Hunting Fear

CHAPTER 15

The reporter, eyes shifting uneasily, backed out of Samantha's booth, muttering, "That's okay, I think I got my money's worth."

Lucas immediately came out from the curtained-off area in back, took one look at Samantha, and handed her his handkerchief. As Ellis stepped into the booth, brows lifted, he said to her, "That's enough. Tell them she's done for the night."

Holding the handkerchief to her sluggishly bleeding nose, Samantha said, "Bastard beats his wife."

Ellis shook her head. "Maybe you can alert the sheriff."

"He's an out-of-towner, dammit."

Shaking her head once again, Ellis went back outside to offer rain checks to those still waiting to see Madam Zarina. "Sam-"

Heading off whatever he'd been about to say, Samantha said, "It's only when I sense violence of some kind that this happens."

"Maybe, but it's something new for you, Sam, something unusual. And that makes it a danger sign." He didn't sound particularly worried about it, merely matter-of-fact.

Samantha yanked off the turban and set it on the table before her, her gaze fixed on his face. "Okay, so fix it so I don't have to keep doing this. Find him."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, don't you think we've been trying?" Despite his words, his voice was still calm, his face expressionless.

"The cops, yes. The feds, yes. You? Well, you've been looking at maps and lists and autopsy reports and compiling profiles. You even climbed half a mountain today. But you weren't trying to find him, you were running behind him trying to find his victims. The way you've been doing for the past year and a half."

"Don't do this, Sam."

"Why not?" She refolded the handkerchief and dabbed at the last of the blood, looking away from him at last to watch what she was doing. "You're going to despise me by the time this is done anyway, so I might as well get everything I have to say said and out into the open."

"This is not the time or the place-"

"This is the only place we have, Luke, and time's running out. Or hadn't you noticed? You won one today, remember? You beat the bastard. And we both know he is not going to be gracious in defeat. He'll be on to the next move, probably already. Selecting his next victim, if he or she wasn 't already chosen long before now. Getting one of his remaining killing machines all polished up and ready."

Lucas drew a breath and said steadily, "It's nearly ten. Why don't you get changed and take off the makeup, and we'll get out of here."

"You can find him, you know."

"Sam, please."

"He feeds on fear, Luke. If what I saw when I touched that pendant is true, he's been feeding on fear for a long, long time. It's all inside him. You can feel that. All you have to do is tap in."

"I'll wait for you outside." He left the booth.

Samantha gazed after him for a long moment, then got to her feet and went into the curtained-off area in back. She changed out of her Madam Zarina getup and creamed away all the makeup, thinking as she studied her face in the mirror that there was less and less difference, these days, between the aged face of Madam Zarina and her own.

Moving more slowly than was usual for her, she neatly put away her makeup and other supplies, finished clearing up the space, and then went outside the booth to join Luke.

Looking at the bright, noisy carnival all around them, she said absently, "I wonder if he's here? Watching us. I wonder what it is about this place that fascinates him."

"You," Lucas said.

Before she could respond to that, Leo appeared, to say worriedly, "Sam, Ellis told me about the nosebleed. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Just a little tired."

"I'm taking her back to the motel," Lucas said.

"Try to get her to sleep late, will you?" Leo asked. "And, Sam, no reading tomorrow night. In fact, no carnival. I've already posted the notice that we'll be closed tomorrow night."

"No need to on my account."

Leo shook his head. "On everybody's account. You haven't been around much, so you haven't realized that everybody is on edge and anxious. There's just too much going on around here. I've even been asked by a few to pull up stakes in Golden and move on."

Samantha didn't look at Lucas. "We're only supposed to stay here until next Monday."

"Yeah. And we will-unless you change your mind about that."

"We'll see," she said.

"Just let me know." Leo sighed. "In the meantime, it'll do everybody good to have a night off. Matter of fact, I think most of them want to go into town, stay at the motel. I can't make out whether it's nerves or just the usual occasional need to sleep somewhere other than the caravans."

Lucas took Samantha's hand, rather surprising her, and said to Leo, "Keep an eye on your people. I don't think this killer would target any of you, but I can't be sure. So watch your backs."

