Blood Ties (26 page)

BJ
had waffled back and forth for the better part of an hour while trying to decide on his target. He had put the crosshairs of his scope on first one possible and then another, his finger caressing the trigger and a soft “Boom” whispering from his lips each time.

But he didn’t pull the trigger.

None of them was quite right.

He noted that the activity was winding down on Main Street and knew his time to choose and execute for maximum shock value was running out, but a voice in his head kept urging him to wait.

Not yet. Keep watching. Mark them all. Remember them
.

We’ll get to them all in good time
.

Wait. The timing has to be just right
.

It was a voice he knew. A voice he listened to.

He waited.

Even when the helicopter touched down near the courthouse and she joined her team, stood talking to them for several minutes near the van housing their mobile command center, he waited. Even though it would have been so easy.

So very easy.

He put the crosshairs of the scope on her face, a face so close he felt he could reach out and touch it. The scope didn’t allow him to see the electric blue of her eyes, but he’d seen them in the daylight so they were easy to imagine. Electric blue eyes in a just-about-perfect face.

He thought about how quickly he could destroy her beauty and her life, but he waited. His finger caressed the trigger, and he whispered “Boom,” but he waited.

He watched her go into the mobile command center, wondering if he had missed the shot for tonight.

No. Wait
.

He waited.

N
aomi lurked. She didn’t think she was very good at it, since her pale blond hair made her sort of neon, and with power for the streetlights back on it wasn’t like it was truly
dark
out there anyway, but she did her best. She was a little surprised at first that none of the deputies or agents appeared to notice her—or didn’t feel she was worth shooing away if they did notice her. She was, in fact, a bit miffed by that. But eventually she decided that everybody was probably just tired.

It had been a long night.

Besides, there really wasn’t anything much to see anymore.

Still, she didn’t dare go near the mobile command center. She had a hunch the guys with the visible guns were a whole lot more alert, a whole lot less tired, and a whole lot more inclined to view her and her cameraman as threats worth taking note of.

And possibly shooting.

Ignoring the way Rob grumbled under his breath, she lurked in the spot she had chosen carefully, in the shadows beneath the now-ragged awning of one of the downtown restaurants, not more than twenty yards from the command center.

“The deputy was killed right over there,” Rob said suddenly, pointing to a spot only a few feet away from them.

“I know that.” They hadn’t cleaned the street of everything.

“And the agent was shot not far from where that command center of theirs is parked now.”

“I know that too. What’s your point, Rob?”

“Just that we’re not very far away, that’s all. And they haven’t caught the guy, you know.”

“He’s miles from here by now,” she said.

“You know that for a fact, do you?”

“What, you think he’d be stupid enough to hang around with this whole place crawling with cops and feds?”

“He was stupid enough to shoot a cop and a fed. That puts him high on the stupid list, as far as I’m concerned.”

Naomi took her eyes off the command center temporarily to look at him. “You’re scared.”

“I’d be right up there at the top of the stupid list if I wasn’t.”

“For God’s sake.”

“What? I’m not allowed to admit this whole situation gives me the creeps? An explosion Fears apart a nice town, one deputy—just a kid!—killed and a federal agent critically wounded, a nutjob sniper on the loose out there, probably watching us right now for all we know, and I’m not supposed to let it shake me up a little? Jesus, Naomi, you take the cake. Is there
anything
you can see other than that anchor chair in New York?”

She was surprised and knew it showed when he laughed.

“It’s no secret, believe me. I’ve been with the station for fifteen years, and I’ve seen about a dozen like you come and go. All puffed up with their plans to sit in one of those big chairs in New York. And you know what? Not one of them made it there.”

“I will,” she told him flatly. “I’ll make it there.” She returned her gaze to the command center and saw that several of the feds were coming out of it. She immediately hurried forward, gesturing for Rob to follow her. “Turn the camera on. Now. Film everything.”

“Christ, if I get arrested for this—”

As they neared them, she heard one of the men ask, “Where’s Galen, anyway? He missed the big meeting.”

