Читать книгу The Hexed - Heather Graham, Heather Graham - Страница 7

Prologue

“Help me, Rocky! Help me!”

Craig Rockwell—Rocky to family and friends—was seventeen, a high school senior. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Melissa Wilson; he just wasn’t interested the way she was interested.

He rolled over restlessly on the bed, her voice—frantic as always—pushed to the background as his half-sleeping mind returned to the thoughts that had occupied him earlier as he’d drifted off over homework.

He’d been waiting to leave here as long as he could remember. He wanted to head to Boston or New York. Not that there was anything wrong with Peabody, Massachusetts. It was fine. It was filled with old houses, history and die-hard Yankees, though sometimes the people around him seemed uptight. He’d been drilled in the history of Pilgrims and Massachusetts all his life, so maybe—since many of the people in the area were descendants of the Puritans who had first settled in the state—it was natural that people here took a wicked long time to progress.

He played football, and he was good. Six-one, strong and sleek and quick, he had set his mind on being the best quarterback possible, and it looked as if he was going to have his choice of scholarships. But that meant hanging in and hanging tough with football and his grades. He was lucky, too. Well, lucky in a way. He had leading-man looks, and when the school drama club was doing The Crucible, he was cast as John Proctor. He would give all of it up, though, to have his dad back.

On Friday nights when training was over, he met up with friends and they went to a movie or sat around a coffeehouse, or occasionally went into Boston for a concert. It was the same group of friends he’d hung out with forever. Haley Marshall, who he’d more or less gone out with until they’d recently called it quits; Jack Grail, lineman; Vince Steward, guard; Renee Radcliff, captain of the cheerleading squad—and Melissa.

They’d known one another since they were kids.

Peabody was fairly small. Population just about fifty thousand, give or take a thousand or two. The town had once been part of Salem, but it had become a separate entity as time went by and the world grew. But there was more out there, and he intended to see it.

He was good, and he wanted to make the pros. If he didn’t make the pros, he wanted to join the FBI. While his mother could trace her family back to the damned Mayflower, his father had hailed from Texas, where he’d been a sheriff. Late in life he’d fallen in love with Rocky’s mom, so he’d been almost seventy a year ago when he’d died of a heart attack. The pain still assailed Rocky often, but he was grateful for his father. It had been better to have him for sixteen years than anyone else for a lifetime.

And he was definitely going to be a lawman, with or without a football career first. FBI. An agent had come to town when he’d been ten and spoken to an assembly, and he’d known since then that was what he wanted to be.

The sound of Melissa’s voice rose, interrupting his restless thoughts.

“Rocky!”

There was a sudden banging at his bedroom window. He started and sat up, staring. Melissa was there, her face white. He couldn’t hear her anymore, but when her lips formed a word he knew what she was saying.

Rocky.

His name, nothing more.

He heard more banging and realized it was coming from the front door. He leaped out of bed and checked the clock. It was still early, just after 8:00 p.m.

He looked back to his bedroom window, but no one was there.

Too many teen slasher movies, he decided. They were fun, though. The girls crawled all over you after a slasher movie, and Haley, completely at home with her sexuality, had been no exception, for which his raging hormones would be eternally grateful. But she had realized he was really planning on leaving, while she just wanted to get married and have babies, so now when the movie ended she was all over Vince or Jack as she tried to figure out who was the best candidate for marriage and settling down.

He didn’t care—he knew he wasn’t what Haley wanted. He just didn’t like it that now Melissa Wilson, apparently with Haley’s blessing, was yearning after him all the time.

It was odd, he thought. If it was slasher movies that unnerved him, it should have been some kind of a homicidal monster at his window. A killer in a human skin mask or something. Instead, he saw the face of Melissa Wilson. She was five-three and a hundred pounds, tops. Not too scary.

Whatever. She was gone. And the banging at the front door continued. He got up and went to see what was going on.

It was Vince. “Hey, man,” his friend demanded, “your mom’s working late?”

His mother was a “vice president” at a small ad agency. In reality she was a glorified assistant with a title instead of a decent salary.

“Yeah,” he told Vince. “They’re shooting that Welcome to Salem ad tonight—in Peabody.”

“Close enough, I guess. I got a couple of beers. Come on out—we’ll hang in the truck, and that way we can toss ’em quick if she shows up,” Vince said.

