Blood Ties (15 page)

“Then,” Miranda said, “we have a completely different investigation on our hands.”

*
Chill of Fear

Seven

Haven

T
HE BOY WAS JUST BEGINNING
to toss and turn in his bed, muffled little sobs escaping him, when Maggie Garrett got her hands on him. Almost at once, he stilled, quieted.

Sitting on the side of his bed, Maggie kept her hands on him. Her head was bowed, eyes closed.

Ruby Campbell watched silently from the doorway, her tiny poodle, Lexie, in her arms. It was a scene Ruby had witnessed many times since she and Cody had come here weeks before, but it still fascinated her to watch the shadows of emotions flit across Maggie’s face, the pain and fear and grief.

Because they weren’t Maggie’s emotions but Cody’s. She absorbed them, took into herself all the horrible memories and fears that tormented the little boy, and gave of her own healing energy to make him whole again. So he could sleep for the rest of tonight and maybe smile tomorrow.

Ruby knew this was helping Cody, because it was helping her. Helping her to accept that her father was gone and that her mother, back in Grace, at the church, was only the physical shell of the person she had once been.
^*
A smiling, pleasant shell with no memory, as far as anyone could tell, that she had once loved a daughter named Ruby.

It was still very hard, accepting that. But Maggie helped. And Ruby was more grateful than she had words to express. Because it didn’t hurt quite so much now. Because she was with people who accepted and understood what she could do, people who cared about her. And because she felt safe here, safe in a way she hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

Maggie took away Cody’s nightmare and soothed him back into a peaceful sleep as Ruby watched. And then she tucked the covers around him gently and got to her feet.

“Ruby, honey, what are you doing up?” Maggie spoke quietly as she came away from the bed.

“I knew Cody was having nightmares,” Ruby answered simply. “Even with the lamp on, he still has them.”

“I see.” With a gentle hand, Maggie guided Ruby back out into the hallway; with her other, she pulled Cody’s bedroom door almost closed. “Well, he’ll sleep now. And he won’t have another nightmare tonight.”

“I know. Because you took his nightmare away, let it scare you instead of him.” Ruby looked up into what she thought of as the sweetest face she’d ever seen, a pretty face surrounded by a cloud of dark red hair. Gentle golden eyes smiled down at her.

A real face, with nothing different underneath. Nothing bad. Nothing ever bad
.

“Something like that.” Maggie turned her toward the bedroom just across the hall and added, “The sun’s not even up yet; go back to bed, honey. Does Lexie need to go out?”

“No, I took her out when she woke me up hours ago.”

“Okay, then. You two get some sleep, and we’ll see you at breakfast.”

“Good night, Maggie.”

“Good night, Ruby.” Maggie didn’t move from in front of the children’s bedroom doors for some time but stood there with her eyes closed, all her senses focused, until she was satisfied that neither of them was frightened or even uneasy. That Cody was sleeping peacefully and Ruby beginning to drift off as well.

Then she opened her eyes and, rubbing the back of her neck somewhat wearily, walked down the long corridor. She passed several closed bedroom doors before turning a corner into a shorter hallway that led to the lamplit master suite.

“Did he wake up this time?” John asked.

“No, I got to him before he could.” Maggie shrugged off her robe, then climbed into the big bed beside her husband. “Ruby was awake, though. Again. Said she knew Cody was having a nightmare. Those two definitely share a connection. If the genetic tests Bishop ordered hadn’t proven otherwise, I’d think they were siblings.”

John Garrett pulled her into his arms, her back against his front, so that they spooned, so that he could help warm her slightly chilled body—a physical consequence of the energy she drew on in order to connect empathically with someone else. He drew the covers up around her and then held her as he felt her begin to relax. He wasn’t the least bit psychic, but he knew how tired she was. He also knew from experience that it would require some time for her to relax enough to be able to sleep again and that talking quietly helped more than silence.

“This is taking a lot out of you,” he said.

“I’ll be fine. Besides, what’s the point of all this if I can’t help them? They’re just kids, John. They shouldn’t even have to remember everything they’ve been through, much less have to relive the pain and horror of it over and over again.”

