Hidden Salem

by Kay Hooper

  But she’d done it, her own determination catching her off guard and bothering her, because against all logic it . . . felt important. Imperative. It felt like something she had to do, letter or no letter.

  And that was disconcerting as hell.

  Still, she had pushed aside the second and even third thoughts, especially once she had located Salem. Because once she had, the pull to go there had grown steadier by the day.

  She had no idea how long this . . . thing she was supposed to do would take, so she tentatively planned for a couple of weeks. It had actually been simple to take an indeterminate leave of absence from work, largely because Thomas Cavendish had set things up carefully to impose the least burden on his daughter, allowing her to choose how involved she wished to be in his business.

  The one truly considerate thing she could ever remember him doing for her.

  Leo whined softly, and she automatically reached out her free hand to rub his broad head and pull absently at the silky black ears. “I don’t know what this is all about,” she confided softly to her dog. “If I had any sense at all, I’d just ignore it. But . . . all Dad left me, really, was stuff. Material things. And questions. Nothing of him. Nothing to help me understand him, understand the way he was. And this . . . this might be my last chance to do that. To understand him. To understand why there are things I can’t remember no matter how hard I try. Blank spaces in my life.”

  Too many blank spaces.

  Too many missing memories.

  Like virtually anything about her mother. She had vanished when Nellie was a toddler, just . . . run away, abandoning her husband and child. That was what Nellie had been told.

  All she had been told.

  And then there was the other thing. The thing she and her father had never spoken of.

  She had never been sure that he’d even known his daughter was . . . different. But it seemed he had known, had even accepted the strange abilities she’d learned in her earliest childhood to hide.

  And he’d never said a word to her. Until the letter.

  Nellie drew a breath and released it slowly. “I don’t think we have a choice, Leo. I don’t think we ever did. And I think that scares me more than anything else.”

  * * *

  —

  GENEVA SLIPPED THROUGH the woods, silent, her passage not noticed or at least not announced by the dogs of Salem as she passed by some of the outlying houses. Not that she expected them to give her away. She liked dogs, they liked her, and by now they’d most certainly grown accustomed to her almost nightly rambles all around town. She’d made sure of it.

  Most usually greeted her from the backs or sides of fenced yards, more curious and hopeful than suspicious, especially since she’d made it a habit to carry a generous pocketful of doggie snacks for those she encountered, until even the most wary of them had been pretty well won over.

  Tonight, though, there weren’t many dogs out at all, or pets of any kind, and no doubt most livestock was shut up warm and snug for the night in the very tidy barns the community boasted.

  It was dark and it was cold, bone-chilling cold, the coldest night by far she’d experienced here yet. Even though she had dressed for cold, and from the skin out, she was still shivering, and already looking forward to a hot, hot shower later tonight. Damn cold. Even if never before this bad, it was nearly this cold every night, or at least had been since her arrival a couple of weeks previously. No matter what the weather reports said, it was always ten to twenty degrees colder in Salem than in the general area outside the valley—including the higher elevations.

  Which was one of the oddities.

  She had wondered more than once if it was all the granite around this valley and underneath it, hard stone God only knew how deep that had frozen miles below the surface and down to its very atoms and never thawed from the last ice age, which had ended more than ten thousand years ago, continuing to radiate an unusual chill even today.

  An unnatural chill.

  If she had dared, she would have sent a message that he should pack for the Arctic, or at least bring along his thermal underwear. But as much as she would have enjoyed doing that, and imagining his expression when he received the message, once on the job she was all business.

  Well, except for that one time.

  Which would not be repeated.

  Frowning, she focused on the here and now, her job. Because even though the dogs of Salem would give her a pass, she was a lot less certain of what else she might encounter in these dark, eerily silent woods. She had, after all, more than once on previous outings observed sentries of a kind, and had too narrowly avoided solitary men she was almost certain had been armed also moving silently about in the forest for reasons she had yet to discover.

  The militia on patrol? Maybe. But against what? Or who? The faint, seeking telepathic tendril she’d cast about her on those occasions had been yanked back behind her shield, a precaution against the possibility that one of those men might have caught her probe. After that, she’d used all the woodcraft she knew well to move silently and cautiously.

  That had been fairly close to town, making her a bit wary of exploring the higher mountain slopes. At least until yesterday morning, when she had found the remains of a man tortured to death. She was venturing again higher up the mountain tonight; she had no idea whether that meant she was less or more likely to encounter the militia. But seeing Bethany’s home had left her grimly determined to do whatever she could to find that child.

  Alive.

  And even if she set Bethany apart, there was still just too little information she’d been able to discover about Salem, and too much of that came second- or even thirdhand.

  She really, really hated it. Born to solve puzzles, that’s what Bishop had said once about her. That she was one of those people who simply couldn’t bear things that didn’t make sense and had to endlessly examine and toss and turn puzzle pieces until every piece clicked into its proper place and she understood the picture.

