by Jenna Ryan
Lightning flickered eerily above the swamp. “Try for what?”
As the wind kicked up and lifted his hair, she glimpsed a faint stirring of amusement in his eyes. “I admire your restraint, pretty lady. In return, I’m going to take you to Nightshade. To see Desdemona.”
* * *
Heavy rain threatened and echoing thunder underscored the music of a dozen brass bands pouring from more clubs and bars than Crucible cared to count.
Bourbon Street on a Saturday night was a spectacle not to be missed, or so said his personal assistant. It was also, she promised, the best place in the city to strategize. Crucible pitched his mind above the pulsing Dixieland beat and did his best to remain a shadow within the shadows.
The succulent aroma of richly spiced food permeated the night air. It blended with myriad exotic perfumes and what he thought of as the smell of an urban garden. Alcohol flowed, washboards hummed and people danced. Right on the sidewalk. Danced and smoked, laughed and drank.
“They’re celebrating the passing of some big-shot businessman. He died last week.”
Crucible slid his eyes sideways as Killian, the liaison between himself and the directors, appeared at his side.
Killian tugged on his hoop earring. “Under the circumstances, this might not be the best time or place for an exchange of information.”
“Who was the businessman?” Crucible asked.
“No one who matters to us.” After scooping his hair into a sleek ponytail, Killian accepted the big-ass beer that was shoved in his hand. “I checked. Thoroughly.” He sampled the beer, made a surprised face and drank again. “Cutter’s making waves,” he said after a third sip. “But I’m guessing you already know that.”
“We’ve talked,” Crucible allowed. “I’m sure we’ll talk again. He’s still annoyed about the fact that the first victim’s daughter, Phoebe Lessard, slipped away from us last year and vanished into the ether.”
“Phoebe Lessard called you, sir, then hung up. That’s hardly your fault.”
“He’s also not happy that a prominent Louisiana politician, who might well know something about Leshad’s organization, is managing to outmaneuver our best investigators.”
“Again, I don’t see how you can be held responsible for that.”
Crucible flicked a large hand. “I have very thick skin where Tom Cutter’s concerned, Killian. My main concern at the moment is Rosemary Sayer. Have we located her yet?”
“No, but since you sent for me, I assume you have ideas.”
Crucible watched a woman—maybe a hooker, maybe not—wind herself around a man wearing the bottom half of a Brooks Brothers suit. “Twila Black, Rosemary Sayer’s great-grandmother, was the second of the silhouette calling card victims,” he said. “We know the first was Madeleine Lessard. Psychic as Twila was if the rumors about these women have any merit. In as much as I tend not to believe, it’s an element that’s becoming more and more inescapable as time goes by.”
“So what are you saying? That you don’t think Leshad’s mad? That there’s some rational basis for these murders?”
“Not rational. Justifiable. In his mind, at any rate.”
Killian set the beer glass down on an overflowing café table. “Sir, if you’re suggesting he’s afraid of anyone who possesses paranormal power, well, one, we couldn’t begin to know who his next target would be, and two, where does that leave all the ‘ungifted’ people he’s had murdered, as well? We’ve done full backgrounds on everyone who received a card and died. Of the seventeen victims to date—eighteen if you include Ben Sayer—only three of them possessed what could be deemed extraordinary perceptive abilities.”
Crucible continued to watch the woman vamp her man of choice. “Lock all the victims away for the moment, Killian, and focus on Rosemary Sayer. Think about her stepbrother who worked for us and died.”
“He might have worked for us,” Killian remarked, “but I’d say he had his own very personal agenda.”
“Personal, not unanticipated. I’m playing a very big hunch here, Killian. We need eyes and ears in the swamp.” He met the liaison’s dubious stare with utter calm. “We need someone on our team who’s not afraid of voodoo.”
* * *
Rosemary didn’t sleep so much as pass out from exhaustion. In the back of her mind, she knew Tanner came and went through the night, but the wheres and for how longs were a blur to her. Only the nightmares registered, and even they were cloaked in fog, shadows, and a faceless Reaper who stared at her over Ben’s dead body until she clawed her way from undulating black to misty morning light.