Rocky shook his head. “My mom can smell beer a mile away.”

“Chicken!”

“Yeah, well, that and our English test is tomorrow, and I have to ace it,” Rocky said.

“Wow. Some wild and crazy hotshot you are,” Vince said.

Rocky shrugged. “You said you’re going to community college until you figure out what you want to do. Well, I know what I want.”

“NYU or Harvard,” Vince said, grinning. “Maybe Yale.”

“Notre Dame. But, hey, I’ll sit in the back of the truck and watch you down a few.”

Vince shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Vince was huge. Six-four, close to three hundred pounds. He was great to have on the football field. He might have taken it somewhere—he just didn’t have the ambition.

“I don’t get you, buddy,” Vince said, opening the back of his Ford pickup and crawling into the bed.

As he did so, another car drove up. It was an ancient Toyota. Best Jack could buy, and then only with his dad’s help.

“Hey!” Jack called. He wasn’t as big as Vince; he was lean, with wiry muscles.

“Come and join us—back of the pickup,” Vince said as Jack got out and greeted them with a grin. “Haley hasn’t got you cornered?”

“Don’t know what’s up. I think the girls were going shopping. Now hand me a beer.”

“See, Rocky? That’s what boys do when the girls aren’t around—they drink beer and watch football,” Vince said.

“There aren’t any games on,” Rocky reminded him.

“Okay, so we settle for drinking beer,” Vince said.

“School night,” Rocky said. “And I have plans to get out of this town.”

Vince looked at Jack and Rocky, grinning. “Rocky, you got it all wrong. Peabody is a great place. Close to the action in Boston when you want action. Away from people when you don’t want a crowd.”

Jack laughed. “I think you’re talking about the wheat fields of Kansas or something. We have neighbors almost on top of us.”

Vince popped a beer and lay back on one of the plastic cushions he kept in the truck for “entertaining,” as he called it, looking up at the sky. “Yeah, in some places you got old Victorian on top of old Victorian. But there’s still some wooded land available. And reasonably priced, too. I get some trust money when I graduate, and I’m buying land.”

“To do what?” Rocky asked.

“I don’t know yet—I just know I’m buying it.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t have any trust money coming,” Rocky told him. He crawled up into the bed of the truck, but he didn’t lie back.

“Witch’s moon,” Jack said.

It was huge and full, Rocky noticed. The local Wiccans were probably all out forming circles or whatever it was they did.

“Werewolves a-howling,” Vince said, laughing.

Rocky frowned, listening intently. Just as Vince had spoken, he could have sworn that he did hear something. Not a howl, exactly. More like a sob.

“What was that?” he murmured.

“You hear a werewolf?” Vince laughed.

“No,” Rocky said, glancing at Vince and rolling his eyes. “But something. Shut up and listen.”

Melissa. Melissa Wilson. She was calling his name again. She was trying to tell him something.

Help me, Rocky. Help me!

“Don’t you hear her?” he demanded, looking around. His next-door neighbor’s house was close—not fifty feet away. The sound, however, seemed to be coming from farther than that. He gazed toward the playground across the street and beyond...where a small forest of pines led down to the pond.

“Hear what?” Vince demanded.

“Melissa,” Rocky said. “I could swear I hear Melissa—and she’s calling for help.”

Vince laughed. “Melissa? What the hell are you talking about? I’m the one doing the drinking and you’re hearing things? You hear anything, Jack?”

Jack shook his head. He looked worriedly at Rocky. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Rocky said. “I’m fine. I’m not hearing things. It’s Melissa, and she’s asking for help.”

“You’re crazy, man. The pressure is getting to you. Hell, you’d help yourself out if you’d have a beer,” Vince offered.

“He may be right,” Jack noted.

Rocky jumped off the bed of the truck and listened. He couldn’t really tell, but the voice seemed to be coming from across the street and...

From inside his mind.

He walked across the street, so intent he forgot to even look for traffic. Thankfully, it was a quiet neighborhood.

“Rocky, what the hell?”

Vince hurried after him, with Jack following behind.

Rocky sprinted across the grass and into the pines.

“Rocky, wait!” Vince gasped. He was bigger, but it was hard for him to run as fast. Jack was quickly catching up.

But Rocky kept going until he finally stopped in the maze of pines, holding his breath, listening.

