Blood Ties

by Kay Hooper

  Maggie took away Cody’s nightmare and soothed him back into a peaceful sleep as Ruby watched. And then she tucked the covers around him gently and got to her feet.

  “Ruby, honey, what are you doing up?” Maggie spoke quietly as she came away from the bed.

  “I knew Cody was having nightmares,” Ruby answered simply. “Even with the lamp on, he still has them.”

  “I see.” With a gentle hand, Maggie guided Ruby back out into the hallway; with her other, she pulled Cody’s bedroom door almost closed. “Well, he’ll sleep now. And he won’t have another nightmare tonight.”

  “I know. Because you took his nightmare away, let it scare you instead of him.” Ruby looked up into what she thought of as the sweetest face she’d ever seen, a pretty face surrounded by a cloud of dark red hair. Gentle golden eyes smiled down at her.

  A real face, with nothing different underneath. Nothing bad. Nothing ever bad.

  “Something like that.” Maggie turned her toward the bedroom just across the hall and added, “The sun’s not even up yet; go back to bed, honey. Does Lexie need to go out?”

  “No, I took her out when she woke me up hours ago.”

  “Okay, then. You two get some sleep, and we’ll see you at breakfast.”

  “Good night, Maggie.”

  “Good night, Ruby.” Maggie didn’t move from in front of the children’s bedroom doors for some time but stood there with her eyes closed, all her senses focused, until she was satisfied that neither of them was frightened or even uneasy. That Cody was sleeping peacefully and Ruby beginning to drift off as well.

  Then she opened her eyes and, rubbing the back of her neck somewhat wearily, walked down the long corridor. She passed several closed bedroom doors before turning a corner into a shorter hallway that led to the lamplit master suite.

  “Did he wake up this time?” John asked.

  “No, I got to him before he could.” Maggie shrugged off her robe, then climbed into the big bed beside her husband. “Ruby was awake, though. Again. Said she knew Cody was having a nightmare. Those two definitely share a connection. If the genetic tests Bishop ordered hadn’t proven otherwise, I’d think they were siblings.”

  John Garrett pulled her into his arms, her back against his front, so that they spooned, so that he could help warm her slightly chilled body—a physical consequence of the energy she drew on in order to connect empathically with someone else. He drew the covers up around her and then held her as he felt her begin to relax. He wasn’t the least bit psychic, but he knew how tired she was. He also knew from experience that it would require some time for her to relax enough to be able to sleep again and that talking quietly helped more than silence.

  “This is taking a lot out of you,” he said.

  “I’ll be fine. Besides, what’s the point of all this if I can’t help them? They’re just kids, John. They shouldn’t even have to remember everything they’ve been through, much less have to relive the pain and horror of it over and over again.”

  “Except that our tragedies shape who we are every bit as much as our triumphs do,” he said. It was an old debate. “They need to remember, babe. They don’t need to hurt, I agree with you there. They don’t need to have nightmares. But they should remember what they’ve lost. What they’ve been through. It’s important.”

  “Yeah, well, since I don’t have the ability to take away their memories, they’ll remember.”

  “Would you, if you could? Really?”

  She was silent for a moment, then sighed. “No, I suppose not. But it’s… hard. Feeling what they feel. Samuel was a monster, that cult he created incredibly destructive, and the damage both did is going to linger on for years, maybe for lifetimes. These kids will carry the scars of what he did to them all the way to their graves.”

  His arms tightened around her. “I know. But you have to know that you make things better for them. Dull the pain, help them conquer the fear. Without you, it’d take years of therapy for them to get past what’s happened to them. If they even could. Bishop made that plain enough.”

  “Well, he was there. He saw. And I’m pretty sure both the kids talked to him; he has a way with kids.”

  “I noticed. But am I wrong in believing his interest in them isn’t entirely based on compassion?”

  “I think you know him well enough to trust your own instincts on that one.”

  “Okay. So what is it? Does he believe one of them is this ‘absolute psychic’ he’s convinced is out there somewhere?”

  “I don’t think so. Bishop’s absolute psychic, theoretically, has absolute control over his or her abilities. That’s not the case here. But these kids… They have a lot of power, John. We don’t have to put them in a lab and hook them up to machines to know that. A lot of power they’ve spent their young lifetimes struggling with.”

  “Is that why it’s still taking so much out of you to help them, even after weeks?”

  “I think so. For so long they’ve had to protect themselves, to hide inside their own minds. But… that’s where the pain is. And the fear. It’s where I have to go to help them.” Her voice was finally be ginning to grow sleepy. “The thing is… that’s where the power is too….”

  John could feel his wife relax totally, in that boneless way that told him she was asleep. He listened to her breathe for a while, his cheek against the soft thickness of her hair as he held her securely.

  Sometimes he could almost convince himself that he could keep her safe always. Sometimes.

  But it never lasted, that certainty. Because Maggie never hesitated to go willingly into the dark horrors of pain and terror that were other people’s traumas, absorbing those destructive emotions into herself in order to heal the sufferers.

  It was what she did. It was who she was.

  John had only recently nerved himself to ask Bishop if there might be a limit to what Maggie could ultimately endure.

