Читать книгу Unseen - Nancy Bush - Страница 10

Dr. Avery was in his fifties, with silver hair and black eyebrows and a stony expression that would have worried Gemma had she not learned that beneath his cold exterior he was a man who fiercely loved his wife and two sons, one of whom was engaged to be married. She knew he’d been in to see her before but she’d gained mostly impressions about him, about what he thought of her injuries, nothing concrete or substantial.

This visit he’d removed the bandage over her eye, the white of which was half-filled with blood.

“I look gruesome,” Gemma said.

The doctor didn’t answer, just kept writing vigorously on her chart.

She’d spent a restless night, waking up to shadowy thoughts and images, fading back to sleep, waking again with her heart pounding in fear and a sense that she needed to save someone, falling to unconsciousness once again, back to the fleeting ghosts and skittish memories.

“Am I going to be able to leave today?” she asked a tad belligerently as the doctor just kept on writing.

He didn’t look up.

“When’s the wedding?” she tried, hoping small talk might get his attention if medicine wouldn’t.

“What wedding?”

“Your son’s.”

His gaze slowly lifted from the chart, which he slid back into its holder at the foot of her bed. “The end of next month.”

“So, are you releasing me? I feel incredibly better than yesterday. Even if I’m gruesome.”

He gave her a studied look. “You seem to have recovered fairly quickly. Your head injuries aren’t as severe…as we initially suspected,” he said cautiously. “You have some bruising around your chest, probably from the seat belt. You’ve lost some time, maybe as a result of concussion, although you haven’t displayed other symptoms.”

“Seat belt…” Gemma repeated. “So, it was a car accident?”

“We’ll know for sure when you locate your vehicle.”

“Then…I’m outta here?”

He nodded once, shortly. Gemma had already spoken on the phone to someone from administration and given them information about herself, which though meager, was enough to satisfy them. She knew her own social security number, or at least one that popped into her head, so she’d rattled it off and the woman at the end of the line had typed it into her file. It had to be hers. It wasn’t like she would know anyone else’s, right?

She was torn between just skedaddling and throwing herself on the hospital administration’s mercy, asking for some cold hard cash to find her way home.

The doctor stood for a moment, rocking on his heels, as if he had something else he wanted to say. Gemma waited somewhat impatiently. She’d redressed in her blood-spattered clothes, knowing she was going to burn them the first chance she got. She just wanted to get out of here and find a way back to Quarry. She couldn’t recall her address but she had a murky idea of the direction to go.

Maybe if Detective Tanninger were around today, trying to meet with that EMT…maybe he’d give her a lift. It was as good a plan as any.

Dr. Avery finally headed toward the door and Gemma swung her legs over the bed. But the doctor hesitated before entering the hallway, gazing back at her thoughtfully. “I haven’t told anyone my son’s getting married. Didn’t want the hospital staff talking about something that might not happen. My son and his fiancée have had a very on-and-off relationship. I don’t know how you knew.”

“You must have told me earlier. I drifted in and out for a while.”

“I wouldn’t have,” he said positively.

Something feathered along Gemma’s skin. A cold whisper of awareness. “Maybe I dreamt it and it just happened to be true.”

He gazed at her a long moment, then pushed out the door.

I’m a mind reader.

She rolled that idea around and found she didn’t like it much. But it felt…real.

Gemma didn’t waste any more time. She found her shoes again and after a quick, horrifying look in the mirror—the whole right side of her face was a technicolor mess—she took a deep breath and prepared herself for an uncertain future.

She was in the hallway when an orderly holding a wheelchair stopped short. “Ma’am, you need to take a seat. Hospital policy.”

She suspected it was hospital policy to take her to administration for check out, too, but the orderly did not appear to be someone who would take no for an answer so she perched on the wheelchair, wondering wildly if she could make a break for it when he rolled her near an exit.

Mind reader, she thought again, and felt decidedly uncomfortable.

Billy Mendes was lanky and bowlegged, as if he’d just gotten off the ranch. He walked with a kind of cowboy strut as well, though it wasn’t an affectation, more like a natural hip swing to get his bowed legs in line.

