“I guess the darkest energy would come from the sacrifice of a priestess, wouldn’t it? And you need the darkest energy tonight. A full moon, a satanic priestess. What else, Leah? Does Jenny have some of your blood in her stomach like Tate did?”
“So you figured that out, did you?”
“That it was your blood? Had to be, really. Whoever planned that sacrifice had saved and stored the blood. And you really couldn’t afford to have another body turn up before your plan was under way. So it had to be your blood.”
“My father’s blood.”
Riley didn’t allow herself to be distracted. “I’m betting you were a teenager when he found you. Or you found him. Evil calling out to evil, I imagine. It does that, we’ve found. Anyway, he had his apprentice. His blood princess. And you were good, I’ll give you that. The whole time I was tracking him, you were on me, weren’t you? I was focused on him, so obsessed I was blind to you being right there. Watching me. Reporting back to him.”
“He would have beaten you,” Leah said suddenly, her voice changing, dropping and taking on a guttural edge. “That was the plan. To seem to be shot. To fall into the river. So we could stop running. So we could settle somewhere.”
“What went wrong?”
“So stupid and senseless. The body armor he wore saved him from your bullets. But it was heavy. The current was stronger than we’d anticipated. And he was winded from the chase. He drowned.”
“Pity,” Riley said without remorse. “I was hoping he really suffered.”
Again, Leah’s head moved in that stiff, twisted way, and again the candles flared, this time as though the flames were fed by gas jets. The clearing was nearly as bright as day, the woods around them dark and shadowed.
From the corner of her eye, Riley made sure Jake was still. And he was. In shock, probably, she thought. Shock of the emotional kind. Or total bewilderment.
She said, “I guess you’ve been having a lot of fun messing with my head, huh?”
“You have no idea,” Leah said. “You were a challenge at first. I was only able to cloak my mind without affecting yours very much. That’s why I resorted to the Taser.”
“Yeah, that plus all the dark energy you were channeling, especially from the sacrifice, was enough to get the job done. And I’ll bet you really enjoyed butchering Wesley Tate. Chip off the old block, aren’t you?”
“I am my father’s daughter.”
Riley thought she had never heard anything so chilling as that proud statement. She drew a breath and fought to keep her own voice even and steady.
“So it was all about payback. You took your time, set up the situation just as you wanted it. Used the satanists as window dressing, something to keep us distracted while you were performing all the black rites alone. Using fire. Using blood. Using death. Whatever it took to get the power you wanted, you needed. To destroy me. Not just kill me. Destroy me.”
“You took away my father. You have to pay for that,” Leah said reasonably.
“Your father was a sadistic bag of evil,” Riley said in a matching tone. “The world needed to be rid of him. The sane world, at least.”
Leah stiffened again but laughed, the sound like brittle sticks rattling together. “You don’t seem to get it, little girl. I’ve already beaten you. I’ve stolen time from you. I’ve wrecked your memories. I’ve fixed it so you don’t even remember falling in love. How sad is that?”
“Now, see, that’s the one step too far. That’s the one that’s going to cost you, Leah. Because I understand the need for vengeance. Makes perfect sense to me. Even to avenge a sadistic bag of evil like Price. I get that. But the memory of finding my soul mate? I want that back. And you’re going to give it to me.”
This time Leah’s laugh was a bit—just a bit—uncertain. “What you don’t get is that you’ve lost. Your mind is so weak there’s no way it can even fight me, much less take back what I stole from it.”
“You’re right. I’m not strong enough to beat you. Not alone. But that’s what you don’t get, Leah. I’m not alone.” Riley reached back with one hand and felt Ash’s fingers close around hers.
There was a frozen moment when Leah realized, understood. She lifted her knife and lunged toward Jenny’s prone body.
Needing the sacrifice. The power.
Riley fired one shot, hitting Leah in the hand so that the knife fell from her suddenly useless fingers.
“No,” she said hoarsely. “I won’t let you—”
Riley had never tried to do anything even remotely like this before, yet somehow she knew exactly what to do. When Leah gathered her fury, all her emotions, and screamed, sending a visible, jagged spear of dark energy from the circle aimed at Riley, it didn’t find its target as a weapon, but as a tool.
