After a long moment of listening to him, alive and breathing, Robbie eased the door shut and went back out into the sitting area of their suite.
She had only slept a few brief hours, but she had the feeling she’d never sleep again. She didn’t want to ever sleep again.
A puppet, a goddamned puppet, that was what that slimy son of a bitch they were after had turned her into. It didn’t matter that he had, apparently, brainwashed her into getting up, getting her gun, and making it as far as Dante’s door—but had not been able to force her to do his bidding.
No, that didn’t matter. She’d shoot herself before she would shoot a teammate.
But he had still gotten into her head, messed with her mind, her memories, making her believe she had shot and killed her partner. And he had done that because he had not been able to make her actually do it.
Robbie hesitated only a moment. She took that moment to shore up her shields, trying to make them stronger than they had ever been before. She took a quick shower and got dressed, pulled her still-damp hair back in a hasty ponytail, hesitated for a moment before clipping her gun to the belt of her jeans, then scribbled a quick note to Dante and left the suite.
Their hotel served food twenty-four-seven and kept a generous selection of fruit, cheese, and crackers just inside the main floor dining room all afternoon until dinnertime, but she paused only to get coffee in one of the cardboard cups. She had no idea what had been going on at their command center, and didn’t pause near the police station even though there seemed to be a lot of activity going on in there.
She thought it seemed dim for midafternoon, and glanced up to see the heavily overcast sky. And hear, faintly, thunder rumble.
Great. A storm. As a general rule, storms weren’t kind to psychics.
She walked into the makeshift command center, finding Lucas and Samantha working. Lucas was at one of the computer stations, and Samantha was studying the evidence boards.
Without so much as a greeting, Robbie slammed the door behind her, and said, “I want this fucker dead.”
—
HE WAS GLAD he had found a private place to do his work. No more alleys where passersby could discover him. Besides, it was still daylight—albeit overcast gray daylight. But the storage shed, as close as he had been able to get to the hotel without risking discovery, was sorely lacking in creature comforts, and he found himself lying on a wrinkled, dirty tarp that smelled of turpentine and seemed to have several small chunks of lumber underneath.
His head hurt.
His head hurt so much.
It was dim in the shed, but he felt the wetness on his face, under his nose, and knew it wasn’t tears. Blood.
He tried to use the tarp to help stop the bleeding, but it was rough and stank and seemed to make him bleed more. Just like he bled more when he tried to move, to sit up.
He could hear it thundering and wished the storm would hurry and get here. They made him feel better, storms. Made him feel . . . stronger. At least since the accident.
The dark usually helped him as well, but not this time. This time, he had pushed too hard, tried too hard.
“Bitch,” he whispered. “I’ll get you next time. I’ll be ready for you next time. Bitch . . .”
—
BOTH SAMANTHA AND Lucas turned to stare at Robbie after her rather violent entrance, perhaps a bit startled but no more than that. Taking unusual things calmly was one of the requirements to be an SCU agent.
“What’s happened, Robbie?” Sam asked.
“I just came out of a waking nightmare.” Robbie couldn’t be still, so she paced. “It seemed as real as this is. Only in that waking nightmare, I was standing by the window in our sitting room, and when Dante came in, I turned around and shot him. Killed him. You want to take my gun? I wish you’d take my gun.”
Sam was frowning slightly. “He already knew he could mess with your mind, change your memories. Why would he give you the memory of killing Dante?”
“Just for jollies?” Robbie was in no mood for speculation but gave it a shot. “I think he tried to make me actually do it. When I came out of it, I was standing outside Dante’s bedroom door, in a robe, holding my gun. So he’d gotten me that far. I really think he believed he could make me kill my partner.”
“But you didn’t,” Sam reminded her quietly.
“No, I didn’t. Not this time. But when he couldn’t make me actually do it, he made me believe I had. He really made me believe I had.” Robbie wasn’t the crying sort of woman, but her eyes glistened with tears she wouldn’t shed. “And how can I trust myself now? Around any of you? As long as this son of a bitch is alive, how can I trust myself?”
“Were you asleep or already up?” Luke asked.
Robbie didn’t even have to think about that. “I’d been asleep. Sleeping hard, because I was tired. When I came back to myself, I was standing at his door. I had my gun, but I was still dressed for bed in a sleepshirt, with a hotel robe over it.”
“So maybe it was an experiment,” Sam said. “To find out if it was easier for him to get into her head, influence her, if she was asleep when he tried. If he’s been watching us, he must know we’ve split shifts. It doesn’t seem to be working out very well, since you barely slept and Dante should be here any minute, but the unsub could have seen you two go into the hotel hours ago.”
Robbie blinked. “Dante’s coming?”
“Yeah. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s nearly as shaken as you are.”
“Why? He was asleep.”
Sam opened her mouth to reply, but Dante came in just then, not slamming the door as Robbie had, but not exactly calmly. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, his hair still damp from the shower, and he was rubbing the center of his chest with one hand.
He looked immediately at Robbie. “I had the most vivid fucking nightmare. You shot me. Only it wasn’t really you.”
