“I can feel her,” I whispered. “She’s got to be here.”
Shane’s brow furrowed. “I feel her, too.”
We stepped inside and closed the door behind us. Shane called up a light ball and illuminated the walls, which were covered with shelves filled with cleaning supplies, paint, tools. I searched for a doorknob, a lever, anything.
“She’s close,” Shane murmured. “Past this wall. There’s got to be a way in—some other entrance.”
He ran his hands along the sides of the shelves, holding the light aloft with his mind. I did the same on the opposite wall, conjuring up a small light ball so I could see. Shane noticed and gave me an approving smile, then his face froze.
“Here.” He tugged at a narrow bookshelf full of paint cans and dried-up brushes. The whole thing swung away from the wall, revealing a crude wooden door secured with a combination lock.
“Shit,” I said.
“I can pick it. Don’t worry.”
“That piece of slime. What if there was a fire?”
“Come on, you think he’d care?” He held the lock in both hands and closed his eyes.
The dial turned, very slowly. Shane was perfectly still. I didn’t want to breathe. The dial spun and spun, then stopped.
“Eighteen,” he whispered, then started spinning the dial the other way. He didn’t get it on the first try and had to go back, turning the dial to eighteen again and looking for the second number. It took him three tries before he figured out it was twenty-two, and then he started on the third. I stood and watched him, his eyes closed, his mind focused utterly on the inner movements of the locking mechanism. It took forever, and I started thinking I should break it and get on with it when something went snick and the lock fell open.
Shane grinned. “Eleven.”
“About time.”
He gave me a look and pushed open the door.
It was a dead-zone between the manicured sheetrock of the hallway and the cinderblocks forming the outer wall. Pink insulation had been hacked away around the doorway. Shane sent his light bobbing into the space, and as its glow bathed the dust-coated walls, we both gasped. Several feet in, slumped against the cinderblock, was a woman.
“Oh my God.” Shane rushed toward her. She was blindfolded and gagged with duct tape. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back, the chain laced through ropes binding her ankles. She didn’t stir as we went to her and lifted her into a sitting position, but she was definitely breathing.
“Knocked out,” Shane whispered.
“That fucker.” I wanted to take off the duct tape, but I was afraid of hurting her. She smelled terrible, like urine and old sweat. There was a bucket in the corner, and empty water bottles and energy bar wrappers littering the damp floor.
“How long has she been here?” I said, feeling sick. He’d obviously been keeping her alive to drain her. Shane was studying the handcuffs. “Can you get them off?”
“Handcuffs are easy.” Even as he said it, the cuffs fell from her wrists. Shane pulled out a pocketknife and began sawing through the ropes at her ankles. The skin beneath was raw and bleeding.
“Come on,” I said as the rope fell away. “Who knows what kind of security he’s got in this place.” I looked around for cameras, blinking red lights. Nothing, but that didn’t mean we were safe.
Shane lifted the woman and carried her out of the cell, locking the door behind us. I risked contacting Lionel to let him know we were coming with a guest, and I felt rather than heard his grim promise to be ready at the front door.
We carried the woman up the center aisle of the church. Seeing all those empty chairs, I couldn’t help remembering the spectacle we’d observed twelve hours before. All those people, ecstatic, thinking they were seeing miracles. All while this poor woman was being drained of life in a freezing, stinking concrete cell. My resolve to take Geary down strengthened. Outside, the rain was still coming down, and Shane shifted the woman in his arms to shield her face.
“Is she coming around?” he asked. “I can’t feel anything.”
It would’ve been an inconvenient time to have her wake up and start screaming. I searched for any sign that she was rising out of the sea of unconsciousness, but she was out cold, not even a flutter of her eyelashes. I shook my head. I was starting to worry Geary had sent her into a coma, and what we were going to do if he had.
Lionel didn’t even blink as Shane settled the woman in the back seat of the car. Rain pooled on the seat beneath her, washing days of sweat and piss onto the vinyl.
