Energized

by Mary Behre

  She was a good person. A kind person. She granted peace to all those who suffered around her. Didn’t she deserve love?

  “You’re nothing but a little freak. A whore! Here, freak, let’s paint you up like the whore-clown you are. Then I can charge admission. Five dollars a peek at the freak.” The bitch’s voice cackled with laughter. Her sister’s voice joined in the jeering. “What’s the matter, sissy baby? Don’t like hearing what you are? Freakazoid. Freakazoid. Everybody hates the freakazoid. God, stop that blubbering. If you weren’t such a loser, you’d be completely worthless.”

  Mercy shut her eyes and pounded her fists against her head. Her mother’s voice taunted more often. Dead or not, the bitch never let her have a moment’s peace. Every time Mercy found a way to be near him, she’d hear her bitch sister’s jeers in her head. But that helped. At least then Mercy could remember her purpose on earth was not to be loved but to grant mercy.

  Tonight, she’d make him notice her. She’d seen him walking alone earlier tonight. He wasn’t like the others she’d set free. He was special. Her one true love. Her dead bitch sister had been wrong.

  Mercy wasn’t worthless. Wasn’t a loser.

  Mercy could be loved.

  He could love her. He would love her. Once she made him notice her.

  It was why she was saving him for last. She knew what he didn’t. She knew that when he found his peace, Mercy would go with him. Not out of pity or pain but because they were meant to be together.

  Not tonight.

  Tonight, she’d set another man free.

  Mercy selected the tube of Waitress Red lipstick, glossed it over her mouth, blew her reflection a kiss, and imagined it was her true love she kissed.

  * * *

  NIALL WAS A friggin’ moron. He’d driven all the way home only to turn around and immediately come back because he’d forgotten to grab the bank deposit. It had been completely by accident. He’d dropped off yesterday’s this afternoon, so it had naturally slipped his mind to grab tonight’s deposit. Anyone could have made the same mistake.

  It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the last thing he’d been at the Cat was flustered by Hannah.

  Yeah. Right. Tell another, Marine.

  That’s what she’d called him that night. Marine.

  She of the fairylike beauty and endless smile.

  Hannah. Hannah Halloran. He’d learned her last name when he’d read her application. But he still had no idea where she lived because the address on the form was for the hotel down the street. Okay, he could have gone over there, but hadn’t he been the one to make her promise to keep the relationship strictly business?

  He was definitely not the kind of boss to screw his employees, figuratively or literally. But damn, she was here. And their one night together had been definitely worth repeating.

  Now he was back at the restaurant. Despite the empty parking lot, lights blazed through the high office window. Either he’d left on the office light or someone was still there. The odds that it was Hannah were slim. She was brand new. With his luck, he’d find Sadie in there no doubt writing him a note complaining about Michael or Ross or Virgil . . . again.

  Maybe I should take care of the deposit in the morning.

  Something crashed inside the kitchen. Hell, it sounded like dozens of dishes breaking.

  Niall was out of the truck and banging on the screen door in an instant. “Open up. It’s Niall. Hey! Is anyone hurt in there?”

  The locks clicked, then the main door pulled back to reveal an ashen-faced Karma. She smiled, a nervous twitch of the lips, then unlocked the screen door. “Hi, Boss. Didn’t expect you back tonight.”

  “Bankroll,” he muttered, pushing his way inside.

  The kitchen gleamed in the quiet. Only the sound of the dishwasher running around the corner broke the unearthly silence. He glanced around the empty room before turning back to Karma, who’d relocked the doors behind him. “You alone in here? I thought I heard a crash.”

  “Oh, um.” Karma sidled past him, angling for the dishwasher around the half wall. “No, I’m not alone. And nothing’s broken.”

  Niall followed her to find Hannah, pale as death, sitting on the floor. Her back propped against the demi-wall. She alternately sucked in air in gasps and sipped at a water bottle, as if trying to settle her stomach.

