Smoke on the Water (6 page)

I went back where I'd been, tried as hard to see something now as I'd tried to scream about what I'd seen before. I had the same amount of luck. The drops were just drops.

“I got nothin'.”

“Try harder.”

I'd never been able to have a vision by trying. Never been able to stop having one by trying either. Visions were funny that way. Or maybe
funny
wasn't the right word.

Annoying? Terrifying? Excruciating? Pick one.

Mary laced our fingers together and tugged. “Let's run water in the tub.”

I pulled back. Even though I'd told Dr. Frasier that I was as dangerous as Mary, I still didn't feel like going into a small room with her and running enough water so that she could drown me.

“I need to rest,” I said. “Visions are exhausting.”

Another good word for them. I had a dozen. None of them were complimentary.

“You can sleep on my bed.”

From the slightly manic sheen in her eyes, I knew how that would go. She'd either stare at me and keep me awake or pace the room with the same results.

“I'll go back to my own.” She released me reluctantly, but she did it. I paused at her door. “Don't tell anyone what we saw.”

“Not until we see something that'll help.”

That wasn't what I'd meant, but it would do.

So far I'd never seen anything helpful.

*   *   *

“Freakiest storm I can remember.”

The maintenance man, who'd introduced himself as Justice Finkel, was old enough for his observation to really mean something. He appeared to know how to fix a generator, or he was at least doing a good imitation.

Sebastian handed him a Philips screwdriver upon request. He was just glad the rain had stopped and the creepy green clouds had disappeared. From the utter silence of the machine and the decrepit appearance, they were going to be out here a while. He hoped the staff was able to quiet the patients. When he'd walked outside, the door closing behind him had cut off the sight and sound of bedlam. He'd searched for Willow amid the chaos—hadn't seen her or Mary. He wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

“Isn't the purpose of a generator to go on when the power goes off?” Sebastian asked.

“Yeah.” Justice squinted into the motor, which gave off an odd but vaguely familiar smell.

“What's its excuse?” Sebastian pointed to the machine with a hammer that he was trying his best not to use on the still-silent generator.

“It's not talkin', but I'm thinking lightning strike.” Justice sat back. “This thing is toast.”

Sebastian sniffed again and got a whiff of … not burned bread but ozone, with a hint of gasoline. They were lucky the whole place hadn't gone up in flames. Probably would have if the building weren't made of stone.

Sebastian gave in to temptation and smacked the flat of the hammer on the corroded shell of the junk generator. Justice didn't seem disturbed by his lack of control. Justice didn't seem disturbed by much—a good trait for an employee of a mental health facility. Sebastian wished he could say the same about himself.

He set the hammer back in the man's huge toolbox. “Now what?”

“I'll get another.”

“When?”

“An hour. Two if the first store's out and I have to go to a different one.”

“Isn't there a Walmart around the corner?” After riding a motorcycle from Missouri to Wisconsin, he swore there'd been one around most of the corners.

Justice rubbed his dirty palms on his damp jeans. “There is. But the corner's probably twenty miles away.”

This far north the next town—or the next corner—was not as close as it was anywhere else except maybe Alaska. His own apartment was in a complex that had been specifically built for employees of this facility. If the job worked out and Sebastian stayed here for more than a year, he'd like a house. Except he'd been told a house of his own would most likely involve building one since houses in the area were scarce and empty ones available for purchase even more so.

“Maybe you should buy two generators,” Sebastian said.

“What for?”

“What if the next one gets hit in the next storm?”

Sebastian didn't care for the lack of power. Although this place was old enough to have locks that needed keys, rather than electrical doors and fences, he still felt twitchy. All he needed was an escaped patient on his first day of work. On any day of work for that matter.

“Lightning don't strike twice in the same place, son. You know that.”

It was a saying, sure, but did that make it true? Justice seemed to think so and Justice knew more than Sebastian did. At least about lightning storms and generators.

The old man headed for his truck, and Sebastian for his office. Inside the patients were quieter than they'd been when he'd left—Sebastian checked his phone—a half hour ago.

He beckoned to Zoe. “Any problems?”

She shrugged. “Anything out of the ordinary gets them riled up.”

“They seem fine to me.”

“Those who don't unrile on their own are given pharmaceutical help.”

Sebastian would prefer less drugs not more. However, a riot in the dark didn't work for him either.

“My patient?” he asked.

“Which one?”

“The one I was talking to when this happened.” The one who had seemed to disappear into thin air.

Zoe cast him an unreadable glance—mostly because the sky was still overcast and the lights were still out. He could barely see her let alone read her glance.

“Last I saw Willow she was coming out of Mary's room and headed for her own.” Her lips thinned. “You should be careful.”

“Of?”

“Willow. Mary too.”

“So I hear. Has either of them tried to kill anyone lately?”

“What's lately?”

“In here?”

“Hard to say. Mary gets agitated. She's gone after a few orderlies, a nurse. But as she has no weapons beyond tooth and nail, was she trying to kill them or wasn't she?”

“Did she say?”

“When she gets like that she says a lot, not much of it coherent.”

“And Willow?”

Zoe gave him a look again, one he still couldn't read. “She's always coherent. She just doesn't say much.”

“Has she attacked anyone?”

“Not yet.”

“Don't be such an optimist.”

Someone called for her, and Zoe lifted a hand, stepped in that direction, paused and glanced back. “I've been here a long time, Dr. Frasier.”

As she appeared too young to have been anywhere but grade school for a long time, Sebastian smiled noncommittally and said nothing.

“Patients like Mary and Willow, the ones with serious delusions and homicidal tendencies, don't get better. They just get dead.”

Sebastian's smile faded.