He came inside the ER and shot a look at Lorraine, the battleaxe nurse with the dyed black hair and orange lips, before crossing the waiting room in a couple of big strides and walking up to Will.

“You the guy lookin’ for me?” he asked. “From the sheriff’s department?”

“Detective Will Tanninger,” Will acknowledged, and the two men shook hands. They moved toward a section of striped chairs near the window where no one else was sitting at the moment.

Mendes kept standing, his hands shoved in his pockets. “You wanna know about the woman who staggered in on Saturday? The one that got out of the silver Camry? I thought the guy who dropped her off was gonna park and come inside and help her, but he never came back. He just drove off and then she just kinda walked from side to side, like she had no balance, y’know? Swaying, like. And then she makes it inside and just crumples to the floor. I came runnin’ from the ambulance.” He waved in the direction of the portico outside the ER. “We were just gettin’ ready to go, but there she was, and I got my ass chewed for that one.” He threw a dark look in Lorraine’s direction. “But hey, we had an accident victim right here. I thought we should help her first.”

“It delayed you from making your call?”

“Not much, it didn’t,” he asserted. “Thirty seconds? Lorraine started screamin’ and I helped the woman to lie down flat. She was out cold by then, but breathin’ okay. ER team grabbed her up and Pete and I took off to the accident on Highway 217. One of those nights where everybody smashes up their cars. Couple of fatalities.”

“So, you saw a man drop her off in a silver Camry?”

He nodded.

“It was definitely a man?”

“Yeah…” He started to sound uncertain.

“Can you remember why you thought so?”

Billy looked puzzled for a moment. “I guess ’cause he was drivin’ kinda fast. Not that girls can’t, too, but not so much in a hospital parking lot. He kinda screeched in and then she got out, and then he reached over and pulled the door shut and left. I thought it was weird he didn’t help her when I saw that she couldn’t walk so well. Maybe it was a chick. Since she didn’t even try to help her friend? But then I thought he or she or whoever was gonna park the car and come back. I don’t know.”

“Could the driver have come back after you left in the ambulance?”

“I suppose…you can check with Lorraine…” He grimaced, letting Will know exactly what he thought of that idea.

“Was there any body damage to the Camry?”

“Uh…I was lookin’ at the girl, and I just saw the car’s rear end, mostly. Don’t recall any passenger-side damage. Didn’t see the front.”

Will grilled him some more and learned Gemma had arrived at the hospital in the early evening, just as it was getting dark. If she were the woman who’d run down Edward Letton, that would mean there had been a lot of hours in between the accident and her appearance at Laurelton General.

There didn’t appear to be anything more to learn from Billy, so Will shook his hand and thanked him for the information, then he turned back to the exit. He was out the door and heading to his department vehicle, when he abruptly changed direction and returned to the hospital, making for the bank of elevators. What was it about Gemma LaPorte that kept him wanting to see her again? Was it just this investigation? The fact that she was an enigma that he couldn’t quit puzzling over? Was it that he both wanted her to be innocent of hit-and-run, and yet somehow hoped she was that avenger? Someone who wanted to rid the world of sick scum no matter what the cost?

That was the kind of thinking that could get him fired, or worse, he knew. That kind of vigilante philosophy that the bad should be punished without benefit of a trial. That murder, in the name of good, was almost okay.

He’d seen it a couple of times in his career. Law enforcement officers who, burned out and frustrated, took their job to that next level. Not waiting for the judicial system to pass its verdict. Deciding to wipe out the offender first and ask forgiveness later.

Only there was no forgiveness. There was prosecution and jail time.

But Will didn’t think he had burned out. He didn’t truly condone Gemma’s behavior. Vigilantism was not to be tolerated at any level. It was just that inwardly—and this Will would never admit to anyone—he applauded her courage and ability to act.

The elevator took him to the fourth floor, and when the doors opened he saw Gemma in a wheelchair, being pushed toward the elevators by an orderly. Simultaneously, another elevator’s doors opened. Edward Letton’s wife, Mandy, stepped out and glanced over at Will, whom she’d met briefly in Letton’s room. Then as both sets of elevator doors closed behind them she turned to Gemma, whose bandage had been removed, leaving the splendor of her bruised face and swollen eye for all to see.

