Final Shadows, page 9
“Do you know who?” she asked quietly. “I didn’t get a sense of identity.”
“Emma Garrick.” His voice was beyond grim. “A telepath with an amazing amount of potential. But from everything we’ve learned, everything we’ve been told, I didn’t think she’d be a target.”
“She’s a born psychic?”
“Yeah. But latent. Completely latent. I talked to her not three months ago, and nothing had changed.”
“If she’s latent—”
“Then the abduction itself must have triggered her abilities. Did they know it would? Is this something new—or just something nobody noticed until now?”
Miranda shook her head slightly, her gaze steady on his face. “We have to find her. Emma. Henry, Katie, the others. We have to find all of them. Even if Murphy and the rest don’t believe they can be found, saved, we have to try.”
“I know.”
“There’s more, isn’t there? What is it, Noah?”
“Emma. She’s . . . Miranda, Emma is only sixteen years old.”
* * *
• • •
Brodie managed to get them both completely under the covers in a few economical movements, without once losing his comforting hold on her.
It was a warm cocoon with him in it, but even as she relaxed again, Tasha murmured, “We have to be up soon anyway. It’s getting light outside. And the others . . . We need to tell Murphy at least, don’t we? About the fire?”
“I’m betting the Bishops will, if she doesn’t already know about it. But we still need to talk to Murphy. With that fire being caused by arson, we need to start considering who would have done it.”
“And why.”
“Yeah.”
“The Bishops were physically closest,” Tasha noted. “And both were sensing as much as they could in those last moments, I’m sure they were. One or both of them might have picked up something I didn’t, since I was so focused on the babies.”
Something in her quiet voice or just something he sensed in her made Brodie pull her an impossible inch closer. “What?” he asked just as quietly.
“There’s something else I think we need to consider.” Her eyes were very dark. “How many of us heard those screams. The Bishops were close, and powerful telepaths, so no surprise if they did. I don’t know if we had anybody closer. But, me? It’s, what, a couple hundred miles between Charleston and Charlotte? Sarah and Tucker are between here and there, but hardly a mile from here; did they hear the babies? Did a nightmare wake them up? Where was Murphy, and did she sense anything? Do we have any other psychics who sensed what happened in that fire?”
Brodie was watching her intently. “And if we don’t?”
“Then maybe I didn’t feel what I felt, didn’t hear their dying screams only because I’m psychic. Maybe I heard their dying screams because they were connected to me.”
“Tasha—”
“I’m in the first or one of the first successful generations of their eugenics program, we’re fairly sure of that.” She was vaguely surprised she could say that in a steady voice when just the possibility of it still totally creeped her out. “Whether I was the lucky but entirely natural product of two born psychics they paired or else something in them or in me was manipulated to make me a born psychic, we don’t know.”
“Tasha, it’s all just supposition.”
“But that’s just it, John. We don’t know what’s only supposition and what isn’t. Which guesses are right and which are wrong. All we know is that I was adopted, that I’ve been watched over in a very creepy way by creepy smiling people with creepy unnatural shadows probably my whole life. Which is weird enough to make me believe that particular supposition is on target.
“And—” She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “There must be others in my generation, other generations, even if we don’t know who they are or how they were produced either. I can’t be the only one. The only success. They never would have set up so many of their—their breeding houses if they weren’t very sure the expense and commitment of so many of their resources were worthwhile.”
“That makes sense,” he admitted.
“So they found something that proved to them it was possible to breed psychics. Another supposition, but I can’t see anything else that makes sense. Whether it was something genetic or something else, we don’t know. But they found something. They know something about this that we don’t know.”
Brodie nodded reluctantly. He hated giving the other side any kind of advantage at all, far less one so close to the very heart of whatever this was.
“Whatever it is, we need to find it. I know doctors and scientists on our side of things are testing my blood and anything else I was willing to give them,” Tasha said.
He had to smile at that, however faintly. She had been very disgruntled and not a little indignant about some of the requests.
