by Jordan Dane
Her mom didn’t say a word. The silence didn’t stop the cries of those kids—and Allison’s agonizing scream—from replaying in Selina’s head. She wanted her mom to hold her, to make it all stop, but that didn’t happen.
“You may not understand what I’m about to say.” Her mother held her face. “But you have to trust me, Selina.”
The girl saw something in her mother’s eyes that she’d never seen before. It scared her.
“Get rid of what’s on that camera.”
“What? I thought you’d—”
Her mother wouldn’t listen.
“And I don’t want you to say anything about what happened. People won’t understand.”
“But momma—”
“Just do it, mi hija. Promise me.”
Her mother grabbed her by the shoulders and squeezed tight. Her mom’s lips trembled and her eyes watered. What she had seen in her mom’s eyes that she hadn’t seen before, she finally knew what it was. Her mother was terrified.
“I promise, momma. I s-swear.”
This time her mother hugged her and the tears came—for both of them—but Selina couldn’t stop shaking.
***
4:00 am
Elisa Madero threw back the covers of her bed and crept toward her closed door in the dark, listening for any sounds coming from her daughter’s room down the hall. Selina had cried herself to sleep, she had no doubt. Unable to return to bed, Elisa clutched at her stomach and paced the floor of her shadowy room.
Her daughter didn’t know everything and Elisa hated keeping secrets from her, but some things a fearful trembling child should not have to deal with. She’d raised Selina the best she could and nothing had been easy alone. She loved her only child and would do anything to protect her. That’s why they’d moved again. Elisa looked at the red digital numbers on the clock she had on her nightstand.
She had to talk to someone—even at four in the morning.
***
“I’m sorry to wake you, but I have no one else to talk to. Something is happening with Selina and I can’t fix it. I’m scared.”
Athena Madero recognized the shaky voice on the other end of the phone. She had always encouraged her sister, Elisa, to call whenever she needed to talk. Athena glanced at her clock and sat up in bed, careful not to wake her lover, Grey Holden. Elisa wouldn’t call at this hour if she weren’t desperate.
“Elisa? What’s happening? Talk to me.” Athena slipped back the covers and headed for the living room. “Is Selina okay?”
Athena had cofounded the Omega Team with Grey, a private security firm of ex-military and law enforcement officers. But in her mind, her most harrowing experiences didn’t rival the steady personal courage it had taken for her sister Elisa to raise her daughter alone. Elisa had fought to be a mother since she’d been sixteen years old and even went against their parents.
That took guts.
“She’s slipping away and I can’t help her,” Elisa said. “I want to be her mom, but this is too much for both of us.”
“Start from the beginning. Tell me what happened.” Before her sister spoke, Athena said, “You’re not alone, mi hermana. We’ll figure this out, together.”
***
Woodbridge, Virginia
Ryker Townsend
A sinister whisper filled my head. In the dark, I couldn’t see anything. My shallow raspy breaths grew more frantic. The weight of desperation crushed down on me until I couldn’t fill my lungs.
‘I slept next to you…and dreamed of carving into your body.’
It wasn’t a dream.
‘I have a knife in my hand. I make my first cut and hear you scream.’
My hands were tied and my leg was in pain, the one I’d injured. The wound was raw as if it just happened.
“No. Don’t!” I cried.
Hot sweat rolled off my skin, even as chills battered me. I clenched my teeth and endured the grueling thrashing of my heart that wouldn’t let up.
‘Look at me,’ the voice screamed.
“No. I can’t. I won’t!”
I couldn’t see. Couldn’t move. Fear paralyzed me.
‘I have to see it…when your soul leaves your body. It’s my right. Do it!’
The stench of death filled my nostrils. It smothered me.
“…can’t…b-breathe.”
A light pierced the dark. I winced with its stabbing pain, but I forced my eyes to see.
A fireball exploded and sent ripples of heat over me. I flung a hand up to cover my face. This time, I wasn’t bound. Fire seared my skin like acid. It spread over my body. I couldn’t escape it.
But through the unrelenting agony of my scorched and blistering skin, I caught a glimpse of soothing white in the distance. When it swept over me, the light cut through the pain to cool my face and put the fire out. I willed the light to stay, but something else happened.
The weight of my body lifted without effort. I didn’t fight my vision. I closed my eyes and relaxed into a roll as the burning pain drained from my body. I let the momentum take me until I tumbled to a stop.
I opened my eyes and came face to face with a charred body.
Oh, God. I gasped.
The abrupt stop shocked me. I braced my arms to push off the smoking corpse, but I couldn’t move. My vision wasn’t done.
The stench of burned skin and body gases forced me to hold my breath, but I kept my eyes open. Bloody peels of charred flesh clung to bone, with teeth exposed. I fought the urge to look away from the repulsive sight. I had to use my gift. I’d been given my ability for a reason.
I never turn away from the dead. I have to speak for them.
Once I took in every detail of the charred face, a serene calm oozed through me. The blackened remains faded as if in a fog, swallowed by a bright light. The blinding glow had severed my link to the body until I couldn’t see the corpse anymore.
