by Misty Dietz
“If you know something about Ann, you’d better tell me now.” The old fashioned wind-up clock on Ann’s nightstand ticked off at least half a minute in the quiet room.
“Tori—my manager—found that brooch at the store under a display table. We thought a customer had lost it, so we kept it at the store for weeks. When no one claimed it, I finally brought it home.” She swung toward him, her eyes a gunmetal gray. “Why didn’t Ann tell me it was hers? It was lying in plain sight in the stock room.”
The uptick in her voice made his pulse climb. “You know something.” She moved to the bedroom door. He realized he wanted her to stay as much as he wanted her to leave. “Out with it. You’re no coward, Sloane.”
She stopped in her tracks. He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. Twenty bucks said she’d start crying any minute. He looked around the room for something to distract her, something else to say, but came up with nothing. He’d always sucked with words. His gut all but ordered him to pull her into his arms and soothe her fear—because she was afraid of something—but he’d kick his own ass before he pulled a stupid move like that.
Which left no safe options, so he stared at her bent head. When she moved gracefully back to the bedroom’s French doors to peer outside, he felt like Neanderthal man trying to understand modern Homo sapiens.
Coarse. Bush-league.
Still, he couldn’t stand seeing her so upset. There was just something about her that made him want to act. Hold her hand. Slay her demons.
Something about her told him she deserved that. Big hearts always had a way of showing themselves. She wouldn’t be here otherwise.
He rubbed his chest and made himself look away from where she still stood by the door, because this was all getting a little too close. Remember what Kasey did.
He’d trusted her, and she’d dropped him into the lion’s den.
Needing some outlet for his restlessness, he left the room.
Soon he returned with the cat in a football hold and walked to stand beside Sloane. As soon as he transferred the tom into her arms, the cat’s motor fired. She brought him up to her neck for a snuggle, grungy as he was. Then she glanced at Zack and back out the French doors. “I sometimes have these…uh, dreams?” She cleared her throat. “Dreams about things I really shouldn’t know about.”
“Dreams. Like when you’re asleep?”
“No.”
“You dream awake?”
“Not exactly,” she said.
“Daydreams.”
“No.”
“Fantasies?”
She massaged her forehead. “No.”
“Delusions.”
“Oh, for heaven sakes, no!”
“Dreams that aren’t night dreams, daydreams, fantasies, or delusions. Help me out here, Sloane.”
“Oh!” She swung toward him, tears on the verge of spilling over. She swiped at them with one hand, looking at it like it was offensive. “Shit.”
His lips curled upward in spite of himself. “My sentiments exactly.”
She closed her eyes. “Okay.” She gathered a deep breath, and Zack had second thoughts about hearing what she seemed ready to confess.
“That brooch on Ann’s sweater? Two nights ago I dreamt about it. In the dream, I heard someone say, ‘Help her. She’s in trouble.’ At the time, I didn’t know who the voice was talking about. Now…” She looked at the floor.
What? He wanted to laugh. “That’s crazy.”
Her head whipped up, her eyes darkening to nearly black. A sliver of energy ran down the length of his spine. Creepy, but exciting in a messed up sort of way. Maybe she was part of that new group the Fargo PD had their eye on. Some weird cult activity was attracting notice a few miles south of town. He made a mental note to keep his dogs inside at night from now on. They’d love that. He smiled.
It seemed to piss her off more.
“You don’t want to believe me, that’s your problem. But know this, Goldman. In all my life, my visions have never been wrong.”
“Visions? Now you’re calling this…this dream-business…a vision?” Nothing in all his soul-sucking years of living on the streets could have prepared him for this. She was talking about some kind of ESP. It was so farfetched he had trouble even imagining it. What did he say to that without offending her?
