Winter's Redemption

by Mary Stone

  He recognized the look. There had been drama in the office when he and Bree had been out. Sun knew the details. Noah didn’t.

  “Please,” he said with exaggerated calm. “Tell me what you know, Sun.”

  Satisfied, she didn’t hold back on the details.

  Word had come down from Ramirez that Agent Black was to be immediately transferred to the Behavioral Analysis Unit. After their meeting on Christmas Day, she’d never come back to VC. An intern with a cart had stopped by to clear her desk. No one in VC had seen Winter since.

  Sun didn’t look terribly sorry about the news. She’d pitted herself against Winter before. Both women were competitive. Neither would back down.

  He couldn’t resist poking a hole in Sun’s triumphant attitude. “I’m surprised you’re not sorry she’s gone. Winter one-upped you on the Presley case. I’d figure you’d want to get even, but you won’t be able to do it from here.”

  Noah left her fuming and checked in with Osbourne, who refused to talk about it. Winter’s defection was an obvious sore spot. He updated his boss on their progress with the case and headed home to clean up.

  His first instinct had been to call her and light her ass up for not even telling him what she was doing. But once he was clean and had demolished a half a box of cereal and three cups of coffee, he realized that cornering her this morning would have been a bad idea.

  He’d already said things to her he hadn’t meant. In his fatigue, he’d have probably blown it.

  Noah settled for texting.

  Does your new boss allow lunch breaks?

  He wasn’t sure if she was ready to talk to him at all, but he didn’t have to wait long for a response. He’d missed her.

  Getting coffee at 12:30.

  It wasn’t exactly an invitation, but Winter didn’t look surprised to see him when he showed up. She was working on her laptop but closed it when he sat down.

  “Secret BAU stuff?” he asked, nodding toward the computer.

  She sat back in her seat and folded her arms, watching him coolly. Then he realized that her hair was down. It jolted him how much her hair looked like Tala Delosreyes’s. If he closed his eyes, he’d be able to superimpose Winter’s face over the victim’s ruined body.

  “What?” she asked as he stared at her, tucking part of it behind her ear self-consciously.

  Noah was about to reply, but the starburst bruise on the side of her face caught his attention. “What the hell happened to you?”

  He shoved away from the table, the metal legs of his chair screeching. Ignoring the glances of other customers in the coffee shop, he rounded the table and dropped down to his haunches beside her. Gently, he ran his fingertips over her cheekbone, where purple faded to green and sickly yellow. In the center of the bruise was a small, scabbed cut.

  “Sit down, Noah. It’s fine. I bumped it the other day.” She nudged his hand away impatiently and picked up her mocha.

  “It looks like someone wearing a diamond solitaire punched you in the face.”

  She snorted. “No one punched me.”

  He studied her as he retook his seat, looking closer this time. She was always pale. He’d seen a kid ask her if she was Snow White one time because her black hair was such a startling contrast with her fair skin. But now, her eyes were tired and shadowed. Her skin looked so translucent, he could see the delicate tracery of veins beneath.

  “Is it the case, the transfer, or me? You look like shit, Winter.”

  She fluttered her thick black lashes sarcastically. “You do know how to flatter a woman, Dalton. You don’t think I have a reason to look stressed?”

  She didn’t try to argue about her rights to the case with him again, for which he was grateful, but he hated this awkwardness between them. Then, something occurred to him. He pushed aside his coffee cup and leaned forward on his elbows, pinning her with a look.

  “You’ve been having migraines. Did you hit your face on something?”

  “I’m fine, Noah,” she repeated, her cheeks flushing with color. It wasn’t a healthy glow. It was a pissed off one. She didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Would you tell me if you were having problems?” He’d seen what her episodes could do to her. They were scary.

  She laughed, but it was bitter. “Not your circus, Dalton. Not your monkeys.”