“Get us out of here,” Shane said, and then we were flying back to the B&B.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Bruce was waiting for us in the kitchen, pacing. He was wearing pajama pants and a torn-up LSU T-shirt. His hair—what he had left of it—was sticking up, and he was holding a cup of coffee that looked like it hadn’t been touched. As we walked in, he set the mug down on the table and advanced on Lionel.
“Doesn’t anyone in this family answer their goddamn cell phones? What the holy hell is going on?”
“That—that preacher down in Briny Point was keeping a woman tied up in his church.” Lionel was a religious man, and I knew Geary’s crime was worse in his eyes for having taken advantage of a flock of faithful.
The screen door banged, and we all turned to watch Shane walk in with the woman in his arms. In the gold light of the kitchen, I saw that she was younger than I’d first thought, maybe early twenties. I ran to the hall closet and got an armful of towels and laid them on the floor. Shane set her down carefully, supporting the back of her head.
Bruce stared. “Lionel, what the hell are thinking—you brought her here? She needs to be in a hospital!” He knelt down and brushed damp, dark hair out of her face. “Is she—is she—”
“She’s alive,” I said. “And we can’t bring her to a hospital. That’s the first place he’ll look.”
“Jesus Christ.” Bruce ran thick fingers through his hair.
Shane arranged her arms at her sides and stood up, rubbing his temples. “I haven’t been able to get through to her.”
For the first time, I noticed what she was wearing—black pants and a red halter top edged with black lace, the kind of outfit you’d wear to a club. She might have had on heels at some point, but they were long gone, and her feet were black with grime. Her clothes looked loose on her, as though she’d recently lost weight. How long had she been in that room?
“I didn’t know what to do about the duct tape,” I said, near tears.
“I’ll get some cooking oil. That may help.” Bruce stood, knees creaking as he walked to the pantry, and came back a moment later with a bottle. Shane was pacing the length of the kitchen, and Lionel was kneeling by the woman’s head. I could tell he was trying to make contact, but he wasn’t getting through.
Bruce handed me the bottle, and I went to work on the duct tape, easing it off millimeter by millimeter, my fingers slick with oil. It took me almost fifteen minutes, but eventually I was able to pull it away from her mouth. It still took patches of skin away with it, but it was better than it could have been. Shane brought a warm, damp washrag, and I wiped the oil and blood from her face.
“We should put her in one of the guest rooms,” Shane said. “We can call Bunny in the morning.”
“I’ll get her cleaned up,” I said, and the men nodded in agreement. Shane carried her up to the guest room in the southwest corner and left me to it.
The girl’s clothes were soiled beyond reclamation. I stripped them off of her, silently apologizing for it but deciding I’d want someone to do the same for me. She had a belly button piercing and a quarter-sized birthmark on her right thigh. I sponged her off as best I could and put her in a pair of Shane’s old sweatpants and a T-shirt. She was much taller and fuller-figured than me, and nothing I had would have fit her.
It seemed almost too much of an invasion to slip into her head on top of everything else, but if we could find anything out about where she w
as from, it might be useful. Unfortunately, all I got was a tangle of frightened images, mostly of the cell where we’d found her—the darkness, the sound of rats, the terror she felt when the happy chatter of churchgoers filtered through the walls. The cold. I clenched my fists so tightly my fingernails bit into my palms. I was going to find this guy.
I left a stack of clean towels and some of the mini-toiletries we kept for the guests on the chair by the bed, then went back downstairs. If she woke up, I didn’t doubt we’d know it.
“You can’t keep her here,” Bruce was saying as I came down the stairs. “She needs a doctor. And what if this maniac comes looking for her?”
I stopped in the doorway, and Shane and I exchanged a glance.
“We’ll just have to go looking for him first,” he said.
* * *
Dominic Geary had a nice place.
Shane parked on the street in front of his house, and we both took in the neat brick two-story with its two-car garage and professional landscaping. Through the fence I saw a fancy built-in barbecue pit in the backyard.
