Shifting Isles Box Set (Books 1-3): The Prisoner, S.P.I.R.I.T. Division, and Return to Tanas

by G. R. Lyons

  Asenna looked at him, pressing her lips together, and gave a small nod before she sat back on the couch and looked up at the files.

  Then her breath caught in her throat, her body going frightfully still for a moment before she rose jerkily to her feet, clutching her throat, stumbling past the coffee table and falling to her knees beside the bed. She reached out to steady herself, her fists closing on the sheets only to drag them off onto the floor as she fell over on her back, cringing in pain.

  Charlie launched to his feet, waved an arm to brush the holograms out of the way, and barked, “Close list!” to the computer as he rushed to her side. The holograms vanished from the air, and Charlie watched in horror as Asenna lay on the floor, twitching in pain as a red line opened up across her throat, spilling blood down her chest.

  He stared at her, panting and unable to move.

  “Crawford,” she croaked, and her eyes glazed over as she stared up at the ceiling, her body slowly going still.

  Charlie shook himself, tried to remember he had a job to do, and yanked his communicator off his belt.

  “Crawford to Dispatch, Spirit event, over,” he panted, trying to catch his breath.

  “Dispatch,” an officer's voice replied. “I read you, Crawford. Recording…now.”

  Charlie took a deep breath and asked Asenna, “Who are you?”

  Something flashed in her eyes, and for a split second it looked as though Asenna was no longer there—not just trapped in the vision but actually moving aside to make room for what lay beneath.

  The moment passed, and in a rough voice, she answered, “Feldis Bordal.”

  “How old are you?” Charlie continued.

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “What do you look like?”

  Another pause, and then: “Brown hair, brown eyes, tall, stocky.”

  “Where are you?”

  A longer pause this time, and Charlie thought he saw something shift in her gaze, but he couldn't be sure.

  Finally, she rasped out, “1732 River Avenue, New Haven. Kitchen.”

  Asenna blinked, starting to come out of the trance, and Charlie heard the dispatch officer say, “Checking database…Nope. Searching shared files…Confirmed client, Talbor Agency. Contacting now. Dispatch out.”

  “Copy that,” Charlie said, and put his communicator aside, staring down at Asenna.

  “Photos,” she said with a slight gasp, though sounding more like herself.

  “What? Oh, right.”

  Charlie snatched up a tablet from the coffee table and turned on the camera, taking pictures of the gash across her throat before it fully closed and vanished. Asenna walked him through creating a new case file attached to the S.P.I.R.I.T. Division database, and then he helped her up off the floor, a puddle of blood slowly drying on the smooth, hard surface and staining the sheets that hung half off the bed.

  “You alright?” he asked, startled by the incongruity of seeing her standing there, perfectly safe and alive, even though she was still covered in blood and had a slash through her throat just a moment ago.

  She nodded. “Fine. You?”

  “I–”

  He shook his head, at a loss for words.

  “Worse than you thought?” she asked.

  Charlie nodded. “I don't think there's any preparing for that. Bloody hells.”

  Asenna gave him a sympathetic look, then gestured toward the door. “Go on. They'll need you at the scene.”

  Charlie looked at her, asking again, “You sure you're alright?”

  “I'm fine, Crawford. Now, go.”

  He looked down at the blood on the floor, back up at the blood drying on her chest, then spun on his heel, hurrying from the room. Chief Rothbur was coming up the stairs just as he was heading down, and Charlie held up a hand before the chief could say anything.

  “Psych eval, I know,” he said. “Don't worry, you won't get any argument out of me. I'll go as soon as I get back.”

  Chief nodded at him and stepped aside to let him pass.

  Charlie snagged Detective Lehinis from his desk, checked out a company car, and headed out to the crime scene, shaking his head as he tried to wrap his mind around what he'd just witnessed.

  Real-time Invasive Telepathy is right, he thought as the car pulled out onto the road. Seven hells, Crawford, what have you gotten yourself into?

