“You don’t,” Gavin said. “We stop it. All of us. But you? You rest. You’ve done your part.”
“I should have told you both earlier,” Lara whispered. “So many deaths. I’m so sorry.” The last words were muffled. Clinging to Jack as much as he did her, she passed out.
“She takes too much on herself,” Jack said.
“Sound familiar? Like someone we know?” Gavin asked.
“Not in the least.”
“Too bad,” Gavin said. He paused, and then added. “She does trust you, Jack. She knows with absolute conviction you’re the one to keep her safe. But she needs you to trust her with your story. Tell her about your first mission.”
“Lara doesn’t need to hear some old sob story of mine.”
“Is that how you think of Jamie and Starr? Old sob stories?”
“Dammit,” Jack said. “You know I don’t.”
“Then why so cavalier? Never mind, I get it. But so does she. Tell her.”
“Night, Gavin,” he said. He nodded to his boss. It was parting greeting, apology for his earlier overreaction, and unwilling acknowledgement of Gavin’s advice all wrapped up into one.
Chapter 33
Thunder woke Lara with a start.
Disoriented, she felt her heart immediately start racing. What was it? Bombs? Gunshots? The door to her cell slamming shut?
“Shh, Lara. I’ve got you.”
Powerful arms reached for her in bed, encircled her shoulders and pulled her close.
“You’re safe, little love. No one’s going to hurt you. I won’t let them.”
“Jack?”
“Right here.”
She looked around, panicked, and still too groggy to be sure of where she was.
“Where’s Grey Man?”
“Dead. I promise.”
Though her eyes took in the same tranquil hospital room where she’d woken each of the last two days, her brain wouldn’t register what she saw. Her body’s internal clock told her it should be midday, but it was dark enough for dusk. Oddly-tinted, the meager light that filled the room made her think of solar eclipses, or what she imagined noon would look like to someone drowning at the bottom of a murky lake.
Fire ripped the sky outside their window. Lara flinched at the concussive blast that shook the massive stone building.
“That was a close one,” Jack said, and, when Lara wouldn’t relax her death grip on his forearm, added, “It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s just a thunderstorm.” He stroked her hair gently, trying to soothe her. “We get them like this all the time. We’re so high up in the mountains the lightning seems worse, the thunder louder.”
Tipping her head back, Lara gazed up into his face. The quiet confidence in his eyes slowed her frantically beating heart.
“Jack?” she said, more clear-headed this time.
“Still here.”
She couldn’t stand it a moment longer She could no longer hold it back. She buried her face against his chest and cried. Lara wracked with sobs so loud she knew she should be mortified with embarrassment, but she couldn’t help it. She wasn’t even sure why she cried, only that it represented some deep sickness that had to come up out of her, like the infection and fever that had almost taken her hand.
Jack held her tighter. He was silent, yet displayed none of the usual male discomfort with a woman’s tears. He simply let her cry herself out.
Finally, her body was done, tears dying away to soft hiccups, and then she could speak again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She swiped at the last wetness at the corners of her eyes with the back of her good hand. “I hate being a crybaby.”
“You aren’t,” he said. “If you didn’t cry or wake up screaming in the middle of the night for the next several months, I’d be worried.”
“Please tell me I am not going to do that again.”
“With what you’ve been through, it’s a wonder you haven’t gone stark raving mad.”
Suddenly he leaned back away from her in bed. With mock concern, he made a show of getting a larger, more encompassing look at her.
“No. Wait,” he said. “You do look a little wild around the eyes. Maybe I was being too hasty.”
“Rat,” she called him.
Neither spoke again for several minutes. They lay comfortably in each other’s arms, listening to the wind howl, the rain lash the window. Watching for lightning strikes, they counted the seconds till the thunder came and, as the delay between flashes and booms grew longer, the storm moved off.
Jack broke the silence. “I want to hear more about this dream you’ve been having.”
