FOURTEEN
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10
Even though it was still very early when they set out the next morning, heavy clouds were already beginning to tease the mountain-made horizons, and now and then a faint rumble could be heard in the distance.
“I hate storms,” Hollis muttered. “Especially the ones that rumble around and around as if they have no idea where they want to be.”
They were still at the hotel and about to climb into their vehicles, none of them happy about the storm.
“Maybe it’ll miss us,” Dalton offered.
“Are you a betting man?”
“Not really.”
“Good,” Reese told him. “She always wins.”
“It’s not my fault you don’t know how to bluff,” his partner told him virtuously. “Stone face or no stone face.”
Dalton lifted an eyebrow at the larger man. “Way I heard it, you don’t have any tells. At all.”
“I don’t. Except with Hollis.” He made the admission calmly and without any sign of embarrassment whatsoever.
Dalton wanted to say something about that, but whatever it was vanished from his mind. He found himself swinging around abruptly, from the open door of the SUV, staring toward the end of the town that was not their destination. He was barely aware that Hollis and Reese were also facing the same direction, their faces grim.
“Oh, shit,” Hollis muttered. She lifted both hands, her fingers massaging her temples. Hard.
“I’m only picking up intention,” Reese said, his voice unusually tense. “Scattered thoughts.”
“I’m getting more. A teacher. Young. Loves her work. But . . . she’s been getting more and more irritable lately. It’s not her nature, not at all. But her head won’t stop hurting. She needs to . . . fix her life. And she— Oh, Christ, she has guns. More than one. And she knows how to use them.”
Galen, Reno, and Olivia approached them from one direction, while from the other came Sully, Victoria, and Logan.
Galen said, “ I studied that school when I drove all through Prosperity. Place is close to being a fortress. It’s a newer school, and with all that’s happened in recent years, they’re all about security.”
“Maybe a fire drill?” Olivia suggested.
Victoria said, “I’m pretty sure they warn the teachers in advance now. So if there’s anything unexpected, they know to get the kids somewhere safe.”
Sully said, “I can’t pick up anything until I’m a lot closer. But get me close enough and I’ll tell you every single thing she’s feeling.”
Hollis was trying hard to sort through impressions, the panic and anxiety of the townspeople, the wordless terror of children. That angry, painful determination to fix a life that hadn’t been broken . . .
“Hollis, you have to stop.” Reese was there, holding his handkerchief to her bleeding nose.
“I can’t,” she said thickly. “You know I can’t. How many kids will she kill? How many other teachers? That thing in her head’s controlling her, and it wants a bloodbath—”
“You’re feeling that?” Reno asked sharply. “The consciousness behind the energy?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And it is familiar, dammit, I know it is.”
Reese didn’t waste any more time getting both arms around her. “Hollis.”
“That’s better,” she murmured. “Don’t let go.”
“I’m not about to,” he said, grim. He was standing behind her, one arm around her, holding her hard against his own body, while his free hand held the handkerchief to her nose.
Softly, Dalton said, “Reese, her ears.”
They were bleeding too.
“Enough of this,” Reese said in a voice few had probably heard since his military days.
“No.” Hollis’s voice was quiet, but no less fierce. “She’s planning it now. I can’t get her thoughts, just those awful feelings. Her mind’s full of blood, just blood. We have to get closer to the school.” Her eyes were . . . odd. Almost glowing.
“Except for vehicles there’s no cover,” Galen said in a calm voice that would have deceived anyone who didn’t know him.
“Then vehicles will have to do,” Reese said.
“Archer—” Sully began.
But Hollis was shaking her head. “Not yet. We have to get close enough to know for certain what’s going on there before we call in the troops. If we call them in. Trained negotiators are too far away, and you know that’s what he’ll want. Never mind that it won’t work. Never mind that you can’t negotiate with evil. Kids are going to die unless we stop this. And we have to be quiet. He wants a big show. He wants a lot of cops. Media. Panic. He wants his bloodbath.”