In an instant, I stood alone, awash in the light and filled with a euphoria I had never felt before.
Is this death, I wondered. Is this—?
Vivid, orange flowers poured down on me in a soothing rain. They glowed as if they were lit in neon. At my feet, crystalline skulls glistened in the light like heaps of hard-packed snow. I raised my arms and turned my face to the heavens.
Death had saved me.
***
Ryker Townsend
I awoke—panting—and sat bolt upright in bed. I stared down at my hands and ran my fingers over my face and through my hair. Nothing hurt, except for the ache of emptiness. The euphoria had gone, but what did it all mean?
I didn’t know why the dream had been different, but a sense of menace had stayed with me. I had touched something evil in my dream. Usually the dead drew me into their last horrific moments. Not this time.
Had the killer reached out to me? Had evil found me in my sleep? The very thought made me shiver. That had never happened to me before.
Through shadows I stared at my bookshelves and my gaze shifted across my loft in Woodbridge, yet I knew a part of me had lingered behind, caught between the horror of a nightmare I couldn’t shake and something new. Even though I felt certain the vision had passed, the sensation of the flowers still washed over me. Petals brushed against my skin and I embraced the feeling, but I didn’t trust it.
My worst nightmares were back—the hellish visions from when I’d come too close to a prolific killer and nearly became a victim.
I wasn’t gullible enough to believe death had done me any favors. My recurring dream that mirrored what happened to me on the Prince of Wales Island in Alaska—when I’d come too close to death myself—had changed for the first time in over a year. But the metamorphosis into something different, with its portent of evil, didn’t feel like a reward.
Death had a cruel streak. It teased a reassuring glimpse to the other side, but I knew better than most. Death expected a price for discovering what dwelled beyond the veil.
You had to die to find out.
&nbs
p; Chapter 2
FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit Headquarters
Quantico, Virginia
Monday, October 31
Ryker Townsend
I stared at the opened email on my computer screen, bleary-eyed, as if it were an eye chart I couldn’t make out. I didn’t know quite how to respond to it. My Unit Chief had a particular skill for impeccable timing.
Chief Anne Reynolds had sent the email today, asking me about the mandatory therapy she’d ordered me to take after a traumatic case a year ago. I’d managed to put her off, but she’d caught on to my excuses for the face-to-face that I knew would come. Her latest email had been a harmless ‘how’s it going’ inquiry on the surface, but I’d read more into it. I had no idea how much she knew or suspected about me. She could have already spoken to my therapist and written to see what I would tell her.
Paranoia was a byproduct of my exhaustion.
I’d had the dream again last night, the third time this week. I thought I had beaten the odds and driven it deep enough into my psyche where I could control it. I’d been wrong, but this time it changed.
I’d constipated my brain with fatigue from lack of sleep. I wanted my Ground Hog Day nightmare to stop, but I had no control over its persistence. The images of glistening white skulls and vivid orange flowers were new. I didn’t know what to make of them, but I knew they were an omen of things to come.
When I heard a soft knock at my office door, I welcomed the interruption.
“You busy?”
Lucinda Crowley, another profiler on my team, poked her head in and smiled.
“That’s a trick question.” I leaned back in my chair. “I refuse to answer on the grounds it could incriminate me.”
“A simple ‘no’ would work.”
“I had to improvise. The word ‘no’ isn’t in your vocabulary.”
“True.” She entered and closed the door behind her. When I heard a click, I narrowed my eyes.
“Did you just lock my door?”
Lucinda didn’t answer. She kept her gaze on me as she shut the blinds to a narrow window that looked onto the hallway outside my office. Once she assured us of our privacy, she stepped behind my desk and swiveled my chair until I faced her. She wore a sharp navy suit with a pale pink blouse that made her skin look like dessert.
I opened my mouth to say something assuredly witty, but Lucinda stopped me. She placed a finger to my lips and curled into my lap.
“Does this make you…uncomfortable?” she asked.
“A proctologist makes me uncomfortable. This doesn’t even come close.”
“Good answer, I think.” She put her arms around my neck and kissed me.
I held her and closed my eyes, breathing her in. The scent of her warm skin took me from the misery of emails and sleepless nights and sent my mind reeling with images of making love to her. I’d crossed a line I never should have with Lucinda. She worked for me, in my unit. I should have stopped her the first time she kissed me last year, but I had grown bone weary of carrying the burden of my secret, alone.
“Dinner. My place, tonight at seven. You bring the wine.” She nuzzled my ear and whispered, “Something red that bites back.”
“I assume you’re referring to wine and not fire ants.” I kissed her neck. “What else should I bring?”
When she didn’t answer and pulled away, I gazed into her eyes and knew she had something more on her mind than popping the cork of my Merlot.
“You can bring an overnight bag and stay the night.”
When I didn’t reply, she pressed for more.
“You never spend the night. I’d like to wake up and feel your arms around me. Is that so terrible? Why haven’t you ever invited me to sleep over at your place?”
“That’s what I like about you, Crowley. You’re subtle.”
“And you’re dodging my question, Townsend. I want to know why.”