"We will, Luke. Thanks."

As he led her back toward the parking area and his rental car, Samantha said quietly, "Leo's still grateful that you stood behind the carnival three years ago. When that garbage about gypsies stealing children hit the papers, a lot of ugly things started happening. If you hadn't convinced the local police to provide some security for us and gone on the record as saying no one in the carnival was involved, God knows where it would have ended."

"I was doing my job."

"You did more than your job, and we both know it."

Lucas silently unlocked the rental car and opened the passenger door for her.

She got in, once again conscious of weariness. And she wondered, as he came around the car and slid behind the wheel, if her plan was going to work. She wasn't sure, not anymore. Yes, Luke had been able to find the sheriff today, in time and against all odds, but she had the sense now that his walls were even higher and thicker than they had been before.

She had gotten too close and he had shut down. Maybe for good.

As they left the fairgrounds, he said, "I need to stop by my room and pick up a few things."

"You don't have to stay with me tonight."

"I'm not going to argue about this, Sam. I'm staying. For the duration."

"If I have to have a watchdog, I'm sure Jaylene wouldn't mind a roommate."

"Stop pushing, Sam."

"I'm not pushing, I'm trying to give you an out."

"I don't want an out."

"Right, you just want to punish me with the silent treatment."

"I'm not trying to-" He shook his head. "Christ, you make me crazy."

"It doesn't show. Very little shows, really, most of the time. On your face. There's intensity inside, force, but you keep it damped down almost always, out of sight. Is that the way you were raised, to show no emotion, no feeling? Is that part of it?"

Lucas didn't answer. In fact, he didn't say a word for the remainder of the trip to his motel and then back to hers. Samantha remained silent as well, and once they were inside the room she left him locking the door and went to take her usual shower.

She didn't linger, this time, under the hot water; it failed to either relax her or even begin to warm the chill deep inside her. She got out and dried off, put on her nightgown and robe. She toweled her hair, then used the wall hair dryer to completely dry it because she felt so cold.

When she came out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, she found Lucas on his feet but frowning at the television, and when she followed his gaze she could see why.

The exterior of the sheriff's department-and their arrival with Wyatt Metcalf.

The anchorwoman was briskly introducing the reporter on the scene, and then he was on-screen with the sheriff's department behind him. His voice held that urgent if muted excitement that was so common in television journalism, as he quickly brought viewers up to speed on the investigation and then detailed today's search and rescue of the sheriff of Clayton County.

"… and a source close to the investigation claims that deputies and federal agents were aided in their search for the sheriff by an avowed psychic. The woman's name is Samantha Burke, though she uses the name Madam Zarina when she tells fortunes in a carnival currently set up here in Golden. My source claims that she has apparently involved herself before in police investigations."

Amazing, Samantha thought, how "involved herself" could sound so suspicious.

"Tom, have the police or federal agents confirmed that Miss Burke helped them to locate Sheriff Metcalf?"

"No, Darcell, officials refused to comment. However, my source is certain that she played a major role in recovering the sheriff alive, and locals are talking of little else. Earlier today, Miss Burke herself made a brief statement on the steps of the sheriff's department, claiming that the person who abducted and murdered Detective Lindsay Graham last week had left an object in the detective's apartment, which Miss Burke says triggered a vision. She did not share details of the supposed vision, but stated that she was certain the same person had abducted Sheriff Metcalf. She appeared willing to say more, but one of the federal agents involved in the investigation cut the statement short and pulled her into the building."

Samantha sank down on the edge of the bed and murmured, "Shit."

The anchorwoman, with only the faintest note of disbelief in her voice, said, "Kidnapping, murder, and mysticism in Golden; we'll look forward to further reports, Tom."

Lucas used the remote to turn off the TV and then dropped it onto the bed. He walked over to the window and pulled the curtains slightly to one side, gazing out.

Samantha knew a delaying tactic when she saw one, and wondered if he was actually too angry to speak. Part of her wanted to say something that might defuse the situation, but she knew she couldn't do that. Not now.

