by Kaylea Cross
“Because I don’t have yet what I came for.”
For a moment, the pain that sliced through her head was blinding. Her stomach rolled. She squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, his face was once again just inches from hers.
His cerulean gaze held hers for a long moment, his thoughts undecipherable. He pushed her down onto her ratty old armchair, then crossed over to the sink and brought her a glass of water. “Do you have some pain pills you could take?”
She took the glass and drank, refusing to let her hands shake. “They don’t make pills for what I have.” The antidepressants hadn’t helped either, so she’d stopped taking them a long time ago.
He took the empty glass from her. “It’s the stress. Once you confess, you’ll feel better.”
Hopelessness washed over her, a wave of misery, then anger, which she liked better. She’d painted him in the grave just a few weeks ago. She shouldn’t have a spell again this soon. Sometimes she went months and months in between. She’d been hoping, damn him, that she would never have another gruesome vision.
“Has Blackwell threatened you?” he asked with concern that was probably pretend. “I can offer protection if you turn prosecution witness. The offer still stands.”
She barely heard him as nervous energy pushed her to her feet. She walked to the cluttered table by the wall and reached for her palette. “Please leave.”
She didn’t want to let him see how bad it was, what it did to her. If he saw, if anyone ever saw, they’d stick her in the loony bin. And then she would lose her daughter forever.
But he stayed where he stood. And when she couldn’t take the images in her head, the tension and the pain any longer, she squeezed a dab of soulless black onto the palette, then a row of other colors, leaving the crimson last.
And then she painted.
Chapter Five
Whatever had hold of her scared the spit out of her. But she stood her ground in front of the canvas and worked. While her posture was rigid, her hand moved in a fluid motion, concentration on her face.
The fire she’d attacked him with was gone. That had been interesting. Made him respond in more ways than one—his body was still buzzing with the sudden contact. She was such a study in contrast, fear and courage, fire and innocence. She had the looks, but layers too, and talent and depth. And one seriously sick friend.
“Talk to me, Ashley.”
But she was no longer aware of him, creating in a trance, in the grip of a vision only available to her. Or doing a hell of a job faking it.
The artist in her studio. Except he’d imagined the creative process differently. He would have thought artists got joy out of creating. She clearly didn’t.
“Ignoring me isn’t going to work.”
But she kept doing it.
For a second, he looked away from her to the wall of windows. Outside, the darkness seemed extra thick tonight, smothering the landscape rather than settling on it. Even the pale moon looked brittle in the sky. And there was something in the house too, some strange tension he couldn’t identify that was separate from the tension emanating from her.
Jack moved a step closer to shield her, his senses on full alert, his body tightening as if expecting an attack. But from where? He was pretty sure they were alone in the house, had made a point to glance in every open door he’d walked by.
Yet he felt an odd need to protect her, although he couldn’t have said from what. He shook his head to clear it. He was tired. He still wasn’t himself yet, not fully. He was building his body back, but it took time.
A small gasp escaping her lips drew his attention to her. The expression on her face was pure torture.
A chill skated down his spine as he watched. The touch of that icy finger felt so real that he whipped around. Nothing behind him.
His jaw muscles drew tight. Great. Now he was going to start acting strange? The shrink had said something like this might happen. PTSD.
Like hell. He rolled his shoulders. He wasn’t going to let Blackwell drive him crazy. He wasn’t going to let Blackwell win.
Ashley guided the brush across the canvas. She looked haunted and in pain. He didn’t like that he seemed to be responding to the despair she was drowning in. He didn’t want to pity her.
And he definitely didn’t want to want her.
Yet he’d thought about her. He’d thought about her in ways an investigator shouldn’t think about a suspect. Her pinup-girl body and her haunted eyes were a pretty potent combination.
The smell of paint and turpentine filled the air. It brought back all those jumbled memories of being in her house for the first time, of having just escaped from the grave and every inch of his body screaming in pain.
He rubbed a hand over his healing ribs as he watched her mix more colors. Her face tight, she winced every couple of seconds, as if the very act of painting hurt her. Then her hand stilled, and for a moment, she stared off somewhere beyond the easel.
“What is it?” He looked at the same blank wall, then moved closer to the canvas that now held a preliminary sketch of walls closing in a small space.
She loaded her brush and began filling out the details, her eyes darting between the blank wall and the painting, as if copying something that remained hidden to his senses. One of those visions she spoke of? Or was she trying to con him?
If she was faking it, she was a better actress than he’d ever seen in any movie.
He could play along for a little while. “What do you see?”
She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand, closing her eyes for a second. “A face.”
That didn’t make any sense. It couldn’t be real. Which didn’t mean she didn’t think it was. According to her father, the accident on the reservoir had messed her up pretty badly. Maybe her brain had been affected.
She made no sound save for tapping the brush on the palette from time to time. More shapes took form; objects materialized out of color alone. The interior of a dark, confined place took up most of the canvas. Clothes hung above a pile of boxes on the floor. Low in the right corner, stroke by stroke, a human form appeared.