“Is he home?” Shane asked.
“Give me a sec.” I reached through the walls and felt for warm bodies. Only one, thank God. At the moment, it was about 4:00 a.m. and he was asleep. Who knew what time unscrupulous telekinetic preachers got started? He might stay in bed until noon.
It had been shockingly easy to track him down. His number had been unlisted, but I figured a guy like Geary probably didn’t skimp on personal luxuries. He had to at least have cable, maybe satellite TV. I’d called around until I got a hit. Geary, it turned out, was a satellite man. I’d told the overworked service rep that I was Mrs. Geary and we hadn’t been getting our bill in the mail, and could she please tell me what address they had on file for us? It had taken longer to drive to his place in the Garden District than it had to get his street number.
I unlocked the front door telekinetically, and we slipped into the dark foyer. In front of us was a flight of stairs, and beyond it, a huge carpeted living room with a flat-screen television and a fireplace with one of those fake gas-lit logs. The couch was cream leather.
“Likes the simple life, this guy,” Shane whispered.
“Shh.”
We crept up the stairs, wincing when one of the steps creaked. Upstairs, Geary stirred in his sleep. We froze.
“Can you start pulling?” Shane asked.
“I can try.”
I reached for Geary. He wasn’t dreaming, and his mind was quiet and still. I started, very carefully, to pull, focusing hard on Geary and avoiding Shane. I connected to him in his sleep, grabbing tiny pieces of his power, but then my concentration wavered and the pull latched on to Shane.
“Back up,” I hissed. “You’re too close.”
“I can’t feel anything.”
“I can!”
“You managed fine out on the lake.”
“I wasn’t pulling from a human, then. And I didn’t know you were there. Back up.”
He stepped back, but I could still feel my power angling for him, attaching to Geary and then wavering back toward Shane like a broken spiderweb.
“Farther.”
“I’m not—”
He was cut off by a loud blaring sound. For a couple of confused seconds I thought it was Geary’s alarm clock. Then I realized it was a siren. Geary’s security system, which we’d both neglected to notice right by the front door, was blinking red.
“Fuck!” Shane said.
“Should we leave?” I had to make even my mindspeech loud over the sound of the alarm.
“What about Geary?”
“We’ll come back for him!”
We raced back down the stairs, but we were too late. I saw flashing blue-and-red lights through the glass of the front door. God, only in the Garden District would cops respond so quickly. “Back door!”
We headed for the living room. Unfortunately, Geary chose that moment to wake up and stagger down the stairs. He was wearing a burgundy silk robe and his hair was sticking up.
He was clearly still woozy from the pull, but when he saw us, his eyes flew wide open. “What the—?”
I telekinetically snapped his jaw shut. He tried to turn toward the door, but I was holding him motionless. I must have drained more of his powers than I’d thought, because he wasn’t even trying to fight me off.
“What the fuck do we do?” I sent to Shane.
The police came up and rang the doorbell. It was barely audible over the sound of the alarm. Two officers shifted on their feet and peered through the glass.
All three of us were frozen. The cops rang the doorbell again.
“Possess him!” I said.
“What? No way!”
“You have a better idea?”
Shane looked horrified. “I’m not even sure if I can get in that deep.”
“It’s the only way. We’re out of time.”
Shane looked at the front door and then at Geary, who was making strangled attempts to yell through his closed mouth. “Oh, hell,” Shane said, and his lip curled back as he invaded Geary’s head.
It took him a moment, and I knew he must have been fighting Geary’s natural resistance. The cops rang the doorbell again, and this time, Geary walked stiffly over and opened the door.
“Dominic Geary?” the cop said. He had to shout over the sound of the alarm. I held my breath.
Shane made Geary nod.
“Is everything all right, sir? We got a call from your alarm company.”