“Who?” Reno asked. “Who’s controlling her?”
“I think it was . . . what started as a . . . mindless evil. It just wanted to kill, to torture. To destroy.”
“But you said he seemed familiar—”
Dalton said to Reno, “Explanations later. I say we pile into two of the vehicles we have here and haul ass to that school.”
She stared at him. “You’re picking up thoughts.”
“Well, of course I am,” he said irritably, grabbing her arm to hustle her into the light-colored BMW that was closest.
Getting to the school was quick and easy, in part because Galen, leading the way in the black SUV with Hollis, Reese, and Olivia, tended to imprint maps in his head after exploring, and so took secondary roads where no traffic or traffic light slowed them down.
And the school itself was as Galen had described, a modern building designed to keep children safe inside. There were numerous exits, of course, but every single member of Hollis’s team knew that their best chance of getting all the children out alive would be to instantly incapacitate the female teacher even now being urged by a powerful force to slaughter as many of them as she could.
They gathered initially behind the hulking cover of the black SUV, and one glance was enough to show that both Sully and Dalton were being all but overwhelmed by the thoughts and emotions battering them.
“Kids,” Sully muttered. “Somebody for God’s sake teach me how to tune out kids. It’s utter chaos.”
Dalton nodded agreement, but his eyes were clearer and he was frowning.
“Stay mad,” Hollis told him softly. “It’s working.”
He sent her a quick glance. “Figured out my secret, huh?”
Hollis was still being all but held upright by her partner, but it appeared both her nose and ears had stopped bleeding. “Enough,” she told Dalton. Then she added to him and Sully, “You two need to circle the building. Slowly. Do your damnedest not to be seen. We need to know exactly where she is. We can’t afford to make a mistake.”
“Copy.” Both Sully and Dalton moved out, cautiously.
Reese was looking at his partner. “She has guns.”
“We’re going to make sure she never fires one of those guns.”
“How are we going to do that?” Reese asked politely.
“We’re going to depend on our rookies.”
“Hollis—”
“You said it yourself. Bishop said it. They were summoned, just like we were. They were meant to be here, meant to have parts to play in all this. We can’t stop this without them. Every one of them has a gift we can use. Every one of them.”
After a moment, Reese said, “Archer’s going to shoot all of us.”
“It all happened so fast,” she said in an innocent tone. “We just had to act.”
“Right.” Then Reese frowned. “I think Dalton’s getting close.”
“Good. Judging by the way she’s feeling, we’re running out of time.”
“If you start bleeding again—”
“I won’t. You’re sharing energy with me. Thank you, by the way.”
“You’re welcome. And stop scaring me like that, will you?”
“I’ll do my best.” She turned her head to watch as Sully and Dalton slipped back through the cars in the lot until they reached the SUV.
“We maybe caught a break,” Dalton said. “She’s in a fairly small classroom at the very end of a hallway. But it’s packed with kids, little kids. I managed to catch a glimpse of a heavy-looking duffel bag half hidden behind her desk. She looks . . . I don’t think it’s going to be much longer.”
“Not much longer at all,” Sully added. “There isn’t just one voice in her head; there are dozens, hundreds, all whispering the same insane shit. I doubt we’ve got more than a couple of minutes before she digs into that bag and starts shooting.”
“Okay, then we move.” Hollis gestured for Galen, Olivia, Logan, Reno, and Victoria to draw closer. “And this is what we’re going to do.”
WHITNEY NEELE KNEW, deep, deep down inside of her, that what she was thinking, what she was going to do, was insane. She knew that. Somewhere deep inside. But wherever that place was, she couldn’t seem to reach inside and grab hold of anything that would allow her to grip her own sanity. It seemed to have gone spinning off into some dark, noisy place.
So there was just here.
Just her usual classroom with her usual, really very noisy students all talking and laughing at once. Even though they were supposed to be paying attention to her. Even though she had already told them more than once to take their seats and listen to her.
She had told them.
