“We were just focused on getting to the house,” DeMarco said. “And when you focus, it’s like a laser.”
She had started to go around to the side of the house where Perla Cross had died, but paused to look at him with her brows raised. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
This time, she frowned at him. “You’ve been telling me an awful lot about myself on this case,” she said.
“Oh, you noticed that.” He strolled past her and led the way around the house.
“Yes, I noticed. Are you going to tell me why?”
“After the case.”
“Okay, now that’s going to drive me crazy.” Hollis knew him well enough not to push, and sighed as she stood looking up at the weirdly trimmed oak tree and the attic window it shaded.
“You’ve got that look,” DeMarco said.
“What look?” Her voice was absent.
“I can almost hear the wheels turning. Puzzle pieces clicking into place. What is it?”
“There was a reason,” she said slowly. “A reason this happened. A reason it happened here. He drew power here. He used power here. Intention.”
DeMarco kept his gaze on her face. “Intention to do what?”
“Blind me.” Her voice was soft. “That’s it. That’s why I felt all along that something was wrong inside me. Because he needed me not to see him. And—deep down, I never trusted these eyes. Never trusted they wouldn’t . . . just stop working. That my body wouldn’t reject them someday. So when he worked so hard to blind me, I blamed myself.”
“It’s a tendency you have,” he murmured.
This time, she didn’t argue. “I wonder if he knew that.”
“How could he have known that? The SCU might be more visible to law enforcement in recent years, but all of us still go out of our way to keep personal details within the team.”
“I don’t know how, but he knew I was coming. Maybe even before I knew I was coming.”
Accepting that, DeMarco said, “Okay. Say he knew before we got here. Why’s he afraid of you? Because you’re the most powerful?”
Hollis shook her head half-consciously and finally looked at him. “It’s still about . . . me seeing him. He was trying to blind me in a very real sense, distract me, because he knew if I saw him, I’d know who and what he was. And then we’d be able to catch him.”
“Can you break through that now?”
“I’m . . . not sure.”
The expression on her face was uncharacteristically afraid. And DeMarco knew he had never yet seen Hollis afraid, not like this, not something on such a deep, almost visceral level. He had only seen that kind of fear in her when she had nightmares remembering the monster who had brutalized her.
“You can do it,” he told her.
“Can I?”
“Whatever he managed to make you feel, it isn’t real, Hollis. It’s not a barrier of energy, or you’d feel it. So it has to be . . . an illusion.”
“I’d see through an illusion,” she objected, her voice actually shaking a bit. “I’ve seen evil, real evil. And if evil can’t hide from me, how could I be fooled by an illusion?”
“You said it yourself. Somehow, he knew about that deep down. The fear about your eyes. And he used that fear against you. He made that the barrier you couldn’t look past.”
Hollis didn’t want to accept that, but hard as she’d tried, she had not been able to come up with another reason. “Then I guess I’ll have to find a way past it,” she said.
“Hollis—”
Whatever he’d been about to say was lost forever. The instant he broke off, Hollis saw it in his eyes. That sharpened, yet inward-turned look she’d seen only once before, his eyes and his aura going silvery in a split second.
He lunged toward her, carrying her to the ground, but even as they were falling, she felt the impact of something hitting Reese, and then she heard two sharp cracks of the rifle that had fired.
For just a moment, lying under the heavy weight of a very big man who was not conscious, Hollis froze, the breath literally knocked out of her. But then everything kicked into overdrive. Her training, her instincts, every psychic sense she could lay claim to blasted past any and every barrier that existed.
Because she had to use everything she had. She had to.
The way they’d landed, she couldn’t see Reese’s face, and she couldn’t get to her gun. But his big silver cannon was right there, and she was just—barely—able to move her hand and forearm enough to get the gun and pull it from his shoulder holster. It felt huge and awkward in her hand, and she’d never fired it or any gun as powerful, but she wrapped her fingers around the grip, looked automatically for a safety, and then held on hard.
She didn’t move after that, but her senses reached out even as her mind feverishly tried to calculate the angles and she tried to guess whether he would come toward them from where he had fired, or be more wary, more careful.
He was arrogant. She had to remember that. He was arrogant, and he’d fooled a lot of people for a long, long time, people who weren’t easy to deceive. He had fooled the people of Clarity.
He had fooled her.
She hadn’t moved a muscle that would have been visible to him, she was sure. So he would come straight at them. Maybe deciding to fire again when he got closer just to make sure.
Federal agents. He had to know they’d never stop hunting him if he killed two federal agents. Did he know? Did he even care? There was a wilderness in these mountains, where he’d grown up; he could probably hide for years—
She heard the snap of a twig underneath a work boot.
Her hand tensed even more on the gun. She’d have to move fast, she knew that. She’d have to shoot before he realized she could. And she couldn’t miss.
She couldn’t miss.
She couldn’t miss.
Another snap, softer—but she knew he was closer. She focused her spider sense with everything she had, not her eyes this time, not yet, but her hearing. She was desperate for it to work. So it did.