Shane made Geary nod again. His hand rose stiffly and punched six numbers into the keypad by the door. The alarm stopped sounding, and my shoulders relaxed in relief. The noise had been panic-inducing.
“Out of town guests,” I said helpfully. “Didn’t know the code.” Shane made Geary shrug.
“Of course. I understand.” The cop turned back to Geary. “If you could just give us the safety code, then?” I dipped into the cop’s head. Apparently he was waiting for an “under duress” signal. His hand hovered over his gun.
“Shane...”
He ignored me. His pupils were more dilated than I’d ever seen them.
“The code, sir?” the cop said. His partner hiked up his belt and settled a hand next to his radio. I forced myself to keep smiling, but my teeth were clenched and I wasn’t breathing. I must have looked manic.
Veins popped out in Geary’s neck. I could hear the cops mentally preparing to call for backup, draw their weapons. I was debating the moral acceptability of knocking everyone out and making a run for it when Geary spoke.
“Nine-seven-seven-eight-four!” He practically yelled it, then snapped his jaw closed again. The cop nodded. I breathed again.
“Sorry to disturb you, sir. Have a good night.” He and his partner left, and I sat down on the couch and put my head in my hands. Shane released Geary, then fell forward next to me, sweat stains spreading under his arms.
“You okay?”
He nodded.
I turned to Geary, who was still staring at us in shock, backing slowly for the front door. “Uh-uh,” I said, restraining him again. “We’ve got some questions for you.”
* * *
Geary wanted us to believe he didn’t own duct tape.
When I went right to the bin above his washing machine and pulled it out, he blanched.
“Who are you people?” he said.
“Quiet.” I duct-taped him to one of his dining room chairs. I could have kept restraining him telekinetically, but I was getting tired, and I didn’t want to risk him getting away. Up close, I was surprised by how big he was. He clearly spent his share of time at the gym, and I wouldn’t have wanted to fight him the old-fashioned way. I wasn’t sure I wanted to fight him at all, but it was too late to worry if I’d be able to overpower him.
“Who the fuck are you?” Geary asked again. His voice was getting shrill. “What do you want?” He jerked his arms against the duct tape and looked around wildly. I thought of the woman we
’d rescued and felt no pity for him whatsoever.
“Oh, we’re just some new parishioners of yours,” I said, and watched him turn even whiter.
He gave up on getting free and switched to wheedling. “Look, you want money? You got it. No problem. Just give me a couple days to get the cash together and you got it.” In his head, he was thinking about how to skip town.
I laughed. “You think we want money? With everything you’ve done, that’s the first thing you think of?” I looked at Shane. “He’s even more of a piece of shit than we thought.”
“Keep your money.” Shane sat down in front of Geary. “You won’t get to enjoy it in prison anyway.”
I had to wonder why he hadn’t recuperated enough to fight back. My pull must have been much more powerful than I’d realized. That, or he was more of a coward than I’d thought. Either way, it wasn’t going to last long, and I couldn’t give him a chance to take us out. I started pulling again, very carefully. As much as I despised the man, I didn’t want to kill him, and I knew I was going to have to take my time. Tiny jolts of power zipped into me, and Geary winced.
“Who’s the girl?” Shane stood, put a hand on either side of Geary and leaned in close. “Where did you kidnap her from?”
Geary tried to lean back, but he didn’t get far. “What girl? What are you talking about?”
I pulled a little more, testing myself. Geary twitched and looked around as if he was trying to figure out where the pinpricks were coming from.
“The girl you had tied up in your utility closet, you sick son of a bitch.” Shane was close to losing his temper. The image of the woman’s raw ankles was vivid in his head. We hadn’t found any ID on her, and we needed to figure out who her family was before I put her attacker in a temporary coma.
Geary looked bewildered. I dipped into his thoughts and found panic. What the hell is going on who are these people what are they talking about oh God ohGodohGodohGod... Out loud, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Oh, Jesus Christ, please don’t hurt me, I swear I don’t know about any girl. I swear! Oh, God!”
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