Love Is The Bond: A Rowan Gant Investigation (14 page)

“Well yeah. You’ve never smoked,” I replied.
“So what?”

She nodded. “Aye. But right now I’m dying for
a cigarette.”

I stared back at my wife without saying a
word, my brain desperately trying to process the contradictory
information it has just been fed.

“I must not be awake,” I finally told her
with a shake of my head. “I could have sworn you just said you were
dying for a cigarette.”

“I did,” she replied with a shallow nod.

“How could you possibly… I mean… Come on…” I
stuttered. “You’ve never even smoked one.”

“Well… I did once. In college. Sort of.”

“How did you ‘sort of’ smoke a
cigarette?”

“I was at a party. I’d had too much to drink
and, well, I just took a puff from a friend’s cigarette. Then I
coughed myself silly and almost threw up.”

“One puff, and it made you sick,” I echoed.
“That still makes my point. If you’ve only ever had just one puff,
and that made you sick, then how could you possibly be craving
one?”

She shrugged, the curious fear still in her
eyes. “I don’t know. All I can say is that I’m pretty sure I want a
cigarette. That’s what keeps going through my mind, anyway.”

The concern that had plagued me earlier in
the day now returned full force.

Up until this morning, I’d had every
indication that the sphere of protection I had placed around
Felicity was doing its job, or so I thought. But now, I was
starting to see some pretty hard evidence that maybe it wasn’t. She
was quite obviously being affected by something preternatural;
there was absolutely no denying it. I mean, first the sexual
aggression, and now here she was, sitting at the kitchen table in
the middle of the night swilling rum as if it were water.

Of course, I wasn’t entirely sure just how
much of an issue the drinking was in and of itself. As petite as
she was, she could drink virtually anyone under the table. She’d
done it to both Ben and me on more than one occasion. Still, the
fact that she was actually craving alcohol wasn’t good, and her
choice of liquor was certainly a red flag as well. She didn’t care
for rum at all. In fact, the one time I’d seen her take a drink of
it—before this moment that is—she had literally spit it back
out.

And now, to be telling me she wanted a
cigarette—this coming from a woman who didn’t allow smoking in our
house and could even be more militant about it than a reformed
smoker?

No, something was definitely wrong with this
picture. It wasn’t just blurry around the edges; it was completely
out of focus.

Adding yet another flaw to the already
screwed up family portrait was the fact that my ethereal headache
was maintaining its rhythmic thud in the back of my skull.
Thankfully, for the moment it didn’t seem to be getting any worse,
but I was already starting to “see” things, as evidenced by the
episode in the bathroom. I knew that could only mean that an
escalation was a mere step or two down the road.

Whatever was happening, it was a good bet
that it was all connected. Unfortunately, I was desperately afraid
I knew what at least part of it meant.

“I think maybe I need to call Ben,” I
announced.

Felicity gave her head a quick shake as she
furrowed her brow. “What makes you think he’ll know?”

I cocked my head and gave her a suspicious
look. “Know what?”

“About Wentworth’s habits,” she replied.
“You’re wanting to find out if Hammond Wentworth was a smoker and a
rum drinker, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“I was already thinking the same thing
myself,” she offered. “You think I’m channeling him, don’t
you?”

“Actually, that’s what I’m hoping for, but I
don’t know if we’ll be that lucky.”

“Aye, what do you mean lucky?” she asked
incredulously. “I don’t want to go through this again. It was bad
enough before…”

I countered with my own query. “Well let me
ask you this: Can you think of another explanation for these sudden
cravings you’re having?”

“Well… No… Not really,” she replied
hesitantly. “But, Gods…”

“Well, actually I can, and I think you’d like
it even less.”

“What is it then?”

The old adage “open mouth, insert foot”
suddenly came to mind. I knew for certain that the name resting on
the tip of my tongue was one she never wanted to hear again. I
couldn’t say that I was all that excited about it myself, but it
was there nonetheless.