“Zack, when I touched your truck door handle, I saw a beefy, blond man in a navy pin-stripe suit encourage you before you stormed into a floor-to-ceiling windowed conference room. There were two older men in sport coats—one gray tweed, the other beige. I felt your contempt for them. Those were the most recent memories of the person who last touched the door handle, which I’m assuming was you. Now you tell me, how accurate are my visions?”
How perfectly accurate, indeed? No way could she know those details. And if she was spot-on about his earlier meeting with Benji’s henchmen, that meant there was either some logical explanation for how she knew…
Or, Ann was in a scrape.
“WHERE IS SHE?” the note had said. Good goddamn question. “Well…huh.”
The fight went out of Sloane so fast her shoulders slumped and her eyes fluttered shut. When she finally opened her eyes, they were that intriguing gray-brown again, though more brown than gray this time, like felled tree trunks, long forgotten on the forest floor. The knots loosened in his gut in spite of his growing fear for Ann.
“Thank you.” She resumed petting the cat, blinking rapidly as though trying to hold back some big emotion.
His heart kicked. “For?”
“For believing me,” she whispered.
He nodded vaguely, but did he? It simply wasn’t logical. Yet, there was no other way she could know about his meeting at the office unless she’d talked to Ross. But his CFO had never mentioned her. Then again, Ross wasn’t known for gossip.
He watched Sloane pet the cat. She seemed so unsettled—scared even—of revealing herself to him. No surprise there, though. An ability like that would pretty much ostracize you from the rest of society. But did that mean he really believed her? He’d have to proceed carefully here. “Ann can’t be in trouble. She would’ve told me.”
“You really want me to believe you’re her confidante? Based on things Ann has mentioned at the store, Tori doesn’t think you two are exactly BFFs.”
Direct hit. He felt the blow rattle him from the inside out. The worst part was that someone else—someone who was making him feel things, dangerous things, he hadn’t felt in a long time—had finally verbalized his failure to carry out his duty to John’s daughter.
It was time to stop being so selfish. There was a baby in the equation now, too.
He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “In your…vision? How did it end? Did it tell you anything about who or where…” God, this conversation couldn’t possibly be about Ann.
“No, I’m sorry.”
He made a sound of frustration, then turned to walk to the kitchen. Sloane murmured to the tomcat and followed him. He could feel her even though she wasn’t touching him. Was that part of her “ability”? She must radiate low-level energy or something. Couldn’t have been easy growing up knowing you were different like that.
Man, he was probably imagining all this kooky stuff. Energy and E-fucking-SP. How? The question rolled around in his mind as he rifled through Ann’s cabinets until he found some instant coffee and mugs. When the water was hot, he stirred in the coffee and handed the cup to Sloane. “Look, I’ve never met someone before who has…powers like yours.” She winced, but he had to know. “Can you, I don’t know, hear other people’s thoughts?”
“Oh my God, no!”
Well, that’s a hell of a relief. “But you can touch something and know its back story.”
“I…” She looked ready to bolt. Her gaze kept wandering to the front door.
“Tell me.”
When her eyes met his, they were luminous. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“It’s called psychometry. Every object
has a soul that retains a memory of sorts. If I try, I can usually…read the most evocative impressions of an object’s history. Especially if the object is metal, and only when it has received strong emotion. But I don’t. I can usually control it now that I’m older. It’s not who I am. I…I hate it. It has never, ever, served a useful or happy p-purpose. It’s only brought…pain.”
Her chest was heaving, tears were spilling, and, man, how he wished he’d never asked her. Besides his employees, he made it a point to never ask personal questions. But with this woman, he couldn’t seem to stop.
“I’m s-so sorry. I’m not usually this emo-emotional.”
Dark rose stained those striking cheekbones. Her gift obviously terrified her. But then, who the hell wouldn’t be afraid?
Don’t you dare touch her. He retrieved a box of tissues from the bathroom and handed it to her. “What else can you do?”
“You don’t think that’s freaky enough?” She blew her nose like a circus clown.
He couldn’t help but smile. “You’re not very scary. Can you dial up your powers to find someone?”
