Energized (27 page)

“W
AIT
IN
THE
car,” Dev said to Niall.

“Fuck that.”

“What's with the salty verbiage?” Dev asked with a shake of his head. “Is it a Marine thing?”

“It's a some-psycho-has-my-brother-chained-up-like-an-animal thing.” Niall reached for the sidearm he no longer carried. Crap. “I can't sit out here. It's my brother in there.”

Dev pulled into a spot on the street, blocking the alley. He called Detective Reynolds. Again. “Reynolds, where are you and O'Dell? I'm outside the suspect's apartment.”

Niall could make out the angry male voice on the other end of the line, but not the words. The meaning was clear. Stay put.

“Understood. I'll await your arrival,” he said into the cell, then clicked off. “Fuckers.”

Niall might have smiled at Dev's response had the situation been any less dire. “So we're going to what? Just sit with our thumbs up our asses and wait for the Dudley Do-Wrong Detectives to show up?”

“Yes, we wait. I follow protocol. Until I have a reason to go inside, we don't move.” Dev turned his gray eyes on Niall, his expression serene. He sent a text that read, “Plan B.”

“Who are you texting and what's Plan B?”

Dev's placid smile didn't waiver. “That was to TSS. And Plan B is—”

“Help!” The scream was loud and male and sounded like Ian. It also appeared to be coming from inside the building. “Help! Police!”

“Now we have a reason.” Dev was out of the car and at the door in seconds.

*   *   *

“
W
HAT ARE YOU
doing here?” Michael asked, frowning at Hannah. He glanced around as if searching for other people, but Shelley had been smart enough to duck into the Master dining room. “Alone?”

“I could ask you the same,” Hannah retorted. Okay, not the brightest thing to say to a psycho killer, but it was all she had.

“I, uh, forgot something.” He turned and locked the back door.

With his back to her, Hannah turned to Shelley who appeared in the diamond-shaped window of the swinging door. Waving at her sister to stay hidden in the front room, she mouthed, “Tell Dev Mercy's here.”

Shelley didn't wait.

Hannah spun back in time to catch Michael staring quizzically at the corkboard.

In two fast strides, Michael grabbed her by the arm and hauled her over to the board. “Where is it?” he demanded.

“Where's what?” Hannah asked, tugging free of his hold.

Michael glanced from his misshapen pinky to her arm, then whispered, “Here.”

He lifted the picture from the counter. The same one Niall had shown her earlier. Michael tucked it into his pocket and headed toward the back door. He had his hand on the lock when he turned back and asked, “Why are you here?”

“Waiting for Niall.” She kept the table between them this
time. Michael took a slow circuit of the room. When he pressed his nose to the window of the swinging door, Hannah's heart beat so loud, she worried he'd hear it.

Michael stared at her. His eyes remained mostly hidden but the weight of his stare was choking. She coughed, raised her voice hoping her sister could hear her.

“Michael, how-how'd you even know someone would still be here?” She inched her way toward the back door, keeping the prep table between them.

“I didn't.” He matched her step for step. Each time she lifted a foot to move to her right, he did too. Only the table kept her out of arm's reach, but it wouldn't last much longer. “Ross keeps a Hide-A-Key in a rock by the back door.”

At the mention of Ross's name, Hannah jerked to a halt.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

His lips curled into a slow, sinister smile. The kind that had her knees turning to rubber and her heart trying to leap into her throat.

“I know all about you, you know. Ross told me.” Michael took one of Virgil's skillets from the hook on the wall over the stove. He twirled it like a baton.

“Nope, I don't know what you mean.” She nodded toward the back door, keeping her eyes on Michael. “You got your picture, don't you want to head out?”

“Wouldn't be right to leave you here alone.” Michael shook his head. “Nah, I can wait for Niall with you. Want me to fix you something to eat?”

The pan arced through the air with a swish.

She swallowed hard. “No, I'm not hungry, thanks.”