  Chapter 6

  CHARLIE AND Lehinis arrived at the crime scene, introduced themselves to the detective in charge from Talbor Agency, and swept through the house with cameras and notescreens, documenting the interior and collecting any evidence they found.

  “You know,” the Talbor detective said as he bent over the body, examining the wounds while he collected a series of photographs, “your Spirit sure is handy. I know a lot of people freaked out when Rothbur first announced what she could do, but I find it rather amazing. I mean, look at this here.” The man sat back on his heels, gesturing at the room in general. “Her contract called for daily drive-bys of the house, but she flat declined any closer inspections. Didn't want our officers peeking in her windows, even if doing so could catch a robber in action. So who knows? Her body may not have been found for a day or more if it hadn't been for your girl.”

  Charlie looked down at the body. “She's still dead, though.”

  “True,” the man agreed. “But you know what they say. Sooner discovered, sooner solved.”

  Charlie started to nod, then glanced around the room, thinking of all the unsolved cases and muttering under his breath, “I'm not so sure about that.”

  From the next room, he heard Lehinis call out, “Is it just me or are an awful lot of dead people getting flowers lately?”

  “What was that?” Charlie asked, carefully stepping around the body and joining the detective in the breakfast nook, just on the other side of a bar counter at one end of the kitchen.

  Lehinis pointed at a vase of fresh flowers resting on the counter next to a blank florist's card. A small wallscreen displayed a phone directory, the listings narrowed down to local florist shops, and a mobile phone lay broken on the floor.

  “Kinda funny, isn't it?” Lehinis asked. “The last one had a fresh delivery, too.” He shook his head. “White roses. Honestly. What is the world coming to?”

  Charlie gave him a confused look, and the Talbor detective walked past them, playfully shoving Lehinis on his way through the room, telling Charlie, “Pay no attention to him. He can't be serious at a crime scene for more than about thirty seconds.”

  Lehinis made a face at the detective's back, then turned and made a show of taking a picture of the flower arrangement.

  He turned and looked at Charlie and gave a shrug. “You never know.”

  Charlie shook his head and went back to the body.

  * * *

  WHEN HE was finished with the crime scene, Charlie returned to Hawkeye and went straight to Dr. Galvin's office, then up to Asenna's room. He stepped inside and blinked several times, trying to make sure he was actually seeing what he thought he saw.

  The room was entirely back to normal, with everything back in place and no sign of blood anywhere. It was as though the whole ordeal had never happened.

  Asenna stepped out of the washroom with a neat stack of sheets in her arms and carried them to the closet.

  “Doc let you out already, did he?” she asked.

  Charlie nodded, watching her rest the sheets on a shelf and shut the closet door before sweeping her gaze around the room.

  “I think that's everything,” she said, visibly drooping with relief. She took a deep breath and straightened up. “Hungry?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “Oh, right,” she said with a grimace, sinking into a chair. “That was your first time.”

  Charlie nodded, shifting his weight, trying to decide what to do.

  “I need to go shoot something,” he said, turning for the door.

  “You too, huh?”

  He turned back to face her. “What's t
hat?”

  Asenna nodded toward the door. “I do that. At night. Go down to the firing range and burn off some stress. Sometimes it helps make the visions go away.”

  Charlie reached for the door knob. “Care to join me?”

  Her eyes widened.

  “I'm sure we both could use it,” he added.

  Asenna looked up at him, hesitated, then slowly rose from the chair. She followed him without a word, and Charlie noticed she stuck very close to him the whole way down, only stepping aside when they found themselves alone in the training room.

  They spent several minutes with their own individual targets, calling up new dummies and ammunition as they needed. Charlie pictured Asenna, lying on the bed and bleeding from wounds that didn't belong to her, then his mind switched to an image of Saira, lying broken in a puddle of water.

  He pulled off shot after shot, not paying much attention to his accuracy, but merely picturing some faceless man in place of the target, wanting to kill whoever was out there, hurting these people and leaving him with nightmares.

