A Deadly Web (6 page)

Now . . . he didn’t even know if he still believed that. And despite his several conversations with Bishop, he was still unconvinced that he could ever learn to control his abilities well enough to make some use of them. He had tried to open a connection, a “door,” Bishop had called it, without success. He had tried meditation and biofeedback, which had left him feeling calm but still unable to see spirits when he wanted to.

There had even been a few dark times when he’d tried both alcohol and various drugs, also to no effect. Except to leave him grateful that he didn’t have an addictive personality.

So Henry went on with his pseudo-normal life, as an architect who specialized in restoring historic old buildings, and never told anyone—except Bishop—that his seemingly uncanny knack for finding valuable original doors and windows and other fixtures for old houses was simply the fact that most original owners showed him where to look.

He never asked. They just appeared and showed him.

Unlike what he’d seen in various movies and TV shows about ghosts and hauntings, Henry had never had to face a negative experience. No angry or malevolent spirits, no spirits that looked disfigured or deformed or even showed the causes of their deaths.

Just helpful spirits dressed in period costume who led the way through basements and attics and storage buildings to things that belonged in whatever building he was restoring.

His own theory was that because he was restoring old buildings to their former glory, there was no reason why any spirit should have negative feelings toward him. Bishop had said it wasn’t that simple, but Henry hadn’t been interested in learning more and it had showed.

Just because he had to live with this didn’t mean he especially wanted to understand how it worked.

So Henry went about his life as though everything were normal. He did his work, talked to investors and clients and landlords, and of course an endless parade of inspectors whose job it was to make sure he was doing
his
job correctly. And followed a seemingly endless succession of spirits to odd storage areas where he recovered original fixtures
and fittings and even furniture designed and built—probably on-site—for the project he was working on.

Long and erratic hours had prevented him from having much of a social life, or at least that was what he told himself. It was okay with him, because he was a solitary soul at heart, and perfectly comfortable with his own company.

But then, while working just after the New Year on the restoration of a plantation house outside Charleston, he gradually realized that spirits had stopped showing up. Common sense told him there should be a
lot
of spirits at a place like this one, because it sure as hell had a lot of history.

But no spirits showed up.

He hadn’t tried reaching out for them in a pretty long time, and didn’t consciously do so then. But, entirely without thinking about it, he opened a door.

Almost at once, he was aware of spirits all around him. But . . . hiding somehow. Drawing back away from him, as if in fear.

Henry barely had time to register the absurdity of that when he became aware of something else. It was getting dark.

In the middle of the chilly January day, inside a huge house whose many windows let in lots of light, it was getting dark.

He thought maybe a rare winter thunderstorm was brewing up at first, but when he turned to look at one of the windows, he saw that it was very bright outside, the sunlight glinting off the windshield of his car. And the glimpse he could catch of the sky showed it clear and blue.

But it was getting darker all the same.

Close the door!

Close the door, hurry!

Henry, you have to close the door!

“What the hell?” he muttered. Because the spirits had never talked to him. They led, they pointed, they smiled. Silently. Even inside his own head, only silence.

Until now.

The urgency was unmistakable, and Henry tried to close a door he wasn’t even sure how he’d been able to open.

He tried.

And then he felt as well as saw the shadows closing around him; not spirits, something else. Something that made his very soul quiver in absolute terror. He kept trying to shut the door but felt some kind of force he didn’t recognize holding the door open so they could get to him. Inky black, icy cold, sliding and blending and slithering all around him, touching him. Taking him.

The blackness swept over Henry McCord, and the last thing he remembered was suddenly wishing he hadn’t lived his life quite so alone.

—

It was one of her volunteer days at the shelter, and Tasha was grateful to be busy and occupied, even above the satisfaction she always felt in doing the work of helping abandoned dogs and cats. And there were people around all day, people she knew, people she had never once felt threatened by in any way, so that helped too.

For a while she was almost able to forget a threat existed.

Almost.

