Cross Council

  Tiara has lost her memory and wakes all alone to strange psychic powers and bloody visions. As she seeks to find herself, she is taunted by a phantom seducer in her mind. It would seem that he is leading her on a merry adventure to find her identity, but is he the lover whose touch she craves or a madman intent on destroying her mind? He sends her pristine white roses, but their purity is tainted with the dripping of bright red blood upon their petals.

  Sample Chapter from Painting the Roses Red

  Tiara blinked and the world shifted, blurred, and became a nightmare of blood. She let the knife fall from fingers numb with shock. It made a sickening splat in the pool of blood at her feet. The hysteria of the moment built in her chest as she watched a single drop of blood slide from her hand onto the one clean spot that had been left on the knife’s handle. The handle of the long butcher knife had been clean where her hand had gripped it. Her hand was covered in blood and the pristine steel of the blade had also been dripping with it, but the handle of the knife held only fingerprints.

  Her mind shuddered. That clean place on the handle of the knife was where her own hand had clutched it so tightly that the rest of the dribbling blood on her hands and the blade hadn’t penetrated. She didn’t want to look up, so she watched the knife at her feet. There was more blood all over the room, but she stared at her feet trying to get a grip on herself.

  With a shudder, she clamped down on her panic. There was no escape from the blood by looking at her feet. Her sneakers had been a pretty white with blue stripes, and she reasoned that she wouldn’t be wearing them to the gym anymore. With a start, she realized that she had remembered something but when her mind reached for the memory of working out at a gym, it seemed to stumble like a stalling car engine. She reached for the memory, grasping desperately for it as she realized that it was the only one she had of anything before the blood. It slipped away, laughing at her as if she was falling down a great hole in the earth. The memory laughed as she tumbled by it on the way down into hell. She shook off the image before it pulled her into an insane spiral.

  Some part of her knew that it wasn’t her blood, but as she searched her mind for an explanation she felt as if she was reaching up from the bottom of that hole. The top and reality seemed so very far away. The blood wasn’t her own. She hadn’t hurt anyone. She knew these things as if they were the core of her.

  The more she reached for the past, the more she vividly knew nothing before the blood. There was an eerie calm in her mind at that emptiness, and even as she rebelled and mentally tried to climb out, her eyes slid to the rest of the room. She didn’t have time to deal with the holes in her mind if she was going to survive the crisis in front of her.

  The holes in her mind were less real than the room she stood in and time seemed to be ticking away in her panic. It was time that she couldn’t afford to waste. Somehow her moments of mental searching left her feeling that she was late. Late for what she didn’t know, but somehow she needed to be running toward something, and the room in front of her was the only tangible thing she had to deal with.

  It was a very cheap hotel room. In the middle of one wall was a large bed, its lime green bedspread, like the worn carpet, darkened with the blood. One scarred nightstand held a phone that she briefly considered picking up to call the authorities. At the thought of having to explain anything in this room with or without the memories behind the wall in her mind, she shifted her attention elsewhere.

  The dresser matched the nightstand in that it was scarred, and it matched the bed and carpet in that it was drenched in blood. Its drawers were thrown open and empty. Even the television hadn’t been spared the splattering of blood, nor the walls, nor the artwork on the walls, such as it was. The blood splayed across the walls in arcs of droplets that drooled down the wallpaper connecting daisies like childish dots.

  She shut her eyes, trying to shut the blood-stained room out long enough to regain control of herself. She was trying to hold onto the tilting world but reality was slippery. It was just so hard to believe she stood here in this nightmare. She begged her mind to concentrate. She had to stay here in the present and deal with this situation before time ran out and the situation dealt with her. She couldn’t explain anything in this room and if anyone found her here, she would have to come up with answers her mind just wouldn’t deliver.

  She wanted to sit in a corner and cry. Any sane person would, she justified to herself. Reality shifted as she grabbed hold of her emotions and rebuilt her spine out of sheer will. She would not quiver in a corner – not for anything.

  She brought a hand up to her forehead to brush the hair out of her eyes before she remembered that her hand was sticky with drying blood. She opened her eyes to stare at that bloody hand and tried to focus on the fact that it was somehow her own hand. A little niggling of paranoia shouted at the edge of her mind that she was a killer. She had killed someone and splattered their blood all over this room in a fit of raging insanity.