  In other words, butt out. Irritation rose, and his retort came out sharper than he meant. “Of course you wouldn’t tell me if your migraines were getting worse. You didn’t find time to drop me a phone call or a text, letting me know that you were transferring units. Did SSA Parrish make you an offer you couldn’t refuse?”

  “This was a mistake.” She stood up, slid her laptop into her bag. “I need to get back to work. For all of Aiden’s faults, at least he trusts me to be a professional and not let my past get in the way of my present.”

  “Winter. Don’t go.”

  It was too late. She was moving toward the door. He stood up to follow her and saw the moment her knees buckled. She was halfway through the inside door when she stumbled. A college kid who was holding the outer door for her stepped forward, clearly concerned, but Noah made it to her side in time to steady her. Under his hand, her bones felt birdlike. She was thin, but up close like this, he could see she’d gotten thinner.

  Winter’s face was leached of color again. “Get me out of here. Please.” The whisper didn’t carry far, but he heard it.

  He thanked the kid holding the door for them and hurried Winter out to where he’d parked his truck.

  She held on until he lifted her bodily into the passenger’s seat. By the time he’d rounded the truck to climb in the driver’s side, she’d gone blank. This time seemed worse. Her eyes were half-open, rolled back in her head so that only the whites showed. Every muscle in her body seemed seized up when he tried to take her hand.

  A constant trembling vibration ran through her body. He opened the glove box and took out a handful of fast-food napkins to hold against the blood that streamed from her nose.

  He was terrified.

  It seemed to go on and on. Before, Winter’s outages had only lasted a few seconds, leaving her shaky, but fine. She’d usually have a little bit of warning. This was different. It struck with little notice, completely debilitating her. The seconds stretched out into a minute. Then, two. He monitored her heart rate, made sure she was breathing and didn’t swallow her tongue.

  At two and a half minutes, Noah was reaching for his phone to call for an ambulance when Winter came out of it. She gave a last hard shudder before her breathing started to even out and her eyes cleared. “That was something,” she said, breathless.

  “You can’t drive anymore.”

  Noah was so worried about her he felt sick. She saw it, and closed her eyes again, leaning back against the headrest.

  “I’m not. Public transportation.”

  “I have a truck,” he stated flatly. “I live four doors down from you, and I work in the same building. Don’t take the bus.”

  “We’re not exactly copacetic enough to be carpooling right now, Dalton.”

  “Take a drink of this.” Noah popped the top on a can of Mountain Dew. “Maybe the sugar and caffeine will help.”

  She took a sip. Made a face. “It tastes like battery acid.”

  “Have you seen a doctor yet?”

  “No.” Her eyes locked steady on his. “No doctors.”

  “Dammit all to hell, Winter,” Noah exploded. He slammed a fist down on the dashboard. “You can’t keep this up. You brag about being this professional agent who can handle her shit? You can’t even handle your own health issues. Max was right. You are a liability.”

  “I told you,” she replied, her voice going cold. “Not your circus.” She reached for the door handle, and Noah hit the lock button. She slowly turned her head until she was facing him again. “Open the door.” Her voice was like ice now.

  “Talk to me.”

  “No.”

  He was handl
ing her wrong. She wasn’t going to give, and he was too fucking tired and frustrated to get through to her right now. “Fine, Wonder Woman. Handle your shit all by yourself.”

  Winter left, and Noah dropped his head to the steering wheel. He sat in his truck for almost twenty minutes, fighting the urge to chase her down. To shake sense into her. To explain to her why he was so worried. He cared about her—too much—and the fragile connection they’d made was on the rocks.

  After another twenty minutes of debating with himself, he came to a decision that could backfire on him and wreck things with Winter for good. He’d weighed it out, though, and had to take the risk.

  Noah picked up his phone and pulled up Google.

  Walking back to the office, the chilly air was bracing, but her legs felt like lead. Winter was glad Noah hadn’t tried to follow her. She had too much on her mind. She was trying not to focus on the fact that this recent vision had happened less than twelve hours after the last one. The episodes were getting closer together, striking with less warning. They were also becoming more intense.