Realizing immediately that I had started down
a path I should have avoided, verbally at least, I tried to
backpedal as best I could. “I’d rather not say right now.”

“No you don’t,” she returned, arching an
eyebrow and stabbing her finger at me. “You don’t announce
something like that then just leave me hanging. What is it you’re
thinking?”

“Felicity, really…”

“Damn your eyes, Rowan Linden Gant, tell
me!”

“All right then,” I replied, hesitation
now obvious in my own voice. “Do you remember when
I
started smoking again, right out of
the blue?”

“Aye, I do. But that was when…”

Her voice trailed off slowly, and her
already naturally pale complexion became even more pallid as any
semblance of color drained instantly from her face. Her mouth
curled downward into a hard frown and she spat, “When you were
channeling
him
.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Exactly.”

I couldn’t blame her for the reaction.
The
him
to whom she was
referring wasn’t on her short list of favorite people. He wasn’t on
the long list either, for that matter. The hard and cold fact about
him was that he was a serial rapist who had ended up murdering two
women—one of them a college cheerleader.

But, as bad as that was, it wasn’t the thing
that made Felicity’s skin crawl the most. That was another matter
entirely. You see, what set his crimes apart was that they were all
by-products of a lurid fantasy he had built directly around her. In
some ways, the effects of his actions still plagued her to this
day.

As for me, well, channeling the sorry bastard
had been one of the worst experiences of my life. It had even
brought me dangerously close to committing murder myself.

I watched my wife carefully as she continued
to brood in silence.

I sighed heavily and wondered about the logic
of having let her press me this far. But, there was nothing I could
do about it now. “So… I think you know where I’m headed here…”

The hard frown continued to crease her
features, but I could also see the light behind her eyes that told
me she had already turned to the same page as me.

I continued. “Put it all together with the
violent sex and…”

“Do you really think that I’m channeling the
killer?” she asked, cutting me off mid-sentence.

“I hope not,” I told her. “But I’m
really afraid you might be. Especially if the killer
actually
is
female.”

“Gods…” she muttered then took another drink
of the rum.

“Yeah,” I mumbled in return. “All of
them.”

After a moment of the two of us sitting and
staring at one another in the nervous silence, Felicity spoke up
again. “So… Is that what you were going to tell me?”

“Huh?”

“Earlier, when you started to say something
happened.”

“Oh, that.” I shook my head absently, still
mulling over the ramifications of what we’d just discussed. “No, it
was something else.”

“Okay, so what happened?” she pressed.

“It was kind of strange,” I replied. “When I
was in the bathroom I started getting dizzy, like maybe I was going
to ‘zone out’, and then I saw this flash. It was an outline of a
heart, and it kind of looked like something was floating behind
it.”

“You mean like what was carved into
Wentworth?”

“Well, kind of, but not exactly.” I shook my
head again. “I suppose the stuff I thought was behind it could have
been the same. But, it also had a dagger piercing it.”

She summed up the imagery. “A heart with a
dagger piercing it? Sounds a lot like a tattoo to me then.”

“Yeah, that kind of makes sense,” I agreed.
“Maybe the killer has a tattoo similar to it.”

“I could call Duane tomorrow… Ummm, I mean
later this morning I guess,” she offered, referring to the tattoo
artist who had done her own pieces of body art. “We could go down
to his shop, and you could look through the books.”

“That might be a good idea,” I mused. “If
nothing else, it might trigger something if I run across a similar
design.”

“So…” she started again. “Are you still going
to call Ben?”

I reached up to rub my eyes and let out a
sigh. Not only was my head still throbbing, but the exhaustion was
working on me too.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s after
midnight. I’m beat. It’s nothing that can’t wait till morning I
don’t guess. What about you?”

“Aye, what
about
me?”

“Are you going to keep boozing or have you
had enough?”

