Blood Dreams (16 page)

“The voice? His voice?”

“It’s an exaggeration to call it a voice, at least now. A faint echo of a whisper.”

“Because you’re able to shut him out?”

“I wish I could say yes.” Dani shrugged. “But I’ve only been taught the bare bones of shielding, and since I never needed it, I haven’t really practiced. No, I don’t think it’s anything I’m doing.”

“Which is bothering you more than anything else.”

“Well, yeah. I should be able to shut out psychic contact from someone else. If that’s what this is. Dammit, I just don’t—”

Marc put his hands on her shoulders. “Dani. Why do you keep trying to carry all this alone? You aren’t Cassandra, but if there’s a war coming, you sure as hell can’t stop it alone. Let us help. Let me help.”

She stared up at him, very aware of his hands, aware of the connection with him that she had tried her best to block ever since that other voice had pushed its way in. Because she didn’t want Marc to sense or feel that, not that cold, implacable, evil voice, not in her—even if it wasn’t her.

Especially if it wasn’t her.

Instinctively, she tried to close off a bit more of herself. “You are helping. One step out of this building, and I’m practically surrounded by your deputies.”

“That’s an exaggeration. And not what I meant, as you damn well know.” He sounded frustrated, and his frown deepened.

“The best thing you can do for me,” she said deliberately, “is to keep looking for this killer. And Reverend Butler is a possible lead, right? So let’s go. If that was thunder I just heard, we may be in for a storm.”

She hoped she was speaking literally and hoped it would only be the weather that would turn violent.

His fingers tightened, and for at least a minute Dani wasn’t sure if he was going to let this drop—for now, anyway. But finally he said in a match of the even, deliberate tone she had used, “You of all people should know that none of us can get through this life alone. When you’re ready, I’m here, Dani. I always have been.”

He released her shoulders and turned away. Dani followed him from the conference room, wishing she didn’t feel so strongly that she had just made an awful mistake.

T
he Reverend Jedidiah Butler was an imposing man, at least in his own mind. To the rest of the world outside his admiring congregation, he was rather average in size and build, could have been any age between forty and sixty, and possessed as his single distinguishing feature a shock of silver hair.

He didn’t even boast the sort of booming voice common among Southern preachers, but instead spoke to Marc in the slightly nasal tone of someone with bad allergies.

“Sheriff, I don’t understand this visit. As I explained to the town council, I haven’t the means to—”

Marc waved that away before the usual rant could get good and started. Thunder was rolling all around, and since they hadn’t been invited inside, he wanted to get this interview over before the storm finally broke.

At least, he hoped it would break. They needed rain in the worst way.

“I’m not here because of the council’s concerns, Reverend.” He glanced at Dani, saw the almost imperceptible shake of her head, and bit back a sigh.

Well, it had been worth a try, he thought. But even without the benefit of Dani’s vision, his own judgment told him this onetime grain-storage facility was unlikely to be the “warehouse” she had seen in her dreams. For one thing, the silo was still standing, and even with that the building was by no stretch of the imagination “huge.” It was, however, in need of serious repairs and smelled strongly of chickens.

Besides, having shaken hands with the good reverend on more than one occasion, Marc already knew the man lacked psychic ability or, indeed, any level of perception even as high as simple intuition.

“Then why are you here?” Reverend Butler demanded. “Is it about those murdered women?”

Marc stared at him, not as surprised as he wished he could be, especially after talking to Miss Patty. It was a bit difficult to read anything sinister or even suspicious in a local preacher’s knowledge when the local florist shared it. He mentally knocked a few more minutes off the clock in terms of when he could expect the media to descend on Venture.

It was Hollis who stepped forward, offering her I.D. folder and badge for the preacher to see. “What do you know about that, Reverend?” she asked pleasantly.

He studied her I.D. for a long moment, then answered with a show of exaggerated patience. “Everybody
knows
about the murders, Agent Templeton. But out of respect for the families, of course we’ve kept our distance and our silence. Especially as you and the sheriff haven’t seen fit to positively identify the victims.”

Marc stopped himself from going on the defensive, though it wasn’t easy. “Lab results take time,” he said.

“Yes, one of my congregants was the gardener out at the Blanton place. He found the…remains.”

Marc and Hollis exchanged glances, but all the sheriff said was “Information he was ordered to keep to himself.”

“He came to me in confidence, Sheriff, as any troubled soul would.” Butler shrugged. “But, as I said, the situation was already being discussed.”

Hollis’s voice was not quite light when she said, “Just as long as there are no lynch mobs forming up.”