  She couldn’t worry about that, either, right now.

  She had to figure out if what she’d seen during her blackout was a vision of the past or the future. Either Winter had just had a flashback to when she was a thirteen-year-old girl, the same age she’d been when her parents were killed and her brother taken, or she’d been in the head of another of The Preacher’s victims.

  The vision was vivid, like all the rest had been. She’d been gossiping with a group of girls she was walking home from school with. Winter—or the victim—was looking down at the pavement as she walked. She hadn’t seen any of the other girls’ faces so she couldn’t tell if they were people she’d known in real life.

  She’d physically felt like a teenager again. It had been a weird feeling. She had been shorter, her limbs lithe and missing the strength that she’d gained as an adult through regular training. If it was a flashback, it was a detailed one. She’d felt the fitful wind that grabbed at her unbraided hair. The faint warmth of the sun that didn’t do much to penetrate the mostly cloudy sky. One canvas Converse sneaker rubbed against a blister that was forming on the back of her right heel.

  Behind her, a voice called out. “Hey, girlie. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  The tone was friendly, but the smooth Southern drawl made the hair on her arms rise. As she—the girl in the vision—had turned, Winter’s connection with the vision broke loose, and she’d come back to awareness in the front seat of Noah’s truck.

  She quickened her steps. The chances of this being a flashback were unlikely. She’d never had one before. Besides, this experience was more like when she’d gotten into the head of The Preacher’s last victim. It was scary, intrusive, and fascinating. If it wasn’t a memory—Winter herself as a child—did it mean that The Preacher was about to target a teenage girl?

  She picked up the pace, hitching her bag higher on her shoulder. Her body felt drained, and her head throbbed vaguely. It had seemed like a good idea to walk at noon. She’d wanted to get away from her desk. The mostly friendly scrutiny of everyone on Aiden’s team. The sharp eye of Aiden himself.

  Now, she just wished she’d stayed at her desk.

  11

  She was a hard worker.

  The woman had been bent over her desk for the last hour as she scribbled on a notepad next to her and tapped at the fancy little computer on her ugly desk. Her office was prissy, decorated in some kind of modern style, with lots of glass and chrome. It had proven to be kind of tricky to get to since she lived in a gated community, but I poked around in the woods a bit and found a broken-down piece of fence. There was a little clearing close by where local rich kids probably came to drink alcohol and fornicate around a devil-worshipping bonfire.

  The thought bothered me more than it usually did. There weren’t enough people like me, tasked with punishing sinners. Not that I was arguing with God or anything.

  I hitched up my coveralls and didn’t bother to tinker with the air conditioning unit by the window. I didn’t need my regular disguise. No neighbors were going to see me. The woman’s office was at the back of her house. Plus, the swanky, rich-folk neighborhood had been carved out of some woods. You couldn’t see through the trees from one big, expensive house to the next.

  I watched as she took a slug from a bottle of water next to her computer. She wasn’t very pretty. Her brown hair was cut boyish short and dyed an unnatural purple color. She looked like a lesbian, but she had a husband. Go figure. The husband had left the house earlier in the day, probably to go bang a real woman and not one trying to ape his fellow menfolk. Unless the “husband” was one of them wrist-wavers that married women just to cover up their sinner ways.

  I thought about that for a bit and got heated up mad about it. Men were superior to women, and it was ordained for them to be able to do whatever they wanted to do. But some men didn’t handle their women right, raising their wives and daughters to be a holy credit to their gender. That’s why He picked out folks to take up the calling of punishing those who deserved it. God had chosen others to take care of the prissy boys of the world. I’d focus on the girls. That’s where my calling was.

  Still. I felt like maybe this husband deserved to be punished too. I’d never thought like this in all my years, and I wondered if it was because of my age. With age came wisdom. Maybe I’d been thinking about it wrong all my life. The thought was disturbing.

