Blood Ties

by Kay Hooper

  Miranda hesitated, then said, “Noah’s working to resolve that situation. It’s one reason he’s not here. Until he does, we’re doing what we can to keep a low profile and not draw undue attention to the SCU.”

  “On a serial-murder case with six certain and two possible victims already? Good luck with that.”

  “We’ve managed so far. The local police have been willing to work with us, willing to not… overreact… to a body dumped in their jurisdictions, especially since none of the victims have turned out to be local citizens. Since the victims have been dumped over so large an area, and since no single police department or sheriff’s department has had to cope with more than one, media attention has been minimal and brief.”

  “But we’ve got two possible victims in the same area this time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody’s going to connect the dots soon enough, Miranda. You know that. There’s a story here.”

  “Yes. And an even bigger story if word breaks that we suspect a pair of killers. Which is why we keep that quiet as long as we possibly can.”

  DeMarco shook off the memory of that conversation and frowned once again down at the map, this time not really looking at it. He felt oddly… cold… all of a sudden, tense and alert in a way he recognized, every sense flaring, expanding beyond himself to seek out and pinpoint a threat of some kind. He looked up, scanned the room warily. But nothing seemed out of place or otherwise amiss.

  Pleasant bedroom, neat and attractive without being overly fussy, which suited him. The TV was on and tuned to MSNBC but muted.

  He had removed his shoulder holster, of course, when he at least nominally turned in for the night, but his weapon lay within easy reach. Reaching out slowly, he put his hand on it but didn’t draw it from the holster.

  Because everything he felt told him the threat he sensed was not anything a bullet could stop.

  DeMarco didn’t particularly like to think about many of his experiences in the military, but they had certainly left him with sharpened instincts in addition to his psychic ones. In those days, it had meant the difference between dying—and coming out alive to not talk about it.

  These days it meant a sense that was not quite psychic telling him something was off-kilter around him.

  Shit. With my luck, this place is haunted.

  But he didn’t think that was it. He wasn’t particularly sensitive to spirits, for one thing, and for another this didn’t feel like a threat to himself but to someone or something else.

  DeMarco’s unique double shield made him hypersensitive to the various energies associated with paranormal abilities, but only when he allowed the outer, protective shield to drop and concentrated on using what made the inner shield so remarkable: If his focus was good enough, he could either make that second shield vastly stronger and more impenetrable or else turn it into a kind of magnet that drew in and interpreted—so to speak—psychic energies.

  He couldn’t steal anyone else’s ability, but he could hamper their power to project anything forceful outward, and he could tune in to whatever frequency was being used.

  “Like a radio,” Quentin had once noted helpfully. “And every other psychic is on a different channel.”

  Which simplified an ability that was incredibly complex but defined it well for all of that.

  DeMarco was pretty sure somebody in the house was experiencing psychic phenomena. What he wasn’t sure of was whether that person was a threat—or was being threatened.

  Either way, it didn’t bode well.

  Swearing under his breath, DeMarco sat on the edge of the bed, then closed his eyes and began to concentrate, dropping his outer shield completely and attempting to tune in to whatever was happening.

  Almost immediately, he was hit with a wave of stark terror.

  Frowning, Diana said, “October? That was when you guys were tracking the killer of all those women in Boston, including Senator LeMott’s daughter, right?”

  “Yeah. The monster in this place—or a place identical to this—was the killer.”

  “Who was taken out of circulation. Locked up.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  Hollis drew another of those get-a-grip breaths and said, “The end of that case turned out not to be. It was connected to what happened later, in January, in Grace.”

  “In North Carolina. The church, Samuel. Yeah, that was the party I didn’t get invited to.”

  “Be glad. We lost some good people there, and very nearly lost a lot more.”

  Diana didn’t like to think of Quentin—of the team—in danger, but she had read the reports and knew what had happened. She knew how terribly high a price had been demanded of them in order to stop that killer.

  “Samuel is dead. The church now is made up of a group of mostly bewildered people who aren’t even sure they want to be a church anymore, none of them a killer and none claiming apocalyptic visions. It’s over.”

  “Maybe not,” Hollis said, staring down each of the endless, featureless hallways in turn. “Maybe we only thought it was over.”

  “Hollis—”

  “Shouldn’t there be a guide by now?”

  “Maybe. Sometimes I have to walk a bit on my own before I find them. Or they find me.”

  “I really don’t want to explore these hallways, Diana.”

  “Hollis, this isn’t real. I mean, it’s like a dream; we aren’t here in the flesh. Nothing can hurt us here.”

  “Nice try, but I know enough about your gray time to know that if our spirits—our consciousness—get trapped here, somehow cut off from our bodies, then we don’t come back.”

  It was another reminder of something Diana didn’t like to think about, but she nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, but I’m pretty sure that’s rare. Besides, I can handle it. I’ve been doing this nearly all my life, and I’ve never not found my way back out.”