“We’re God-fearing people, Agent Templeton. Even if we had some idea who this evil killer is—and I assure you we do not—we would never take it upon ourselves to hunt him, far less punish him. That is for the law, and the courts, and God to do.”

It was a nice little speech. Dani wondered why she didn’t believe it.

Because she was a cynic, probably.

Or maybe it was something else.

She tried to concentrate on the possible something else, not really listening as Marc asked Butler a few routine questions about whether he’d seen or heard anything suspicious during the last few weeks. Instead, against her better judgment, she realized she was listening for that voice again.

His voice.

Because with every second that passed, she became more uneasy, more uncomfortable. She was acutely aware of the urge to look back over her shoulder, behind her, but when she looked she saw nothing but the countryside she recognized.

So what was it she was feeling? Sensing?

The fine hairs on the back of her neck were standing straight up, her hands felt cold, and there was a leaden queasiness in the pit of her stomach. Yet when she looked at Butler, at her surroundings, nothing about him or them seemed responsible for what she felt.

Thunder rumbled louder now, rolling around as it did in the mountains so that it seemed to circle them, and she wondered if that was it. Could it be? She had never been as sensitive to storms as many psychics were, to the point of discomfort, but they did tend to affect—enhance, strengthen?—her normal senses.

So maybe that was all it was. Still, she knew she was trying to listen for something beyond her normal senses and honestly didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that she could hear no faintest hint or echo of the whisper that so terrified her.

“Dani?”

She blinked at Marc, then scrambled mentally as she realized the reverend had already turned to go back inside his church and that Marc and Hollis were both looking at her with raised brows.

“Sorry.” She got back into the front passenger seat of Marc’s car, hoping she hadn’t missed anything important.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

“Fine. My mind just wandered, that’s all.” She was still listening for that voice but at the same time was aware that what she was feeling physically was very familiar. Pressure. Like in the dream walk. Could that be from the approaching storm?

She reached up surreptitiously to touch her nose, a little surprised to find no blood there. Because the pressure was increasing, and she had to fight the urge to move, to try to somehow get out of the way of whatever it was that was pushing at her, pressing against her.

Nothing.
There’s nothing. Just the storm coming. Just my imagination.

Marc looked at her a moment longer, frowning, then started the car and began to maneuver it down the long, rutted “driveway” that wound through a mile of countryside to the old storage facility.

From the backseat, Hollis said, “I hate storms. But maybe that’s why. Because I’ve never been able to see auras before.”

18

D
ANI TURNED IN
her seat, noting as she did that Marc shot a quick glance at the rearview mirror so he could see the agent’s face. A face that was, Dani saw, just a little strained and far more pale than was normal for her.

“I gather that wasn’t the non sequitur it sounded like?” Dani said.

Hollis was looking at Dani. Or, rather, her gaze seemed to be probing the space about a foot out from Dani’s body.

“No. It wasn’t a non sequitur. It was…completely on topic.”

“Which topic?” Marc demanded.

“On the topic of monsters.”

Dani forced a laugh. “Who, me?”

“No.” Hollis met Dani’s eyes finally, her own holding a weirdly flat shine. “Dani, can you shield?”

“A little. Not much, but—”

“Do it. Now. Concentrate.”

Dani obeyed without hesitation, closing her eyes and doing her best one more time to remember how she’d been taught to wrap herself in a protective blanket of her own energy. It didn’t seem to be getting any easier.

Through gritted teeth, Marc said to Hollis, “What the hell do you see?”

“Something I’ve never seen before.” Hollis’s voice was low, tense. “But I believe…it’s not a normal aura. It’s an attack of some kind. Someone or something is trying to get at Dani. Marc—”

He didn’t wait for whatever Hollis had been about to say but instantly reached over with one hand and covered both of Dani’s cold and tightly clenched ones, holding on even when he felt a jolt, even when she cried out in such pain that it broke something inside him.

Without another sound, Dani went limp.

D
ani looked around, puzzled for a moment because there was nothing but darkness as far as she could see, and silence, and she had the feeling she was alone here. Perhaps it should have frightened her, but oddly it did not.

She couldn’t feel a floor or ground beneath her feet. She couldn’t, actually, feel her feet, and when she looked down she couldn’t see them, because her body just sort of dissolved into darkness.

That probably should have scared her too.

It probably should have scared her a lot.

“No, you were always more comfortable with this sort of thing than I was,” Paris said as she mostly emerged out of the darkness in front of Dani.

“I’m the one who tried to run away from it,” Dani pointed out, not as distracted as she should have been by the fact that Paris seemed to have a body only from the navel up.

