The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set

by H. P. Bayne

  But not tonight. Tonight, his mind ran at top speed, stress and high blood pressure sending constant jolts into his brain that prevented its shutting down. He loved his family more than anything, but they were his Achilles heel too.

  He had consciously worked at stepping back, particularly with Sully, having realized a couple years ago how much he was prone to hover—and how that was increasingly driving his brother batty. But it wasn’t easy by any means; his natural instincts to protect those he loved battled the need to allow them space to live their lives.

  When they were kids, Dez had caught himself a couple times calling his foster brother by the name Aiden. Sully hadn’t made a thing of it, but Dez had, and he’d often repeated a mental reminder that Sully was not Aiden. As the years passed and he matured, he grasped the full meaning of the subconscious mix-up. It wasn’t simply a matter of getting a second chance at having a little brother or the continued difficulty in accepting Aiden was gone. It wasn’t even that Sully and Aiden were alike, because they really weren’t.

  It was, Dez had come to realize, connected to his own need to fix what had happened to Aiden, to go back and prevent it, to protect him, to be the big brother. Because he would never get that chance with Aiden, he’d visited those intentions instead on Sully. Transference, they called it. Sure, Dez loved Sully as much as any guy loved his kid brother, probably more than many come to that. But he’d learned to give him breathing room, which didn’t come naturally. And he had to admit their relationship had improved because of it. In releasing his hold, Sully was more inclined to come to him as he always had in the past, more than he probably would have otherwise.

  In the middle of the night, Dez heard Sully getting up and stumbling across the hall from the spare room to the main bathroom. He checked the bedside clock. 2:58 a.m.

  During the couple of minutes that followed, Dez thought he could hear his brother talking to someone. Curiosity was not Dez’s strong suit when it came to Sully’s late-night conversations. He knew full well he really didn’t want to know who was on the receiving end of those chats. He chose the safer option, continuing to lie there, waiting for the eventual sound of his brother shuffling back to bed.

  Instead, Dez heard smashing glass.

  He wasn’t alarmed, knowing Sully usually took a glass up to the bathroom before bed so he could brush his teeth. Dez guessed his brother had knocked the glass off the counter accidentally or, worst case scenario, he was dealing with a poltergeist that liked to throw things.

  Whatever it was, Dez figured it merited a check, if only to make sure Sully wasn’t in need of stitches.

  “Everything okay?” Eva mumbled, half into the pillow, as Dez got up.

  “Fine, Evie. Go back to sleep.”

  Eva’s reply was incoherent as Dez slipped into his terrycloth robe and shuffled off down the hall.

  The bathroom door was closed, a sliver of light showing from the crack where door met floor. Dez rapped quietly so as not to wake Kayleigh. Granted, she was a solid sleeper, but no sense taking chances. If this was a ghost thing, Dez wanted her kept as far from it as possible.

  “Sully? You okay in there?”

  When no answer came, Dez knocked again and spoke a bit louder. “Hey, Sull, you okay?”

  Still no answer. Dez felt his heart thud against his ribcage.

  He knocked one more time. “Okay, I’m coming in, man.”

  The door was unlocked, the knob turning easily in his hand. But, while Dez was able to inch the door open, he found some sort of force being applied against it, keeping Dez out and Sully in.

  “Sully? Answer me, man. What’s going on?”

  Dez gave the door another little push, uncertain whether his brother was holding it shut, or if this was some otherworldly force. He’d seen that happen before, and he didn’t like it at all.

  He liked even less that fact Sully had yet to answer him.

  Pushing a bit further, Dez was able to get the door opened just enough to catch a glimpse of the wall across from the sink, the one holding the towel rack.

  What he saw was blood.

  A lot of blood.

  He called out Sully’s name, louder now, pushed at the door with the strength of desperation, managing this time to move it. His brother, naked except for his underwear, fell across the floor in front of him, apparently knocked away from the door by the force of the shove. Dez entered the room fully, gasped at the blood soaking the walls, the floor, the sink, the broken mirror.

  Soaking Sully.