Deliberately offhand, she said, "I just can't get the hang of talking to reporters, can I?"

"Is that all you have to say?" His voice was very quiet.

She wanted to tell him the truth, that she had gambled her little press conference would only make the local papers and that it had been designed as much to anger him as anything else, another of her tactics intended to push through his walls.

But she was just too tired to get into all that, so she merely said, "Well… I can say I didn't expect a TV reporter to quote me on the eleven o'clock news, naive as that sounds. There wasn't a TV camera there, so… I can even say I made a mistake talking to the press at all. But what difference would any of it make, Luke? I became part of the story, and they were not going to let me pass unnoticed."

"Just like before." His words dropped into the quiet room like icicles.

"So it's my fault, what happened before? It's my fault that a reporter lied and claimed I knew who had abducted that child, that I'd seen it in a vision, and the kidnapper panicked and killed her?"

"I never said that."

"You never had to. Oh, you blamed yourself for not finding her quickly enough, but we both know if I hadn't been involved, that reporter would never have made his claim, would never even have speculated there was anything paranormal in the investigation. And maybe, just maybe, that little girl would have lived long enough for you to find her alive."

Samantha had known that in pushing and prodding Luke she was likely to open her old wounds as well as his, but she hadn't expected the strength of the pain.

Lucas turned but remained at the window. His face was hard, expressionless. "It wasn't your fault," he said.

"Once more with feeling."

"What do you want from me, Sam? I never believed it was your fault. What I did believe, what I came to understand, was that Bishop was right about the issue of credibility. Because any unscrupulous reporter would find it a lot easier and a lot safer to fabricate something as coming from the mouth of a carnival mystic than from a federal agent."

"I won't apologize for who and what I am."

"Have I asked you to?"

"Sometimes it feels that way."

He shook his head. "Even though you haven't told me everything, I know enough to understand that you didn't have many choices fifteen years ago. Life in a carnival over life on the streets? No question you made the better choice."

Samantha waited for a moment, then said, "You aren't going to ask, are you?"

"Ask what?"

"Ask what happened to leave me, at the age of fifteen, with just those two choices." She kept her voice steady.

He hesitated visibly, then shook his head once. "This isn't the time to get into-"

"Like I said, we're running out of time. I honestly don't expect much more, not for us. You aren't in my future, remember? And if all we have is now, then I'd just as soon get all the skeletons out of their closets where we can both see them. Just in case we ever do meet again. Or just in case we never meet again."

"Sam, you don't have to do this."

"You don't want me to do this," she said, knowing only as she spoke that it was the literal truth. "Because it'll make it harder for you to walk away if I do."

He frowned slightly but didn't protest that statement.

She turned a bit on the bed in order to face him more fully and clasped her cold hands together in her lap. "Have a seat. This may take awhile."

Lucas came away from the window and did sit down on the other side of the bed, but said, "It's late. You're tired, I'm tired, and we have another long day tomorrow. We have a killer to hunt down, Sam."

"I know. Remember what I said that first day? You can't beat him without me."

"Because you can piss me off?" he asked.

She drew a breath, too tense to be able to see any humor now. "Because I make you listen to things you don't want to hear. You refuse to let yourself feel pain or fear until you have absolutely no other choice. So I'm not giving you a choice."

"Sam-"

Ignoring the beginning of protest, she said steadily, "I was six when I became psychic. It happened the first time he threw me against a wall."

Jaylene watched the same news report and grimaced as she turned off the TV in her room. She wasn't surprised when her cell phone rang a summons just minutes later.

She checked the caller I.D., then answered with, "You saw the news report, huh?"

"Yes," Bishop said.

"Uh-huh. And just how long have you been close by?"

"Long enough."

Jaylene sighed. "I had a hunch there was more going on than you were willing to say. I mean, I know you sometimes send in a watchdog or two without alerting the primary agents, even someone working undercover, but you don't often turn up personally when another team member is leading an investigation."

"This killer has more than a dozen notches on his belt, Jay, and he's shown no signs of even slowing down. Or of conveniently wanting to be caught. He has to be stopped, and here."

