The Missing (32 page)
Authors: Shiloh Walker
Tags: #Contemporary, #Romantic Suspense, #Romance Suspense
All conscious thought fled. She lifted her gaze and stared at the stranger without seeing his face. The gray dropped down on her like a lead weight, and she could feel it pressing on her, crushing her. Only Cullen’s hand on her right arm and the stranger’s on her left kept her from hitting the ground.
She saw faces.
Dozens of faces flashed before her eyes. Grief-stricken parents, lost children, infuriated, frustrated law enforcement officials. Their thoughts formed a collective voice, and it echoed inside her mind in a refrain:
Why?
Why?
There was another question, just as loud, and it was one that Taige had asked more than once.
Who?
Until that moment, the answer had been unknown. But now there was a flicker of knowledge.
Who?
Until that moment, the answer had been unknown. But now there was a flicker of knowledge.
Elusive, it danced away before she could fully understand it. Reflexively, she reached up, grabbed hold of the stranger standing in front of her. The connection—it had come from him. Tenuous at best, and if she faltered for just a second, it would slip away again. Instinct almost had her forcing her way inside the man’s thoughts, and she just barely managed to restrain herself, seeking instead to deepen that surface connection.
This isn’t happening.
But it was. There was no denying it. From the corner of her eye, she could see the man who’d unknowingly brought this on. He was a paramedic, about her age, about her height, and when he’d been a kid, he’d lost his older sister. The girl had been in that stage where adolescence gave way to adulthood. They’d looked a lot alike.
The killer had seen the brother, seen him—and remembered the sister. Remembered killing her. The killer had relived those memories with a passion so intense it had left an imprint, like pressing his hand into fresh cement. And the cement, in this case, was the medic.
Son of a bitch. He’d wiped all traces of himself clean, then he’d run into this man who bore such a strong resemblance to one of his victims. This man didn’t even realize he’d met his sister’s killer, however briefly. And the killer probably didn’t realize he’d left such a strong imprint, either.
The little memory flashes, the psychic imprints worked to fall into place within her mind. All the answers danced just below the surface, moving closer and closer, shifting, realigning, until the answer was there.
All but glaring at her. Taige moaned and sagged to her knees, jerking away from the two men trying to keep her upright. Tears burned in her eyes, and she buried her face in her hands. Warm hands came up and cupped her shoulders. Without looking, she knew who it was: Cullen. He knelt behind her, sliding his arms around her waist and pulling her back against him as her mind fought to accept the knowledge before her.
Cullen’s warmth, his strength, surrounded her as she knelt on the ground and fought not to be sick. Fought not to cry. If she started, she wouldn’t stop for a good long while. There’d be time for tears later. But not now.
Now she had to go. Had to find him and see if she’d really seen what she thought she’d seen.
Reaching up, she covered one of Cullen’s hands with hers. “We need to go.”
One hand smoothed across her shoulder to cup over her neck. “What’s going on, Taige? Where are we going?”
“Back home. He’s there.”
TAIGE wouldn’t speak to him.
It was damned eerie having her sitting in the car with him right then, because she seemed more dead than alive. Her skin had a grayish cast, her mouth had a tight, pinched look to it, and she gazed out the windshield with an unblinking stare. Cullen doubted she saw anything, not the scenery whipping by and not the cars they passed as they sped south down the I-65.
For the first hour, he’d tried to talking to her, but she hadn’t answered anything he’d asked. She wouldn’t speak at all. He shot the clock on the dashboard a glance. The damn thing hadn’t ever moved so slow. He was driving nearly ninety miles an hour. On occasion, a snarl in the traffic had him pulling out on the shoulder to drive, and he only hoped that if they got pulled over, Taige’s Bureau ID would get them out of trouble. Assuming she could focus enough.
The miles seemed to drag by, even though he was driving so fast the scenery sped by at a blur. Finally, he saw the exit he needed for Highway 59, and he took it at sixty-five miles an hour. The two-lane highway wasn’t as busy in the middle of a Monday morning, but the cars were still moving too damn slow to satisfy him.
The silence got to him, and he glanced at Taige again. “Where are we going?”
Finally a response. “Just keep driving.”
“Driving
where
, exactly?”
where
, exactly?”
She didn’t answer. The thick fringe of her lashes lowered, shielding her eyes. She looked—damn, Cullen didn’t even have the words to describe how she looked. Shattered. Devastated. Shocked.
He wanted to hold her, wished he could pull the car off the road and say
screw it
. The need to do just that was strong.
screw it
. The need to do just that was strong.
Yet there was an equally strong need that kept him driving. A part of him that was hot with anticipation and the need to get where they were going, find who they were looking for, so Cullen could kill him. Slow. Nice and slow. Cullen hadn’t ever pegged himself as a bloodthirsty type. He’d never admit it, but when he was in the delivery room the day Jillian was born, he’d gotten damn queasy when he saw the blood. His legs had gone all watery, and for a minute, he had been scared he was going to humiliate himself and pass out on the delivery room floor.
His dad loved to go hunting, but Cullen had gone with him exactly one time—one time, and he’d known that hunting was not his thing. The smell of blood, the sight of it, the feel of it. Hell, no.
But right now? He craved it. He didn’t just want to find this man and kill him. He wanted to hurt him.
The bastard didn’t know it, but he was already dead.
As they drew closer to Gulf Shores, the traffic from the tourists thickened until they were moving along at a snail’s pace. At least it felt that way to Cullen. Blood roared in his ears so loud, he barely heard Taige’s voice when she said, “Turn here.” The narrow highway was just north of town, and it wasn’t at all familiar to Cullen.