“Who is that?”
His words could have been gunshots for the shock they gave her. As if she’d forgotten, in the space of a few minutes, that he was standing behind her. Her shoulders dropped. “Someone who can’t be saved.”
“How do you know him?”
“I don’t.”
Part of him responded to the strong emotions rolling off her—horror, dismay, fear—and his protective instincts rose. He set that ridiculous impulse aside. “How do you know where he is? How to paint him? Did Blackwell show you? Did he bring you pictures?”
She whirled on him with tears in her eyes, anger tightening her mouth. “The picture is in my head! Don’t you think I would stop it if I could? You really think I want this?”
He glanced back and forth between the canvas and the despair on her face. No, she didn’t look like she wanted any of this. For the first time, he wasn’t sure what to say. He didn’t like it.
She turned back to the painting and lifted her brush again. By the time she completed the last finishing touches, her shoulders hung limp, fatigue rimming her eyes. She cleaned her brushes on autopilot, barely looking, stuck them in an old, stained spaghetti jar, then slumped into the lumpy armchair by the window, legs pulled up under her, arms wrapped around herself, looking out into the darkness without really seeing anything as far as he could tell.
“Go away,” she whispered.
When he was ready.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and snapped a dozen pictures of the painting. Then he stepped away from the easel to walk around the room, paying little attention to the large abstracts he didn’t understand, his gaze returning to the easel in the middle over and over again.
She sat with her eyes closed and her hands up to shade them from the light.
“Head still hurts?”
“It’ll be better in a minute.”
Not having the light in her eyes would probably help. He strode to the top of the stairs and flipped the switch. Some light still filtered up from downstairs, but the loft was lost in a twilight of semidarkness that surrounded them like a cocoon.
He could no longer see the painting clearly, but every detail had been etched into his mind, the entire image, and the way she’d created it.
His brain circled back to the same question over and over again. What had he just witnessed? A carefully choreographed performance was the only logical answer. He didn’t believe in psychic phenomena.
The police departments he’d worked for over the years often received calls from psychics on high-profile cases. “I see a body near water.” “A body near a cabin.” All general predictions, bound to come true once in a blue moon in an area that was riddled with creeks and lakes, or in woods where hunting cabins abounded.
Out of a hundred calls, one would hit close enough for the media to make a big deal out of it and it would be splashed all over the news as “proof.” Even a blind squirrel found an acorn now and then—law of statistics—was his opinion.
And if Ashley Price wasn’t psychic… Blackwell had to be somehow behind her convincing little play. He walked around, trying to figure out their game.
As he passed by the bank of windows, he caught sight of a dark figure outside, illuminated by moonlight at the edge of the trees, and the last small doubts he might have had disappeared.
Blackwell.
Instantly, his entire body was alert. “I need some air. You stay inside.”
She still had her eyes closed. She didn’t even acknowledge him, too busy to be pretending to be off in her own little world of dire visions.
Had the bastard come to watch the performance? To make sure she was convincing?
Jack brushed past her and took the stairs two steps at a time. He ran through the house, burst through the door, nearly slipping on the slick steps outside. He caught his balance and set off across the snow.
The shadow man took off, slip-sliding on a patch of ice. Jack pushed forward, sucking in his breath against the cold. He’d left his gloves in his car. He shoved his hands under his armpits as he ran. He’d need his fine motors skills when the time came to go for his gun and squeeze the trigger.
Adrenaline filled him, and elation.
Now. He would have the bastard this time.
The man up ahead jumped a ditch and scrambled up a snowy incline. He slipped back. Jack put everything he had into an all-out dash, caught up, and vaulted on top of the rising figure.
“I didn’t do anything!”
Not Brady’s voice. Definitely, not. This one sounded much younger.
Disappointment slammed into him like a fist.
He flipped the gangly boy onto his back and held him by the front of his down jacket with both hands. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing out here?”
The kid, about fourteen or fifteen, stared up at him, wide-eyed and breathing hard from his dash, scared now. “They dared me…go out to the creek in the dark. Where that cop was buried.”
“They who?”
“My friends.”
Jack pulled both of them to standing, anger pumping through him. Every breath stung; the cold bit into his skin. “And where are your friends now?”
“They were right behind me. I think they took off when they saw you coming. I didn’t do nothing wrong.”
He gritted his teeth. “You were trespassing.” But he let the boy go. Stupidity wasn’t a crime.
He watched as the kid scampered toward the road without looking back. “And don’t come here again! This is private property,” he called after him.
The adrenaline had worn off, and his whole body ached, reminding him that he was far from fully recovered. He swore, hating the weakness. He couldn’t afford aches and pains. When he caught up with Blackwell, he needed to be ready.
He hadn’t been ready tonight. He’d seen the shadowy figure, rage had taken over, and he’d acted without thinking. What the hell was wrong with him, tackling that kid? But he could have sworn…
He took a slow breath, let his lungs fill with cold air.
