Blood Ties

CHAPTER 4

DIANA OPENED HER EYES SLOWLY, then sat up a lot faster, shoving the covers aside to sit on the edge of her bed.

Her bed—changed. Weirdly one-dimensional, a photograph without light or shadow. Like the room that was dull and without color or life or warmth. It was filled with that oddly flat, colorless twilight that was not day and not night but somewhere in between. She had always suspected that this place lay somewhere outside time, apart from what she knew and understood time to be. That it was something between the living world and whatever lay beyond it.

As far back as she could remember, she’d called it the gray time.

She turned her head and looked at the clock on her nightstand, which had boasted large red digital numbers in a readout easy to see. Now it was blank, featureless and numberless. All clocks were the same here, missing numbers or missing hands and numbers.

No time passed in the gray time. Funny, that.

Creepy.

Diana got out of bed, not bothering to find slippers or even socks, though her feet were cold; it was always cold in the gray time, and no amount of clothing or blankets had ever made a difference. Besides, she wasn’t physically here, after all. At least—

She looked back, both relieved and, as always, unsettled to see herself still there in the undisturbed bed, sleeping, face peaceful. Her physical body breathed, its heart beat. It lived.

But everything that made her emotionally and psychologically Diana—her personality, her soul—no longer occupied that body. She couldn’t see the thread connecting the two halves of herself but knew it existed. Knew how fragile it was. How easily it could be severed.

Yeah, great job scaring yourself. Stop thinking about what could happen. Just move.

“Remember all this in the morning. No matter what happens. There’s no more forgetting now,” she told her sleeping self, unsurprised by the hollow, almost echo of her voice. Normal, for the gray time. And so was the faint and faintly unpleasant smell.

Her own alert readiness and familiarity with this place was also normal, and she wondered as she always did why she never felt this sure of herself in the real world. It would make so many things so much easier, she thought, if she could feel this way all the time.

That rueful awareness had barely dawned when she started around the foot of the bed toward the door and was jolted to a stop by what she saw. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Beats me,” Hollis said, looking around her warily. She was standing just inside the door to the hallway. “This is your world, not mine. I was asleep in bed, minding my own business, a minute ago. I saw me there. Which was an experience I’d rather not repeat, thank you.”

“I told you not to look back.”

“Hey, I was curious. And at least I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt, so, you know, thankful for that. Why’d you pull me in?”

“I didn’t,” Diana said slowly. “I’ve only done that once, when we tried it months ago—and I was surprised as hell that it worked.”

“Then why am I here?”

“That was my question, remember?”

Hollis shivered and absently rubbed her bare arms. “Damn. If I’d known this was going to happen, I would have worn flannel pajamas instead of this nightgown.”

Diana was about to explain that more clothing wouldn’t have helped the chill, but then she took a second look and said, “Huh. That’s an awfully… urn… Not something you usually pack for a work trip, is it?”

“Can we just get on with it, please?”

“Get on with what?”

“Whatever it is I assume I’m here for.”

“I don’t know what you’re here for. Or why I’m here, when I haven’t been able to get here for weeks even when I tried.”

“Something to do with the case, no doubt. The more deeply involved in an investigation we get, the more apt we are to find all our senses reacting—including the extra ones.” Hollis shrugged. “At any rate, one thing I’ve learned in the SCU is that you take things as they come. We’re here now, and there has to be a reason why we’re here. What’s your normal procedure? Just start walking and see where your guides—isn’t that what you call them—take you?”

“Yeah, usually. If a guide shows up, that is.”

“I don’t think I’ll ask what happens if no guide shows up. Just lead the way, will you? If I remember correctly, being here in your gray time is physically draining, and we were both tired to begin with.”

“It’s not my gray time.” But Diana moved past Hollis and led the way from her room.

As soon as they stepped out into the hallway, it became apparent that they were no longer at the B&B.

“Oh, man, this is creepy,” Hollis breathed.

Diana looked over her shoulder at the other woman. “I don’t recognize this place. You do?”

“I hope not. I really, really hope not.” Hollis didn’t as a rule give much away in terms of her expression, but the strain in her voice was impossible to miss, and her eyes were huge.

Diana looked around them. They stood at what appeared to be an intersection of two seemingly endless corridors. Each corridor was hospital-clean and gleaming even in this dull gray twilight, and each was lined with closed doors that were all identically featureless with the exception of gleaming grayish handles.

“Looks ordinary enough to me,” she said, returning her gaze to Hollis’s very still face. “I mean, no weirder than other places I’ve visited in the gray time.”

“But you’ve never been here before?”

“I don’t think so. Why? Where is this place?”