  All she had after two weeks here was a box of puzzle pieces and no idea what the picture was supposed to look like.

  The closest thing to real, hard evidence she had so far was the photographs of the mutilated victim—and since she had snuck back up there after visiting the Hicks home earlier in the day, she knew only too well that the entire area had indeed been sanitized.

  So—no body. Photographic evidence that wasn’t enough. She hadn’t dared get close enough to take a biological sample the first time she’d been up there in the hopes of possibly identifying the victim. And by the time she got back up there, finding anything viable was simply impossible.

  The militia was very, very thorough.

  So just more puzzle pieces for her frustrating puzzle.

  It looked like a normal little town on the surface, and most of the people appeared normal, sounded normal, acted normal—but her spider senses were tingling like mad, and other than a single sense, hers weren’t especially well honed.

  Behind the smiling faces and pleasant greetings was . . . something else.

  The whole place . . . felt wrong.

  Which was why she was searching these woods rather than going directly to what she believed was her destination: that house out in the middle of nowhere that Bethany had been dared to approach alone.

  Geneva paused next to a huge oak, her gaze roaming all around, trying to see beyond the closest trees and able to see quite well despite the lack of moonlight. Her spider senses really weren’t any good when it came to vision, but Bishop had told her to believe they were, and that actually seemed to help make her normal vision at least a bit more acute, but . . .

  It was another odd thing. Sometimes these woods were really, really dark, and sometimes they weren’t. And it didn’t have a damned thing to do with moonlight or the lack of it.

  It was almost like the trees,
evergreen and hardwood, sometimes decided to huddle close way up high, lace their branches soundlessly to form a sort of roof and shut out the light. For whatever reason. As if there could be a reason.

  It was an eerie thought, but not the first time she’d thought it.

  I’m missing something. Even with extra senses I’m missing something important. I have to be. There’s too much weird and . . . off . . . in this place, this town, without there being a . . . center. A nexus. Someone or something pulling all the strings. Because it isn’t just one weird thing; it’s a hell of a lot of them. People. Animals. Things. Places. Actions. Habits. Even the air itself sometimes holds a whiff of something that makes my skin crawl, and I don’t think it’s just all the static. No matter what it looks like on the surface, no matter how normal, underneath is something bad. And every once in a while one of them gives it away. Veiled glances and guarded conversations. Smiles that never touch their eyes. The flicker of a thought that doesn’t make sense. That weird militia that really doesn’t act like any I’ve ever heard about, especially the guy giving most of the orders but not, apparently, the one really in charge. And in a town this small where so much else is connected, where so many of the people are connected, there has to be a center point . . . or overlapping . . . or something . . .

  So why hadn’t she been able to find it?

  She heard a faint fluttering sound and turned her head to see, without much surprise, a huge crow not twelve feet away, perched on the lower branch of another tree, regarding her with bright black eyes and eerily sentient curiosity. It wasn’t the first time one of her night rambles had drawn an escort.

  Another of the weird, unsettling things about Salem.

  They were everywhere, both day and night, and watched everything, the crows, saw everything. Usually singly or in small groups, in town as well as in the woods.

  There was something very weird about the way they hung around. And watched. What she had yet to discover was who—or what—they reported back to. Because that was something else of which she was positive, even if only pure instinct made her so certain of it. The birds were sentries, spies, escorts; every sense she could command told her that much. The watchmen on the walls of . . . whatever was being hidden and guarded in this town. Whatever was being done secretly. Perhaps they were even weapons, though she had never yet seen them attack anyone.

  And the townspeople seemed fairly oblivious to them. From all appearances, they didn’t consider the presence of one or more on this or that tree, this or that street sign, this or that railing, at all odd.

  But it was odd. It was even eerie.

  The Birds.

  Yeah, while you’re sneaking through dark, dark woods on a dark, dark night, think of a creepy movie that scared the shit out of you as a kid. That’ll help.

  A second crow joined the first, this one soundless. And then a third, also making no sound.

  Neat trick, that.

  Uncanny.

  Unnatural.

  She wasn’t especially afraid, because it had happened before and had ended well, with her safely back in bed. Possibly because she had each time gone no farther, retreating at once, choosing not to, on those occasions, test the sentries, not to keep pushing on toward . . . whatever. It was what her instincts were telling her to do now.

  She should stop. Go back to her room, maybe continue the search tomorrow, in daylight.

  Except that she couldn’t do that.

  Because unlike all the other nights, tonight she had a definite purpose. Tonight, she had to find that house out here in the middle of the woods and look for a little girl no one else seemed to realize was lost.

  But the crows . . .

  Turn around and leave. Go back to the B and B. These are . . . a line. A red line. Go no farther.

  That was . . . eerie. Almost like an alien voice in her head.

  Surely not. Her shields were up, even though it actually made her head hurt to not use them in a situation where she should have. She was depending on woodcraft and her usual senses, because . . . because she wasn’t sure why. Except that it seemed to her the right way to do this.

