скачать книгу бесплатно
She squeezed her eyes closed, then shook her head. “Not here. The buildings are too tall. They block the light. So does the Dumpster.”
“Then it’s not a street. It’s an alley.” And he’d searched most of those in Barrett. But just because Irina had been adopted in Barrett didn’t mean she still lived in the city, so he’d searched some surrounding areas, too. His gut twisted again at the thought of Irina in any of those dangerous areas, alone. “Tell me about the buildings. Describe them to me.”
Elena’s brow furrowed. “It’s dark. All I see are walls of dark brick, maybe red, maybe brown—”
“A sign. Something—”
“Just the Dumpster. The name of the company’s worn off the side. She’s hiding behind the Dumpster.”
Had she been in one of those alleys he’d searched, hiding? Had he been that close to finding her, to protecting her from a killer?
Come on, Irina. Come out. Stop hiding. Let me find you. Let me save you.
As she’d saved him? He shook his head, amazed that the thought had occurred to him, all wrapped up with the old, nagging memory. But looking into his past wouldn’t help him find Irina; only looking into her future would.
“You have to concentrate. Focus on what’s around her!” His agitation raised his voice above the usual rasp of his damaged vocal cords.
“Ty…” Ariel warned.
He expected Elena to protest, too, to remind him that her gift didn’t work this way, on demand, as if she directed a camera onto a scene she’d orchestrated.
Her breath audibly caught, and she flinched at whatever scene played out inside her head. This wasn’t just a memory; she was in the midst of a vision. “Oh my God…”
“What?” he asked, his guts twisting again.
“She—she steps out from behind the Dumpster, she drags herself out of there. But it’s too late.” Her voice rose with a hint of hysteria. “She tries to run, but he catches her. He grabs her so hard. He’s hurting her! She’s too weak to fight him…too weak to save herself….”
Damn Donovan Roarke to hell! As soon as Ty tracked him down, he intended to send him there.
“It’s okay,” Ariel said, wrapping her arm around Elena’s thin shoulders. “Your visions are of the future. This hasn’t happened yet.”
“But—”
“It hasn’t happened yet,” Ariel insisted.
“And it won’t,” Ty maintained. He wouldn’t let Roarke get to Irina.
Maybe as desperate to convince herself as her sister, Ariel said, “He doesn’t have her.”
Yet.
“I’ve had this vision twice now,” Elena reminded them, her voice cracking with emotion, her pale eyes shimmering with unshed tears and fear. “He’s going to find her before we do. And we all know what he’s going to do to her.”
Kill her.
She had had that vision, too. The one of Irina dying just as horrifically as their mother had. Elena had gotten good at recounting her visions, but she had yet to find a way to deal with what she saw. She was shaking.
And so was Ty.
As Ariel had said, Elena’s visions were of the future. Donovan didn’t have her yet, but Ty suspected the madman was closer to finding her than Ty was. He had to beat the killer to her, because once Roarke got his hands on Irina, Ty would be too late to save someone. Again.
A new voice echoed in her head now, louder than all the others she’d heard before. And full of hatred. He talked about killing people, about making them suffer.
Irina knew about suffering, and lately not even the drugs or alcohol could relieve hers. She’d been weeks without and felt no different sober from inebriated. Except for the shaking. She couldn’t stop shaking.
Summer had fled quickly from western Michigan, leaving early autumn cold, the nights chilly enough that she lost feeling in her fingers and toes. She might have to find someplace warmer than the alley to sleep. But then she’d have to deal with people.
Fear gripped her. Fear of the man inside her head. Because even though he hadn’t said her name, like the women who called for her, she knew he intended to kill her as he had the other witches. He thought she was a witch and he wanted the charms he thought her mother had given her and her sisters two decades ago. He believed they were powerful, that they would heal the pain that reverberated inside his head.
And hers. She winced, pressing her palms against her eyes, blinded from the voices and the pain. Like the women he’d killed, she felt his torment as acutely as theirs. The hammering at the base of her skull and her temples. Her body reeled from the onslaught, and she writhed in agony on her makeshift bed behind the Dumpster.
She had to deal with the pain the best she could. She had to let go of reality and slip into the abyss, into the calm where her mind and spirit left her tortured body, where she ceased to exist as she had these past months.
But as she started slipping away, a raspy voice called out to her. “Irina…”
She moaned and shifted again on the bed, drawing her knees to her chest to curl into a ball. She resisted the compulsion to open her eyes, refusing to come back into a world where she knew only pain and suffering.
“Irina, come out….”
But he was just as stubborn, refusing to let her go. She heard the determination in his voice, along with a trace of desperation. She recognized that more readily, as it called to her own.
“Irina, let me save you….”
His raspy whisper raised goose bumps on her skin. Was he nearby? Or even closer, inside her head?