At the end of the day she went along with a few others to a casual restaurant near the shelter, because they were all tired and the only decision they wanted to make about dinner was to point at something that looked good on a menu.

So it was a bit later than usual when she pulled her car into her space outside the condo, well after the winter night darkness descended. Her space was as close as possible to the building, another of her attempts at safety and security. And the entire parking area was, actually, designed with safety in mind. It was well lit and surrounded by wrought-iron fencing that was attractive but would also be difficult to scale; residents gained access to the small courtyard via a gate that, as part of the entire security system, was manned around the clock.

The guard manning the gatehouse tonight had been cheerful and calm, nothing at all in his bearing indicating he felt at all uneasy about the security of the parking lot that was his area of responsibility.

And still, with all that, Tasha found herself hurrying to the building’s door, hurrying to swipe her card and punch in the code, hurrying to close the door behind her.

She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath, and for way too long, until she leaned against the wall by the door and heard it escape her tense body in a rush.

Dammit.

Tasha hated to feel so . . . out of control.

Someone was watching her. She
knew
someone was watching her. But she couldn’t see them, didn’t know
where they were or who they were—or why the hell they were watching her at all. She wasn’t being paranoid, she
knew
that. She was being watched.

Because she was psychic, that other voice in her head had told her the previous night. The voice that, all day today and even now, even when she let herself think about it, was absent.

“Everything all right, Ms. Solomon?”

She started and looked at the security guard. “Yes. Yes, of course, everything’s fine, Hawes.”

His last name, no title; it was the compromise the security staff and residents had reached after some debate when the building had been completed and waiting residents moved in. No one liked the formality of honorifics or titles for the security staff or the
in
formality of first names on either side, so they were left with this.

So far, it worked.

“I’m heading back toward the elevator,” Hawes said.

Tasha managed a brief laugh. “Do I look . . .” She didn’t quite know how to finish that.

“It’s an odd night,” Hawes said, matter-of-factly. “Most everybody who’s been out tonight has come home jumpy. I expect it’s the full moon. Affects people even when they don’t realize.”

Tasha hadn’t even realized the moon was full.

She headed for the elevator, Hawes walking more or less beside her. He was a former cop, she knew that much, a Chicago street cop who had chosen to semi-retire in a warm southern city.

Most of the security staff had the same sort of
background, former cops or retired military, if anything overtrained for security jobs in a residential condo. They were all very calm and seemingly unflappable, the women as well as the men; the security staff was roughly one-third female, while the concierge staff was about two-thirds female.

Every single one of them a trained professional who at least appeared to take this job as seriously as they had taken their previous ones.

So how had those men gotten past them the night before?

Tasha almost asked Hawes about it. Almost.

Instead, keeping questions and doubts to herself, she stepped into the elevator when the doors opened and lifted a hand in farewell as they began to close. “Good night.”

“Good night, Ms. Solomon.”

The ride to the third floor was brief and uneventful. The hallway was empty of any threat. The apartments she passed on the way to hers were quiet no matter what activities might have been going on inside, thanks to excellent soundproofing.

For the first time, Tasha thought that maybe the soundproofing shouldn’t be quite so good.

Because if anyone inside were to cry out for help . . .

Refusing to finish that thought, she let herself into her apartment. The lights she always turned on before leaving were still burning; she hated walking into a dark room, always had.

Even before all this, before she’d been conscious of any threat against her, she had hated walking into darkness.

I wonder why. Did I always know there was a threat out there somewhere, sometime? No. No, that’s stupid.

No inner but alien voice offered a response.

She didn’t put her purse down as usual but first methodically searched the apartment. Just as she had after those men had left. Every room, every closet, every cabinet; she opened everything that was closed and checked thoroughly inside.

She found nothing, which should have made her feel at least a bit better.

It really didn’t.

Tasha turned on the TV in the living room more for background noise than anything else, and chose a channel that tended to run science documentaries. The one airing at that time appeared to be something about how life in the universe had begun.

