Hollis was frowning slightly. “You’ve moved around a lot, according to Bishop. When you saw spirits in whatever town or city you were in, were they local?”
It was his turn to frown. “Now that you mention it, yeah, they were. Or, at least, what they asked me to do was local. I hadn’t thought about that before. Why? Is that important?”
“I don’t know what’s important yet,” she told him frankly. “But this is a big valley holding several thousand people. And the town was founded over two hundred years ago. That’s a lot of people living and dying here over time.”
Galen spoke up then to say mildly, “Graveyards at every church I saw while I was driving around. Half a dozen or more. And two big cemeteries outside the city limits, one north and one east of the town. Everything very well tended, both the church grounds and the cemeteries. Nothing neglected. Even the oldest graves look to have been taken care of.”
“So, respect for the dead.” Hollis was frowning. “I don’t know if that matters either. I’ve only ever seen one spirit in a cemetery, and she wasn’t buried there. Logan?”
“I stay away from cemeteries and graveyards,” he said flatly.
Her frown faded, and she smiled at him. “Unless you’re different from every other medium I know, you don’t have to avoid graveyards or cemeteries; the dead don’t seem to want to hang around those places. Although you generally see a few in churches, and definitely hospitals.”
He blinked, and asked almost unwillingly, “Do spirits always ask you for help?”
“A few have. A very few have helped in investigations. But mostly I just see or sense them around. Off in the corners, the shadows of some house or building usually. Not really coming forward. I think most of them aren’t interested in interacting with the living. Unless, as you’ve discovered, they need the help of the living.”
“At any hour of the day or night,” he said somewhat bitterly. Then he eyed her. “Maybe it’s different for— You aren’t a born medium, are you?”
“No, I was triggered a few years ago.” She could say it easily now, without horrific memories clawing through her mind. And other than a couple of nightmares when she and Reese had first arrived at their island, those had stopped as well.
Hopefully for good.
Thoughtfully, Hollis added, “It probably is different for born mediums, though every one I know is unique in some way. I didn’t have any kind of a shield at first, and I broadcast, which was . . . disconcerting. But other members of the SCU helped me. And it got better.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her. “Recruitment speech?”
“Of course not, Logan. Would I do that?” Her tone was mild.
“I have no idea what you’d do,” he told her. “But if Bishop couldn’t persuade me, I doubt you could.”
DeMarco murmured, “Don’t be so sure.”
Logan looked at him, but before he could say or ask anything, Hollis was speaking again, briskly.
“Okay, look, guys. We were all summoned here, and there is definitely something weird and crazy going on. Some very deadly weird and crazy. Since nothing else has stuck out so far, we can be fairly certain at least for now that the energy in this valley has to be the cause. And since neither Logan nor I have seen any spirits, we probably aren’t dealing with spiritual energy.”
“Have you before?” Victoria asked.
“Dealt with spiritual energy? Oh, yeah. But if the spirits want to get involved in this, they aren’t saying.”
Politely, Logan asked, “Then why are we here? Why am I here? I don’t have a secondary ability. I see spirits. If there are no spirits here, if none are involved in—whatever the hell this is, then why am I here?”
“It’s a good question,” DeMarco said.
Hollis looked at her partner. “Yeah. But I still don’t know what it means. A very upset spirit told me I had to come to Prosperity. I’m guessing Logan was told the same way.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Although he wasn’t initially upset. I mean, not about that. He was upset because his girlfriend had been wrongly accused, he said, of poisoning him.”
It was Hollis’s turn to blink as she looked at him. Then she turned her gaze to her partner again. “How come I don’t ever get stuff like that?”
“Give it time,” DeMarco said.
“Something to look forward to,” she murmured.
