by Dale Mayer
She chuckled. “Well, if it is, it’s enchanted with something I’ve never seen before.”
“How much do you know about enchantment?”
She shrugged. “Only what I’ve read. And what started as a curiosity as a young girl has become a fascination ever since. I’ve read widely.”
“Do you know people who work in this industry?”
“I know of them,” she said quietly. “I’ve never contacted anybody. I’ve never associated with any of them or had private consultations with them.”
“Why not?” That question seemed to surprise her.
“Why would I? Most of them would need some history or background. Information I don’t share well. Most would see things I don’t really want anyone else to see. Plus a lot of charlatans are out there. How would I find those who are truly gifted?”
“So you do believe in all that psychic stuff,” he said.
“How can you even ask that after Irene,” she cried out. “We saw her flung off the damn cliff and then reappear.” She motioned at the coffee. “Do you mind if we get coffee now?”
He turned toward the machine. “Sorry. I was just wondering out loud if we could call anybody for help.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Didn’t you contact somebody already?”
“Yes,” he said. “He was supposed to send somebody who was nearby, but I haven’t heard anything yet.”
Just then came a knock at the door. He looked over at her, handed her a cup of black coffee. “We’ll get the fixings in a minute.”
She waved him off. “I like it black.”
He opened the front door, aware she had come behind him and stood there too. In front of him stood a six-foot-plus male, with huge shoulders, arms crossed over his chest and almost silver hair.
Rowan spoke first. “Hello. May I help you?”
“Name’s Grayse,” he said.
Rowan’s eyebrows shot up at the name.
The man nodded. “Right. Stefan sent me.”
He brushed past Rowan and stopped in the living room. The dogs came running, but, instead of barking, they greeted him like a long-lost friend. He bent down and gently cuddled them for a few moments while he eyed Phoenix.
“So, you are her,” he said.
“I’m who?” she asked, a touch of defiance to her voice.
“John Hopkins’ only surviving daughter,” he said, straightening up. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and rocked back on his heels. “I was there.”
“You were where?”
“At the compound when the place was raided.”
Rowan reached out to catch Phoenix as she faltered. Coffee splashed on the floor, and he glared at Grayse. “A little more finesse would help.”
Grayse snatched the coffee cup from her hand. “Let’s go sit down.”
In the living room, Phoenix sat on a love seat, and Rowan sat beside her. He had yet to clean up the coffee spill on the floor, but Grayse seemed to have that in hand as he walked into the kitchen and grabbed a paper towel, came back and cleaned it up. “What kind of a name is Grace for a man?”
“Well, there’s no C in it,” he said cheerfully. “It’s G-R-A-Y-S-E.”
“It’s still an odd name.”
“It is, indeed,” he replied. “However, that doesn’t change the fact I was one of the psychics who directed the police to save Phoenix. Along with Stefan—in energetic form.”
Rowan didn’t dare touch the subject of Stefan in an energetic form. “Psychics and saving. Stefan didn’t mention anything about this,” Rowan said. “You better take us back to the beginning and explain.”
“Glad to. I’m happy to see Phoenix is doing well. We weren’t sure she would be cognizant of anything back then.”
“What do you mean?” Rowan asked and glanced down at Phoenix.
“She was in shock. We didn’t know if it was the shock from the raid, the amount of poison her mother had managed to get in her, or everything that had gone on just before then. Her body appeared to be severely burned over a good forty percent of it, and, considering that, for her to still be walking was a miracle. She was sent to the burn unit immediately.”
Phoenix made a startled sound.
Grayse smiled at her gently. “But you didn’t stay long, as you were healing beautifully. You had already started the healing process yourself. Good job, by the way. We don’t get too many young psychics like you who can heal so beautifully. But, then again, we also don’t get too many who have been through the kind of trauma that required that level of healing.”
“What made you look for her?” Rowan asked.
“We knew a lot of energy was coming from one particular part of town. Stefan had been called psychically to help a young child heal from horrific injuries somewhere in that region several times, but Stefan never could find the location of the abusive home,” Grayse said. “We had no real way to know what was going on. I would wake up sometimes with really strong premonitions of children dressed all in white, laughing and having fun, and yet such darkness came with the premonition.
“I could never figure out what it was. I drove the neighborhood for years, but I couldn’t pinpoint where all this energy was coming from. As soon as I’d get a premonition, I would get into my vehicle and drive, trying to trace it. But the trouble with a premonition is, it’s a forward vision. I would never have any energy to track it. I tried meditation. I contacted several other psychics to see if we could zero in on what was going on. But we never located this hot spot.”
“Until?”
“Until Phoenix reached out to Stefan—and Maddy, an incredible healer who works closely with Stefan. This last time they managed to loop me in to help locate her,” he said smoothly. “Obviously she doesn’t remember doing so.”
Phoenix shook her head. “I cried out for help to anybody who would listen, and I had two people who helped to heal me, but I didn’t have names or faces, just a feeling when they were there helping,” she said. Her voice was faint but growing with strength. “I often called out. I didn’t expect anybody to respond.”