She went into her lamplit bedroom, hesitated for a moment, then gathered up her pajamas and went into the bathroom, pushing the door to behind her. Living alone, it really wasn’t her habit to close doors between rooms, but her edginess also made her feel oddly exposed.

It made sense, she thought. When you knew someone was watching you, you felt watched all the time, even safely alone behind walls and draperies and locked doors.

Security is an illusion.

Her own inner voice, reminding herself of something she had no need to be reminded of. She
wasn’t
safe here, and it was both useless and stupid to pretend otherwise.

She stripped, put her clothing into the hamper, and then took a long, hot shower. The water felt good, breathing in
the steam felt good, and Tasha felt considerably better and more relaxed when she finally stepped out of the shower. She wrapped her hair in one towel and dried off with another, rubbed a lavender-scented body lotion into muscles that had worked hard that day, and then pulled on her pajamas.

It wasn’t until she was loosening the towel covering her hair that she turned toward the mirror. It was steamed over, not surprisingly. But Tasha realized she could see bits of herself.

A pale green eye that was oddly wide. Strands of dark auburn hair. Her fingers near her temple as the towel fell to the floor behind her.

She could see bits of herself, she realized, because letters were written on the steamy mirror. Words that made her go cold to the bone.

YOU CAN’T HIDE, TASHA.

“I thought you would have made contact today,” Murphy said.

“No good opportunity.” Brodie shook his head. “I’m glad she’s cautious, but it isn’t making it easy to approach her. She’s never really alone.”

“Not necessarily a bad thing.”

“True. And I’ll probably have to make contact with her in some public place just so she’ll feel relatively safe. Besides, since Duran has already made one move, he’s more likely than not to move against her again sooner rather than later.”

“I’d still like to know how she showed up on his radar.” Duran was one of the few enemies, a leader on the “other” side, that they could put a face to, yet their best
investigators had been able to find out nothing more about him than a name that led nowhere. He was a cipher.

A deadly cipher.

“Yeah, you and me both. Look, go ahead and take off, get some rest.”

They had been splitting the watcher duties.

Murphy said, “Okay, but I’m coming back to relieve you around four. You’ll need to rest yourself if you mean to approach her tomorrow.”

“No argument.” Brodie settled down where they had decided was the best position to watch Tasha Solomon’s condo during the night, the corner of a rooftop on a three-story building that housed on its ground floor her favorite coffee shop. From their position they could see both entrances to her building and had a good view of her corner apartment.

Both the blinds and the curtains were drawn.

“Think she’s in for the night?”

“Yeah, pretty sure. Honestly, I don’t think she’d risk going out at night right now. She’s even more jumpy than before. The only time today she seemed able to put any worries or uneasiness out of her mind was when she was working at the shelter.”

Brodie eyed Murphy. “You think or you know?”

“Think. Her walls are up and we haven’t tried getting through.”

“It might make my job easier if you do.”

“Or the opposite. An alien voice in her mind spooked her. Duran’s goons spooked her. If we push, she could
get spooked enough to haul ass away from here. And I have a hunch she wouldn’t be easy to track. At least not for us. The last thing we need is her in the wind.”

“True enough. Get some rest, Murphy.”

“See you around four.” She lifted a hand in a brief salute, then left the roof and made her way down to the street. She was somewhat preoccupied, tired but not enough to stop her mind from considering various possibilities and probabilities, weighing her own options, still walking the fine line she had been walking for some time now.

They had so few answers. So damned many questions.

And too many psychics like Tasha Solomon in danger and yet also in a position to possibly give them more information, more answers.

What she knew.

And what Duran might reveal in trying to get to her.

Murphy had been involved in this secretive group they had never really named for several years now, and in her time the only certainty she felt able to count on was that there were two sides to this . . . conflict.

Not a war. Exactly.

Maybe a struggle. A struggle to find and protect psychics from some mysterious “other” that wanted them.

Reasons unknown.

