by Rebecca York
The woman’s voice brought her back to reality. Blinking, she looked around the unnatural environment.
“You can come back later,” the nurse said kindly but firmly.
Beth allowed herself to be led out of the room. Then she was in the waiting area, and Hannah was beside her.
“How is he?”
“He’s not there,” she whispered.
Hannah’s face registered panic. “What do you mean, not there? Didn’t they bring him here?”
“They brought him to one of the rooms back there. His physical body. But his mind…” She trailed off, trying to think how to convey what she meant. “He’s not…” She couldn’t finish, couldn’t say it again.
“I’ve spoken to Lucas. He’s arranged for you to spend the night here, if you want.”
“Here?”
“There’s a VIP suite upstairs. He’s gotten all of us rooms.”
Beth was dumbfounded. “Us? But he doesn’t even know me.”
“He knows you care about Cal.”
“I’ll pay for the room.”
“Nonsense. Cal probably told you that Lucas has money to burn. Not just the million dollars he acquired. He’s sold his father’s ranch.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know anything about the ranch, or Lucas Somerville, for that matter. But she could see that these people cared deeply about Cal.
So she let Hannah take her up to the fifth floor, where she found a comfortable sitting area and a bedroom that looked as if it had materialized from an upscale hotel chain—except that it had two hospital beds.
The surroundings were of little interest to her. But she knew she had to rest. So she slipped off her shoes and slacks and crawled under the covers of the nearest bed.
In the morning she’d have to get Tim to let Granger out and feed him. But Tim wouldn’t mind doing it, since he’d be working the farm anyway. She’d call him early. That would be no problem because she was too worried to sleep.
That was her assumption. But almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, she found it was too much effort to keep her eyes open. Once they were closed, she felt sleep pulling at her with a kind of supernatural force.
A spurt of fear shot through her. Some part of her knew she had to resist, had to keep herself awake, because sleep meant danger. She didn’t know why. She only sensed that it was true.
Heart pounding, she lay there, knowing that if she succumbed, something terrible was going to happen. The feeling was like all the other premonitions she’d had in the dark hours of the night, and she fought for control with all her will.
Then she felt a tiny sliver of doubt come creeping into her consciousness.
You want to help Cal, a small voice urged. You want him back.
How will sleeping help him?
I don’t know. But it will.
Still, she was afraid to give in, remembering the long history of terrible extrasensory experiences that had seized control of her. Her father’s car accident. Hallie. The time she’d known that her old dog, Sampson, had been hit by a car and that she’d find his lifeless body on Underwood Road. The time she’d known that kids from her school were going to take a curve on Route 108 too fast and crash into a tree.
None of those psychic visions had ever brought her anything but pain—and guilt, because deep down she’d always felt as if she should have done something.
But this time was different. In some strange way, she sensed that maybe there was something she could do. Still, fear made her fight. She managed to roll to her side and pull up her knees, her sense of self-preservation struggling against the voice in her head until finally the voice was the stronger of the two.
Within minutes, sleep claimed her.
For a short time she was blessedly inert. And then with a jolt she woke up in a place of nightmares, and she knew that she had made a terrible mistake.
She was in a dark shadowy woods. A woods that had never been part of the familiar Maryland countryside she had known all her life.
This was a horror-movie landscape thick with vegetation and the smell of decay. Around her, towering trees blocked out the sun. At ground level, dense underbrush pressed in against her. Vines hung from the branches and slapped against her face as she tried to make her way through the thick greenery, her feet slipping in slimy mud.
Some part of her consciousness knew she was dreaming. But that didn’t make the terror—or the danger—less. In the darkness she could hear deep, menacing animal noises. Shrieks, growls. And then the sound of something coming toward her, moving on padded feet through the darkness.
In her mind, she saw a large jungle cat, its claws sharp, its teeth poised to tear at her throat. She screamed, cowering back against the broad trunk of a tree.
Then from an immense distance, she thought she heard someone calling her name.
“Beth? What the hell are you doing here?”
It was Cal. She would know that soft southern voice anywhere. He was here. But he was too far away to reach her in time. Because if she stayed in this terrible place a moment longer, she would be killed.
Moaning in terror, she struggled against the dream, and somehow she wrenched herself away. Literally wrenched her mind out of the nightmare, out of sleep.
She lay there on the bed, her breath coming in rapid gasps, her skin covered with perspiration. It had been a dream. Just a dream. But instinctively she knew that the danger was real, not only in her imagination.
The door opened, and her body jerked on the bed.
Then Hannah was crossing the room, coming toward her.
“Beth, are you all right? You were moaning. What happened?”
She pushed herself up, leaning forward and pulling up her knees. Wrapping her arms around them, she looked at the other woman. “I had a nightmare,” she said in a small voice.
“It must have been bad. We could hear you thrashing around. Then you screamed.”
“I…yes.” She raised her face toward Hannah. “I’m sorry I woke you.”
“No, I wasn’t asleep. Do you want me to stay with you?”
“No. I’ll be okay.”