Tasha knew what amused him and managed a smile, even if it was brief. “And I know Bishop has some really good private lab he uses running a complete genetic test on me. But he’s already told us that genetic tests have been done on every born psychic in his unit plus born psychics he’s monitored for years—plenty of . . . specimens . . . tested—and so far doctors and scientists have found absolutely nothing at the genetic level that is in any way different from nonpsychics.”
“Yeah. Nothing they recognize, at least.”
“So we don’t know if any of that—any of it—will prove anything at all. And what else do we have? Not even Tucker has been able to find paperwork on me beyond the fact of my birth and the bare statement that I was adopted by a perfectly normal couple who never said a word about it to me or kept any documents concerning an adoption.” She shook her head a little, still baffled by that. “And no luck at all in tracing ownership of that—house—I was apparently born in.”
“No paper trail,” Brodie murmured.
“It makes supposition less likely to be wrong, doesn’t it? I mean, too many of our guesses seem to be way too close to possible not to contain more than a grain of truth.”
“Probably. But we still have no proof of any of this.”
“No, but maybe we have a better idea of where to look now. And we definitely have to find out whether one of Duran’s people went rogue and burned that house or somebody else did. We have to know why it was destroyed. Why they were.”
Brodie thought about it for a few moments, frowning slightly, then said with clear reluctance, “As much as I hate so many of us being in one place at the same time, I think we need to call Murphy—and I believe she’ll want those of us here in Charleston most closely concerned in this all to come together. There’s no good reason I can think of for Duran to do it, not like that. Whether one of his people went rogue, or someone else did it for reasons of their own, we have to understand why it was done.”
He didn’t get the chance to call Murphy.
She called them.
* * *
• • •
“There was nothing to be done by the time we got there,” Bishop told the others, wrapping up his brief but succinct report on the fire only a few hours before. They were gathered together in the building that had been recently converted—at least outwardly—to luxury condos only a mile or so from Tasha’s building. Bishop and Miranda, Tasha and Brodie, Tucker and Sarah Mackenzie, and Murphy.
They were in the penthouse condo, where Tucker and Sarah Mackenzie had been living for the past weeks, and the meeting had been called by Murphy just as soon as the Bishops had arrived back from Charlotte. It was still very early morning, no one had taken the time to eat breakfast, and they all had some version of coffee near to hand even though none of them needed the caffeine to be wide-awake.
Miranda said, “Even the neighbors were only just being awakened when we heard the first sirens, though the house was completely engulfed and must have been burning for at least ten to twenty minutes by then.”
Bishop said with a frown, “And there was something odd about the dogs too. We saw a dozen or more in the neighborhood while we were approaching the house, and not a single one was barking. They were awake, alert—and totally silent and still. Both inside the houses we could see, and outside in the yards. Most of them had to be able to both see and hear the fire.”
“I’d call that creepy,” Tasha said. She had been rather subdued since she and Brodie had arrived, still clearly shaken by what had awakened her, what the Bishops had seen. But it was also clear to everyone in the room that she and Brodie had turned a corner in their relationship; they weren’t touching, but they remained close to each other.
Brodie, frowning as Bishop had, asked the fed, “Can any of your people control animals psychically?”
“Control, no. I have one agent with a canine partner she raised and trained, and they communicate telepathically almost as easily as we’re talking now. There are a few others either in Haven or on our watch list who have shown the ability to communicate with animals at some level and in limited ways. But not control, not like that.”
“The dogs should have reacted,” Tucker said.
“Especially to something like a house fire,” Sarah agreed. “No matter how they start, they aren’t exactly quiet, and they are very, very visible in the night.”
Miranda said, “An explosion would have awakened the neighborhood, and we would have been close enough to hear it. So it wasn’t a gas line, or anything else that would have roused anyone in time to get into the house before it got too bad. Especially when none of the dogs sounded the alarm—and the smoke detectors and other fire alarms inside the house had been disabled.”
“You’re sure of that?” Brodie asked.
“Positive. We’d been monitoring the emergency services radios and scanners, and re-ran the recordings on our way here. No one was alerted to the fire until a neighbor, one street over, got up to let his dog out, and called it in because he could see the flames through the trees. It had to be arson. It was set to go up like a bonfire and that’s exactly what it did.”