They did know of a few of the . . . soldiers . . . on the other side, the way they
knew
Duran. Not where he was born, or when, or where he’d gone to school or, really, anything about his background. Duran headed up their
field operations, most of them, they knew that, but who or what he reported to was a mystery.

Still, after years, a mystery.

So there was also a struggle to gather information.

A struggle to understand. To learn who was behind this and why. To have it make sense somehow. To be able to look back and reaffirm that those who had fallen, to the other side or because of them, had given their freedom or their lives in a good and just cause.

Melodramatic.

Yes. But also true.

There was just so damned much they didn’t
know
.

They hadn’t even found a single way to protect psychics; each one was a unique situation and called for unique measures to make them safe. Some were in hiding, not really living any kind of a normal life and yet the only sort in which they felt even marginally safe.

A few had taken the opposite tactic, going public in a major way, drawing media and other attention to themselves. Sarah Mackenzie came to Murphy’s mind, at least in part because Sarah’s was both the most recent and the most successful case she knew of.

With Tucker Mackenzie’s celebrity status as a very famous best-selling author, and the publication of his book about his wife’s rather astonishing abilities garnering them both a lot of media attention, it at least appeared that Duran had backed off. They couldn’t even find evidence that he had the couple under surveillance where they lived in Richmond.

But they weren’t
sure
, of course.

They were never sure.

And just when they thought they were sure of something, just when they thought there was a fact they could stand on, it was neatly pulled out from under them.

Usually by Duran.

Don’t think about Leigh. Don’t think about the others lost along the way. But good people, dammit. Good people.

Murphy slipped away from the downtown area where Tasha Solomon’s condo was situated, but she didn’t return to the small apartment several blocks away, rented for the duration.

Instead, after hesitating only briefly, she stood in the shadows of a darkened doorway on a quiet, peaceful street, and pulled one of the burner cell phones from her bag.

Dead. The next two were dead as well, their batteries drained even though they had not yet been turned on.

Murphy cursed under her breath, making a mental note to charge all of them later tonight.

The fifth one she tried still had some power. Maybe enough. She punched in a number. Always the same one. He never worried they could trace the call, even ping the cell he always used.

Because they had never been able to.

Dammit.

“Yes?”

Murphy recited the address of a bar a couple of blocks from her location. A dark place, open late. Quieter than most bars, its patrons mostly intent on drowning their
sorrows and not interested in what was going on around them while they did so.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said.

“I can make it in ten,” he responded, calm as ever.

It was a little game they played. Murphy tried to gauge how close by he was at any given time, and he consistently surprised her.

“So you are in Charleston,” she said.

“Didn’t you expect me to be?”

Murphy didn’t want to talk about what she expected, not during a cell call. So all she said was, “See you there.”

She didn’t wait for a response, just ended the call, turned off the phone, and removed its battery. She then went on her way, tossing the phone and battery into different trash receptacles.

He’s here himself. Which means Tasha Solomon is more important than we knew. Maybe more powerful. More . . . useful somehow? Or . . . is it just one more game of his, to keep us guessing?

To keep me guessing?

Murphy headed toward the bar, wondering vaguely if the high wire she walked was actually visible beneath her.

And wondering how long she could continue to walk it before she lost her balance and fell.

Undoubtedly into a very unpleasant pit.

—

Jeffrey Bell hadn’t asked to become psychic. And since the car accident that had resulted in a head injury hadn’t
been his fault, he felt a bitter sense of resentment toward the universe that he hadn’t just ended up with a totaled car, but pretty much a wrecked life as well.

“Please.” Her voice even over the phone was desperate. “You have to help me, Mr. Bell. You don’t know me, but—”

He didn’t want to listen to another of the stories that had begun to haunt every day of his life.

“Listen,” he said to her, keeping his voice even and calm even as he made a mental note to himself to change his home number yet again. And to fucking screen his calls with voice mail. “I can’t help you, lady. Really. I can’t just flip a switch and predict something for you or anyone else.”