  Squatting in front of her he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.” Her eyes were a bit unfocused but she nodded. Her color was off and she definitely didn’t appear fine.

  “Did you fall down?” Because that would be his luck. To have her slip on something in his restaurant.

  “No,” Hannah and Karma replied in unison. They glanced at each other and laughed weakly.

  “I had a vision and needed to sit down. I knocked over the clean silverware in my haste.” She took another, longer gulp of her drink. “Sorry. I’ll clean that up in a few minutes.”

  Only then did Niall notice the forks, knives, and spoons littering the floor.

  “You stay put, I’ll get it,” Karma said, moving to clean up the mess. “What do you want to do, Hannah?”

  “About what?” Niall asked at the same time Hannah said, “Go to the police, I guess.”

  Hannah and Karma both gave him that infuriating stare that women had when they thought the men they were with were being obtuse. He didn’t squirm. If his mother couldn’t make him uneasy—well, she could, but only she could do that to him after his life in the Marines—he wouldn’t let them.

  What did she say?

  “What was that about a vision?” he asked. His neck itched at the calm expressions both women wore.

  “I was loading up the dishwasher when I had a vision of a murder.” Hannah shivered and looked at her hands. “It was gruesome. There was blood everywhere. He struggled and fought, even when the knife was coming down. It was the most awful thing I’ve ever witnessed. And the smell . . .” She shivered again.

  “It was pretty freaky from where I was standing,” Karma added, opening the dishwasher as soon as it cut off. “She went pale, and I swear for a minute I didn’t think she was going to come out of it. She was saying some creeptastic things.”

  Despite her deathly pallor, Hannah’s eyes went wide. “I spoke? I don’t think I’ve done that before. At least, no one ever mentioned me doing that. What did I say?”

  “You kept talking about giving mercy, then you said, ‘Baptize me in your blood. Show me you’re grateful for my mercy.’” Karma’s accent returned, thicker than Niall had ever heard it before. She ran a hand through her short, curly hair and blew out a breath. “You didn’t sound like you. Your voice, I mean. It was like someone or something else was talking through you. If I hadn’t known what you can do, if I hadn’t already seen your bright, clean aura before, I’d have been hauling butt out of here and calling the cops. You sounded like a psychopath.”

  Hannah’s eyes brimmed with tears in her too-pale face. The sight had his gut twisting even as his mind struggled to wrap itself around this absurd conversation.

  “I’m so sorry, Karma. I didn’t mean to frighten you. If it makes you feel any better, it scared the dickens out of me too. Psychopath is a good word. That vision was definitely seen through the eyes of one crazypants individual.” Hannah rolled the open bottle against her cheek, as if needing to cool down. “But I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen anything like that before. I’ve never been inside a killer’s head until now and she was seriously screwed up.”

  “‘She?’ The killer was a woman?” Karma asked, her accent gone again. “Do you know anything about her?”

  Hannah squinted as if trying to see in the distance or draw up a memory, then shook her head. “Not really. All I can remember is that she called herself Mercy. Wait, there was something else.” Hannah squeezed her eyes closed, then shook her head and opened them
again. “Something about her hand. Something wrong with it? I can’t really remember it clearly.”

  Karma held up a dirty knife wrapped in a hand towel. “Do you want to try again?”

  “Definitely not. Two trips into her crazyland are more than enough for one night. I’ve never felt so ill after a vision before. Not even when I accidentally stumbled into Mr. Hobson’s hidden porn room memory.” She paused, grinning. “Although, I’m pretty sure I was blushing when I came out of it.”

  Niall slowly straightened and just listened to the women talk. He was used to Karma’s weird utterances about auras. Hell, she had a gift for reading people and had done more to help him weed out the worst of their staff than Ross and his parents put together. But damn, now he had two women working for him and claiming to be in touch with the other side or some other woo-woo shit.

  He should have stayed home.

  “Will you drive us?” Karma asked, touching him on the forearm and drawing him from his thoughts.

  “Drive you where?”