Like she'd eat anything he offered.

“Huh.” He set down the wooden-handled skillet on the table between them and put his hands on either side of it. “Why do you look scared?”

“No reason. Psh-pah. I'm not scared.” She tried her brightest this-is-just-a-drunk-customer smile. “Why do you ask?”

“Because when I said Ross, you jumped.” He pointed at her. “Just like you did that time. You know, don't you?”

“Know what?” She feigned ignorance and gauged how long it would take to get to the back door and unlock it before Michael caught up to her. Too long.

Michael leaned his face forward and gave her a sinister smile. “Mercy,” he whispered.

Hannah grabbed for the skillet and swung at his head. And missed. She did clip his shoulder. Michael slammed into Virgil's stove and crashed to the floor.

Thank you,
Buffy reruns!

“Run, Shelley!” she yelled, bolting for the back door, only to swing around at a thunderous crack behind her.

Michael was on his feet again, slamming the swinging door against Shelley's unmoving body. She must have been waiting on the other side of the door and rushed into the kitchen, only to have Michael catch her with the door.

Rage flowed through Hannah like a landslide. The skillet still clutched in her hands, she charged around the table and swung at his head before he'd looked up.

Hannah swung twice, knocking him away from her sister's unmoving body. He fell against the wall and the lights went out.

*   *   *

S
EVERAL ALARMS BLARED
at once. People rushed out of the surrounding apartment buildings from all directions. Niall raced past the confused citizens stumbling into the street, staying on Dev's six.

Like in combat, he catalogued the outside noises—a baby crying, questions being volleyed, sirens in the distance moving closer, and silence coming from inside Michael's apartment. Catalogued and ignored all but the most important.

Glock in hand, Dev used his free fist to pound on the door. “Tidewater Police, open up!”

Nothing. Not a sound. Not a movement. Utter silence.

He did it again.

This time, Dev asked, “Did you hear that? Sounds like someone calling for help.”

Dev didn't wait for a response but kicked in the door. It
took two vicious attempts, but he broke open the door. The cracked frame went with it in a crunch. Despite the glow of the sunset outside, the inside of the apartment was dark, cavernous. Cramped.

A sickly sweet stench of roses hung in the air, like someone had plugged in one too many air fresheners. The smell was overpowering. Blackout curtains hung over the windows in the living room; only a red night-light in the hallway offered a glimmer of relief from the oppressive dark.

Dev turned his head and mouthed, “Stay here.”

Niall wanted to fight that command and search for his brother, but Ian and Ryan had arrived behind him. Like Dev, they had weapons at the ready. Each member of the three-man team began to clear the apartment.

Now this Niall understood. He'd been in combat zones long enough to know how to clear a room. Unarmed as he was, he couldn't do much more than get shot if he opened the wrong door. As much as it chafed, he remained on guard by the closed front door.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“Got something,” Ian called from the back of the apartment. “We've got a live one.”

Niall didn't think, didn't wonder, simply bolted to the room. His brother lay exactly as Hannah had described, facedown, naked, and chained to the wall. Ian was at his side, checking his vitals.

Niall reached for the hook, holding Ross's chains, but Ian stopped him by placing a hand on his wrist. “Don't touch him yet. He's alive but unconscious. He's okay for now. We don't want to disturb the scene. You're not supposed to be here, remember. Neither are we.”

Staring at the blond hair plastered to the side of his little brother's face, Niall's insides twisted. He wanted to set him free. Not wait and leave him chained like an animal. But that bastard, Michael, needed to pay for what he'd done to Ross. At least his baby brother slept through this part. Perhaps he'd sleep until he reached the hospital.

Ian pushed to his feet and moved to the doorway. “It was a cursory check but his vitals seem stable.”

“I take it you two are Plan B?” Niall asked, switching places with Ian. He couldn't set his brother free so settled for kneeling next to the bed.

