by Kay Hooper
Yet, at least.
She hunched her shoulders against the chill she told herself was only the October night.
Miranda was saying easily, “Things tend to happen quickly with Hollis, especially during investigations, so it’s sometimes hard to keep score. But you’ll be meeting her and Reese tomorrow.”
Victoria nodded, then said curiously, “I was wondering about Dalton. Did he call in?”
“No.”
“But he was summoned?”
Miranda nodded, smiling faintly.
Victoria looked at her for a moment, and then laughed. “Don’t tell me. You sent Reno to fetch him?”
“Do you know anybody else who could take Dalton somewhere he doesn’t want to be?”
“No,” Victoria said, and laughed again. “Not even Bishop.”
* * *
• • •
TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 7
Leslie Gardner slipped from the bed, not trying to be particularly quiet since Ed was snoring and always slept like the dead anyway. His was a curiously gentle, rhythmic snore, and she had teased him their entire married life about it. Her own personal sound machine, lulling her to sleep.
At least, it always had.
They’d been in bed by a bit after eleven, as usual after a busy weekday, and as usual he fell asleep right away.
But not Leslie. Not even her own personal sound machine helped much lately.
Her head was pounding so hard she had to feel her way to the bathroom, and when she got there and eased the door closed, she turned on only the light in the shower, dim behind its curtain.
Even that hurt her eyes.
She didn’t know what time it was except that it was late—and she had to be up early to fix the kids’ lunches and make breakfast. She needed her sleep. The supposed painkillers she’d taken hardly two hours before had not even taken the edge off the pain. She wanted to take more, but the bottle was empty.
Her head had been hurting on and off for days.
Note to self: Buy something stronger tomorrow.
There was a small, padded bench between the shower and the vanity, and Leslie sat there for what seemed like a long time, her elbows on her knees and both hands pressed to the sides of her head. It hurt.
It hurt, and somewhere inside that throbbing pain, inside her aching brain, she could have sworn she heard, very faintly, two words whispered. That was all. Just two words.
But everything in her shied away from listening to those words, even acknowledging what they were, even though the silent battle made her head hurt more. Trying not to moan with the pain, but also trying to hold back those awful words, to pretend she didn’t hear them, that everything was normal.
It was just a headache.
She talked to herself aloud, her voice soft.
“I have to sleep. I have to get back into bed with Ed and sleep. Tomorrow, things will be better. Tomorrow, things will be fine. My head won’t hurt anymore. The light won’t bother me anymore. I won’t hear impossible words. And I won’t . . . I won’t see . . . anything strange. Everything will be back to normal. I’m sure.”
She used the vanity to help lever herself upright, and clung to it for long minutes because she felt dizzy and weak. She splashed cold water on her face and dried it with a towel, resisting until that moment any glance into the mirror above the sink.
In the dim light she saw her face, pale but her own. Eyes huge and oddly . . . blurry. Maybe because of the words in her head, the words she refused to hear.
Maybe that.
Or maybe it was something else.
She stared at herself for a long minute, then looked past her left shoulder.
It was her shadow on the light-colored wall. Just that, just her shadow. Except that it had a funny red tint. That was one thing that was wrong.
The other thing that was wrong was that she shouldn’t have had a shadow just there, with the dim light in the shower. It was on the wrong side. And, besides, she shouldn’t have had a shadow at all. Not like that. Not all . . . distorted.
Not a monster shadow.
Feeling a little sick and a lot shaken, Leslie Gardner slipped back into bed beside her snoring husband, very carefully not looking to see if the shadow had followed her even here into the dark.
* * *
• • •
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8
In the bedroom of a small but surprisingly cozy cottage on an all-but-deserted island in the Bahamas, Reese DeMarco woke to find himself alone. He woke early out of long habit, but not this early, not without reason.
The reason this time was the empty place beside him.
It was still dark outside, and the muffled sounds of the ocean told him it was approaching high tide only a dozen or so yards from the cottage. There was no light in the bedroom, but when he looked at the nearly closed door, he could see a light coming from the living space beyond.
He got out of bed and found a pair of sweatpants to pull on, then went out to the living room to find what he expected to find. The scent of coffee was sharp in the morning air, a glance toward the compact kitchenette showing him the coffeemaker with a pot already half empty.
Hollis was on the couch, the big coffee table before her covered with papers and her open laptop, which was plugged into a wall outlet. A mostly empty coffee cup sat on the end table beside the couch. She was barefoot and bare-legged, and wearing nothing but a man’s white shirt that made her look, even with her recent golden tan and the few pounds he’d managed, with his cooking, to add to her slender frame, deceptively fragile.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked, leaning on the back of the couch slightly to one side of her.
“I slept. As long as I could. Sorry if I woke you.” She leaned back and looked up at him with a faint smile. And returned his deep and not-at-all-brief kiss with matching fire.
