A Deadly Web (2 page)

Her eyes snapped open, and Tasha Solomon fought to control her breathing. Fought not to betray the dagger of icy fear slicing deeper than her marrow.

The cacophony of voices in her head was instantly muted, shut in a room in her mind, the door slammed closed against them. She could still hear them, but only distant whispers now.

Most were her neighbors or at least from this general area, not all of them here but most nearby or passing by, their homes or jobs all around this small local café, their thoughts the ordinary ones of ordinary lives. Observations, absent thoughts, pain. Irritation, fretting, planning, worry, admiration, jealousy, envy.

Fear.

Worry about some poor little girl being abused.

Tasha wanted to home in on that one, that worry, so she could find out which neighbor was hurting their kid. She’d damned well do something about
that
, and it wouldn’t involve cops. And the abused wife, who was that? Living in her secret hell, probably behind a smile of normality, thinking of the gun she had dared to buy but probably lacked the will to use. Alone. So alone.

Tasha wanted to help her too.

But . . . it was that other voice that kept her mental door firmly closed, at least for now. Because she couldn’t risk reaching out again, listening again, opening herself up like that again. That other voice, or maybe it was many voices, she could never tell for certain. Many voices speaking as one. That was how it felt, how it sounded in her mind.

Many, many voices. Certain. Implacable.

And when she tried to see them . . .

Shadows.

Tasha always felt more than saw them. Shadows. Watching. Listening. Waiting. All around her, but not close enough to touch.

Not yet, at least. But they had been getting closer, she knew that. Biding their time, but creeping nearer.

So they could watch her, as they had watched her for a time now.

It was difficult to focus in such a public place as the café where she sat, especially filled with a lunchtime crowd, but she closed her eyes and tried. Opened that mental door cautiously just a bit, just far enough, she hoped. Still somewhat protected, but . . . She tried to listen, see, with senses other than her ears and eyes.

Shadows.

Dark, misshapen, slipping away when she tried to see them, vanishing like smoke through her fingers, the shadows were as elusive as they had been for more than a month now.

Elusive—but always near.

Always watching.

Even in broad daylight, they watched her. Followed her. And she couldn’t tell from the faces around her, as she moved through her days, whether any belonged to the shadows. She didn’t want to believe that anyone or anything watching her was so near, literal shadows on the edges of her life. But she didn’t
know
. In a crowd, how could she tell?

She couldn’t.

If Tasha had been a nervous sort of woman, she’d be in a straitjacket by now. Or at least heavily medicated.

As she would be if she had told anyone about the shadows.

Because that was crazy, right, being haunted by shadows she could see only in her mind? That was nuts. Virtually always feeling an almost primitive sense of danger, the inner urge to run or hide—

But not alone. Every instinct compelled her to stay visible as much as possible, to avoid dark corners or quiet places where they could . . .

What? Kill her? Hurt her? Take her?

Change her life forever?

“Miss?”

Tasha blinked, brought herself back to the here and
now. She looked up at the waitress, who was displaying slightly uneasy concern.

“Miss, are you okay?”

Forcing a smile, Tasha said, “Yeah, fine, thanks. Meditation. When it’s crowded like this, I try to . . . go somewhere else in my mind.”

The waitress’s young face relaxed and she even popped her gum, cheerful again. “Oh, I see. I wish I could do that. Often.” She glanced around, then smiled wryly. “Can I clear this away for you? Would you like coffee?”

Tasha glanced down at the plate before her, at the half of the turkey sandwich still untouched, and knew she wouldn’t finish it. “Yeah, thanks. To both.”

“Would you like a box for the rest of the sandwich and fries?”

She wouldn’t eat it herself, Tasha knew, but there was a big dog in a fenced yard she always passed on her way home, and he always welcomed leftovers. “Please.”

The waitress smiled brightly. “Be right back.”

Tasha looked at the check lying on the table, grimaced, and dug in her purse for her billfold. She was taking up valuable table space with her lingering, and she could see that there were a few people waiting at the front with varying degrees of patience to be seated. She pulled out cash to cover the bill, plus a generous tip. Generous enough that the waitress would be happy to allow her to sit here a bit longer and enjoy her coffee.

Not that she would enjoy it. There wasn’t a lot she enjoyed these days, and that was something she resented.

Something that pissed her off.

Because as much as the weird and mysterious shadows she sensed made her afraid, they also made her angry. She’d lived her whole life with the ability to pick up the thoughts of people around her, most people, and she’d learned to deal with that, privately, without becoming some kind of public freak.

The trick was not talking about it. At all.

To anyone.

She didn’t hang out a shingle and tell fortunes or claim to be some kind of mystic, bending over an outstretched palm even as she listened with that odd extra sense to the thoughts of the person across from her.

Well . . . she had once. A charity fund-raiser, and she’d volunteered to be the “psychic.” Yards of colorful, silky material draped around herself, and fake gold bracelets jangling on her arms, and a crystal ball lit from below to look properly mysterious.

Tasha had done that only once. It had been unexpectedly exhausting to sift through the chaos of impressions to find mental truths and mine just enough nuggets to impress her “clients” without scaring the shit out of them. And even so, she knew at least a few people had left her tent not a little spooked by her accuracy.

She’d had to consciously dial that back, making use instead of vague “impressions” that led her to predict happy lives and prosperity and correct decisions made.