Beth felt a small surge of relief when Hannah turned and left the room. She wanted to be alone, to figure out what had happened to her. She had been pulled into a nightmare—a place where she knew it was impossible for her to stay and keep her sanity. Yet, at the end, she had heard a voice. Cal’s voice. Although it had been far away, it had seemed very real, as if he actually were there.
She considered that idea for a moment. Then, with a shiver, dismissed it. She couldn’t believe—didn’t want to believe—that he had really been in that horrifying landscape. He was downstairs in the ICU, unconscious. Yet she couldn’t entirely rid herself of the conviction that he had been in the dream with her, that he needed her.
If she dared go back to that place, could she find him?
She made a low noise that was almost an hysterical laugh. Make that—could she find him before the monsters tore her apart?
Clenching her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering, she huddled down under the covers, her thoughts chasing themselves around in circles. Sleep was impossible now, so that when Hannah knocked on her door at five in the morning, she’d simply been lying rigidly in bed, feeling torn first one way and then the other.
“None of us could sleep,” Hannah said. “Do you want to go down to the cafeteria and get something to eat?”
Beth didn’t think she could eat much. But being with people who cared about Cal was better than lying in bed, she decided.
She staggered to the bathroom, looked at her bleary-eyed face in the mirror and grimaced.
When she entered the lounge ten minutes later, she noted that Lucas, Sam and Hannah all looked almost as bad as she did.
“I have to call the man who works at my farm,” she told them, “and get him to take care of my dog. Poor Granger’s never been alone before. He’s going to miss me.”
“If I could slip him into the VIP suite, I’d
do it,” Lucas told her, and she gave him a little smile, knowing he was telling the truth.
They stopped by the ICU, where she was granted another ten minutes with Cal. Apparently there was no change in his condition. He was still unconscious, still unresponsive as she stroked her hand against the dark stubble on his cheek. And as she stood there looking down at him, she had the awful feeling that she’d failed him last night.
Breakfast was impossible. She was too miserable to eat, but she did manage to sip on a mug of coffee heavily laced with the half-and-half Sam poured into it. To fill the silence, Hannah told her about how she and Cal had worked together as uniformed officers and then as detectives in Baltimore City. Then Lucas related his adventures in Texas with Hannah. Beth went last, talking a little about the case she and Cal were working on. But she didn’t have to tell them about the murder and assault at the reunion committee meeting because it had made the Baltimore Sun.
Some time during the morning when they’d gone back to the lounge, Sam Lassiter brought her a shopping bag with a clean T-shirt and underwear.
“Thank you,” she said, grateful but a little embarrassed that he’d gone shopping for intimate apparel for her.
After she changed, she came back into the sitting area to find a man talking to Hannah, Sam and Lucas. He was short and compact in build, with close-cropped hair and hard features. He looked like a cop, she thought.
She could see his stance was belligerent. When he turned to her, his expression was angry.
“I already asked Lassiter. Now I’ll ask you. What the hell was Cal doing going off in the middle of the night to some hare-brained meeting when he was supposed to be working undercover with you?”
She blanched, wondering if this man was always so graceless in his communications.
Lucas came up behind the man. “Beth, this is Lieutenant Ken Patterson of the Howard County Police. Cal’s boss.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she said in a cold voice, her hand remaining firmly at her side. Raising her chin, she said, “Cal and I had a pretty traumatic couple of hours at the reunion committee meeting, as I’m sure you know. When we got out of there, I assumed we both had the rest of the evening off. Or do I have it wrong? Is he supposed to be on duty twenty-four hours a day?”
His eyes narrowed. “He’s not supposed to get himself incapacitated on his own time.”
Sam came up behind the man. “I told you, if you want to blame someone, blame me. Don’t lay a guilt trip on Beth. She’s got enough on her mind right now.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t much like this situation.”
“Because you care about what happens to him? Or because you’re annoyed that he ended up in the hospital unconscious and ruined your investigation?” Beth asked, making an enormous effort to keep her voice from trembling.
“Both. I need someone to work this case. And since he can’t do it, I’ll have to assign someone else.”
After delivering that bombshell, Patterson turned on his heel and stalked out of the room.
“Nice guy,” Beth murmured.
“He’s got a lot of problems right now,” Hannah said. “Like the fallout from the reunion committee meeting last night.”
Lucas put a hand on her shoulder. “Sorry the guy had to be such a jerk. I don’t envy Cal working for someone like that.”
“Neither do I,” Beth muttered
The lieutenant had set her nerves on edge. She was barely holding herself together as they took the elevator to the ICU. And she was even more dispirited to find there was still no improvement in Cal’s condition. As the hours dragged by, she could feel one of her headaches descending.
Closing her eyes, she tried to will away the pain. But it remained, a dull throbbing in her temples and the back of her head that only got worse as the day wore into evening.
A triple dose of painkiller didn’t help. Needing to feel as if she was doing something for Cal, she left her new friends and went down to the chapel off the lobby, sat in one of the pews near the back and clasped her hands. It had been a long time since she’d asked God for any favors. She asked now. “Please,” she whispered, “please, let him get better. Please let him wake up.”
