by Кей Хупер
“I’m sorry about Dale,” she said.
“So am I. He was just a kid marking time in a uniform, with nothing special planned for his future. But he should have had more time to find something special for himself.”
“Yes.” She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry we brought such tragedy to your town, Des.”
“You didn’t bring it.” He kept his voice stoic. “That maniac you’ve been tracking brought it. I just hope you get the son of a bitch.”
“We will.”
Though her voice wasn’t especially emphatic, somehow he believed her. Maybe because her voice wasn’t especially emphatic.
Miranda said, “Dr. Edwards is in Serenade?”
“Yeah, she arrived with the first group of your people. In one of the choppers. I hope you don’t mind that I hitched a ride on one heading back up this way. The pilot said his orders were to fly up here and stand by to ferry some of you back to Serenade.”
“It’s a lot quicker than driving,” Miranda said. “And you’re welcome to the ride. As soon as we get some word about Diana…”
Duncan assumed that Miranda, at least, would need to get back to Serenade fairly soon; another SCU agent had arrived with the first group of them and had stepped in to fill her role as lead investigator, something the sheriff gathered was very much a temporary thing. But from the sound of it, Quentin was here for the duration, whatever that might be. Duncan wasn’t sure about the other two.
Before the silence could stretch too far, he said, “Your doctor seems to believe our clinic has enough of the basics for her and her assistant to work with, and the rest she brought with her.” He paused. “Never seen a doctor travel with so many boxes of equipment.”
“She’s a top-notch forensic pathologist,” Miranda said. “I should have called her in yesterday—or, rather, Tuesday—instead of sending the two murder victims to the state M.E.”
“From what I saw, calling in her and her mobile lab is a major production, so not something to order up if you aren’t even sure how long you’ll be staying. The first chopper couldn’t even hold her assistant, just her and the equipment.” He paused, then added, “Anyway, she’s going to do the autopsy on Dale. And she’s been working on the guy your people found on the roof of the old theater. Said right off the bat he’d been dead at least twelve hours when he was found.”
Slowly, DeMarco said, “So, not yesterday’s sniper but at least possibly Tuesday’s.”
Hollis said, “That doesn’t make sense. Two snipers? What, has somebody sicced an army on us?”
“If so, it’s not a very efficient one,” DeMarco said without emotion. “Two misses on Tuesday, and only one shot fired yesterday. I have to believe he didn’t just get… lucky… yesterday. If the deputy wasn’t the target—and I think we all believe he wasn’t—then either it was sheer bad luck that he stepped in front of the bullet aimed at Diana, or else the sniper was showing off and meant to get both of them with a single shot.”
“Why Diana?” Hollis was staring down at her clasped hands. “That doesn’t make sense either. She’s not even a full agent yet; she hasn’t had time to make any enemies.”
“The way we were running around out there this morning, it could have been any of us,” DeMarco pointed out. “He probably marked all of us as agents on Tuesday, while he was watching from that deer blind. We have no way of being sure Diana was the specific target yesterday. He could have intended to just get an SCU agent, period.”
“Especially since the shots on Tuesday were fired at you and Reese,” Miranda reminded Hollis.
“Okay, but two snipers?”
Miranda said, “I have a hunch we’ll find that the man killed on the roof of the old theater was… pure theater. Staged, posed, for us to find. Another victim.”
DeMarco nodded. “It makes more sense that way. If nothing else, it had our people focused on the wrong building, the wrong place, which gave the real sniper more time to do what he intended to do and get safely away. Plus, finding a body arranged that way is bound to be a distraction for us, another… red herring.”
“Maybe because we were getting too close?” Hollis said, a hopeful note in her voice.
“I wish I thought so,” DeMarco said.
Nodding, Miranda said, “I wish I did too. But it feels to me more like him just being clever. Playing games. Staging a ‘sniper’ for us to find, and on the roof of an old theater, is pretty dramatic.”
Before anyone could respond to that, a doctor came in to the room. Wearing scrubs and exhaustion, he looked around with eyes too old for his youngish face and settled immediately on Miranda as the one to speak to.
“She’s made it through surgery,” he said, in the flattened voice of someone who had been fighting a long battle he was afraid he might have lost. “We’ve done as much as we could to repair the damage. Her heart stopped twice on the table, and we’ve got her on a ventilator. Honestly, I’m surprised she made it this far. But she’s strong—and he’s not letting go. If she makes it through the next forty-eight hours, she has a chance.”
“A chance for full recovery?” Miranda’s voice was steady.
“I don’t know,” he said bluntly. “There are some… variables here I don’t really understand, including an unusual amount of electrical activity going on in her brain.”
“Going on now?”
“We’ve done three scans, initially to check for damage to the spine because the bullet passed so close. On the first scan, her brain lit up like a Christmas tree. Very unusual. So we scanned again, after we got her a bit more stabilized, and again after surgery. A hell of a lot of activity in the first and third scans, much less in the second. As if she’s in and out. Or maybe using energy in a peaks-and-valleys kind of rhythm. But the peaks are very high, very intense. Too intense. If they occur too often or last too long… I frankly don’t know how long that can go on before it damages her brain, just the way a high fever would.”