Bing would warn him about becoming so obsessed that he was starting to see what he wanted to see. Good thing the captain hadn’t been here to witness this.
He rubbed his hand over his face, then climbed out of the ditch and slogged back through the snow. Her front steps were covered in snow and ice, he registered again, and reached for the shovel leaning against the stairs before he realized the handle was broken. He kicked the snow off the steps the best he could, then walked inside, stepped out of his snowy boots, and padded up the stairs.
Ashley stood at her easel, arms wrapped tightly around her body, staring at the painting in the semidarkness.
He came to a stop behind her, trying to see what she saw when she looked at the macabre image. “There were some teenagers out back.”
“What?” She turned, her eyes disoriented. She blinked a few times. “Sometimes I hear snowmobiles in the night. Just kids having fun.”
He looked back at the canvas because he suddenly couldn’t stand the broken look in her eyes. In the dark, the painting looked muted, almost black and gray, precious few light areas with way too many shadows, the old man in the lower right quadrant lifeless and crumpled.
“It would be best if you told the truth,” he said but didn’t have it in him to really get up into her face again. The run and tackle out in the cold had taken the bluster out of him, as did her palpable misery.
He wanted the whole vision thing to turn out to be fake. Like he’d wanted the kid out there to be Blackwell. But if he wasn’t strong enough to accept reality, he wouldn’t be strong enough to catch the bastard. And reality was that she’d painted the image out of nothing. Reality was his cop instincts said she wasn’t faking her emotions. His most basic instincts said she was real in every way.
And as much as he resisted it with all the willpower he had, something inside him responded to her.
She is going to be a complication.
He didn’t like the idea. He didn’t like that someplace deep inside, he was softening toward her. He’d come for something completely different.
Her chin came up and she held his gaze, some of her fire coming back as she said, “You want the truth? The truth is, I’m going crazy.”
Okay, not what he’d expected, but he considered the words for a second. He’d certainly seen his share of the mentally unbalanced in his years of working for various police forces. “People who are crazy usually insist that they’re completely sane.”
She didn’t seem relieved. “Are you going to take this painting too?”
He didn’t need it; he had the photos on his phone. He nodded anyway. “It’s evidence.” Although of what, he couldn’t say.
And he wasn’t sure whether he was taking the damned thing because part of him wanted to give her a break and he didn’t like that so he felt the need to make sure he wouldn’t give an inch. Or because it looked like the painting was hurting her and he felt some weird need to stop it.
He didn’t do emotions.
He sure as hell didn’t do mixed emotions.
“Don’t leave town,” he said, to make sure the both of them knew it.
Chapter Six
After a night that started pretty roughly, then continued with her tossing and turning, worrying about what Jack Sullivan would do with her paintings, Saturday morning came too early. Ashley lay in bed, the bedroom dim in the gray winter morning light.
She looked at her cell phone on the nightstand, dread and disappointment filling her little by little. She had to call her father and Maddie, let them know she couldn’t come today.
Detective Sullivan had ordered her to stick around. On any other day, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But today was the day she was supposed to show her father that she was making progress.
She wanted to get into her car and try, even if her throat wo
uld close up when she reached I-95. Even if she would be gasping for air and swimming in cold sweat. Even if she had to pull over. Even if it took her all morning to make the two-hour drive.
She needed to face her fears. She couldn’t give up, or she’d never have Maddie back.
She sat up in bed. She would not give up. She felt stronger now than last night. She would call Jack Sullivan and demand her freedom back. She hadn’t committed any crimes, hadn’t been charged with anything. He had no right to put her under house arrest or whatever he was doing.
She reached for her cell phone just as the sounds of a rumbling motor reached her from outside. A snowmobile. She hesitated. Maybe she should go and talk to those kids and warn them about the creek. Her property in the back was really becoming a mess. Come spring, she would have to hire Eddie to clean it up a little. If one of those kids got hurt on her land…
She pushed to her feet and hurried to the closet, shrugged into the first set of clothes she put her hands on, jeans and a thick sweater. She shoved her phone into her pocket and hurried downstairs, combing her hair with her fingers as she ran. She wanted to catch those kids before they rode away.
She jumped into her boots and grabbed her coat, and could still hear the motor, coming closer, when she rounded the house. But as she reached the back, it was Eddie driving a snowmobile from the woods, pulling a log on a chain. And then she saw his beat-up pickup parked to the side.
“Did I wake you?” he asked with an apologetic smile as he stopped and turned off the engine. He wore his usual quilted flannel jacket and wool cap, lumberjack boots, and work gloves—he looked like someone out of a maple-syrup commercial.
“I needed to wake up. When did you get here?”
“About an hour ago. I’ve been looking around out back. Plenty of fallen branches. A couple of trees too. Water washed out the roots of a pretty big oak at the far end of the creek, probably when all that snow melted after Christmas.”
“Take as much as you need.” He was doing her a favor, really. He used most of the wood in his woodstove and the big stumps for chain-saw art he made and sold, proving her point that deep inside, everybody was an artist.