  Dez had been a cop long enough to know what blood spray looked like and what it meant, and it had Dez moving quickly, turning Sully—still prone on the floor—to look for the source. He found it at his brother’s right wrist, a wide gash opened and spurting. Dez grabbed for a towel, and had just turned back toward his brother when he spotted movement from his right. Dez reacted on instinct, blocking the path of the large shard of blood-covered glass his brother was clutching in his left hand. Although Sully wasn’t focused on Dez—he didn’t appear focused on anything—the shard had been set on a course toward Dez’s neck.

  Grabbing Sully’s uninjured wrist and pinning it to the floor, Dez wrested the makeshift blade from his brother’s cut fingers just as Eva appeared behind him.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Eva, call 9-1-1 and make sure Kayleigh doesn’t come in here.”

  He didn’t need to look to know Eva had gone to do as asked, leaving Dez to deal with Sully. He kicked the door closed and created a tourniquet with the towel around Sully’s right wrist. When he checked his brother’s left hand, Sully struggled against him, and Dez shifted so he could draw his brother up against him and hold him there.

  “Sully, stop. Just try to relax, okay? You’re going to hurt yourself worse. Help’s coming. Just hold on.”

  “Blue room.” The voice had come from Sully, but it wasn’t him—his voice, only far lower with a grating sound Dez had never heard in his brother’s ordinarily soft tones. “Blue room.”

  The phrase was repeated over and over, louder and louder until Dez at last felt forced to press a hand over Sully’s mouth, in part to prevent Kayleigh’s hearing and in part to keep Dez from losing what was left of his sanity as he sat here, holding his bleeding brother on the bathroom floor.

  Dez realized he was rocking back and forth, taking Sully with him, as tears pooled in his eyes and dripped down his cheeks. “Sully, shh. Please, listen to me, man. Come back. Sully, I need you to come back. Please. Please, Sull. I need you to be okay. I need you to be okay, buddy.”

  Muffled beneath Dez’s hand, the terrifying chant had stopped somewhere along the way and Dez realized his brother was no longer struggling. Sully was trying to talk, the stifled sounds softer now; Dez removed his hand.

  “Sully?”

  “Dez? What the hell happened? How did I get down …. Oh, God. Oh, God. Dez?”

  “It’s okay, Sull. It’s going to be okay.”

  The words, said to ease the fear evident in Sully’s voice and in the way his body was shaking, felt empty to Dez as he lowered his tear-streaked face against the back of his brother’s head.

  He didn’t let go until the ambulance came.

  10

  Flynn’s legs were longer but Mara was faster, which probably explained how they managed to reach the ER soft room at the same time.

  Dez knew he must look a wreck, hands, arms and face covered in Sully’s blood, eyes and nose red and puffy from crying. He hadn’t had a lot of answers for his parents when he’d called them from the ambulance, and his attention had been taken up trying to calm Sully before the EMT in back finally gave up the battle and sedated him.

  But the expressions on Flynn and Mara Braddock’s faces as they stared wide-eyed at Dez showed they’d be needing a little more info, and fast.

  “He’s going to be all right,” Dez said, greeting his parents with a hug on shaky legs. “He’s going to be fine.”

  “Define ‘all right,’ son,” Flynn said.
“Because it sounds to me like Sully tried to kill himself.”

  “It wasn’t him, Dad. I don’t know who it was, but it wasn’t him.”

  Mara closed the door, sealing the three of them in the room for privacy. “Are you saying he was possessed?”

  Dez hated thinking about it, but there was no other explanation. “It sure looked that way. First of all, he slashed up using his left hand, and Sully’s right-handed. And then he was speaking in this weird voice, kept saying the same thing over and over: ‘Blue room.’ I kept talking to him and he eventually came around. It was like he had no idea how he’d gotten there, how he’d gotten hurt.”

  Dez didn’t say anything about the attempt Sully—or whomever he’d been at the time—had made to stab him in the neck. That was one thing Dez intended to keep to himself. He sure as hell hoped to keep it from Sully if he could manage it. His brother would feel bad enough about the rest of this, and there was no telling how he’d react to the knowledge he’d tried to hurt someone he loved. Add the attempted attack on Dez to Sully’s existing guilt over Betty, and Dez wasn’t sure his brother had any place left inside him to put it.