Logan, frowning, brought them ruthlessly back to his original question. “Okay, so the two mediums involved were told to come here by spirits. I don’t know about yours, but mine pretty much stopped talking in midsentence and then looked anxious and afraid. In less than a minute, he looked terrified. Said something about both the living and the dead being in trouble or being hurt by this—by whatever this is. That I had to come to Prosperity, that I had to help them stop it. All of you, I assume. Then he disappeared. Then there were a whole bunch of dead people all around me in the park, just standing and staring at me, which has never happened to me before and which was creepy as hell. Felt like the fucking zombie apocalypse, except they all looked normal—for spirits. Just staring at me. And then there was a girl spirit, a young woman, who also begged me to come to Prosperity. Said I was needed here. So. If this energy has nothing to do with spirits, if the threat here has nothing to do with spirits, then how am I needed here?”
“I hate to have to repeat myself,” Hollis said, “but I have no idea. Yet. We’re very much at the speculation and information-gathering stage of the investigation. But it definitely bothers me that neither of us has seen a spirit in or around Prosperity.”
“Due to the energy here, maybe,” DeMarco said. “Or the pressure. Maybe whatever’s holding energy in this valley is also holding spiritual energy out.”
Hollis nodded slowly. “Could be. And, if so, it might explain why two mediums were summoned. It may well take both of us, if that’s what we have to do.”
“I’m not following,” Logan said.
“We open doors,” she said. “It’s what mediums do. We open doors between the world of the living and the spirit realm; that’s what allows the communication. If all this energy in the valley is somehow blocking or otherwise holding out spiritual energy, maybe we’re the only ones who can let it back in.”
Politely, Logan said, “And why in hell would we want to do that? If the spirits stay away, I’m seriously considering moving here to live. A nice, peaceful place where no dead people talk to me.”
DeMarco said, “Where seven people have died today under very mysterious circumstances.”
Still truculent, Logan said, “Well, none of them has shown up asking for my help, so why should I care?”
Hollis said, “It’s all about balance, Logan. The dead have their parts to play just like we do.” She looked at her partner suddenly. “Maybe that’s the common denominator we’ve all missed.”
“What do you mean?”
“What summoned us. And the way we were all summoned. No matter what our abilities are, we all heard, in some form, voices telling us to come here. Logan and I saw spirits who were very upset, distraught, who clearly felt threatened. You heard a voice telling you to come here. Olivia said she heard whispers, then voices telling her to come to Prosperity. Reno had a vision of a hellish place filled with hideously deformed creatures that might once have been human—and Shadow People, one of which offered her a pretty chilling warning of what could happen if we can’t stop whatever’s going on here.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Victoria said suddenly. “Shadow People. They seem to keep turning up in—popular lore. Supposedly where people are experiencing the ugly side of the paranormal. I’ve seen self-proclaimed mediums on TV saying the Shadow People are demonic.”
Almost absently, Hollis said, “More of those TV mediums than you might think are genuine.”
“Talking about demons?”
Hollis looked at her, saw
her. “Dark energy. Negative energy shaped into a . . . recognizable form. Maybe even negative spiritual energy, originating from very evil dead people. Calling them demons is probably as accurate a term as any.”
“You mean they don’t go straight to hell?” Galen sounded disgusted.
Still in that preoccupied tone, Hollis replied, “Sure, some of them do. Maybe most of them.”
DeMarco glanced at the end of the table, a little amused to note that the answer had visibly disconcerted Galen. It wasn’t often that his hard face showed any emotion. It was even rarer for him to be disconcerted. By anything.
Victoria looked disconcerted as well. “There’s a hell? An actual fiery pit?”
“Something like that,” Hollis replied. “A place of judgment, punishment. Not necessarily a fiery pit, though probably for some. For others . . . punishment fitting the crime, would be my guess. I think most of us, as long as we try to make it through life in a positive way, have another chance, maybe a lot of chances, to get it right, but the truly evil find something very different waiting for them after death.”
Victoria gazed at their team leader in unconscious fascination. “Wow. I . . . did not know that. Never been very religious.”