  “First time for everything.”

  “You had to say it.”

  “Sorry. Diana, I find your gray time unnerving enough in concept, but to be here in this place is … Let’s just say I’ve been in some majorly scary situations, and this one is right up there with the worst of them.”

  “Okay, then, we leave. Now.” Diana gripped her fellow agent’s wrist and said, “Close your eyes and concentrate on the place you want to get back to. Your room in the B&B.”

  Hollis wavered visibly. “We might learn something here—”

  “Fear is weakness, and neither one of us wants to be weak here, trust me on that. We’re going back.”

  Hollis closed her eyes and kept them closed as long as she could. Did her best to concentrate, to focus. But the stillness of the place, the faint odd smell that made her think of rotten eggs and maybe a place too close to hell, the cold that seeped into her very bones, all of it worked on her nerves so that she finally opened her eyes. “Diana?”

  “Concentrate.”

  “We’re still here.”

  Diana opened her eyes and looked around. Steadily, she said, “Okay, then it looks like we have to stay long enough to see what we were brought here to see.”

  “Great. That’s just great.”

  Still seemingly utterly calm and comfortable in this unnatural place, Diana said, “I’m not going to let you go. We’re going to start walking until we find whatever it is we’re meant to find here.” She waited for Hollis’s nod, then chose a hallway, apparently at random, and began to walk.

  Hollis didn’t question the choice. She was totally out of her element here and had to trust that Diana’s experience would lead them—and lead them safely.

  Diana tried the doors one by one as they reached them, but each one was locked. The hallway continued to stretch before them, seemingly infinite, with door after door locked and impenetrable.

  After a while Hollis began to be more conscious of her weariness than of her fear. Every step required more effort, a heaviness dragging at her. Her breathing grew more labore
d, and she felt a bit light-headed.

  Diana, who appeared to be unaffected, looked back at her with a frown as she paused in the middle of the corridor. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “You won’t get an argument.” Hollis tried not to huff and puff as she said it.

  Down the corridor a bit, one of the doors swung inward with a faint but audible creak.

  “Oh, that can’t be good,” Hollis said.

  “Maybe it’s the way out.”

  “Yeah, right. They always make that mistake in horror movies. Let’s not, okay?”

  Diana hesitated, then said, “My instincts are telling me to go that way, Hollis. To step through that doorway. All my experience is telling me the same thing. I’ve got to get you out, and right now that looks like the only viable option.”

  Hollis allowed herself to be pulled along as Diana headed for the door, but said, “You should talk to Dorothy. Ruby slippers. Click your heels, there’s no place like home. All that jazz.”

  “Yeah, I need a reliable shortcut out. I get it,” Diana said. “So far, though, I’ve been at the mercy of the guides pretty much. And when I’ve had to get out, I’ve gotten out.”

  “Wasn’t Quentin your lifeline a couple of times?”

  “Yes. But I survived on my own doing this for twenty-some-odd years before he came along.”

  “No need to bristle. I was just asking.” Hollis was staring at the partially open door they were approaching, most of her attention on that.

  The way out?

  Or a doorway leading to something infinitely worse?

  Hollis did her best to tamp down a rising, unreasoning panic. Not that there was no reason to be afraid in this otherworldly place, this gray time, where everything was outside her experience. But the degree of fear was something she had never felt before. And considering everything she had experienced since a horrifically violent event had changed her life forever, that was an unsettling realization.

  Why was that partially open door scaring the shit out of her? What were her own instincts or senses trying to tell her?

  Diana said, not quite defensively, “I was not bristling. I just… I don’t want to have to depend on Quentin like that.”

  “Okay, I get that, I do. Now, are you absolutely sure we need to walk through that door? Because I’ve got an awful feeling that whatever is waiting for us in there is not a good thing.” She intended to add a few stronger sentiments but stopped, frowning.

  “Hollis?”

  “That’s odd. Really odd. It feels almost like something is pulling at me.” She looked down at Diana’s hand on her arm, then shook her head. “Not you. Something… I’m sorry, Diana, I—” Hollis vanished, there one instant and gone the next, like a soap bubble.

  Her first realization was that she was so tired, moving hardly seemed worth the effort. Breathing hardly seemed worth the effort. But Hollis did breathe and, eventually, did move. She fought to open her eyes. And fought to say something, if only in a whisper.

  “Damn, that was—”

  She was in her bed, that much she realized, if sluggishly. Strong arms were holding her, and against her cheek she could feel the steady beating of a heart.

  Wait, that’s not right.

  It felt right, or at least it felt good, felt safe and maybe even something better than safe, but it was unfamiliar.

  “Hollis?”

  She caught her breath, then concentrated all the strength she could muster into the effort required to push herself away, to sit up in the bed on her own and stare at him.

  “Reese? What the hell?”

  “I think that’s my question. Want to tell me where you were just now? Because a major part of you wasn’t here.” His hands remained on her shoulders for support.