Tanner’s guest room contained an iron bed, a chest of Early American drawers, a distorted mirror and one hard chair with wobbly legs. Not exactly home sweet home, but on the positive side, it wasn’t the sty she’d expected. Thanks largely, he’d informed her, to a woman who came around when the mood struck, to clean and paw through his closets, searching for any lingerie or accessories that might have been left behind by whatever female he’d brought home the previous Saturday night. She’d stuff the found items into her bra, then wear them for her husband until he got tired of seeing the items and her.
All in all, Rosemary reflected, Tanner led a very peculiar life.
With last night’s rain dripping from the eaves and steam rising from the swamp, she crawled out of bed. Please let there be coffee, she prayed, and tried to recall if she’d seen a machine or even a percolator in the makeshift kitchen.
Eyes half-closed, she pulled on a short white robe. Then frowned through a layer of tangled hair at a wooden doll she hadn’t noticed last night.
The painted face struck her as vaguely familiar, but it couldn’t possibly be the same face she’d seen in a Boston alley the night Ben had died. Could it? No. That was too out there, even for someone with her background. Shrugging off the weird twinge, she made her way first to the kitchen—yes, there was coffee and amazingly, a machine—then on to the bathroom.
She gave Tanner major points for having hot water. The shower stall was tiny and it lacked a curtain, but the handheld sprayer worked, and she only spotted one inoffensive lizard on the windowsill.
She emerged securing a towel around her body and feeling slightly more awake. With her mind and eyes diverted, she was fortunate to notice the size-thirteen feet before she plowed into their owner.
Bringing her head up, she came nose to chest with a man who was about as mobile as a live oak tree.
“Uh, hello.” Since he didn’t move, she took a barefoot step back. “Are you…?” Cocking her head, she considered him. “No, you’re not Ernest’s brother.”
But he was tall, dark and imposing, with eyes that transfixed, the strong suggestion of a widow’s peak and a thin, unsmiling mouth.
“My name is Ethan Grimes,” he revealed. “I’m here about the house.”
He wasn’t wearing a cape, just a black shirt and gray pants, but Rosemary visualized one, complete with a red silk lining and a dramatic collar. Too many late-night movies, she decided, and smiled. “Sorry, I’m a guest here. It’s Tanner you want.”
Something glittered in his eyes. “Do you know where I might find him?”
“I heard shots coming from the work shed earlier. You could look there. Go through the door, turn right and walk straight back.” She glanced at his boots as she spoke. Italian leather, thick, but probably not tough enough to withstand the clamping jaws of an alligator. “You, uh, might want to watch your step.”
He couldn’t see into her head—or her into his, which was odd—but she felt something dark swirling inside him. “That’s excellent advice,” he replied. “In the swamp and in life.”
Unsure, Rosemary watched him go. Okay, weird interlude aside, how did a man wearing boots walk across a wooden floor and make no sound?
“Not important,” she said aloud, and went into the bedroom.
She was shoving her shampoo bottle into her pack when she looked up and noticed the chair by the door where the wooden doll ha
d sat was empty. Now that might very well be important, because she hadn’t seen the doll in Ethan Grimes’s hand, and she’d definitely seen it earlier.
Thunder rumbled far in the background. Enough of the sound effects, she thought, exasperated. She checked the corner shadows and under the bed. There was no sign of a doll-snatching alligator, only a dusty blue garter that brought a faint smile and a slight lessening of the tension knots inside her.
Why on earth was she still here?
She started to twirl the garter on her index finger, but froze and clenched it in her fist instead.
Next to the chair from which the doll with the painted wooden face had come and gone, an old woman stared at her. Stared through two empty, black sockets where her eyes should have been.
But weren’t.
* * *
“Name I got from the rental agent was John Beckett, not Ethan Grimes.” Tanner swiped a perspiring forearm over his headband, and set the rifle he’d been reconstructing on the workbench. “Why the switch?”
