“Then we help.” Hollis looked him in the eye, daring him to question.
He smiled faintly, but didn’t push it. Hollis didn’t know whether to hope he trusted her and his other team members, or to be worried by his lack of concern for them.
She looked around at her team. “Everybody clear? We’re looking for disturbed ground. Old wells, caves, even a plowed field or a gully that looks odd. Trust your instincts. And alert the rest of us if you find anything you consider especially suspicious.”
“You mean if it feels wrong?” Olivia asked.
“Yes. If it feels wrong, if your instincts are in any way telling you to stay away, then do that. And call the rest of us.
“You have your maps with your search grids marked. When we’re all in position, I want to do a radio check. We should have voice communication now. I hope. But even if we don’t, the warning and tracking system is designed to work even in the middle of a much stronger energy field than we have here.”
In less than fifteen minutes, the team moved out from their hotel and headed to their positions beginning about two miles outside town and a mile from the site of the first death.
Then they went to work.
Hollis was surprised but pleased to find that Dalton was very familiar with maps and with the rougher terrain she had assigned them along one of the outer edge of the valley, though when she thought about it she wondered if she should have been surprised. He had, after all, ended up in Kodiak, Alaska. And given his nature, he probably hiked into the wilderness regularly in order to get as far as he could from other people.
Their radios worked, and rather well, which was another pleasant surprise. “But if we don’t find the source soon,” she said to Reese and Dalton, “I doubt that’ll be the case.”
“Is the energy still intensifying?” Reese asked her.
“I think it’s stronger than it was yesterday,” she told him. “Not so sure it’s stronger than it was this morning.” She hesitated, frowning slightly.
“Something?” Reese asked.
“I don’t know. Pretty much everybody in this valley is worried and horrified, so I’m getting a lot of that. A sort of . . . uncomfortable feeling of people watching each other. But for just a minute there, I thought I got a flash of something else. Something . . . driven.”
“A consciousness trying to control another mind?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.” Her frown deepened, and she added slowly, “You know, that attempt this morning, as eerie as it was, wasn’t nearly as powerful as I’d expect. Unless . . .”
“Unless,” Dalton supplied, “everything that happened yesterday took more energy than whatever this consciousness expected. From the timeline you gave us, it looks like the worst murders took place early in the day. By the time Deputy Lonnagan managed not to kill his wife, it was late in the day. What if that was less about his ability to resist and more about how much energy had been expended in that . . . mad rush to kill as many people as possible while scaring the shit out of everybody else?”
Hollis blinked, surprised. She was sitting turned in her seat so she could see both her team members, and caught a glint of amusement from Reese.
“That could be it, couldn’t it?” Dalton asked absently as he studied the map.
“Yes,” Hollis told him. “That could definitely be it.”
“Makes sense,” Reese murmured.
“None of this makes sense,” Dalton said, and then added, “I think there’s a ravine up ahead we should probably check out.”
* * *
• • •
“FOR ALL THE world,” Hollis told Bishop much later when she reported in that night, “as if he’d said nothing remarkable. Did no one ever tell Dalton he’s a born cop?”
“Apparently not,” Bishop said.
“I think he’s right about the energy field. And I’m beginning to understand why we got the summons when we did. I’ll bet nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary on Monday. Either the energy field didn’t exist then, or else it was . . . contained . . . much lower to the ground and in a much smaller area around the source.”
“Do you believe it hadn’t begun affecting anyone yet?”
“The opposite,” Hollis told him. “Reese and I stopped by the station before we came back to the hotel, and Katie filled us in on the results on all the deputies interviewing family and friends of those affected. It seems that both Leslie Gardner and Sam Bowers were class parents last weekend when their kids’ class took a little prospecting trip out into the valley.”
“You believe they found the source.”
“I think there’s a good chance they did. And probably never felt anything other than a twinge in their heads or a faint pressure they believed was the start of a sinus headache. Family reported that both of them suffered from allergies.”
“Very thorough deputies,” Bishop noted.
“Yeah, Archer has them well trained. They got a specific location for that class trip, and according to our maps it’s in a grid section we would have searched tomorrow. An area up against the raw cliff face that looks so weird all around the base of the valley. Which would have been a perfect place for kids to dig up pretty rocks.”
“What’s the plan?”
“We’ll all head to that area first thing in the morning. If we find the source—and I hope to hell we do given that it’s probably building up to attack mode again—then we’ll try to seal up the portal. Any ideas, by the way, on how we can do that?”
“Call me in the morning,” Bishop said, “before you head out there. We’re still working on possible solutions.”
“Good, because I haven’t given it much thought,” she said ruefully.
Unsurprised, he said, “We’ll try to have some options for you. And one, I’m sorry to say, may be the weather.”
“What?”
“Afraid so. The latest forecasts show a storm system moving over the mountains sometime tomorrow.”