Rocky!

Melissa’s voice again.

He walked through the trees, grateful for the full moon, whose light filtered through the branches. Branches reaching toward him like skeletal arms.

Yup. Too many slasher movies.

Fallen pine needles were brittle beneath his footsteps as he moved through the trees. Something brushed his face, and he almost gasped aloud before he realized it was just a spiderweb.

“Rockwell, where the hell are you going?” Vince yelled from somewhere behind him.

“Come on, man. What are you doing?” Jack demanded as the other two caught up to him. “You’re scaring me.”

Rocky didn’t know. He kept walking through the woods until he came to a barren circle surrounded by pines. A little area of dust and rock and bracken, and...

Melissa. Melissa Wilson.

She was lying on her back, arms and legs stretched straight out. She was staring up at the night sky, at the full moon. Her eyes, he realized, were frozen open.

A red line extended around her throat and dripped to the forest floor.

Melissa Wilson was dead.

* * *

“Mr. Rockwell?”

Rocky started. He’d been sitting in the front office of the Virginia office of the FBI special division called the Krewe of Hunters, waiting for his appointment with Jackson Crow. He was the assistant director of this branch of “special” investigations. The titular head of all the Krewe units was a man named Adam Harrison, but he was seldom seen. He seemed to “direct” from some kind of lofty haven.

The events that had filled his mind—as fresh as if they’d just happened, although they had been almost thirteen years in the past—faded with the sound of the receptionist’s voice. Until recently, he’d buried the memories of Melissa Wilson deep in the darkest recesses of his mind.

He’d forgotten about football after finding her. He’d concentrated on law enforcement in college and gone to work first with the Boston police, and then he’d made it into the FBI Academy and taken a position in L.A. after graduation. Since his mother had remarried—a great guy, a retired fireman—he didn’t suffer from the only-child guilt that would have made him feel he needed to be near her.

Over the past ten years, he’d learned that Hollywood really was a world of illusion, and that only made the area a hotbed for mayhem and murder.

And now...

And now here he was, seeking a new position with a vengeance. He’d followed the Krewe of Hunters for the past few years. His curiosity had been piqued from the first time he’d read about their cases—and heard the rumors in the field offices. No matter how the members of the special unit were mocked, they were also respected, because they had a batting average that was off the charts.

And that was what he needed now.

Because it had happened again. A murder so much like Melissa’s that it gave him chills—and practically in his hometown.

“Special Agent Crow will see you now.”

As Rocky walked into Crow’s office, the man rose to greet him. He’d known Crow was Native American, and he wasn’t surprised the man was tall and fit. He hadn’t expected him to be quite so striking, though. He studied the man he hoped would be his boss, and he knew that Crow was studying him in return.

“Sit down. I’ve been reading your file and the clippings that you sent about the case,” Crow said.

Rocky sat. “And?”

“I see that another woman has been discovered in circumstances exactly like the girl you found.”

“Swampscott this time,” Rocky said. “Practically next door.”

Crow looked gravely at Rocky. “You were personally involved with the original case as a teenager.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think that will affect your work?”

Rocky hesitated.

One wasn’t supposed to be emotionally involved in the field; it could jeopardize the ability to make the best decision possible in a tough situation.

He let out his breath. “Yes,” he admitted.

Crow looked back down at the file before him.

“This woman was left just as your friend Melissa was. Arranged in a very specific position—almost as if her body was meant to create a pentagram.”

“Five points,” Rocky agreed. “And there was a silver medallion lying on her chest—the same as in Melissa Wilson’s case.”

Crow leaned back, stared at him for a long moment, then nodded slowly.

“I’m assuming you’ve studied up on the Krewe of Hunters and that’s why you wrote to me.”

“Yes.”

“And of course, we’ve studied up on you, too.”

“I’m damned glad. I’m sure I wouldn’t have a chance here if you hadn’t.”

Crow actually smiled. He leaned forward and said, “My boss—our director, Adam Harrison—is like a magician. It will still take me about twenty-four hours to get you transferred over. But,” he said, looking up, “feel free to head on up to Massachusetts right away. I’ll inform you when the transfer goes through.”

He stood. Rocky did the same, and Crow held out his hand.

“Welcome to the Krewe of Hunters, Agent Rockwell.”