“Me either. Religions mostly just try to explain things,” Hollis said. “In terms people can understand. Most every religion has some form of hell, limbo, purgatory. So people are warned that there are always consequences. In this life. In an afterlife. And in whatever comes after that.”
* * *
• • •
ARCHER RETURNED TO the station less than five minutes later, and was introduced to Victoria and Logan. He felt more weary than he could ever remember feeling, far too tired to want to get into another baffling discussion about psychic abilities, so he wasn’t about to bring up the question of what psychic “tools” had been added to the team of pretty ordinary-looking people.
He tended to weigh people quickly when first introduced, but he didn’t even try with these two. Something else claimed his attention almost immediately.
Hollis had introduced the two newest team members, her voice just a bit distant, and after making professionally polite noises at the newcomers, Archer realized that everyone in the room was watching Hollis with varying degrees of tension or concern. She wasn’t looking at any of them, just sort of staring into space as he’d seen her do earlier.
And her unusual eyes were . . . luminous.
Afraid to ask, more afraid not to, the sheriff finally said, “Somebody want to tell me what’s going on? Hollis?” He was hardly aware that it was the first time he’d used her given name unprompted.
After a moment, she blinked, then looked at him. “Hmm?”
“What is it?”
Hollis abruptly rose to her feet, startling him, and turned her gaze, frowning now, through the glass partition dividing the room from the bullpen, and past that to the lobby and the front desk.
Before Archer could ask again, there was a commotion in the lobby, a confusion of thuds and bangs combined with an unnaturally loud voice he didn’t immediately recognize. Cody Greene, the deputy manning the reception desk, was sort of scrambling to turn around, his hand on his gun in a movement that looked more instinctive than deliberate.
Matt Spencer and Kayla Nelson were the only two deputies in the bullpen, having delivered Elliot Weston to a cell in back and made sure he was being watched at all times. Both had been relaxed but rose quickly to their feet the instant the commotion began, hands also coming to rest on the grips of their service weapons.
Before anyone could react in any other way, a uniformed deputy with an armful of guns pushed open the glass door of the lobby and rushed into the bullpen—and straight back to the conference room, his wide-eyed gaze fixed on the face of the sheriff.
“Here!” He thrust the guns, several rifles and what looked like a shotgun, into the sheriff’s surprised arms, then immediately unloaded two pistols from his pants pockets onto the conference table with a clatter, and began unbuckling his belt, his service weapon still securely fastened in its holster.
“Jim, what the hell?” Archer half turned toward Hollis, the closest to him, long enough for her to reach out silently to take the rifles and shotgun from him and place them on the table.
“You have to take them. You have to keep them.” Jim Lonnagan’s voice was low, hurried. “Keep them away from me. Away. I nearly killed her, Jack. I nearly killed Kim. I had my hands around her throat, and—and the voice said to kill her, said I had to, and I was listening, Jack, I wanted to do it! Just like I wanted to buy these damned— Take the guns, please, lock me in a cell before I hurt her, before I hurt anybody—”
His face was ghostly pale and beaded with sweat, fear and desperation coming off him in waves.
DeMarco, who had risen as the others had when his partner did, saw Hollis lift one hand and rub her left temple hard, her gaze fixed on the deputy and her expression holding both pain and anxiety. He could feel it through her, the emotions so powerful they were like a punch in the gut. And even so, she was trying to probe, to understand what was fighting so hard to influence this deputy.
Archer accepted Lonnagan’s gun belt, almost tossing it onto the table, then snapped out to the deputies standing stock-still a few feet away in the bullpen, “Go check on Kim, now.”
Both started, jolted out of their frozen bewilderment, and hurried toward the front door.
Lonnagan was still babbling, virtually unintelligible now, his voice a desperate tumble of words chased by terror. He grasped fistfuls of Archer’s slightly open jacket, the plea for help obvious even if coherency was beyond him.