She twisted the now empty tumbler in her hand
and gave the bottle a long stare before reaching out and picking it
up. She unscrewed the lid and tipped it toward the glass.

“I don’t even feel a tingle yet,” she mused
aloud. “You’d think I would get at least that.”

I shot her a glance and quipped, “At this
rate maybe we should be signing you up for AA.”

She simply frowned back at me and continued
pouring a healthy measure of the alcohol into the tumbler. After
twisting the cap back onto the bottle, she shot me an annoyed glare
and thumped it down on the table in such a way as to tell me my
comment was unappreciated. Without a word she began sipping the
rum, not even bothering to refresh the ice cubes that by this point
in time had all but disappeared.

Before I could offer up an apology, the
ringer on the phone pealed into the room. I slid out of my seat and
started toward the wall where it hung.

“Maybe that’s Ben,” Felicity said.

“Yeah, maybe,” I replied as I stepped across
the room. Leaning in I squinted to read the block letters on the
liquid crystal display of the caller ID box. What I saw actually
made my heart skip upward into my throat.

I snatched the handset from the base and
fought to keep the panic out of my voice as I spoke. “Helen? What’s
wrong?”

“Rowan,” Ben’s sister replied, her own voice
tense. “Is Benjamin with you? It is very important.”

My friend’s older sister was the last person
I would have expected to call at this hour of the night, and the
very fact that she was on the other end of the line told me
something was seriously amiss. The addition of the semi-controlled
tension in her voice simply bolstered that feeling even more.

I’d never known Helen to be overly emotional.
In fact, she was just the opposite. Not frigid by any means but
calm and even tempered to a fault. She was, after all, not only a
psychiatrist but also a trained and practicing psychotherapist, and
she definitely had the temperament for it.

To be honest, it was because of this that we
had first met. She had seen me through some very hard times dealing
with what could only be termed as post-traumatic stress after
nearly being killed by a raging sociopath, not to mention helping
me come to terms with my curse of hearing the dead speak. She had
even been there for Felicity in the wake of her own brush with
those vile stresses. However, while our initial contact had been on
a professional level, we had become good friends over the past few
years, and I knew her current demeanor was out of character.

“We haven’t seen him since early this
afternoon,” I said. “Helen, what’s wrong?”

Her reply followed a perceptible hesitation.
“I’m at the hospital now, and I am afraid that our father has taken
a turn for the worse.”

“Your who?” I blurted without thinking.

“Our father, Rowan,” she replied, emotion
cracking in her voice. “He’s in the hospital. Did Benjamin not tell
you?”

“No, he didn’t.”

What I couldn’t bring myself to voice was the
fact that I was under the impression that their father had died
long ago. At least, that is what Ben had led me to believe ever
since I’d known him.

“I can’t say that I am surprised,” she
sighed.

“You said he took a turn for the worse. Is it
very serious?” I asked. I suspected that I already knew the answer
but didn’t want to make blind assumptions.

She hesitated again. The pause gave me an
instant mental picture of her weighing her words before speaking,
just as I’d seen her do many times before. When she finally spoke,
the matter of fact delivery was a weak barrier against the flood of
emotion she was obviously trying to contain.

“He is dying, Rowan.”

Out of reflex I said, “Helen… I’m so
sorry…”

“Thank you,” she replied.

Felicity was out of her seat now and was
giving me a questioning stare as she touched my arm. I cupped my
hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “It’s Helen Storm looking
for Ben. Their father is dying.”

“Their father?” she asked quietly, just as
puzzled as I. “You mean Ben’s father? But, I thought…”

I gave her a quick shrug and shake of my head
then returned my attention to the phone. “Helen, is there anything
we can do?”

“No,” she returned. “No, but thank you. It is
simply his time. It is just that… Just that Benjamin needs to be
here.”

“I understand,” I told her. “Like I said
though, the last time we saw him was early this afternoon here at
the house. He got paged, made a call, and then left in a bit of a
rush.”