She looked at him like he was crazy. Which was hilarious, really. This whole thing had to be a dream. Maybe he’d eaten some bad fish yesterday. In a while he’d wake up, go to work, and see Ann at the front desk as always.
“No. I can’t…what I mean is…I can’t call it up whenever I want. A vision, that is. They sometimes come to me when I’m over-tired and stressed. When I’m too exhausted to keep my protection shield at full strength.” By the end she was whispering, and he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Protection shield,” he repeated.
She nodded at the floor.
“As in some invisible energy field that wraps around you to, what? Keep bad things away?”
She nodded again.
“So you have object reading abilities if the object receives strong emotions by the person who touches it, but you have visions only sometimes? Like they’re involuntary?”
She hesitated. “Ye-ah.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. She was either snowing him or flat out petrified. He didn’t like either possibility.
Time to go for broke.
“Someone—I don’t know who—left a note on my door this morning.” He pulled it out of his pocket, held it up, and watched her carefully. Sloane fussed with a canister on the countertop. All the beautiful color she’d had on her face leached to white.
“Something’s going on here, and it’s not good. This isn’t metal, but can you somehow help me find Ann?”
Her mouth worked for a moment. “I’d rather not.”
He scrubbed a hand behind his neck, not sure if he was ready to laugh himself into the loony bin for overreacting to Ann being uncommunicative for less than twenty-four hours, or pound the wall in frustration over a dogging intuition that she was really in trouble.
But he was alive today because of his gut.
He looked at Sloane, his mind choosing words his mouth refused to form. To tell her to go. That she was full of shit, and he didn’t believe her. Couldn’t believe her.
Could he?
Yet…how far was intuition from ESP when you got right down to it?
“Please help me find Ann.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t. This could…hurt you.” She shivered.
“Tell me how?”
“You just have to trust me on this.”
That was the worst thing she could have said. Zack knew all about people who encouraged others to trust them. They were the most betraying bastards on the planet.
They regarded each other in Ann’s kitchen. Suddenly, a loud crack sounded from the condo wall expanding in the heat of the sun. Sloane flinched violently. Zack’s pulse picked up.
He saw the instant she made her decision.
“I’m sorry!” She snagged a dish towel off the counter and sprinted to the front door like the place was ablaze. She wrapped the towel over her hand, reached toward the door handle…
And went to her knees.
Chapter Six
“No, no, no, no, no!”
The words had come out of Sloane’s mouth, but they seemed so far away. Reality was slipping. Icy pressure began to scrape and claw at her skull. The landscape in her mind grayed. She turned in a circle, looking, straining into the smoky palette. Where was she?
A chill wind teased her hair and picked up detritus as it moved beyond her, swirling, congealing to form a single tornado. Then two of them, three, and she lost count. Twirling, mesmerizing, a curtain of tornadoes as far as she could see, fading, fading into gray.
She looked up and her head swam. More gray. An endless ocean of it. She put her head between her legs so the dizziness would ease. Oh, sick. Don’t wanna be sick again.
The whirling winds stopped. The curtain parted. And she whimpered at the view of a brown-haired girl’s broken body, her blood a crimson rug beneath her in a pristine bed of snow. The girl swiveled her head until she was staring at Sloane with bulging, bloodied eyes. She lifted swollen, rope-burned arms and in a low, hollow sound keened a song of torment.
Hickory dickory dock,
Her blood is on the rock.
The clock struck one,
The girl came down.
Hickory dickory dock.
The girl’s unearthly voice, childlike in pitch, but empty, empty, empty, echoing with a sea of sadness, tore into Sloane. She rocked on her knees, trying to block the noise with her hands, but the sound was coming from within.
A shadow coiled up in the midst of the grizzly vision, a new soundless tornado sweeping up the snow, defiling it, and then expelling it over the mangled body in a blanket of darkness. The swirling winds swallowed the gruesome scene, creating a new murky backdrop for what was to come.