“Anything more specific?” Hollis wasn’t happy for several reasons. Because storms still bothered her, because they still interfered with her abilities, and because she was uneasily aware that the electrical and magnetic energy of a storm could very well intensify, even feed, the energy field in the valley.
Hell, it could detonate the energy, for all they knew. And, poof—no valley. At all.
“Any unusual danger from this storm?” Hollis heard herself ask.
“No, nothing out of the ordinary, not for Prosperity and the valley. According to the weather service, that area of the mountains is well known to play host to highly unpredictable weather, going back hundreds of years.”
Hollis felt an odd sensation she couldn’t immediately identify, and when she could identify it, all she knew was that it was a deeply unsettling sense of familiarity.
“Hollis?”
“Yeah, I’m still here,” she said slowly.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Just . . . déjà vu, or something.”
“Or something?”
She concentrated, trying to grasp an illusive feeling even as it vanished like smoke through her fingers. “Whatever it was is gone now, Bishop. Probably not important.”
“You know better, Hollis.”
She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, her gaze meeting DeMarco’s slightly anxious one. “Well, if I’m aware of it later on I’ll try to hold on to it longer. I don’t know what else to tell you, Bishop. Look, I’ll call you in the morning before we head out.”
“All right. I’ll have whatever information and suggestions we settle on ready for you.”
“Thanks. Talk to you tomorrow.” She hung up the phone, then looked with faint surprise at the handkerchief DeMarco held out to her. A slight tickling beneath her nose prodded her before he could, and she held the cloth to nostrils pinched shut,
continuing to breathe through her mouth.
Neither one of them said anything for several long minutes until Hollis dabbed at her no-longer-bleeding nose.
“How weird is that?” she murmured.
“Hollis?”
“I wasn’t trying to do anything, Reese. Except . . . to figure out what suddenly felt familiar. Bishop said something about the weather here being unstable going back hundreds of years, and I felt like . . . like I should have known that.”
“How? Why?”
“I have no idea. It was just a flash, a feeling of familiarity. Then it was gone.”
“You said déjà vu.”
“It was the first thing that came to mind. Just that the information about the weather didn’t surprise me. As if I . . . Hell, I don’t know.”
“You’re scaring me a little bit.”
“I’m scaring myself.” She shook off the sensation as best she could, even though it left a lingering chill. “Very weird feeling.”
“Are you expecting a spirit?”
She blinked at him. “What? No. Why?”
He reached over to touch her arm, his thumb gliding over gooseflesh. “You’re cold.”
She stared at her own arm, then frowned at him. “Yeah, I am. I must be more tired than I thought.”
After a moment, he said, “I think tonight the hot shower should come before the hot meal.”
“I think you’re right.”
FOURTEEN
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10
Even though it was still very early when they set out the next morning, heavy clouds were already beginning to tease the mountain-made horizons, and now and then a faint rumble could be heard in the distance.
“I hate storms,” Hollis muttered. “Especially the ones that rumble around and around as if they have no idea where they want to be.”
They were still at the hotel and about to climb into their vehicles, none of them happy about the storm.
“Maybe it’ll miss us,” Dalton offered.
“Are you a betting man?”
“Not really.”
“Good,” Reese told him. “She always wins.”
“It’s not my fault you don’t know how to bluff,” his partner told him virtuously. “Stone face or no stone face.”
Dalton lifted an eyebrow at the larger man. “Way I heard it, you don’t have any tells. At all.”
“I don’t. Except with Hollis.” He made the admission calmly and without any sign of embarrassment whatsoever.
Dalton wanted to say something about that, but whatever it was vanished from his mind. He found himself swinging around abruptly, from the open door of the SUV, staring toward the end of the town that was not their destination. He was barely aware that Hollis and Reese were also facing the same direction, their faces grim.
“Oh, shit,” Hollis muttered. She lifted both hands, her fingers massaging her temples. Hard.
“I’m only picking up intention,” Reese said, his voice unusually tense. “Scattered thoughts.”
“I’m getting more. A teacher. Young. Loves her work. But . . . she’s been getting more and more irritable lately. It’s not her nature, not at all. But her head won’t stop hurting. She needs to . . . fix her life. And she— Oh, Christ, she has guns. More than one. And she knows how to use them.”
Galen, Reno, and Olivia approached them from one direction, while from the other came Sully, Victoria, and Logan.
Galen said, “ I studied that school when I drove all through Prosperity. Place is close to being a fortress. It’s a newer school, and with all that’s happened in recent years, they’re all about security.”
“Maybe a fire drill?” Olivia suggested.
Victoria said, “I’m pretty sure they warn the teachers in advance now. So if there’s anything unexpected, they know to get the kids somewhere safe.”
Sully said, “I can’t pick up anything until I’m a lot closer. But get me close enough and I’ll tell you every single thing she’s feeling.”
Hollis was trying hard to sort through impressions, the panic and anxiety of the townspeople, the wordless terror of children. That angry, painful determination to fix a life that hadn’t been broken . . .