  Perhaps she had another personality that had committed this heinous act. Maybe that was the pit in her mind. Maybe there was another personality in that portion of her mind that had done something unspeakable and left this side of her to deal with it. The steel control she clamped on her emotions firmed into a cold detachment, analytically attempting to examine herself.

  Or maybe she had done this to herself. Maybe she was dead and standing here as a ghost of herself. Maybe someone had killed her and her body was somewhere in this room. And perhaps she would be forced to haunt this room until someone found her killer. Maybe the room was saturated in her blood, and she was dead at her own hand or someone else’s.

  But then what was she to have earned such a gruesome death in this tawdry hotel room. She wanted it to be a dream and hoped that she would wake up in that cold sweat that bad dreams leave on your body. She wouldn’t even mind the interrupted sleep this time if she could just wake up.

  She stood facing the mirror over the dresser, but she’d avoided looking in that mirror most of all. She hadn’t wanted to look in that mirror and see a ghost of herself staring back, or worse nothing staring at her at all. She didn’t want to look in that mirror and see a killer in her own eyes.

  A shudder rippled through her shoulders. She was not a killer, she told herself, gritting her teeth. That eerie calm reasserted itself. And neither was she asleep. She clenched her hand into a fist and brushed away the terror. Her shoulders squared up, her chin lifted, and she took a deep breath of coppery blood and stuffy hotel room. She would not look into the mirror until she had regained her inner strength.

  She shut out all her senses and touched the core of herself. She may not have remembered who or what she was at that moment, but she knew her own soul and it would stand and walk through this pit. The room seemed to quiver with her energy.

  She locked her fears and emotions into a cage in her heart and looked up into the mirror. The familiarity of her angular face, her crystalline blue eyes, her stubborn jaw that refused to quiver and her full lips that refused to shake all calmed her heart. These were not a killer’s eyes, though the strength in them could stare a killer down or see into someone’s soul. Another deep breath of relief calmed her further.

  She looked into her own eyes and sunk into the depths of her own personality as if she’d done it a hundred times and she had. It was as natural as breathing to know the soul behind the eyes. She recognized her talents as easily as she’d recognized her own face. It was a comfort to know some detail of her life. She was gifted and she saw things. She was a force to be reckoned with no matter the situation. She was strong and generous. And she was sane, she told herself sternly.

  For a life-saving moment, the blood disappeared and she stood and gazed just at herself. She was, at that moment, as she had always been. Her heart opened to her inner self, secure in the fact that she was not a killer. She was not dead. She was not dreaming. And w
hile it was not her blood, it was someone’s blood and she could feel them call to her. She could also feel a surge of urgency emanating from the blood.

  She couldn’t remain here. Her eyes scanned her blood-covered body. She wasn’t stupid enough to leave this motel room looking this way either. Nor was she stupid enough to call the police. The blood was human, but she had no proof that the person or people the blood came from weren’t dead by her hands.

  Yes, her mind assured her, that felt right. She needed to get cleaned up and get out of here. She needed to go somewhere. She didn’t know where but there was somewhere she needed to go. And when it came down to it, that’s all she really had left. That wall blocking off the memories in her mind left her with only her gut instincts and what felt right. No one had found her so far. There were no sirens of authorities coming to get her yet, but there might be. She could think while she moved.

  Her mind switched into problem-solving mode. There was no way she could clean this room, but she could get herself cleaned up. It was a typical cheap motel room under all the blood, and she could see the doorway to the little bathroom. She fought down squeamishness as her shoes squished across the wet carpet. She slipped her shoes off outside the bathroom, and piled the rest of her bloody clothes on the other side of the doorway near the sink.

  She’d start with a shower. She wasn’t sure what she would wear but she knew that she had to start with a clean body. She showered, using two of the three little bars of paper-wrapped soap. Rinsing her long brown hair without shampoo and conditioner was a pain, but at least its dark color would hide what she couldn’t rinse out.

  Going through the motions of such a simple thing as a shower reminded her of little things, and she focused on them only enough to glean what she could from them. Her long legs were limber and muscled because she liked to run, but she only liked to run because she loved to eat fast food and running helped her keep all that fat from going straight to her hips.

