The Last Time I Saw Her

by Karen Robards

  “Before we get completely off topic here, let me ask you something,” she said. “Considering what happened the last time, did you hesitate at all? Did you even consider the possibility that stealing a body might be a bad idea?”

  “Compared to what? Watching you get shot? Or raped? If I hadn’t grabbed a body, that psycho would have killed you back there. Nothing I could have done. This Hughes guy was unconscious, which made it easy. I jumped in. To save your ass, just so we’re clear.” His face hardened as he spoke, and his eyes glinted unpleasantly at her. His tone had grown more and more grim. But it was Michael grim, not Spookville grim, and she was (mostly) relieved to know that the demon was finally in abeyance. “What would you have done if I hadn’t shown up inside that school bus when I did? Hmm? You might want to think about that.”

  Charlie could tell that a rant on the dangers of the prison and her line of work in general was on the tip of his tongue, and she had more important things to talk to him about at the moment. To forestall the lecture—and also because having him solid like this in her arms was too good an opportunity to miss and the temptation was overwhelming—she kissed him, a quick but, she hoped, distractingly hot kiss on the mouth that felt like such a luxury because she’d almost never had the opportunity to kiss him at will before.

  When she broke it off, his breathing had quickened and his eyes immediately sought her mouth. “Babe—”

  Disregarding the huskiness of that, as well as the whole shivery-melty thing that was going on inside her, she interrupted him to get right back to the point. “How long do you have the body for?”

  The change in his expression told her that he’d figured out that her kiss had been designed to sidetrack him.

  He said, “It’s not like I rented a car. I don’t know precisely. Long enough. At a guess, a day or two.”

  A day or two. A day or two out of all eternity. A day or two in which they could touch, and kiss, and make love, and—the promise of it dazzled her, the briefness of it broke her heart. But at least he was back, and even when his time in that body was up he would still be there, in the earthly plane with her (that is, if a hunter didn’t swoop in and get him) and that was much more than she’d ever thought she’d have again. But right now their situation, with all its potential upsides and downsides, had to be put on the back burner in favor of more pressing concerns.

  He bent his head with the obvious intention of kissing her again.

  “Wait.” Pressing her fingers against his mouth to forestall him—he promptly kissed them, a warm and suggestive kiss that caused her heart to skip a beat—she shook her head at him and, in self-defense, curled her fingers and pulled them away. He frowned at her and she looked at him earnestly.

  “Michael. Since you do have this body and are physically capable, we need to go after Paris. Sayers is—you know what he is. We have to try to rescue her. And Bree. And the boys, too. Oh, and the chaperone. And the driver. All the hostages, but the kids first. Probably Paris first.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Michael returned her look with a level one of his own. The black-eyed devil who’d come back to her from Spookville had been replaced by the tough and pragmatic man he was at his core. Charlie suddenly wasn’t sure how much of an improvement that was.

  “You have wings?” he asked.

  She blinked at him. “What?”

  “Because without them, you’re not getting off this ledge. I could probably climb back up to where I came down from even if I am wearing handcuffs and some kind of fancy leather-soled shoes that are slick as shit, but you can’t. And I’m not leaving you.”

  “I’ll be fine here. I—”

  “Also it’s dark, and I’m not Superman, which means I don’t have X-ray vision, and I’m not a damned bloodhound. Even if I left you here, which I’m not going to do, what do you think the chances are that I could find that girl or Sayers or anybody else, for that matter? By now they could be anywhere.”

  “But we have to do something.”

  “Not only do we not have to do something, we’re not going to do something.” His tone was brutal in its finality. “We’re going to wait right here until a rescue crew with a damned rope shows up to get us off this ledge.”

  “We can’t just wait here! Who knows how long it might be?”