  As for the crows, the odd thoughts in her head were just because their presence made her wary, as it always did, but especially here and tonight, at a level deeper than the cold chill of this place. She had the feeling the crows were only sent—or only made sure she became this aware of them—when she got too close to things they guarded.

  Guarded for their masters.

  Them. The men behind this.

  She didn’t know who they were, though she doubted it was the militia, or at least not entirely. Not that a lack of certainty had stopped her from speculating. An educated guess—based on the fact that five families had formed an alliance of sorts and had pretty much carved this town out of wilderness hundreds of years ago using muscle, determination, intelligence, and not much else—marked their descendants, or at least some of them, as being the ones behind whatever this was.

  So maybe they, or one or more of them, with the militia as their soldiers—some of whom she was fairly certain belonged to those families—formed to keep order just the way the families liked it. That was how it looked.

  On the surface. But Geneva had developed, over the years, a nose for the rot that lay beneath far too many pleasant surfaces. And all her senses had been warning her to be cautious, be wary, even without the crows. The surface might seem unthreatening, creepy crows notwithstanding. But beneath—

  She was yanked from her thoughts by the realization that she had been too still for too long, too lost in thought and speculation, that she should have moved the instant her instincts or that alien voice told her to go no farther, retreated as usual, and by the fact that the three crows were suddenly looking beyond her rather than at her.

  Oh, shit.

  “Good evening, Miss Raynor. Taking the night air?” The voice was deep, calm, male, and not in the least threatening.

  Which did not in the least reassure her. Because there was something in that voice, something that made the hairs on the nape of her neck quiver even as every instinct she could claim shrieked a warning that she was in trouble. Bad trouble.

  All of a sudden, it was even colder than it had been.

  * * *

  —

  DUNCAN CAVENDISH STOOD at the window of his large house, with its view down to Main Street, only the streetlights and various security lights shining now, so late, and he felt powerful. He had always been powerful, of course, in many ways. The head of his family, the most powerful of the original Five, he was listened to by the other heads, their offspring and soldiers. He was respected.

  He was also feared.

  Duncan knew that. He liked it. But he was cautious about it, because no man is invincible, and because he knew very well that even fear would not stop the other four families from moving against him if they knew exactly what he’d been doing and why. In fact, fear might spur them to act before he was ready.

  He had to be even stronger to keep them at bay. Even more powerful.

  And he had to eliminate the threat Nellie Cavendish posed. She would be here soon, he knew. He lacked the Talent of precognition, but he’d had her watched for a long time, and he knew where she was, knew she was hesitating miles outside Salem.

  Knew she would come because she had to.

  He had not been able to find out for certain how powerful or even how many Talents she possessed, not now, but . . . As an infant, her Talents had already begun to manifest, and what manifested so early promised great Talents to come. Great power. A simple, ordinary bout of colic had brought down on Salem one of the worst storms Duncan could remember. Oh, Thomas had denied his small daughter had caused that, had even tried to laugh it off, but Duncan knew. He’d seen the child’s face.

  When baby Nellie cried, storm clouds began to gather. And when she gurgled ha
ppily, the skies were clear and trouble-free.

  Duncan knew. He knew because he knew the family history better than Thomas ever had, and he knew more than one Cavendish ancestor had possessed that particular Talent. And that, in every case, it had gotten stronger as they had grown into adults, at times becoming uncontrollable.

  Dangerous.

  It was, after all, one of the Talents that had caused their family and the others to create the Barrier generations before, a wall placed by those of another Talent in a young mind to protect both the child and the families—and the town. It had become a normal thing to do, and yet Thomas had refused to place a barrier in his infant daughter’s mind. His resistance had surprised Duncan, angered him, in part because he was certain that Sarah, with her own inborn Talents, had strongly influenced his brother. Thomas’s refusal had led to their final confrontation and Thomas’s decision to take his small family and leave Salem.

  Duncan pushed aside the vague, nagging question of whether Thomas had ever truly been certain that his beloved wife had not left him by choice. Duncan hadn’t been willing to risk her further influence over her husband—and their daughter. She’d possessed too much of the Talent herself to be allowed that.

  He wondered, as he always did, just how much of that she had passed along to Nellie.

  It was part of what he feared, that what there was in her untaught mind might rage forth—and destroy. He couldn’t be sure. All he could be sure of was that whatever Talents Nellie possessed would reach their full strength by the time she turned thirty. It seemed an arbitrary number, but their family had proven it to be accurate to within a few months.

  The Barrier, when placed correctly, contained those energies, and it did so quite well as a rule.

  Sometimes the Barrier began to fail on its own by the time the child grew into his or her twenties, the Talent refusing to be denied. Other times the wall seemed to smother the Talent so that it went latent, often for that lifetime. Fear of Talent could create its own Barrier, which is what Duncan suspected had happened with Nellie. Any of the Talent raised outside Salem virtually always feared the Talent and tried to be normal.