Hollis drew a breath and let it out slowly. “The first time I saw it, I was in somebody else’s dream {see Blood Dreams}. Found out later it’s a real place. And the real place is… Once upon a time, it was an asylum. Back in October, I met the monster who was caged there. He strapped me down to a table, and…”

“Hollis?”

“And he almost killed me.”

Reese DeMarco leaned on an elbow as he studied the map spread across his bed, his gaze moving intently from one highlighted spot to the next. Two of the highlights were close together and represented the two bodies found in Pageant County today. Or, rather, the previous day, since it was after midnight now. The other six were spread farther apart, over three southeastern states.

He was looking for a pattern.

He wasn’t finding one.

Not that it surprised him. The SCU was made up of serious and experienced monster hunters with the added edge of psychic abilities, and they were successful because they were very, very good; if a rational pattern in this madness had existed, the efforts of the rest of the team likely would have found it by now.

Eight murders committed in just over eight weeks. Five women, three men. All apparently tortured—with a singular creativity—before they were killed, and the most recent two further mangled and defiled after they were dead. No connection between the victims. No real enemies in any of their backgrounds individually, and virtually no commonalities among them as a group except for race: All had been white.

And all, with the exception of the most recent two, had been dumped like garbage by the side of various roads.

DeMarco frowned as he thought about that one more time. Until Serenade, the victims had been, as far as they could tell, shoved out of a car, possibly even a moving car.

Which, as Miranda had noted, pointed to the possibility of a second murderer, or at least an accomplice, since shoving a body out of a moving car was not an easy thing to do, and shoving one out of a stationary car required at least a few moments and some strength—or help.

That, more than anything else, had made this case, this investigation, unusual even for the SCU. One serial killer rampaging through their towns or counties was virtually always more than the local or state police could handle; they simply weren’t set up, with the procedures, the equipment, or the personnel and experience, to track down a killer of that sort, especially if he was only passing through and had no connection to the area.

Two serial killers, or one with an accomplice, put them into a smaller category than the relatively small one of serial killer: A conspiracy to commit murder was rare, and a serial killer with a partner or a sidekick was even more so. Only a handful of such cases had ever been documented by law enforcement.

“We’re keeping the possibility to ourselves for now,” Miranda had told DeMarco earlier in the evening, just as she had told the other agents on the case. “As well as we can, anyway. No leaks to the media. Nothing written in our reports. We don’t even discuss it among ourselves unless we’re absolutely sure we’re alone. And that includes not telling local police—unless and until we know the killers are in the area and we have a shot at finding them.”

“You know there are two of them, don’t you?” DeMarco had asked.

“We believe there’s a good chance.” We meaning she and Bishop. “But we’re not certain, Reese. Until we are, we investigate this case according to procedure and the evidence, not speculation.”

DeMarco had been about to remind her that they speculated all the time, when something she’d said before began to nag at him. “Nothing in our written reports? We don’t let the Bureau in on what’s going on?”

“We don’t speculate in our reports about something we have little or no evidence to support.”

He eyed her. “Oh, they are really not going to be happy with us about that.”

“When we stop these killers, that’ll be the only thing anybody who counts remembers about the investigation. That the killing was stopped.”

“I doubt the Director will be one of those people.”

“That’s okay. There are others. Noah’s spent a great deal of time and effort building a network of support, and that network will hold. No matter what the Director thinks.”

“And what about Bishop’s enemy? Whoever’s been reporting SCU movements back to the Director since—what—last summer? If we don’t know who that was—or is—we can hardly stop the leaks. And if we mean to withhold info from the Bureau, we damn sure need to make sure they don’t catch us doing it.”

Miranda hesitated, then said, “Noah’s working to resolve that situation. It’s one reason he’s not here. Until he does, we’re doing what we can to keep a low profile and not draw undue attention to the SCU.”

“On a serial-murder case with six certain and two possible victims already? Good luck with that.”

“We’ve managed so far. The local police have been willing to work with us, willing to not… overreact… to a body dumped in their jurisdictions, especially since none of the victims have turned out to be local citizens. Since the victims have been dumped over so large an area, and since no single police department or sheriff’s department has had to cope with more than one, media attention has been minimal and brief.”

“But we’ve got two possible victims in the same area this time.”

“Yes.”

“Somebody’s going to connect the dots soon enough, Miranda. You know that. There’s a story here.”

“Yes. And an even bigger story if word breaks that we suspect a pair of killers. Which is why we keep that quiet as long as we possibly can.”