  “What’s this all about, Dez?” Flynn asked. “It sure doesn’t sound like Betty.”

  “I think it’s this man who’s been coming around Sully since right before the first break-in. Sully’s really scared of him, and I haven’t seen him this freaked over a ghost in a long time. There was this moment yesterday, right before we found those clothes in the dumpster, that the ghost came at Sully. He thought maybe he was trying to get inside him or something. Only I put myself in the way.”

  Mara smiled. “You did? Dez, you hate ghosts.”

  “I hate it more when they go after people I care about. Anyway, I didn’t exactly know where the bastard was until I was standing right in the middle of him.”

  Dez cut the conversation short as his uncle Lowell came into the room.

  “Sorry, I dropped your folks off and went to park the car,” he said. “How’s Sullivan?”

  “He’s going to be okay, I think. How’d you end up here?”

  “I was at your parents’ place this evening. I wanted to pick your dad’s brain about everything that’s been happening at the Black Fox. I was hoping maybe he was in on something.”

  “And you were wrong,” Flynn said with a small smile.

  “Yeah, I was. Anyway, Flynnie and I ended up having a couple drinks, so he figured I shouldn’t be driving. We went to bed a few hours ago and woke up to this. What the hell, Dez?”

  “I don’t know, man. I can’t figure it out.”

  “I know he must have been upset about Betty,” Lowell said. “I mean, I think the two of them were pretty close. She used to tell me all the time what a good worker he is, how much she liked him.”

  “They were friends, yeah, but I don’t think Sully tried to kill himself over it.”

  “So then, what?”

  A knock on the door announced the arrival of the doctor, a man who appeared to recognize Lowell immediately, judging by the smile and the warm handshake.

  “Mr. Braddock, somehow I didn’t put two and two together,” he said.

  “Dr. Garva,” Lowell said to his family by way of quick introduction. “Doctor, my brother Flynn and his wife and son, Mara and Desmond.”

  “I understand Sullivan was adopted?” the doctor asked. Dez noticed he was still addressing Lowell.

  “Foster, technically,” Lowell said, but Flynn cut in with his own firm handshake and an added comment. “Permanent placement, close as you’d get to adoption. How’s my son?”

  “Sullivan’s going to be fine, physically,” the doctor said. “He sliced into a vein, but it’s sealed itself off and we’ve put in a few sutures. It may be that there’s some muscle and nerve damage, but for now I just want the wrist immobilized, so time will tell with that. We cleaned and bandaged the cuts on his other hand, and he needed only a couple of stitches there. Frankly, it’s his mental state I’m most concerned about. He seems fine right now, but I’m worried he says he’s missing time. The last thing he remembers is walking into the bathroom, and the next he was being restrained by his brother. He’s concerned, and so am I. It might not be such a bad idea to admit him to the hospital’s psychiatric ward for observation and an assessment.”

  Dez met his mom’s eye and shook his head just enough that she’d notice. A psych ward wasn’t what Sully needed. Dez didn’t want to think what would happen if that ghost got to his brother again with no one around who understood what was happening.

  “I really think Sully needs to be around his family, right now,” Mara said.

  “No offence, ma’am, but he was around his family when this happened. And he can’t explain why he did this, meaning there’s no way to necessarily prevent a reoccurrence. Now, I’m told he’s been under a lot of strain the past couple of days, so that might help to explain why he might be suffering some form of mental breakdown, but—”

  “Sully’s not suffering a mental breakdown,” Dez said. “Yeah, he’s in the middle of some bad stuff, but we can get him through that.”

  “My understanding is that ‘bad stuff’ entails the fatal shooting of a friend right in front of him,” the doctor said. “That would be plenty to cause most people to suffer mental and emotional collapse.”

  Flynn lined up with Dez and Mara. “I understand what you’re saying, doctor, but Dez and I are police officers, and Mara is a family counsellor. We’re well placed to be able to take care of Sully. I promise you if there’s any sign he’s taking a turn we don’t think we can manage, we’ll bring him back in.”