“It was the stuff out there you were running away from, the stuff you couldn’t control. People, relationships. Emotional stuff. The psychic stuff was always easier for you.”

“I can’t control this.”

“Oh, of course you can. You always could.”

“Bullshit.”

“To paraphrase what you said to Marc, that’ll fix things—a good, resounding
bullshit
.”

“I didn’t tell you what I said to Marc.”

“Mmm. Never mind that now. Just remind yourself that you really can control this. Later, when you think about it, when it matters. Don’t forget.”

“What’s happening later?”

“You’ll need to know stuff.”

“Paris—”

“It’s all right, Dani. Some things are meant to happen just the way they happen. We both knew this was one of them, right? We both know that’s why you really came home.”

For the first time, uneasiness stirred in Dani, cold and deep. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do.”

“No. I don’t.”

“I wasn’t in your vision dream. Right from the beginning. Before you told anybody. Before you came here. Before you did anything at all to affect what you had seen. I should have been there with you, and I wasn’t.”

“So? It’s one of the things I knew would change.”

“No, Dani. It’s one of the things you knew wouldn’t change. That’s why you’ve been so shut inside yourself. Why you’ve kept Marc from getting close the way he wants to, and why you even shut me out.”

“I never—”

“Dani. The only time you let me in was during the dream walk. Not before then. Not since. Because you were afraid. Because you thought there’d be a moment, somewhere along the way, when you could change things. This one particular thing. If you were strong enough. Quick enough. If you tried hard enough. But that’s not the way it works, you know.”

“Paris—”

“Miranda said it. No matter what we see or what we dream, the universe has a plan. All this was part of the plan.”

“I won’t accept that,” Dani whispered.

“Afraid you don’t really have a choice, sis. Besides, you’ve already accepted it. We both have. That’s why we didn’t need to talk about it all these weeks while you were letting me cry on your shoulder, and cried yourself, about the end of my marriage. We both knew that wasn’t the only ending we were grieving.”

“Paris—”

“I’m glad you came back here after the divorce. Have I told you that? How much it meant to me that you came?”

“You didn’t have to say anything. I knew.”

“We always do, don’t we? The best part about being a twin. All the things we don’t have to say.”

“There are things we do. Paris—”

“Listen, what Shirley Arledge told Hollis is right: He’s tricking you. Look past the trick, Dani. You know the truth, it’s there in your vision dream. Just think it through.”

“I can’t do this by myself.”

“You won’t be by yourself. A twin is never alone, no matter what.” Paris was already drifting back into the darkness. “And you can do what you have to, Dani. When the time comes. You’ll know. You’ll make the right choice.”

“Paris, come back!”

“It’s okay.” Her voice was faint and fading. “I’ve got something for you, something you can use. I think it was always supposed to be yours anyway. Come see me before you leave, okay?”

Dani listened as hard as she could, but she couldn’t hear her sister anymore.

And the darkness closed in.

Sunday, October 12

D
ani resisted opening her eyes for a long time even after she knew she was awake and aware. A part of her wanted to hide, to dive back down into the darkness and search for Paris.

But a stronger part of her knew there was only one way back into that darkness, and willing herself there wasn’t it.

She opened her eyes. A hospital room, she thought. Dim and hushed, with machines beeping quietly nearby. There was never a sense of time in a hospital room, Dani had found; there was routine and order, but the nights and the days looked very much alike. Her own internal clock told her hours had passed, that it was probably at least late Sunday morning.

Which meant she’d been out a long time. She wondered with faint amusement what the doctors had made of her.

Somewhere in the building, a medical paper was probably being drafted.

She was distracted from that thought by the realization that there was a shadowy figure in the far corner of the room, but it was the closer presence she was far, far more aware of.

“Dani…”

She turned her head to see Marc beside her hospital bed, holding her hand. He looked incredibly relieved and incredibly weary, older than he had looked yesterday.

We pay such a price.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

Dani considered, then nodded. “Good. I feel good.” More than that, really. She felt strong. Stronger than she’d ever felt before, and in a way that was completely unfamiliar to her. It wasn’t muscles, it was…

Power.

“Dani…something’s happened.”

She nodded again. “I know. Paris.”

He didn’t seem surprised by her knowledge but offered details. “She isn’t dead. At least—The doctors say it’s a coma. They can’t explain it. But they couldn’t explain you either.” He shook his head. “They’re saying she’s showing some brain activity, and as long as that continues, there’s hope.”

Dani knew. She heard the clock in her head ticking off the remaining days—or hours, or maybe just minutes—of Paris’s hope. There was so little time left.