  “I wish I could answer that, John, but I can’t. The theory is, Maggie’s innate sense of self-preservation would stop her from absorbing more than she can handle. Stop her from expending too much of her own energy to heal others. But we don’t know that’s true.”

  “And if it isn’t? You’re telling me this could kill her?”

  “I’m telling you we don’t know. That’s why we work as hard as we can to learn as much as we can about these abilities. For answers to questions like yours. In the meantime, we’re all feeling our way, if not blindly then certainly in the dark.” Bishop paused. “I know none of this is what you bargained for. But you know as well as anyone that we give hostages to fortune. That we can’t always protect those hostages, hard as we try. Not with all our strength. Not with all our determination. Not with all the knowledge and abilities we can command.”

  John knew the mantra. “Because some things have to happen just the way they happen.”

  “Some things. Not everything. I’m a bad loser, John. You’re a bad loser. So we’ll hold on to what’s ours with all our might.”

  “And beat fortune?”

  “Bend it at least. When we can. As much as we can.”

  John tightened his arms gently around his sleeping wife, then turned his head slightly toward the bedroom window, watching the rising sun pierce the blood-red horizon.

  If I was a superstitious man, I’d call that a bad omen.

  Good thing he wasn’t at all superstitious.

  “John?”

  He looked at the doorway to see Ruby standing there, her eyes huge in her very pale face. Even the tiny poodle in her arms looked fearful.

  “Ruby, what—”

  “Something bad’s going to happen. Something really bad.”

  Serenade

  It was nearly ten that morning, and Hollis had just begun reading through her second file of the day when she saw it. “Shit.”

  All around the room, her fellow team members looked up from their laptops, but it was Miranda who said, “What is it?”

  “Victim number fiv
e, Wesley Davidson.” Hollis kept her voice even. “He was born in Hastings, South Carolina. I worked my first case there almost two years ago. A serial killer who went after blondes.”*

  Miranda said, “You were teamed with Isabel.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And used up one of your nine lives there, if I remember correctly,” Quentin contributed.

  “At the time, I thought I’d used up the only life I had.” Hollis frowned at the screen of her laptop. “I’m barely into the file, so there may be more—but isn’t that enough? A connection, however tenuous, to a past case?”

  “Well,” Quentin said, “given that Taryn Holder—assuming our female victim here is identified as her—just stayed at The Lodge and was last seen leaving there, with no further connection I’ve been able to find, and Vaughan-Seymour was peripheral to the investigation of Samuel’s cult, I’d say mark that one as connected and move on to another file. But I’m not the boss.”

  Miranda smiled faintly. “The boss agrees—more or less. Read all the way through the file if you don’t mind, Hollis. Something else may jump out at you.”

  DeMarco said, “Three victims out of eight establishes a pattern, at least to my mind.”

  “Yes,” Miranda agreed. “But is there any kind of meaning in the pattern, other than some vague connection to the SCU? If this is about us—about the unit or Noah—I’d expect there to be more to the pattern than what we’ve seen so far. A killer smart enough and driven enough to have chosen his victims like this is the sort who’d want to show off. And show up those of us investigating his crimes.”

  “Catch me if you can,” Diana murmured. “If you’re smart enough to put together the puzzle pieces I’ve left for you.”

  “Exactly.”

  Hollis nodded. “So we keep reading.”

  “We keep reading. And I think it’s time we set up a couple of whiteboards and begin charting all this—now that we have something to chart. The rest of the supplies should be in the SUVs we locked up at the sheriff’s department last night.”

  DeMarco got to his feet. “I’ll go. Since I’ve been undercover and off the grid for the past two years and more, I’m the least likely to recognize one of the connections to past SCU investigations.”

  Miranda tossed him the keys. “I’m not sure what’s packed where, but you should be able to leave one of the vehicles where it is for now.”

  “Copy that.”

  As he left the dining room, Hollis rubbed the back of her neck, already feeling the strain of sitting for too long in one position at her laptop. She shifted a bit in her chair, thinking she was stiffening up, and only then realized that she was cold.

  Very cold. As if someone had suddenly opened a window into winter.

  The physical reaction was always the same. All the fine hairs on her body stood out as though electrical energy filled the room, and goose bumps rose on her flesh as the chill spread through her.

  And there was still a jolt of fear—less now, but still that uncomfortable sense that some doors were never intended to be opened by the living. Not, at least, without some dreadful cost.

  Slowly, Hollis forced herself to look up.

  At first, the room appeared just as it had been, with her fellow agents intent on their workstations and oblivious to her sudden tension.

  “Hollis.”

  She caught her breath and turned her gaze to the doorway that DeMarco had passed through only moments before.

  Not quite in the dining room but a couple of steps out in the foyer stood a familiar figure. Appearing entirely solid and hardly ghostlike, she had long fair hair and an anxious expression.

  “Hollis, go after him.” Her voice was clear and strong.

  “What?” Hollis was barely aware that Diana was gazing at her in puzzlement, that Miranda and Quentin exchanged looks before beginning to rise from their chairs.

  “Go after him. Stop him. Now.”