The soft scuffing of a boot on rough ground. That would be about fifteen yards away, she thought.
Another soft sound. Twelve yards.
The sounds of small rocks and pebbles crunching underfoot. Ten yards.
Hollis knew she was taking a potentially deadly chance in lying underneath Reese’s limp body, as if she herself had been hit. Because she couldn’t know for certain whether he knew which one of them he had shot.
Crunching, finer gravel underfoot. Eight yards.
Somehow, using a strength that came from some place she’d never needed to tap before, Hollis was able to push Reese off herself and sit up in the same motion.
Across less than six yards, the oddly glazed, surprised eyes of Joe Cross met hers. She saw the tip of his rifle start to lift—and the cannon in her hand went off with an ungodly roar, knocking Hollis back down to the ground and knocking the breath out of her again.
But she struggled to sit up again, gasping, to see Joe Cross on his back, legs splayed—and his rifle at least a foot from his hand.
Without hesitating, without daring to pause to even look at her partner, she pushed herself up off the ground and went quickly but warily to check.
The monster’s eyes were open. And just above them was a very large hole that had quite literally taken the top of his head off.
Even so, Hollis bent to get his rifle and carried it and Reese’s pistol back to him, tossing both aside and out of her way without giving a thought to whether it was safe to do so.
She rolled Reese onto his side, knowing the bullets had gone into his back and also knowing they had not gone completely through his body. But when she saw where the bullet holes were, her mouth went dry.
“Oh, God. Reese? Reese?”
He was unconscious, and his
face was far too pale, but he was breathing. He was breathing.
Hollis fumbled at his belt to find the cell phone he carried, the one in the special SCU-designed case, praying that when his primal sense had punched through his shields, that primitive sense of a gun pointed toward him, he had not rendered the cell useless.
“Please, please, please,” she whispered, fumbling now to find the right button. It was on, a little dim, but there were bars, and Hollis quickly hit two buttons on the screen, the speed dial that would call Cullen’s cell, and the speaker. Then she put the cell on the ground and pushed it at least a foot away from her.
Later, all she would be able to say was that she didn’t think about anything she was doing, just acted. Pushed the phone away from both of them because the last of its power could be drained just by being close to them. And especially by what she was about to do.
The speaker on Reese’s cell was a good one and the volume was turned all the way up, so she could clearly hear Cullen answer.
“Reese? We just got info from Quantico—”
“Cullen, it’s Hollis. Cross is dead. Reese is down, he’s been hit. We’re at the Cross house. Send EMS and the sheriff, and get your ass out here.” She did not yell, but Cullen afterward swore he had never heard a voice sound so utterly distinct in his life.
“Copy. Hang on, we’re coming.”
Hollis was on her knees beside Reese. She checked his carotid with astonishingly steady fingers, almost holding her breath until she was sure his heart was beating.
But faintly. Too faintly.
“Don’t you die on me,” she told him in a hard voice. “Don’t you dare die on me. We have things to talk about, don’t we? Don’t we? We have things to say and things to do, and we are not finished yet. Do you hear me, Reese? We have time.”
His pulse was growing weaker.
Quickly, Hollis got her Windbreaker off and bundled it into a rough cushion under his head, holding his shoulder to roll him onto his stomach, with his head turned to one side.
“You’re not going to die,” she said, conversationally now. “You’re just not. I’m not going to let you.”
She heard, dimly, the sound of sirens, but ignored them. On the curving mountain roads, the EMS would not get to Reese in time.
There was almost no blood around the neat bullet holes in his back, but she knew it was because the real damage was inside. She bent over him and carefully placed a hand over each of the wounds. And then she closed her eyes and focused every bit of energy she had into the desperate need to heal.
She could feel her very life force flowing from her, down her arms, to her hands, into Reese. And then she felt even more, only dimly aware that she was tapping into something else.
She opened her eyes for just a moment, and it seemed very bright around her. She thought she saw other hands cover hers on Reese’s back, almost transparent hands, one, then two, then three, maybe more, touching him and touching her, and she felt more energy surge through her and into Reese.
Hollis closed her eyes again and concentrated everything she had and everything she was into the healing. Because he wasn’t going to die. Not Reese. She wasn’t going to let him die. She owned him, that was what he’d said. He was hers, and she wasn’t going to lose him. No matter what.
“Hollis . . .” It was barely a whisper, she thought.
She ignored that. There were sharp pains in her back, two of them, as if a heavy board had cracked against her, and then deep inside her a fiery pain that made her breathe raggedly through gritted teeth. But she was no stranger to pain.
She could take it.
She thought her nose was bleeding, or maybe it was tears dripping down onto her hands, but she didn’t care, it didn’t matter, she just had to make sure Reese didn’t die. Nothing else mattered to her.
Nothing.
“Hollis . . . Hollis, stop it. You’re— Hollis, you have to stop. Now.”
She didn’t stop until he pried her hands off his back, until he gathered her into his arms, and even then she was busy . . . healing . . . still.