DeMarco shook off the memory of that conversation and frowned once again down at the map, this time not really looking at it. He felt oddly… cold… all of a sudden, tense and alert in a way he recognized, every sense flaring, expanding beyond himself to seek out and pinpoint a threat of some kind. He looked up, scanned the room warily. But nothing seemed out of place or otherwise amiss.

Pleasant bedroom, neat and attractive without being overly fussy, which suited him. The TV was on and tuned to MSNBC but muted.

He had removed his shoulder holster, of course, when he at least nominally turned in for the night, but his weapon lay within easy reach. Reaching out slowly, he put his hand on it but didn’t draw it from the holster.

Because everything he felt told him the threat he sensed was not anything a bullet could stop.

DeMarco didn’t particularly like to think about many of his experiences in the military, but they had certainly left him with sharpened instincts in addition to his psychic ones. In those days, it had meant the difference between dying—and coming out alive to not talk about it.

These days it meant a sense that was not quite psychic telling him something was off-kilter around him.

Shit. With my luck, this place is haunted.

But he didn’t think that was it. He wasn’t particularly sensitive to spirits, for one thing, and for another this didn’t feel like a threat to himself but to someone or something else.

DeMarco’s unique double shield made him hypersensitive to the various energies associated with paranormal abilities, but only when he allowed the outer, protective shield to drop and concentrated on using what made the inner shield so remarkable: If his focus was good enough, he could either make that second shield vastly stronger and more impenetrable or else turn it into a kind of magnet that drew in and interpreted—so to speak—psychic energies.

He couldn’t steal anyone else’s ability, but he could hamper their power to project anything forceful outward, and he could tune in to whatever frequency was being used.

“Like a radio,” Quentin had once noted helpfully. “And every other psychic is on a different channel.”

Which simplified an ability that was incredibly complex but defined it well for all of that.

DeMarco was pretty sure somebody in the house was experiencing psychic phenomena. What he wasn’t sure of was whether that person was a threat—or was being threatened.

Either way, it didn’t bode well.

Swearing under his breath, DeMarco sat on the edge of the bed, then closed his eyes and began to concentrate, dropping his outer shield completely and attempting to tune in to whatever was happening.

Almost immediately, he was hit with a wave of stark terror.

Frowning, Diana said, “October? That was when you guys were tracking the killer of all those women in Boston, including Senator LeMott’s daughter, right?”

“Yeah. The monster in this place—or a place identical to this—was the killer.”

“Who was taken out of circulation. Locked up.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Then why are we here?”

Hollis drew another of those get-a-grip breaths and said, “The end of that case turned out not to be. It was connected to what happened later, in January, in Grace.”

“In North Carolina. The church, Samuel. Yeah, that was the party I didn’t get invited to.”

“Be glad. We lost some good people there, and very nearly lost a lot more.”

Diana didn’t like to think of Quentin—of the team—in danger, but she had read the reports and knew what had happened. She knew how terribly high a price had been demanded of them in order to stop that killer.

“Samuel is dead. The church now is made up of a group of mostly bewildered people who aren’t even sure they want to be a church anymore, none of them a killer and none claiming apocalyptic visions. It’s over.”

“Maybe not,” Hollis said, staring down each of the endless, featureless hallways in turn. “Maybe we only thought it was over.”

“Hollis—”

“Shouldn’t there be a guide by now?”

“Maybe. Sometimes I have to walk a bit on my own before I find them. Or they find me.”

“I really don’t want to explore these hallways, Diana.”

“Hollis, this isn’t real. I mean, it’s like a dream; we aren’t here in the flesh. Nothing can hurt us here.”

“Nice try, but I know enough about your gray time to know that if our spirits—our consciousness—get trapped here, somehow cut off from our bodies, then we don’t come back.”

It was another reminder of something Diana didn’t like to think about, but she nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, but I’m pretty sure that’s rare. Besides, I can handle it. I’ve been doing this nearly all my life, and I’ve never not found my way back out.”

“First time for everything.”

“You had to say it.”

“Sorry. Diana, I find your gray time unnerving enough in concept, but to be here in this place is … Let’s just say I’ve been in some majorly scary situations, and this one is right up there with the worst of them.”

“Okay, then, we leave. Now.” Diana gripped her fellow agent’s wrist and said, “Close your eyes and concentrate on the place you want to get back to. Your room in the B&B.”

Hollis wavered visibly. “We might learn something here—”

“Fear is weakness, and neither one of us wants to be weak here, trust me on that. We’re going back.”

Hollis closed her eyes and kept them closed as long as she could. Did her best to concentrate, to focus. But the stillness of the place, the faint odd smell that made her think of rotten eggs and maybe a place too close to hell, the cold that seeped into her very bones, all of it worked on her nerves so that she finally opened her eyes. “Diana?”