She had.
The voices in her head were adding to the cacophony until she could barely hear herself think. Until she couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but, finally, give in and just stop fighting the voices. What was the use, after all? The voices would win. They would always win.
Always.
HOLLIS AND VICTORIA made it all the way down the interior hall to Miss Neele’s classroom without being seen. Both knew they were on borrowed time, not only because Whitney Neele’s face looked curiously plastic, curiously without expression, but also because Reno and Logan were in the school office hopefully buying at least a little time with some unbelievable explanations that surely wouldn’t hold the principal long.
Sully waited just outside the windows, ready in an instant to burst through them, and Reese had found his way into a supply closet that opened right into the classroom near the teacher’s desk.
“I can’t,” Victoria whispered for at least the tenth time. “I’ve never been able to—”
“All you have to do is keep her still,” Hollis whispered back. “Just for a few seconds, just long enough for me to get my hands on that bag. Once the guns are out of her reach, either one of us can take her.”
“Hollis—”
“Just concentrate, Victoria. I promise you, you can do this.”
Victoria was pretty sure nobody had ever bet their life on her before, and she was damned sure nobody had bet the lives of dozens of kids on her, so she drew a deep breath, concentrated as hard as she could, and stopped Whitney Neele from ever touching one of the guns in her bag.
HOLLIS THOUGHT ARCHER was honestly too stunned by what had so nearly happened at the school to have thought of most of the questions he should have asked. And Katie helped along with that, encouraging the kids to tell their self-important stories at the top of their lungs even though not a single one of them had any clue as to what had so nearly happened.
And Hollis, having picked up a few slippery tricks from Bishop over the years, managed to get herself and her people off school grounds and back to the even more necessary task of searching the valley for a doorway or portal for evil. And without explaining a single word more than she had to.
“You’re dangerous,” Dalton told her.
“Only on odd Thursdays. Besides, it worked, didn’t it?”
“You’re a brave man,” Dalton told DeMarco.
“You have no idea,” DeMarco replied.
“Very funny,” his partner told him, then bent her attention to the map. “Okay. I think a few more yards should do it. From there, we should move on foot.”
Dalton looked at her. “Are you sure you’re all right? I mean, you look chipper as hell, but for a while there I thought we might have to call EMS.”
“I’m tougher than I look,” she told him.
“And too stubborn to argue with usually,” DeMarco added.
“I’ll get you for that,” Hollis told her partner, but didn’t follow it up with any details, rather to Dalton’s disappointment.
They had driven their vehicles to within fifty yards of the location marked on Hollis’s map, and were now approaching the area cautiously. Hollis, DeMarco, and Galen were all armed now, even though Hollis was certain nothing living awaited them. Nor did she expect spiritual energy, since the pressure and faint but pounding headache she was always conscious of whenever she was in this valley and outside DeMarco’s shields had never once reminded her of a spirit’s visit.
But it hadn’t gone away, either.
Mediums. I’m here. Logan’s here.
Why would we need mediums?
“Hey, look.” Dalton, several yards to the left of Hollis and DeMarco, was pointing at the oddly sheer cliff face they were approaching.
For a moment, Hollis didn’t see whatever he was pointing at, but then a shaft of sunlight fought its way through the clouds and touched the cliff face. There was a brief glitter as the light touched bits of mica embedded in the raw earth, and that was when Hollis saw the opening.
It seemed to dance before her eyes for a moment or two, a gash in the earth and hard rock that was less than a cave and more than a simple crevice. About twice the height of a tall man, the opening was clearly no more than a couple of feet wide.
And the tumble of granite boulders piling at the base of the shadowy opening was mute evidence that it was either recently created—or recently opened.
Sully said, “Didn’t Bishop say something about tremors being recorded here?”
Hollis nodded slowly, her gaze on that oddly inviting doorway. “Yeah. Very faint tremors over the last month or so. Not bad enough to damage anything man-made, but still worrying in a moderate earthquake zone.”
