by Lisa Ladew
West stopped talking and stared into Katerina’s soul. She could see the depths of emotion in his eyes. “Katerina, have you ever seen anyone recover from a near drowning?”
Katerina shook her head no, unable to speak.
“It’s not pretty. And it’s not immediate. This kid woke up and it was like it had never happened. If it wasn’t for his wet clothes and the asystole on the monitor, I would’ve sworn it hadn’t happened. So I’m just sitting there staring at him, and Jay is staring at me, and neither of us knows what the hell to do because this kid was dead a second ago, when his mother rips the back of the ambulance open and scoops him up. She’s crying and she can’t even speak and she’s damn near suffocating him again, and she’s just saying thank you thank you thank you over and over again and Jay and I don’t even know what to say. That kid was dead, Katerina. He never should have woken up. But he did. And they released him from the hospital that day. They couldn’t even find a reason to keep him. It was like it never even happened.”
Katerina shook her head, her hair flying in her face. The story was fascinating, and the way he told it made her see him in a new light. But she couldn’t see how it had anything to do with what was going on with her.
“But West, what happened to me was not a miracle.”
“I know it wasn’t a miracle, but in a world where miracles exist, can’t you believe that some people have… abilities that don’t make sense?”
Katerina considered. Then her mind seized on another contradiction. “But my mother didn’t touch the people that she caught. Nobody knew who they were until she did her investigation and gave them a name.”
West stood up and went to check on his noodles. He turned back to her from the stove. “So maybe she didn’t touch people. Maybe she touched things. Maybe she touched bodies. Maybe she touched the crime scene, and she was able to gather information that way.” He looked around the room wildly, and then back at her. “Wait right here.”
West dropped the spoon he was holding and ran to her front door. He ripped it open and disappeared.
Katerina sat in the chair, dumbfounded. She couldn’t believe what they were talking about. She didn’t believe in psychics. Her mother hadn’t been a psychic. She would’ve known. Not if you didn’t believe, a small voice spoke up in the back of her head.
West still wasn’t back. Suddenly, a white fear gripped Katerina. He wasn’t coming back. The killer had gotten him. But then feet pounded outside her open door. West came running back inside and Katerina breathed a sigh of relief.
He walked to her and held a hand out. She opened her hand to accept whatever he was offering. He dropped a small lump of metal into her hand.
“What is this?” she asked.
He turned to the stove and busied himself again. “You tell me,” he said over his shoulder.
Katerina shook her head in amused frustration. Okay, just humor him. She held the lump of metal in her hand and willed it to tell her something. Nothing. She rubbed it. Nothing. She dropped it on the table. “I don’t have a clue.”
“That’s okay, it’s old. It’s a Civil War bullet. It might be too old. Try this.” He held out his hand again.
She looked at it. “It’s a pen.”
“Yep,” he said cheerfully. “Tell me whose pen it is.”
She snorted. “Really? You really think I can do this just by touching something?”
“Katerina, it’s the only thing that makes any sense. Otherwise, where did these images come from? How did you know where the body was?”
Katerina bit the inside of her lip. He had a point there. She rubbed the pen and concentrated. Nothing. She caught him looking at her surreptitiously. He faced back around to the stove. She held the pen between both of her hands and tried to make her mind blank. She asked the pen who it belonged to. Finally, she threw it down on the table.
“Nothing. You’ve got this wrong.”
He looked thoughtful. “Maybe you can only do people,” he said rubbing his chin. “Maybe your mom only did objects and you only do people. Or maybe her ability was a lot stronger than yours. I still wonder what would’ve happened if you had touched Pam. She’s a person.”
Katerina stood up and paced through the kitchen. “You don’t understand, West. This experience almost killed me! It’s like… it’s like if I had cancer and in order to get better they wanted me to get chemotherapy, but the chemotherapy ended up killing me. It was that bad. There’s no way I’m going to try to make that happen to me again.”
West whirled around, the passion in his voice matching the passion in hers. “But he was a monster! Like touching the son of Sam or Jack the Ripper. Nobody would choose to do that. But what if you touch someone good? What if you touch Mother Teresa? Could the experience be a good one? Couldn’t you get images of love and peace and harmony?”
Katerina stared at him, considering. Then she reached out and grabbed his arm, her soul wide open.
Chapter 16
Katerina arched her head back in bliss. She closed her eyes and let the sensations wash over her. A pulse of blue light flashed through her mind, wiping it clean. She groaned slightly, almost like a woman having an orgasm.
West pulled his arm out of her grip and grabbed her around the middle. She opened her eyes and blinked quickly, looking at him.
“You almost fell backwards,” he told her. “What happened?”
“Can we sit down?” she whispered, still in the grip of the sights and sounds of West.
“Sure.” West helped her to the sofa in the living room. “I’ll be right back. My noodles will burn if I don’t go.”
Katerina laid back on the couch and tried to make sense of what she had seen and felt. Her thoughts were a confused jumble of contradictions. When West came back to the couch and sat down next to her, she still hadn’t made any sense of it.
“So what happened?”
