Nightmare (31 page)

By my best guess, now that the mark had appeared on my neck I
had less than eight hours before whatever was going to happen
to me happened.

It was strange how fast the symbol had appeared. Jordin and
Carrie reported multiple instances of the nightmarish dream
before they ever had the mark on their necks. I had only had the
dream once.

Howell Durham's apparitions that attacked us at the grave
must have reported back to him. So he and his pseudoscience
cronies had accelerated the process just for me.

I knew that Jordin and Carrie had both disappeared at night.
Even though Jordin's journal indicated that she signed up for
DHI's crazy scheme, that didn't mean she knew the full extent of it at the time, and the fact that she had come to both Derek and
me asking for help meant that something had gone very wrong.
As for the others, there may not have been anything particularly
otherworldly about their disappearances; now that we knew real
men made of flesh and blood were involved, it was more likely that
these people from Durham Holdings just outright kidnapped
the people bearing the mark. Maybe it acted like some kind of
weird homing beacon for them.

If so, then it would be leading those same men to me right
now.

But the question remained of how it got on my neck in the
first place. On that, I hadn't a clue.

Then again, Jordin and Carrie both hadn't been on the move
when they found their marks. They hadn't done anything to
prevent what was going to happen, because Carrie had no idea
what it meant, and Jordin pretty much just submitted to it.

I, on the other hand, was a moving target. If they wanted me,
they would have to catch me.

Or, I thought sourly, they could just wait until I knock on their
front door.

Why should they bother chasing me if I was headed straight
for them?

Derek drove in the early morning to reach the address Pierre
Ravenwood had provided, a heavily wooded area at the foot of
the Catskills where we found nothing.

The exact address didn't exist. It was an empty lot in the
middle of nowhere, with a large wooden sign proclaiming that a new strip mall was coming to the sleepy, barely inhabited area
about a year from now.

The one thing we did find was Pierre, waiting for us on the
side of the road in front of the parcel of empty land. He stood
outside in the unseasonably frosty ground, leaning up against
the side of his sedan with his arms crossed.

I instructed Derek to pull up behind him and stop.

Pierre inspected us with a sour expression as we approached.
"What are we doing out here, Ms. Peters?" he said, a little louder
than was necessary.

"You tell me," I replied. "This is the address of Durham Holdings' New York office, right?"

"According to the sign," Pierre replied, nodding at the billboard announcing the construction of the soon-to-be strip mall.
"That doesn't tell me why I'm here."

"Look," I said. I had run out of patience. "Whatever has happened to my friend, it's preceded by the appearance of that symbol
I showed you, and now it's happening to me!"

I spun in place, pulled my hair to the front, and lowered my
collar so he could see the mark on my neck.

Pierre was silent, but I saw his eyebrows scrunched together
when I turned back around.

"Something is at work here. You must know it, you can feel it in
your gut. It's what led you to write that article about the college
dropouts. You can either help us figure out what it is or you can
go back to writing obits or whatever you've been demoted to."

A moment of silence passed as Pierre Ravenwood stared me
down.

Derek chimed in. "Why would DHI fake an address? You
think it's all a hoax and the office just doesn't exist?"

My instincts were saying no to that. "What would that serve?
An address to an office that isn't really there?"

"So what are you thinking, then?" Pierre asked. "This address
is a decoy?"

"Has to be," I replied, nodding. "The office is real, it's just not
here. But I'd be willing to bet it's around here someplace."

"We passed a gas station a few miles back," Derek pointed
out. "Maybe we could ask around."

Pierre let out a long sigh, but said, "I'll follow you."

"No," I said, stopping him before he could get into his car.
"You're driving."

"What?" Derek and Pierre both said at the same time.

I looked at Derek. "The two of us are being hunted. If whatever attacked us at the cemetery reported back to DHI, they
almost certainly included a description of the truck that smashed
through the cemetery gates."

Derek reluctantly agreed.

Pierre closed his eyes and shook his head. "Just get in the
car. I'll busy myself pretending I didn't hear any of what you
just said."

The lady at the twenty-four-hour gas station hurriedly put
out a cigarette butt as we walked into the store.

I looked at my watch. It was after three in the morning
already.

"Help you find something?" the woman asked.

I forced a smile as I approached the counter. Her name tag
identified her as Vera.