Lucinda cocked her head. She wouldn’t settle for my sarcasm and I didn’t blame her. The truth was that I hadn’t invited her to my home for one reason. She’d want to make love and stay the night, but I couldn’t let her do that.
I wanted to save us both the embarrassment of me asking her to leave.
“Sleep is overrated.” I avoided her laser vision. “Besides, your eyes would be closed. What difference does it make if I’m there or not?”
“That’s not an answer.”
It certainly wasn’t, but how could I respond without hurting her, especially when I didn’t know the truth myself?
Before Lucinda came into my life, I didn’t stay over with any of my lovers. I’d been an equal opportunity dodger. I had my reasons and countless tried and true excuses. They would have worked on anyone else, except Lucinda.
I have psychic visions. I see through the eyes of the dead and dream of what is burned onto their retinas when they die or I heed them when they speak to me the only way they can. When I sleep, they share their gruesome puzzle pieces with me. It’s my job to make sense of the skin-crawling ways the dead communicate.
All things considered, I preferred emails.
My gift manifests in many different ways, but mostly it grips me with horrific nightmares that I refuse to explain to anyone. After the case in Alaska where I nearly died trying to keep my secret, I told Lucinda everything. Since then, the burden of carrying the secret of my odd psychic visions had been easier to bear with her knowing the truth.
But the nightmares that plagued me now had been different and they had nothing to do with my affinity with the dead.
“How are your therapy sessions going?” Lucinda asked. “You about done?”
“That is the question of the day…apparently.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Someone else has been asking?”
My unit chief wasn’t the only one with impeccable timing. Crowley had a water-tight knack for knowing when I needed her. Last year she’d led the rescue team to find me on a remote island in Alaska. Without her instincts, I would have died. My ego and my gift had made me vulnerable to a serial killer.
The Totem Killer had dosed me with drugs without me knowing it. Under the influence, my visions had turned into waking nightmares, whether I’d been asleep or not. I couldn’t trust my gift or even my own profiler instincts. I’d lost control and been blindsided by a killer hiding in plain sight. I’d been impotent and nearly gotten another victim, Ben Stevens, killed because I’d wanted to keep my gift a secret.
The Totem Killer had taken something from me that I would never get back. I didn’t know if I could trust my gut impulse anymore. My perverse nightmares were a chronic reminder of my failure. I couldn’t change the past and didn’t know if I had it in me to redefine who I was. I didn’t know where to start.
Any reasonable person would expect PTSD to be a part of the reason I conjured the persistent nightmare, but my psychic ability complicated things. My dreams had become the sacred fabric of my life. They were my gift and my burden. I took the good with the bad.
How could I be sure this new horror wasn’t my mind showing me something I needed to see? To confide in a therapist felt like pulling at a loose thread that could unravel the tightly woven tapestry I’d made.
I ignored the implications of PTSD and had decided to ride it out. But after last night when the dream changed, I didn’t know what to think anymore.
“I’m almost done with the therapy.” I held Lucinda’s hand and avoided her eyes. “But you know I can’t talk about everything in my sessions. A big chunk of my ordeal had to do with my ability.”
“You were stalked and drugged. The hallucinogen affected your visions and messed with your head. I can understand you holding back from a therapist on that, but—”
She leaned her forehead against mine and sighed.
“There’s something you aren’t telling me. I can feel it,” she said. “I thought we didn’t have any more walls between us.”
I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. Lucinda was right. I let her
into my life by sharing my darkest secret, yet I stopped short of full disclosure when it came to my most chilling memories of a hunt for a killer that nearly destroyed me.
The harder I tried to forget what happened, the more my memories haunted me—every whisper in the dark and the sickening hallucinations that were all too real—everything hit me in razor sharp detail. The madness hadn’t let go of me and I hated my weakness. I resented the torment my mind had inflicted on me.
I needed time to deal with it. Lucinda couldn’t help me. She’d only want to fix me.
“I need space. Let me deal with this, my way. I don’t want secrets between us either.” I brushed back a strand of her hair and gazed into her eyes. “I promise to tell you everything, when I can.”
She stared at me and I didn’t flinch. That earned me a smile.
“You’re not alone, Ryker. That was the point of you telling me about your visions.” She kissed my cheek. “But if you need me to be patient, I can do that.”
“Liar.”
***
Afternoon
Ryker Townsend
Sinead Royce—my genius computer specialist, resource diva and eyewear aficionado—had summoned the team to a conference room for a briefing on our new field assignment. Lucinda sat across the table from me, next to my evidence recovery techs, Devin Hutchison and Camilla Devore. Hutch and Cam smiled at what Sinead wore, but they didn’t say anything.
Sinead didn’t let a workday ruin her enjoyment of Halloween. Today she dressed in Goth black, painted her fingernails to match, and wore oversized dark glasses adorned with fetching rhinestones. The frames dwarfed the subtle features of her face and made her look younger than her twenty-two years.
I thought of Sinead as a brilliant white rose thriving in a tangle of thorns.
“We received a call for assistance from Brownsville, Texas. Fair warning, people. These images are disturbing. ” Sinead hit a button and a charred body projected onto the conference room screens—the blackened face I had seen in my vision.