  “Why? Andrea, what’re you—”

  “If you don’t stop him, he’ll die. Do you understand? He’ll die. There’s a bomb in one of the cars.”

  Quentin said, “Hey, is she—”

  Hollis didn’t hear the rest. She jumped up so abruptly that her chair fell over behind her with a crash, and she raced from the room. Andrea had already vanished by the time she reached the foyer, but Hollis hardly noticed.

  She flung open the front door, banged through the screen door, and was across the wide porch and jumping over the steps down to the walkway before she could even begin to look for DeMarco. She drew in a deep breath to yell his name.

  And was yanked off her feet and into the shadows of the big magnolia tree that shaded half the front yard.

  Dale McMurry hadn’t stayed past his shift as Bobbie had. He wasn’t the ambitious sort, really. The gig as a part-time deputy offered decent pay and good benefits, and more often than not he served as a less-than-glorified file clerk.

  Which suited him just fine.

  He didn’t mind at all living rent-free in his parents’ basement, where his mama still cooked for him and did his laundry. It gave him a handy excuse for why all his “relationships” ended by the third date: Girls figured out quickly that he wasn’t a great prospect for their future.

  Of course, some might also have figured out that he was gay, but since they hadn’t asked and he hadn’t told, he allowed himself to believe they just thought he was a loser.

  His dad might sneer at a loser, but at least he wouldn’t beat the shit out of one.

  So far, anyway.

  His second-shift job allowed Dale to let himself into the house after midnight, when the old man was usually asleep in front of the TV, and his mama never woke him for breakfast until his dad was at his own job as a mechanic for one of the car dealerships in Serenade.

  The arrangement worked for Dale.

  However, he wasn’t such a mama’s boy that he wanted to spend all his free time at home. So on that sunny Wednesday morning, he drove his car downtown and parked in the back lot at the sheriff’s department, then walked the block or so to one of the few recreational spots the town could boast, at least for locals: a game room with pool tables, arcade games of various eras, and the latest thing in video poker machines.

  Dale didn’t have a gambling problem. What he had was a crush on the assistant manager of the local bank, who often spent his lunch hour at the game room.

  Since it wasn’t quite lunchtime, Dale got himself a soda from the snack area, then sat down at one of the arcade machines near the front window, where he could both watch the door and see the sheriff’s department.

  Sheriff Duncan hadn’t expressly forbidden it, but he disliked any of his deputies, even the part-time ones, hanging out in the game room, especially in the middle of the day.

  The street was quiet. Dale noted idly that the two SUVs left for the feds were still parked out front of the station. He fed a few quarters into the machine and began zapping aliens.

  Gabriel Wolf was not what anyone would have called a patient man—except in his work. In his work, he had all the patience of his namesake when hunting, with the skills, reflexes, and cunning to match. He could track just about anything over just about any kind of terrain. He also possessed a kind of sixth sense that wasn’t quite psychic, which often told him where his quarry would be—even if that quarry was more predator than prey. And he preferred to flit among the shadows whenever he got the chance.

  He considered it an irony of the universe that his twin sister, Roxanne, was the night hunter of the pair.*

  Don’t blame me for that.

  “I’m just saying, maybe splitting the duty the way we have may not always be the best way to go about things, that’s all.” He spoke aloud out of habit but kept his voice low so nobody would think he was talking to himself and maybe come after him with a net. “Why not shake things up a bit? I could try a nap in the daytime; you could try a nap at night. These abilities of ours are supposed to be train-able. Right?”

  Tr
ainable up to a point, but you know the limits as well as I do. Look, if you want to try again, we will. But not in the middle of a case, all right? Pay attention to what you’re doing.

  “How hard is it to walk, for Christ’s sake? I haven’t needed to pay a lot of attention to that for more than thirty years. I’m roaming around in a Christmas store, Rox, just innocent as hell, like any tourist, looking at a lot of sparkly shit I don’t want to buy. And how come so many of these little towns have Christmas stores, anyway?”

  Because they’re popular. Because tourists come from miles around for a good one.

  “Yeah, yeah. Want a snow globe? There’s one here with Santa and his sleigh inside.”

  I think I have—

  When his sister’s thoughts broke off abruptly, Gabriel could feel the familiar crawling sensation of unease; if he had been his namesake, the fur would have been standing up stiffly all along his spine. After a lifetime of sharing thoughts, sometimes the absence of them was far more important. “Rox?”

  Let’s not play innocent tourist anymore, Gabe. You need to get out of here and to high ground. Something is happening.

  “What is it?” He was already moving toward the exit, but casually so as not to draw the attention of the few other browsers or the store clerks with their slightly comical elf hats.

  Not sure. Something closer to the center of town. Wait. Lemme concentrate.

  There was a pause in his mind as Gabriel smiled automatically at the clerk nearest the front door, waved a friendly hand, and exited the Christmas store.

  Got it. Our sniper is back.

  Gabriel slid behind the wheel of their rental and started the car. “What, in town? In broad daylight? That doesn’t sound like a pro. Are you sure it’s him?”

  Pretty sure. He isn’t shooting. Watching. He’s watching…. Oh, shit, Gabe. I think maybe we should have taken him more seriously, kept eyes on him no matter what.