Victoria said, “Shield or not, I can feel something coming out of there. Almost like hot air.”
Ha! I knew she was sensitive to energy, Hollis thought.
While she was busy coping with a return of that odd sense of familiarity, it took Hollis a moment or two and a surprising amount of willpower to tear her gaze away to look at the younger woman, and then before she could say anything to Victoria, she saw just beyond her Galen, who was standing utterly still and staring at the opening with a completely unfamiliar, almost mesmerized expression.
Hollis felt a sudden stab of anxiety she couldn’t have explained. “Galen—”
“It’s familiar,” he said slowly. “I . . . want to go inside.”
“Nobody’s going in there,” DeMarco said.
Hollis was trying to juggle about a dozen different thoughts, one of them an echo of Galen’s desire to enter the portal.
That’s what it is. A portal. A doorway. Why shouldn’t we go inside? How could that be wrong?
“Hollis?”
We don’t have much in common, Galen and me. But there is one really big thing. Except that it can’t possibly be connected to this, can it? It was—what was it? A year and a half ago? And far away. Well, relatively.
“Hollis.”
She suddenly became aware of Reese’s hand gripping her arm, and stared down at that touch for an instant before looking up at him. And feeling the almost tactile sense of a cool breeze blowing past her, maybe even through her.
“Back with us?” he asked politely.
Hollis blinked at him. Then she drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Wow. Whatever you’ve got packs quite a wallop.”
“Hollis.”
“Well, it does.” She heard quiet laughter, and realized it was Victoria and, rather surprisingly, Dalton, who were laughing at her. Or with her. Whatever.
She straightened slightly, wondering if the urge to lean against him had blown in with the breeze. Reese didn’t let go of her arm, which she was glad about because that cool breeze was dissipating the last wisps of whatever had drifted into her mind.
And that was a sobering realization.
Very sobering.
“We need to close that up,” she said quickly. “Now, before the storm gets here.”
“Shouldn’t we—” Logan began in an unconsciously fascinated voice.
“No, we shouldn’t. Reese was right. Nobody’s going in there.” Hollis forced herself to remember every suggestion Bishop and his team had made about how to close and seal this portal.
Her instincts were peculiarly quiet about it.
“I can do it,” Olivia said suddenly. She was standing only a few feet away from Galen, her anxious gaze leaving him to fix on the portal still yards away from them.
Reno said, “Those rocks look damned heavy.”
Olivia sent her a quick smile. “I used to think that mattered. Studied all sorts of formulas about mass and density. Until I realized all I really had to do was want to move something.”
It had been one of the possibilities Bishop had suggested, Hollis remembered. Depending on what kind of portal they found, and whether there was enough relatively loose rock around it. It was, he’d said, one possible reason why Olivia had been summoned.
And it looked like enough rock to Hollis. “If you’re sure,” she began.
“It’s what I do,” Olivia said.
Then things began to happen so quickly it was almost a blur of motion and sounds and cold darts of fear.
Olivia began to lift both hands, rather like a small but very determined magician about to conjure, and when there was sudden movement from the portal, most of those watching realized on some level it was happening too fast, that Olivia had not had time to do this.
A huge boulder none of them had paid attention to several yards to one side of the portal rocked suddenly, then lifted and hurtled toward Olivia as though flung by some careless giant.
A threat, Hollis realized in those frozen seconds. I should have known only rage would have been the result when we stopped his bloody school massacre. He’s beyond angry. He wants to kill us all.
And energy, once freed, was not easily contained again. Except by a fury even greater and more powerful than disembodied energy could ever be.
“Olivia!”
Hollis wondered, later, when there was time to wonder, whether Galen’s instincts had kicked in. So many years spent watching over various SCU agents, guarding their backs, protecting them and what they were doing.
Maybe that was it.
Or maybe it was something else.
He moved with blinding speed, grabbing Olivia and both pulling her out of the way and pushing her to safety, out of the path of the boulder.
