FOUR
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7
Victoria Stark leaned back against the front of her white Chevy Cruze and watched as excellent artificial lighting held back the night and allowed her to see the sleek private jet touch down on the single long runway of this small private airstrip. She wondered idly who the airstrip belonged to. There was, as far as she could tell, no name posted anywhere; Bishop had given her turn-by-turn directions from the nearest main highway but hadn’t referred to her destination as anything other than “the airstrip.”
It was a remote place in a small and otherwise apparently deserted valley in the Appalachians, but very well kept, with a staffed office; a control tower that, though small, was clearly adequate and well staffed as well; and a small group of quiet but efficient people who took care of whatever traffic landed here.
Two somewhat unusual-looking large green helicopters had only a half hour before been towed from the big hangar, gleaming and obviously ready to go . . . wherever. And several people stood ready to guide the jet to its place near the hangar and the choppers, should it need guidance.
Since she’d arrived just before dark some hours ago, Victoria had gotten the chance to explore and to observe, an opportunity she hadn’t had on her single prior visit here years before.
She had already eyed with faint interest the simultaneous arrival of a big black SUV that practically screamed federal vehicle, a more nondescript Jeep, a Bronco, and a very nice but not new light-colored BMW X5 SUV. All were parked out to the side of the small office that adjoined the hangar, not far from where she waited with her own car. The drivers had parked the vehicles, apparently leaving the keys inside, and then had all gotten into another black SUV and driven away, without saying anything to anyone as far as Victoria had been able to see.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Coffee had been offered when she’d arrived, and it was gratefully accepted; the temperature at this altitude had already been dropping, promising a bracingly chilly October evening. Especially to someone who had come from the far warmer city of New Orleans.
She had also been invited to wait inside the small office section, where there was a warm, comfortable if small lounge area with newspapers, magazines, and a flat-screen offering, a woman named Karen had told her pleasantly, satellite channels, and a recliner comfortable enough for a nap.
Instead, refusing the offer with polite thanks, Victoria had wandered around on foot for a while, drinking her coffee and stretching her legs after the long trip north. Not thinking about why she was here, but distracting her mind with far more trivial things. About the airstrip. The people who had delivered vehicles so silently and efficiently, and those who clearly worked here in other capacities in what appeared to be a 24/7, year-round operation. All were pleasant, smiling—and not disposed to talk overmuch. Were they feds? She didn’t know. Maybe only technical support? Private security? She hadn’t seen a sign of anyone being armed, and nobody had objected to her wandering, either before or after darkness had fallen.
She found that interesting.
Victoria had entered the office area only once more, for a second cardboard cup of coffee that she carried back outside. That plus the jacket she’d gotten from her car left her warm enough to remain outside. And allowed her to witness the arrival of at least part of the group gathering here, probably for no more than a few minutes before they’d be choppered up to the mountain house.
The jet taxied to within about twenty yards from the hangar, closer to her at this end of the structure, and its roar quieted and then dropped off even more to a low rumble as men carrying blocks hurried to place them in front of and behind the wheels.
Victoria watched as the jet’s door opened, the stairs that were part of the door let down with it. She wasn’t very surprised when Bishop was first off the plane, heading immediately toward her. His lithe, almost feline grace and deceptively easy stride marked him as an athletic man very comfortable in his own skin, and Victoria thought every time she saw him that he was physically more powerful than he looked and that he wielded a great deal more of other kinds of power than even the massive government organization to which he belonged could boast.
He could, she believed, be a very dangerous man.
He was most certainly the first man she would turn to in times of trouble. Any kind of trouble.
Beating him to the punch, she said as he reached her, “I knew you’d get us eventually. I made a bet with Sully. He owes me a hundred bucks.”
“He didn’t think I’d get you?”
“Not in less than five years. I guessed within three. So I win.”
Bishop smiled faintly. “How have you been, Victoria?”
“Fine,” she said mildly. “Until this morning. Still wondering if you had anything to do with that, by the way.”
“Not one of my abilities,” he said, equally mild. “If I could summon psychics from thousands of miles away, I think I would have known about it before now.”