“No switch, merely an error in communication.” Grimes showed his teeth in a smile that read like a grimace. “My attorney is John Beckett. He made the arrangements on my behalf.”
“Yeah? And how much do I want to bet Mr. Beckett is currently incommunicado?”
“Only until the day after tomorrow. He’s deep-sea fishing off the Florida Keys.”
“Papers?”
“In my vehicle.” Grimes’s features remained closed. “I came looking for privacy, Mr. Tanner. Two days early, I’ll admit, but my reasons are entirely legitimate, and as you already know, my money’s perfectly good.”
“John Beckett’s money’s good.”
“And I’m here. Not looking for any trouble or to bother you or your lovely lady.”
“Is your name really Grimes?”
Another painful attempt at a smile. “Would you believe me if I said yes?”
Tanner picked up the mostly done rifle. “Show me your papers, and we’ll see.”
Inclining his head, the man turned toward his vehicle—a Hummer that looked swamp ready and expensive enough to deepen the seeds of doubt already growing in Tanner’s head. Those seeds, however, could be his inherent cynicism and not the instincts of a rusty Navy SEAL turned Crucible lackey. If the papers were in order, he’d let the situation play out a bit before passing judgment on Mr. Grimes.
He had a bigger problem in any case. Like it or not—and he didn’t—he’d taken a lethal weapon into his house. Ben had confided once, in a moment of drunken camaraderie, that his stepsister’s great-grandmother could cook a person’s brain with a single nasty thought. An even drunker hour later, he’d gone on to add that there was only one person’s mind Twila Black feared more than her own.
Her beautiful but deadly great-granddaughter’s.
* * *
“Who the hell are you?” Emphasis on the hell, because while Rosemary’s great-grandmother had been frail from age, the woman standing between her and the bedroom door was positively skeletal. So, definitely not Twila returned from the grave.
Sallow skin like wrinkled tissue paper covered bones disfigured by disease. The woman’s hair was thin and yellow-white. Her fingernails resembled claws, and the plain brown dress she wore looked wet, as if she’d just scratched her way out of the swamp.
“You don’t know me,” she said. Although old and crackly, her voice was gentler than her appearance suggested.
Rosemary held herself very still. “Am I dreaming? It doesn’t feel like I’m dreaming.”
“You’re wide awake, child.”
She wished she thought that was a good thing. Why come to her? Why no eyes? Why did these things always happen when she was alone? “Are you real?” she asked when the woman lapsed into silence.
“No.”
A sigh escaped. “Not entirely surprised.”
“And yes.”
Resigned, Rosemary gave a short laugh. “Even less surprised.”
“I have form through lineage, through family ties,” the woman revealed. “It’s a fragile link. You’re angry.”
“No, I’m really not. Confused, yes, possibly verging on hysterical, but not angry.”
“Over your stepbrother’s death.”
Ah, now that was a different matter. Rosemary hardened her mind. “Ben did what he did—went to a man called Crucible and offered to try to infiltrate the criminal clique of the madman who murdered my great-grandmother and my great-great-aunt—because of me. Yes, he loved them, but he did what he did primarily because he was worried about me. And you already know this, don’t you?”
“Leshad sees only himself, Rosemary. Remember that. It’s one of his greatest failings. He creates his own truths, and he believes them. But he has much fear inside. All is not as it appears. One day, he’ll see everything and nothing. And my scarlet bells will ring him to the fiery pit of Hell where he belongs.”
Rosemary’s head began to throb. “Is that a riddle I should understand?”
“It’s what is, and what will be. But other things will be first. I had a child once, late in life, as your great-grandmother had a child who had a child and so on. The one called Leshad believes that death is an end, but he’s deceived. Sadly, he is also dangerous. He wields much power these days, as do those who work for him. The beauty I grew deceives. In a similar way, so do many who answer to Leshad. One I know well can tell you more. Feel your way, child, and there is a chance you may survive.”