“That's us,” Ian said, but his tone lacked its normal humor.

“Time.” Ryan appeared in the doorway. His monosyllabic word had Ian hustling to his side.

“Got this, Dev?” Ian asked.

“Go,” he said to his cousins, then picked up his cell and placed a call. “This is Detective Devon Jones, Tidewater PD. I need an ambulance for an unconscious white male, early twenties. He's been kidnapped and appears to have been drugged. We're located at . . .”

While Dev spoke with EMS, Niall turned to the doorway saying, “Thank you—”

Ian and Ryan were gone. They'd left the same way they'd arrived, silent as wraiths.

C
OPS
SWARMED
IN
TO
the apartment around Niall. The group included the two homicide detectives who had given Hannah such a hard time. One glare from them and Niall realized she'd probably like to know all of her visions hadn't been for nothing. He stepped out of the bedroom as the paramedics hurried in.

“I need to call Hannah,” Niall said, pulling Dev aside. “Where's Michael?”

“We've got a BOLO for him. Right now, let's focus on the positive. We've found your brother and he's alive.”

“Right, good point.” Niall scrubbed a hand down his face as the detective headed toward the homicide cops. “Dev, I'm going to ride to the hospital with Ross.”

“Good idea.”

Leaving Dev to deal with the cops and medics, Niall stepped out into the warm evening air. He took his first deep breath since Hannah's visions had started earlier that night. He needed to call his parents, not that they could go to the
hospital, but they'd need to know. In a few minutes. Right now . . .

He dialed Hannah's number. It went to voice mail. She was probably talking to her sister. Or in the bathroom. Or . . .

Ryan's blue Ford Ranger screeched to a stop at the curb. Ian opened the passenger side and jumped out. He raced past Niall, into the apartment. Niall turned to follow but Ryan called out, “Niall, get in the truck. Hannah's in trouble.”

He moved as ordered. Jumped in. Closed the door. Fastened his seat belt. All without feeling a damned thing. His mind had spiraled down to one thought,
Hannah's in trouble
.

Fuck.

That.

Not one to mince words, Ryan said, “Hang on,” and peeled out, tires squealing.

*   *   *

I
N THE DARK,
Hannah nearly tripped over Shelley's hand. Her arm was bent at an unnatural angle around the swinging door. With the skillet still in one hand, Hannah pushed on the door until she squeezed through. Then as gently as she could, she tugged Shelley fully into the Master Room.

The last rays of sunshine filtered through the room's giant windows, casting the bruise on Shelley's head in stark relief. Hannah kept her back against the door. Using her foot, she pulled a chair across the floor.

It squeaked on the hardwood, but she had to do something. Out in the open they were in danger. The chair wouldn't keep him out, but it would slow him down.

She needed time to get her unconscious sister to safety. Carefully, Hannah inched her way toward the front door, dragging Shelley with her.

Michael must have awoken because there was the distinct sound of things crashing in the kitchen. For a heart-stopping minute, she thought he'd left. The back door closed and the silence that came after had Hannah holding her breath.

She held her sister's limp body close in the shadows and started to inch toward the front door again, when the back
door banged a second time. Something else crashed, this time against the door separating the kitchen from the Master Room.

Certain Michael was going to burst from the kitchen at any moment, Hannah moved as quickly as possible, trying not to jostle Shelley too much. She'd just managed to get her sister outside when Michael started cursing at her.

“This is all your fault! He needs me to set him free. But am I with him? No! I'm wasting my time with you!” Michael grabbed Hannah by the hair.

Her scalp burned as he wrenched her backward, off her feet, and dragged her back into the restaurant. Hannah twisted and dug her fingernails into his right wrist.

Michael shouted in pain and dropped her.

Hannah's heart pumping at a frantic pace, she shoved to the balls of her feet. They'd shifted positions. Now Michael blocked her path to Shelley. She stepped to her right, he followed. She jumped to the left, so did he. He wasn't touching her anymore but his arms were spread wide and his fingers flexed.