"We're looking for directions, actually," I said in the friendliest tone I could muster. "We're trying to find an office building, but
the address we have took us to the wrong place."

"Lived here my whole life, sweetie," said Vera, and she helpfully pulled out a map from a rack just in front of the counter and
unfolded it on the countertop. "What are you looking for?"

"Durham Holdings," I replied.

Vera was looking down at the counter but I saw her flinch.
She tried to remain casual as she asked, "You always go looking
for offices in the middle of the night?" The "helpful local" had
dropped out of her tone.

"Just the mysterious ones," said Derek, stepping forward
and flashing that charming smile of his. "Surely you've heard
of it, haven't you?"

To my tremendous surprise, and a growing irritation at my
entire gender, Vera actually blushed a bit at his attention. I was
watching when it happened, and I was so offended that I must've
opened my mouth, because Pierre elbowed me to get me to close
it. The guy might have been somewhat handsome, but come on.
He was going to be a minister, for crying out loud. There had
to be some commandment that forbade him from using this
uncanny ability to make random women swoon.

"Well, sure, I've heard of it," Vera said. She leaned in conspiratorially and lowered her voice, even though we were the only
people in the building-or anywhere for miles around. "We're not
supposed to talk about it."

"Why not?" asked Derek.

Even though she was still mooning over him and those Colgate teeth of his, she hesitated.

I rolled my eyes. "You can trust us, Vera. I'm nobody, this
guy in the back is just along for the ride, and Derek here is a preacher's kid and has never done a bad thing in his life. The
last six hours notwithstanding."

Derek threw me a look but quickly returned to Vera. He flattened out the map that she'd unfolded and pointed to a familiar
spot on it. "This is where the address led us to. Is there somewhere
else we should be looking?"

Vera gave Derek a half frown/half smile and slid her finger
down the map to a location high up in the Catskills. Then she
winked at him.

Pierre stepped forward and got a good look at the spot on
the map Vera was pointing to, memorizing it.

"Thank you, Vera," Derek said, and smiled at her one last
time before we left.

As we were walking back to the car, Pierre asked, "Are you
two dating?"

"No," Derek told him.

"No!" I stated emphatically.

"My heart belongs to another," Derek said, all the charm
dissolving into hardened resolve. "She's one of the girls they
abducted and I'm going to get her back."

"Well, you two act like an old married couple," Pierre
observed.

I grimaced. "We just ... we've had to spend a little too
much time together lately. Derek's engaged and I am exceedingly
available."

"Good," Pierre said, getting into the front seat of the car.
"Then if we get to the bottom of this DHI business and I get my
old job back, I'm taking you to dinner, Ms. Peters."

I blinked. Then I grinned as I slid into the back seat.

We wound our way slowly through a small township and on
up the mountain, passing a sign that labeled the area as "Catskill
State Park."

"Why would the state of New York let a company build an
office out in the middle of a park?" I mused.

"Kickback," Pierre said from the front seat. "Have you seen
these roads we're riding on? They've been re-paved very recently
and outfitted with reflectors and guardrails on both sides."

"Yep," said Derek. "And I noticed a brand-new-looking high
school in that town we just passed through."

Pierre nodded. "DHI lined the pockets of all the right people
in that tiny little town, made sizable contributions to the local
economy and the natural environment, and were granted a concession in return. Your friend Vera said the locals weren't supposed to talk about the place. They've probably been asked by the
bigger businesses in town to help them keep a low profile."

"But all that subterfuge just to build a little office out in
the middle of a forest up on a mountain?" I asked. "Feels like an
unbalanced trade."

But something had caught Pierre's eye. "Maybe the office is
not so little. Look."

He pointed through the front windshield at a sight far in the
distance, and it couldn't have been more out of place if it tried.
Derek whistled.

The mountain forest concealed most of it, but the top few
floors of what was easily a ten-story building or better stuck
out above the tops of the trees. It was white, with a perfectly
round footprint, and had floodlights lining the roof's perimeter, shining straight down to create A-shaped glows up against the
building.

We were more than five miles away, maybe farther, but moving
straight toward the big white structure. "Stop the car," I said.

Pierre pulled over on the side of the road, up against a thick
cluster of spruce trees.

"You said they knew you were coming," Pierre said.

"Right," I agreed. "We can't drive in, we'll be spotted before
we get close."

"Then we find another way to reach it," Derek said, "and go
the last leg by foot."