“Except that our tragedies shape who we are every bit as much as our triumphs do,” he said. It was an old debate. “They need to remember, babe. They don’t need to hurt, I agree with you there. They don’t need to have nightmares. But they should remember what they’ve lost. What they’ve been through. It’s important.”

“Yeah, well, since I don’t have the ability to take away their memories, they’ll remember.”

“Would you, if you could? Really?”

She was silent for a moment, then sighed. “No, I suppose not. But it’s… hard. Feeling what they feel. Samuel was a monster, that cult he created incredibly destructive, and the damage both did is going to linger on for years, maybe for lifetimes. These kids will carry the scars of what he did to them all the way to their graves.”

His arms tightened around her. “I know. But
you
have to know that you make things better for them. Dull the pain, help them conquer the fear. Without you, it’d take years of therapy for them to get past what’s happened to them. If they even could. Bishop made that plain enough.”

“Well, he was there. He saw. And I’m pretty sure both the kids talked to him; he has a way with kids.”

“I noticed. But am I wrong in believing his interest in them isn’t entirely based on compassion?”

“I think you know him well enough to trust your own instincts on that one.”

“Okay. So what is it? Does he believe one of them is this ‘absolute psychic’ he’s convinced is out there somewhere?”

“I don’t think so. Bishop’s absolute psychic, theoretically, has absolute control over his or her abilities. That’s not the case here. But these kids… They have a lot of power, John. We don’t have to put them in a lab and hook them up to machines to know that. A lot of power they’ve spent their young lifetimes struggling with.”

“Is that why it’s still taking so much out of you to help them, even after weeks?”

“I think so. For so long they’ve had to protect themselves, to hide inside their own minds. But… that’s where the pain is. And the fear. It’s where I have to go to help them.” Her voice was finally be ginning to grow sleepy. “The thing is… that’s where the power is too….”

John could feel his wife relax totally, in that boneless way that told him she was asleep. He listened to her breathe for a while, his cheek against the soft thickness of her hair as he held her securely.

Sometimes he could almost convince himself that he could keep her safe always. Sometimes.

But it never lasted, that certainty. Because Maggie never hesitated to go willingly into the dark horrors of pain and terror that were other people’s traumas, absorbing those destructive emotions into herself in order to heal the sufferers.

It was what she did. It was who she was.

John had only recently nerved himself to ask Bishop if there might be a limit to what Maggie could ultimately endure.

“I wish I could answer that, John, but I can’t. The theory is, Maggie’s innate sense of self-preservation would stop her from absorbing more than she can handle. Stop her from expending too much of her own energy to heal others. But we don’t know that’s true.”

“And if it isn’t? You’re telling me this could kill her?”

“I’m telling you we don’t know. That’s why we work as hard as we can to learn as much as we can about these abilities. For answers to questions like yours. In the meantime, we’re all feeling our way, if not blindly then certainly in the dark.” Bishop paused. “I know none of this is what you bargained for. But you know as well as anyone that we give hostages to fortune. That we can’t always protect those hostages, hard as we try. Not with all our strength. Not with all our determination. Not with all the knowledge and abilities we can command.”

John knew the mantra. “Because some things have to happen just the way they happen.”

“Some things. Not everything. I’m a bad loser, John. You’re a bad loser. So we’ll hold on to what’s ours with all our might.”

“And beat fortune?”

“Bend it at least. When we can. As much as we can.”

John tightened his arms gently around his sleeping wife, then turned his head slightly toward the bedroom window, watching the rising sun pierce the blood-red horizon.

If I was a superstitious man, I’d call that a bad omen
.

Good thing he wasn’t at all superstitious.

“John?”

He looked at the doorway to see Ruby standing there, her eyes huge in her very pale face. Even the tiny poodle in her arms looked fearful.

“Ruby, what—”

“Something bad’s going to happen. Something really bad.”

Serenade

I
t was nearly ten that morning, and Hollis had just begun reading through her second file of the day when she saw it. “Shit.”