  “Easy there, hot shot,” Asenna said.

  Charlie sighed and put down his gun, looking over at her. “Sorry. I needed that.”

  “Looks like it. You've shredded that dummy to bits.”

  Charlie looked over at the target and chuckled to himself, seeing the mess it was in. Then he looked over at the other targets, and saw frightfully perfect shots and patterns in each of them.

  He cleared his throat. “So…um…where'd you learn to shoot like that?”

  Asenna cleared her weapon and set it down, shaking her head. “I have no idea. Chief brought me down here one day, a few days after he moved me here. Said he wanted to see if I could handle a gun. He just stood there, watching me, as I picked it up and aimed. Never said a word to me, never told me what to do, and somehow everything I did just felt natural. I could just shoot without even thinking about it. Kinda freaked me out, to be honest. Someone taught me how to shoot, how to fight, but I don't remember who.” She paused, picking up the gun. “I'm actually better with a bow and arrow but…well, it's not like there's much call for that sort of thing.”

  Charlie laughed, pointing at the targets. “Better than that?”

  Asenna nodded. “And thank you. Usually I get the whole 'women can't shoot' line from people.”

  “Oh, no,” Charlie said, laughing to himself. “I know better than that.”

  “How so?” she asked, setting the gun aside, turning around, and hopping up onto the table, swinging her legs.

  “Well, y– Uh…my…” He paused, the amusement draining out of him. He cleared his throat and said, “My wife…long before she was my wife…helped teach me how to shoot. I was pretty skeptical at first, thinking this ladylike, old-fashioned, slip of a girl couldn't possibly handle a gun.” He paused again, chuckling to himself. “After she put me horribly to shame on my first attempt with a target, Chief came over and said, 'Always watch out for a woman with a gun, because women are very good at pointing fingers accusingly, so as long as she aims like she's pointing a finger at you, you won't be living to tell the tale.'”

  Asenna threw her head back and laughed. “Chief said that? Oh, that's hilarious. What did your wife say?”

  Charlie grinned. “She told him to not say such ridiculous things, pointing her finger right at him. Chief put his hands up and took a step back, and we all burst out laughing when Saira realized what she was doing.”

  Asenna laughed, and Charlie felt his smile slip as he watched her.

  “Gods, I miss her so much,” he whispered.

  Asenna instantly sobered, looking over at him, and she hopped down off the table, reached around to his booth, and called up more ammunition.

  “Fire away, Crawford,” she said quietly, giving him a sympathetic look, and returned to her own booth, slamming another magazine into her gun.

  Charlie watched her for a moment, shook his head, picked up his gun, and worked off some more tension.

  * * *

  AS SOON as Crawford left for the day, Asenna dug a pint of ice cream out of the freezer and sat down on the couch, not even bothering with a bowl as she indulged.

  She turned the wallscreen back on and called up her unsolved cases list again, finding Saira Crawford's file still marked out in red.

  “Seven hells, Chief,” she muttered to herself.

  She tried to override the lockout on the file, hoping the computer would close it on Chief's unit so that it could be opened elsewhere, but the system informed her that such access would require Chief's passcode and voice confirmation, as his private tablet was doubly secured.

  “Gods damn it all.”

  Returning the half-finished pint to the freezer, Asenna peeked out the door, saw the office mostly empty, and snuck downstairs, riding the elevator down to the basement level and heading for Records.

  The door opened with her passcode and retinal scan, and she stepped into the cold and silent room. One wall was covered with alphabetized discs, recording individual client information and insurance policies. On the other side of the room, a similar set of shelves held individual discs for criminal investigations, permanent backups of the information available on the main servers. In the middle of the room, rows of wide shelves held sealed containers for storing physical evidence.

  Asenna walked slowly down the rows, checking the labels on each box until she reached the Cs. Running her hand along the shelf, she read each name as she passed it, then lurched to a stop.

  Cransen and Cryntz sat immediately beside one another, with no space between for the name Crawford.

