someone else. It was the past coming in. Sharon Miller reliving it through us, so we’d finally understand.”

  He nodded, holding her closer.

  “It wasn’t real, Jack,” she told him.

  “You’re right about everything but that.” He brought his head up, looking past her, into the darkness. “It was very real.”

  She turned to follow his gaze, and she saw them. Faint wisps in the shapes of women. Some were more defined than others, mists shaping into faces and limbs and hands. Others were just vague shapes, silhouettes of light in the darkness. “God, there are so many of them,” she whispered. “But there were only four in the room.”

  Jack rose, clasping her shoulder. “They’re buried in the back lawn.”

  She closed her eyes. “Oh, God.”

  “It gets worse,” he said softly. “He’s still doing it.”

  Her head came up fast. “What?”

  “Phillip Miller isn’t dead, Kiley. He’s alive and well and living not far from here. And he’s still murdering women.”

  And then she remembered. “The missing prostitutes from Albany. Oh, my God, Jack! We have to get out of here, we have to stop him and—”

  There was a groaning sound, and a powerful crash, followed by light spilling in from behind. The trapdoor lay open, the way to the cellar clear.

  Kiley met Jack’s eyes. “I am so sorry I ever called you a fraud, Jack. You’re—you’re so amazing it’s scary.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Remind me to tell you later why you’re dead wrong about that.”

  She frowned at him. But then she turned to look back at those shapes, the spirits of women, all of them. “It’s over. We’ll stop him. We promise. And then you can rest in peace.”

  EPILOGUE

  KILEY’S ENTIRE HOUSE WAS surrounded in yellow police tape. Police cars, SUVs and vans lined the street, and heavy equipment growled and belched in the back yard. News crews were everywhere, but Kiley wasn’t giving any interviews. She’d written what she could about all of this in her latest column, and the rest was going into a book.

  She stood on the sidewalk, watching the bodies being exhumed and carried in plastic bags out to waiting vehicles, one by one. Jack sat on the curb close beside her, fallen leaves in brilliant colors carpeting the sidewalk around him, reading the paper.

  Officer Hanlon came over to where she stood. “They’ve arrested Phillip Miller. There were three women in his basement when they arrived.”

  Jack looked up from the newspaper. Kiley’s throat tightened up. “Alive?”

  “Yes. Thanks to you.”

  She swallowed hard. “Thanks for telling me.”

  Hanlon nodded and headed back to the house. Kiley looked down at Jack. “Well?”

  He met her eyes, then refocused on the page and began reading aloud from her latest column. “‘So to sum it up, I’ve learned that not everything I don’t understand or believe in is necessarily make-believe. There are good psychics, and there are bad ones. And the only way to judge which is which is by how they make you feel. If their advice helps you, heals you, answers a need you have, then they are as genuine as any minister, priest, pastor or shrink. I’m retiring from my former career of debunking everything I don’t happen to believe in. After what I’ve seen in my house, I know now that there is far more in this world than I will ever understand. And it humbles me to admit that the extraordinary and genuine skills and gifts of three psychics I called fakes—two of them in this very column—were what enabled me to find the truth about the women who were murdered and buried on my property, and to stop a killer at the end of a thirty-year spree. Those psychics were for real, even though I claimed to have proven otherwise. I will never question what I don’t understand again.’”

  Jack folded the newspaper and got to his feet. “It’s wonderful. Your best column ever.”

  She shrugged. “If a psychic as gifted as you are doesn’t know whether he’s a fraud or not, how the hell can I pretend to?” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you were as convinced you were a fake as I was, all this time. How can you have a gift like that and not know?”

  Jack shrugged. “Chris knew. He knew all along. I guess it just took a case I cared this much about to make me aware of it.”

  “Yeah? And what was it about this case that made you care so much?”

  He gave her a slow, sexy smile, reached out to clasp her nape and pulled her to him for a long, lingering kiss. His lips moved against hers when he said, “I think you know.”

  “No way,” she whispered back. “You’re the one who’s psychic, remember?”

  “Right. So I suppose I have to spell it out for you.”

  She sent him a smile and nodded. “Please.”

  “I’m nuts about you, Kiley. I don’t know when I went from hating you to loving you—maybe it was from the very start. But I know I do.”

  She nodded. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I’m going to need a place to crash for a while, for one thing.”

  He made a face at her. She smiled fully. “And you know, there is that pesky fact that I love you, too.”

