The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set

by H. P. Bayne

  Clark was busy briefing the forensic identification unit, which had recently arrived, leaving Dez to hand in his statement to Forbes. Naturally, the older man wasn’t prepared to just leave well enough alone, which suited Dez fine. After all, he had a bone of his own to pick.

  “You might be buddy-buddy with Clark, but I’m onto you,” Forbes said. “Don’t think I don’t know the kind of company you’ve been keeping these days. Only a matter of time before you cross the line in a way that has everyone seeing you the way I do.”

  Dez chose to ignore the comment, focusing on his real concern. “Silver Sam’s. You know it?”

  “The pub in Riverview? Yeah, I’m familiar. Why?”

  “Were you there last night?”

  Dez watched Forbes for what he expected would be a lie, but didn’t immediately see anything but confusion. “Why?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “No. I wasn’t. Why?”

  “Just wondered. Greta was there, is all.”

  Dez saw the big, red wall go up behind Forbes’s eyes, anger barely contained. “You trying to start something here, Braddock?”

  Forbes’s tone was that blend of quiet and dangerous, the warning as clear as a rattlesnake’s tail shake. But while Dez wasn’t typically one to go spoiling for a fight, he wasn’t about to back down from one either—particularly when he had a purpose in mind.

  “Someone followed her last night,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “I’m thinking you know exactly who.”

  Forbes lowered his chin, allowing him to glare up at Dez in a way that resembled an angry pit bull. Only there was more to his rage now, more than just Dez in its sights. “It wasn’t me, you bastard. Did you follow?”

  “Of course I did. That’s when everything went to hell. I lost sight of them near the Riverview Cemetery. Next thing I know, I’m being attacked.”

  “What about Greta? What happened to her?”

  This wasn’t what Dez had been expecting, Forbes doing a more-than-adequate impression of a man in the dark—and a concerned one at that.

  “So it wasn’t you last night, in the cemetery?”

  “I was nowhere near there. What happened to Greta?”

  The answer to that question didn’t make Dez feel a whole lot better, not to think it and not to say it. While he had few reservations under normal circumstances about upsetting Forbes Raynor, there were some lines he refused to cross. The biggest was messing with a guy’s mind when it came to his family.

  “I don’t know.”

  Dez had been entertaining suspicions his attack last night had something to do with Sully. Now Forbes’s believable denial left him in little doubt.

  Had the whole thing been an attempt to draw Sully out? If so, it had clearly been done by someone with an inside line on Sully’s abilities, given it had been the ghost of a dead five-year-old who had led Sully there in the first place.

  That left Dez with the question of what his attacker had expected should Sully not have received the message. Any longer and there was no denying Dez would have needed a pine box or an urn of his own.

  Which brought up some other concerns: If the purpose was to lure Sully out to grab him, why not just act on it last night while he was preoccupied in the cemetery? Was it possible the person who’d buried him alive had allowed Sully the opportunity to rescue Dez, thus sparing the culprit the guilt of murder? Dez allowed the hopeful notion only as long as it took him to look back down at his hands, coated in a sticky, dry layer of another man’s blood. There was no evidence, of course, Lachlan’s attempted murder was connected to Sully or his birth mother, but that would have made it a coincidence of monstrous proportions.

  Dez guessed the real answer was Pax, Sully’s would-be kidnapper could have been caught unawares by the existence of the large hound. That would have left the man searching for something with which to knock out or kill the dog first, and would explain the evidence Dez had observed and gathered earlier today. That likely meant the man had followed them back to Dez’s building and kept watch there, following Sully in the morning and making a move as soon as it became practicable.

  Dez had spent the day wavering between anger at Sully and deep worry, and found himself in that uncomfortable in-between again as he waited in his SUV to see whether Lucienne might return. He had questions for her too, such as how she’d seen the ghost of a man who wasn’t dead. Sure, Sully had once had a similar experience, but it didn’t erase Dez’s doubts now.

  With only Pax to hear, Dez voiced his frustration anyway: “Damn it, Sull.” If only his brother had given him the chance to protect him, maybe this situation would have turned out differently. Maybe.

  But then again, his life was filled to the rafters with people he’d let down, so maybe not.

  With no way of knowing how long he’d been there, trapped in the small cell, Sully struggled to keep his mounting anxiety in check as he listened for the sound of someone approaching from the other side of the door.

  Time passed, enough that Sully gave up trying to decide how much. Morning could have passed to evening, or one day could have given way to the next for all he knew. Most of his thoughts were lost to the dread of seeing Dr. Gerhardt come through that door.

  Once in a while, he would reach out mentally, trying to pick up on the Purple Girl, always without luck.

  Sully guessed she must have given up on him when he’d repeatedly failed to heed her warnings. Lord knew she’d provided him with more than enough to have prevented this had he listened.

  Instead, here he was, trapped in the exact situation he’d been trying so hard to avoid.