“Hollis, you have to stop.” Reese was there, holding his handkerchief to her bleeding nose.
“I can’t,” she said thickly. “You know I can’t. How many kids will she kill? How many other teachers? That thing in her head’s controlling her, and it wants a bloodbath—”
“You’re feeling that?” Reno asked sharply. “The consciousness behind the energy?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And it is familiar, dammit, I know it is.”
Reese didn’t waste any more time getting both arms around her. “Hollis.”
“That’s better,” she murmured. “Don’t let go.”
“I’m not about to,” he said, grim. He was standing behind her, one arm around her, holding her hard against his own body, while his free hand held the handkerchief to her nose.
Softly, Dalton said, “Reese, her ears.”
They were bleeding too.
“Enough of this,” Reese said in a voice few had probably heard since his military days.
“No.” Hollis’s voice was quiet, but no less fierce. “She’s planning it now. I can’t get her thoughts, just those awful feelings. Her mind’s full of blood, just blood. We have to get closer to the school.” Her eyes were . . . odd. Almost glowing.
“Except for vehicles there’s no cover,” Galen said in a calm voice that would have deceived anyone who didn’t know him.
“Then vehicles will have to do,” Reese said.
“Archer—” Sully began.
But Hollis was shaking her head. “Not yet. We have to get close enough to know for certain what’s going on there before we call in the troops. If we call them in. Trained negotiators are too far away, and you know that’s what he’ll want. Never mind that it won’t work. Never mind that you can’t negotiate with evil. Kids are going to die unless we stop this. And we have to be quiet. He wants a big show. He wants a lot of cops. Media. Panic. He wants his bloodbath.”
“Who?” Reno asked. “Who’s controlling her?”
“I think it was . . . what started as a . . . mindless evil. It just wanted to kill, to torture. To destroy.”
“But you said he seemed familiar—”
Dalton said to Reno, “Explanations later. I say we pile into two of the vehicles we have here and haul ass to that school.”
She stared at him. “You’re picking up thoughts.”
“Well, of course I am,” he said irritably, grabbing her arm to hustle her into the light-colored BMW that was closest.
Getting to the school was quick and easy, in part because Galen, leading the way in the black SUV with Hollis, Reese, and Olivia, tended to imprint maps in his head after exploring, and so took secondary roads where no traffic or traffic light slowed them down.
And the school itself was as Galen had described, a modern building designed to keep children safe inside. There were numerous exits, of course, but every single member of Hollis’s team knew that their best chance of getting all the children out alive would be to instantly incapacitate the female teacher even now being urged by a powerful force to slaughter as many of them as she could.
They gathered initially behind the hulking cover of the black SUV, and one glance was enough to show that both Sully and Dalton were being all but overwhelmed by the thoughts and emotions battering them.
“Kids,” Sully muttered. “Somebody for God’s sake teach me how to tune out kids. It’s utter chaos.”
Dalton nodded agreement, but his eyes were clearer and he was frowning.
“Stay mad,” Hollis told him softly. “It’s working.”
He sent her a quick glance. “Figured out my secret, huh??
??
Hollis was still being all but held upright by her partner, but it appeared both her nose and ears had stopped bleeding. “Enough,” she told Dalton. Then she added to him and Sully, “You two need to circle the building. Slowly. Do your damnedest not to be seen. We need to know exactly where she is. We can’t afford to make a mistake.”
“Copy.” Both Sully and Dalton moved out, cautiously.
Reese was looking at his partner. “She has guns.”
“We’re going to make sure she never fires one of those guns.”
“How are we going to do that?” Reese asked politely.
“We’re going to depend on our rookies.”
“Hollis—”
“You said it yourself. Bishop said it. They were summoned, just like we were. They were meant to be here, meant to have parts to play in all this. We can’t stop this without them. Every one of them has a gift we can use. Every one of them.”
After a moment, Reese said, “Archer’s going to shoot all of us.”
“It all happened so fast,” she said in an innocent tone. “We just had to act.”
“Right.” Then Reese frowned. “I think Dalton’s getting close.”
“Good. Judging by the way she’s feeling, we’re running out of time.”
“If you start bleeding again—”
“I won’t. You’re sharing energy with me. Thank you, by the way.”
“You’re welcome. And stop scaring me like that, will you?”
“I’ll do my best.” She turned her head to watch as Sully and Dalton slipped back through the cars in the lot until they reached the SUV.
“We maybe caught a break,” Dalton said. “She’s in a fairly small classroom at the very end of a hallway. But it’s packed with kids, little kids. I managed to catch a glimpse of a heavy-looking duffel bag half hidden behind her desk. She looks . . . I don’t think it’s going to be much longer.”
“Not much longer at all,” Sully added. “There isn’t just one voice in her head; there are dozens, hundreds, all whispering the same insane shit. I doubt we’ve got more than a couple of minutes before she digs into that bag and starts shooting.”