Holding hands, which seemed a bit odd.
“Took you long enough,” Hollis said. “And we’ve decided it is.”
Trinity frowned at her. “Is what?”
“Another dimension. Or time. Maybe both.”
“But definitely,” DeMarco said, “not in sync with our own dimension or time.”
Deacon looked at Trinity and said, “You know, we’re all a little too calm about this. Am I the only one bugged by that?”
“Apparently.”
Before he could waste a glare, DeMarco gestured with his free hand toward a grandfather clock against the wall opposite the stairs. “Take a look at that.”
At first, Deacon didn’t know what he was supposed to be seeing. But then he realized. “No hands. No numbers. The face is blank.”
Hollis was nodding. “It’s like that in Diana’s gray time. I mean, she calls it the gray time, but time isn’t there. Or doesn’t work the same. The clocks have no features, just like that grandfather clock has no features.”
Trinity said, “So we’re in some kind of spiritual realm?”
“I think so,” Hollis said cautiously.
Still calm, Trinity said, “You’re the only medium here, as I understand it. So how come all four of us—plus Braden—ended up in some kind of spiritual realm? In the flesh?”
With a sigh, Hollis said, “Our boss holds the belief that the universe puts us where we need to be. He says if you find yourself in an unexpected place, by whatever route, chances are you’re supposed to be there. After that, follow your nose.”
“And since we’re here?” Deacon ventured.
“Well, we’re investigating two very unnatural deaths. When you think about it, that’s what the four of us have in common. The universe put us here—wherever or whenever here is—presumably to continue investigating.”
Trinity said, “But the parsonage doesn’t have anything to do with our murders.”
“Wish you hadn’t put it quite like that,” Deacon murmured.
“You know what I mean. The murders we’re investigating have no connection with this parsonage.”
“They must have,” Hollis said, adding simply, “because we’re here.”
Deacon looked at DeMarco, who said only, “I’m a stranger in a strange land myself. Hollis said this feels like spiritual energy to her, and I believe her. She says we have to be here because we have a pretty good idea of what the killer is, if not who, and she’s supposed to face him here. Somehow.”
“Wait,” Trinity said, absently shifting her jacket so as to be able to get to her gun as quickly as possible if need be. “Hollis knows what the killer is, but not who?”
DeMarco was wondering how to explain the inexplicable, when Hollis did it very simply.
“Remember the bogus preacher from Atlanta, the one you had to rescue Melanie from? Somebody killed him, but he’s been after us pretty much ever since, the SCU and Bishop, from his grave, first by proxy and now, apparently, by hijacking himself another body. And I’m betting you’ll recognize him before we do if he’s still in that body, because whoever it is was born and raised here in Sociable and probably, at one time or another, was or could have been part of The Group.”
Oddly enough, Trinity latched onto a single phrase in the whole explanation. “If he’s still in that body?”
“He’s burning it out, more or less. Too much energy, too much power. What he could harness and control in his previous incarnation, he can’t handle in this new host. It’s . . . spilling out. He can’t control it all. Can’t you feel it?”
“I can, as a matter of fact.” Trinity drew her gun, looking around warily.
“If he burns it out, or believes he’s going to, he’ll be looking for another host. I’m betting one or all of us get nominated.”
“Lovely,” Trinity said.
“He’s here,” Hollis told them. “Somewhere. And we have to stop him here. Before he invades one of us, or manages to get away somehow and . . . survive to fight another day. He’s a monster, and he has to be stopped, this time for good.”
“And you know how to do that?” Deacon asked.
“I hope I will. When the time comes.”
Trinity eyed her. “You know, you sound very matter-of-fact about this, but I get the sense it’s scaring the hell out of you.”
“Good guess.” Hollis drew a breath and let it out slowly. “See, I get the sense that either I opened a door into some kind of hell, or somebody—some thing—opened it for us. If I did it, I don’t know how I did it. If it was opened for us—it’s intended to be a trap. And I don’t think we get out without destroying the monster.”
Deacon drew his gun. “I’m guessing bullets can stop the body, even if we don’t know yet what’ll kill the monster.”
DeMarco said calmly, “We have a few issues to deal with. Either because he knows he’s burning out the body he has or because he wants a new toy to play with, Samuel has tried more than once to . . . possess . . . Hollis.” He lifted their clasped hands briefly. “I’ve extended my own shield to offer her some protection, but we’ve never really tested the limits of that. I can feel whatever he’s become, not all the time, just now and then, probing. Looking for a way in.”
“I thought you could handle negative energy,” Trinity said to Hollis.
“This stuff is . . . more than negative. I can’t really explain it because I don’t understand it. But I have the very strong feeling that I have to be the one in control if the only way to kill the monster is to . . . channel all that dark energy. If I can. If I let it in.”
“No,” DeMarco said.
She managed a shaky laugh. “I’m here, Reese. I’m one of only two people we know of who took a direct, unshielded hit from Samuel’s dark energy before he died—and lived to tell the tale.”
“Hollis—”
“And since then, I’ve channeled enough dark energy to build half a dozen monsters. What was that, if it wasn’t the universe getting me ready for this?”