She opened her eyes and blinked, clearing the sparks and the sea of black from her vision. All that loomed before her was the big Dumpster, the distant glow of the street lamps glinting off the rusted metal.
The cold reduced the stench, so only a faint odor of coffee grounds and mold drifted from it. But her stomach churned even though it was empty of everything but nerves. What had she done to herself? What had she become?
God, she’d been desperate for so long, desperate for a peace of mind she would probably never know.
“Irina, we need you….” called out a feminine voice, cracking with emotion. “We need our baby sister.”
Another woman added her thoughts. “The only way we can stop the witch hunt is with all three charms….”
Charms?
She peered up at the sky, at the sliver of crescent moon that hung high above the buildings, high above the earth. Out of Irina’s reach, like the memory from her childhood of her sisters, of her mother…that last time she’d seen them before their family had been ripped apart. Pain and fear were all she remembered as she trembled under the renewed force of those emotions. She’d only been five then and she’d survived. She hadn’t given up.
Until now…
Tears stung her eyes, tears of shame blinding her, but she could still see the alley. She could still see the bedraggled mess she had become…because she’d stopped fighting. Those other women—they hadn’t given up. They’d fought for their lives, and two of them had survived and had saved those they cared about, one of them a little girl. Her cries had haunted Irina as much as her mother’s. But the little girl had been brave, far braver than Irina.
Hadn’t they survived? Or had she only imagined their courage? Either way, she envied it and had to emulate it if she were to survive, too.
She had to get out of the alley, get something to eat, a safe place to sleep—get her life back while she still had it. The drugs she’d taken had been prescription ones—some painkillers, some for schizophrenia—but even those hadn’t stopped the voices. Maybe it was time she accepted that they were real. But if the voices were real, so was the killer. Dare she leave the alley? Dare she trust anyone?
“Believe,” the raspy-voiced man murmured. But was he speaking to her or himself? What did he want to believe? Who was he? He’d called her name, as her sisters had. He wanted to find her, too. Why? For them or for himself?
She closed her eyes, sparks of deep blue glowing against the insides of her lids. Instead of fighting his voice, she blew out a breath and immersed herself in his mind. He didn’t say anything else. The blackness remained, thick and impenetrable, with undercurrents of barely suppressed anger.
This man was no different than the other—full of rage. A killer. He wasn’t going to save her. She couldn’t trust him.
Could she trust herself? Could she trust her sanity?
She had to; she couldn’t go on as she had, barely existing. She opened her eyes, then reached for the Dumpster. Her fingers clawed at the rusted metal as she sought handholds to pull herself up. Her knees shook, threatening to fold, but she locked them and stood. Physically she was weak, but emotionally she was stronger than she’d been in a long time.
Her sisters were looking for her but couldn’t find her. So she had to find them. Urgency rushed through her veins. Like those other women, the ones who hadn’t survived, they were in danger. She remembered her sisters’ voices calling out with fear and pain. But they had fought for their lives; they hadn’t died, like their mother. They were still alive.
And so was Irina.
For the first time in a long time, she realized that. All the pain she’d felt, it hadn’t been hers. She was fine, just weak. She staggered toward the street, but before she could leave the alley behind, a dark shadow stepped in front of her. She shrank back toward the Dumpster, not because she thought the hulking man one of the homeless who lived on the streets as she did but because she knew he wasn’t.
The pain in his head pounded in hers as he silently spoke to her. Witch, you weren’t easy to find. If only she’d stayed hidden a little longer…
She shouldn’t have let that raspy voice call her out of hiding. She shouldn’t have listened to him.
She glanced behind her, toward where flames licked up the sides of the barrel at the end of the alley. No one stood around it, as they did every other night, as they had earlier that night.
“Help me!” she called out, praying they would emerge from the shadows where she was certain they hid, frightened of the stranger. They had no reason to fear him, not as she did. “Help me!”
“Shh,” the man murmured aloud. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Liar,” she yelled at him, her throat scratchy from disuse. “Liar!”
He lifted his hands palms up, holding them out to her. “I’m here to help you,” he insisted. “Your family sent me to find you.”
She didn’t hear what he spoke aloud, though. She read his demented mind. Now that I have you, I can get the rest of your family. I can get the other charms. Then I’ll kill all the witches.
“No!” she screamed as she continued retreating from him. Her back, beneath the heavy wool sweater she wore over a threadbare T-shirt, warmed as she neared the burning barrel. Sweat, from fear and the heat, dribbled down between her shoulder blades.
“Come with me, Irina,” the man said, his voice soft and low as if soothing a frightened animal. “I’ll bring you to your sisters.”