  “Daylight, at the very latest. Believe me, by now this mountain is crawling with cops. FBI, National Guard, you name it, they’re all out here. You think a mass escape of death row inmates from the Ridge didn’t get the big guns called out? You notice how you’re not hearing any sirens, or seeing blue lights, and the road up above us isn’t bumper-to-bumper cops? That tells the story right there. They’ve got the mountain blocked off. They’re here, in the dark, searching. They’re just keeping a low profile because they don’t want to spook anybody into killing more hostages.”

  “So why don’t we yell, ‘Help! Help!’ and go ahead and see if we can’t get rescued?” Charlie asked. “Then we can tell the rescuers about the barn and the pickup truck, and any other details that might help them find those kids.”

  He shook his head. “The problem with that is there are seven armed killers somewhere on this mountain who probably know we overheard them talking about the barn and the pickup truck and everything else. It might even be that they’re a hell of a lot closer to us than any rescuers. If we start yelling, they’re going to know where we are. There’s no cover on this ledge. If one of them decided to take a shot at us—from, say, the road up there or the ledge we came down from—we’re sitting ducks. I don’t like playing dodgeball with bullets, and we’re not going to put ourselves in a position where we have to do it. What we are going to do is sit tight and stay out of the way and let the cops do their jobs.”

  Charlie looked at him like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Do you know what Sayers does? He gouges out his victims’ eyes. After he rapes them. Before he kills them. And Abell—Abell’s an animal. And Torres—”

  “I know what they do,” he interrupted. “I was on death row with all of them, remember? And by the way, I think it’s a piece of damned idiocy that you know what they do and you still come within a hundred miles of them.”

  “It’s called my job,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know what? If we really have to talk about this again, we can do it later. Right now, there are children out there at the mercy of serial killers.”

  “Maybe they escaped. Some of ’em were squeezing out of the bus windows when I jumped out the back after you.”

  “And maybe they didn’t!”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  Charlie stiffened in his arms. “That’s not your decision to make.”

  “Oh, so it’s yours?”

  They eyed each other measuringly.

  “Charlie, look,” Michael said. “Even if we could get off this ledge, we’d only get in the way, and might even catch a bullet for our trouble. The folks that are hunting them right now will have thermal imaging equipment, and night-vision goggles, and lots of other sophisticated equipment that we don’t have. Plus they’re not stuck on a damned ledge with a five-hundred-foot drop if somebody puts a foot wrong, one of ’em’s not a woman with absolutely no law enforcement or weapons training, and I’m assuming that they have more than one gun with about half a clip left in it. Which would be good, considering that, as I said before, the escapees are all armed.”

  “Michael—” It was a protest.

  “You can ‘Michael’ me all you want. It is my decision, because you can’t get off this ledge, and I’m telling you it ain’t happening. We’re staying put. Your savior complex is showing, babe.”

  Charlie’s brows snapped together. Come to think of it, she absolutely preferred demon Michael.

  “I do not,” she said, “have a savior complex.”

  “You have a savior complex and a death wish,” he retorted. “You stood up in that bus and yelled at a man with a gun who’d just murdered
someone right in front of your eyes. Then you punched another armed man in the face, which, by the way, was either the bravest or the stupidest thing I ever saw. You’re lucky to be alive. I wasn’t kidding about you needing to see a shrink, Shrink.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She glared at him, but before she could verbally annihilate him as she absolutely meant to do, he said, “Look, this is hell on the knees. You want to fight, how about we get comfortable first?”

  Her lips compressed. But then, because the unforgiving stone really was hurting her already bruised knees, and anyway, much as she hated to face it, he had a point about the swarming cops and high-tech equipment and the rest of it even if he was also being totally high-handed and infuriating as usual, she said, “I don’t have a death wish or a savior complex. And I don’t want to fight. But fine, let’s move.”

  He lifted his arms over her head. She let go of his neck and sank back. Then they moved the few feet necessary so that they were sitting with their backs against the cliff. In front of them, the ledge ended in a drop into utter blackness. The two scruffy bushes growing out of the crack where the face of the cliff met the ledge were maybe three feet to Charlie’s left. From their faintly spicy scent, Charlie thought they might be witch hazel. The ledge itself was about ten feet wide by twenty feet long, a tiny scar on the mountain’s craggy face.