It slammed into him with an audible sound Hollis had never gotten used to, over half a ton of granite meeting flesh and bone, crushing and mangling.
“No!”
Wrenching herself away from Sully and Logan, who had practically caught her in midair, Olivia darted around the boulder toward the portal, and lifted both arms as she had before. But this time there was a roar like a tornado passing, and the rocks and boulders piled around the portal and for yards in every direction were swept up as if in that tornado, lifting and swirling, and then slamming into the portal with terrific force.
As if they knew, the smaller rocks and boulders wedged themselves into the cracks and crevices while the larger ones found larger openings, granite scraping across granite as they forced themselves in tightly, blocking the portal until there wasn’t a single chink where anything could have gotten in. Or out.
In the sudden silence, Hollis felt her ears pop, and yawned widely to ease a different kind of pressure. “Wow,” she muttered. “Cool ability.”
Dalton, surveying the closed portal with calm satisfaction, said, “I’d forgotten how impressive that was.”
Hollis looked at Olivia as she slumped slightly, then looked up at her partner. “Looking fragile does not mean being fragile,” she said in a tone of realization.
“I figured that out a while back,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Before Hollis could comment further, there was a groan and a curse from beneath the rock, followed by Galen’s voice. “Little help here?”
Olivia whirled with a gasp, her hands lifted again, and the boulder rose off Galen’s fallen self and rolled away.
“Damn, that hurt.” He didn’t sit up immediately but did lift a hand to rather gingerly work his jaw. There was blood on his face, on as much of him as was visible, and under the fascinated eyes of the observers, it seemed to soak back into his skin, disappearing within moments.
Olivia dropped to her knees beside him. “I thought you were dead,” she said unsteadily.
“That was why,” Hollis realized suddenly. “Why you had to be here.”
“That was why.” He moved a bit gingerly, telling Olivia, “It’s not so easy to kill me.” He sat up finally with no more than a wince. “People are always trying to kill him,” Hollis told Olivia. “Even Reese did once.”
Olivia stared up rather uncertainly at the tall blond man standing beside Hollis.
“It’s a long story,” DeMarco told her.
“No, it isn’t,” Galen said. “You shot me. Twice.”
“There were extenuating circumstances,” DeMarco said, then added almost immediately, “Let’s not get into war stories, all right, Galen? We’re not quite finished here.”
“I didn’t think so.” Galen got to his feet and stretched briefly, then extended a hand to help Olivia up.
“You’re going to give them all the wrong idea,” Hollis told him severely. “Not everybody can come back from death.”
Galen eyed her. “No?”
“There were extenuating circumstances,” she said after a brief pause.
“Uh-huh. I think I heard somebody say this portal needed to be sealed?”
“Right. Yes. The portal may be sealed with rocks, but it needs energy to seal it for good. And then there’s all the energy contained in this valley. Until that’s transformed or allowed to disperse harmlessly, some other citizen could pick up a few guns and decide to hold a turkey shoot.”
A sudden rumble of thunder made Hollis wince. “Damn. I don’t know if that’s going to help, or just get in the way.”
Dalton, frowning at her, said, “You don’t need to channel the lightning?”
“God, I hope not. That’s—very disconcerting. And unpleasant. No, I think there’s enough energy left here in the valley.”
“Energy that came through the portal? Sure you want to do that?”
“I think it’s the only thing that will truly seal the portal,” she told him. “At least, that’s what my instincts are finally telling me. The energy was created there. It’s where it belongs. And now’s the time; the energy is still tied in a way to the portal, but the longer we wait to put it back where it belongs, the harder it’s going to be. This is where it needs to go.”
“What about the consciousness?”
“It’s still in there,” Hollis said, nodding toward the blocked doorway. “Underground, where it came from. I think. I still have that sense of familiarity, but it’s . . . tenuous. I’m not sure I’ll ever figure out what that was about. Not sure I can, either, as long as it stays buried the way it belongs. Anyway, if we ever figure it out, I’ll bet we find some human-shaped monster behind it.” She frowned at her partner. “We’ll need to check all the old wells and any other openings we can find in the valley for energy. I think once this main energy field has been redirected to seal the portal, any other opening should be easy to block. May take some time, though.”
