Кей Хупер - Blood Ties

“I don’t know where they’re coming from, Ruby. I don’t hear voices, it’s not my thing.”

“It’s your thing now.”

“Well, yeah, I suppose. But it wasn’t my thing, so I don’t know how to control it.”

“Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes this stuff controls us.”

“That’s definitely not my thing,” he told her.

“No, I didn’t think so. Your thing is… not dying. Isn’t that right?”

“I heal myself. So far, that means not dying. But everybody dies sooner or later.”

“Maybe to really kill you they’d have to cut off your head,” she suggested gravely.

Galen was startled, but only for a moment. “You like horror movies,” he guessed.

She smiled shyly. “We weren’t allowed to watch them inside the Compound. But Maggie says it’s good for us sometimes to be pretend-scared. And John likes horror movies. So we watched some.” I see.

“They didn’t scare me, really,” she confessed. “Not after the church. Not after Father. But it was nice to pretend bad and scary things aren’t real. Nice for a while, at least.”

He shook his head and heard himself saying, “Ruby, what are you doing here?”

Her face changed just a little, going guarded. And there was a secretive expression in her eyes that he’d never seen before. “John’s teaching me how to play chess. You start out with all the pieces on the board. That’s why I’m here. Because I’m one of the pieces.”

“Ruby—”

“You should try to listen to your voices, Galen. You really should. I think there’s something important they need to tell you.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“How would you know that?” he asked quietly.

“Because I hear voices too. And they always— always —tell me things I need to know.”

“Like the reason you had to come here? The reason you have to be a chess piece?”

“Yes. Like that.” Ruby turned her head, gazed toward one of the windows she was forbidden to approach, and said in the same soft, musing voice, “Right now they’re telling me something bad happened again. Something we couldn’t stop. Poor thing. She was a chess piece too. She was a pawn. She had to be sacrificed.”

“We’ve done a complete sweep of the downtown area,” Dean reported to Miranda when she and the others returned to the mobile command center. “Sheriff Duncan pulled in all his people, part-timers included, and even swore in a couple of retired deputies and a few friends he trusts, so we’ve got enough manpower—barely—to keep a fairly close watch on most of the buildings. But we didn’t find the bastard.”

“No luck with the dogs?”

“Nada , The handlers are as baffled as their dogs seem to be. Do you want to call them off?”

Miranda frowned. “No. No, just ask them to patrol. To crisscross the town independently. Randomly. They can decide among themselves when to take breaks, but I want those dogs visible as much as possible. If nothing else, it should at least make it tougher for the sniper to move around.”

“Copy that. I’ll go tell them.”

“And then you and a few of the other agents go ahead and take your own breaks. Get some breakfast, grab a shower if you like, sleep a couple of hours. Everything’s set up for us at the B&B. There are beds and cots enough to go around, though some of us are doubling up in rooms. Not that it much matters, since we’ll be on rotating shifts for the duration.”

“You guys didn’t get much downtime,” he noted.

“We got enough. Besides, with more agents on the way and scheduled to arrive by sometime late this afternoon, we should all be able to get a good night’s sleep tonight.”

Under his breath, Tony muttered, “Damn. Jinx.”

Miranda glanced at him, then said to Dean, “Take your time. We’re mostly waiting for paperwork—the posts Sharon conducted and ballistics reports. And we’ll probably go over the victim files one more time, looking for connections. There isn’t much else to do, at least for the next few hours. Unless you’ve picked up something you haven’t mentioned, that is.” Dean Ramsey was a fifth-degree clairvoyant.

He shook his head. “Not a whole hell of a lot, I’m sorry to say. At first I thought it was just the general confusion, all the violence, but… there’s a weird vibe about this place. Can’t quite pin it down, but I’ve never sensed anything like it.”

“Join the club,” Tony said with a sigh.

Dean offered a wry smile, then said to Miranda, “When I try harder, when I push, it’s like I’m picking up some kind of interference, almost like hearing static on a radio.”

Tony and Jaylene exchanged quick glances.

Miranda simply nodded. “Don’t try to force it. Maybe taking a break will help.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He didn’t sound too convinced but left to follow her orders without argument.

“Interference,” Jaylene said. “Why does it make me very uneasy that word keeps cropping up?”

“It’s an anomaly,” Miranda responded. “And anomalies are signposts. Things to pay attention to.”

“Consider me paying attention,” Jaylene said. “Because even though the vibes I get are almost always from objects, I’m feeling the weirdness of this place too.”

Tony said, “And me. I keep wanting to rub the back of my neck, because it feels like the hair’s standing straight out. Not an especially pleasant sensation.”

“My question,” Miranda said, “is whether this is something natural and specific to the town for some kind of geographic reason or something new. And if it is new, I want to know when it started and whether it’s artificial, man-made, or…”

“Or psychic?” Jaylene suggested.

Miranda was frowning now. “Dean can’t pick up anything. Neither of you has been able to. I haven’t. Reese knew when a gun was being pointed at Hollis and him, but that was well outside town, higher up in the mountains—and before the bomb blast all he was really sure of was that the sniper was watching. Plus, he didn’t sense a thing before the sniper shot Diana, and a gun pointed his way virtually always sends up giant red flags. Gabe and Roxanne have a solid internal connection, but otherwise they’ve been… fuzzy, missing things they should have been able to pick up on easily.”

Sighing again, Tony said, “Psychic, then.”

“Christ, I hope not. It’d take a hell of a lot of energy to have that sort of dampening effect on so many psychics of different abilities and degrees. And it sounds too much like what was happening in Samuel’s Compound on that last day.”

“Damn,” Jaylene muttered.

“You did jinx us,” Tony said to Miranda. “Whenever anybody says we’ll get a good night’s sleep, we never do. Something always happens.”

The words had barely left his lips when Sheriff Duncan came in to the command center, his expression grim. “I’ve got a missing deputy,” he said.

“Who?” Miranda asked—and Tony looked at her curiously, because he had the odd notion she knew exactly what the sheriff would reply.

“Bobbie. Bobbie Silvers. As near as I can figure, she hasn’t been seen since sometime last night.”

WHEN HOLLIS WOKE UP, she had no idea how much time had passed; this was an internal room in the hospital, so no windows allowed any natural light to signal whether it was day or night.

She hoped it was still Thursday; surely she—they—hadn’t slept all day, even though she felt as if that could be the case. Hell, she felt as if she’d slept for a week. Her eyes were scratchy, her muscles stiff from apparently remaining in the same position for God only knew how long, and a gnawing emptiness told her she hadn’t eaten in too many hours.