Mandy understood who Gemma was instantly. “You…” she said tautly. “What are you doing on my husband’s floor?”

Gemma, who’d seemed locked in her own thoughts, looked blankly at Mandy.

“This is the fourth floor,” Will told Mandy. “Your husband’s on five, but he’s not allowed visitors. You know that.”

She didn’t even register a word. “You’re the woman who ran him down.”

Gemma’s eyes widened.

“Ms. Letton, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Will said, stepping between Gemma and Mandy Letton, whose gaze had zeroed in on Gemma like twin laser beams.

“I don’t know what kind of monster you are,” Mandy said with a catch in her voice, “but my husband’s barely alive because of you! Were you drinking? On drugs? Or was this some kind of thrill kill! Luckily, you didn’t succeed. He’s still alive and he’s going to make it.”

Gemma’s gaze turned from Mandy to Will. He could read the questions in her eyes: Why didn’t Letton’s wife know what Letton had been about to do? Will would have loved to tell her that members of both the Winslow County Sheriff’s Department and the Laurelton Police Department—the city where Mandy and Edward Letton lived—had tried to explain about the guard at Edward Letton’s door, but Mandy was actively not listening to anything they said that alluded to—or explicitly described—the van and its special chains, cuffs, and restraints.

“You should be the one with the guard outside your door,” Mandy declared in a shaking voice.

Gemma’s lips tightened. “I’d choose my words carefully if my husband were a predator.”

“Wait.” Will put up a hand and blocked Mandy’s view of Gemma and vice versa.

“You’re the one who started those vicious rumors! I should sue you for assault and slander!”

“If your husband survives, he’s going to jail,” Gemma stated certainly. “He earned that all by himself.”

“He’s going to survive. And you’ll be the one going to prison for attempted murder!”

“Ms. Letton, I’m going to escort you downstairs,” Will said, turning to Gemma’s orderly. “I’ll meet you down there,” he said, actively blocking Mandy from any further progress toward Gemma.

Gemma was having none of it. She climbed out of the wheelchair and walked the last few steps to the elevator, slamming her palm on the call button of the second elevator. “I’m leaving on my own power. You can tell whoever’s in charge of hospital policy, what they can do with that wheelchair.”

Mandy Letton tried to get past Will, who kept his body between her and Gemma. He realized he would probably find humor in the situation later on, but in the moment he was aware that, given their own devices, these two women could end up in a physical fight. Stranger things had happened.

Mandy struggled again to get past Will. The orderly tried to convince Gemma to get back in the wheelchair. Gemma’s elevator car arrived with a bell-like ding. Will watched her get inside and turn to tell the orderly she didn’t want him or the wheelchair anywhere near her, then the elevator doors closed.

Mandy Letton pushed Will hard in the center of his back. “Damn you. You’re letting her go? She tried to kill my husband!” Hysteria flooded through the anger.

The orderly said in awe, “You just pushed an officer of the law.”

Mandy whirled her flash-fury on him. “Shut up. Shut up! Everybody shut up!”

“Ms. Letton, you need to get control of yourself,” Will warned. He didn’t want to arrest her. Didn’t want this scene to become a deep hole and more fuel for the media on the Letton case.

Her mouth quivered and her eyes grew hard. When the second elevator arrived, she turned into it blindly and faced to the back. Will and the orderly joined her. Nobody said a word.

As soon as they hit the street level, Mandy pushed past both Will and the orderly. They watched her hightail it to the parking lot and Will was hot on her heels. If she was looking for Gemma LaPorte, he was going to make sure no physical violence occurred.

Gemma was nowhere in sight and Will was annoyed. He followed Mandy out to her car, a white compact, and waited under a watery sun as the wind threw a shimmer of rain at him.

Then he slowly turned around, searching the lot for a glimpse of a woman with straight brown hair whose movements were cautious with the need to keep pain at bay.