Before Robbie could speak, Lucas held up a hand. “What do you mean it wasn’t really her?”
“It was . . . her face was like the missing people we watched on the videos. Like the face of a doll. No expression. No life. Creepy as hell, though not as creepy as seeing—and feeling—her shoot me. I mean, I got shot once; it was just a graze, but I remember how it felt. This was like that, only much, much more painful.”
“More than a dream,” Robbie muttered. “That bastard got into our heads again.”
Dante frowned. “First time for me.”
“You were asleep,” Sam told him. “More vulnerable even with that strong shield. Especially since he can’t seem to aim his energy very well.”
“Really?” Robbie said. “He aimed it at me pretty well.”
It was Lucas who said, “I doubt he meant Dante to know anything at all. It was you he was after, Robbie, you he’d already left . . . bread crumbs to follow. You he wanted to be able to control. What Dante got was . . . spillover.”
“Vivid spillover,” Dante muttered. “I swear my chest hurts like hell.”
Dryly, Sam said to him, “Power of suggestion. Robbie was convinced she’d shot and killed you, and she’s a telepath. She doesn’t usually broadcast, but in moments of extreme stress . . .”
“I have been known to,” Robbie admitted, with an apologetic grimace to her partner. “Sorry.” Then she frowned. “I don’t like the way this bastard is playing with our minds. My mind. And why’s he fixated on me?”
Musing, Luke said, “It could be yours is the only ability he really understands, or believes he does. Close to what he has himself; any kind of true mind control or mind influence has to begin with telepathy. Or it could be he wants to control you for some reason we don’t yet know.”
“We need to figure that out,” Robbie told him. “And I mean soon. I catch him in my head again, I’ll give him more than a headache or nosebleed.”
Dan
te said, “You can do that?”
“She’s not supposed to,” Lucas said.
“Oh, tell me Bishop wouldn’t approve, destroying a monster like this one. Besides, it’d be self-defense.”
“That’s a report I’d like to read,” Sam murmured.
“I’m still in the dark,” Dante complained. “You could destroy him? As in—kill him? With your mind?”
Earnestly, Robbie said, “I’d have to be touching him physically. And I’d have to be really pissed off.”
“And if you were?”
“Well . . . ever get hold of your daddy’s shotgun and shoot a pumpkin or watermelon when you were a kid just to see what would happen?”
“Yeah.”
“Something like that.” Robbie seemed very calm.
Dante was rather glad she was calm. He looked at Lucas. “When I joined the unit, I was told that psychic abilities couldn’t be used as weapons except defensively.”
Sam murmured, “Read the fine print. That’s shouldn’t be used as weapons except defensively.”
“Sam.”
“Well, it’s true. Look, we don’t have many psychics in the unit either powerful enough or with enough control to actually be able to hurt somebody else. And, like Robbie said, she has to be enraged, completely out of control. That’s not only not her normal state, it’s almost unheard of.”
Reassuringly to her partner, Robbie said, “And Bishop taught me a lot about control. So did Miranda. I’ve never killed anybody with my mind.” She paused, then added, “Blew the hell out of some pumpkins and watermelons, though.”
Dante sat down at the conference table. “Nobody ever tells me anything.”
Robbie sort of waved the hand not holding her coffee at him, and said to Luke and Sam, “With all due deference to Dante’s uneasiness, I’m way more concerned with our unsub and his apparent ability to waltz in and out of my mind whenever he wants.”
“It might not be so easy for him,” Lucas pointed out.
“I don’t know if it was easy for him or hard, but I don’t want him in my head again, ever,” Robbie snapped—if quietly.
“Calm down,” Sam said quietly. “There’s no way in hell you’d ever deliberately shoot your partner. If this unsub made a try for that, I’m guessing he ended up just as you expected, with a pounding headache and probably a nosebleed. At least. If he’s relatively new to his abilities, he could have ended up with a lot worse. But whatever he was trying, all he could really do was what he did before. Plant a few memories in your head. Probably quick and brief ones.”
—
HE COULDN’T GET the bleeding stopped for the longest time, and that frightened him, even though he didn’t want to admit it.
Only cowards were afraid, and he was no coward.
He finally tore strips from his shirt and stuffed them up inside his nose. The plugs kept the blood from streaming down over his now-torn shirt, but he had to breathe through his mouth, and every time he swallowed he tasted blood.
That was . . . unpleasant.
And he suspected there was something badly wrong with his head. It hurt, of course, maybe worse than it had ever hurt before, but . . . the lumps. They had been there before, of course, but when he put his hands up to feel, he realized there were new bulges. He wondered if that was what happened when a brain grew beyond the capacity of a skull to hold it.
Would the skull crack, eventually? Or would it continue to bulge, as his bulged?
That could be a problem.
Still, he was utterly committed to his plan, and just as utterly convinced it would work. First he would finish punishing Jonah, that was paramount. Because it was all Jonah’s fault, and he had to pay.
Choices. It was all about choices.
Every choice had a price.
And Jonah would pay. Because when the girl had escaped, all according to plan, she had unknowingly stepped on a pressure plate, and that would set it all in motion.