“Where are we going?” he asked as they started to head east.
“The church.”
Cullen didn’t want to ask which church. He had a feeling that he already knew the answer to that, just by that expression in her eyes: dazed disbelief and desolation. “What church? Why?” he asked shortly. She didn’t answer. Just barely, he kept from growling at her. He took the turn onto that gravel road so sharply, the truck skidded, and the tires threw dust into the air. There was a sign set in a flower bed, surrounded by chaotic bursts of flowers.
Disciples of the Lamb, it read.
Under that, worship times. And under that . . . a name.
Leon Carson, Minister.
For just the briefest second, time seemed to stop. Cullen slammed on the brakes and read the name again, certain he’d misread it.
“Son of a
bitch
!” he roared. Shoving his foot down on the gas, he sped down the winding little drive, pulling in front of the church and stomping on the brake. Tires squealed.
bitch
!” he roared. Shoving his foot down on the gas, he sped down the winding little drive, pulling in front of the church and stomping on the brake. Tires squealed.
“He’s not here,” Taige murmured. Cullen released his seat belt and paused, looking back at her. She moved slowly, as though each movement hurt.
“Did he take my daughter?” he demanded.
She swallowed. He could hear it, and it sounded as loud as a gunshot. “I think he did.”
Taige wasn’t sure if she’d be able to stand up just yet. In the entire time she’d known Cullen, he’d always been so self-contained. Even when she’d seen him after his mother died, he’d been contained. Holding his grief, his rage, everything he felt so tightly inside, only the echo of it could leak through to spill onto her.
But that restraint was shattered now.
She could feel his rage so strongly, her hands trembled in sympathy. Her gut was tangled into a million knots, and adrenaline pulsed through her. When she took a deep breath, the connection deepened, so strong and sudden that for a moment, she couldn’t tell where she left off and he began. When she looked around, it was with his eyes.
When she moved, it felt wrong, felt off, and it was because her brain was still mired in his. It took three tries to get the door to open, and when she slid out, she had to brace a hand against the side of the truck just to stay upright. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to erect some sort of shield between them. It was shaky and thin, not strong enough to block him out, but it was better than nothing.
Just barely. Enough that she could open her eyes and look at the church and the rectory and know that she was seeing it with her eyes and not his. To her eyes, the church looked simple, plain, just a pretty country church with a white picket fence, flowers, and stained glass windows.
But the house—
“Shit.” Taige swallowed the bile churning up through her belly. The house was new. Over the past ten years, the church had grown, more and more members joining, and five years ago, those members had built the rectory. Five years old. Most houses that new didn’t have much psychic energy inside them, especially not a house where only one person lived.
But this house was screaming with it. Chilled to the bone, she crossed her arms over her chest and started toward the neat little brick house. She could sense Leon’s energy, an echo of his personality. All people left it behind, almost like a scent. When she’d lived with her uncle, she had kept her shields up so that she couldn’t pick up anything random from him. It had been an effort to avoid feeling his hatred of her and maybe, because she had always blocked him off, she’d missed the clues.
He’d been killing for a long time.
Those little memory flashes she’d picked up earlier from the paramedic told the story in vivid detail. She saw dozens and dozens of faces, all of them differing in physical appearance and age. There were hairstyles that had to date back to the seventies, girls wearing the big hair and stirrup pants of the eighties, blue eye shadow almost up to the eyebrow. A boy no more than ten wearing the red fake leather jacket made popular by Michael Jackson.
So many of them—rage churned inside her like bile, boiling up her throat, threatening to spill out onto everything around her, hot, potent, and deadly. She swallowed against it, struggled to breathe past the nausea. It wasn’t time yet. She couldn’t break down yet, couldn’t get sick, couldn’t scream in denial or let herself wallow in the storm of guilt that waited.
Not yet.
Because there was another child. When Leon had seen the paramedic earlier, he hadn’t just thought of the man’s sister, he’d also thought of another child. Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, her body just beginning to show signs of womanhood. A demon child with a demon gift, and the time to purify the child was drawing near.
“Please, God.” Taige closed her eyes and prayed. “Don’t let me be too late.”
On the heels of that soft prayer came a rush of energy. Adrenaline-induced, she knew, and once it faded, she was going to crash, and crash hard. But for now, it gave her the strength she needed to pull the Glock 9 mm from the holster at her side and hold it steady as she crossed to the house.
“I thought you said he wasn’t here,” Cullen said, his voice neutral. Neutral, but it couldn’t hide the rage blistering through him.
“He’s not,” she said quietly. But she’d been wrong before.
Terribly wrong. Bitter, futile rage burned inside her as she thought back to how many times she’d told Rose that Leon wasn’t dangerous to anybody other than Taige. She couldn’t have imagined him hurting somebody other than her, not in a thousand years. And she had been so very wrong.
Walking to the house, Cullen at her side, she took a few seconds to bolster her shields. Bad, bad things had happened inside that house, and it had left a nasty, stinking cloud of death hovering, all but coloring the air. If she walked into that unprepared, she’d never emerge with her sanity intact.
“So, if you know he’s not here, you got a plan for getting inside? Or are we even going inside?” Cullen asked. His voice was calm, almost level, but it didn’t quite mask the fury she sensed inside him.
“Oh, we’re going inside.” The adrenaline crashing through her still had her shaking minutely. “You feel like trying to break a door down? I’ve got some lock picks in the car, but I’m too shaky to use them.” She held up her hand and stared at it, watching the fine tremors.
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