She had no idea how to get home, but she was outside the hospital. In the parking lot in a fitful rain. No purse. No socks. No damn underwear. No funds. No means at all. She couldn’t think of the number of a close friend—for that matter she couldn’t think of the name of a close friend—and her half-baked plan to ask hospital administration to loan her cab fare and add it to her bill, was out the window. She wasn’t going back in there for any reason. Any reason at all.

She was free, and she intended to stay that way.

And she was insanely furious at Letton’s deluded wife. Insanely furious. The pounding in her head was rage which was aggravating her injuries.

Had she tried to kill the man? She hadn’t believed herself capable, but God, she hadn’t expected the depth of her revulsion, the extent of her anger. She wanted to throttle that blonde, pillowy bitch. The woman was all curves and boobs and hips and a mouth that just kept yammering.

And she was driven by fear, too. Mandy Letton’s threats about Gemma’s possible incarceration had been heard, processed and given her more impetus to get…the…hell…out!

But now she was stuck. Standing in the gray, late-morning light, a cold breeze throwing rain at her, cutting through her clothes and making her quake like she was stricken with seizures, she scanned the lot for deliverance. She’d used up all her strength just leaving the building. Now she wanted to collapse on the ground and hug herself to contain the little warmth that had followed her outside.

She heard the footsteps behind her and whipped around, nearly overbalancing herself. She knew before seeing him that Detective Tanninger had followed her. She heard a car turn down the lane, squealing a little as it came too fast, then the detective grabbed her arm and pulled her aside.

Tanninger grated, “Let’s not make it your day to die. Come here. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go. My car’s over there.” He actually put an arm around her and guided her toward the department-issue car at the end of the row. She could have cried, the warmth and strength of him felt so good. She sensed dimly that she’d been negotiating life on her own for a long, long time, and the support was welcome yet unfamiliar.

He bundled her inside, grabbing a jacket from the backseat and laying it across her knocking knees. She smelled leather and maybe a hint of aftershave and a whiff of coffee from the forgotten paper cup in the cup holder. He climbed into the driver’s side with a squeak of leather. He switched on the ignition, put the vehicle in gear and eased toward the exit.

“Quarry?” he asked.

She nodded.

And that was all they said until they were away from the hospital and down Highway 26 to just outside of the Quarry city limits, some thirty minutes later. Will drove the patrol car through the city’s downtown area—basically one street with businesses on either side that petered out and turned into rural farmland at the far end. Gemma gazed out the window as they passed Thompson’s Feed & Grain, Century Insurance Co., Pets and More, the Burger Den, and other businesses whose names rippled through her consciousness, familiar and yet it was like she’d entered a parallel universe, everything felt so out of sync. At the west end of the street she saw LuLu’s, a one-story rectangle painted green with white trim with a handicap ramp leading to the front door. Her family’s diner. Now hers. Across the street and facing a different direction was the PickAxe, Quarry’s only tavern and bar. She ran through several remembered moments from each establishment, pictures from her own youth. Yes, she was definitely from this place, although the particulars were still hazy.

“Am I still going the right direction?” Will asked.

“Turn on Beverly Way,” Gemma directed. “Go almost to the end. My house is down the lane to the right. The fields back up to the quarry for which the town’s named.”

“You have acreage?”

“Farmland…ranchland…my father dabbled in both.” She gazed out the window and thought about Peter LaPorte. She could scarcely visualize him. He’d blended in with the surroundings, a quiet man who seemed content to let his wife run the show. Jean LaPorte had been fiery and intense and opinionated. She’d been the one who’d insisted they adopt Gemma.

Adoption…

And suddenly Gemma was hit by a memory so sharp she was surprised she wasn’t cut and left bleeding. She wasn’t even sure the memory was true, or if it had been fed to her so well and so often that she believed it to be real. It didn’t matter. It was part of her history either way.