  “Do you?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  He kissed her once more, tucked her under his arm and led her back down the sidewalk toward the car. “When the police have finished here, we should have the other psychics in town come back here, do a cleansing ritual, make sure those spirits have made it across to the other side. They deserve to be at peace. God knows they’ve suffered long enough,” Jack said.

  “I agree. But I have a feeling they made it just fine. I think they’re at peace now, Jack.”

  “Yeah, I feel as if they are, too.”

  They reached the car, and he opened her door for her.

  “Where are we going?”

  “My place, or I guess I should say our place now.”

  She shot him a loving look. “You mean I can move in?”

  “Yeah. Just one rule, Kiley.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t bring any ghosts with you.”

  SOMEONE ELSE’S SHADOW

  Barbara Hambly

  For George…and Baby

  CHAPTER ONE

  “TESSA?”

  Dim light shone at the top of the first long flight of stairs. Maddie Laveau hitched her duffle coat closer around her shoulders, glancing warily back at the plate-glass door onto East Twenty-ninth Street. Yellow streetlights glared through the glass doors into the narrow lobby, barely more than a widened corridor with a caretaker’s booth. Quincy the caretaker had gone home an hour ago at ten, which was just as well, since Maddie wasn’t in the mood for a forty-five-minute monologue on the subject of taxes and the Republican party. The place smelled of moldy carpets and cigarettes smoked decades ago. The street door had been locked, and Maddie had locked it again behind her the minute she’d let herself in with Tessa’s key.

  But if her roommate had a key, she told herself—duplicated from that of another dancer, who’d duplicated it from one of the instructors who was no longer teaching at the Dance Loft—God knew who else in New York had them.

  Heart pounding, Maddie mounted the dark stairs.

  “Tessa, are you there?”

  Silence. Though the Glendower Building had always given Maddie the creeps, it housed one of the most respected dance schools in the city. Maddie wasn’t sure why this was so—God knew there were other buildings in New York City, including the one she lived in, just as old, just as shabby, just as dingily lighted.

  But from the first time she’d walked through its doors, twenty-two months ago now, it had made her nervous, as if there was always something there looking over her shoulder.

  She climbed the long stairway quickly, two stories past the dancewear shop on the first floor and the storerooms and offices on the second, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder: Like someone could have been hiding in the lobby? A Barbie doll couldn
’t have taken cover there. Someone had repainted the stairwell during the last remodeling in the eighties with the neutral pinks and grays fashionable then, but hadn’t stripped the old wallpaper underneath or put in modern lighting. The result was simply dingy, and Maddie guessed that underneath the gray industrial carpeting lurked layers of carpet tiles and the brown linoleum still visible on the upper floors. Uncovering the original wood, laid back in the 1890s, would be like revealing the stratification in some archaeological dig.

  During the several months she’d taught belly dancing in one of the Dance Loft’s smaller studios, Maddie had always hated being in the building at night. Charmian Dayforth, the owner, seemed to have no qualms about handing out keys to students, instructors and the part-time office help that came and went with the speed of Hollywood wives. After seven and a half years of living in New York, Maddie moved through the building with great wariness, with one hand in her coat pocket curled around a can of pepper spray.

  Her roommate, Tessa, had been in town exactly six months. And while the girl had a self-reliant barrio toughness to her, she was only eighteen.

  Which was why Maddie was climbing the long flight of stairs from the lobby in the semidark at eleven-fifteen on a January night, after dancing all evening at the Al-Medina Restaurant on Lexington Avenue. The advanced ballet class officially ended at ten, but the instructor frequently ran late, especially now, with the auditions for the American Ballet Academy coming up.

  With the auditions approaching, Tessa would stay on later still.

  This was not a good idea, in a neighborhood that wasn’t anything to write home about…Not that Tessa had anyone back in El Paso to write home to.

  From the small and gloomy lobby at the top of the first flight of stairs, Maddie followed the light to the door marked The Dance Loft and pulled out the second of Tessa’s much-duplicated keys. The front office of the dance school was identical to the dozens Maddie had seen in Baton Rouge, in New Orleans and in New York over the twenty-three years since her first ballet class when she was five: threadbare carpet, plywood paneling, posters displaying the names of teachers. Rows of black-framed eight-by-tens of ballerinas floating weightless and serene onstage, or head shots scribbled with autographs. Looking at the little room through its glass door, Maddie had to smile as she put the key in the lock….