Hunting Fear (35 page)

“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.

Wednesday, October 3

Caitlin Graham honestly didn’t know why she was still involved in the investigation of kidnappings and murders. Why she wanted to be here, and why they allowed it. She thought of herself as the only civilian in the bunch, despite Samantha’s lack of law-enforcement credentials; the other woman clearly understood the procedures involved, as well as possessing an obvious investigative knack.

“The only thing we have that even remotely resembles a lead,” she was saying now, “are those ATV tracks the CSU found up at the mine this morning.”

Looking over a printout he’d just received, Lucas said, “Preliminary report is that the vehicle is likely to be a Hummer, just like we’ve been driving up there.”

Wyatt grunted. “We have four in the motor pool. Other than those of us who have to patrol in the mountains around here, they aren’t all that common—though more so than they used to be.”

“Impressive TV ads,” Caitlin said. “And they’re on some high-profile TV shows. So now they’re sexy.”

The sheriff agreed with a rueful nod.