It was one of the things they had discovered for themselves during the weeks away from the job and other people. A passion for each other of rather astonishing ferocity, something that was still a new aspect of their partnership but one very much treasured even more for the long and difficult path that had brought them here, separately and together. And something that had most certainly deepened their already strong connection to each other.
That last fact had also created a few surprises for them as yet untested in the field.
“Don’t start something,” she murmured when she could.
“Why not? We have a few hours of vacation left.”
“Yeah, but right now something about this summoning business is bugging me. And you know how I get when something’s bugging me.”
He knew.
Looking at the coffee table, he noted a ruler and a red marker as well as a couple of pencils and pens and a legal pad, supplies she generally carried in her laptop case, and realized for the first time what most of the papers spread out on the table were. “We’re on an island that’s barely inhabited, and you found a map of the southeastern US?”
Turning her attention back to the map, Hollis said absently, “It’s amazing what you can find if you need it.”
“Are you conjuring things out of thin air now?”
She frowned at him.
“Just asking.”
“No, I haven’t sprouted a new ability,” she said dryly. “At least not one that you don’t know about. I just noticed something on the flight over here that my pilot obviously missed.”
“I had other things on my mind,” he said apologetically. “What did I miss?”
“A whole bunch of rolled-up maps behind our seats in the chopper. So I went and looked. And found these.”
He eyed her. “You went out there in the middle of the night wearing nothing but my shirt?” The helicopter sat waiting for them in a clearing some little distance from their cottage.
“Barely inhabited island,” she reminded him.
“Uh-huh. But inhabited. You realize that our landlady’s teenage son is fascinated by you?” A fact he had noted during the occasions when they’d been out on the beach or zipping around on Jet-Skis or scuba diving in the incredibly clear water. When Hollis’s brief swimsuit had shown off much more of her than her normal casual clothing.
Difficult to miss a teenage boy wearing a puppy-dog look of extreme yearning and devotion, even at a distance as he lurked, apparently believing himself hidden. Even more difficult for a powerful telepath to miss the tangled adolescent thoughts practically catapulted their way.
There were only three major structures on their small island: their cottage, a currently empty cottage a couple hundred yards away from theirs, and a much larger building at the other end of the island that served as an inn during the winter months, which were all owned by their widowed landlady, who lived there with her sixteen-year-old son and a small staff of employees who kept the inn and cottages in good order.
Hollis said, “He’s fascinated by the chopper. I caught a glimpse of him lurking in the bushes while I was digging around for the maps.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“It’s nearly dawn. Sun’ll be up soon. I guess he gets up early.”
DeMarco sighed.
She grinned at him.
“You are a sadistic woman,” he told her.
“It’ll keep you on your toes,” she said, not at all apologetically. Then added, “Come look at this, will you?”
He came around the couch to sit beside her, looking obediently at the big map. The legal pad had been pushed to the side, its top sheet at least covered with Hollis’s neat, flowing script in what appeared to be a list, but he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and focused his attention on the map.
There were numerous small, red circles grouped in a rather small area of the southeast, most in the southern Appalachians. And most of the markings clearly indicated towns.
DeMarco studied them for a moment, then straightened to look at his partner. “The locations of past cases?”
“Yeah. It occurred to me that a disproportionate number of cases these last years have taken place in the southeast. Mostly in little mountain towns, but some as far south as Atlanta and as far east as the coast.”
He glanced at her laptop, which was clearly in sleep mode, pushed aside as the legal pad was. Another man might have asked her why she had felt compelled to not only bring along her work laptop on what was supposed to be a completely carefree vacation, but also to actually work.
Reese DeMarco was not another man.
So all he said was, “You keep notes of all the cases the unit works?”
“Nothing classified or even confidential,” she assured him. “Just brief notes I make for myself. Started it with the first case I worked, then later on backtracked to study earlier cases and noted those too. And all the ones since, of course. Locations, who was on the team, the bare outlines of crimes, victims, monsters and whether we caught or destroyed them. And how, if I thought it mattered.”
He nodded. “Okay. And?”
“Well, I know we seldom do geographic profiles of the cases we work in these areas, mostly because it would be fairly useless in such small towns. And I don’t think we’ve ever done a geographic profile of the whole southeast.”
“Probably not,” he agreed.
“I didn’t really know what I was looking for when I got started,” she confessed with a slight frown. “Something was bugging me and I couldn’t ignore it. So . . . I just kept marking the places where we’d had cases. All those little towns, the few times all the action took place outside little towns, like the church and that really weird case-that-wasn’t with Luther and Callie’s location up in the mountains and us at Alexander House.”
DeMarco nodded.
“I marked everything I could find in my case notes, plus a couple of investigations I knew about but in which the SCU was never officially involved because the unit didn’t officially exist at the time—yet Bishop was there, and he got involved. Like that town in North Carolina where his cousin Cassie helped catch a nasty killer, and even Atlanta, where Bishop helped his college friend look for his missing fiancée.”
