Blood Ties (30 page)

He stopped prowling and stared at her. His immediate instinct was to deny, but somehow instead he found himself asking, “What do you know about that?”

“About your voices? Just that you hear them. Since the church. Since what we did to Father. Since things changed for a lot of us.” She paused. “Are they still talking to you?”

“Whispering,” he said finally. “I can’t understand what they’re saying. Can’t quite hear them.”

“Maybe because you aren’t listening hard enough.”

“What do you mean?”

Curled up in the big armchair near a dark fireplace, Ruby returned his stare with an odd serenity. “You’re… shut inside yourself. I expect that’s so you can help your team. So you can guard other people, keep them safe. Keep me safe. But it makes a shell around you. A hard shell. Maybe the voices can’t get through well enough for you to understand what they’re saying.”

“Maybe I don’t want them to,” he found himself replying.

“Are you afraid of what they might tell you?”

Damn
.

Galen thought it was ridiculous for him to be confiding in a twelve-year-old girl, but he couldn’t seem to stop the conversation.

“I don’t know where they’re coming from, Ruby. I don’t hear voices, it’s not my thing.”

“It’s your thing now.”

“Well, yeah, I suppose. But it
wasn’t
my thing, so I don’t know how to control it.”

“Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes this stuff controls us.”

“That’s definitely not my thing,” he told her.

“No, I didn’t think so. Your thing is… not dying. Isn’t that right?”

“I heal myself. So far, that means not dying. But everybody dies sooner or later.”

“Maybe to really kill you they’d have to cut off your head,” she suggested gravely.

Galen was startled, but only for a moment. “You like horror movies,” he guessed.

She smiled shyly. “We weren’t allowed to watch them inside the Compound. But Maggie says it’s good for us sometimes to be pretend-scared. And John likes horror movies. So we watched some.” I see.

“They didn’t scare me, really,” she confessed. “Not after the church. Not after Father. But it was nice to pretend bad and scary things aren’t real. Nice for a while, at least.”

He shook his head and heard himself saying, “Ruby, what are you
doing
here?”

Her face changed just a little, going guarded. And there was a secretive expression in her eyes that he’d never seen before. “John’s teaching me how to play chess. You start out with all the pieces on the board. That’s why I’m here. Because I’m one of the pieces.”

“Ruby—”

“You should try to listen to your voices, Galen. You really should. I think there’s something important they need to tell you.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“How would you know that?” he asked quietly.

“Because I hear voices too. And they always—
always
—tell me things I need to know.”

“Like the reason you had to come here? The reason you have to be a chess piece?”

“Yes. Like that.” Ruby turned her head, gazed toward one of the windows she was forbidden to approach, and said in the same soft, musing voice, “Right now they’re telling me something bad happened again. Something we couldn’t stop. Poor thing. She was a chess piece too. She was a pawn. She had to be sacrificed.”

“W
e’ve done a complete sweep of the downtown area,” Dean reported to Miranda when she and the others returned to the mobile command center. “Sheriff Duncan pulled in all his people, part-timers included, and even swore in a couple of retired deputies and a few friends he trusts, so we’ve got enough manpower—barely—to keep a fairly close watch on most of the buildings. But we didn’t find the bastard.”

“No luck with the dogs?”

“Nada
, The handlers are as baffled as their dogs seem to be. Do you want to call them off?”

Miranda frowned. “No. No, just ask them to patrol. To crisscross the town independently. Randomly. They can decide among themselves when to take breaks, but I want those dogs visible as much as possible. If nothing else, it should at least make it tougher for the sniper to move around.”

“Copy that. I’ll go tell them.”

“And then you and a few of the other agents go ahead and take your own breaks. Get some breakfast, grab a shower if you like, sleep a couple of hours. Everything’s set up for us at the B&B. There are beds and cots enough to go around, though some of us are doubling up in rooms. Not that it much matters, since we’ll be on rotating shifts for the duration.”

“You guys didn’t get much downtime,” he noted.

“We got enough. Besides, with more agents on the way and scheduled to arrive by sometime late this afternoon, we should all be able to get a good night’s sleep tonight.”