Bishop came out of the shadows to stand at the foot of her bed. “I’m sorry, Dani.”

She looked at him. “I never thought we’d meet with those words, even though I dreamed them. Sort of. But I get it. You knew he’d come after one of us.”

“Yes. Something Miranda saw. But…it could have been either one of you. There was no way for us to be sure.”

“Until I started hearing his voice in my head.”

Without flinching, Bishop said, “At first I believed he’d choose Paris as one of his victims. When she wasn’t a part of your vision dream, not beside you when she should have been, and once Miranda was out of the picture, that seemed the obvious answer.”

“You were going to use her. Watch her, follow her. Wait for him to go after her. Bait on a hook.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “But it seemed our best chance of catching him. It bothered me from the beginning that neither of you really fit his victim profile, but from the beginning here he was veering from that, at least in terms of coloring. I had to assume his ritual was changing in some fundamental way, and that meant it was possible he was choosing victims using some other criteria and then…making them fit. Both of you could be made to fit.

“You were still dreaming, and Paris was still missing from that dream. That vision dream. But then the killer’s M.O. began to change in drastic, unpredictable ways, and quickly. Very quickly. That…neon crime scene. Being a little too obvious in stalking and photographing Marie Goode, a previous victim’s jewelry left in her home, plus flowers.”

“Too obvious,” Dani said, half to herself. “Look at me, look what I’m doing.”

Bishop nodded. “Not at all in character for the Boston serial. Not a kind of progression, a kind of evolution, I’ve ever seen before in a serial killer.”

“And yet.”

He nodded again. “And yet. We were sure this was the same killer even before we got here, positive in our own minds even without evidence to back that up. Since then, Hollis had seen Becky Huntley, later Shirley Arledge; both of them and Karen Norvell were the right physical type, matching the victims in Boston. And you were hearing that voice, a confirmation of our suspicion that we might be dealing with a psychic killer.”

Marc said roughly, “How is that any kind of confirmation of anything?”

Dani looked at him. “I knew,” she said simply. “I kept trying to tell myself that I wasn’t really hearing an alien voice in my head, that it was just some…weird psychic fluke, a leftover echo from one of the doom dreams I couldn’t remember anymore. Anything. Anything but the truth. That he was real. That he was here. And that he had found a way to connect with me.”

“Which,” Bishop said, “caused me to believe that you, not Paris, were his intended target.”

“I kept walking into his trap,” Dani said. “In the vision dream, no matter what else changed, that never did. I knew it was a trap, always, every time, and every time I walked into it.”

“Yes, another sign that you were the one he was focused on. We didn’t leave Paris unprotected,” Bishop said. “But I thought he’d come after you.”

Marc, his voice still harsh, said, “If you knew the bastard was psychic, why didn’t you expect
this
kind of attack?”

“Because this kind of attack, a psychic attack, is more rare than hen’s teeth,” Bishop told him. “It just doesn’t happen, especially when there’s no blood connection. And he hadn’t shown any sign that he had even attempted such a thing before.”

“There was no way for you to know,” Dani said, her fingers tightening in Marc’s. “If our abilities worked that way, we’d have all the answers.”

“I’d settle for just one or two I can hang my hat on,” Marc told her. “Dammit, Dani, you nearly died. Nothing touched you, nobody laid a finger on you, and
you nearly died
.”

There was more than anxiety in his voice, and she heard it and wished she could wrap herself in it and in him and just stop everything else. For a while. Just a while. But the clock in her head refused to stop ticking, and even though she squeezed Marc’s hand again, she forced herself to concentrate on what Bishop was saying.

“Which is why an SCU guardian is on the way here to keep watching. Over you.”

“I don’t need a guardian.”

“Dani—”

“But someone else does, if I’m right. This guardian of yours, what’s his ability?”

“Her ability. I choose guardians carefully; among other things, she has a shield she can extend around someone else.”

“Psychic protection. Good. Then I need her to stand guard over Paris.”

Bishop was frowning but nodded immediately. “Done.”

He thought he owed her, Dani thought. And she wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t right about that.

She looked at Marc. “I have a hunch you won’t be getting too far away from me for the duration, right?” It was more than a hunch.

She knew.

Marc was nodding. “Bet your ass. But I’m no psychic guardian, Dani. I can’t protect you from another attack like this one.”

She wasn’t so sure about that, but all she said was, “I think he went after Paris a lot harder than he did me. And I think I know why. I’m not sure about the timing of everything, but I get the motive. I think. Anyway, unless the vision dream changes drastically the next time around, I’m there at the end. Paris…never was.” She looked back at Bishop. “Like you said.”