Lara tensed. Fear started up anew. She didn’t want to think about what she’d seen.
Tell him, Gavin’s mental voice had urged her just before she’d passed out in Jack’s arms. He can handle it.
Jack might be able to handle it, but could she?
He sensed her reticence.
“How about I tell you about Jamie and Starr first?”
“Jack. You don’t have to–”
“No. It’s time. I need to.”
“Okay.”
She settled back into his embrace to let him tell his story. She recognized it as a reprieve, but also wanted to give him the emotional support he needed to unburden himself of guilt he’d carried too long. Whatever he had to say was at the heart of what made Jack, Jack.
“I was twenty-four when I went on my first solo finding,” he said. “It wasn’t the first time I’d been away from The House. I was raised here, by the way. I grew up hanging out under your maple tree.”
“The one from my dream?” she asked.
“Mmm-hmn. The very same one. That’s the orphanage it’s standing in front of.”
The girl with the blue stuffed dog.
It made sense to her now, why there were so many children in the dream. Why he–
“What was that?” Jack asked, catching her thoughts.
“Nothing. Go on. I want to hear.”
She silenced her own internal dialogue so that he could concentrate on the story and nothing else.
“Anyway, I’d been assigned a safe house. In Virginia. Roanoke. I moved in and started to search the fields for Lost Ones just the way I’d been taught. It was Taylor who trained me. The agent who’s missing. I went on several findings with him before they let me out on my own.
“I was a natural at it. I’d always known it, too. You could say I was pretty full of myself when it came to my abilities. Of course, at that age, you don’t have much in the way of perspective.”
Lara could tell how difficult this was for him. Already, he’d dived into the self-blame.
“In fact, I surprised myself when I ran across not one, but two dream signatures belonging to Lost Ones on my very first hunt in the fields. It took me almost a week and more than a dozen false trails, but I finally tracked them down. Their signatures were tightly intertwined, both feminine. Relatives, I guessed. One was a lot stronger than the other, and though she probably didn’t realize it, cries for help she kept locked up inside of herself leaked out into the fields.
“As a finder, you can never be sure where you’re going to end up on a run. You don’t have a photo or an address or even a time zone. You just have to open a barrier, step through, and hope for the best. I’m typically visualizing my twin at the same time I get a look around at a place. My first concern is to make sure I don’t materialize inside flooring, walls or furniture. If I’m outside, it’s the same. Avoid trees, sidewalks, lampposts, you know the drill. My second concern is that no one notices me there initially. That first trip is always supposed to be short, no more than a few seconds to look around, find a name, hopefully get to a window or door, look out and get an address or landmark. I’ll come back later once I have more information on the target and know what I’m getting into. Since it’s easier to track a Lost One when they’re dreaming, they aren’t typically awake to see me.”
“But this time someone saw you?” Lara as
ked.
“A little girl. In a princess costume with fairy wings. I’d opened the barrier into a bedroom in the middle of the night. It wasn’t her bedroom. It was her older sister’s. The little girl sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, facing the bedroom door. Her fairy wings were rumpled and one was torn. She didn’t seem to notice. I had the impression she’d chosen not to sleep, but instead to guard her sister for some reason.
“She stared right at me. She wasn’t the least bit afraid of me, though; she was solemn. Very solemn. I didn’t know her name, of course, so I called her by the first thing that came to mind.”
“Sweet Pea,” Lara guessed.
“Sweet Pea,” Jack agreed. “Her real name was Jamie. She was six. ‘Hi, Sweet Pea,’ I whispered.
“ ‘Are you a knight?’ she whispered back. I didn’t know how to answer that. Her eyes were wide in awe, no doubt at seeing someone materialize out of thin air right in front of her.”
“No doubt,” Lara said. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her my name was Jack.”
“You dodged the question,” Lara said.