Under his breath, Tony muttered, “Damn. Jinx.”

Miranda glanced at him, then said to Dean, “Take your time. We’re mostly waiting for paperwork—the posts Sharon conducted and ballistics reports. And we’ll probably go over the victim files one more time, looking for connections. There isn’t much else to do, at least for the next few hours. Unless you’ve picked up something you haven’t mentioned, that is.” Dean Ramsey was a fifth-degree clairvoyant.

He shook his head. “Not a whole hell of a lot, I’m sorry to say. At first I thought it was just the general confusion, all the violence, but… there’s a weird vibe about this place. Can’t quite pin it down, but I’ve never sensed anything like it.”

“Join the club,” Tony said with a sigh.

Dean offered a wry smile, then said to Miranda, “When I try harder, when I push, it’s like I’m picking up some kind of interference, almost like hearing static on a radio.”

Tony and Jaylene exchanged quick glances.

Miranda simply nodded. “Don’t try to force it. Maybe taking a break will help.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He didn’t sound too convinced but left to follow her orders without argument.

“Interference,” Jaylene said. “Why does it make me very uneasy that word keeps cropping up?”

“It’s an anomaly,” Miranda responded. “And anomalies are signposts. Things to pay attention to.”

“Consider me paying attention,” Jaylene said. “Because even though the vibes I get are almost always from objects, I’m feeling the weirdness of this place too.”

Tony said, “And me. I keep wanting to rub the back of my neck, because it feels like the hair’s standing straight out. Not an especially pleasant sensation.”

“My question,” Miranda said, “is whether this is something natural and specific to the town for some kind of geographic reason or something new. And if it is new, I want to know when it started and whether it’s artificial, man-made, or…”

“Or psychic?” Jaylene suggested.

Miranda was frowning now. “Dean can’t pick up anything. Neither of you has been able to. I haven’t. Reese knew when a gun was being pointed at Hollis and him, but that was well outside town, higher up in the mountains—and before the bomb blast all he was really sure of was that the sniper was watching. Plus, he didn’t sense a thing before the sniper shot Diana, and a gun pointed his way virtually always sends up giant red flags. Gabe and Roxanne have a solid internal connection, but otherwise they’ve been… fuzzy, missing things they should have been able to pick up on easily.”

Sighing again, Tony said, “Psychic, then.”

“Christ, I hope not. It’d take a hell of a lot of energy to have that sort of dampening effect on so many psychics of different abilities and degrees. And it sounds too much like what was happening in Samuel’s Compound on that last day.”

“Damn,” Jaylene muttered.

“You did jinx us,” Tony said to Miranda. “Whenever
anybody
says we’ll get a good night’s sleep, we never do. Something always happens.”

The words had barely left his lips when Sheriff Duncan came in to the command center, his expression grim. “I’ve got a missing deputy,” he said.

“Who?” Miranda asked—and Tony looked at her curiously, because he had the odd notion she knew exactly what the sheriff would reply.

“Bobbie. Bobbie Silvers. As near as I can figure, she hasn’t been seen since sometime last night.”

Fifteen

W
HEN HOLLIS WOKE UP
, she had no idea how much time had passed; this was an internal room in the hospital, so no windows allowed any natural light to signal whether it was day or night.

She hoped it was still Thursday; surely she—they—hadn’t slept all day, even though she felt as if that could be the case. Hell, she felt as if she’d slept for a week. Her eyes were scratchy, her muscles stiff from apparently remaining in the same position for God only knew how long, and a gnawing emptiness told her she hadn’t eaten in too many hours.

She wasn’t sure whether DeMarco was awake, until she was able to ease from his loosened embrace and sit on the edge of the narrow bed. Looking at him as she absently finger-combed her hair, she realized she didn’t feel the same uncertainty she’d felt earlier about his state of consciousness; he was asleep, and deeply at that.

His face was relaxed in a way she’d never before seen, his breathing deep and even, and the tension she usually sensed in him was absent.

