Кей Хупер - Blood Ties

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

It 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.” {see Sense of Evil}

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.