Jonah would be first through the doorway, if he knew Jonah. And he did. He’d be first through, and he’d see what was waiting for him. The punishment that was worse than being shot or killed; those were too quick.
This . . . this would haunt Jonah Riggs forever.
—
ROBBIE THOUGHT ABOUT it, then sat down heavily in one of the chairs at the conference table across from Dante, obviously still more shaken than she wanted to admit. “It seemed so real. So unbelievably fucking real.” Then she looked around, suddenly realizing. “Where’s Jonah? Wasn’t he supposed to be working with you guys?”
Sam filled her in on what had been happening, finishing, “He left about an hour ago, so—”
Before she could finish, Jonah came into the command center. He looked windblown, but the relief on his face told them all they really needed to know.
“How is Nessa?” Sam asked anyway.
“In pretty good shape. Cuts and scrapes on her bare feet, and I doubt she’ll ever sleep in a dark room again, but Doc says she’ll be fine with enough rest and good food.”
“He didn’t hurt her?”
“No. She doesn’t remember him even touching her. Though she was out at first, so . . . still possible, I guess. She wanted a shower, and Doc had a quiet word with her; he doesn’t believe she was molested or suffered any kind of sexual attack.”
“She didn’t see him,” Lucas said, and it wasn’t a question.
Jonah shook his head. “If I understood her, he was seldom there, and when he was, because she was trying to hide her awareness from him, she visualized a black snake. Although even if she’d opened her eyes, she wouldn’t have been able to see him; from what she said, it was darker than dark in that place.”
“Was he starving her—the rest of them?”
Jonah shook his head. “Nutrients through an IV as far as Doc could tell from Nessa, and what she could tell him about where and how they were held.”
“So the others are alive?”
“They were when Nessa got away. At least, she thinks they were. She could hear them breathing, and in feeling her way out, touched at least a couple of them.” He paused, shook his head. “Freaked her out, but she didn’t scream. She’s a strong little girl. She was certain they were breathing.”
“Kept where?”
“I left two of my men with orders not to budge from where we found Nessa, and I didn’t backtrack because I wanted to get Nessa to the doc ASAP. But from what she said and where we found her, he’s been keeping them in what used to be an old clay mine. Deep underground.”
“I didn’t know clay was mined,” Luke said.
“All kinds of things have been mined in Tennessee,” Jonah said. “A couple hundred years back, this state was considered one of the richest in the South for minerals. Anyway, clay was mined for reasons you’d expect: pottery, additives for masonry, that sort of thing. Usually in big open pits, which ended up as lakes once they played out, most of them. But there were a few test shafts bored into the ground here and there; some were successful, and some just . . . ended. It sounds like that’s where Nessa and the others have been held. There’s a forest there now, but when the shaft was originally dug more than a hundred years ago, the trees were a lot more sparse.
“The shaft, large enough for a man of medium height to stand up straight, was bored down at a slight angle, and at the bottom they found a big cavern. Interesting, but it was unsuitable for removing clay. And there was nothing else interesting there, no other minerals or gems. It was marked on the old map—I have one of my people digging that up now—and notes made that if anyone ever decided to build there, the cavern would have to be blasted first, and fill brought in.”
“It’s that close to the surface?” Lucas asked intently.
“Safe to walk across, even ride a horse or drive across probably, but not safe to sink any kind of building foundat
ions there. That area was even farther from town than it is now, so they just took simple precautions. The entrance boarded up with timbers, DANGER, DO NOT ENTER painted across them. And people forgot. The paint faded, the timbers rotted, and the forest grew all around it.”
“Until the unsub came along.”
Jonah nodded. “If he grew up around here, he could have heard about it. There are a few mine shafts scattered closer to the mountains, but the ranger service makes sure the barriers at the mouth of those shafts cannot be opened. Dangerous.
“I don’t remember any of my friends as kids wanting to explore any caves or shafts, and I haven’t had to chase any away in the years I’ve been chief, but everybody knew it was somewhere in the woods. If he’d been hiking in the woods, he could have found it. Vines had grown up all around there, but they wouldn’t have been too difficult to pull away. And it’s far enough out that he probably didn’t worry much about keeping it hidden while he came and went.”
Sam frowned. “Did Nessa say anything about pulling vines away when she was getting out?”
“No. But she was so intent on getting out, I doubt she would have even noticed them.”
“We’ll need to talk to her,” Sam said.
“I know. But right now, the doctors and her family are around her. And we know where to find the others without having to talk to her first. That’s our priority, finding the others.”
“Agreed,” Luke and Sam said in one voice.
Jonah frowned at Robbie. “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”
“We had a little disturbance.”
“Little?” Dante murmured.
Robbie shook her head. “Never mind that for now. I think it’s safe to say that both Dante and I are wide awake, believe me.”
“Okay.” Jonah straightened. “I’ve put Doc on alert at the clinic, and I have my people standing by. Sarah will meet us at the station.” When Lucas raised his brows, Jonah added, “My first priority is getting those people out of there. I mean to go in there in force, armed, and wearing vests.”