“I admire your fatalism,” Trinity said. “I think.”
“I just have to be able to control the energy,” Hollis said.
“I’d call that an issue,” Deacon said. “Do you know how to be in control?”
“Not yet. This kind of thing has always just sort of . . . come to me. In the past, I mean. Bishop calls them instincts awakened by circumstances. I’m really hoping he’s right about that, and whatever I need to know will come to me when I need it to. Until then, my best guess is that we treat this house like it’s a piece of the puzzle and just start studying it. Looking for the monster.”
Trinity was looking at DeMarco. “There’s something else.”
He answered readily—though not very comfortingly. “We have absolutely no idea how long we’ll be in this place. Or even how long we can be and still emerge safely.”
Hollis said, “Any spirit realm is meant for spirit energy. Our spirit energy is encased in flesh. We don’t belong in this place, in this form. We’re like . . . an invading bacteria.”
“Seriously?”
“I know how it sounds, believe me. But I’m absolutely certain that this very place will try to eject us. Right now, Samuel’s dark energy is pretty focused on me, and it’s . . . keeping the rest at a distance. There’s other dark energy in this place, energy that’s angry, that’s suffering, that’s . . . crazy.
“Too crazy even for Samuel, or . . . too much for him to control in his present host. Whatever that energy is, it isn’t focused on me. It isn’t focused at all. Yet. The good news is, everybody’s shield seems to be holding. Your auras have that metallic outer edge I associate with repelling energy.”
After a moment, Deacon looked at Trinity. “Which one of us said it was a good idea to come here?”
“I don’t think it matters anymore. We’re here.” She looked down at the black dog sitting so calmly beside her. “I do wish I knew what he has to do with all this.”
“Maybe we’ll find out,” Dea
con suggested. “Want to flip a coin to determine who goes upstairs and who checks out this floor?”
He saw Hollis’s mouth tighten, but her voice was as calm as ever when she said, “Reese and I will take the upstairs; you two take this floor. Stay within sight of each other if you can. And don’t go into the basement.”
“It looks so . . . normal,” Hollis said slowly to her partner as they moved along the upstairs hallway from room to room. He was still holding her hand, and she had no desire to pull away.
He understood what she meant. “Not red, not . . . distorted. Perfectly ordinary rooms. As if the people who once lived here could reappear at any moment.”
“I hope not,” Hollis said.
“See any spirits?” He only knew that he saw none.
“No. And that’s what’s spooky.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re all around us, Reese. I can feel them. It’s almost like they’re hiding.”
“The negative energy?”
“Yeah. They may be too strong for Samuel to handle right now, but crazy as it is, as dark as they are, they’re afraid. I can feel that. They must be afraid of him.”
“Maybe not,” DeMarco said calmly. “Maybe they’re afraid of you.”
“No, I—”
“Maybe Samuel can control energy, Hollis. But you can transform it. Dark into light, remember? Maybe whatever this dark energy is, whatever they are, they stopped wanting to be anything but dark a long, long time ago.”
“Maybe.” Her voice was thin.
DeMarco’s fingers tightened around hers. He could feel the dark probing of his protective shield. And he could feel her hand shaking. “Hollis? Don’t let go.”
“I don’t know if that’s going to be enough.” They had followed the landing around and were approaching the closed door of what both remembered was the room behind the left front window.
“You’re strong enough, we both know that.”
She stopped. “I don’t want to open that door.”
“Because the black energy is there?”
Hollis shook her head slowly, her gaze fixed on the door. “That’s not what I’m afraid of. It’s . . . done something. Something special, just for me.”
All traces of humor or calm had left Hollis. She was tense, her eyes wide, her hands shaking. Breathing as though she couldn’t quite get enough oxygen into her lungs.
“How do you know?”
“I can smell it,” she whispered.
It took DeMarco only a moment to understand what she meant. Because he could smell it as well. It was something that jarred old memories inside him. Memories of war, of broken bodies.
Blood. A great deal of blood.
“He thinks he can get in that way. He thinks he can . . . hurt me enough . . . shock me enough . . . frighten me enough . . . so he can get in. That was the plan, Reese. All along.”
“To get you?”
“Me first. Not just . . . because we beat him. Because he wants to prove . . . he isn’t afraid of mediums, like we thought. He wants to prove . . . he can control one. Me. He wants . . . revenge. He wants . . . power. He wants . . . to make me suffer.”
DeMarco’s fingers tightened around hers. “Then I say we don’t give him what he wants. We can leave, Hollis. Now. Come back later, when the odds are in our favor.” He hesitated, then said, “We both know there’s nothing alive in that room. No one we can save by opening that door.”
“Except me,” she whispered.
“Hollis—”
As strong as he was, she was still able to break the grip of his fingers, wrenching her own free and almost stumbling forward to open the bedroom door.
She made a soft, wordless sound DeMarco thought would haunt him until his dying day, standing in the open doorway, stiff, her hands braced on the door frame on either side of her.
He took a step, his hands lifting to her shoulders, looking past her to see.
A bare room with only a mattress on the floor.
A stained mattress. A soaked mattress.
And on it . . .
