by Kay Hooper
“You need to get some sleep.”
“No shit.”
Brodie sighed. “Look, I’m sorry I was delayed. It couldn’t be helped.”
“Meeting a possible new ally. I heard. Good one?”
“Very, I think. Offers us a pretty long reach inside law enforcement. But his position is . . . a little tricky. A lot of people are close to him, maybe too close. Maybe close enough to know too much about us before we’re ready for them to know. If we ever are. And I’d feel better if I knew how he found out about us. He was very elusive about that without raising red flags in my head. Neat trick, that.”
Murphy eyed the big man across the table from her. He was a physically powerful man, enough so as to give anyone pause even slouched down in the chair as he was. And he was very good-looking in a dark, brooding way. But his eyes, those very, very sharp eyes, sentry eyes, gave the lie to his seemingly relaxed body.
He was a born guardian.
A born Guardian.
Murphy wondered, actually for the first time, if that was the way of things in their very unusual world. Had they all been born to do this, after all? Was it as random as it appeared, or was it fate? She had often felt that she herself had been born for this work.
“You’re frowning at me,” Brodie told her.
“My headache is giving me ideas I don’t like.”
His brows lifted in question.
“Never mind.” Murphy glanced around them, more by habit than anything else, to reassure herself they couldn’t be overheard. Yet she still lowered her voice when she said, “You were meeting Bishop.”
Brodie’s sentry eyes became even sharper. Sharp enough, Murphy thought idly, to slice through something.
Or someone.
“Want to tell me how you know that?”
“Just trying to ease your mind. He knows about us because he made contact with me a few months back.”
Brodie didn’t look as if his mind had been eased. At all.
She shook her head slightly. “I move around more than most, you know that. I’ve crossed his path a few times, his and some of his team members.”
Grim, Brodie said, “Please don’t tell me any of his team know about us. He said not.”
“He was telling the truth. Just him and his wife. Miranda. A unique connection between those two, and it has nothing to do with marriage vows or wedding rings.”
Brodie refused to be sidetracked. “From what he told me, nearly every member of his team is psychic, and a fair number of them are telepaths. You really think something like this can be kept secret inside a group like that? Doing the sort of work they do?”
“It’s because they do the sort of work they do that they aren’t likely to even notice us. Bishop trains his people to shield whenever possible, and to focus—very narrowly. Their focus is killers, mostly of the serial variety, and they have plenty to occupy their minds. Which is sad when you think about it. On the other hand, they go up against murderers they can actually chase and catch and cage—or kill. And we have on our hands virtually invisible enemies and a mysterious conspiracy. Or several of them. I’ve never been quite sure.”
“Murphy.”
She frowned at him. “Look, Bishop put that unit of his together in the teeth of official opposition and scorn within the law enforcement community. It’s been an uphill battle for him all the way, still is in some situations. But the thing he’s held to with teeth and claws is that there’s nothing at all unnatural or inhuman about psychic abilities; they’re just other senses not everybody happens to have.”
Brodie waited.
“He and his people have worked their asses off for years tracking and caging or destroying human monsters, and they’ve done it using a combination of law enforcement and investigative training and their psychic abilities. Which they bend over backward to keep matter-of-fact and firmly grounded in scientific possibility. Just other tools in the toolbox, like their guns and expertise with computers or martial arts or profiling, or whatever else each agent specializes in.
“Bishop and his people can’t do their jobs if other law enforcement officials can’t take them seriously. Any hint of some vast, mysterious conspiracy linking abducted psychics, and his unit would be laughed out of the Bureau. It’s in his best interests to keep our secrets to himself, and nobody knows that better than he does.”
After a moment, Brodie said, “I don’t doubt his intent. Much. But in a unit full of telepaths—”
“Listen, you know that old saying about how two people can keep a secret only if one of them is dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we both know people can keep a secret. People can keep a lot of secrets, for a long time. If the stakes are high enough. If the secrets are important enough. If it matters enough.” She paused. “It matters to Bishop. What’s happening to psychics, the threat against them. It matters to him. If we need him to, he’ll take our secrets to his grave.”
—
Henry McCord had a lifetime of practice in hiding what he could do. Thirty-six years, more or less. He could actually remember the first time he had seen a spirit.
At his grandfather’s funeral. The old man had stood on the other side of the casket and winked at him.
Henry had been six.
So, thirty years of learning to cope in whatever way he could. Realizing early on that grown-ups didn’t want him to talk about the dead people, that it made them really uncomfortable. Which had puzzled a childish Henry, since it seemed they would have liked to know that something of themselves survived death. It had reassured Henry, at least then.
Now . . . he didn’t even know if he still believed that. And despite his several conversations with Bishop, he was still unconvinced that he could ever learn to control his abilities well enough to make some use of them. He had tried to open a connection, a “door,” Bishop had called it, without success. He had tried meditation and biofeedback, which had left him feeling calm but still unable to see spirits when he wanted to.