“It’s still early,” DeMarco noted. “And we can easily stay another day or two.”
“That sounds good,” his partner told him. She opened her mouth to say something else, then stared past DeMarco, her eyes widening.
They all turned, instinctively to see what Hollis was staring at with such pleasure, and Hollis was heard to say much later that it was the sort of thing that made psychic rookies either sign on for life—or take to their heels.
Nobody ran.
“Ruby,” she said with more than a little awe. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
She had been young in life—her most recent life, at any rate—but there was something very wise and very ancient in her eyes. She touched down lightly only a few feet from Hollis, smiling, her wings folding neatly so they were very nearly invisible.
“I had to visit you here,” she said, her voice sweet without being at all childlike. “This was where Samuel began, you know.”
“What? The Reverend Adam Deacon Samuel? How many times do we have to kill that son of a bitch before he stays dead?”
“Who is—or was—Samuel?” Reno asked, her fascinated gaze on the angel.
“I think he was Satan,” Hollis told her. “Some might disagree. He didn’t have any charm at all.”
Ruby was smiling. “His flesh died long ago, you know that. Even the vessels he borrowed. But even evil has its beginning somewhere, sometime. This place was the nexus of his beginning. You’ve known for a long time, Hollis. That there hadn’t yet been an end to him—and that there had to be. Which is why you—all of you—were summoned here. To finish it.”
Logan spoke slowly. “Are you a spirit?”
“That depends,” she replied gravely. “Are you glad you can see me?”
He drew a breath and let it out slowly. “I really think I am.”
“Then I’m a spirit. And we’ll see each other again, Logan. But first a few of us are going to help you and Hollis and Victoria make a few doorways in that energy dome. And then they, with Reese’s help, will bring the energy needed here to seal this portal once and for all.”
Suddenly finding her voice, Victoria said, “Me? That’s impossible. I don’t . . . I’m not . . . Energy isn’t my thing.”
Hollis laughed suddenly. “I think you’re all going to find that impossible is a word we don’t use in the SCU. There really isn’t a place for it there.”
“But—”
“Come on, Victoria. Why don’t you help us?”
Victoria shook her head. “What? I can’t do that.”
“Of course you can,” Hollis told her.
“I don’t know how.”
“Of course you do.”
“Hollis—”
“Come on, we’ll show you.”
“Oh, damn.” Victoria glared halfheartedly around at her team members, then moved toward Hollis. “Everybody better stand back. Angels can’t be killed, can’t they? Ruby—”
“I’ll be fine, Victoria. And so will you.”
“But I don’t know what I’m doing.”
But in the end, of course, Hollis and the others were right.
Victoria did know what she was doing.
THE REALLY PECULIAR thing, Archer told them later, was that he had managed to trace the nearly ancient belt and gloves they’d found not far from the sealed portal. The items had belonged to a man who, though unnoticed by the history books, had quite likely been one of the first serial killers to ever visit evil on the young colonies of America.
Hunted by a group of men from an eastern territory, accused of murdering at least three young women, Adam Deacon had been run to ground in the valley near what had been a small mining camp where Prosperity now stood. Caught with blood literally on his hands and the body of the favorite daughter of a wealthy family at his feet, he had been chased up into the mountains by a mob howling for his blood.
There hadn’t been much law and order in those days, and when miners had thrown his mostly dead body into an abandoned shaft and collapsed it behind him, no one had thought it anything other than justice.
Archer hadn’t been able to find out much more about Deacon, but Bishop had more resources, and he soon found out all they were ever likely to about Adam Deacon. He’d been accused of at least another dozen murders, all of them bloody.
But the most peculiar thing was that, as a young man before his rampage began, Deacon had been struck by lightning.
Twice.