Then I’ll kill all of you! Hang the redhead. Drown the blonde. Crush her daughter. And you, since you’re the spitting image of your mother, I’ll have to burn you at the stake, just like I burned her.
“Killer!” she shrieked at him. “You’re a killer!”
“Shh…” he said again, for the first time glancing uneasily around at the shadows bouncing off the walls of the buildings that flanked the alley. “I’m a private investigator. I told you—your family sent me.”
“I can hear you,” she said. “Not what you’re saying but what you’re thinking. I can hear you!”
His dark eyes gleamed eerily as he stared at her. “You can hear me?”
“I know what you did. I know what you intend to do,” she insisted.
But she wasn’t going to let him. She whirled around to the other side of the barrel, then kicked over the rusted metal cylinder. The barrel broke apart, and the flames leaped toward him.
Throwing his arms up over his face, he shrank back against the wall of one of the buildings. Cowering as the barrel rolled toward him, sparks flying, he screamed, “No!”
Taking advantage of his distraction and distance, she ran from the alley, the heels of her worn shoes pounding the asphalt and scattering tin cans and paper debris as she headed toward the street. Her long skirt tangled around her legs, slowing her frantic dash.
You witch! When I catch you, you’ll suffer. She heard his thought first, then his ragged breathing as he chased her.
Propelled by fear, she didn’t dare stop running when she reached the curb, so she hurled herself into traffic. Tires squealed, brake pads burning, but the driver didn’t stop in time. The metal bumper glanced off her thigh, knocking her onto the asphalt.
He would get her now; she couldn’t run anymore. As big hands reached for her, closing around her arms, she screamed, her throat straining, her voice rising with hysteria. “Don’t kill me! I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!”
Chapter 2
Irina tugged on her wrists, trying to free her hands. But the bindings held her tight, trapped. Panic pressed on her chest, and her lungs labored for breath.
“Let me go!” she shouted, her throat raw from screaming. Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes from the pain. “Let me go! He’s going to kill me!”
But no one believed her. If they had, they wouldn’t have brought her here. To a psychiatric ward. She’d been in one before, but she hadn’t been strapped down to a bed as she was now. She’d been an intern, not an inpatient. Committed.
She couldn’t blame them for not believing her. She struggled to believe herself. Could she really hear other people’s thoughts? Was that possible?
Maybe her earlier fear that she was hallucinating was founded. Maybe she belonged here. She sagged back against the mattress, which wasn’t much softer than the thin cardboard over asphalt where she’d spent so much of the past few months. Even though an IV dripped saline into her arm, rehydrating her, she weakened, her lids drifting closed. Some doctor or nurse had injected her earlier with a sedative, which must have finally taken effect. Although her muscles relaxed and she breathed easier, her anxiety didn’t lessen.
She wished she still believed she was crazy, that she was making up the horror her life had become. But she’d already accepted her truth. And she knew her fate.
He’d be coming back for her.
The doorknob rattled, startling her into fighting against the restraints. She thrashed on the bed, the springs and metal frame creaking in protest of her frantic movements.
“Stop it! You’re going to hurt yourself,” a young woman cautioned as she entered the room.
“He’s going to hurt me. He’s going to kill me!” Despite the sedative, Irina’s voice rose as the panic pressed down on her chest, stealing her breath.
“You’ve been saying that since the police brought you here.” The woman wore the same green scrubs as the nurses but with a white coat. She wasn’t much older than Irina; she’d probably just begun her residency. Irina didn’t remember talking to her before.
“How long ago was that?” she asked—when she’d run in front of the police car, when a concerned officer had lifted her from the asphalt. She’d pleaded with them to save her from the man who’d been chasing her. But they hadn’t seen him; like the homeless people in the alley, he’d disappeared into the shadows. But Irina had still been able to hear his thoughts and had known he watched her. She’d screamed that at them, too, that she could read his mind, that she could read theirs. They thought she was crazy. And so they’d brought her here.
“Last night,” the doctor answered her. “So, tell me, who is this man you’re afraid of?”
“I don’t know.” She hadn’t even noticed the passing of time. He’d claimed to be a private investigator hired by her sisters to find her. But she knew he’d been lying.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
Irina. She hadn’t been called that in twenty years, not aloud, but now, locked in a psychiatric ward, with voices in her head, she felt more like Irina Cooper than she ever had Heather Bowers.
Since Irina hadn’t answered her, the pretty young doctor probed, “Don’t you know your name?”
For the first time in a long time, Irina felt as if she did really know who she was. But with the witch hunt resurrected, she wasn’t about to admit to being Irina Cooper.
“I want to help you,” the woman insisted, her dark eyes earnest.
If not for the voices, Irina would have been her. She’d been in her last year of medical school, after having already completed her master’s in psychology, when the first scream had torn through her mind and torn apart her world. “I wish you could….”