  “To the station. I think someone needs to know about what I saw.” Hannah pushed to her feet, finished off the last of the water, then pitched the bottle in the recycling bin. “I have no idea how the cops deal with people like me down here, but I can’t do nothing.”

  “You want me to go with you while you tell the police you imagined you were in a killer’s head?”

  “No, I want you to drive us to the police station so I can report what I saw in my vision of being in a killer’s head.” Hannah narrowed her eyes on him. “You’ll come with me, won’t you, Karma?” When Karma nodded Hannah added, “I need to report a murder. I can give a description of the man who was killed.”

  “Don’t you have a car?” He couldn’t help but ask. “How’d you get here from Fincastle?”

  “What does that have to do with anything? I took the bus.” She gave him a withering sort of smile. The kind of smile that was both adorable and reproachful all at the same time.

  He might have laughed if what she was saying hadn’t been so serious. And fucked up. She needed to see reason.

  “Do you know who did it? Where it happened? When it happened? Hannah, how do you know you didn’t dream it up? Couldn’t this all be in your imagination?”

  Hannah’s shoulders rolled back and down, as if preparing for a fight. “I didn’t dream it up. Nowhere in my imagination would I want to picture some poor young guy getting stabbed to death. And I’d have to work pretty freaking hard to imagine the stench of blood and death that darn near seared the inside of my nostrils during that vision. Whatever! Don’t drive me. I’ll walk over. Someone just point me in the right direction.”

  “Hannah, people don’t just go to the police to report crimes they haven’t actually beared physical witness to.”

  “I did,” Karma interjected. When he turned to glare at his restaurant manager she arched an eyebrow at him and added, “Well, I did.”

  “As I recall, that wasn’t well received, was it?” He remembered the story of what happened when Karma had repeatedly contacted the police to report that a child declared dead was actually alive and kidnapped. No one would listen to her. Well, almost no one. In the end, she’d been right. Something that still floored Niall to think about. “As I recall, that experience was hard on you. Very hard. And people weren’t exactly happy with you. Do you want to put Hannah through that?”

  “The only people unhappy with me for going to the police were the ones responsible for what happened to that little boy. As I recall, his mother was overjoyed.” She turned her back to him and took Hannah by the hands. “Hannah, unlike when I did it, you won’t go in there alone. And I’ll make sure to introduce you to someone I guarantee will believe you. We’ll go see my boyfriend, Zig. He’ll know what to do.”

  The women started past him. Hannah’s golden eyes were dull. They’d been vacant when he’d first come into the kitchen but this was different. Hurt swam in them. She paused and glanced up at him. “I’m not crazy. I know what I saw. I thought you would believe me.”

  “I barely know you. You honestly expect me to tell the cops that I believe you had a psychic vision?” Okay, that was a shitty, vicious lie. He knew her intimately. Niall heard the words come out of his mouth as if someone else spoke them. If ever he wished life had a delete key, this was it. He’d have gone back and erased his thoughtless, rude-ass words from existence.

  “I suppose not.” She lifted her chin in the air, the dull look in her eyes replaced by golden ice chips and she strode out the back door.

  “Very nice, Boss,” Karma said, reminding him she’d been standing there.

  Crap!

  “It’s not—”

  “You know one of the things I’ve always respected about you was your brutal honesty. Don’t bother to lie now, remember I can see your aura.” She was almost to the back door when she turned and added, “You know, if you’re trying to drive her away, you’re doing a bang-up job.”

  CHAPTER 9

  HANNAH SKETCHED THE image of the victim from her vision on the sketch pad she kept in her backpack. It was hard to stay focused on the image with her squeezed between Niall and Karma in the front seat of Niall’s truck. She did her best not to touch him, but it was impossible to avoid his arm considering the truck was a stick shift and her legs were sprawled on either side of the gears.

  “Sorry,” he muttered when his muscled forearm brushed the top of her left thigh again. She felt the heat of him through her black work slacks.