“If they manage to get dead before they make someone else that way … it's probably for the best.” She trotted in the direction of whoever was calling her name.

Sebastian stared after her, uncertain if her attitude was anything he should worry about. It was the most honest opinion he'd ever heard, and how could that be bad? Zoe hadn't said
she
was going to take matters into her own hands.
That
would be a problem. Still, he should take a gander at her personnel file, just for kicks and giggles.

Sebastian went to his office, leaving his door open so he could hear any undue commotion. He'd sat at his desk and reached for his keyboard before he remembered there was no electricity and he would be unable to access any personnel files until there was. He made a note about that, then reached for the physical files. Thank heaven for old-school Dr. Eversleigh, who still liked to treat patients while perusing a hard copy of their information. Sebastian turned on the flashlight feature of his phone and got to work.

Mary McAllister—born March 12, 1962.

She looked older than she was. Lifers usually did.

He didn't see much in Mary's file that he hadn't suspected. Schizophrenia diagnosed in late twenties. The usual medications, which she often stopped taking when she felt “better.” Then she wasn't better anymore.

Alcoholism. Recreational drugs to the point that they were no longer very recreational. Harder drugs—narcotics, heroin, coke.

There was mention of her trying to ride a broom off the roof, which resulted in a compound fracture. Sebastian wondered if she'd started to believe she was a witch before or after that incident.

“Probably before.” The falling and the breaking should really have convinced her otherwise, but it hadn't. Maybe Peggy was right and actually learning about Wicca could help. At this point, probably couldn't hurt.

He read on. The file was pretty thick.

Theft to support her habit. Dealing for the same. Nothing out of the ordinary or surprising until he got to the reason she was in here.

The voice of Roland—he paged back through the file. None of the voices had ever been named before. Didn't mean she hadn't decided to name one of them then. Didn't really matter if this voice was new or old. What mattered was that it had told her to kill her fifteen-year-old son, and she'd listened.

Owen McAllister was now twenty-eight. A marine, in the K-9 Corps. Multiple tours in Afghanistan, which might explain why his mother had tried to kill him and not managed it. Certainly he'd been fifteen at the time, but anyone who spent that long in the Marines had probably started out pretty tough in the first place. Considering the kid's entire life … he'd had to be.

According to the file, the last time Owen had visited, Mary hadn't remembered him. That had been over a year ago. He hadn't been back since. Sebastian hoped he was all right, though there was no notation in the file of anything different.

He should probably call the man. Sebastian made another note.

He drew out the next file, opened it, grew quickly bored. The patient was a few days from release. Not much for Sebastian to do but have a final meeting and sign the papers. He set the file aside and gave in to his desire to search for the one he really wanted.

Willow Black—birth date unknown.

How could that be? Sebastian read on and found out.

Abandoned at birth. Foster home after foster home after group home, to the street and back again. Failure to bond. Confusion. Delusion. Lies. Alcohol. Drugs. Runaway. Around Willow, bad things seemed to happen. That she sometimes knew about them before they did only made her seem guiltier of causing them in the first place. Then came the night she'd used a knife.

According to Willow, the man she'd stabbed had planned to do horrible things to her with a knife of his own. That there'd been no weapon on him had been brought up several times at the trial, along with the lack of a ring sporting the face of a snarling wolf, which Willow insisted he meant to brand her with before he burned her body. None of this helped her defense. It only made her sound insane.

He spun his chair toward the window, staring at the heavy gray sky. Raindrops still pattered from the tree leaves, the wind flinging them against the glass in clumps.

He found it interesting that as a child she'd had an irrational fear of water, had said on several occasions that she saw the future in it. Then, Mary had said the same.

According to Dr. Eversleigh, Willow had been doing well since coming to this facility. In their discussions of water and visions, she'd admitted that what she'd believed could not be true. For Mary to know about those visions contradicted this. If Willow had just met the woman as she claimed, why would she tell Mary these things, especially if she no longer believed them? Of course, Willow wouldn't be the first patient to tell her doctor what he wanted to hear.

Sebastian let out a short huff of amusement. Why was he trying to find sense in the nonsensical? Because even though his patients were often delusional, those delusions made sense within the world of the delusion. And this … it just didn't.

“Dr. Frasier?”

He glanced up to find Peggy Dalberg in the doorway. “Everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“The electricity should be back up in an hour or so,” he continued.

“You psychic?”

Considering the file he'd just been reading, he gaped. “Excuse me?”

“It's pretty hard to predict when the electricity will go back on otherwise.”

“Oh. Right.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. His mind was still full of Willow. He wondered how he was going to make that stop. “Justice went to buy a new generator. The other one got hit by lightning.”

“That's weird.” She glanced behind her with a frown.

“Apparently.” Though the way she was acting, she thought it was a lot weirder than he did. “Peggy? You okay?”

She turned back. “Why wouldn't I be?”

“Question with a question usually means you don't want to answer.”

She smiled at him as if he were an adorable, yet precocious child, but she didn't answer his question, only asked yet another of her own. “Do I have your permission to teach Mary and Willow about Wicca?”

“What's the rush?”

She shifted her shoulders. “I kind of told Mary that I would. If you say no, she's probably gonna need to be sedated.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“You know better.” Or at least she should.

“I do. And I'm sorry. Seemed like a good idea at the time.” She spread her hands. “It still does. I think the peace of it all would help her. At the least, learning that witches can't fly couldn't hurt. I just shouldn't have promised before I asked you.”

“Your jumping the gun is relatively minor in the scheme of things.”

“Thanks.”

“Go ahead and teach them. But—”

“I know. If one of them suddenly starts to fly or turns into a chicken, my ass is grass.”