“I guess you were right. I did get something off of you. I felt… sweetness, I guess. And love, I think. I saw a woman.” Katerina described the woman.
West looked at her, wide-eyed. “That was my wife, that was my Stephanie.”
Katerina saw the pain in his eyes and was sorry she had caused it. “And I saw me. But I looked different than I really do. I was prettier than I really am. My nose was straight and my eyes were a deeper green than they really are.”
West reached a hand forward slowly, and touched the slight bend in her nose. “I’ve never noticed that your nose is a tiny bit bent. And I love the green of your eyes. They are the most beautiful color green I’ve ever seen.”
Katerina felt like she was drowning in West all over again. She leaned forward and before she knew what was happening, her lips were on him. His mouth opened hungrily and their tongues touched lightly, searchingly. Katerina breathed in his scent of peppermint and orange spice, feeling suddenly like she couldn’t get enough of him. She felt West’s hands in her hair, lifting, and sliding the strands between his fingers. She ran her own hands up his finely muscled chest, pulling impatiently at his shirt, wanting it gone.
Then sanity reasserted itself and she pulled away. “West, we can’t, I don’t want to work with anyone else. And I need the job.” She heard the desperation in her voice and it made her sick, but she was telling the truth.
West looked at her and his eyes blazed. When he spoke, his voice was husky with desire and regret. “Katerina, I didn’t mean for it to happen. It won’t happen again.”
He stood, and Katerina almost cried.
***
West sat up, disoriented. He looked around the room and remembered where he was. The couch in Katerina’s apartment. It was morning. He rubbed a hand through his hair and thought about yesterday’s discoveries and discussions. As far as he was concerned, the incident where Katerina had touched him closed the matter. She was psychic, at least in some way. He would be lying if he said it didn’t freak him out a little bit. Could you have a normal relationship with someone who knows what you’re thinking? But
she doesn’t seem to actually know what people are thinking. Plus, it was clear to him that this had never happened to her before. Was this ability something that she just developed? Or something that she never recognized before?
He heard Katerina cry out from the bedroom and before the noise died in the air, he was halfway down the hallway. “Katerina!”
She was on the bed, asleep still, tangled in her bed sheets. Her hands fluttered against the mattress and her lips were pulled back in a now-silent scream. He knelt next to her and touched her gently. She rose straight off the bed and cried out again.
“Katerina, wake up, it’s me, West. You’re okay. You’re in bed.”
Her eyes flew open and she looked at him, then collapsed against him.
“Bad dream,” she whispered against his chest. He could feel her heart racing.
“The women?”
She nodded. “But it’s not as bad as it was before. I don’t see the woman whose body we found anymore. And nothing seems quite as intense now.”
West stared at her intensely, his mouth working silently.
“What?”
“Remember yesterday when I said we should be more proactive?”
She nodded again.
“What if we go look for the other two bodies?”
Katerina’s eyes grew wide as she regarded him. She shook her head slightly and West thought it was probably unconscious.
“No, hear me out.” he said. “These images and these dreams, they’re haunting you right?”
“Yes…” she said uncertainly.
“But one of them is gone now that we found the body, so if we find the other two bodies, not only are we helping your state of mind, but we might give the cops a clue that will help them arrest this guy faster.”
Katerina was silent for several minutes. Finally, she gave him a weak smile and said, “Well what else are we gonna do on our day off?”
***
Two hours later, after a good breakfast, a lot of strategic planning, and a call to Blaise to find out the status of the investigation, West and Katerina were in West’s truck, heading out to Tetam County. When they reached the border, West pulled over and dug under his seat for something. He produced a paper, folding map and climbed back into the driver’s seat, handing it to Katerina.
Katerina looked at him. “The lady with the blonde ponytail is in a stream somewhere. A small stream. But I can just pull up a map on my phone.”
“I thought this might be better. Maybe you can put your hands on the map and see if anything comes to you.”
Katerina gave him a bemused look. “That’s not going to work.”
“How do you know?” West asked her, a teasing glint in his eye.
Katerina shook her head. “I’m glad someone can joke about this.”
He reached over and took her hand. “Hey, I’m not making fun of you.”
She smiled at him. “I know. Sorry if I’m a little bitter about it.”
He squeezed her hand and smiled back.
She played her hands over the paper map but gave up quickly. “Nothing. I don’t feel, see, or smell anything.”
This time, he saw the teasing glint in her eyes. “Okay, it was worth a shot. Why don’t we just start here,” he ran a finger over a blue wavy line on the map, “then travel this way, and just check them all.”
“That could take days.”
“It could, but I’m willing to bet we’ll find her somewhere close to here.” He circled a small area on the map with his finger.
“Why?”
“Because it’s the only stream area close to where we found the first body.”
She mused for a second. “Perhaps…”
As they drove towards the area that they had decided on, West opened his mouth to speak. At the same time, Katerina pushed out a question, hardly taking a breath.
“So why do you think I don’t always see stuff when I touch someone?”
West smiled. That was the same thing he had been about to ask her.
“I don’t know. Touch me now. Do a test.”