  She held still until he slid the gear into fifth, then she straightened her leg to give them both some much-needed space. She was not going to be attracted to him anymore. Hadn’t she been telling herself just that since his comment in the kitchen?

  Barely know you. Okay, yes, their time together had been a single, solitary night. But they’d shared something more. At least, she thought they had. Perhaps, she’d been wrong. He hadn’t been thrilled to see her today. Except . . .

  Except for that single spark she caught in his eyes when he didn’t realize she could see him watching her during her shift. No matter his words, he was attracted. Even if he had acted like a jerk.

  Then Niall had surprised her. He’d followed Karma outside and offered to drive them to the station after all. Hannah hadn’t wanted to climb in, much less sit in the middle, but Karma refused to walk in the dark. Not that the city was terribly dark with all the streetlights. But since she didn’t exactly know where she was going, she needed Karma.

  She glanced at her pad, examining the lines and shading made shaky by the bumps in the road. It wasn’t perfect, because she couldn’t recall everything. Still, it was good. Good enough to compare to missing persons’ photos like she’d seen in TV shows and movies.

  Besides, if she kept drawing and erasing, she’d end up drawing Niall instead, since he was foremost in her mind. Tucking the pad and pencil back in her backpack, she stared at the street ahead. Niall radiated an air of quiet brooding that unnerved her. It made her want to strike up a conversation with him, but after his last smackdown, she wasn’t sure it was worth the risk.

  Hannah inhaled a tired breath. That was really stupid. Now she had to work hard to ignore his delicious masculine scent. That wonderful, earthy, male aroma combined with some light, spicy cologne. She’d first noticed that scent during their night back in December. Sometimes she wished she could draw scents the way she could pictures. She’d capture his and rub it all over her.

  Stop it, Hannah!

  What was she thinking? She was furious with him, not attracted.

  Right. And the sun was a peaceful shade of blue.

  The truck bumped and rolled to a stop outside a two-story brick building. Hannah didn’t wait for Niall to shift gears again, but flipped her leg over the stick shift, knocking his hand with her knee.

  “Sorry,” she said, hip-checking Karma, who had the go
od sense to get out of the truck so Hannah could follow. “Thank you for the ride, Niall.”

  He opened his mouth but then closed it again without uttering a sound. A muscle worked in his cheek as if he were chewing on his tongue. The light from the dashboard cast him in an odd, sickly green glow. With a curt nod, he threw the truck into reverse and left.

  Hannah stared at the taillights until they disappeared around a corner. An odd sensation pinched in the center of her chest. That was the third time she’d watched him leave. Maybe that was the universe telling her something.

  And the temper that had been brewing since the scene at the Cat faded into a cold, withering sense of loss.

  “You make him nervous.” Karma wrapped an arm around Hannah’s shoulder. “Or maybe he’s just a coward.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so. He’s anything but a coward.” Hannah whipped her head around to gape at her new friend. “He didn’t seem nervous to me. He seemed anxious to get as far from me as possible.”

  “You’re right about the not-being-a-coward thing. He’s the first to run into danger but you can’t see his aura. It was all green when he came in and found you. But just now, it had a nasty yellowish tinge to it. I’ve never seen his aura so off before. Yep, you make him really, really uncomfortable.”

  And didn’t that just suck to hear?

  “I think your gift might be off tonight. I saw that yellowish-green. It was the lights from the dash of the truck.”

  Karma laughed. A rich, throaty laugh. “Normally, I’d be offended by someone doubting my gift, but since I can see your aura too, I understand. You’re under a lot of pressure.” She looped her arm through one of Hannah’s. “Are you sure you want to go through with this? Niall wasn’t altogether wrong about the cops. Not all of them are receptive to the idea of a psychic.”

  Hannah thought about it for a minute. “I need to tell someone. What if that guy isn’t dead yet? No, he is. I know it. I’ve never had a premonition in my life. I only see what’s been. But what if he’s still tied up in that building? What if his family is searching for him? He’d want them to know what happened to him. I have to tell someone who can do something about it. The police station is the best place to start.”