Dangerous To Love

by Toni Anderson, Barbara Freethy, Dee Davis, Leslie A. Kelly, Cynthia Eden, J. Kenner, Meli Raine, Gwen Hernandez, Pamela Clare, Rachel Grant

  He moved forward, swirling through time, pushing on into decay and silence, when the grand old dwelling had been abandoned and the trees had thickened and closed in around it. A little further—memories of curious children, vandals, thieves. Breaking glass and falling beams. And every so often, rough male voices, as if despite the abandonment, over the decades the place had often been used by men looking to abuse women.

  Finally, he entered a recent time. Modern. He heard ugly, cruel laughter and loud, twangy music. Smelled sweat and sex.

  And he burned. For an infinitesimal second, he felt like his feet were being held over an open flame, his skin melting off his bones, though he had noticed no burned remnants or other evidence of fire.

  A man’s voice, raucous and deafening, confirmed he had arrived in the present day. Aidan’s instinctive reaction was to lift his hands to his ears. Of course, that wouldn’t block out something that existed only as a memory inside his mind. Besides, he had to listen. He needed to.

  Woo-whee, boys, would you look at that one? Look at those titties. Nothin’ store-bought about ’em. No plastic surgeon ever made anything so fine. Girl, come on over here and show my son here what you got between your pretty little legs.

  Other voices joined in, talking about their delight in their oh-so-special club. Laughter and brutal lust made animals of men the world probably saw as decent. They’d been here a hundred and fifty years later, but the words and tone sounded the same as the echoes from the slave quarters.

  These monsters had passed along their warped tastes to their own sons, keeping the cruelty alive generation after generation.

  He groaned, overwhelmed by a sense of fear that had consumed that nameless, faceless girl, knowing why she was afraid. She had been abused—slapped, pushed, and dragged. Rough hands had torn at her clothes and forced her down. Anguish overwhelmed her.

  Someone else’s tears burned Aidan’s eyes; another person’s screams wanted to erupt from his mouth.

  He couldn’t do this for much longer.

  “Vonnie,” he whispered, certain the key to her disappearance was here, needing to find it.

  A new voice intruded, and suddenly it all became clear.

  He’d already found her.

  Mama, why? Why’d you do this to me? Please. No, please, don’t touch me! I don’t want to. Don’t make me! That hurts, oh God, Mama!

  His eyes flew open as Vonnie’s voice—and everything else—disappeared. Aidan stared forward, unseeing. All the sounds, the words and impressions settled into place in his mind, forming a picture, one he knew would never leave him. Just as the echoes of her tearful, girlish pleas would never leave him.

  He understood now, saw the complete truth of this secret club and the men who came here. Saw what they wanted and what they did and who they did it to. They’d done it to Vonnie Jackson, long before she’d disappeared.

  God, had that poor kid never had a happy day in her entire life?

  “Aidan?” Lexie whispered. She reached for him, putting a hand on his arm, pulling back when she felt his undeniably tense body. He couldn’t stop fisting and unfisting his hands, filled with anger he was desperate to release, as he’d released it against that thug in the alley earlier. Not at her, of course. God, no. But at the men whose voices he’d just heard.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Taking a few deep, steady breaths, he nodded. His pounding heart slowed and he forced himself to relax, release his fingers, unclench his muscles. “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  Huh. He couldn’t explain it in a million years. Not to anyone, not even her, whose mind had melded with his the previous night. He didn’t know that he could find the words to describe what it was like to have hundreds of voices all talking in his head at once. Especially when those voices had revealed some of the ugliest, most vicious memories of their lives, things that would confirm the worst pessimist’s opinion of the vileness of the human race.

  Sometimes, his ability was a punishment more than anything else. There were things he’d rather have gone to his grave not knowing. He desperately wanted to take a shower to wash clean the filth and corruption that seemed stuck to him now, as if he’d walked into a huge spider web and its stringy remnants clung to every inch of him.