“Then who—or what—did?”
“That is the question, isn’t it? One of them, at least. Are you ready to go up to the house?”
“Yeah. Bag’s in the backseat. Do I lock up the car?”
“Not unless you want to. Excuse me for a minute.” He headed toward the office end of the building, apparently to make or finalize arrangements, and Victoria remained where she was, watching others disembark from the jet, only two carrying bags like her duffel.
She knew them, to varying degrees. Except the one bringing up the rear, carrying three bags in his large hands. He was very large all over, an obviously powerful man who looked like he worked out hard for a living and then tossed around granite boulders for fun. Big granite boulders.
Miranda reached her first; she was carrying a single bag. “Hey, Victoria.”
“Miranda. Who’s the big guy?”
“I forgot you hadn’t met Galen. He’s SCU.”
Victoria glanced past her to look at the big man again. “He doesn’t look much like a healer,” she said. She had always been interested in names and their meanings and origins.
“You’d be surprised,” Miranda murmured. “If we’re leaving as quickly as I believe we are, I’ll introduce you up at the house.”
“Yeah, I thought Bishop wasn’t wasting any time, at least not getting us to Base.” Then she looked past Miranda again, this time at the other woman she definitely recognized. “Hey, Olivia.”
“Hey, Tory.” The only person Victoria allowed to get away with the diminutive of her name, Olivia was, at twenty-eight, two years older than Victoria, but at five-foot-nothing and petite, with copper hair that framed her heart-shaped face in a simple shoulder-length cut, large blue eyes holding a faintly startled expression, plus a childlike voice, Olivia had always seemed the younger of the two.
An indignant feline howl from the carrier she held in one hand drew Victoria’s attention, and her smile widened. “I can tell Rex still hates to travel.”
“He made a horrible fuss on the jet until Bishop talked to him,” Olivia confessed. “Then he settled down for the rest of the flight, I think. But he wants out, and I think he saw the choppers. He hates them even worse than planes.” She brushed a strand of copper hair away from her face with a small, fragile hand, an unconscious sigh escaping her.
“Still the headaches?” Victoria asked with genuine sympathy, noting that the other woman’s pretty face was unusually pale even for her, and that the big eyes were darkened.
“Yeah. And since this morning worse than usual. Miranda gave me a couple of pills when the jet picked me up in Vermont, and they knocked me out for most of the flight so I got some rest, but the pain was back when I woke up.” There was nothing of complaint in her childlike voice, merely a matter-of-fact acceptance of something she lived with virtually every day of her life.
Victoria looked at Miranda. “Are we getting an actual healer to go along with us on this jaunt? I’m thinking we’ll need one, and not just to help Olivia and Sully with their headaches.”
“We’re getting the best in the unit, but Hollis and Reese won’t get here until sometime tomorrow.”
“Hollis Templeton?”
Miranda nodded.
Victoria let out a low whistle. “Heard of her. A lot. And some pretty wild stuff even for us. According to the psychic grapevine, there isn’t much she can’t do.”
“There are always limits, but it’s fair to say Hollis is still exploring hers, so we aren’t yet sure of which abilities she’ll end up with, or how strong they’ll ultimately become. In the meantime, we’re certainly hoping she can help with Olivia’s and Sully’s headaches—and any other painful problems that might come along.”
Olivia set Rex’s carrier down on the ground, ignoring the profane feline muttering from inside it, and said, “How come everybody else hears stuff on the psychic grapevine? And how do you, Tory? Telepathy’s still not your thing, right?”
“Right. No more than it’s yours.” Victoria smiled. “But this grapevine is the real sort with people—psychics—talking out loud and otherwise communicating via traditional channels. Usually on the phone. And there’s e-mail, at least for those of us who don’t short out electronics. Reno keeps in touch.”
Olivia nodded. “Oh, that grapevine. She keeps in touch with me too. But I don’t remember her mentioning anybody named Hollis.”
Victoria wasn’t surprised. Olivia was very nearly as fragile as she looked, in more ways than one, and no doubt Reno’s checking in with her had been more about making sure Olivia was all right than it was about passing on information.