“But I just need to know if he’ll come back!”

“And that’s something I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”

“If we met in person—”

“Nothing would change.” Somewhat grudgingly, he added, “If I’m going to see anything at all, your voice would have been enough of a trigger. At least that’s the way it’s been so far. Look, I’m sorry, but I just can’t help you.”

“But—”

“Sorry,” he repeated, then hung up the phone. And immediately unplugged it.

So far nobody had gotten his cell number, but he figured it was only a matter of time. He could give up the landline. Change cell numbers. Move again as he had moved here to Atlanta only a month previously.

It wouldn’t help.

Sooner rather than later, they would begin to find him again. The desperate. The lost. The greedy. Needing
something from him, urgent and pleading. Sometimes demanding.

As if he owed them.

In Jeffrey’s mind, he didn’t owe anybody a damned thing. Except maybe a kick in the balls to the universe, if he could have done that. Because his life had been fun before the accident. A job he found satisfying, an apartment perfect for his needs. Friends and family around.

Normal.

But nothing had been normal since the accident. Family and friends, if they believed him at all, were wary of him. Avoided him. Clearly uneasy about what he might tell them.

And it looked spooky, he’d been told, whenever a new face or voice or place triggered one of his visions. His girlfriend told him he went white, his eyes went dark, and his stillness, for minutes at a time, was truly creepy to see.

She told him that just before she dumped him.

As for his job, they hadn’t
said
he was being laid off because of what he was suddenly able to do. The economy, they said.

“I’m sorry, Jeff, but you know how it is.” His supervisor sounded calm in the way that someone very nervous forced himself to be calm. “But there’s always a demand for IT people, so I’m sure you won’t have trouble finding another job. You’ll have an excellent recommendation from us, I can assure you of that.”

“Except,” Jeffrey had responded evenly, “there’s this lousy economy. That might factor into my ability to get another job.”

“Yes. Well, maybe a different city . . .” He didn’t quite say the more distance Jeffrey put between them, the better.

Except that was what he was saying.

Jeffrey had risen to his feet and headed for the door, almost wishing he knew something he could have tossed over his shoulder, something seriously spooky. But he had discovered that his “abilities” were beyond his control, grabbing him unexpectedly in damned inconvenient moments, and virtually never something he could trigger at will.

So he cleaned out his cubicle, and he left.

He left, moving temporarily to New York, where he could feel anonymous, sending out résumés all over the country. And the job offer from a company in Atlanta had been reassuringly prompt.

A better job, actually. And he had tried to avoid betraying this “gift” he had been cursed with. Had tried to limit his contact with other people, avoiding crowds whenever possible, remaining detached from others emotionally. Doing his best to isolate himself.

And it worked. For about two pretty lonely weeks. And then somebody Googled him
because
he was so quiet and kept to himself, and the gossip started. The questions asked jokingly became patently uneasy. Somebody blogged about him, there was an anonymous tip or two to the newspapers—and word got out.

Word got out, and people began contacting him.

The desperate. The lost. The greedy. Believing he could help them find something, someone. Pick a winning
lottery number. Believing he was the answer to all their problems. Believing he could make their lives better, or at least reassure them that their lives would have meaning.

And then there were the disbelievers, the ones who wanted to challenge him, test him, prove he was a fraud.

So here he was. Packing a bag to go stay in a hotel, because his address had been posted by some nitwit on Twitter
and
Facebook who had thoughtfully tagged a whole bunch of the Roswell, Area 51, ghost hunting, paranormal believers—and he knew all too well what that would mean.

People turning up at his door.

A lot of people.

Jeffrey was nearly packed when a vision slammed into him as they sometimes did, without warning.

Darkness. Then the overwhelming, unsettling sounds of whispering, as though from a thousand voices, ten thousand, all saying things he couldn’t quite hear. And the darkness lifted just enough for him to have a sense of vast space all around him, space filled with . . .