  Much as it went against the grain to just give up, Charlie reluctantly accepted that she was stuck. For her at least, going up or down was problematic. She was lucky she hadn’t fallen to her death the first time.

  “You have a gun?” she asked as they got settled, referring to what he’d said about having a gun with only one clip.

  “Yep. Took it off Dirty.”

  “Dirty?”

  “Fleenor.”

  “Oh.” She paused for a moment, reflecting that being with a living, breathing man who knew his way around a gun was a definite plus under the circumstances, especially since what she knew about guns could be summed up with “point and shoot,” and she had an aversion to them besides. To that she added a quick mental review of the seven armed murderers who were presumably still on the mountain. “That’s good.”

  “I think so.”

  Legs bent, Michael rested his forearms on his knees. He seemed to be doing something twisty with the handcuffs. Charlie sat beside him with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, close enough to him that their bodies brushed because, well, despite her slight level of annoyance with him she really needed to be touching him. His reappearance was still too new, and the pain she had suffered over his absence was still too raw. Between the rising wind and the temperature of the stone at her back, she was starting to get really cold. Her thin shirt and pants had not been designed to keep anyone warm during an autumn night spent outside in the mountains. She was also starting to be acutely aware of various aches and pains. If there was a part of her that wasn’t bruised or sore she decided that she must be somehow overlooking it. The knuckles of her right hand felt stiff. Her pants were ripped at both the knees and various other places, and she could see through the gaps in the cloth that her legs were scraped up. Her shirt had popped its top two buttons, so that the modest vee of her neckline was now an immodest vee, revealing more than a hint of cleavage and a glimpse of her lacy white bra. She refused to think about the hint of moisture against her nipple that remained from Michael’s mouth.

  “How about you—” Michael began, only to break off as a shout split the air, faint but not so distant that Charlie couldn’t make out the words: “Stop, or I’ll put a bullet in your back.”

  Stiffening, she shivered. God, she hated this part of her “gift.” Fleenor was dead, yet she could hear him, and would’ve been able to see him, too, if she’d been close enough, as his spirit reenacted the last moments of his life. A moment later, the follow-up she’d been expecting reached her ears: “Dr. Sto-o-one. Here I am. Good to see you decided to wait for me.”

  That was followed by a choked cry and the sounds of a struggle.

  “What the hell?” Michael had gone rigid beside her. He was looking up toward the sounds, but there was nothing to see above them but a whole lot of dark.

  “Fleenor,” Charlie said with resignation. Then she had a thought, and cast Michael a sideways glance. “You can hear him, too, huh?”

  “Hell, yes, I—” Michael broke off as he started to get to his feet, no doubt contemplating some violent action designed to defend them. She put a calming hand on his arm and added, “Don’t worry, he’s still dead. His spirit’s on a loop, repeating the last moments of his life. It’s a fairly common side effect of a violent, unexpected death. He isn’t aware of us, or anything in the earth plane. Spirits go through that sometimes, you know, before they move on.”

  The thing about Michael was, he did know. Besides being a spirit himself, which took care of the whole I-don’t-believe-in-ghosts problem she’d been running into all her life, he’d witnessed enough of what she’d gone through to know exactly what she was talking about. The supernatural world was as real as anything on the earth plane, and because of some dirty cosmic trick she was one of the few who absolutely, without a doubt, knew it. That knowledge was something she’d had to keep to herself for most of her life, and especially since she’d become a physician, as the medical community tended to frown on doctors who saw ghosts. Certainly it didn’t take them seriously. Since he’d died, Michael, previously a total skeptic when it came to the paranormal, had become a reluctant convert. Which meant, among many other not-so-wonderful benefits, he got to listen to Fleenor’s randomly repeating death reenactment, which Charlie was one hundred percent sure no one else on that mountain besides the two of them was able to hear. As she had previously concluded, one of the good things about having Michael in her life was that she no longer had to experience those things alone.