  “What the–” she murmured, running her fingers over the inch of cold metal between the two boxes. “That can't be right.”

  Asenna spun around and headed straight for the wall of digital storage, rapidly scanning the labels until she found what she was looking for.

  Or, rather, didn't find what she was looking for. Again, there was nothing between labels reading Cransen and Cryntz. The records file for Saira Crawford was gone.

  “Alright, this is getting ridiculous.”

  She picked up the tiny disc labeled Cryntz and turned it around in her hands, wondering for a moment if maybe it had been mislabeled, then glanced along the shelf to either side, thinking maybe Saira's file had simply been misplaced. No matter how much she looked, she found nothing.

  Asenna tapped the disc against her palm, thinking, then started to put it back in place.

  As the disc slid into its slot, the label vanished for a moment as the overhead light reflected back from the case, the name Cryntz disappearing and reappearing between tiny flashes of light.

  The disc clattered into place as Asenna dropped it and fell back, crashing into a shelving unit behind her.

  Flashing lights…

  Screaming pain…

  Let me out!

  Asenna ran out of the room. She headed toward the elevator, punching the button repeatedly, then hesitated, gulping down air, and turned back toward the training room instead.

  An hour with a gun sounded better than drowning herself in more ice cream.

  * * *

  THE NEXT day, Asenna curled up in the recliner while Crawford showed her the evidence they'd gathered at Bordal's crime scene, keeping her face blank as she took in the sight of the body, the setting, and the medical examiner's report.

  “Gods, I wish we could catch this bastard,” she said with a sigh. “And they found no DNA whatsoever?”

  Crawford shook his head. “Not a speck. No fingerprints, no hairs. She'd been raped, but there was no semen. Absolutely nothing we could use to identify her killer. Not even any footprints anywhere outside the house.”

  “Fuck.”

  Crawford gathered the holographic documents back into the file and tossed the whole thing at the wallscreen, leaving the air clear. “Are you always so vulgar?”

  Asenna grinned at him. “Why, does it bother you?”

  “I don't spend a great deal of time ar
ound women, in general,” he said, leaning back on the couch and crossing his arms behind his head, “and my wife was always so prim and proper. It's just weird to hear a woman curse so much.”

  “Well, if you don't like it, you're welcome to leave,” she said with a shrug, jumping up from the recliner and heading toward the kitchenette. She grabbed the unfinished pint of ice cream from the day before, sighed, and slammed the freezer door shut before turning around to face him.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “Got kinda pissed off last night and I guess I'm still moody.”

  “I can see that,” he murmured.

  “Here,” she said, turning back to the freezer, grabbing another pint, and tossing it to him. “Let's see if ice cream therapy works on men as well as women.”

  She pulled two spoons out of a drawer and walked one over to him as he read the label and eagerly ripped off the lid.

  “No complaints from my end,” he said, taking a spoon and digging right in.

  Asenna set a napkin on the table before him, then stepped past the recliner and climbed up onto the bed, crossing her legs and slowly digging at what was left of her pint.

  “So,” Crawford began around a mouthful. He swallowed and cleared his throat. “How…um…How long have you been working here, exactly?”

  “About…three years now, I think? Pretty much ever since Chief brought me here after I woke up in the hospital. It wasn't really an official thing right away. Mostly it was just a convenient arrangement, gave me a place to live, and under Chief's protection, while I tried to make sense of these visions I was getting. Pretty soon it just sort of worked itself out into what it is now. We had to make up the protocol as we went, since there had never been anything like this before, but it works. It's not perfect, of course, but it's useful in its way.”

  Crawford nodded to himself, a thoughtful frown on his face as he dug at his ice cream.

  “Can I ask you something?” he murmured after a long silence.

  “Sure,” Asenna answered with a shrug, scooping up another spoonful from her own pint.

  “Why do you– I mean, the visions…Why–” He paused and cleared his throat. “I'm just wondering–”