  Let it go. You know what to do.

  He counted backward from a hundred, concentrating on the present, pushing all the rest away. There was only now, only this, only people to help, not sadness for those he couldn’t.

  The one sure way he was ever able to get past something so traumatic was to focus on the good he did with his ability. The lost people he’d found, the terrified families to whom he’d provided answers and given closure.

  He knew he could do at least one more good thing with it—find out what had happened to Vonnie and all the other missing girls who, he now suspected, had been subjected to the same pain, degradation, and rape.

  Finally, he was able to move completely past it, his mind clearing and his fury dissipating. He no longer had to fight for control, for peace. He simply attained it between one breath and the next, the promise of doing something about what he’d heard—attaining justice—bringing him completely back to himself.

  Beside him, Lexie was staring out the window, gazing at the moon-brightened shadows of the wind-whipped trees dancing across the front of the house. “This is the place, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. We found the clubhouse.”

  “How can something intended to be so lovely,” she whispered, “be so awful?”

  “More awful than you can possibly imagine,” he replied, shaking his head slowly. “We should go. We need to pick up the others and bring them back here.”

  She nodded, not asking any more questions, as if knowing he was simply incapable of answering them. “Good idea. That house is too big for just the two of us to explore.”

  True. But that hadn’t been why he’d decided they needed to go get Julia, Mick, and Olivia.

  He’d be willing to bet that old building contained an updated room—or several—probably lit by generator power, which contained all the modern conveniences sexual sadists would need. Bad enough for him, or Lexie, or anyone else to be exposed to any object in that room. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like for Mick, who, with a single ungloved touch, would see exactly how those objects had been used in the past. And who’d used them.

  Hearing had been bad enough. Seeing it was more than he could stomach. But that was Mick’s gig, the reason he’d come here.

  Even more disturbing, though, would be if they did find any human remains, Jessie Leonard’s or anybody else’s. Because then it would be Olivia’s turn to touch. Worse, it would be Olivia’s turn to take the place of the victim and feel everything she’d felt, for the last one hundred and thirty seconds of her life.

  God, what an awful, dark power.

  Olivia Wainwright had died many deaths in the two years that he’d known her. The quiet woman had been stabbed, shot, strangled, and drowned. Brutalized. He found it amazing she hadn’t ended up in a psych ward. Or—considering he sometimes wondered if being completely drenched in so much pain and death wouldn’t drive a weaker person to suicide—in the morgue.

  Not Olivia. Instead, she kept coming to work every day, trying to solve those murders, help the people whose final two minutes and ten seconds she’d shared.

  It shouldn’t come to that tonight, however. He doubted they’d find any remains. Not because he didn’t think any murders could have been committed in this place, but because he assumed anybody who’d committed them would have disposed of the evidence. There might be shallow graves on the property, but they wouldn’t find them in the dark.

  Tomorrow, hopefully, Derek, the other EA agent, would be able to come down and help them out. Because if anyone had endured a bad death here, Derek Monahan would know it. He’d see it, would be able to watch the victim reenacting his or her own murder, again and again, at the very spot where it had occurred. N
ot a ghost, really, merely the imprint—the photocopy—that had been made on the world through an act of explosive violence.

  Aidan didn’t doubt there would be something to see. This place, so coldly beautiful, but as wicked and corrupt as a prettily decorated chamber of hell, had definitely enjoyed its share of violence. Aidan knew that. He’d heard it and had felt its malevolence.

  Funny, how all their abilities would be so important here. Mick could touch something and know it had been used in a killing. Aidan could sense death. Derek could see it, Olivia could experience it. And Julia interacted with it on a daily basis.

  Every single one of those abilities would come into play. He’d found a place where each member of the Extrasensory Agents team would do what he or she did best.

  Now he just had to get them all here.

  Saturday, 7:35 p.m.