Sloane panted on her knees in Ann’s foyer, reaching out with her hand until the gray swallowed her arm up to her elbow. She blinked back sweat as it rolled into her eyes. Maybe she’d start laughing now and never stop.
Sloane, come back.
Through the disorder of her mind, she heard it. A deep rumbling like thunder after a lightning bolt, spearing light into the shadows. She extended her hand in front of her, wiggling her fingers. The gray had eased back. She whipped her head around, honing in on a chink of light through the gloom. Slowly, as though dragging her arm through quicksand, her hand strained toward that light. She braced for a new nightmare and—
Touched the sun.
Heat settled in her bones, unclamped her muscles, and traveled in fiery waves through each sinew, cell, and capillary until the warmth scorched away every last trace of darkness inside her. She was weightless, adrift on a current of positive, white energy. It had never been like this. She’d stay here forever.
Dammit, Sloane, get back here!
God. It has to be God. Only God could swear in a voice like that. His bass timbre vibrated along the white currents, slid into her body, and pushed roots into her very soul, filling her with a peace like she’d never known. Warm bands came around her, gathering her to the source of the light, and oh, surely this was Heaven. She pressed nearer that heat, wanting to simply be absorbed into the warmth, but—
The light had substance. And a heartbeat. And smelled vaguely of woods and…
Soap?
Her eyes gradually cleared, and she soon realized the heartbeat was coming from beneath her cheek, which rested on a black T-shirt, which covered a rock-hard chest.
Zack.
Her head popped up so fast it bumped into his chin. His eyes, a turbulent green, held hers for a second before he guided her head back down to rest against his chest once more. He kept his hand under the curtain of her hair, using the pad of his thumb to softly brush the side of her neck. Up and down, that warm thumb slipped across her skin. It’s okay. You’re okay. Safe. I won’t let anyone mess with you, that thumb told her. His arms, too. She inhaled deeply, trying to match his steady breathing.
Lord. She was attached to h
im. Like literally Saran-Wrapped around his body. Even her legs were scissored intimately between his. She should be mortified, but she wasn’t. She felt…
Content.
She wanted to sneak a look at him again, but was afraid he’d be able to read her naked emotions. He felt so good, his chest solid and warm beneath her cheek. And he wasn’t doing that awkward back pat that people who were uncomfortable about being in others’ personal space did. One arm wrapped around her waist and the other braced her back, his palm sliding across her upper shoulder and then against the nape of her neck in a motion meant to soothe.
She inhaled and took him into her lungs, her body, her mind. She wanted to stay like that for hours, to be held so tenderly, almost possessively, by someone who knew—if not understood—what she—
“Oh!” She drew back from his arms so suddenly she clipped her head against his chin again. “Sorry! Oh my gosh, do you know what just happened here?”
“You saw something bad,” he said.
“A bad vision, yes, the start of one anyway, which was rolling into another one, but then— You touched me, right? When I was reaching for the door handle?”
He smoothed her eyebrow with his thumb. “How do you stand it?”
“Did you touch me or not?”
“I did.”
Her mind spun as she processed this information. Was it possible that he was some sort of psychic anchor for her? She’d read about that once, but had dismissed the idea as farfetched because even her mother, renowned psychic that she was, didn’t have any such thing.
Or person.
“That’s never happened to me before,” she said.
“And what exactly was that?”
“I didn’t even touch the door handle, but as I got closer, a huge wave of negative energy blew through me, and as scared as I was when I was about to leave, I didn’t think to put up my shield.”
“So, what happened? Where the hell did you go?”
That was apt. Yes, Hell. Sloane-style. But she couldn’t tell him that. “Uh, usually, as a vision grabs me, I’m a passive conduit, helpless to stop the flow of images until the vision ends. I can’t wake myself up or push it away. I’m stuck. But just now…” She paused and looked down at the hardwood floor.