“He had an errand,” replied a tall, gorgeous brunette.

Man, she’ll make great television
.

“Agent? Agent, Naomi Welborne, Channel 3 News. If you could say just a few words to calm some of our nervous viewers?”

To her delight, the woman paused in response, though her expression could hardly be said to be encouraging. If anything, she seemed a bit distracted.

“Look, Ms. Welborne—”

“Just a few words, please.” Naomi smiled with all the charm she could muster. “Please, we’ve been standing out here all night. If I go back to the station without anything at all, my boss will can me.”

The brunette gave her a wry look. “Nice try, Ms. Welborne.”

Don’t let her walk away, dammit
.

Desperate, Naomi said, “Okay, maybe he won’t can me, but I’ll be doing the fu—freaking weather again. Come on, give a fellow professional woman a break, won’t you? I’m not asking you to spill your guts, just give me something I can run with for the morning news. Do you believe the explosion and shooting yesterday are connected with the remains found here this week of two murder victims? Do you believe locals are involved?”

“Sheriff Duncan gave the press a statement hours ago, Ms. Welborne. I really have nothing to add.”

She would have moved away, but Naomi took a couple more steps and turned a bit so the other woman would see her face more clearly in the glow of the streetlight.

“Come on, at least let me confirm the report that agents of the FBI are spearheading the investigation into yesterday’s bombing—”

“Nice try,” the fed repeated.

She won’t admit it was a bomb. Shit
.

“Okay…. There was a federal agent wounded yesterday, right? That’s what everybody is reporting, what the police scanners said. Shot with the same bullet that killed that young deputy. Do you think it was a freak shot, or do you believe he was that good?”

“Ms. Welborne—”

“The agent was airlifted from the scene almost eighteen hours ago, isn’t that so? How is she?”

“She’s… holding her own.” The brunette glanced at Rob with a slight frown as he shifted a bit to the side to get a better angle.

Naomi hurried on. “Then she’ll be okay?”

“We don’t know yet. Ms. Welborne, I appreciate that you’re trying to do your job, but I can’t say anything more. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

Oh, shit
.

“Agent—”

——

T
here. Now. You know what to do
.

BJ smiled. He centered the crosshairs of his scope, and his finger caressed the trigger.

“Boom,” he whispered.

And squeezed the trigger.

Thirteen

A
M I RIGHT?”
Diana asked her guide. “Is one of the truths I’m here to uncover the truth that Samuel wasn’t destroyed at the church Compound like the report said?”

Matter-of-fact, Brooke said, “He was killed. You know that’s true because your friends were there. Quentin was there.”

“Yeah, but… he—Quentin said the energies there that day were really strange and everybody was affected by them. That there was lightning plus the weird energies
plus
several psychics using their abilities in ways they never had before. That was where Hollis found out she could heal herself after Samuel tried to kill her. And the little girl—Ruby. She helped the Haven operatives and SCU agents fool Samuel.”

Brooke was silent, merely looking at Diana serenely.

“They did an autopsy before he was cremated,” Diana said. “I read it. I looked at the damn stomach-turning photos. The doctors wanted to know if there was anything different about him physically. Bishop wanted to know the same thing.”

“And what did they find?” Brooke asked.

“His brain was … They said it wasn’t normal. Wasn’t healthy. Not tumors or anything, not cancer, just not healthy. Something about the color of the tissue and the weight of the brain. They said they’d never seen anything like it.” She hesitated. “Maybe because of all the electrical energy he channeled, his brain was… changed.”

Again, Brooke’s reaction was silent waiting.

Diana hardly noticed, thoughts and speculations tumbling through her mind almost too fast to absorb. “But they believed they destroyed his psychic abilities before he died. Burned them out, using a massive blast of pure energy he couldn’t withstand. They were almost certain. He was no threat, no threat at all.” She stared at the grave, seemingly young guide. “Were they wrong about that?”