Hollis said steadily, “You can’t be sure of that.”
He looked at her briefly. “No. But it’s what my training and experience are telling me.”
Miranda said, “The brain activity is in an area you wouldn’t expect it to be?”
“In several areas I wouldn’t expect. And all I feel certain of is that she’s a long way from being brain-dead. Whether that will have any positive effect on her physically or will do the opposite is a question I just can’t answer.”
He sighed. “The bullet missed her spine, but there was a lot of damage and she lost a lot of blood. I’ve seen people come back from worse. Not many, but some. Look, there’s nothing any of you can do for her now. She’s being settled in the ICU and will be there for days yet.” Assuming she survives. “No additional visitors for at least a few hours, not until morning preferably, and even then I’m asking you to make it one at a time and brief. It’s difficult enough for the doctors and nursing staff to work around Agent Hayes.
“Go get cleaned up, get some sleep. I have your number, and I’ll call you if there’s any change.” His mouth twisted slightly. “Or he will.”
“We appreciate you allowing Quentin to stay with her, Doctor.”
“There wasn’t any allowing about it, and you know that, Agent Bishop.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen something like that only once before, and I believe it made all the difference that they were able to stay together. I’m not too proud to accept all the help I can get. So. The staff has instructions not to interfere with Agent Hayes.”
“Thank you.”
“If she has family, I think it would be best to call them in. As soon as possible.”
“Thank you,” Miranda repeated. Then, as he began to turn away, she said, “Doctor? When her heart stopped, you had to shock her.”
He nodded, then said simply, “Agent Hayes never let go of her hand, and he never even flinched. One day I’d like very much to talk to you about that. Because I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
“
It might be best,” Brooke said, “if you went to the hospital on this side. To be near…”
“My body?” Diana heard a slightly brittle laugh escape her, a sound given an eerie cadence by the hollow almost-echo of the gray time. “What’s the point, when I can’t get back to it?” She was sitting on a cold bench on a hauntingly silent and empty gray time Main Street in Serenade, where she had been since her second attempt to connect with Quentin had shown her something she very much wished she had never seen.
She had no idea how much time had passed in the living world.
Was she already dead? If she was able to bring herself at least partway back so she could see something of the living world, even if only for a split second, would she see her terribly wounded body laid out on a slab in some cold and sterile morgue?
Or had she been sitting, frozen, on this bench for long enough that she would see her own funeral?
Jesus.
“You’re still holding on to the connection with Quentin,” Brooke observed serenely.
“It’s more like he’s holding on to it. On to me.”
“Well, he’s a stubborn man.”
“Yes,” Diana murmured.
“And he had a…jolt or two of power that helped him hold on. Helped make the connection stronger. He’s determined to hold you, no matter what. Even to pull you back.”
Diana could feel that, faintly, a steady pull with an occasional more-urgent tug she was powerless to obey. “For all the good it’ll do. I’ve tried to reach out for him, but… I can’t. Not this time.”
And she had tried. Desperately.
Why didn’t I reach when I had the chance? Really reach, really connect with Quentin the way he wanted.
The way I wanted.
Too late. Dammit, too late now.
The anguish of that was more painful than anything she had ever known.
“Don’t give up, Diana.”
“Yeah, right.” She shivered, unable to stop the memories that washed over her. Herself as only a toddler, being led by her father down a long hospital corridor lined with rooms filled with people even her baffled, frightened child’s mind had known were more dead than living. People who lay silent and still in their beds, machines beeping and hushing as they recorded heartbeats and “assisted” the bodies to draw air into their lungs.
And, finally, being led into one of the rooms. Held up by her father so she could see… her mother. Or what was left of her. A still body, its heartbeats recorded by a beeping machine, another machine forcing it to breathe.
Just a body.
Diana had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that her mother was no longer there. And that she was never coming back.
What she knew now was that her mother, in a desperate attempt to locate her lost daughter, had pushed her psychic gifts beyond limits she could control, severing the tie that bound her spirit to her physical self. It had been only a matter of time before her body, kept alive by machines, finally ceased to function.
Diana had blocked those memories for a long, long time, because terror and grief had threatened to overwhelm her and because, barely a year ago, she discovered that she shared her mother’s gifts—and the risks involved in using them.
Only it hadn’t been a case of her pushing her gifts, as her mother had, but a sniper’s bullet that had fatally wounded her body and severed her spirit’s connection to it.
“Not severed. Not completely, at least. It doesn’t have to end that way, Diana.”
“Doesn’t it? Hasn’t it already?” Hard as she tried, Diana couldn’t hold her voice steady.
Matter-of-fact, Brooke said, “You would have moved on by now. Mediums almost never linger here.”
“Almost never.”