“Jim—Jim, calm down. It’s all right. Jim—”
Both Victoria and Logan had jumped up when Hollis rose, and both had instinctively given way to the distraught deputy, backing away from him and the table. Almost directly behind him, Victoria stared at the deputy for just a moment, then met Hollis’s gaze.
Hollis nodded once.
Immediately, Victoria stepped close enough to Lonnagan so she could reach up and touch either side of his head with both hands.
“Sleep,” she said quietly.
The babble was cut off as though a switch had been thrown, and Lonnagan dropped, caught expertly by Victoria. Logan stepped forward to help automatically, and Galen moved around the table toward them.
It all happened within the space of a few seconds.
“There’s a couch in the sheriff’s office across the hall,” Hollis told them, the pain and anxiety no longer gripping her features. “Take him in there for now.”
Archer stared down at his deputy, his face still holding shock, and watched as Galen and Logan carried the unconscious man out of the conference room. He looked blankly at Victoria. “What did you do?” he asked.
“It’s all right, Sheriff, he’s just sleeping,” Victoria replied, calm. “I think he needed to, don’t you?”
Archer stared at her a moment longer, then looked at Hollis. He obviously wanted to ask a dozen questions, but only one emerged. “What the hell?”
“Sit down, Jack,” she said.
The sheriff found himself sitting down at the table just where his deputy had stood, hardly noticing that Victoria silently pulled out the chair for him. He looked at the pile of guns before him and repeated, “What the hell?” rather helplessly.
The others were reclaiming their seats, joined in less than a minute by Galen and Logan. Hollis waited until everybody was there again before she spoke to the sheriff, and even though the words were somewhat flip, her tone was anything but.
“Good news, bad news,” she said to Archer. “The good news is, your deputy didn’t murder his wife or anyone else.”
“And the bad news?”
“He almost did.”
Archer was staring at her. “Jim Lonnagan is a good man.”
&nbs
p; “I don’t doubt it. Did you listen to what he was saying, Jack? A voice told him to buy the guns. A voice told him to kill his wife. A voice he very badly wanted to obey. I seriously doubt he’s in the middle of a psychotic break none of you saw coming. Any mental illness would have presented with symptoms long before now. So this is new. This was sudden. This was something no one, not you and not Deputy Lonnagan, could have seen coming. What I know, what I feel, is that he’s the one I’ve felt struggling so desperately not to give in. If he’d lost that struggle, he would have killed his wife. And maybe himself. Maybe others.”
Archer wearily rubbed his face with both hands in what was becoming a familiar gesture. “And if he’d killed Kim, but not himself? Would we have found him on his front porch smiling and blank like Elliot Weston? Or asleep like Leslie Gardner?”
“Probably one of those,” Hollis said in that steady voice. “Though more likely another successful suicide. He fought so hard, I doubt he could have lived with it if he’d been forced to kill his wife. But he fought it, Jack. And he won. That’s important. It’s the first real evidence we’ve had that whatever’s doing this can be fought, and not by resorting to suicide the way Sam Bowers did. It can be fought. And it can be defeated.”
“Energy?” There was no longer even disbelief in his voice.
“Some kind of energy. But energy alone can’t speak, not words. It can’t urge, command. Not without a guiding mind behind it, focusing and controlling it.”
“What does that mean? Somebody’s doing this? Somebody’s driving people to murder others?”
Hollis barely hesitated, knowing that the sheriff would be able to accept a somebody as an enemy far more easily than he would a something. Especially when the something pretty much defied description, far less definition.
Besides, she wasn’t absolutely positive a person or people weren’t behind it all. Somehow.
“That’s what it means. We’ll find out who’s behind it, Jack, I promise you. It’s what we do.”
He stared at her for a moment, then half nodded, something in his expression telling everyone in the room that he had reached his limit, at least for the day, that he literally couldn’t absorb any more of the weird and crazy.