  As he absorbed the fact that Fleenor couldn’t hurt them, Michael’s taut muscles slowly relaxed.

  “I wasn’t sure, since you’re in a body now, that you’d still be able to hear things like that,” she told him.

  “I can.” His voice was grim.

  “I see.” Hers wasn’t.

  “Your life’s a damned freak show,” he told her as Fleenor started up again. “You know that, right?”

  Giving him a pointed look, she said, “Yes, Casper, I do.”

  He met her gaze, his mouth quirked as he caught her meaning, and then he leaned over to kiss her. The touch of his mouth on hers, the hard possessiveness of his kiss, the casual way he made it instantly hot and deep, got her heart thundering and made her body clench and burn just as quick as that, as if her physical response was an automatic, conditioned reaction to a familiar stimulus now. This was pure Michael, no demon at all, and it was still scorching enough to blow her mind. But besides being sexy as hell, it made her feel like they were a couple, like they were in a relationship and they both knew it and accepted it. Which she supposed was all true, and was such a disaster on so many levels that she refused to even let herself dwell on it. She slid a hand behind his head and kissed him back because she loved him, and the hard truth was that she was helpless in the face of it even if she knew that she was looking at heartbreak on the horizon.

  When he straightened to return to the handcuffs, she tilted her head back against the rock wall and contemplated the sky. Fretting about her fellow hostages was as upsetting as it was apparently useless, so she pushed that out of her mind by focusing intently on the here and now. Night had fallen, and the mountain peaks around them were no more than dense black shapes against a black background. A thick cloud cover allowed only fleeting glimpses of one or two tiny, distant-looking stars, and the moon was nowhere in sight. The ledge was so dark by this time that she couldn’t see where it ended, or anything much beyond Michael, who was deep in shadow. Smokelike tendrils of mist floated everywhere, the rising wind moaned through the trees and mountain passes, and it was growing colder by the minute. If she’d been by herself, she woul
d have been miserable and afraid.

  As horrible as it might be of her, she was suddenly glad Michael hadn’t left her alone. Although she had a knot in her stomach that twisted tighter every time she thought of Paris, or Bree, or any of the others.

  Please God watch over them and keep them safe.

  “So how about you go ahead and fill me in on the evil twin?” Michael said.

  Looking at him—he was frowning down at whatever he was doing with the handcuffs—Charlie took a deep breath, dragged her wandering wits back together, and said, “I think that’s literally what he is. Your evil twin. As in your identical twin brother and the real Southern Slasher. I think he’s the one who really murdered Candace Hartnell and those other women they said you killed.”

  Stopping what he was doing with the handcuffs, Michael held her gaze for a pregnant moment and then drawled, “And yet you’re calmly sitting here with him.”

  “I’m sitting here with you. That’s why I asked you if he was likely to pop back into his body without warning.” She frowned at him. “You’re sure about what you said, right? You’ll know in plenty of time to warn me?”

  “I’ll know.” His voice was grim. “But you had no way of knowing that when I climbed down here. You could have been stuck on this ledge with the animal who slaughtered all those women. Who you think might have slaughtered all those women.”

  “Well, you’re the one who climbed down here.”

  “Because you were down here, and you’re down here because you had to risk your life scrambling down a sheer cliff with a death drop to get away from another fucking serial killer.”

  “We’ve had this conversation,” Charlie said. “The interesting thing we were talking about is I think the body you’re in belongs to your identical twin brother who actually committed the murders you were convicted of.”

  “You think that’s the interesting thing.”

  “Yes, I do. Yes, it is.”

  He took a moment before replying. “You know, if I’d known that all it took to convince you that I didn’t kill those women was having an evil twin turn up, I would have rounded one up a hell of a lot sooner.”