  Images of what I could do to a man to punish him took hold of me, and I sat down next to the house and hunkered up beside a bush to think of it for a spell. My knees crackled and popped, but I ignored them. Maybe I’d wait for him to come home and punish him too. But I’d never punished a man before.

  A little uncomfortably, I wondered if it would make me a sinner. To do the things I did to the girls on a man seemed a little unnatural. I had to ponder the thought for a while before I decided since the husband wasn’t home, I wouldn’t have to worry about him now. Maybe the next time, I’d decide.

  A fat raindrop hit my nose, and when I looked up, it was dark. Like somebody had speeded up a movie from daytime to nighttime. I’d been daydreaming again. Gathering wool, as my grandpa used to say. Shaking the cobwebs out of my head, I stifled a groan, trying to straighten up my legs. I was all bent-up from sitting the same way for too long.

  Rheumatism. I didn’t know if it ran in the family since my ma and pa were dead long before they got old like me, but my doctor said I had it for sure. My knuckles were still all knotted up from all my holy writing I’d done at Winter’s house a few nights ago. I hoped the Lord wouldn’t ask me to do so much of it tonight.

  Stretching up on my toes, I looked in the window again and saw the girl still hunkered over her computer. The things some women’s husbands let them get away with was downright disgusting. The woman should have been dressed in soft, pretty colors. Feminine, like God made her. This one was dressed all in black. A bulky sweater hung off her like a potato sack, covering up her breasts so a man couldn’t get a good look at what she was selling, which would have been a virtue if the covering had been more attractive.

  The way she was letting herself go to fat was shameful too. She dropped a pen, and when she bent over to grab it, I could see that her ass was wide under the tight black pants she wore.

  All black, like for a funeral. I shook my head in disapproval. She sure needed punishment, but I wasn’t ashamed to say that I liked the prettier ones. Lessons were fun to teach when the sinning harlots you were teaching to were pretty.

  This one’s fate had been sealed when she’d glanced over at me from the counter where she was paying for fuel for her big Mercedes SUV in Roanoke. A man’s car, I thought in disgust. But in that quick second, before she looked away, went back to what she was doing without even registering me, I’d seen her eyes.

  They were my girlie’s eyes.

  Framed with black lashes, they were deep, quiet blue like the Smoky Mountains
from a distance. It didn’t matter what the rest of her looked like. She’d be my next. It was a sign. She had Winter’s eyes, and that was enough to tell me that God wanted me to punish her. Because, the more I thought on the matter, Winter deserved to be punished more than any other female I’d ever culled before.

  Maybe when I finally got around to her, she’d be my last project. I’d have to make it perfect. I went woolgathering again, just imagining it.

  Time skipped again on me, and then it was late at night. I wondered how long I’d been standing still. If anyone were driving by, they’d have seen me and probably thought I was a fancy statue in the fancy yard. Chuckling at that notion, I grabbed up my bag of tools, heading for the sliding door to the dining room.

  It was time to get to work. It’d be practice, for when I finally punished my girlie.

  Noah spent the next day feeling like something was missing. Something essential, like his first cup of coffee. Or breakfast. He had an empty spot in his day where Winter should have been.

  He’d done his best to pay attention while he met with Bree to divide up witnesses for follow-up. She’d known what his problem was, though. Around lunch, she’d finally broached the subject.

  “Are you going out for coffee again?” Bree made the question sound casual, but the look she gave him was pointed.

  “What? No.” Noah shook his head and looked back down at his computer.

  “Are you sure? I saw Winter heading out. She had a bike helmet on and her laptop case. I just wondered if the two of you were meeting for coffee again.”

  He didn’t want to talk about Winter, but he didn’t want to offend Bree, either. It wasn’t her fault he’d been an asshole and was on the outs with his best friend. He forced a smile and winked, for her benefit. “Maybe I was hoping to take my partner out to lunch.”

  She leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms. “Nice try. As if you didn’t know my fiancée was coming to pick me up. I told you Shelby was swinging by around noon when you came in this morning.”