It was almost like the Taser attack that had really started everything, only this time Riley wasn’t caught, wasn’t trapped, and was a long, long way from defenseless. And this time she didn’t discharge her strength into the earth but channeled the sheer energy flung at her, took from it what she was determined to have, and then sent what was left streaming back to its source.
But when it returned to Leah, it was white-hot and burning, and her second scream shattered the night even as the energy shattered her circle of power. There was an almost blinding burst of light, the scream was cut off as though by a knife, and then it was over.
The candles were gone. The salt scattered to the winds. And clean moonlight shone down on the two women closest to the altar, one of them just beginning to stir and the other a crumpled form on the ground.
“Is she dead?” Ash asked.
“No,” Riley answered. “But powerless now. Jenny was drugged, but she’s coming out of it. She should be fine.”
“With a stomach full of blood, she’s going to be sick.”
“Well, after that, she’ll be fine. I don’t know if she’ll go back to being a satanist, but she’ll live.”
“Thanks to you.”
She turned and looked at him, smiling. “Thanks to us. Hello. I remember you.”
Ash was smiling as well. “Good.”
Jake struggled to rise from the ground, his “What the bloody hell is all this?” several octaves higher than he, perhaps, would have preferred.
Riley glanced at him, and then said to her soul mate, “I have a feeling the debriefing is going to take some time.”
“That’s okay,” Ash said, pulling her into his arms. “We have time.”
EPILOGUE
Gordon admitted he’d been feeling uneasy about Leah for weeks before he called me,” Riley said. “It was nothing he could put his finger on, just a feeling something wasn’t right. When all the supposed evidence of occult activities began turning up, he thought maybe that was it, that somebody’d put a hex on her or something like that.”
Ash raised his eyebrows. “A hex?”
“Hey, we’ve all seen weirder things, believe me. And Gordon’s Louisiana roots run deep. Thing is, stories his grandmother told him clash with his Duke education, so he has a tendency to doubt his own instincts when it comes to the paranormal.”
“Duke, huh? I guess that also explains why he’s drawling one minute and talking like a college professor the next.”
“Yeah, that explains it.” Riley leaned against the deck railing and gazed down the beach, where a bonfire burned brightly—surrounded by a rather sober group of satanists. It was Friday night, and they were having their scheduled “marshmallow roast.”
“I don’t think they’re having much fun,” Ash noted.
“No. Too much to take in, probably. Even though they weren’t involved, they got too close to the dark side for a while. The very dark side. That tends to give people pause.”
“I can see how it would.”
Riley smiled slightly, without looking at him. “But not you, right?”
“Any pausing I did was early on,” he said. “Back when we were both cranky about falling in love. Once we fell, there really wa
sn’t anything to be done about it. Except enjoy.”
“Glad you added that last part.”
“Probably a good thing I can. I mean, I’m hitching my fate to a clairvoyant ex-military FBI agent who specializes in the occult and has the power to yank me out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night and draw me miles to her side in order to help her defeat the evil spawn of a serial killer.”
Riley chewed on her lower lip for a moment, and said, “Well, when you put it like that…”
“I’m a very brave man.”
“Yes. You are.” Riley turned and smiled at him in the bright moonlight. “Bishop’s going to try to recruit you, you know.” It wasn’t quite a question.
“I had a feeling.”
“Well, we’d make a hell of a team.”
Ash pulled her into his arms. “We already do, love.”
It was all the answer Riley needed.
BANTAM BOOKS BY KAY HOOPER
The Bishop Trilogies
Stealing Shadows
Hiding in the Shadows
Out of the Shadows
Touching Evil
Whisper of Evil
Sense of Evil
Hunting Fear
Chill of Fear
Sleeping with Fear
The Quinn Novels
Once a Thief
Always a Thief
Romantic Suspense
Amanda
After Caroline
Finding Laura
Hunting Rachel
Classic Fantasy and Romance
On Wings of Magic
The Wizard of Seattle
My Guardian Angel (anthology)
Yours to Keep (anthology)
SLEEPING WITH FEAR
A Bantam Book / July 2006
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2006 by Kay Hooper
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hooper, Kay.
Sleeping with fear / Kay Hooper.
p. cm.
1. Government investigators—Fiction. 2. Psychics—Fiction. 3. Occult crime investigation—Fiction. 4. South Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.O587 S55 2006 2006042767
813/.54 22
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90268-6
v3.0
Kay Hooper, Sleeping With Fear
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