There had even been a few dark times when he’d tried both alcohol and various drugs, also to no effect. Except to leave him grateful that he didn’t have an addictive personality.
So Henry went on with his pseudo-normal life, as an architect who specialized in restoring historic old buildings, and never told anyone—except Bishop—that his seemingly uncanny knack for finding valuable original doors and windows and other fixtures for old houses was simply the fact that most original owners showed him where to look.
He never asked. They just appeared and showed him.
Unlike what he’d seen in various movies and TV shows about ghosts and hauntings, Henry had never had to face a negative experience. No angry or malevolent spirits, no spirits that looked disfigured or deformed or even showed the causes of their deaths.
Just helpful spirits dressed in period costume who led the way through basements and attics and storage buildings to things that belonged in whatever building he was restoring.
His own theory was that because he was restoring old buildings to their former glory, there was no reason why any spirit should have negative feelings toward him. Bishop had said it wasn’t that simple, but Henry hadn’t been interested in learning more and it had showed.
Just because he had to live with this didn’t mean he especially wanted to understand how it worked.
So Henry went about his life as though everything were normal. He did his work, talked to investors and clients and landlords, and of course an endless parade of inspectors whose job it was to make sure he was doing his job correctly. And followed a seemingly endless succession of spirits to odd storage areas where he recovered original fixtures and fittings and even furniture designed and built—probably on-site—for the project he was working on.
Long and erratic hours had prevented him from having much of a social life, or at least that was what he
told himself. It was okay with him, because he was a solitary soul at heart, and perfectly comfortable with his own company.
But then, while working just after the New Year on the restoration of a plantation house outside Charleston, he gradually realized that spirits had stopped showing up. Common sense told him there should be a lot of spirits at a place like this one, because it sure as hell had a lot of history.
But no spirits showed up.
He hadn’t tried reaching out for them in a pretty long time, and didn’t consciously do so then. But, entirely without thinking about it, he opened a door.
Almost at once, he was aware of spirits all around him. But . . . hiding somehow. Drawing back away from him, as if in fear.
Henry barely had time to register the absurdity of that when he became aware of something else. It was getting dark.
In the middle of the chilly January day, inside a huge house whose many windows let in lots of light, it was getting dark.
He thought maybe a rare winter thunderstorm was brewing up at first, but when he turned to look at one of the windows, he saw that it was very bright outside, the sunlight glinting off the windshield of his car. And the glimpse he could catch of the sky showed it clear and blue.
But it was getting darker all the same.
Close the door!
Close the door, hurry!
Henry, you have to close the door!
“What the hell?” he muttered. Because the spirits had never talked to him. They led, they pointed, they smiled. Silently. Even inside his own head, only silence.
Until now.
The urgency was unmistakable, and Henry tried to close a door he wasn’t even sure how he’d been able to open.
He tried.
And then he felt as well as saw the shadows closing around him; not spirits, something else. Something that made his very soul quiver in absolute terror. He kept trying to shut the door but felt some kind of force he didn’t recognize holding the door open so they could get to him. Inky black, icy cold, sliding and blending and slithering all around him, touching him. Taking him.
The blackness swept over Henry McCord, and the last thing he remembered was suddenly wishing he hadn’t lived his life quite so alone.
—
It was one of her volunteer days at the shelter, and Tasha was grateful to be busy and occupied, even above the satisfaction she always felt in doing the work of helping abandoned dogs and cats. And there were people around all day, people she knew, people she had never once felt threatened by in any way, so that helped too.
For a while she was almost able to forget a threat existed.
Almost.
At the end of the day she went along with a few others to a casual restaurant near the shelter, because they were all tired and the only decision they wanted to make about dinner was to point at something that looked good on a menu.
So it was a bit later than usual when she pulled her car into her space outside the condo, well after the winter night darkness descended. Her space was as close as possible to the building, another of her attempts at safety and security. And the entire parking area was, actually, designed with safety in mind. It was well lit and surrounded by wrought-iron fencing that was attractive but would also be difficult to scale; residents gained access to the small courtyard via a gate that, as part of the entire security system, was manned around the clock.
The guard manning the gatehouse tonight had been cheerful and calm, nothing at all in his bearing indicating he felt at all uneasy about the security of the parking lot that was his area of responsibility.
And still, with all that, Tasha found herself hurrying to the building’s door, hurrying to swipe her card and punch in the code, hurrying to close the door behind her.
She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath, and for way too long, until she leaned against the wall by the door and heard it escape her tense body in a rush.
Dammit.
Tasha hated to feel so . . . out of control.