"No argument. But why the cloak and dagger? Why not just tell us you're involved?"

"Because the killer's focus is on Luke-and I'm too recognizable to the media."

Jaylene knew that the latter, at least, was quite true; he had a memorable face and presence, did Bishop, and it was only very rarely possible for him to work undercover.

"You think if you showed up publicly, the killer would shift his focus?"

"No. I think he'd leave Golden and try to take his game elsewhere. He knows about us, Jay. About the SCU. And if any other team members showed up publicly, he'd very likely come to the conclusion that we had a decided edge in his game. A psychic edge."

Thoughtful, Jaylene said, "And yet he lured Sam here. Think he doesn't believe she's genuine?"

"My guess is exactly that. Her involvement in the investigation three years ago was more or less a public fiasco, at least from the media's reporting of it; anyone reading those reports would probably decide she was a phony."

"So he wanted her here as a… distraction… for Luke?"

"Why not? Even if that angle didn 't work, chances were good the media would grab on to Samantha as a good story and at the very least add to the tension. Among the investigators and the townspeople."

"Making it even harder for Luke to concentrate." Jaylene frowned. "Yeah, but if this guy really is matching wits with Luke, why work so hard to turn the game to his own advantage? I mean, why not a level playing field?"

Bishop said, "A nicely sane, competitive mind would want that, yes. But a sociopath? He just wants to win, and never mind fair play. He wants to prove, in his own mind, that he's better than Luke. Smarter, stronger. Manipulating people and events is just another way he's doing that."

"So we were being naive in even trying to figure out his rules."

"I'd call it an exercise in futility."

"Guess you're right. Sam said something about broken minds not working the way we'd expect them to."

"She's right about that. The only thing we can know for sure," Bishop said, "is that he has a personal grudge against Luke."

"I assume you're checking on that?"

"We've already gone back through his cases in the last five years, and nothing looks promising in the way of a lead. Harder to find out about his cases before he joined up, but we're working on that." Bishop paused, then added, "I don't know if Luke could remember anything helpful, but it wouldn't hurt to steer him in that direction."

"He doesn't talk about his past, you know that."

"Doesn't talk about it with a vengeance, yeah. But I'm hoping Samantha has had some effect."

"Oh, she's having an effect. I'm just not sure, when all's said and done, what that effect will be." It was Jaylene's turn to pause, and then she said, "Straight out, boss-did you get in touch with Sam, or did she get in touch with you?"

Bishop sighed and murmured, "It really is hell trying to keep information away from psychics."

"That isn't an answer."

"She got in touch with me."

"It's that vision she had in the beginning, isn't it? The one that made her decide to take the bait and come to Golden."

"Yes. That's all I can tell you, Jaylene. And more than Luke needs to know right now. He also doesn't need to know that Galen is keeping an eye on you whenever you're alone or that I'm anywhere near Golden."

"More secrets from my partner?" She sighed.

"I wouldn't ask if I didn't believe it was important."

"Yeah, you don't need to remind me of that."

"No," Bishop said. "I didn't think I did."

Lucas had expected something bad. Samantha was too intelligent to have bailed out of any kind of normal family life, even at an age when hormones and youthful stupidity tended to rule far too many decisions and actions.

So he had expected bad. He hadn't expected this.

Those dark, dark eyes never left his face, and her voice was steady, almost indifferent, as if the telling meant nothing to her. But he could see the tension in the hands knotted together in her lap, and he could see the pain in her pallor.

See it. But not feel it, not feel her pain.

Only his own.

"He was my stepfather," she said. "My real father was killed in a car accident when I was still a baby. My mother was the type of woman who had to have a man around, had to feel she belonged to someone, so there was a succession of uncles while I was a toddler. Then she met him. And married him. And I don't suppose she knew in the beginning that he liked to drink, and that drinking made him mean. But she found out. We both found out."

"Sam-"

"I don't remember what set him off that day. I don't even remember being thrown against the wall, not really. I just remember waking up in the hospital and hearing my mother anxiously telling the doctor that I was clumsy and kept falling down the stairs. Then she put her hand on my arm, patting it, and I… saw what had happened to me. Through her memories. I saw myself flung against the wall like a rag doll."