“Sometimes it is like that. When you don’t really believe anybody is out there. It depends how much power is in the energy you send out. And somebody also has to be listening. Think of it like a receiver. You can send out a signal, but somebody has to receive it. I saw premonitions, but they were ahead of time, so I was of little help until Stefan looped me in, and I could send out inquiries. Then a friend mentioned some weird disturbance came from his town and wondered if I could help him narrow it down.”
“But you were already trying, weren’t you?”
“I was,” he said. “But I went to the cops this time. One I had worked with a couple times, and I told him that I needed to find the person sending out energetic cries for help, but I had no way to locate them. I wanted him to tell me what areas of town I would find families being watched by the cops or where foster care or social services were looking. He told me there were just too many. And, in most cases, they never found anything wrong.” Grayse stopped for a moment to collect his thoughts.
“In one of my premonitions I finally figured out I saw schoolbooks. Not normal schoolbooks though. They looked like religious schoolbooks, and I talked to my friend and asked if he could tell me who was being homeschooled in the area. He laughed and told me that he didn’t know, as no rules or regulations governed homeschooling. I thought that was a terrible shame. But together we managed to get a little more information as to some of the homeschool groups in town. I walked to a couple locations just to wander around the outside, so I could check out the energy, but I never saw anything and realized we had somebody living completely under the grid. Likely a religious group.
“When I talked to my friend about that added detail, he told me of a place they had heard rumors about, and every time they went to check on it, only a couple women were there. Raising their families together. When I got the address, I drove by and knew it was the place. But I had to come up with pr
oof. About six days later I saw the premonition of the poisonings and the mass suicide. But, even then, the authorities couldn’t just move in on the compound. I had to have more than that. Not just a suspicion.”
Phoenix looked at him. “Nobody ever came.”
“No,” he said. “Obviously food came in and out of that compound, so I kept track of deliveries. I parked myself in the shadows for days. Finally a group of women headed into town to do some shopping. They wore their white dresses and went into one of the grocery stores. They came out with quite a bit of food. They went to three stores but always very quietly. Didn’t say much about what they needed and left. When they were gone, I asked the storekeepers about them and was told they came like clockwork, always paid, never spoke, and the owners had no problem with them. I asked if they had any children with them, and one said sometimes they had a couple but most of the time none.”
“What did you do then?” Rowan asked. “Because a couple women shopping is hardly grounds for a police investigation.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Except, when I approached the group to speak to them, one of the women appeared terrified. I asked her if she needed help because she looked like she wanted to escape, but two women from their little group grabbed her by the arm and took her away.”
Rowan heard a startled gasp from Phoenix and turned to look at her. “One of the women disappeared, didn’t she?”
She nodded. “They told me that she died. That God had called her home.”
Grayse’s face turned dark. “I contacted the cops and said I thought we had a captive situation, maybe a kidnapping. But I didn’t understand all the details. I told him what I saw. I had also taken a picture of the women’s faces. The cops ran them through facial recognition and found that, years ago, all three women had dropped off the face of the Earth as far as their families were concerned. The cops then went to the property. I warned them about the poison. About a chance of a mass killing. They went in with a full SWAT team.”
Rowan made a choking sound at the back of his throat. He knew what it took to get something like that going. But then to have three women missing for that long, and one obviously terrified and looking to escape, maybe that had been enough grounds. He probably could have gotten that done through his office too.
“You said you could feel the energy I was sending out,” Phoenix said to Grayse. “How long was I sending it out?”
“A couple years, I think Stefan said,” he said apologetically. “If we could have pinpointed what was going on earlier, I could have saved you a lot of pain.”
She sagged on the couch. “Wow. I tried so hard to contact anybody out there, to believe somebody was listening to me, and … you were,” she said in astonishment.
“Yes,” he said. “By the time we were alerted to the growing strength in your voice, a few of us were caught up in what was going on. Again we had to play by the rules of the police though.”
She nodded her head. “You said you were there the day of the raid?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“You know for sure my father is dead?”
He looked at her in surprise but gave a definitive nod. “Not only am I sure because of seeing him but I also checked for a pulse, and he was definitely gone. His chest was pretty much blown apart by bullets. He wasn’t coming back. And, yes, I can see how, in your mind, that might be something he was capable of.”
“Was a second man there?” Rowan asked.
“Not at the time,” Grayse said. “There was always concern about that because we did see signs of a second male.”
“Did you find all the women?”
“Twelve children, seven women, and one grave with one woman. That was the one I had seen in town.”
Phoenix turned her gaze out the window as Rowan asked her, “Were you around when she was murdered?”
She nodded slowly. “I think I saw her afterward in a vision. She looked so peaceful. She was lying on a bed with her hands folded, and our father kept telling us that she had chosen to go home to God. She was surrounded by candles, and strange symbols were painted on her gown. Just like Hogarth’s father …” She twisted about and looked wordlessly at Rowan.