Someone was watching her. She knew someone was watching her. But she couldn’t see them, didn’t know where they were or who they were—or why the hell they were watching her at all. She wasn’t being paranoid, she knew that. She was being watched.
Because she was psychic, that other voice in her head had told her the previous night. The voice that, all day today and even now, even when she let herself think about it, was absent.
“Everything all right, Ms. Solomon?”
She started and looked at the security guard. “Yes. Yes, of course, everything’s fine, Hawes.”
His last name, no title; it was the compromise the security staff and residents had reached after some debate when the building had been completed and waiting residents moved in. No one liked the formality of honorifics or titles for the security staff or the informality of first names on either side, so they were left with this.
So far, it worked.
“I’m heading back toward the elevator,” Hawes said.
Tasha managed a brief laugh. “Do I look . . .” She didn’t quite know how to finish that.
“It’s an odd night,” Hawes said, matter-of-factly. “Most everybody who’s been out tonight has come home jumpy. I expect it’s the full moon. Affects people even when they don’t realize.”
Tasha hadn’t even realized the moon was full.
She headed for the elevator, Hawes walking more or less beside her. He was a former cop, she knew that much, a Chicago street cop who had chosen to semi-retire in a warm southern city.
Most of the security staff had the same sort of background, former cops or retired military, if anything overtrained for security jobs in a residential condo. They were all very calm and seemingly unflappable, the women as well as the men; the security staff was roughly one-third female, while the concierge staff was about two-thirds female.
Every single one of them a trained professional who at least appeared to take this job as seriously as they had taken their previous ones.
So how had those men gotten past them the night before?
Tasha almost asked Hawes about it. Almost.
Instead, keeping questions and doubts to herself, she stepped into the elevator when the doors opened and lifted a hand in farewell as they began to close. “Good night.”
“Good night, Ms. Solomon.”
The ride to the third floor was brief and uneventful. The hallway was empty of any threat. The apartments she passed on the way to hers were quiet no matter what activities might have been going on inside, thanks to excellent soundproofing.
For the first time, Tasha thought that maybe the soundproofing shouldn’t be quite so good.
Because if anyone inside were to cry out for help . . .
Refusing to finish that thought, she let herself into her apartment. The lights she always turned on before leaving were still burning; she hated walking into a dark room, always had.
Even before all this, before she’d been conscious of any threat against her, she had hated walking into darkness.
I wonder why. Did I always know there was a threat out there somewhere, sometime? No. No, that’s stupid.
No inner but alien voice offered a response.
She didn’t put her purse down as usual but first methodically searched the apartment. Just as she had after those men had left. Every room, every closet, every cabinet; she opened everything that was closed and checked thoroughly inside.
She found nothing, which should have made her feel at least a bit better.
It really didn’t.
Tasha turned on the TV in the living room more for background noise than anything else, and chose a channel that tended to run science documentaries. The one airing at that time appeared to be something about how life in the universe had begun.
She went into her lamplit bedroom, hesitated fo
r a moment, then gathered up her pajamas and went into the bathroom, pushing the door to behind her. Living alone, it really wasn’t her habit to close doors between rooms, but her edginess also made her feel oddly exposed.
It made sense, she thought. When you knew someone was watching you, you felt watched all the time, even safely alone behind walls and draperies and locked doors.
Security is an illusion.
Her own inner voice, reminding herself of something she had no need to be reminded of. She wasn’t safe here, and it was both useless and stupid to pretend otherwise.
She stripped, put her clothing into the hamper, and then took a long, hot shower. The water felt good, breathing in the steam felt good, and Tasha felt considerably better and more relaxed when she finally stepped out of the shower. She wrapped her hair in one towel and dried off with another, rubbed a lavender-scented body lotion into muscles that had worked hard that day, and then pulled on her pajamas.
It wasn’t until she was loosening the towel covering her hair that she turned toward the mirror. It was steamed over, not surprisingly. But Tasha realized she could see bits of herself.
A pale green eye that was oddly wide. Strands of dark auburn hair. Her fingers near her temple as the towel fell to the floor behind her.
She could see bits of herself, she realized, because letters were written on the steamy mirror. Words that made her go cold to the bone.
YOU CAN’T HIDE, TASHA.
FIVE
“I thought you would have made contact today,” Murphy said.
“No good opportunity.” Brodie shook his head. “I’m glad she’s cautious, but it isn’t making it easy to approach her. She’s never really alone.”
“Not necessarily a bad thing.”
“True. And I’ll probably have to make contact with her in some public place just so she’ll feel relatively safe. Besides, since Duran has already made one move, he’s more likely than not to move against her again sooner rather than later.”
“I’d still like to know how she showed up on his radar.” Duran was one of the few enemies, a leader on the “other” side, that they could put a face to, yet their best investigators had been able to find out nothing more about him than a name that led nowhere. He was a cipher.