She’d been found on a Washington State ferry when she was five or six years old, alone, shivering, freezing cold. She’d been wearing several layers of clothing—one of them being a leather shift that was reminiscent of Native American dress, specifically from the Chinook Indian tribe. The note pinned to her outer jacket said simply, I am Gemma. Take care of me. It was scrawled in a spidery hand, and the law enforcement officials believed she’d been raised by an elderly person from one of the tribes living on the Olympic Peninsula. These tribes were modern-day Native Americans, yet the chemise was very traditional. The authorities believed that Gemma had been deliberately placed on the ferry and abandoned, and though they questioned various groups of people—and also the people on the ferry—all they learned was that a very stooped woman with iron-gray hair in braids, was seen with a girl, maybe Gemma, when they were boarding the ferry. Some felt the elderly woman got off the boat before it sailed. No one was sure. All that was for certain was that Gemma was sitting quietly on a bench when it docked and complaining of a headache.

And in truth she’d had crippling headaches as long as she could remember. The LaPortes, her adoptive parents, had taken her to doctors who prescribed pain medication, and Gemma had taken this medication most of her life.

Now, she lifted a hand to the injured side of her face. Yes, there was pain, but it was the pain from physical force. It was not from something inside her head.

“What?” Will asked, throwing her a look as he turned onto Beverly Way.

“I just remembered something I’d forgotten.”

“About the accident?”

“No.”

Her adoption had been messy. She had no papers. No record of birth. The process went on for years before she was given proper credentials and therefore a social security number, the one she’d recalled at the hospital. She knew that sometimes she felt like she could almost remember the old woman who’d left her on the ferry. She could smell charred firewood and taste a cornmeal patty of some kind. There were words, too, but they were singsong, like a chant, for her young ears. A nursery tale. Indian lore.

But where did she fit into all that? There was nothing about her that said Native American. Her eyes were greenish/hazel. Her hair was medium brown. Her skin was white and burned like a son of a gun when she spent too much time in the sun. Will Tanninger’s was far darker than hers. If any part of her was Native American, then its percentage was small for she sported no latent features.

And why had she been left on the ferry? Why had she been rejected? Was there something about her parentage that had spurned her from their group? Some reason she was tossed out?

Maybe because she possessed extra unwanted abilities?

She shivered, then tried to reach back into her consciousness as far as she could. The effort made her head hurt like hell and all she recalled was a plastic hospital mask descending on her face and a sickly, chemical scent. She gagged at the memory.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said flatly, thinking now—as she had many other times, she realized—that she was extremely lucky Peter and Jean LaPorte had adopted her. They’d taken care of her, loved her the best way they knew how. Peter had been a tad removed, but it was more because he didn’t know how to show affection rather than any aversion to Gemma in particular. Jean had loved her fiercely. Had wanted Gemma to be just like her. Had fashioned her in a way that spoke more of what Jean was made of than anything to do with Gemma herself. Jean bullied, pushed and fought her way through life.

And she’d lied…about…something…

“This turn,” Gemma said, surfacing with difficulty. Will eased onto the rutted lane and they drove down an oak-lined drive and then across an open grassy area. Ahead, the two-story, white house with the wraparound porch looked like a prototype for “Early Twentieth Century American Farmhouse.” Gemma recalled her father working constantly on the house’s upkeep. Now, several years after his death, the neglect was starting to show in the dry rot on the edges of the siding, the missing shingles on the roof, the streak of rust at the edge of the gate latch.

“You having trouble remembering?” Will asked as he pulled to a stop.

Gemma realized he saw much more than was comfortable for her. Her first instinct was to lie. Just like her mother did. That thought caused her to hold her tongue, and she simply said, “It’s not likely I’m going to forget my whole life for long.”

He walked her to the front door, both of their heads bent against the stiff breeze. She hesitated a moment. “I can get in through the back,” she said. They walked across the porch, down a few steps and along a dirt track. The rear porch was basically a couple of long, wide steps, the paint chipped away from use. Gemma reached around the sill of the door but found nothing. She hesitated a moment, willing her brain to think while Tanninger looked on. He shifted position and she heard the rustle of his uniform, the squeak of his shoes. It sounded vaguely sexual to her and for a moment she wondered who the hell she was. Why did she think these thoughts? What of her own history was she not recalling?

And then another memory surfaced. “We moved the key to under the bench,” she said, and reached beneath the seat of the back-porch bench, finding the key wedged in a niche between thin slats of wood.