“News to me,” DeMarco observed. “One of these days you’ll have to tell me those stories.”
“As much as I know, sure. I only found out because I’m nosy and kept asking questions.”
He smiled slightly, his normally rather coldly handsome face both relaxed and softened in a way that would have startled nearly everyone who knew him, but said only, “So you marked all these places in the southeast where . . . paranormal things involving various SCU agents and Haven operatives happened. And?”
She frowned at the map. “There are probably a dozen different ways to do this, but this is the one I picked.” She reached for a sheet of clear plastic he hadn’t noticed underneath the coffee table, on which were drawn several straight lines in red.
“Where on earth did you find that? Not in the chopper?”
“No.” Hollis looked a little guilty. “I took it out of the frame of that print over there.” She nodded toward a suitably tropical print hanging on the wall between two narrow bookcases on the other side of the living room. “I wouldn’t have if it were glass, but . . . Anyway, we might want to slip Mrs. Clairmont a little bonus so she can replace this sheet of plastic.”
“I doubt she’ll even notice,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah, but we know I took it,” Hollis said absently as she slid the plastic over the map and placed it carefully.
He smiled again, but waited until she had the plastic in place and then leaned forward again to study the result for several moments. “Huh.”
“Like I said, probably a dozen different ways to draw lines from one place to another and make some sort of pattern. But this is the one that felt right to me.”
She had drawn, in essence, an asterisk, or perhaps more accurately a kind of sunburst, with straight lines of differing lengths beginning at a marked location on the outer edge of the large cluster and ending at the opposite outer edge, both the starting point and the end point of each line a location of paranormal events, with several others along the line itself.
Every single case she had noted fell along one of the precisely straight lines she had drawn.
“Look at what’s at the center,” she said steadily.
DeMarco looked. “Damn. Prosperity.”
“Yeah. Prosperity. It looks like it’s been at the center of some very bad things for a long time. The very quiet, very peaceful center. Until now.”
After a moment, DeMarco said, “By the time we finish packing and load the chopper, the sun should be up and Mrs. Clairmont as well, so we can turn in the keys. I think we should head for the mountain house ASAP.”
“I think you’re right,” Hollis said.
FIVE
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8
Sheriff Jackson Archer studied what appeared to be the scene of a suicide, holding on to professional detachment as best he could. He was a good cop and a popular sheriff. And though he had spent a few years with the Charlotte police in order to acquire the sort of experience a small, ordinarily peaceful mountain town rarely offered and even more rarely needed, the truth was that Prosperity had been exceptionally peaceful since he’d taken office, and he suspected he’d gotten used to that.
So professional detachment was difficult.
Not that any cop could with complete detachment view a scene in which a man had blown most of his head off.
“Why a shotgun?” his chief deputy Katie Cole asked, her own detachment having long since departed; her voice shook more than a little, and her face was paper-white. That shock looked odd on her, unfamiliar, at least to Archer, because he’d really never seen her anything but calm, professi
onal, and both courteous and pleasant enough to hide the steel inside her from all but those who knew her well.
He had taken some flak for hiring an “outsider” to be his chief deputy rather than promoting from within, but Katie had a background in law enforcement, and both her friendly, easy manner and her solid training—sharpshooter proficiency on the shooting range and skilled physical workouts in the gym that had pushed other, larger deputies to their limits—had mostly quieted the early rumblings in his department. Plus, experience in working with her day to day had convinced even the most jealous of her hiring and rank that she was indeed the best qualified for the job of chief deputy.
Though those same people might have been forgiven for revising their impressions now.
Because right now, her pale face caused her dark blond hair, worn in a casual ponytail that made her look far younger than thirty-two, appear even darker, and her normally sharp hazel eyes were dark and disturbed. She looked a little shocked, a little frightened, and more than a little unsure of what to do next.
He didn’t blame her for that. Any of that.
“Why a shotgun?” she repeated when the silence had lengthened.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Archer responded grimly.
From her position several feet farther from the body than the sheriff’s, Katie said with a stab at professionalism if not detachment, “I can see with those long arms of his he could easily reach the trigger even with the end of the barrel up under his chin like that, and it’s obvious he did from his position, but why use a shotgun when he owns several other guns?”
“Guess he wanted to make sure he got the job done.”
Katie eyed her superior, in part because it was a far less stomach-churning view than that of the victim. He was thirty-eight, tall, rugged in a way that made him look more like the sheriff of an Old West town than a twenty-first-century small mountain town. (She had caught herself more than once expecting to hear the metallic jingling of spurs.) He had dark brown hair with a bit of silver mixed in, level gray eyes, and an almost-always calm voice that could turn persuasive—or hard as nails—depending on what the situation called for. He had one broken marriage behind him, a not uncommon curse of law enforcement work, but he didn’t talk about that and Katie hadn’t asked.