“Concentrate.”

“We’re still here.”

Diana opened her eyes and looked around. Steadily, she said, “Okay, then it looks like we have to stay long enough to see what we were brought here to see.”

“Great. That’s just great.”

Still seemingly utterly calm and comfortable in this unnatural place, Diana said, “I’m not going to let you go. We’re going to start walking until we find whatever it is we’re meant to find here.” She waited for Hollis’s nod, then chose a hallway, apparently at random, and began to walk.

Hollis didn’t question the choice. She was totally out of her element here and had to trust that Diana’s experience would lead them—and lead them safely.

Diana tried the doors one by one as they reached them, but each one was locked. The hallway continued to stretch before them, seemingly infinite, with door after door locked and impenetrable.

After a while Hollis began to be more conscious of her weariness than of her fear. Every step required more effort, a heaviness dragging at her. Her breathing grew more labored, and she felt a bit light-headed.

Diana, who appeared to be unaffected, looked back at her with a frown as she paused in the middle of the corridor. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”

“You won’t get an argument.” Hollis tried not to huff and puff as she said it.

Down the corridor a bit, one of the doors swung inward with a faint but audible creak.

“Oh, that can’t be good,” Hollis said.

“Maybe it’s the way out.”

“Yeah, right. They always make that mistake in horror movies. Let’s not, okay?”

Diana hesitated, then said, “My instincts are telling me to go that way, Hollis. To step through that doorway. All my experience is telling me the same thing. I’ve got to get you out, and right now that looks like the only viable option.”

Hollis allowed herself to be pulled along as Diana headed for the door, but said, “You should talk to Dorothy. Ruby slippers. Click your heels, there’s no place like home. All that jazz.”

“Yeah, I need a reliable shortcut out. I get it,” Diana said. “So far, though, I’ve been at the mercy of the guides pretty much. And when I’ve had to get out, I’ve gotten out.”

“Wasn’t Quentin your lifeline a couple of times?”

“Yes. But I survived on my own doing this for twenty-some-odd years before he came along.”

“No need to bristle. I was just asking.” Hollis was staring at the partially open door they were approaching, most of her attention on that.

The way out?

Or a doorway leading to something infinitely worse?

Hollis did her best to tamp down a rising, unreasoning panic. Not that there was no reason to be afraid in this otherworldly place, this gray time, where everything was outside her experience. But the degree of fear was something she had never felt before. And considering everything she had experienced since a horrifically violent event had changed her life forever, that was an unsettling realization.

Why was that partially open door scaring the shit out of her? What were her own instincts or senses trying to tell her?

Diana said, not quite defensively, “I was not bristling. I just… I don’t want to have to depend on Quentin like that.”

“Okay, I get that, I do. Now, are you absolutely sure we need to walk through that door? Because I’ve got an awful feeling that whatever is waiting for us in there is not a good thing.” She intended to add a few stronger sentiments but stopped, frowning.

“Hollis?”

“That’s odd. Really odd. It feels almost like something is pulling at me.” She looked down at Diana’s hand on her arm, then shook her head. “Not you. Something… I’m sorry, Diana, I—” Hollis vanished, there one instant and gone the next, like a soap bubble.

Her first realization was that she was so tired, moving hardly seemed worth the effort. Breathing hardly seemed worth the effort. But Hollis did breathe and, eventually, did move. She fought to open her eyes. And fought to say something, if only in a whisper.

“Damn, that was—”

She was in her bed, that much she realized, if sluggishly. Strong arms were holding her, and against her cheek she could feel the steady beating of a heart.

Wait, that’s not right.

It felt right, or at least it felt good, felt safe and maybe even something better than safe, but it was unfamiliar.

“Hollis?”

She caught her breath, then concentrated all the strength she could muster into the effort required to push herself away, to sit up in the bed on her own and stare at him.

“Reese? What the hell?”

“I think that’s my question. Want to tell me where you were just now? Because a major part of you wasn’t here.” His hands remained on her shoulders for support.

She was sure it was for support.

“I was—wait. How did you get into my room?”

“I picked the lock.”

Hollis blinked at him, trying mightily to get her sluggish mind moving with some semblance of normalcy. That struggle was complicated by the fact that she could see his aura, and it was so unusual in color and full of what she took to be sparks of flickering power that all she wanted to do was stare at it. “Why?” she managed to ask finally.

“It was the fastest way to get in here.”

“That’s not what I meant. Why did you have to get in here?”

“You were in trouble,” he said, calm and matter-of-fact. His face was expressionless as always, though his pale blue eyes seemed to be darker than normal.

She blinked again. “I was?”