Victoria had always believed that Reno was a born caretaker, though she didn’t look it and seldom sounded it. It was also interesting that her first name, more commonly given to a Latin-American male child, meant “to rise again.” Like a phoenix. Except that a phoenix rose from the ashes of its own destruction, and as far as Victoria knew, Reno had never come close to being destroyed.
Yet, at least.
She hunched her shoulders against the chill she told herself was only the October night.
Miranda was saying easily, “Things tend to happen quickly with Hollis, especially during investigations, so it’s sometimes hard to keep score. But you’ll be meeting her and Reese tomorrow.”
Victoria nodded, then said curiously, “I was wondering about Dalton. Did he call in?”
“No.”
“But he was summoned?”
Miranda nodded, smiling faintly.
Victoria looked at her for a moment, and then laughed. “Don’t tell me. You sent Reno to fetch him?”
“Do you know anybody else who could take Dalton somewhere he doesn’t want to be?”
“No,” Victoria said, and laughed again. “Not even Bishop.”
TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 7
Leslie Gardner slipped from the bed, not trying to be particularly quiet since Ed was snoring and always slept like the dead anyway. His was a curiously gentle, rhythmic snore, and she had teased him their entire married life about it. Her own personal sound machine, lulling her to sleep.
At least, it always had.
They’d been in bed by a bit after eleven, as usual after a busy weekday, and as usual he fell asleep right away.
But not Leslie. Not even her own personal sound machine helped much lately.
Her head was pounding so hard she had to feel her way to the bathroom, and when she got there and eased the door closed, she turned on only the light in the shower, dim behind its curtain.
Even that hurt her eyes.
She didn’t know what time it was except that it was late—and she had to be up early to fix the kids’ lunches and make breakfast. She needed her sleep. The supposed painkillers she’d taken hardly two hours before had not even taken the edge off the pain. She wanted to take more, but the bottle was empty.
Her head had been hurting on and off for days.
Note to self: Buy something stronger tomorrow.
There was a small, padded bench between the shower and the vanity, and Leslie sat there for what seemed like a long time, her elbows on her knees and both hands pressed to the sides of her head. It hurt.
It hurt, and somewhere inside that throbbing pain, inside her aching brain, she could have sworn she heard, very faintly, two words whispered. That was all. Just two words.
But everything in her shied away from listening to those words, even acknowledging what they were, even though the silent battle made her head hurt more. Trying not to moan with the pain, but also trying to hold back those awful words, to pretend she didn’t hear them, that everything was normal.
It was just a headache.
She talked to herself aloud, her voice soft.
“I have to sleep. I have to get back into bed with Ed and sleep. Tomorrow, things will be better. Tomorrow, things will be fine. My head won’t hurt anymore. The light won’t bother me anymore. I won’t hear impossible words. And I won’t . . . I won’t see . . . anything strange. Everything will be back to normal. I’m sure.”
She used the vanity to help lever herself upright, and clung to it for long minutes because she felt dizzy and weak. She splashed cold water on her face and dried it with a towel, resisting until that moment any glance into the mirror above the sink.
In the dim light she saw her face, pale but her own. Eyes huge and oddly . . . blurry. Maybe because of the words in her head, the words she refused to hear.
Maybe that.
Or maybe it was something else.
She stared at herself for a long minute, then looked past her left shoulder.
It was her shadow on the light-colored wall. Just that, just her shadow. Except that it had a funny red tint. That was one thing that was wrong.
The other thing that was wrong was that she shouldn’t have had a shadow just there, with the dim light in the shower. It was on the wrong side. And, besides, she shouldn’t have had a shadow at all. Not like that. Not all . . . distorted.
Not a monster shadow.
Feeling a little sick and a lot shaken, Leslie Gardner slipped back into bed beside her snoring husband, very carefully not looking to see if the shadow had followed her even here into the dark.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8
In the bedroom of a small but surprisingly cozy cottage on an all-but-deserted island in the Bahamas, Reese DeMarco woke to find himself alone. He woke early out of long habit, but not this early, not without reason.
The reason this time was the empty place beside him.