Rosemary looked to the side. Only long enough to blink and regroup, but that’s all the time it took for the woman to vanish.
And for something to fall from the shadowed rafters onto her head.
CHAPTER FIVE
“You’re in a swamp, Rosemary.” Tanner didn’t need to see her face in the passenger seat of his slightly less reliable second truck to know she was still irritated with him. “Most of the creatures that live here slither and crawl.”
“And fall on people’s heads.” She shot him a tight look. “Apparently.”
“Crayfish snakes are small and non-venomous.”
“Two feet long isn’t small.”
“It is stretched out next to a six-foot cottonmouth, which, by the way, is extremely venomous. You got lucky. Be grateful, and next time you decide to conjure up a dead person, check the ceiling first.”
The expression on her face held a warning, but they’d hammered out an agreement before climbing into his truck an hour ago. No matter what he said or did, she wouldn’t set him on fire or do anything to cause him copious amounts of pain. He took it on faith that she was a woman of her word.
“Are you sure the person, ghost, whatever, wasn’t your great-grandmother? As I recall, Twila Black was blinded by severe cataracts.”
“Tanner, the woman I saw was blinded by having no eyes. There’s a rather large difference between the two conditions.”
“Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”
Arms folded, she stared through the windshield at the lush greenery. “Sometimes when I dream, but it’s always Twila I wind up talking to.” She flicked him a glance. “I’ve never seen this woman before.”
“And you’d rather not see her again.”
She surprised him by shaking her head. “Not sure I’d go that far actually. This might sound strange, but I’m terrified of snakes and alligators. Ghosts and apparitions, not so much. I think she was Madeleine Lessard.”
“Possibly. Describe her to Desdemona. She’ll have more answers than I do.”
Rosemary’s brows went up. “Have them, or be willing to share them?”
He rested an arm on the open window well. “Some of both. You know enough about Crucible to understand that former agents have constraints on how much and what kind of information they can divulge. And if you’re thinking of probing my brain, believe me when I tell you that wouldn’t be pleasant for either of us. When I want to, I can put up strong mental blocks.”
She laughed for the first time sinc
e leaving Deadman’s Swamp, and he wished like hell she hadn’t. The last thing he needed on this steamy, hot day with a truckload of bullshit already rolling around in his head, was a whatever-she-was—witch, seer, voodoo queen in training—making him hard.
Still amused, she slid the fingers of one hand through her hair. “In that case, and in the interest of being an amiable travel buddy, I’ll change the subject. How did it go with Ethan Grimes earlier?”
Tanner shrugged. “His papers checked out.”
“Does that mean you trust him?”
“Did I say I trusted him?”
“Tanner, the fact that you let him move into your unready rental property implies a certain level of acceptance. However, I’ll rephrase the question. Do you believe he’s who and what he claims to be?”
“He claims to be a ghost writer for a well-known author whose name he’s not at liberty to divulge.”
“Meaning you think he has secrets.”
“Come on, Rosemary, we all have secrets.”
She eyed him sagely. “Some of us more so than others.”
Tanner merely smiled. “Pick another subject.”
Crooking a leg up under her, she studied his profile. “You don’t give your trust easily, do you?”
“Could be that’s because I don’t possess your talent for barging into people’s heads and grabbing the information I want.”
“Uh-huh.” She shooed a fly out the window. “You know, if I could actually do that, I’d be the most hated and feared person on the planet. Also the richest, because there’d always be somebody willing to pay me money. If not to barge in and grab, then to back off and lie.”
“You got into my head easily enough.”
“When you let me. You said yourself, you have strong mental blocks. That inhibits the barging part quite severely. Even reading your average Jane and Joe can be tricky without their cooperation. Sometimes I’ll get a sense of people’s intentions, but nothing detailed. I’m what you’d call unschooled in the art.”
He regarded a late-afternoon sky that had grown almost as forbidding as the previous day’s. “What did Twila think about your feelings?”