She had probably been pretty once. But now her naked body was horribly wounded, sliced and gashed. Her legs splayed open to reveal . . . display . . . the butchery done to her.
The blood was still wet, still dripping.
DeMarco had the sickening feeling that if he touched her, he would find her still warm.
It was only then that he looked at her face, and shock tumbled through him. Shock and pain and a sudden brutal realization of what this meant.
What this sacrifice meant.
Hollis was right, this was for her.
Because even though there wasn’t so much as a smear of blood on Toby Gilmore’s face, it was grievously mutilated.
Her eyes were gone.
—
DEACON REALLY DIDN’T know what to expect as he and Trinity—and Braden—moved slowly from room to room. He had searched this place, this floor—God, had it only been the day before?—so it was familiar. And it looked so normal.
He had no idea who they were looking for.
What they were looking for.
The old-fashioned house had one room running into another, so they could almost literally circle through. They had circled around to what had been used, clearly, as a front parlor, when Braden stopped, the low rumble of a growl eerie in the otherwise quiet house.
“Look,” Trinity said, almost in a whisper.
He followed her gaze upward—and saw the blood seeping through the ceiling. It had been dropping on the rug below, the faded ruby-colored rug that now looked sickeningly fresh and bright just in spots. Large spots.
Where a lot of blood had fallen.
They heard a sound from upstairs, DeMarco calling Hollis’s name, then hurried footsteps on the bare wood floors above, and from where they stood in the parlor, they could see Hollis coming down the stairs, one hand on the railing.
When she reached the ground floor, she turned immediately toward them, and they could see her face was white, her eyes wide and dark and unblinking, her mouth set. Her movements were stiff, as though every joint ached.
DeMarco was right behind her, his face not impassive as it had always been, as Hollis’s was now, but twisted into an expression of pain so deep that Deacon wanted to look away.
“Who?” Trinity demanded hoarsely.
Hollis stopped just a step inside the doorway, her gaze going to the bright red spots on the faded rug. She didn’t look up at the ceiling.
“I . . . recognized her from . . . her picture . . . in the file.” Her voice was deadened. “Toby Gilmore.”
Trinity sucked in a breath, her own face whitening. “Son of a bitch. That sorry son of a bitch . . .”
“Too kind.”
They all turned, even Braden, and then they froze. Even Braden.
He stood in the doorway that led to a dining room, an ordinary-looking man in his early thirties. Not too handsome, but not plain. Pleasant features. But his eyes . . .
They were insane.
And the contraption wrapped around him was insane. They could all see the explosives, enough to blow up the house, to destroy them, enough to put a hole in the side of the mountain. They could see in the hand he held up a dead man’s switch.
“Sonny,” Trinity said. “Sonny Lenox. I heard you were dead.” Slowly, she raised her weapon, aiming it at him.
“I was.” His voice was incongruously pleasant. If he even noticed her gun pointed at him, Deacon’s, and DeMarco’s big silver gun, he didn’t appear to be the least bit disturbed. “Well, almost. Brain-dead, they said. If there’d been family to pull the plug, they probably would have pulled it. But then I woke up.”
“You didn’t wake up.” Hollis’s voice was still oddly deadened, flat, her eyes still very, very dark as she stared at him. “Samuel got you. Does he let you speak for yourself now and then?”
Sonny Lenox looked faintly troubled. “I have these blackouts,” he said in a puzzled tone
. “And when I wake up . . . I think I’ve done things. Bad things. And I’m tired. I’ve been tired a long time. So it’s going to be over.” He lifted the hand holding the dead man’s switch a bit higher. “It’s going to be over. I’m going to be able to rest.”
“You killed Toby,” Trinity said.
He blinked. “No. I loved Toby. I remember that. I loved her . . . and she broke up with me. So I left. But I still loved her.”
Stark, Trinity said, “That’s her blood dripping from the ceiling.”
He looked up, frowned, then returned his gaze to her face. He looked at each one of them in turn, finally settling on Hollis. “You’re the one,” he said.
“Am I?” No expression on her face. No emotion in her voice.
“Yes. You’re to leave now. Go outside. Go to the church. Wait there.”
“What am I waiting for?”
“For him.”
Hollis shook her head. “No. He’ll come to me. Here.”
“But I’m going to blow up here,” Sonny Lenox said reasonably. “And get rid of these others. He wants you, though. Maybe he’ll let you sleep more than he let me sleep. You should ask him about that.”
“No.”
He blinked. “What?”
“No. I’m not going to the church. I’m not moving. If he wants me, he’ll have to come get me.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Deacon felt it first, flinching as a wave of dark rage battered his shields.
Without looking at him, Hollis said, “Samuel was a psychic, Deacon. And he could project. Shore up your shields.”
Deacon wondered how it could be Hollis giving him that advice, how she could look so calm, even if DeMarco’s shield was still wrapped around her—
And then he recognized something bleak in DeMarco’s expression, and he realized that not only was the other man no longer extending his shield to protect Hollis, but he no longer had to.
She was protecting herself. Whatever horrific things had been done to Toby Gilmore, something about her death had changed Hollis. It had given her a shield.
“Samuel,” she said, her voice suddenly soft, singsong, like a child calling another to play. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”