“I dodged it. But if she wasn’t expecting someone, it felt like she was hoping for someone to show up. Though like I said, she wasn’t afraid. She introduced herself, and then gestured back over her shoulder at the bed. ‘That’s my sister, Starr,’ Jaime said. She stood up, faced me, and I’ll swear if she didn’t look every inch the princess. ‘Are you here to help us?’ she asked.
“I glanced at the girl in the bed, who looked more dead than asleep. I’d slipped into the room very quietly, not like the times you’ve seen me so far. I’d had more time to prepare and could open the barrier slowly, carefully. Even so, the conversation I was having with her little sister would have woken most people. Starr didn’t move. She barely breathed. I judged her to be about thirteen.
“ ‘I need to find my other sister,’ Jamie told me.
“ ‘What’s her name?’ I asked.
“ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I never get to see her. But I know where she is. Will you go with me? She’s in trouble.’ ”
“In trouble?” Lara said. “You said you’d tracked two dream signatures, and that they were so close with each other you thought they were related. So, Starr and her sister were your Lost Ones?”
“At that point I wasn’t sure who I was there for or even who else might be in the house,” Jack said. “I knew Jamie couldn’t be one of my Lost Ones. She was too young to run. Starr was a possibility and the way she slept wasn’t normal. A girl just hitting puberty was in the right age range for the ability to manifest, but just barely. More commonly we come into it in our late teens through our early thirties. Some even later than that.”
Lara wondered what she would have done if she was in Jack’s position. Jumping blind into a strange house in the dead of night sounded like the worst possible scenario. Especially when you didn’t know who lived there. What if Jack encountered an adult who thought he was an intruder there to rob the family or, God forbid, there to steal a child? Someone in the house could call 911 and have the police arrive in minutes. If the parents had guns, they might shoot first and phone the police later.
“So did you go with Jamie to find her sister?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t have. It was a terrible risk.”
“But you did. Of course you did. That’s who you are.”
“I knew I should have left right then, and come back after I’d had a chance to better investigate, but Jamie—I don’t know how to say this—she wasn’t a child. Despite the fairy princess costume, no one had ever really let her be one. She was adamant about going to find her other sister. I suspect she would have done it with or without me that night. I wasn’t going to let her do it alone.
“We crept out of Starr’s bedroom, which was on the second floor, down a hall, some stairs to the foyer, then through the living area to the kitchen. The house was dark, but the whole time I kept wondering when one or more parents would wake up and what I would do when they found me with their little girl. I’d closed the barrier up in Starr’s bedroom. Could I get to a conventional exit? Should I even try? What was going on that Jaime needed my help? I took in as much information as I could on our way. The grandfather clock in the entry gave the time as 2:36, so I suspected the house was in my own time zone. It was obsessively neat, the décor more than a little sterile, and upscale, the type a professional like a lawyer or a doctor might own. Except the only signs of a profession I saw were stacks of bibles, and boxes of religious pamphlets and DVDs in a room also filled with shipping supplies. I thought maybe the father was a minister or some type of evangelical that made his living selling mail order.
“When we got to the kitchen, Jamie led me to a basement door. We could hear these soft, eerie cries from below without even opening it. ‘She’s down there,’ Jamie said. I told her to wait in the kitchen while I had a look.
“On the floor in the center of the basement was a wooden box. It was large and rectangular and had probably once been used to store long narrow tools. It was just a little smaller than a coffin. It was padlocked. Soft scratching noises came from inside the box, along with an exhausted whimpering, like from someone who had screamed in terror for hours until all humanity and emotion had been wrung out of them.
“I happened to glance to my right and along the wall, I saw a rollaway bed had been set up. One look at the sheets and I knew someone had had sex in it not long ago. My heart was pounding. I’d never come across anything like this when I was training with Taylor.
“Jamie hadn’t stayed in the kitchen. Suddenly she rushed down the stairs in her bare feet and went straight to the box. She put her lips to the crack where the lid met the body of the box, and whispered, ‘Hello?’