She had two choices: try to go through him or go into the kitchen. Hoping he'd follow, she darted toward the back of the restaurant.

The slaps of his sneakers against the floor told her he'd followed.

Hannah nearly tripped over the chair he must have tossed aside when he'd come through the kitchen. Jumping over it, she threw her hands up and shoved the door wide.

The stench of gas hit her in the face before her feet touched the ground. She choked on a cough and covered her mouth with her hand. The burners hissed, flameless.

Michael must have turned them on when he arrived and since broken off the knobs. They lay scattered in pieces on the floor. Terror had her feet turning to cement when he said, “I don't want to hurt you, Hannah.”

He stalked through the door and drew a knife from the magnetic rack near Paulie's stove. It sang sinisterly. The sight of the large silver blade shattered whatever mental block had her frozen. Hannah backed up, determined to
survive. Her lungs burning and her eyes watering from the gas filling the room, she searched for something to help her.

She spotted a wooden-handled frying pan that Michael must have thrown on the prep table during his temper tantrum. Grabbing it, she held it aloft. “Back off!”

“You're going to hit me? Why?” His voice took on a high-pitched quality. Younger somehow. “I liked you. You were nice to me. You never called me names. You didn't make me do things. You were a good person.”

Hannah swallowed hard. He'd switched from present tense to past tense mid-rant. As if she were already dead.

“But I have a destiny. A mission.” His voice hardened, deepened. “I save people.”

“Seriously? You just bashed my sister's head in and you're planning to kill me. That's not saving people!”

Michael's face contorted with rage. He arced the knife up and came for her.

Hannah didn't think, just swung the pan hard. It connected with Michael's damaged hand. He howled in pain. The knife clattered to the floor and slid under one of the prep tables. She thought he might dive for it, instead he charged her again.

He tackled her. The pan skidded across the floor and under one of the metal racks, out of reach. Hannah's head slammed against the floor hard enough to make her see stars but she refused to die like this. She brought her knee up, driving it between his legs.

Michael emitted a high-pitched scream and rolled off her. She flipped to her belly and started to push to her feet but he grabbed one of her ankles with both hands.

Hannah's face slapped against the floor before she rolled onto her back. She kicked Michael, pummeling his face, head, hands, shoulders, and any other part of him she could reach. She kicked until long after he'd stopped moving.

In the stillness, she lay listening to her heart thunder in her ears. The air in the room was heavy with the weight of gas. Coughing, she started to crawl on sweaty hands and shaky knees. Her eyes, lungs, and ankle burned, and her
whole body ached. But she was freaking alive.
Thank you, universe!

She pushed to her feet in front of Niall's office. Michael groaned and she glanced back. She choked on a scream. He was digging a match out of one of the matchboxes the Boxing Cat kept for lighting candles.

Hannah's pulse hammered in her throat. She'd never make it to the back door. She ran into the office, slamming the door shut and diving under the sturdy wooden desk. The door blew apart in the explosion. Heat and debris slapped at her back. It sounded like bombs dropping as storage supplies crashed down from the shelves onto the workstation above her. The desk shimmied but didn't collapse.

In the silence that followed, all Hannah could hear was a grotesque ringing in her ears. Was she dead? Not if the tinny sound in her ears and the pain singing through her body were any indication.
Thank you, God!
Somehow, she was alive. Aching but definitely breathing and in one piece, amazingly enough.

She started to crawl through the smoky room. She had to get out of the building and find Shelley.

Hannah hadn't made it far when her shirt snagged on a metal rack. She tugged herself free, then crawled toward what remained of the kitchen.

The back door had blown off its hinges. Water rained down from the sprinklers in what was left of the ceiling. Metal racks, pans and pots, and pieces of ceiling fell like hail in a summer storm. Funny, she would have expected everything to have already been on the ground. It was stupid, but she found herself staring around in morbid fascination. The shelves were twisted and bent. The workstations had taken most of the blast and were little more than shards of shrapnel embedded in what was left of the walls.