“Because they understand death far better than most people. They understand it’s a change but not an ending. So they tend to be ready to move on, to take the next step in their journey. But you haven’t. You’re still here. Which means there might be something you can do to change things for yourself.”
“Or it might just mean I’m stubborn too. Holding on to life even when there’s no real hope.”
“We shape our own fate.”
“Do we?”
“Some of it. Maybe most of it. If you have a stronger reason to live than to die, perhaps you can make that happen.”
For the first time she could remember, Diana heard the words of a guide and was afraid she was being deceived. Could she trust Brooke to tell her the truth? About anything?
So far, she had not felt that sense of wrongness that had alerted her to the false Quentin. Brooke looked exactly as she had looked before, spoke in the same way, and nothing about her seemed false or off. But Diana didn’t trust herself to sense anything in particular, not now, because the probability of her own death was a black cloud of terror and regret wrapping around her, smothering her.
Accepting this fate was no easier because she knew something of herself would survive death, that there was some existence afterward. She didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to leave the living world.
She didn’t want to leave Quentin.
She wasn’t ready. Not now. Not yet.
Trying her best to push all that aside, she heard herself responding to the guide, attributing her casual, almost offhand tone to sheer instinct. “Make that happen? Do something to change my own fate? What, here? I don’t do anything in the gray time, Brooke, except talk to guides.”
“This time maybe you can.”
“Yeah, like what? Figure out who shot me? I doubt he’s on this side.” She paused, then added quickly, “He isn’t, is he?”
“No.”
Diana wondered if she could believe that. If she should.
What if he’s here? Could he find me here? Could he hurt me even more on this side? Hollis was afraid Samuel’s pet monster could have, if he was dead. How do I know the sniper isn’t capable of that, whether he’s alive or dead?
Do I even understand this place, this time, as well as I always believed I did?
Could there be someone else here, another psychic, watching her? Watching and perhaps exerting some kind of control or at least influence over her? And, if so, how could that person, that being, hide in a place where there was no darkness or light, where there were no shadows?
“You have to look for the truth.”
“The truth underneath it all, yeah, I remember. I don’t have a clue what you meant by that, but I remember.”
“It’s all about ties. About connections.”
Diana sighed. “Between what? People? Places? Events?”
“All that.”
“Thanks. That was a lot of help.”
Brooke turned and walked away.
Diana looked after her for a moment, then got up from the bench and quickly followed. She didn’t know where she was being led and had the awful fear that she could end up someplace a lot worse than an eerie Serenade Main Street, but one thing she was absolutely sure of was that she didn’t want to be alone in the gray time.
“Hey, wait up.”
“Keep up,” Brooke said, without turning.
“You’ve got a mouth on you for a kid.”
“You of all people should know I’m not a kid,” Brooke said as Diana caught up with her. “None of us is a child in the gray time, even if we died as children. I’ve lived and grown up and died more than once, and I remember every life when I’m here. We all remember it here.”
That did startle Diana, even though it explained a lot; she had been communicating with unnervingly mature “child” guides all her life. But it also raised the question… “Wait. I don’t remember another life. Just the one. What does that mean?”
“It could be another sign that you don’t belong here.”
Diana began to feel more hopeful even as she wondered, again, if she could believe what any guide said.
“Then again,” Brooke continued, “it could just mean you’re a new soul.”
Resisting the impulse to swear
out loud as she was swearing inwardly, Diana instead struggled to keep her voice steady when she said, “So people who believe in reincarnation are right?”
“Let’s say they’re on the right track.”
“Karma?”
Brooke didn’t need the question clarified. “There are far worse hells than a pit of fire and torment. And better heavens than pretty clouds and harp music.”
“And we reap what we sow?”
“We’re called to account for our actions in one way or another, never doubt that. It’s all a question of balance. The universe likes things to even out. Sooner or later.”
Diana wanted to think about that but became aware that they were no longer walking along Serenade’s Main Street. Everything around her seemed to blur for an instant, and then she realized that she was, once again, in the gleaming, featureless halls of that onetime asylum.
“Brooke, why are we here?”
“Because we have to be. You have to be.”
“I thought you wanted me to go to the hospital where my—where I am. This can’t be that place, because this place doesn’t exist in the living world. Not anymore.”
“You have to be here,” Brooke repeated.
“She’s lying to you,” a new voice said calmly.
Diana stopped, turned very slowly, and wasn’t at all relieved or happy to see Quentin standing in an open doorway just behind them, smiling at her.
“I know I should go back with you, Miranda,” Hollis said. “I know the doctor said there was nothing we could do for Diana here. But…”
“But you think otherwise?” Miranda showed no signs of impatience, even though the sheriff had gone ahead to tell their pilot that they were ready for the trip back to Serenade.
Hollis hesitated, then moved her shoulders in a gesture not quite a shrug. “I don’t know what I think. But what I feel is that I need to stay close, at least for now.”
“You realize that staying here will be difficult for you.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I figured that out a few hours ago.” Hollis didn’t look at DeMarco, even though she could feel him watching her.