Threading the key in the lock, she murmured, “So this is what Alzheimer’s people must feel.”

“Memory coming and going?” Tanninger did not follow her inside and Gemma turned back to him.

“Pretty much.”

“It’s only been a few days since your accident.”

“Yeah.”

Gemma nodded and worried there was something else, something more, at work here. She wondered whether she was obligated to ask him in, but he took the decision away from her by pressing a card in her hand and telling her to call him if she remembered anything. He glanced at the battered white truck parked near the outbuilding, then said good-bye and headed back around the front of the house to his car.

She hurried through the house to the windows, looking out past the front porch to see him climb into the vehicle, turn it nose-out, and then leave splattered mud as he drove up the gravel drive.

Alone, Gemma slowly turned around and exhaled. She was glad Detective Tanninger was gone so she could think. Absorb. Plan.

She examined the decor in the living room/parlor. Her mother’s. Lots of quilts and florals and stuff. She felt suddenly claustrophobic. Jean had been a hoarder. Keeping items way past their pull date, in Gemma’s opinion.

“How long ago did you die?” Gemma asked her, her voice hanging in the empty room. It felt to Gemma like eons, and yet she sensed it was within the last few years, like her father. She could remember Peter’s death clearly. Could see the casket at Murch’s Funeral Home and the smattering of people, small groups that moved through the viewing room and on to the gravesite. Could remember her own sadness and a sense of apprehension that filled her. The apprehension, she realized, was because she’d been left to take care of her mother, who had always had a strong opinion on what Gemma should do with her life: stay in Quarry and help in her mother’s business as a psychic.

Her mother the psychic.

Gemma sat down hard on a needlepoint-upholstered foot-stool.

Charlatan. Flim-flam artist. Crook. Liar. That’s what her mother had been. Gemma had left home at eighteen, following after an army man who’d been stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington State. He’d moved all around and she’d followed, but their relationship had dwindled as her headaches and memory loss increased when she’d scornfully thrown away her medication, believing the drugs to be the work of her parents, whom she’d deemed at the time to be self-serving and harmful to her health.

Not completely true. Her boyfriend…his name escaped her now. So frustrating! Her boyfriend had been the pernicious one. Eroding her self-esteem. Overpowering her and claiming her sexually. Enjoying a sadistic streak that manifested itself in a myriad of ways that Gemma, too young and inexperienced, had chosen to either ignore or absolve.

But she’d always had an incredibly accurate ability to predict the future. Something her mother had seen early and grasped onto and found a way to make a buck from. Of course, Jean’s clientele believed her to be the psychic, but it was Gemma who could suddenly pop up with some future scenario or path the seeker should take. Gemma the under-appreciated, and unseen.

The boyfriend…was…dead…She couldn’t recall how, but she was pretty sure he was gone. Maybe as a result of the war in Iraq? Somehow that didn’t feel right but she felt she was on the right track.

After his death, and a period of bumming around, working at diners and restaurants, Gemma had returned home, and that’s when Jean’s Psychic Readings had really taken off. Jean had opened shop in this very house, using the first floor bedroom as a kind of office.

Now, Gemma walked to that office and realized someone—herself, she suspected—had completely redone the space. There was no couch, no beaded shades, no knickknacks of moons, stars and other astral images. Instead there was a simple, hand-hewn fir desk—courtesy of Peter LaPorte—and two rather modern club chairs. Beside the desk stood a file cabinet, a lamp with a caramel-colored glass shade, and bookshelves filled with hardbacks. Gemma went directly to the file cabinet, which was locked. Her attention was momentarily drawn to the lamp, which was plugged into a floor socket embedded in the fir planks. Spying the cord, she tugged on it gently, thinking there was a reason it seemed out of place. Maybe she should move the lamp to the other side of the desk.

Before that, though, she wanted to see what was inside the file cabinet, and spent a fruitless twenty minutes searching every drawer and cubbyhole in the office looking for a key. Foiled, Gemma sank into the wooden, swivel desk chair. She was certain the file cabinet held the information she sought: bills, identification papers, bank accounts, all the accoutrements needed to prove one’s existence in this day and age.