“Hollis . . .”
She felt him cradling her, and even with the fiery pain inside her, it was wonderful, it was enough. She let go with a little sigh, the sirens fading away, and blackness surrounding her.
—
HOLLIS WAS VERY tired, and for a little while, or maybe it was a long while, she wasn’t sure she would be able to make it back. But they were with her, the spirits who had helped her save Reese, spirits she had helped in the past. They all had names, and she knew them, and thanked them while they helped her back through an odd sort of veil, a hazy space that was bright and warm, and was definitely not Diana’s gray time.
It’s not time, yet, Hollis. Not for you. You have to go back. You have to go back to Reese . . .
“Stay with me. Don’t leave me. I won’t let you leave me.”
She opened her eyes slowly, the lids scratching as if she’d slept a long time, or maybe hardly any time at all, because her voice sounded normal, she thought, when she murmured, “I own you. That’s what you said. I own you, and . . . I’m never going to lose anything else that matters to me. Reese . . . you matter to me . . .”
She realized, in the few seconds granted to her, that she was in a hospital bed, which was ridiculous since she knew her wounds were healed now, there wouldn’t even be a scratch—
And then he was there, bending over her, that amazingly beautiful face and those eyes that had always seen her so clearly, even the parts of her she hadn’t wanted anybody to see, and he was kissing her and muttering rough words the whole time, words that probably made no sense to anyone but them. But that was okay, that was fine, because nobody else needed to understand.
And more time passed before Hollis could think about anything remotely sensible. Reese was stretched beside her on the hospital bed, holding her close, both of them drifting pleasantly in the twilight that came just before and sometimes just after sleep, when she murmured, “There’s two things . . . I need to tell you.”
His breath warm in her hair, he murmured back, “What’re those?”
She thought that was funny, but her laugh was only a small sound. “First, I love you. I always have, you know that.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Because I love you too.” His arms tightened around her.
“Good,” she said. “You can drive.”
“Drive where?” he asked, not sounding very interested.
“Prob’ly back to the sheriff’s department first. Get backup. Finish the job. The case. Catch the monster. We still have to do that.”
“You shot him, Hollis. He’s dead.”
It took an effort she really didn’t want to make to move at all, because she was tired and sleeping in his arms sounded like the best thing in the world right now.
Except right now there was a very bad thing in the world. Their world. Her world. A monster needed to be stopped. Quickly.
So Hollis made the effort, shifting around, turning until they faced each other. His eyes opened and she instantly knew he wanted to kiss her.
“Not yet,” she told him, with regret obvious in her voice. “What time is it? Is it still Sunday?” The hospital room was an interior one with no windows. And in hospitals, as in casinos, there was maintained an everlasting day.
Casinos. Jeez, why did I put that in my analogy?
“Yes, it’s still Sunday. Not quite six o’clock.” He rarely wore a watch, but Reese always knew the time and could be counted on to be accurate to within five minutes or so.
“Really? Wow, a lot happened today. And more to come. We need to get going.”
Reese touched her face with one hand. “Hollis, what are you talking about? You need sleep. Hell, I need sleep. We both nearly died today.”
“Yes, but the monster didn’t.”
&n
bsp; “Joe Cross is dead.”
“He wasn’t the monster. I saw his eyes before I shot him. They were . . . glazed. Distant. Like a sleepwalker. Which I think is what he’s been. The monster just . . . used Joe. To deflect suspicion from himself, maybe. Definitely because he needed a tool he could control. And Joe, poor Joe . . . You saw him, Reese. He really was grieving the loss of his wife. Even if he did help the monster kill her. Something I think the monster taunted him with afterward. It would explain his extreme grief. That’s all I felt from him, but I’m betting a stronger empath could have looked deeper and felt guilt as well.”
“What? Hollis—”
But she was pushing herself into a sitting position, carefully testing her back by twisting slightly side to side. “That doesn’t feel half bad, actually. Are you okay?”
He was propped on an elbow, the two of them barely fitting in the hospital bed, and he was fully dressed except for his shoes. “I need to sleep about a month, but other than that . . .”
“Good.” Hollis swung her legs off her side of the bed, realizing both that she was in a hospital gown and that there was no IV. “No needles or tubes?” she asked, remembering other hospital stays.
“There wasn’t so much as a speck of blood on you by the time the EMS crew got to you. Or on me, though the bullet holes in my jacket and shirt gave them pause. Anyway, I threw my weight around, and called Bishop so he could throw his weight around, and they basically just checked to make absolutely sure neither of us was bleeding and our vitals were normal. I told them you needed to sleep, so they gave us this bed.” He paused, adding, “They’re very confused.”
“I imagine so.” She slid off the bed, relieved when her legs held her with hardly a quiver. Then she remembered what she was wearing and turned around to face the bed, hastily reaching back, only to find that the hospital gown was not open in back.
“They’ve redesigned them,” Reese said, not without a note of regret. “They tie on the side now. And close completely.”
“Where are my clothes?”