All around the room, her fellow team members looked up from their laptops, but it was Miranda who said, “What is it?”

“Victim number five, Wesley Davidson.” Hollis kept her voice even. “He was born in Hastings, South Carolina. I worked my first case there almost two years ago. A serial killer who went after blondes.”
^*

Miranda said, “You were teamed with Isabel.”

“Yeah.”

“And used up one of your nine lives there, if I remember correctly,” Quentin contributed.

“At the time, I thought I’d used up the only life I had.” Hollis frowned at the screen of her laptop. “I’m barely into the file, so there may be more—but isn’t that enough? A connection, however tenuous, to a past case?”

“Well,” Quentin said, “given that Taryn Holder—assuming our female victim here is identified as her—just stayed at The Lodge and was last seen leaving there, with no further connection I’ve been able to find, and Vaughan-Seymour was peripheral to the investigation of Samuel’s cult, I’d say mark that one as connected and move on to another file. But I’m not the boss.”

Miranda smiled faintly. “The boss agrees—more or less. Read all the way through the file if you don’t mind, Hollis. Something else may jump out at you.”

DeMarco said, “Three victims out of eight establishes a pattern, at least to my mind.”

“Yes,” Miranda agreed. “But is there any kind of meaning in the pattern, other than some vague connection to the SCU? If this
is
about us—about the unit or Noah—I’d expect there to be more to the pattern than what we’ve seen so far. A killer smart enough and driven enough to have chosen his victims like this is the sort who’d want to show off. And show up those of us investigating his crimes.”

“Catch me if you can,” Diana murmured. “If you’re smart enough to put together the puzzle pieces I’ve left for you.”

“Exactly.”

Hollis nodded. “So we keep reading.”

“We keep reading. And I think it’s time we set up a couple of whiteboards and begin charting all this—now that we have something to chart. The rest of the supplies should be in the SUVs we locked up at the sheriff’s department last night.”

DeMarco got to his feet. “I’ll go. Since I’ve been undercover and off the grid for the past two years and more, I’m the least likely to recognize one of the connections to past SCU investigations.”

Miranda tossed him the keys. “I’m not sure what’s packed where, but you should be able to leave one of the vehicles where it is for now.”

“Copy that.”

As he left the dining room, Hollis rubbed the back of her neck, already feeling the strain of sitting for too long in one position at her laptop. She shifted a bit in her chair, thinking she was stiffening up, and only then realized that she was cold.

Very cold. As if someone had suddenly opened a window into winter.

The physical reaction was always the same. All the fine hairs on her body stood out as though electrical energy filled the room, and goose bumps rose on her flesh as the chill spread through her.

And there was still a jolt of fear—less now, but still that uncomfortable sense that some doors were never intended to be opened by the living. Not, at least, without some dreadful cost.

Slowly, Hollis forced herself to look up.

At first, the room appeared just as it had been, with her fellow agents intent on their workstations and oblivious to her sudden tension.

“Hollis.”

She caught her breath and turned her gaze to the doorway that DeMarco had passed through only moments before.

Not quite in the dining room but a couple of steps out in the foyer stood a familiar figure. Appearing entirely solid and hardly ghostlike, she had long fair hair and an anxious expression.

“Hollis, go after him.” Her voice was clear and strong.

“What?” Hollis was barely aware that Diana was gazing at her in puzzlement, that Miranda and Quentin exchanged looks before beginning to rise from their chairs.

“Go after him. Stop him.
Now.”

“Why? Andrea, what’re you—”

“If you don’t stop him, he’ll die. Do you understand? He’ll
die
. There’s a bomb in one of the cars.”

Quentin said, “Hey, is she—”

Hollis didn’t hear the rest. She jumped up so abruptly that her chair fell over behind her with a crash, and she raced from the room. Andrea had already vanished by the time she reached the foyer, but Hollis hardly noticed.

She flung open the front door, banged through the screen door, and was across the wide porch and jumping over the steps down to the walkway before she could even begin to look for DeMarco. She drew in a deep breath to yell his name.