Los Angeles
Evening
After seeing the face of a dead man—a man Mia could’ve sworn had been on the train the day Raine died—doubt cut into her confidence. There was too much at stake for her to have misgivings. Why couldn’t she be more like Faith…more confident in her own skin?
Before she went to bed, she decided to take a long soak in the hotel tub with steamy hot water. She needed sleep, but she couldn’t rest with Dan gone. He and Mike were teleconferencing with Andy Moreil, working on filling in the data gaps to the past of Mateo De La Cruz’s life. Faith had offered to keep her company, but she needed time to think and let her psychic gift work.
Up to her neck in hot water, Mia breathed in the steam and replayed what she remembered of the attack on the train. Many faces bombarded her, the people she had committed to memory. Steeped in shadows, the images poured from her mind as if the flow would be endless—until her gift settled on only two.
Raine and Brax.
Mia sensed Valentine with her now, as if he’d always been a part of her. Naked in the tub, she felt vulnerable. She didn’t know if he had remote vision like Kat Culhane. He could have x-ray vision like Superman for all she knew, but feeling exposed didn’t stop her from reaching out to him.
Why can’t I find you?
She willed the message to him alone, but Mia sensed nothing. She wasn’t strong enough.
***
After midnight
In the throes of a forceful vision, Mia shivered in the icy rush of water and gasped when she couldn’t catch her breath at the shock. She opened her eyes wide yet couldn’t see.
Help me.
She didn’t know if she spoke or let her mind scream her plea to the Lotus Circle—to Faith. When no one answered, Mia reached out her hands and couldn’t see her arms.
Am I dead? Is this what dying feels like?
The familiar question erupted from her worst nightmare as a jolt of adrenaline raged through her body. She writhed against the misery of its punishment. When she lost her balance and toppled over, she fell off an edge and spiraled through darkness, flailing her arms and screaming.
Oh, God. No. Please!
Blind, Mia couldn’t see anything, not even to break her fall. She smashed into something hard. Her body crumpled and she smelled blood. Half her face crunched like broken bone. Shaking, she groaned and splayed her trembling fingers over what she’d hit. Grit and gravel scraped against stone.
When she couldn’t move—and her head felt swollen enough to burst open from her throbbing agony—she realized her body hung upside down. She swayed in the inky blackness, bound to something she couldn’t see.
Mia knew she would die here…until a voice echoed through a vast emptiness to find her.
***
“Mia, wake up.” Dan’s muffled voice.
With hands on her shoulders, someone shook her.
“You’re having a nightmare…or one of your visions.”
When she finally opened her eyes, Mia had been blinded by a piercing glint of something metallic. The image triggered word associations that she’d grown used to remembering. Money. Riches. Gold. Her vision had lingered and she couldn’t shake it. She clung to its remnants as if it were a prized discovery.
Tears streamed down her face as she wiped her watery eyes.
No, not tears.
“I’m c-cold, Dan. What…h-happened?”
Mia realized she sat on the tiled floor of her shower with ice cold water pouring down on her. With her skin covered in goose flesh, her whole body shook from the chill. With her teeth chattering, she couldn’t stop her shivers and she had no recollection of leaving the bed.
Drenched, Dan knelt in the shower and held her in his arms—with total acceptance and understanding—reminding her why she loved him with all her heart.
“I’ve got you. You’re safe, Mia.”
In the distance, she heard a loud pounding on a door and she remembered that she wasn’t home. They were still in L.A. and in a hotel room.
“Who’s…k-knocking?” She forced the words through her clenched jaw.
Dan got to his feet and reached for a towel.
“It’s Faith. You probably sent out a bat signal. You kept asking if you were dead. Honey, you scared the hell out of me.”
In a tender gesture, Dan ran a hand through her soaked hair and helped her up. He placed the white hotel robe over her shoulders and another towel around her neck, but nothing warmed her.
“I have to let Faith in…or the hotel will think we’re trashing their room with a party.” Dan grabbed the other robe and shrugged into it as he headed for the door.
After Mia stepped out of the shower, she stared into the mirror and crossed her arms to ward off the chill. She listened to Dan greet a frantic Faith at the door, still connected to her vision. When darkness lingered behind her eyes, she shut them to replay the revelation coiling through her head like an insidious worm eating its way out.
Everything would be important.
She’d been with Valentine. No one needed to confirm it. She just knew.
As death drew closer to him, he let her see more of his love for Raine. Why are you doing this? Was he giving up and letting go? Mia didn’t understand why he had let her visualize his tender underbelly when it came to the woman he loved.
Don’t give up. Please!
Mia felt like a keeper of a very important promise that Valentine had entrusted to her alone. She didn’t feel worthy.
***
In the eerie stillness and total darkness, Valentine had lost all sense of time and drifted in and out of awareness. He wasn’t sure he could call it sleep.
When he dreamed, he relived the attack on the train in painful detail, as if he could’ve stopped it. He made mistake after mistake with Raine suffering more each time. Valentine even pictured exactly the instant she died and it felt as if he had pulled the trigger.
Please stop. He couldn’t turn his mind off.
Valentine was afraid to rest—afraid to dream.
When he straddled the line between twilight sleep and being fully awake, he found bittersweet torture whenever he opened his eyes. He could swear Raine slept beside him as he flashed on a precious glimpse of her. He smelled her skin and sensed the warmth of her body. He counted the breaths she took, comforted by the soft rhythm of her beating heart, and willed his waking dream to be real.
When she faded into the pitch-black darkness—as if he’d lost his mind—he fought his yearning for merciful oblivion by forcing every memory from his brain that kept her alive. If his imagination had triggered her to appear in dozens of familiar memories, he never wanted those hallucinations to end. In a peculiar delirium, he even spoke to her and pictured her snuggling into his arms and answering in her drowsy voice.
‘Go back to sleep, honey. Hold me.’ In his mind she nuzzled into his chest, but his arms felt nothing.
“There’s nothing I want more, baby.” A tear rolled down his cheek.
He had no place to put the love he still held in his heart for her. She had filled his life in ways he couldn’t have pictured before he met her. Now he was lost without her. He didn’t care about anything, except killing Mateo.
“Raine…I miss you,” he whispered.
His words echoed back to him, empty and hollow.