She stayed in the chapel for a long time, her hands clenched as she repeated the words over and over. Then she took the elevator back to the ICU.
Cal wasn’t there, and her heart leaped into her throat, blocking her windpipe. Running back to the nurses’ station, she asked, “Where is Detective Rollins?”
“He’s having more tests.”
“What tests?”
“You’ll have to speak to Dr. Koenig.”
The doctor was with another patient. Unable to draw in a full breath, Beth waited for him, pacing back and forth across the tile floor.
When she saw the doctor’s face, she knew immediately that any news she was going to get regarding Cal would be bad.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” she demanded.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his white coat. “I’m afraid Detective Rollins’s brain activity is…deteriorating.”
The words made her chest clench as though she’d been grabbed by an iron fist. “Why?” she managed to say. “What’s happening to him?”
“We can’t come up with any reason.” He paused, sighed. “It’s almost like he doesn’t want to come back to consciousness.”
“No!”
The doctor ignored her exclamation and continued, “The thing is, we just don’t know enough about the brain. Sometimes with a patient in a coma, the problem is obvious. Sometimes not. There are times when I can’t say why one victim of head trauma recovers and another doesn’t.”
The doctor had never talked about a coma before, and the word clawed at her throat. “You don’t think Cal will recover,” she said faintly.
“I wouldn’t want to go that far,” he allowed. But the tone of his voice was enough to plunge her into despair.
Chapter Ten
Unable to sit still, Beth paced along the length of the hall as she waited for an orderly to bring Cal back to his room. Once they’d transferred him to his bed, they gave her a few minutes with him again. The sight of him pale and still as death suffused her heart with a depth of pain she couldn’t have imagined.
The only comfort was the warmth of his flesh, the rise and fall of his chest. But she sensed the same thing she had before—that his spirit was somewhere else.
“Cal,” she whispered.
He didn’t answer, of course. And this time she stopped denying what she had been afraid to face. Outrageous as it might seem, she knew where he was. In that dark, forbidding nightmare jungle that had scared her witless.
She shuddered. The man she loved was there. In that terrible place where the dream monsters were gnawing away at his mind, and he couldn’t find his way back.
Which gave her no real choice. She had to go there again, even if the place terrified her to the depths of her soul.
“Cal, wait for me. I’m coming back,” she whispered as she leaned down to press her lips against his cheek before walking out of the ICU.
Back in the private lounge area, she was unable to tell the others about her conversation with Dr. Koenig or about what she was planning to do, so she simply said that she had to get some rest. After shutting herself inside her room, she pulled the heavy blackout drapes, kicked off her shoes and stood with her fingers pressed to her aching temples.
Then, knowing she was stalling, she forced herself to cross the room and lie down on the bed.
The sensation of hitting the pillow felt strange, as though her aching head was sinking into the foam-rubber softness. As it had last night, the experience took her captive. Her eyes drifted closed, and once again she felt sleep pulling at her with a supernatural force. Once again, a jolt of fear shot through her, and she felt her heart begin to drum in her chest. But this time it was far worse than last night. This time she knew what was waiting for her.
There was almost no transition. One mo
ment she was conscious of lying on the bed and the next, she was back in that dark, dank jungle where the thick canopy of foliage shut out the light and the underbrush was alive with creeping, slithering monsters.
Terror seized her by the throat, held her in its grip.
“Cal? Where are you, Cal?” she tried to shout, but her voice was only a croaking sound.
Cal didn’t answer, and she was certain she had made a terrible mistake by coming here. The certainty increased as she zeroed in on the sound of something big moving through the leaves, padding toward her on what sounded like giant feet.
There was nothing she could do but turn and sprint away. As she ran, branches and thorns grabbed at her clothing like hands trying to hold her back.
Sobbing, she yanked her clothing from their grasp. Then above the roaring in her ears, she heard another sound. A voice.
“Beth. Where are you? Beth!”
It was Cal! Cal. And she felt hope explode inside her chest.
“Cal! I can’t see you. Where are you?” she shouted.
“Keep talking to me. I’ll find you.”
If he could find her, so could the monster. Cal was just a man—and the monster was fast, strong, savage. “It’s going to get me. It’s right behind me,” she screamed.
She heard Cal moving through the foliage, coming toward her, and she turned in that direction, quickening her pace.
But it was too late. Something tore at her back. Not thorns, animal claws. She cried out and threw herself forward. Then the sound of gunshots rang out in the darkness. Behind her, a massive body crashed to the ground.
Whirling, she saw the thing that had been stalking her with such single-minded purpose. Something with scales and massive teeth. Dark, beady eyes. Something that had never walked the earth.
Cal was beside her then, urging her away.
“Come on. We have to get out of here before something else tries to get us.”
The rustling sounds in the underbrush confirmed that other creatures were moving toward them, following the sound of their voices and their scent.
“Where are we?” she asked, cringing against her protector.