  The area where they’d left Aidan’s colleagues shortly before dusk wasn’t far from the old house they’d found. Not in mileage, anyway. But as Lexie and Aidan drove down the hidden lane toward the main road, the tree limbs scraping the roof of his SUV like a dead man’s fingernails out of some campfire horror story, she found herself wishing they had farther to go. A lot farther.

  She didn’t want to go back there. She definitely didn’t want to go inside that house.

  She had never once thought of herself as being any more perceptive than the average person. Smarter than some, yeah, though not as smart as others. But in terms of instinctively knowing something was bad just because of a sensation in her bones or a crawling on the back of her neck, no. At least, not until tonight.

  “Somebody should have torn it down decades ago,” she whispered, watching in the passenger-side mirror as they rounded a bend and the house finally disappeared behind them.

  He said nothing, merely reaching for her hand in the darkness, confirming what she already knew. Whatever he’d seen, or sensed about that place, it had been beyond awful.

  “Is Vonnie in there?” she had to ask, her throat as thick and tight with emotion as it was because of the pain and bruises. “Are we going back to find her body?” And the bodies of all those other girls?

  “No, Lex, she’s not there, though I’m certain she was. At least a couple of years ago, I believe.” A muscle in his jaw flexed, and she saw the anger that had seemed about to overwhelm him a few minutes ago when he’d been in that strange, frightening trance.

  “The killer brought her here?”

  He shook his head.

  “The club,” she said, at last understanding.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what it is?”

  “I know.” He sneered. “They call themselves the Hellfire Club. Good name for the bastards since I have no doubt they’ll burn in hell.”

  He only hoped its flames were as painfully hot as they’d felt during those scant seconds when he’d felt them licking at his own feet.

  “How do the girls come into it?” she asked, though she suspected she already knew.

  “These club members are sexual deviants, or sadists, all with a taste for teenage girls. It looks as though they bring three, maybe four of them out here at a time every month or so. A dozen or more grown men spend the night sharing them, doing things to them that no decent person would ever do to another one.” His profile, stark in the moonlight, appeared as hard and immoveable as a marble statue. “It’s . . . depraved.”

  For a second, she thought she would vomit. Reaching for the controls, she pushed a button to send the window gliding down, needing a rush of cool evening air on her face.

  He had one more piece of information to share. “I can’t say nobody has ever died in that house, but I didn’t get any sense that murder is part of these men’s repertoire. For them, it’s all about rough, degrading sex with underage girls.”

  Lexie put her head back against the headrest, letting the ugly ramifications sink in.

  She’d known more than ten teenagers had gone missing, had probably been killed. And she’d believed there was a killer at large. Now, though, the scope had just grown exponentially.

  A dozen men. Three or four girls at a time. Every month. For years.

  They could be talking about a hundred or more rape or molestation victims here.

  She pounded the side of one fist against her door, so overcome with anger and disgust, she just needed to hit something. “Oh, no, nothing bad could ever happen here in perfect little Granville,” she snarled, mimicking the locals who’d been so angry about her articles. “I fucking hate small towns.”

  “Savannah’s seeming more and more like heaven the longer I live here,” he admitted.

  “Or New York. You don’t see people there throwing blankets over their heads, ignoring murder and abuse, pretending they live in a place that’s much too nice for anything bad to ever take place.”

  Maybe she’d leave. Maybe when this was over, she’d say to hell with it and get outta Dodge. Her house was rented, so there was no property to worry about. She had only a few friends. And, other than getting to work with Walter, she couldn’t say she loved anything about her job anymore. Picking up and taking off sounded better all the time.

  It took a while in the darkness, but after a couple of minutes, they reached the end of the dusty private driveway. “Maybe I should pull the log back into position,” he said, hesitating before pulling out onto the main road. “I should have done it before, just didn’t think of it since I wasn’t sure this would be the place.”

  “We’re less than a mile from Julia and the others. You really think somebody’s going to notice in the next five minutes that it’s not where it’s supposed to be?”

