Sleeping With Fear (21 page)

R
iley could command a literal arsenal of hand-to-hand combat techniques, everything from exotic martial arts to down-and-dirty street fighting, and it was the latter instincts that guided her in this particular instance.

With lightning speed, she reached back and grabbed him, her hand squeezing with full strength and short nails digging into his testicles.

He howled in agony and let go of her, and as he fell she twisted expertly and ended up facing him-with his gun in her hands.

Curled on the ground clutching his bruised flesh, gagging and moaning, he was so wrapped up in his own suffering that Riley was reasonably sure he was blind and deaf to everything else around him for at least a couple of long minutes.

She waited him out, his own gun trained on him, and, when he showed signs of beginning to recover, spoke calmly.

"Nature gave you greater size, more muscle, more aggression. Your edge. She also gave you balls." Riley cocked the revolver she had taken from him. "My edge."

Jake didn't even try to get up, and wheezed a few times before he was able to say, "Jesus…you fight dirty."

"I fight to win," she told him. "Always."

He wheezed some more, finally getting out, "I figured…you'd use some…of that…martial…arts shit."

"Yeah, I could have. But this way was more fun." Even as the flippant words left her, Riley had a realization, and there was no humor in her voice when she added, "You shouldn't be here. Goddammit, Jake, what're you doing here?"

He made a halfhearted attempt to rise, then fell back with a groan. "Shit, Riley, you told me to meet you here. Said you had it all figured out, and-"

She lowered the gun but continued to hold it in a practiced two-handed grip. "Then why did you grab me?"

"For the hell of it," he replied with another groan, this one more theatrical than real. "I thought you might try to throw me over your shoulder or something, but-Jesus Christ, Riley-"

Typical macho bullshit, she thought, not sparing the energy to even be indignant or disgusted by it. He'd been curious about her self-defense skills, and he'd wanted to get his hands on her.

Figured.

Some of her energy was focused on maintaining the deceptively foggy surface of her mind, but she spared a few tendrils to reach out and probe the clearing.

Absently, she said to Jake, "Stay down, understand? Don't even try to get up. I didn't call you myself, did I? Somebody passed on a message?"

"What're you talking about?"

"Who told you I wanted to meet you, Jake? Or can I guess?" She raised her voice. "You can come out, Leah."

There was a moment of silence, and then the tall redhead stepped into the clearing on the other side. And into the circle. She was definitely out of uniform, wearing a long black robe. The hood was down, allowing her long red hair to gleam in the bright moonlight.

"When did you know?" she asked calmly.

"Slow on the uptake, I'm afraid," Riley answered, matching the other woman's calm. "Today-or yesterday, rather-just before you started yanking my mind around. I figured out there was a connection I had missed. Gordon said it. That he didn't believe in coincidence. Ash and me both here, each with a past connection to John Henry Price, that was what he was thinking. Couldn't be coincidence. And wasn't. You wanted Ash in this. That's why it had to be here. In Castle. Because this is where you found Ash. Right?"

Leah smiled faintly. "I may have underestimated you."

Riley kept going. "Ash was here, and he wasn't going anywhere. He was the only one who had come close to putting Price behind bars where he belonged. And it didn't matter to you that he'd failed. It mattered to you that he had dared."

"He shouldn't have done that," Leah said. "It was…upsetting. The trial. All the watching eyes. We don't like watching eyes."

Riley resisted the temptation to follow that tangent. "So it had to be here. Where you'd make your stand and even all the scores. You'd already met Gordon. Probably in Charleston, when he was looking for his retirement spot. That was the question I forgot to ask him, you know, who it was suggested Opal Island as a nice place to retire. I had it backwards, thanks to that sweet little story you spun for me about picking Castle by sticking a pin in a map. I thought he was already here when you came. But it was the other way around, wasn't it, Leah?"

"I'm going to regret Gordon, I think," she replied. "He's been fun. And amazingly easy to handle. Most men are, I've found."

It was taking everything Riley had to split her focus, to keep her eyes on Leah, her voice even and calm as she talked, while another part of her consciousness was reaching out in another direction entirely.

Everything she had was-she hoped-just enough.

"You had already picked your group of satanists," she went on. "Thanks to Price and his interests, you knew the right people. Knew how to find what you were looking for. A tame group ready to relocate, a member with an ex-husband hoping to reconcile. It was, as you say, easy enough to manipulate Wesley Tate. Maybe you went out with him once or twice and found out about Jenny that way."