Nearby, Michael groaned and the racks shifted. She threw up her hands to shield her face from any more falling objects and had only a nanosecond to realize she'd made a fatal mistake.

Michael lay dying, his face and left arm horribly black
and burned. His right arm had been ripped off in the blast. There was an oozing bloody stump where his elbow had been. His clothing had been burned away along with most of the skin on his chest. He was gurgling in agony and touching the same rack she was.

And she'd just formed a psychic link to a madman.

*   *   *

“Y
OU BETTER HIDE
in there, you freak. If you ever go near another one of my boyfriends, I'll cut off your dick,” Mona screamed as Michael hid in the bathtub.

He'd scrubbed his naked body until it was raw. He couldn't get the blood off his skin. His gray angel was dead.

Still, Mona kept screaming, “He was my boyfriend. She killed him because of you!”

The vision swirled from the grungy white-tiled walls to his mother's pristine little bedroom decorated in forget-me-not wallpaper. His mother's angry, disgusted face so close to his, it resembled an evil clown with crazy eyes.

“He was mine! Mine! You had no right to take him away from me, Mother!” Mona yelled. Fat tears poured down her ugly face. She clutched at the dead body on the floor. Black blood pooled beneath the body on the once immaculate green carpeting. “It wasn't his fault. The little freak demanded the fuck. Begged for it. And today wasn't the first time.”

Their mother let out a howl of fury. With arms like windmills, she beat his back until he couldn't draw breath without agony. The strikes weren't as torturous as the vicious words pouring from her mouth, “You're a good-for-nothing little shit. Just like your useless prick of a father. Nothing but a whore with a dick. That's all you freaks want to do, fuck anything that moves. Now look at my carpet. It's ruined and it's all your fault!”

Michael was spun around. His mother held him painfully by the scruff of the neck. Her fingernails digging into his flesh as she forced him to stare into the vacant eyes of his dead lover.

He wouldn't weep for his gray angel. Mother would only
punish him more. Michael wished he could have gone with him. But not the way he'd died. The sight of the knife sticking out of the angel's stomach was sickening. He'd suffered for hours before he finally exhaled his last breath.

His mother kept spitting vitriol at him. “You're so foul, no one could love you. I should have had an abortion the moment I found out about you but then I would have destroyed my real baby too.” She threw him hard against her aging dresser. Michael tripped, his pinky finger catching in a broken drawer. It caught and bent backward.

Blinding pain ripped through him as the bone snapped in two places.

“Quit your squalling!” Mother said, hauling him to his feet. One look at Michael's broken finger, and she paled. “Now look what you made me do! I killed for you and now you made me break your finger. You piece of shit.”

Mother wrung her hands together.

“I'm sorry, Mother,” Michael said through tears he couldn't fight any longer.

“You're right, you're sorry. A sorry excuse for a human being!” His mother paced back and forth, hands shaking. She swung around and slapped Michael across the face hard enough to split his lip. “Stop making all that noise! I can't think.”

Then he begged using the only word that had ever seemed to affect her in the past, “Mercy.”

Michael bit down, blood pooled in his mouth and dribbled down his chin. Finally, the wild animal look in his mother's eyes faded and she exhaled a long breath. Gently, she tugged Michael to her side. “You liked that boy?”

“He was mine, Mom! Do you hear me? Mine! And the whore stole him from me. Now he's dead!” Mona yelled, leaping to her feet. She was backhanded as Michael had been and crashed to the floor. Like Michael, his sister had taken a beating when Mother had found him in bed with the gray angel and Mona still crying on the floor. Then Mother had killed his love.

For a moment Michael had thought perhaps she had
done it out of a misguided need to protect her children. Until she'd gone berserk and beaten him until he couldn't see clearly through his swollen eyes.