"A head injury," Lucas murmured.

Samantha nodded. "Severe concussion. Kept me in the hospital for more than two weeks. And I still have horrendous headaches sometimes, lasting for hours. So bad they literally blind me."

"You should have told me that sooner, Sam. Those nosebleeds-"

"Seem to be related to visions of violence. The headaches just come, suddenly, out of nowhere. I've never been able to pinpoint a specific cause." She shrugged. "All part of the psychic package, apparently."

Lucas muttered a curse under his breath but didn't say anything else. There wasn't much he could say; the SCU had learned long ago that moderate-to-severe headaches did seem to be the norm for a large percentage of psychics.

Samantha said, "I didn't understand, of course, what it all meant. I didn't understand about being psychic. All I knew was that I was different. And I came to know that being different made me a target of his rages."

She paused, then added, "I learned to stay out of his way as much as possible, but as the years passed, he got worse. The rages got more violent, and he always wanted a target. He beat up my mother from time to time, but something about me seemed almost to… draw his anger."

Roughly, Lucas said, "You know damned well it wasn't you, wasn't in any way your fault. He was a sick son of a bitch, and he hurt you because he could."

Samantha shook her head. "I think he knew, somewhere inside him, just how different I really was. I wasn't something he could understand, the way he understood my mother's need of him. I never tried to argue with him or defy him, but I never gave him the satisfaction of hearing me cry, and that baffled him. I think he was afraid of me."

Lucas felt another twinge of pain as he thought of how she must have looked beneath the brutal blows of a domestic monster, small, slight, defiantly silent. "Maybe. Maybe he was afraid of you. That doesn't make it your fault."

With a shrug, she said, "He was the sort who struck out at anything he feared, and when he drank he got paranoid as well as mean. Like I said, I did my best to stay out of his way. As I got older, it was a bit easier to find somewhere else to be, even if it was only the library or a museum. But, eventually, I'd have to go home, and I'd find him waiting for me."

Lucas didn 't ask why none of her teachers or neighbors had noticed the abuse and reported it to the authorities. He knew too well that what bruises and cuts weren't hidden beneath long sleeves and pants would likely go unnoticed. And that most people were hesitant to get involved.

"After that first time when he put me in the hospital, he was more careful, or at least I suppose he was. He seemed to know just how far he could go without inflicting enough damage to send me to a doctor. Usually it was bruises and minor cuts, nothing that wouldn't heal or couldn't be hidden.

"It might have gone on years longer, I guess, since I was stubbornly determined to finish school despite him. I even had dreams of winning a scholarship and going on to college. But then, not long before my fifteenth birthday, he went too far and broke a couple of ribs."

Lucas swore under his breath. It hurt him to hear this; he couldn't even imagine how much the reality of it had hurt her.

"I didn't realize at the time; I just knew it wasn't easy to breathe. But the next day at school, a teacher noticed the careful way I was moving and sent me to the school nurse. I tried to tell her I'd just fallen-not to protect him but because I'd seen kids going from bad homes to worse ones in the foster system, and I preferred the devil I knew. But she didn't believe me, not once she had my shirt off and saw all the half-healed cuts and old bruises.

"So after she bound up my ribs, she called my mother and him to come to school. She talked to them in the other room, so I don't know what was said. But when he came back into the room to get me, I could tell by his face that he was angrier than he'd ever been. One of those simmering furies of his that could last for days before he exploded."

When she fell silent, Lucas had to ask. "What happened?"

Samantha replied, "He grabbed my wrist to pull me up from the cot I was sitting on, and even though it had never happened before, his touch triggered a vision."

"What did you see?"

"I saw him kill me," she answered simply.

"Jesus Christ."

For the first time, Samantha seemed to be looking beyond Lucas, her eyes distant, almost unfocused. "I knew he'd do it. I knew he'd beat me to death. Unless I ran away. So I did, that night. I packed everything I could carry in one bag, stole about fifty bucks from my mother's purse, and I left."