Leah shrugged, still smiling.

"You had almost all the players ready. Gordon was here. Ash was here. Tate was primed to get his ex-wife and her group here. I was next. To get me here, you needed to worry Gordon. So you did. By planting all those little signs of occult activity. I don't know, maybe you planted a bit more than signs. Maybe you planted the worry in Gordon, or strengthened it. So he'd contact me."

Riley took a half step to one side, coming around just a bit to face the other woman more squarely.

She didn't raise Jake's gun.

"And I came. All according to your plan. Or was it his plan? Does your father control you even from his grave, Leah?"

That surprised Leah, her smile fading and tension visible as she stiffened.

Riley nodded. "He really didn't like women, but he had tried to be what he believed was normal. No marriage on the books, no girlfriend we could ever find, so I'm betting your mother was a one-night stand. What was she, Leah, some hooker he paid to help him get it up?"

Leah's head moved slightly in an odd, twisted way-and in the circle all the candles flared suddenly brighter.

The extra light allowed Riley to see what she had been afraid of seeing. In the center of the circle, lying limply across the flat altar stone, was Jenny.

Not dead yet: The long, curved blade of the knife Leah held was not yet bloodied. But the dark woman was clearly unconscious.

Riley was still trying to hide the part of her mind and senses that was reaching desperately for a connection, so she made her voice a bit slow and uncertain.

"I guess the darkest energy would come from the sacrifice of a priestess, wouldn't it? And you need the darkest energy tonight. A full moon, a satanic priestess. What else, Leah? Does Jenny have some of your blood in her stomach like Tate did?"

"So you figured that out, did you?"

"That it was your blood? Had to be, really. Whoever planned that sacrifice had saved and stored the blood. And you really couldn't afford to have another body turn up before your plan was under way. So it had to be your blood."

"My father's blood."

Riley didn't allow herself to be distracted. "I'm betting you were a teenager when he found you. Or you found him. Evil calling out to evil, I imagine. It does that, we've found. Anyway, he had his apprentice. His blood princess. And you were good, I'll give you that. The whole time I was tracking him, you were on me, weren't you? I was focused on him, so obsessed I was blind to you being right there. Watching me. Reporting back to him."

"He would have beaten you," Leah said suddenly, her voice changing, dropping and taking on a guttural edge. "That was the plan. To seem to be shot. To fall into the river. So we could stop running. So we could settle somewhere."

"What went wrong?"

"So stupid and senseless. The body armor he wore saved him from your bullets. But it was heavy. The current was stronger than we'd anticipated. And he was winded from the chase. He drowned."

"Pity," Riley said without remorse. "I was hoping he really suffered."

Again, Leah's head moved in that stiff, twisted way, and again the candles flared, this time as though the flames were fed by gas jets. The clearing was nearly as bright as day, the woods around them dark and shadowed.

From the corner of her eye, Riley made sure Jake was still. And he was. In shock, probably, she thought. Shock of the emotional kind. Or total bewilderment.

She said, "I guess you've been having a lot of fun messing with my head, huh?"

"You have no idea," Leah said. "You were a challenge at first. I was only able to cloak my mind without affecting yours very much. That's why I resorted to the Taser."

"Yeah, that plus all the dark energy you were channeling, especially from the sacrifice, was enough to get the job done. And I'll bet you really enjoyed butchering Wesley Tate. Chip off the old block, aren't you?"

"I am my father's daughter."

Riley thought she had never heard anything so chilling as that proud statement. She drew a breath and fought to keep her own voice even and steady.

"So it was all about payback. You took your time, set up the situation just as you wanted it. Used the satanists as window dressing, something to keep us distracted while you were performing all the black rites alone. Using fire. Using blood. Using death. Whatever it took to get the power you wanted, you needed. To destroy me. Not just kill me. Destroy me."

"You took away my father. You have to pay for that," Leah said reasonably.

"Your father was a sadistic bag of evil," Riley said in a matching tone. "The world needed to be rid of him. The sane world, at least."

Leah stiffened again but laughed, the sound like brittle sticks rattling together. "You don't seem to get it, little girl. I've already beaten you. I've stolen time from you. I've wrecked your memories. I've fixed it so you don't even remember falling in love. How sad is that?"