If she sat still and let her mind go blank, perhaps more memories would come. She’d made it this far.

With that thought, she then considered her medication. Scrambling to her feet, she hurried as fast as she could up the stairs to the second floor and the bedroom at the far end of the hall. Her bedroom. She’d not moved into her parents’ room after their deaths, though it was closest to the only upstairs bathroom. She couldn’t make herself.

Entering her bedroom she stopped short. The walls were a soft, rose red with white paneled wainscoting. The bed was white. All white. The books stacked neatly in a pile on the white nightstand had to do with tapping into unused parts of the brain. Gemma picked one up carefully and leafed through it. Passages were underlined and she suddenly, sharply remembered placing the pen to the page and making those marks.

There was another book on psychological abnormalities. She picked it up and scanned the bold headings inside: Borderline personalities. Multiple personalities. Sociopaths. Pedophiles…

The book slipped from her fingers and fell with a clunk on the fir planks. She picked it up immediately and leafed through it some more. In this one she’d made no notes, apparently, but this is what she’d been reading about. This and accessing inaccessible parts of the brain.

She was becoming more and more convinced that she’d been chasing Edward Letton. Her pulse started a slow, hard, deliberate pounding. She’d run him down, known he was going to hurt someone. A young girl.

And then she heard her own voice inside her head:

Red’s your color. It helps you learn things, know things. The medication keeps you from having the headaches but it interferes with your ability. Red helps you access the inaccessible…

Gemma gazed wild-eyed around the room. She could almost feel her mind expand and she forcefully shut it down, terrified of what might enter into it. Hurriedly, she raced to the bathroom, found the pills, shook some into her palm and swallowed them dry.

The rain had ruined his plans.

His head pounded. Rage beat at his temples. He’d meant to burn the witch at her home but couldn’t and now the other one was gone. Gone from the hospital.

But he knew where she haunted. He knew he would find her scent again.

Now he looked over the fields behind his house. Far across, in the dying light, he could see the fir trees sway. He stepped outside and stood in the feel of the wind. There was no moon tonight. It was hidden by the clouds.

He needed the rain to stop. He needed dry weather to feed the flames.

Across the field, lights switched on in the main house. Fury licked through him. They were spying on him, feeding information about his family to everyone who would listen.

Quickly, he stepped around the side of the house to the carport where his brother’s truck stood. The carport roof sagged in the middle, nearly touching the GemTop which sat over the truck’s bed.

He could smell her.

Over the evil scent of the witch was the putrid odor of death.

His hand automatically clapped to his neck and the bandage he’d laid over the vicious wounds she’d inflicted. He’d had hell to pay at work over that one. “Hey, retard, you cut yerself shavin’?” Rich Lachey had said when he’d stopped in at work.

Wolf had been in a hurry. The body was under his GemTop so he’d parked the truck at the end of the lot. He hadn’t had time to do more than change clothes and slap a bandage over the jagged wounds on his neck before he showed up to tell Seth it was gonna be awhile before he could get to that engine.

But he’d run into Rich instead. He’d wanted to smack the grin from his face. His hands clenched in preparation. He wasn’t slow, he was careful. But everyone, especially the witch-mother, had underestimated him.

“The name is Wolf, not retard.”

Rich threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Okay, Wolf. Where ya been? Seth wants to know.”

“I’ll be back next week.”

“Next week? Seth ain’t gonna like that.”

Seth can suck my dick.

Wolf knew his value. He didn’t ask for much pay. He didn’t ask for anything except the freedom to choose when he was available. His brother had paved the way for him.

Now, opening the GemTop, he looked in at the body. A blanket was tossed over her body, one arm hanging out. He could see his own blood on her fingers and rage filled him anew.

She had to burn.

He wanted to set up a pyre in his own backyard but he knew better…he knew better…

But the other witch. The one he’d chased. The one who’d escaped the hospital.

He knew where she haunted.

And it was the perfect place to take this one.

He would burn them both.

First this one, then the other.

On her own evil hunting ground, he would find the site for his pyre.

They all had to burn.

Every last witch.