  His stomach, which had been jumping around as if looking for its own escape, made a rumbling noise, reminding him he hadn’t eaten since Dez’s. But hungry though he was, Sully doubted his insides would accept food, not until he’d been able to decipher the precise nature of the danger he was in. There were priorities to contend with, after all, and food trailed miles behind the idea of his recapture by Gerhardt and his staff.

  As if responding to his silent questions, light footsteps sounded outside the door. Then the sound of a key turning in the lock.

  Sully scrambled to his feet, moving to place himself behind the door where his captors wouldn’t immediately see him. He’d had plenty of time to think through a plan of attack. It might not be a very good plan; more than likely it was a terrible one. But he anticipated going up against several large orderlies—he’d go with whatever he had.

  He listened to the sound of the lock clicking open.

  The handle being turned.

  The grate of steel on steel as the door was forced free of a sticking jamb.

  The door began to open.

  Sully pulled in a long, quiet breath. And he waited.

  12

  Sully had less than a second to size up the man who came through the door.

  Enough time to realize he was in trouble.

  While the man wasn’t as big as Dez—a feat all but impossible—he still had an inch or two on Sully. And worse, unlike Sully, it looked like this guy had put away plenty of decent meals in the past couple years. While the man wasn’t obese, Sully put the difference in their weight at somewhere between fifty and seventy pounds—more than enough to convince him he had a real fight on his hands.

  And that wasn’t even factoring in the possibility of someone else hovering behind this guy, out of Sully’s view.

  He didn’t wait to observe the man further, seizing this one chance before the man noticed anything amiss in the semi-dark room.

  Backing it with every ounce of strength, determination and will to live he possessed, Sully sprang from behind the door, slamming the full weight of his body into the other male.

  He was rewarded with a grunt, the larger man staggering under the impact. But, Sully noted, not enough to push him out of his escape route.

  Sully had never been highly skilled in a fight, but he was plenty agile. He managed to get in
a second body blow, using his still-low position to drive his shoulder into the man’s gut.

  Though the man didn’t shift as much as Sully had hoped, it sounded like the wind had been forced from his lungs, and Sully made a break for the small gap the move had created.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Sully knew what it was to take a hit, had had plenty of opportunity in his pre-Braddock days to normalize the pain and fear that came with abuse. While he’d never been particularly good at dishing it out, he was more than capable of taking it and working through it.

  Unfortunately, it seemed this guy had been taught the same lessons. He recovered fast, managing to grab Sully before he could get through the door. Sully felt himself spinning, then saw the wall coming at his face. He managed to turn his head in time to prevent a broken nose, but the impact left his right ear ringing and rattled his brain enough that he would have collapsed had the man not been pressed up against him, holding him in place.

  It took a few seconds for the world to right itself, and he became aware the man was speaking to him, the voice deep and scratchy as if battling laryngitis.

  “Stop fighting. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Sully gave up. His arms were wrenched behind his back, the wall and the large man providing a more-than-adequate rock and hard place. He let his breath out in a defeated sigh that continued through his question. “What do you want?”

  The man didn’t answer immediately; he seemed to be thinking. “If I let you go, you’re not going to try anything, right? I don’t want to have to tie you up, but I will if you make me.”

  Being trapped in this cell with no way out was bad enough. But he’d been in more than one room while strapped down, leaving him completely defenceless when Gerhardt and his henchmen had come at him. He might not be able to put up much of a fight in his current situation, might stand no real chance of escape, but at least if he stayed unbound, he stayed sane. Sully was relatively certain he could have coped with some of the things that had happened at Lockwood had he not been restrained at the time; it was the helplessness far more than the discomfort or pain that had left him with recurring nightmares and periodic flashbacks and panic attacks.

  “Okay,” Sully said. “Okay.”

  His voice sounded defeated even to his own ears, and it proved enough to secure his physical release from between the man and the wall. Sully turned to face his captor, the two of them taking several steps toward their intended targets—the man moving to block the door while Sully placed some distance between them.

  There wasn’t much light to go by, granted, but as Sully took his first good look at the man, he was struck by something familiar, a memory resting just out of reach inside his brain.

  “I know you,” Sully said. “Don’t I?”

  The man nodded slowly. “The fire at the Blakes’. McCoy Falls.”

  Sully stared at the man as the pieces snapped into place, the recognition making sense—even if there was little about this man that resembled any longer the boy he’d once been.

  “Brennan?”

  “You saved my life back then. You remember?”

  It was Sully’s turn to nod. There was no forgetting.

  God knew he’d tried.

  “Why did you bring me here? What did you do to my dog?”

  “The dog will be fine,” Brennan said. “Just a tranq. As to why you’re here, we’ll get to that. Right now, I just need you to tell me.”

  Sully waited for Brennan to further explain the request but, after a few seconds of waiting him out, Sully realized nothing more was forthcoming. “Tell you what?”

  “How you knew. You never told me. After that night, after the police took us away, I never saw you again. So how did you know?”

  “About the fire? I smelled smoke, I guess.”

  Brennan backhanded the wall with a fist. Sully jumped, took an involuntary step back, no longer so certain the larger man cared whether he hurt him or not.

  “Bullshit,” Brennan said. The word sounded like a slap. “Don’t lie to me. How did you know?”