“You were afraid. Terrified. And weakening fast.”

“Wait,” she said again. “You were in my head?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what? Exactly?” She was feeling stronger. And she was feeling defensive.

DeMarco didn’t seem disturbed by that.

“I could sense that something was wrong in the house, that the energy here had changed. It felt like a threat.”

“And you’re hypersensitive to threats,” she remembered.

He nodded. “So I focused on that and realized the threat was directed at you. I knew you were in a bad place. I also knew you couldn’t get out of there alone. So I came to help.”

Hollis was trying to concentrate and finding it very difficult. “How did you know you could? I mean, where I was … That isn’t a place you just walk into, not unless you’re a medium. Hell, not unless you’re Diana.”

“Hollis—”

She felt a chill go through her and stared at him. “Diana couldn’t find her way out. She tried—and couldn’t. And where she is, that awful place…Oh, my God. What if he’s dead? What if he’s dead and back there torturing people all over again? Torturing souls this time? What if he has Diana strapped to that table now?”

Diana had no idea what had happened, but she didn’t have a good feeling about it. At all. She hesitated there where Hollis had vanished, trying to decide whether she should continue on through that invitingly half-open door or turn back and make a concerted effort to get herself out of here.

“Diana.”

She frowned at the grave young girl who had appeared as abruptly as Hollis had vanished. A guide she didn’t recognize, though that wasn’t at all unusual; she seldom encountered the same guide twice.

“Who’re you?”

“I’m Brooke.” The girl, who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen when she was alive, said reprovingly, “Diana, you aren’t supposed to bring living people into the gray time. It’s dangerous for them. And for you too.”

“Is she okay?”

“Yes. This time.”

“Look, I didn’t intend to bring Hollis in.”

“No. But you did once before. You brought her in deliberately. And that opened a channel.”

Diana didn’t like where this was heading. “You mean Hollis can turn up here whenever she likes?”

“No. I mean she can come here when you do. That she’ll be drawn here when you open the door. Because it’s her nature. She’s a medium. The last person you should have brought in here.”

“Shit.”

“It’s taken you a lifetime of experience to be able to come here and move around without losing all your strength. Without the constant danger of becoming trapped here. Hollis hasn’t had that. She could get lost here. She could die here.”

“I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Diana—”

With a gesture that swept aside the subject for the moment, Diana said, “Brooke, why am I here? Hollis said this place was where a killer was… kept. On the living side. But that’s over. He isn’t here now and he can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

Brooke shook her head and took a step back, then turned toward the partially opened door. “Everything’s connected, Diana.”

A typically guidelike response.

Diana followed but said, “Nothing like this has ever happened here in the gray time, not to me. What is it you need me to do for you?”

“I need you to find the truth.”

“What truth? How you died?”

“No. It started long before I died. That’s what you have to find. The truth buried underneath it all.”

“Brooke, I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You will.” The young guide walked through the open door.

Diana paused, drew a deep breath, and then followed.

To her surprise, she found she was back at the B&B, though it took her a moment to recognize the hallway in which she stood. She looked around, frowning, but finally oriented herself.

It was the hallway outside her room.

Brooke was gone.

Still, Diana was all too aware that her “trip” into the gray time was not over. Because she was still there. The hallway was gray and cold, everything still and peculiarly one-dimensional. The little side table between her door and the one to Quentin’s room looked as if it was a part of the dull gray wall, and the prints hanging on the walls might have been grayish crayon smudges for all the depth they displayed.

She looked at Quentin’s door for a moment, tempted, then told herself she had already been here too long. Her legs had that heavy sensation she recognized, and it was a bit harder to breathe than it should have been. She might not tire easily in the gray time but she did tire eventually, and when she did, the progression toward exhaustion was rapid.

She needed to leave.

With still little idea of why she had been brought into the gray time and feeling very frustrated about it, she went to her own bedroom door, opened it, and went inside.

Except it wasn’t her room. It was Quentin’s.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed and rose to smile at her. “Diana. I’ve been waiting for you.”

She stared at him, aware of the niggling sense of something not right, something… off. “Have you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why?”

“You know why. We belong together. I’ve been waiting for you to realize that. To accept it.”

Diana was straining to listen, and with more than her ears, but it was difficult because she was growing colder and colder. And her strength felt as though it was draining away. As though someone had pulled a plug.

“You have to accept it,” he said in a reasonable tone as he came toward her. “It’s the way things have to be, Diana. I know what’s best for you. You can trust me.”

“No.” She fumbled behind her, trying desperately to find the door handle. “No, I can’t trust you.”

“Diana—”

“You’re not Quentin,” she said.