That had been a year ago, and Tasha had no intention of doing anything like that again. Just that one innocent event had roused the uneasy suspicion of several people she knew, and it had taken all the casual amusement she’d
been able to muster to convince them of what they wanted to believe anyway.

That it had all been pretend. Not real.

Because it couldn’t be real, of course.

Nobody could do that sort of thing.

—

The man in the black leather jacket stayed close but took care not to allow himself to be seen. There would come a time for that, a moment now and then to be briefly visible, to allow her to catch only a glimpse of him slipping out of sight.

They had learned the effectiveness of such glimpses, and just how to build on them, just how to elicit the fear and even panic that served them so well.

First only a glimpse, barely noticed, easily dismissed. Nothing identifiable except that black leather jacket, a subliminal trigger of uneasiness for so many people in this culture, a hint of danger. Then a glimpse elsewhere, here and there along the regular routine, and so the almost wordless suspicion of being followed.

A glimpse just before darkness. Slipping away, too far to identify except by that jacket. A glimpse in the neighborhood, outside a store, a theater, a church. At the bank, the dry cleaners, the local coffee shop, a favorite restaurant. A lurking presence that could not be innocent and so had to be potentially dangerous.

He was watching. Was he following? What did he want?

A glimpse outside, across the street, the automatic checking that doors and windows were safely locked for the night
interrupted by uneasiness. Locks checked again. Security systems tested and set. Because everyone knew stalkers weren’t just after celebrities, not anymore.

So . . . possible. Maybe. A faceless enemy.

Somebody watching? Somebody waiting for a chance, the right moment in which to act . . .

Maybe.

Shattering the illusion of safety.

They had learned well how to unsettle, to worry, to panic.

People who panicked made things so much easier.

People who panicked made mistakes.

—

Grace Seymore woke to darkness, and for a long and panicked minute or two she thought she was blind. But then she realized she could see dim shapes around her. People moving—but with an eerie silence.

She wanted to speak, to call out a question and demand someone tell her what the hell was going on, but for some reason she was unable to make a sound. And her memory was . . . fuzzy. She thought she had been at home, taking advantage of the waning winter sunlight to do a little yard work. Not that she could do much except weed this time of year, but that was enough, that was necessary, and it kept her from thinking very much.

Usually.

Her second marriage had just crumbled around her, and Grace felt nothing but bitterness about that. It wasn’t her fault, after all, that she’d been born with the family curse.
She’d been raised to hide it, naturally, since it totally creeped people out if she reached for a phone before it began to ring, or knew things about people she shouldn’t have known.

It wasn’t her fault her abilities had grown stronger over the years.

That they’d grown more and more difficult to hide.

As for the two men she had loved and married, she honestly couldn’t decide if she was a bad judge of character or if both husbands had simply been unable to live with a woman who too often knew
exactly
whom they’d had lunch with that day.

Or that they’d spent that lunch in a motel room.

Grace pushed that out of her mind and tried to remember today. She had been on her knees wrestling with a stubborn weed and then . . . nothing. A moment of icy coldness that had made her wonder idly if a rare winter storm was heading for Charleston—and then blackness.

Now, she was . . . here. Wherever here was. Lying on something hard, in darkness, unable to speak. And—when she tried—unable to move.

She was strapped down.

Hard as she tried, no sound escaped her. Fear became terror, roiling around in her mind and body, leaving her even colder than she had been in this cold place. In desperation, she reached out with that other sense, that curse she’d been born with.

Shadows. Misshapen, distorted, blacker than black. Sliding away when she tried to focus on them, uttering low sounds that made the hair rise on the nape of her neck in a primitive response.

Bad. Very bad. Evil. Not . . . human. And they want . . . they want me . . . they . . . No. Oh, please, no! Don’t make me . . .

But she couldn’t protest out loud. Couldn’t cry out against the prick of a needle that made the fear recede, made her feel as though she were floating on a peaceful sea. For a moment. And then she became aware that they were moving her body, spreading her legs, raising her knees.

Oh, God, no!

Their hands on her were cold, so cold, and she could feel breathing, even colder than the touch, cold and reeking of something that smelled old, older than the earth, older than time. She wanted to cry out, to scream a protest, but she could make no sound.

No sound when she felt them penetrating her body. No sound when she understood what it was they were doing to her.

Grace Seymore could do nothing except lie naked and exposed on a cold table in a cold, dark room, while the monsters changed her life forever.

—

John Brodie was always cautious; it was his nature as well as his job. But he was more cautious than usual about this particular meeting because even the idea of it made him profoundly uneasy.

There were so few in law enforcement they could trust.

A precious few, as he had been reminded.

“He can help us, John.”

“From all accounts, he has his hands full with that unit of his.”

“All the better for us. Despite their efforts to remain low-key in the public eye, the truth is that the Special Crimes Unit is the most safely visible group of psychics we know of—and they’re within law enforcement. We haven’t been able to find a reliable, trustworthy source inside law enforcement; to have someone like Bishop on our side can give us an enormous edge.”

“I don’t know about that, boss. We don’t know who Duran has on his payroll. It seems every time we turn around, we stumble over another dirty cop or fed working for his side.” Brodie found that knowledge very grim, and it showed.

“Granted. Which makes it vital for us to have a well-placed source of our own. Someone with high-level access to information and the authority to act with virtual autonomy. Someone who knows the value of discretion. Someone who knows about psychics and psychic abilities, quite likely more than we know. But aside from all that, just to have a unit chief inside the FBI . . . You know what that could be worth, potentially, John.”