It was still dark outside, and the muffled sounds of the ocean told him it was approaching high tide only a dozen or so yards from the cottage. There was no light in the bedroom, but when he looked at the nearly closed door, he could see a light coming from the living space beyond.
He got out of bed and found a pair of sweatpants to pull on, then went out to the living room to find what he expected to find. The scent of coffee was sharp in the morning air, a glance toward the compact kitchenette showing him the coffeemaker with a pot already half empty.
Hollis was on the couch, the big coffee table before her covered with papers and her open laptop, which was plugged into a wall outlet. A mostly empty coffee cup sat on the end table beside the couch. She was barefoot and bare-legged, and wearing nothing but a man’s white shirt that made her look, even with her recent golden tan and the few pounds he’d managed, with his cooking, to add to her slender frame, deceptively fragile.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked, leaning on the back of the couch slightly to one side of her.
“I slept. As long as I could. Sorry if I woke you.” She leaned back and looked up at him with a faint smile. And returned his deep and not-at-all-brief kiss with matching fire.
It was one of the things they had discovered for themselves during the weeks away from the job and other people. A passion for each other of rather astonishing ferocity, something that was still a new aspect of their partnership but one very much treasured even more for the long and difficult path that had brought them here, separately and together. And something that had most certainly deepened their already strong connection to each other.
That last fact had also created a few surprises for them as yet untested in the field.
“Don’t start something,” she murmured when she could.
“Why not? We have a few hours of vacation left.”
“Yeah, but right now something about this summoning business is bugging me. And you know how I get when something’s bugging me.”
He knew.
Looking at the coffee table, he noted a ruler and a red marker as well as a couple of pencils and pens and a legal pad, supplies she generally carried in her laptop case, and realized for the first time what most of the papers spread out on the table were. “We’re on an island that’s barely inhabited, and you found a map of the southeastern US?”
Turning her attention back to the map, Hollis said absently, “It’s amazing what you can find if you need it.”
“Are you conjuring things out of thin air now?”
She frowned at him.
“Just asking.”
“No, I haven’t sprouted a new ability,” she said dryly. “At least not one that you don’t know about. I just noticed something on the flight over here that my pilot obviously missed.”
“I had other things on my mind,” he said apologetically. “What did I miss?”
“A whole bunch of rolled-up maps behind our seats in the chopper. So I went and looked. And found these.”
He eyed her. “You went out there in the middle of the night wearing nothing but my shirt?” The helicopter sat waiting for them in a clearing some little distance from their cottage.
“Barely inhabited island,” she reminded him.
“Uh-huh. But inhabited. You realize that our landlady’s teenage son is fascinated by you?” A fact he had noted during the occasions when they’d been out on the beach or zipping around on Jet-Skis or scuba diving in the incredibly clear water. When Hollis’s brief swimsuit had shown off much more of her than her normal casual clothing.
Difficult to miss a teenage boy wearing a puppy-dog look of extreme yearning and devotion, even at a distance as he lurked, apparently believing himself hidden. Even more difficult for a powerful telepath to miss the tangled adolescent thoughts practically catapulted their way.
There were only three major structures on their small island: their cottage, a currently empty cottage a couple hundred yards away from theirs, and a much larger building at the other end of the island that served as an inn during the winter months, which were all owned by their widowed landlady, who lived there with her sixteen-year-old son and a small staff of employees who kept the inn and cottages in good order.
Hollis said, “He’s fascinated by the chopper. I caught a glimpse of him lurking in the bushes while I was digging around for the maps.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“It’s nearly dawn. Sun’ll be up soon. I guess he gets up early.”
DeMarco sighed.
She grinned at him.
“You are a sadistic woman,” he told her.
“It’ll keep you on your toes,” she said, not at all apologetically. Then added, “Come look at this, will you?”
He came around the couch to sit beside her, looking obediently at the big map. The legal pad had been pushed to the side, its top sheet at least covered with Hollis’s neat, flowing script in what appeared to be a list, but he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and focused his attention on the map.
There were numerous small, red circles grouped in a rather small area of the southeast, most in the southern Appalachians. And most of the markings clearly indicated towns.