  He hesitated, then shrugged in apology. “Sorry, I don’t like to take chances.” Pulling the vehicle out and then onto the shoulder, he said, “Wait here.”

  Aidan exited and jogged back to the log, which looked massive and heavy but, he said, was easily moved. Shoving it across the lane, he was back in his seat within a minute. He’d just buckled up as a pair of headlights came into view, heading toward them, away from town.

  “Close,” he said. A few seconds earlier and those headlights would have spotlighted him shoving at a downed tree in the middle of nowhere.

  Shifting the SUV into drive, he pulled out onto the road just as the oncoming vehicle, a large passenger van, blew past them going well above the speed limit.

  “Hope Julia, Mick, and Olivia have been staying well off the road,” Lexie said, frowning as she turned and watched the van’s taillights disappear. “Even with their flashlights, some idiot going seventy on a country road might not spot them.”

  Glancing over, she realized Aidan wasn’t listening. A dark, forbidding frown tugging at his brow, he appeared in the grip of another of those strange trances he’d been in a few minutes ago at the house.

  “Aidan,” she snapped. Realizing they were drifting into the oncoming lane, and another pair of headlights was heading for them, she raised her voice. “Pull over!”

  He shook his head, hard, his hands jerking a little on the steering wheel, swerving the SUV back into their lane. “Damn,” he muttered, sounding out of breath and shocked.

  “Did it happen again?”

  He nodded once. “I started hearing those voices all over again. I didn’t go looking for them. I’d never do that while driving.” His voice shook. “I’m so sorry, Lex. I can usually control this. Guess touching the log again put me more in tune with the voices I’d heard, of the men who’d touched it before.”

  “It’s okay. We’re both fine.”

  He swallowed visibly, admitting in a low voice, “That house shook me up. It has some seriously bad karma.”

  “I know.” Unable to help it, she had to admit, “I hate the thought of going inside.”

  “So maybe we shouldn’t,” he told her. As she started to protest, he held up a hand. “Not tonight, I mean. It’s going to be pitch-black inside and even if there is a generator, as I suspect, we won’t be able to fire it up and tur
n on any lights without potentially letting somebody know we’re in there snooping around.”

  “What about flashlights?”

  He hesitated, as if trying to figure out how to put what he was thinking into words.

  “What we do, what everyone on the team does, is very precise,” he finally said. “We all open ourselves up to some pretty intense situations every single day. Doing it in the dark, in a place like that, when we can’t entirely control what we’re touching, or what we might stumble over that could trigger a response . . . well, there are risks involved. Look at what happened just now, even after I thought I had shut it out.”

  She thought about that, the way the evil aura of the place had actually reached out and gripped him again, even when he was driving away from it. They could have been in an accident, and another trip to the local ER was not on her to-do list. Neither was getting killed.

  “There they are,” he said, nodding toward Julia, Mick, and Olivia, whose flashlights were visible just up ahead. “Let me run this by them and we’ll decide as a group, okay?”

  Fair enough. If Aidan had thought there was any chance Vonnie was in that house, or that going into it tonight might help them find her, she had no doubt he’d insist on doing it. That he didn’t was both disappointing and a bit of a relief. Disappointing, because she had been hoping, deep inside, that they might actually find the missing girl at the whispered-about clubhouse.

  Relieved because, as little as she wanted to go in that place at any time, doing it at night was something she just didn’t want to contemplate. Not now, not after the day she’d had.

  Within another few minutes, Aidan’s three friends were back in the car. Insisting that Lexie remain where she was, Mick took a seat beside Julia in the back.

  Aidan didn’t turn the vehicle around, but he didn’t head toward town right away, either. Instead, parked on the shoulder, he told them all that they’d discovered, and what he thought they should do about it.

  Julia immediately agreed. “There’s nobody alive in that house,” she said, as if she’d already gotten an inside tip. “We’d go in looking for clues, not a missing person, and it’s too easy to miss something in the dark.”