  She was sure it was for support.

  “I was—wait. How did you get into my room?”

  “I picked the lock.”

  Hollis blinked at him, trying mightily to get her sluggish mind moving with some semblance of normalcy. That struggle was complicated by the fact that she could see his aura, and it was so unusual in color and full of what she took to be sparks of flickering power that all she wanted to do was stare at it. “Why?” she managed to ask finally.

  “It was the fastest way to get in here.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Why did you have to get in here?”

  “You were in trouble,” he said, calm and matter-of-fact. His face was expressionless as always, though his pale blue eyes seemed to be darker than normal.

  She blinked again. “I was?”

  “You were afraid. Terrified. And weakening fast.”

  “Wait,” she said again. “You were in my head?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what? Exactly?” She was feeling stronger. And she was feeling defensive.

  DeMarco didn’t seem disturbed by that.

  “I could sense that something was wrong in the house, that the energy here had changed. It felt like a threat.”

  “And you’re hypersensitive to threats,” she remembered.

  He nodded. “So I focused on that and realized the threat was directed at you. I knew you were in a bad place. I also knew you couldn’t get out of there alone. So I came to help.”

  Hollis was trying to concentrate and finding it very difficult. “How did you know you could? I mean, where I was … That isn’t a place you just walk into, not unless you’re a medium. Hell, not unless you’re Diana.”

  “Hollis—”

  She felt a chill go through her and stared at him. “Diana couldn’t find her way out. She tried—and couldn’t. And where she is, that awful place…Oh, my God. What if he’s dead? What if he’s dead and back there torturing people all over again? Torturing souls this time? What if he has Diana strapped to that table now?”

  Diana had no idea what had happened, but she didn’t have a good feeling about it. At all. She hesitated there where Hollis had vanished, trying to decide whether she should continue on through that invitingly half-open door or turn back and make a concerted effort to get herself out of here.

  “Diana.”

  She frowned at the grave young girl who had appeared as abruptly as Hollis had vanished. A guide she didn’t recognize, though that wasn’t at all unusual; she seldom encountered the same guide twice.

  “Who’re you?”

  “I’m Brooke.” The girl, who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen when she was alive, said reprovingly, “Diana, you aren’t supposed to bring living people into the gray time. It’s dangerous for them. And for you too.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Yes. This time.”

  “Look, I didn’t intend to bring Hollis in.”

  “No. But you did once before. You brought her in deliberately. And that opened a channel.”

  Diana didn’t like where this was heading. “You mean Hollis can turn up here whenever she likes?”

  “No. I mean she can come here when you do. That she’ll be drawn here when you open the door. Because it’s her nature. She’s a medium. The last person you should have brought in here.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s taken you a lifetime of experience to be able to come here and move around without losing all your strength. Without the constant danger of becoming trapped here. Hollis hasn’t had that. She could get lost here. She could die here.”

  “I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “Diana—”

  With a gesture that swept aside the subject for the moment, Diana said, “Brooke, why am I here? Hollis said this place was where a killer was… kept. On the living side. But that’s over. He isn’t here now and he can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

  Brooke shook her head and took a step back, then turned toward the partially opened door. “Everything’s connected, Diana.”

  A typically guidelike response.

  Diana followed but said, “Nothing like this has ever happened here in the gray time, not to me. What
is it you need me to do for you?”

  “I need you to find the truth.”

  “What truth? How you died?”

  “No. It started long before I died. That’s what you have to find. The truth buried underneath it all.”

  “Brooke, I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “You will.” The young guide walked through the open door.

  Diana paused, drew a deep breath, and then followed.

  To her surprise, she found she was back at the B&B, though it took her a moment to recognize the hallway in which she stood. She looked around, frowning, but finally oriented herself.

  It was the hallway outside her room.

  Brooke was gone.

  Still, Diana was all too aware that her “trip” into the gray time was not over. Because she was still there. The hallway was gray and cold, everything still and peculiarly one-dimensional. The little side table between her door and the one to Quentin’s room looked as if it was a part of the dull gray wall, and the prints hanging on the walls might have been grayish crayon smudges for all the depth they displayed.

  She looked at Quentin’s door for a moment, tempted, then told herself she had already been here too long. Her legs had that heavy sensation she recognized, and it was a bit harder to breathe than it should have been. She might not tire easily in the gray time but she did tire eventually, and when she did, the progression toward exhaustion was rapid.

  She needed to leave.

  With still little idea of why she had been brought into the gray time and feeling very frustrated about it, she went to her own bedroom door, opened it, and went inside.

  Except it wasn’t her room. It was Quentin’s.

  He was sitting on the edge of the bed and rose to smile at her. “Diana. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  She stared at him, aware of the niggling sense of something not right, something… off. “Have you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why. We belong together. I’ve been waiting for you to realize that. To accept it.”