  There was no good answer for that. The truth would in itself sound like a lie, and Sully had told precious few people about what he could see. The nature of Brennan’s mood change, not to mention his role in Sully’s kidnapping, strongly suggested the man was unhinged, and Sully didn’t want to push him over the edge he was already teetering on.

  “Answer me!”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “I want the truth. It wasn’t the smoke, it wasn’t the flames. It sure as hell wasn’t the Blakes, because they didn’t even know what hit them.”

  “I didn’t set the fire, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “I know you didn’t,” Brennan said, his voice quieter again. “That’s not what I was getting at.”

  Sully had no idea what he’d said or done to bring about the change of emotion, which was too bad because that meant he had no idea how to replicate it. He didn’t answer immediately, his brain doing a quick run-through of various scenarios, how they might play out. The best option seemed to be easing Brennan into it slowly, to avoid disturbing him any more than the words themselves would do naturally. He thought he’d come up with a good way to start when Brennan solved the problem for him.

  “You know things,” Brennan said. “Things other people don’t. Things they don’t want to know.”

  Sully waited Brennan out, hoping he wasn’t done supplying his own answer.

  “You saw a girl that night,” Brennan said.

  “The girl who set the fire?”

  “The girl who wouldn’t let us go through the bedroom door. She had purple hair.”

  The words were as startling as Brennan’s earlier mood change. Sully responded without thinking. “You saw her, too?”

  “I thought you knew that. You couldn’t tell I was shitting myself?”

  “I thought you were scared of the fire. You didn’t say anything about her.”

  “I did.”

  “No, you didn’t. I’d remember.”

  Brennan looked to be considering that, as if sending his mind back to that time and place. It didn’t appear to be a pleasant trip, a fleeting grimace crossing his face before his eyes returned their focus to Sully. “You didn’t say anything either.”

  “I don’t say much to anyone about that sort of thing.”

  “So she’s not the only one you’ve seen?”

  If only, Sully thought. Out loud he answered, “No. There have been others.”

  “A lot?”

  “Enough.”

  Brennan regarded him again, sizing him up within some yet-unknown test. Sully wasn’t sure he wanted to know, so opted to continue the conversation. “What about you? Do you see others?”

  Sully caught the flash of fear in Brennan’s eyes before the larger man looked away, focusing on a spot on the wall to the left of Sully. Brennan’s voice was soft, almost too low to hear, when it came. “All the time.”

  Sully glanced quickly around the room, finding it empty save the two of them. “Even now?”

  To his surprise, Brennan nodded in the affirmative. “There’s a man standing between us, leaning against the wall. He’s dressed like people you’d see in those old black and white movies. I think he used to live here.” Brennan paused, corrected himself. “Still does, I guess.”

  His eyes snapped back to Sully. “Don’t you see him?”

  “No, I don’t. I can only see certain ones. From what I can tell, they’re all victims of homicide.”

  Brennan’s eyes, fixated on Sully, widened slightly. “People who were murdered?”

  “I think, anyway. I’m not sure all the time. I’ve never really gotten a handle on it.’

  “That’s not what I heard about you,” Brennan said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I heard you’re pretty strong with this stuff, that you don’t let it get to you. Let them get to you.”

  Sully ut
tered a low, humourless chuckle. “Well, you heard wrong. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I don’t know how to control it, how to communicate. I don’t really know anything. I’d like to be able to help, but I don’t know how.”

  Brennan’s silence spoke volumes as his lips parted around gritted teeth, eyebrows lowering to accentuate the deep creases already permanent in his flesh. A long exhale of breath whistled through Brennan’s teeth, and he began to shake.

  In two quick strides, Brennan was on Sully, fisting the front of his hoodie and shoving him hard into the wall.

  Something inhuman looked out of Brennan’s eyes, something desperate and almost demonic. And Sully was faced with the chilling realization Brennan—this Brennan—was capable of killing him.

  Mr. Blake had once attacked Sully, hands tightening around his throat, fingers squeezing while Sully stared into a face bearing the same expression Brennan wore now. Sully had ended it by kicking Mr. Blake in the groin. Had he not, he was convinced he would have joined the Purple Girl—hovering back then in the corner of the room, eyes closed and glowing with what seemed to be a building heat.

  She was back now, again in the corner, eyes closing.

  “Brennan,” Sully said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did to upset you.”

  Brennan’s breaths came fast through clenched teeth and flared nostrils, fists pressing into Sully as if trying to force him through the wall. It hurt, but Sully refused to reveal the pain to Brennan. Pain and fear were weakness, and he was convinced weakness—both the existence and the perception of it—was his enemy here.

  Brennan’s fists balled into the material of Sully’s jacket, squeezed harder and harder. Squeezed like Mr. Blake had that afternoon.

  The Purple Girl was glowing now, her core alight with yet-contained fire.

  “Brennan ….”

  Brennan gave Sully one last hard slam into the wall and released him. But the rage was still there.

  He released it in a scream of pent-up fury. “What the hell good are you to me then?”