Brooke countered with another question. “Were they the only ones capable of deception, do you suppose?”

Diana looked around at the grayish but gleaming corridor, endless, stretching both ways as far as she could see, all the doors featureless. Except for the single one with a cross, a shape that seemed now to be scorched into the metal. “He fooled them?”

“What do you think?”

“I think Bishop isn’t easy to fool. Quentin isn’t easy to fool.”

“Maybe it wasn’t easy. Maybe it cost Samuel—a lot.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe he had to learn what everyone has to. That even the best-laid plans seldom go as we expect. Maybe he didn’t have quite the mastery over his own fate that he believed he would.”

Diana frowned. “So he somehow fooled them… but lost control there at the end.”

“Maybe.”

Thinking about it, a very unsettling question occurred to Diana. “Can you kill pure evil? Can you destroy it?”

“What do you think?”

Diana drew a breath and let it out slowly. “He didn’t move on,” she whispered, the realization an icy lump in the pit of her belly. “He was ready for them somehow, ready….”

She returned her gaze to Brooke’s calm face. “He had premonitions. He saw the future. Is it possible he knew what would happen? Possible he knew how they meant to destroy him?”

Brooke pursed her lips, for all the world as if discussing something casually. “Well, premonitions are tricky beasts, and interpreting them isn’t always easy. You can know the fact of something without necessarily knowing how it will come about.”

Diana considered that, her mind still racing. “So he might have known he’d lose. That no matter what it was they meant to do, no matter how hard he was able to fight them, in the end he’d still lose. They’d take his abilities. He might even have known that someone close to him would take his life. And knowing that, he would have planned. He would have found a way… for something of himself to survive.”

“Energy is never destroyed,” Brooke pointed out. “Only transformed.”

“Bishop knows that.”

“Maybe he and the others believed the energy
was
transformed. There was so much power all around them when they were fighting Samuel, even in them. Changing them. And at the end there were so many broken bodies to mend—and to bury. And Samuel was gone.”

“Maybe,” Diana finished, “they needed to believe that.”

Brooke nodded. “Maybe they did.”

Diana felt a cold so deep her bones ached with it. She had been so cold for so long she wondered if it was possible to ever be warm again.

She looked around once again at the corridor, at the representation of a place where more than one evil soul had done terrible things. “That’s why I keep coming back here to this place. To this… representation. Because this is where he grew so powerful. Where he absorbed so much dark energy his evil creature created. This is where he meant to destroy them the first time. Bishop, the others. Where he tried.”

“Tried and failed,” Brooke reminded her.

“Yes. But he lived to try again. Lived to grow stronger. And that time he was in a place where he felt even more powerful. The closest thing he had to a home. So why am I not there, at the church’s Compound? Why is this place more important?”

Brooke was silent.

This place. Corridors. Shiny and sterile. Endless corridors… A place to move through…

And then she got it.

“He’s here, isn’t he? Here in the gray time. His spirit didn’t… That black and twisted spirit found a way somehow to stay in the gray time all these months. To hide here.”

“Do you think it was in his nature to hide?” Brooke asked neutrally.

Diana’s answer came slowly. “No. No, I read the profile on him. He was all about attention, adulation. Worship. But… it would have been in his nature to wait, maybe. If he had a plan. If he believed there was a way for him to go back.”

“How could he do that? Go back? His body is ashes now, scattered on the wind.”

“He’d need another one,” Diana said automatically. “If he means to go all the way back, means to live again in the flesh. If he finds a way to do that, the power to do that. It’s…just barely possible. I’ve seen it happen before.
^*
But it wasn’t permanent. The struggle of two minds for dominance, the energy of two souls in one body is—”

She broke off, and for one dizzying moment the whole gray time world seemed to spin around her. “He isn’t—he won’t—he doesn’t want
my
body. Does he?”

Dispassionate, Brooke said, “If that was his plan, I would say two things went wrong for him. Your injuries were far more severe than he’d anticipated, and Quentin refused to let go.”