  She didn’t have the stick-like figure of today’s models, but Humphrey Bogart would have found her full breasts and hips hot and, seeing as she went for the black and white movies type over the Tom Cruise type, that suited her just fine. Her heart quivered a bit at the thought of someone special in her life. Did she miss someone or was she just lonely? There was an empty place in her heart. It was harder to shut that out of her mind, but she forced herself to keep moving.

  She hummed big band and blues, country and rock and roll while she showered. When she tried to remember a particular song that she liked, she hit that wall, but when she let herself not think about it, she was eclectic in what she knew. She studied herself casually, as if it was something she did often. It was natural to probe and study people. She worked with people. She helped them cope with things. If she could help others cope with things, she could certainly help herself through this.

  She dried herself with one of the puny towels and reached for a second to dry her hair. The door to the bathroom swung a little as she tugged the little towel off the rack and she was rocked with a frantic feeling of relief at the backpack that hung on the back of the door. Her fingers shook as she wrapped the towel around her hair before grabbing the backpack and searching it, desperate for information. The calm that she demanded of herself was shallow, but it would hold.

  Her fingers dug for a wallet, a driver’s license, a credit card, something that would tell her who she was and what she was doing there. She found a clean set of clothes, including underwear, black socks, black jeans, a plain black t-shirt, a thin navy sweater, black sneakers, and a light jeans jacket. There were also the basic necessities like a toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, a hair brush, deodorant, and such. There was even a set of keys that gave her a little hope, but no wallet or anything that could remotely identify her.

  She clamped down on the panic that rose when she realized she didn’t know her own name. There had been enough panic today. There would be no more. There would be no more panic and no more shaking, she told herself sternly.

  Thinking that maybe her wallet was in a car parked just outside the hotel room, she hurriedly dried off. She forced herself to calmly brush her teeth and hair and get herself dressed presentably before she tried to rush to whatever car might be outside, and whatever answers might lay in that car.

  She cleaned the hair out of the drain in the bathtub, wrapped her bloodied clothes and shoes in a plastic laundry bag, and tucked the last bar of soap into her backpack with the clothes. If she’d really done something wrong, there would be enough forensic evidence here to hang her if they looked closely enough, but she didn’t need to make it easy. She wiped down surfaces in the bathroom with a washcloth and returned to the main room to get the knife.

  She froze. Either she hadn’t seen them before or they hadn’t been there. She felt reality shudder in her mind again. She closed her eyes and took another breath. The theme from Phantom of the Opera rose in the back of her mind. Blood still drenched the room but on the dresser stood a large vase filled with a dozen huge white roses.

  Her heart yearned to touch the soft petals but crossing the room would walk her back through the blood on the floor. She could smell them from where she stood and felt calmed. Some part of her mind registered the sinister nature of white roses dripping with the red blood, but her heart just wanted to touch them, hold them, and be held by their scent and softness.

  It wasn’t rational to go to the roses. She was running out of time. She needed to get to whatever vehicle matched the keys in her backpack. She needed to find out who she was in a safe place away from here. She heard a voice whisper in her mind, “I love you.” Irrationally, she ripped the bedspread and sheets from the bed to cover the floor from the bathroom to the dresser. It wasn’t much help since the bedspread had been drenched too, but at least the blood wouldn’t be splashing at her feet. In the end, she just didn’t care. She took the two small steps to the dresser as carefully as she could and took a single rose.

  She glanced up into the mirror over the dresser and the moment froze itself into her mind. The half of the rose that faced the mirror was red with fresh blood. Her eyes were caught by those in the mask over her shoulder. Those eyes smiled at her and her heart melted. His eyes held hers as he lowered his lips to the back of her neck and whispered a kiss that had her leaning back into the man who wasn’t there.

  The scent of blood and roses snapped her eyes back open and he was gone. For a moment her heart had been complete, but then he was gone again. Her eyes hardened as she looked at herself in the mirror. Wasn’t that just typical of a man and the sappy sentiment of true love?

  Book 2 of the PSI Consulting Series is a Light-Hearted Mystery