She blinked and was suddenly there again, her gaze fixed on his face. "That's when I got my first lesson in changing the future. Because he didn't kill me. What I saw never happened."

Lucas hesitated, then said, "You know it's not that simple. The vision was a warning of what would happen if you didn't leave, didn't remove yourself from that situation. It was a possible future."

"I know. And I learned, over the next years, that some things I saw couldn't be changed. I even learned that sometimes my own intervention seemed to bring about the very thing I was trying to avoid, what a vision had shown me." Her smile was twisted. "The future doesn't like to be seen too clearly. That would make things too easy for us."

"Yeah, the universe doesn't like us to get too complacent."

Samantha sighed. "It was like walking a high wire sometimes, especially in those early years. The only talent I had was… telling fortunes. Sometimes I'd try to change what I saw, and sometimes I felt almost paralyzed, unable to act at all."

"You were very young," Lucas said.

"Like I said, I wasn't young even when I was." She shook her head, adding more briskly, "I headed south, knowing that the weather would be milder if I had to sleep outside. And I usually did. Told fortunes on street corners for a few bucks. Got busted a couple of times. And finally hooked up with Leo and the Carnival After Dark."

"How long were you on the streets?"

"Six, seven months. Long enough to know I wouldn't be able to have any kind of a life that way. As you said, the carnival was a much better option." She looked at him steadily. "And if you're wondering, I don't want your pity. Lots of people have sad stories; at least mine had a relatively happy outcome."

"Sam-"

"I just wanted to remind you that you aren't the only one who knows something about pain and fear. You aren't, Luke. It was a long, long time before I could sleep through the night. A long time before I stopped expecting him to suddenly show up in my life and hurt me again. And a long time before I learned to trust anyone."

"You trusted me," he said.

"I still do." Without waiting for a response, she got up from the bed and began turning the covers back. "The shower's yours. I'm going to bed. Can't seem to get warm."

Lucas wanted to say something, but he didn't know what. He didn't know how to bridge the distance between them, far too aware that he was responsible for it. He knew what Sam wanted from him, or at least he thought he did-her needling had made that plain.

She wanted him to tell her about Bryan.

But that was a wound that was still raw and untouchable, and Lucas shied away even from thinking about it.

Instead, he gathered what he needed from the bag he had brought from his own motel room and headed for the shower, hoping the hot water would help him to think.

He had no doubt that without her needling and pushing, he would not have found Wyatt in time. She had found a way- however painful-to force him to reach beyond his walls, to lash out in anger, and in so doing to open himself to the fear and pain he'd been designed by nature to intercept.

It disturbed Lucas deeply that his own anger seemed a better key to unlocking his abilities than anything else he had discovered in years of concentrated effort. He had to believe, just from what he knew of psychics and psychic ability, that his was not supposed to work that way.

He should have been able to consciously, calmly, tap his abilities, focus them-and to do so long before he was so drained and exhausted the effort very nearly incapacitated him.

He knew that.

He had known that for a long time.

He even knew why he had been unable to do so, though it was not something he allowed himself to consider very often.

As badly as he wanted to find the victims of the crimes he investigated, as badly as he wanted to find those who were lost and in pain and terror, there was a part of him that dreaded and even feared what it cost him.

He felt what they felt.

And their terror, their doomed agony, pulled him into a hell of torment that was a memory he couldn't bear.

The bedroom was very quiet and semidark when Lucas came out of the bathroom. He checked the door again, just to be sure, then slid his weapon under the pillow beside Samantha's and got in that side of the bed. The lamp on his side was on low, and he left it that way.

He lay beside her for a long time, staring at the ceiling. Then he felt her shiver and, without hesitating, turned toward her and pulled her into his arms.

"Still cold," she murmured, unresisting.

He pulled her a bit closer, frowning, because her skin wasn't cold, it was just this side of feverish. And he had the sudden, unsettling realization that the cold place Samantha tapped into to use her abilities, the place a brutal animal had awakened with violence, was as hauntingly dark and tormenting as anything he had ever experienced.

And, for her, inescapable.