Hollis frowned a little, though she couldn’t have said why, exactly, she was bothered. DeMarco had as much right to sleep as she did, after all, and even his seemingly ever-vigilant senses had to rest sometime. None of the team had gotten much rest in the last few days and, besides, she had no idea what he might have been doing before joining them in Serenade or how long he had gone without sleep at that point.

She shook off the thoughts, deciding just to be grateful that there would be no more awkward—on her part, at least—conversation while they lay in bed together.

Move. Don’t think, just move
.

Given the tininess of the silent, lamplit room, it required only a couple of steps for her to reach the door, and she slipped out without looking back at DeMarco.

They had been offered the use of visitors’ restrooms, complete with lockers for their belongings and private showers; it was a kindness provided for the families of patients who spent long days, even weeks, in the various intensive-care units on this floor. Both Hollis and DeMarco had gotten cleaned up and changed not long after Miranda and the sheriff headed back to Serenade, but Hollis felt the need to shower again now, mostly to clear her fuzzy head.

She found herself in a quiet and unfamiliar hallway, and it took a moment or two for her to remember that she hadn’t exactly been conscious when DeMarco carried her from the IC unit where Diana lay to this room.

Carried me. Jeez
.

Hollis pushed that out of her mind and took a few tentative steps to her left down the hallway, wondering if she was headed in the correct direction. Everything still looked unnatural to her, too faded and colorless to be real life and yet not—quite—the desolate emptiness that was Diana’s gray time.

Just creepy enough to make her distinctly uncomfortable.

“Hollis.”

Shit
.

Hollis turned slowly to find Andrea standing a few feet away. Like the other spirits Hollis had seen earlier, she looked more real than her surroundings did, and her aura was bright shades of blue and green.

It was, Hollis realized, the first time she’d ever seen Andrea’s aura.

“You have to help Diana,” the spirit said.

“Andrea—”

“You have to help her to heal. If her body isn’t healed, she won’t be able to come back to it.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

Appearing to take the wry comment literally, Andrea said, “She’s in great danger. The longer she’s in the gray time, the less likely it is she’ll be able to get back. Her spirit’s being weakened there, and her body is weak here.”

“I tried to heal her body. Or help her heal, anyway. I don’t think I did her very much good.”

“You have to try again.”

Since she’d planned to do just that, Hollis nodded but said, “Listen, can’t you finally tell me who you are? And why you’re apparently attached to me?”

Andrea took a step back, clearly startled. “I—I’m not—you opened a door.”

“Months ago I opened a door. I mean, when I first saw you. So why do you keep coming back? Or are you—did I leave you on this side? Can you not go back?”

“Not until it’s finished.”

“Until what’s finished?”

Andrea seemed distracted for a moment, looking around as though she was lost, then she said, “He’s trying to protect you, but what he’s doing… It’s keeping you from helping Diana. Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“He’s tried to put a veil between you and the spirit world. Energy. To keep you safe, he thinks.”

“Who thinks?”

“Reese.”

“Wait. It’s because of Reese that everything looks weird and only the spirits seem real?”

Andrea nodded. “He wants to help. To protect. But he can’t stand between you and the spirit world. He can’t block your natural energies. That’s why the real world looks faded to you, because his energy comes from there and only works the way he believes it works there. You have to stop him before he pushes you closer to the spirit world. That’s not the way. Especially not now. You have to help heal Diana, and you have to be very much in the living world to do that.”

“Last time I had to help Ruby.” Hollis wasn’t really protesting, just trying to understand what was going on.

“They both have a role to play.”

“Andrea, for God’s sake—”

The spirit began backing away, fading. “There’s a better way to use his energy, his shield. His protection. Tell him that. Help Diana. Everything depends on it, and there’s not much time….”

Hollis found herself alone in the corridor once again. She drew a breath, let it out slowly, and then turned back to the room where DeMarco slept. She went in and sat on the side of the narrow bed, put her hand on his shoulder, and attempted to shake him.

“Hey!”

It occurred to Hollis only afterward that rudely awakening a man with DeMarco’s background, training, and apparent nature probably wasn’t the wisest thing in the world, but at that moment she wasn’t thinking about any possible danger from him.