DeMarco studied them for a moment, then straightened to look at his partner. “The locations of past cases?”
“Yeah. It occurred to me that a disproportionate number of cases these last years have taken place in the southeast. Mostly in little mountain towns, but some as far south as Atlanta and as far east as the coast.”
He glanced at her laptop, which was clearly in sleep mode, pushed aside as the legal pad was. Another man might have asked her why she had felt compelled to not only bring along her work laptop on what was supposed to be a completely carefree vacation, but also to actually work.
Reese DeMarco was not another man.
So all he said was, “You keep notes of all the cases the unit works?”
“Nothing classified or even confidential,” she assured him. “Just brief notes I make for myself. Started it with the first case I worked, then later on backtracked to study earlier cases and noted those too. And all the ones since, of course. Locations, who was on the team, the bare outlines of crimes, victims, monsters and whether we caught or destroyed them. And how, if I thought it mattered.”
He nodded. “Okay. And?”
“Well, I know we seldom do geographic profiles of the cases we work in these areas, mostly because it would be fairly useless in such small towns. And I don’t think we’ve ever done a geographic profile of the whole southeast.”
“Probably not,” he agreed.
“I didn’t really know what I was looking for when I got started,” she confessed with a slight frown. “Something was bugging me and I couldn’t ignore it. So . . . I just kept marking the places where we’d had cases. All those little towns, the few times all the action took place outside little towns, like the church and that really weird case-that-wasn’t with Luther and Callie’s location up in the mountains and us at Alexander House.”
DeMarco nodded.
“I marked everything I could find in my case notes, plus a couple of investigations I knew about but in which the SCU was never officially involved because the unit didn’t officially exist at the time—yet Bishop was there, and he got involved. Like that town in North Carolina where his cousin Cassie helped catch a nasty killer, and even Atlanta, where Bishop helped his college friend look for his missing fiancée.”
“News to me,” DeMarco observed. “One of these days you’ll have to tell me those stories.”
“As much as I know, sure. I only found out because I’m nosy and kept asking questions.”
He smiled slightly, his normally rather coldly handsome face both relaxed and softened in a way that would have startled nearly everyone who knew him, but said only, “So you marked all these places in the southeast where . . . paranormal things involving various SCU agents and Haven operatives happened. And?”
She frowned at the map. “There are probably a dozen different ways to do this, but this is the one I picked.” She reached for a sheet of clear plastic he hadn’t noticed underneath the coffee table, on which were drawn several straight lines in red.
“Where on earth did you find that? Not in the chopper?”
“No.” Hollis looked a little guilty. “I took it out of the frame of that print over there.” She nodded toward a suitably tropical print hanging on the wall between two narrow bookcases on the other side of the living room. “I wouldn’t have if it were glass, but . . . Anyway, we might want to slip Mrs. Clairmont a little bonus so she can replace this sheet of plastic.”
“I doubt she’ll even notice,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah, but we know I took it,” Hollis said absently as she slid the plastic over the map and placed it carefully.
He smiled again, but waited until she had the plastic in place and then leaned forward again to study the result for several moments. “Huh.”
“Like I said, probably a dozen different ways to draw lines from one place to another and make some sort of pattern. But this is the one that felt right to me.”
She had drawn, in essence, an asterisk, or perhaps more accurately a kind of sunburst, with straight lines of differing lengths beginning at a marked location on the outer edge of the large cluster and ending at the opposite outer edge, both the starting point and the end point of each line a location of paranormal events, with several others along the line itself.
Every single case she had noted fell along one of the precisely straight lines she had drawn.
“Look at what’s at the center,” she said steadily.
DeMarco looked. “Damn. Prosperity.”
“Yeah. Prosperity. It looks like it’s been at the center of some very bad things for a long time. The very quiet, very peaceful center. Until now.”
After a moment, DeMarco said, “By the time we finish packing and load the chopper, the sun should be up and Mrs. Clairmont as well, so we can turn in the keys. I think we should head for the mountain house ASAP.”
“I think you’re right,” Hollis said.