  Dr. Garva smiled politely. “Of course, I can’t force him to stay. If you insist on taking him with you, that’s your prerogative. But if he runs into further problems, if you see any signs of more missing time or episodes of psychosis, I’d advise taking him to see Dr. Roman Gerhardt at Lockwood. He does some on-call work for us here, and he was actually planning to see Sullivan tonight if he was admitted. I can advise him you’ll take Sullivan directly to Lockwood if there are any serious concerns.”

  Lockwood Psychiatric Hospital was known as the Lockwood Asylum at its inception in the Victorian age. Later, the facility was rebranded as an “institution” until improved understanding and sensitivity about mental illness had them changing it simply to “hospital.” As far as Dez was concerned, it was the last place he wanted his brother, regardless of what it was calling itself these days.

  “We’ll bear that in mind, Doctor, thank you,” Flynn said. “For now, I’d just really like to see my son.”

  Having been told they wanted no more than two in the room, Flynn and Mara went to sit with Sully until the discharge papers were signed. Dez went to the nearby bathroom to wash up, scrubbing until his brother’s blood swirled little by little down the drain. He could have done it earlier, during the approximate hour wait for his parents to come in from the acreage, but he hadn’t wanted to leave the soft room and risk missing the doctor.

  That done, Dez returned to the room and his uncle, who had located a coffee machine. Dez gratefully accepted the styrofoam cup Lowell gave him.

  “How you holding up, kid?”

  Dez took a slow sip, finding the coffee too hot to manage just yet. He settled for holding it between his hands. Dez rarely got cold but the events of the night had set a chill inside him he couldn’t shake.

  “I don’t know,” Dez said. “I’ll be fine, though.”

  “You sure? I mean, you and Sullivan are really tight, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, we are.”

  “So it had to be pretty scary, what you walked into.”

  “I walk into that stuff all the time. It’s the job.”

  “Not when it’s your brother, though.”

  That was a fact, one that merited another sip of the hot coffee, temperature and scalded tongue be damned.

  “Has he ever done anything like this before?” Lowell asked.

  “If he had, you would ha
ve known about it.”

  “Look, Dez, I know this isn’t what you want to hear—it’s not what any of you want to hear—but maybe the doctor’s right. Maybe Sullivan should spend some time being checked out. Just to be safe, you know?”

  “Sully doesn’t need checking out,” Dez said. “He’s one of the most stable people I know. He’s dealt with a lot in his life and he still is, and he handles it. I don’t know how, but he does. Between the two of us, I’ve always been the one more likely to fly off the handle.”

  “No offence, Dez, but what happened tonight is not a sign of a stable person. It’s a sign of someone who needs some serious help. I know all three of you deal with mentally or emotionally unstable people all the time, given your work, but you know as well as I do that even the most experienced experts hand off personal matters to other professionals; being too close can blind you to the truth. He’s got an awful lot going on in his life right now, and even the strongest people hit breaking points. Maybe he’s hit his.”

  “He was fine before he went to bed.”

  “Maybe he seemed fine,” Lowell said. “Maybe even to himself, he seemed fine. Sometimes things snap without a person knowing. He could have suffered something as simple as a PTSD-related flashback or nightmare, something that brought everything to bear all at once.”

  Dez had considered not saying anything to his uncle, but he knew his brother, knew without having spoken directly to him about it that Sully hadn’t intended what he’d done. The left-handed slashing and the attempted stabbing of Dez were enough to prove that. It had been Sully in body only. Whoever had been inside him was responsible. Sully didn’t belong in a mental hospital. If anything, he needed a bloody exorcist.

  “Look, Uncle Lo, I know you don’t go in for this stuff, but I don’t think it was Sully. I think it was someone else, something else, at the helm.”

  “Something else, as in an evil spirit?”

  It was there in spades, Lowell’s skepticism. Since his childhood, Sully had helped the police behind the scenes solve some of their more challenging homicide and missing person cases, and no one was supposed to know. Which meant Lowell didn’t know, giving him plenty of room to doubt. It was the one thing Dez hated about Lowell, his dismissal of Sully as attention-seeking or even crazy.