Katerina reached out her hand, slowly, hesitantly. She lightly caressed his arm, and then gripped it in the same way she had the night before. She looked at him blankly and let go. “Nothing.”
“Maybe it only happens the first time. Or maybe you have to do something – ask it to come or something.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw her eyes narrow in concentration. She grasped his arm again. This time, he saw her tilt her head back, hard enough to whack it against the seat. She made a low noise in the back of her throat and slumped towards the window.
He felt something too. The wheel slipped slightly in his hands as energy pulsed up and down his arm.
Alarmed, he ripped her hand off of him.
She stayed slumped over for a few moments and he almost stopped the truck. “Katerina, are you okay?”
She muttered something under her breath and he couldn’t quite make it out. It sounded like so good.
Her eyes fluttered. “I’m okay,” she said.
“You made it happen.”
She sat up straighter. “Yes, I did.”
“How?”
“It’s hard to explain. I’m not totally sure myself. But I… I opened myself up to it.”
“And what did you see?”
“I saw Stephanie again. I saw you and her on your wedding day.” West winced. He couldn’t help himself. He looked forward for the day when Stephanie’s name didn’t cause him pain.
“And I saw me again, you keep making me look prettier and prettier.”
West looked at her. “You are pretty.”
She shook her head. “I’m not as pretty as the picture of me I see in your mind.”
She stared at him for a moment and then went on. “And I saw something else. I don’t even know if it was a memory or what. If it was a memory you had, then I was you. You must’ve been a kid, because you seemed small. You crawled under a porch to get something that had been left there for you. It was a basket, and when you reached your hand out to pick it up, a snake inside it opened its mouth and latched onto your arm. I felt your terror.”
West’s hands jerked to the right. He quickly pulled the truck over on the empty road and parked on the side. He lowered his face onto his hands and felt Katerina touch his back gently.
“West, what is it? Are you okay?”
He looked at her, disbelief on his face. “I can’t believe you saw that. I was five. It was my Easter basket. My parents hid it under the porch, and when I found it, there was a snake inside it. It was terrifying. I still have dreams about it sometimes. I think I slept with my parents for a week after that.”
He looked at her and her eyes were wide open and staring at him, her mouth slightly open. He shook his head, still freaked out.
Wanting to push past the moment, West shakily pulled the car back onto the road and began to drive. “So what we have to figure out now, is why you don’t always see things when you touch people, and why, if you have to ask for it, why you saw something when you touched that man the other day. You weren’t asking for anything, were you?”
“Maybe it’s an energy thing,” Katerina said softly. “Like maybe I can only catch glimpses of things that people feel really strongly about, or huge moments in their life.” She sounded resigned to it. Like it was an illness she couldn’t shake.
West thought about it. That would make sense.
Ahead of them, he saw the mile marker that would designate the turn off they were going to take. He took a sharp left and followed the bumpy dirt road to its completion, both of them caught in their separate thoughts. The road narrowed until it was little more than a dirt path, and the forest grew alongside them. West continued checking the map and looking at the road, until he finally thought they were in the right place.
“Should I stop? The stream will be to our left.”
Katerina looked around. She wrinkled her nose. “This isn’t it. Don’t ask me how I know
, because I don’t know. But there’s no point looking around here.”
West stopped his truck and turned around immediately. He trusted her to know. They checked two more streams that broke off from the main river, and it took almost an hour. West was enjoying the smell of the forest and the empty road. They hadn’t seen anyone, not even a hunter or a landowner.
As he turned left onto the fourth, tiny, dirt road that they were checking, he sensed a change in the air immediately. Katerina sat up straight and a kind of electricity crackled off of her. He felt afraid suddenly, and he didn’t know why. Not of Katerina, he was sure. Was he?
West drove slowly, trying to look every way at once. To his right was the forest, and to his left was the stream. He couldn’t see the stream, but every once in a while he could hear it, gurgling past them. He was just about to ask Katerina how far he should drive in when he heard the passenger door open. He slammed on the brakes but Katerina was already up and out of the truck. He recognized the same crazed look in her eyes from the day they had found the first body.
West swore under his breath and threw the truck into park. He ripped the keys out of the ignition and took off after Katerina. She ran directly towards the stream and suddenly she disappeared from his sight. He heard a loud splash and swore again, doubling his speed. As he reached the edge of the stream, he had to fight through the underbrush around it. And then the ground disappeared beneath him. He also ended up in the water. He overbalanced when he landed and slipped forward, running headfirst into Katerina. She grunted as his head connected with her back. He looked up, not sure whether to apologize, or ask her what she was doing, when he saw the hand floating in front of them. They had almost dropped right on top of the body.
He grimaced, the body bloated and decaying beyond any recognition.
He pulled Katerina to him and said “Let’s get out of here, we need to call the police. There’s nothing we can do.”
Chapter 17
West climbed up the embankment and pulled Katerina after him. He could hear her breathing, ragged and quick. He was worried about her mental state and wanted to get her back to the truck as quickly as possible. The second woman was real too, and dead too, and even though they had both known it, the emotional reality of it hadn’t hit West until he saw her body in the stream.