"Now, see,
that's
the one step too far. That's the one that's going to cost you, Leah. Because I understand the need for vengeance. Makes perfect sense to me. Even to avenge a sadistic bag of evil like Price. I get that. But the memory of finding my soul mate? I want that back. And you're going to give it to me."

This time Leah's laugh was a bit-just a bit-uncertain. "What you don't get is that you've lost. Your mind is so weak there's no way it can even fight me, much less take back what I stole from it."

"You're right. I'm not strong enough to beat you. Not alone. But that's what
you
don't get, Leah. I'm not alone." Riley reached back with one hand and felt Ash's fingers close around hers.

There was a frozen moment when Leah realized, understood. She lifted her knife and lunged toward Jenny's prone body.

Needing the sacrifice. The power.

Riley fired one shot, hitting Leah in the hand so that the knife fell from her suddenly useless fingers.

"No," she said hoarsely. "I won't let you-"

Riley had never tried to do anything even remotely like this before, yet somehow she knew exactly what to do. When Leah gathered her fury, all her emotions, and screamed, sending a visible, jagged spear of dark energy from the circle aimed at Riley, it didn't find its target as a weapon, but as a tool.

It was almost like the Taser attack that had really started everything, only this time Riley wasn't caught, wasn't trapped, and was a long, long way from defenseless. And this time she didn't discharge her strength into the earth but channeled the sheer energy flung at her, took from it what she was determined to have, and then sent what was left streaming back to its source.

But when it returned to Leah, it was white-hot and burning, and her second scream shattered the night even as the energy shattered her circle of power. There was an almost blinding burst of light, the scream was cut off as though by a knife, and then it was over.

The candles were gone. The salt scattered to the winds. And clean moonlight shone down on the two women closest to the altar, one of them just beginning to stir and the other a crumpled form on the ground.

"Is she dead?" Ash asked.

"No," Riley answered. "But powerless now. Jenny was drugged, but she's coming out of it. She should be fine."

"With a stomach full of blood, she's going to be sick."

"Well, after that, she'll be fine. I don't know if she'll go back to being a satanist, but she'll live."

"Thanks to you."

She turned and looked at him, smiling. "Thanks to us. Hello. I remember you."

Ash was smiling as well. "Good."

Jake struggled to rise from the ground, his "What the bloody
hell
is all this?" several octaves higher than he, perhaps, would have preferred.

Riley glanced at him, and then said to her soul mate, "I have a feeling the debriefing is going to take some time."

"That's okay," Ash said, pulling her into his arms. "We have time."

G
ordon admitted he'd been feeling uneasy about Leah for weeks before he called me," Riley said. "It was nothing he could put his finger on, just a feeling something wasn't right. When all the supposed evidence of occult activities began turning up, he thought maybe that was it, that somebody'd put a hex on her or something like that."

Ash raised his eyebrows. "A hex?"

"Hey, we've all seen weirder things, believe me. And Gordon's Louisiana roots run deep. Thing is, stories his grandmother told him clash with his Duke education, so he has a tendency to doubt his own instincts when it comes to the paranormal."

"Duke, huh? I guess that also explains why he's drawling one minute and talking like a college professor the next."

"Yeah, that explains it." Riley leaned against the deck railing and gazed down the beach, where a bonfire burned brightly-surrounded by a rather sober group of satanists. It was Friday night, and they were having their scheduled "marshmallow roast."

"I don't think they're having much fun," Ash noted.

"No. Too much to take in, probably. Even though they weren't involved, they got too close to the dark side for a while. The very dark side. That tends to give people pause."

"I can see how it would."

Riley smiled slightly, without looking at him. "But not you, right?"

"Any pausing I did was early on," he said. "Back when we were both cranky about falling in love. Once we fell, there really wasn't anything to be done about it. Except enjoy."

"Glad you added that last part."

"Probably a good thing I can. I mean, I'm hitching my fate to a clairvoyant ex-military FBI agent who specializes in the occult and has the power to yank me out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night and draw me miles to her side in order to help her defeat the evil spawn of a serial killer."

Riley chewed on her lower lip for a moment, and said, "Well, when you put it like that…"

"I'm a very brave man."

"Yes. You are." Riley turned and smiled at him in the bright moonlight. "Bishop's going to try to recruit you, you know." It wasn't quite a question.

"I had a feeling."

"Well, we'd make a hell of a team."

Ash pulled her into his arms. "We already do, love."

It was all the answer Riley needed.