“Shit. Another connection to Iceland. So he probably poisoned her?” Rowan turned with a look back at Grayse and filled him in on Theo Hogarth’s case. “On the surface the connections are slim but if, with this piece of information …”
“I wonder how many other women are buried on that property?” Phoenix asked.
“Do you suspect more?” Grayse asked. “I know they did a search, but they didn’t find any proof that other bodies were there.”
Rowan studied her. “What’s the matter?”
“I often worried I was killing some of the others. Because I was always injured, so I always needed energy, and I didn’t have enough myself, so I pulled energy from people,” she said, for want of a better explanation. “Wherever there was energy, I took it to try to heal. I know it’s wrong of me, but I didn’t know it at the time. After seeing the dead woman’s vision, I wondered if I’d had a hand in her death.”
Grayse, with a wave of his hand, brushed that aside. “You were in terrible pain, and you were being tortured,” he said. “Anybody would have granted you that energy.”
“Are you sure? I might have taken too much.” She chewed her bottom lip in worry.
“You can put that to rest,” he said gently. “She was poisoned.”
Chapter 19
Phoenix sagged in relief. “I’ve carried that one with me for a long time. I knew what I was doing was necessary, but I also knew I wasn’t supposed to take from other people,” she murmured, looking from Rowan to Grayse. “I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t stop myself.”
“It’s only wrong if you take so much you kill them,” Grayse said. “In this case, as a child taking energy from an adult, you didn’t. And neither could you have because it generally takes permission for somebody to do that or an incredible amount of energy to override the other person’s will.”
“What do you mean by permission?” Rowan asked. “This is getting more confusing. I understand Phoenix was tortured. She healed extremely fast because she accessed other people’s energies to help her and, in turn, created more torment for herself because then they kept pushing her limits to see how much she could take.”
Grayse winced. “Right. Don’t we just love the evil human mind-set,” he said. “We did wonder if we’d find other graves, but we saw no sign of them. And I don’t think the dogs ever found anything on the property.”
“Maybe not,” she said, “but I wonder if anybody checked the basement.”
Grayse leaned forward slowly. “There was no basement, Phoenix. None at all.”
“Yes, there was,” she said. “At least I remember a basement.” She turned her gaze inward. “We had to go outside to get there though, so maybe not.”
Grayse stood and frowned at her. “You mean, like a bomb shelter?”
She nodded. “I think so. Something was definitely down there. And it was pretty big inside.”
“So, how about a trip back to that property, and let’s take another look? It would be nice if we could tidy up some more loose ends. We have an awful lot of missing women in the US. If one happens to still be there, surely a trip to the property is worth it,” Grayse said persuasively.
“Not to mention the fact you’d be safer there than here,” Rowan said. “Although you’re likely too injured to fly.”
Grayse looked at her shoulder, frowned and said, “You were shot?”
She lifted her head, startled. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve seen bullet holes before.”
She gasped. “But you haven’t seen my shoulder, so how can you say that?”
“Maybe not,” he said, chuckling, “but I can see through a bandage.”
“Do you have X-ray eyes?” she demanded.
“Not quite,” he said. “I have some medical-based intuitive skills. I
can see wounds, and, when I say see, I mean see them in my mind. And that’s definitely a bullet hole. Somebody shot you. Who?” He turned his gaze to Rowan.
“We don’t know,” Rowan replied. “A geologist was with us and died in the lava field at the same time, and we don’t know if he was shot, pushed or jumped.”
Phoenix got up, walked over to the kitchen table and came back with her letter. “Ever seen anything like this?” She held it out for Grayse to look at.
Grayse took it in his hand and gasped at the shock. “My God,” he said. “Where did you get this?”
“My mother gave it to me initially. My father took it away, and then he gave it back to me not too long before the raid,” she said. “I came here specifically to throw it into the Burning Fires. My father named me Phoenix Rising, saying I was born to rise from the ashes. And, as a punishment, or a part of my training, he consistently burned me so I could become accustomed to the feeling, and so I would rise again.”
“The purpose of throwing this into the lava is what?”
She took a deep breath. “It’s for me to walk away. Because that’s part of my childhood. It’s part of whatever it was my father belonged to. My father was a psychic or at least could burn flames at the end of his fingers.”
Her news seemed to have the effect of a bomb. Grayse sat back down again and stared at her and then ever-so-slowly he nodded. “That would explain why I couldn’t always pick up your energy,” he said. “Because somebody was shielding it. Somebody was shielding the compound. We had no way to know. It never occurred to us that somebody was actively doing that. We just figured whoever was calling out was too weak to get through to us.”
“Which is quite true,” she said. “I was, most of the time.”
“Did your father know what you were doing?” Rowan asked. “Did he have any idea you were sending out messages and using other people’s energies?”
“Who knows what my father knew or believed,” she said. “He had diaries. Lots of them. He used to keep a running journal of everything that happened. He said it would be important one day.”