“The person in the box heard her and went still. ‘Jamie?’ a young girl’s voice said. ‘You shouldn’t be down here. Hurry. Go back to bed before he comes back.’
“ ‘Who are you?’ Jamie asked.
“I’m Starr,’ the girl in the box said.
“ ‘Starr? I have two sisters named Starr?’ ”
“It was her twin,” Lara said, breaking into Jack’s tale again.
“There was no second sister,” Jack confirmed. “But even Starr thought there were two of her. She’d been told that by her father. ‘I’m the devil’s Starr. No one’s supposed to talk to me. Hurry, Jamie, get out of here before it’s too late,’ she said.
“All this time, I’d been searching for something I could use to cut or break the padlock, but though the father had his workshop down here all the cabinets had their own locks. Finally, I noticed a length of pipe propped in a corner. It wasn’t that heavy, but it was all I could find. I grabbed it, turned around and I saw her on the stairs.”
“Who?” Lara asked.
“The mom. She’d stopped halfway down, and stood there frozen in place, dressed in this prim, old-fashioned nightgown. She held her arms across her chest so tightly it was like she was trying to keep something inside her from escaping. I expected her to start screaming, but instead she simply stared at me. Her face was so calm.
“I need to stop and explain something here,” Jack told Lara. “Some runners can tell the difference between another runner’s twin and true bodies as easily as they could a living human from a life-sized photo cutout of that person. I’m not one of those people. Unless the twin is still connected to the original, hovering just out of sync with it, or something has gone really wrong, like when you only half-materialized in my room at the cabin, I can’t tell one from the other.
“The mom knew exactly who I was. Or more precisely, what I was.”
“A runner,” Lara said.
“Right. She knew she was looking at a twin. It didn’t faze her. But then, she seemed really out of it anyway. Shell-shocked in general. It made sense. If the father was molesting and abusing his daughter, there was a good chance the abuse had started with the wife.
“ ‘Where is he?’ I
asked her.
“ ‘Gone,” she said. “He won’t be back till morning.’
“I pointed at the wooden tool box. ‘Where’s the key to this lock?’ She was mute. ‘Does he have it?’ I asked. She nodded. I took a mental step back, furiously trying to think through what to do next. I was torn. I wanted that girl out of the box immediately, but I knew there would be consequences for them, the mom, Starr, even possibly Jamie, if I went ahead and bashed the crap out of the lock with the pipe I had in my hands. The father would come back, see the broken lock and start beating the wife or children to get the truth out of them. The truth was that I wasn’t in my real body. I was a twin at that point, with a definite time limit during which I could act. At most, I’d have a few hours to get them packed up and safely out of there, provided they’d even come with me, or the father hadn’t taken the only vehicle available. I thought about trying to coach Starr through how to get herself out of the box, by returning to her body, but she clearly didn’t understand how any of it worked. I doubted she’d ever consciously opened a barrier before. She’d probably just twinned herself and stepped out of her body at night, not knowing she could go other places beside the house. I knew eventually Starr’s twin would open a barrier and return to its body naturally, when her energy ran down and she fell asleep.
“In the end, the mom surprised me. She continued down the stars, headed for the father’s workbench, reached her hand around the side and got an extra key he had hidden there. She handed it to me and I got Starr out of the box. Her fingernails were ragged and bloody from having clawed at the wooden lid. Imprints of the father’s hands stood out on her arms, bruises already forming. Except for a pair of panties, she was naked. There was blood on the panties and more bruising on her thighs near her crotch.
“I wanted to murder the bastard. Instead, I instructed the mom to find something for the girl to wear, and tried to decide whether or not to call the police. The problem here was—and I learned that he’d been doing the same thing with the mom—he never abused their true bodies, only their twins. Minor injuries to a twin don’t usually show up physically when a runner returns to his or her body. It takes something catastrophic–”
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