Saying aloud only one of the dreadful possibilities that had been chasing each other through her mind, Tasha said, “One shadow breeding house deliberately burned, and it wasn’t empty. Maybe because something was going wrong there? With the program?”
“Did you feel anything—else—wrong?” Murphy asked her directly.
Other than babies burning alive.
“No. It was—only the fire. It’s like I told John, I felt the babies, when the fire was—was burning, their terror and agony. I have no way to be sure, no proof, but there didn’t seem to be anything else wrong with the babies. Nothing I could sense.”
“The opposite, in fact,” Brodie said quietly.
Tasha looked at him, then nodded. “The babies . . . I think they knew it was deliberate, knew that they had an enemy. Some of them, at least, probably the ones closest to term. They were psychic. I don’t know if they were telepathic or clairvoyant or what, but I know they were already psychic. Not latent.”
“In Duran’s mind,” Brodie said, “unborn babies already showing signs of psychic abilities would be a huge plus.”
Miranda said, “That fits with what we picked up, at least in part. We got that the babies were psychic. Nothing more specific than that in terms of their abilities, but definitely psychic.”
Murphy nodded. “So, highly doubtful Duran and his people were . . . culling. Destroying failures and all the evidence of them. This place, at least, sounds like it would have been a win for Duran. Especially at this stage, when we’re reasonably sure they’ve already had some success, and for long enough to have learned what works and what doesn’t, at least in their eugenics program. Besides which, it’s too obvious and too . . . messy a way of dealing with problems, if there even were any. Too many bodies to get rid of after a very public tragedy.”
* * *
• • •
Emma Garrick still wasn’t sure what had happened. She was cold, and afraid beyond anything she’d ever felt before, but she wasn’t a weak girl or a stupid girl, and every instinct told her she needed to understand what had happened.
Wherever she was now was dark and quiet, silent even, and that didn’t make her feel better. That didn’t make her feel better at all. She couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t move. In fact, her whole body felt weirdly numb, the way her face did after the dentist shot her up with novocaine.
So all she could really do was think, to try to understand and get it all straight in her head. She had been . . . What? At school? No. No, she’d been . . . There had been a party at Gary’s house. A party that hadn’t even started until after midnight, but Toby was going to be there, and she’d badly wanted him to see her in something other than her school uniform.
So she’d sneaked out after her parents were asleep. And she’d gone to the party, which hadn’t been as much fun as she’d hoped because two other girls had taken turns plastering themselves on Toby, which he’d seemed to enjoy. A lot.
She’d nursed one beer for more than two hours, disliking the taste but wary enough not to either drink something with a lot more kick or set her red Solo cup down so somebody else could have slipped something into the beer.
Being a cop’s kid wasn’t usually a good thing; Emma knew way more than she wanted to about how quickly and easily kids got themselves into trouble.
Like sneaking out. And everything that followed that fairly minor rebellion.
Her dad was going to kill her.
A new car, her first car, and she’d run the damned thing off the road sneaking home at dawn.
Jeez.
He’s gonna kill me. I’m gonna be grounded until my eighteenth birthday. Maybe my twenty-first birthday. Dammit. Goddammit.
It was only beginning to get light as Emma struggled to pull herself out of the little car that had slid inexplicably if gently off the road and into a not-so-little ditch. And it hadn’t been until she’d done that and stood on the side of the road looking around that it had occurred to her she didn’t know where she was.
Nothing had looked familiar. Which had been weird, because it wasn’t like she lived in a big city. She would have sworn she knew practically every inch of this small town in Kentucky. But nothing looked familiar.
Nothing looked familiar at all.
And it was real quiet, not even crickets.
The first chill had crawled up her spine then, so icy cold that her instinct was just to run like hell. No matter where, just run. But before she could obey that instinct, she started to feel even colder, and she was puzzled because it was getting darker, not lighter like the sun was coming up.
It had gotten darker, and colder, and she thought she heard whispering, or maybe it was leaves rustling, but that almost never happened in June. And then she’d caught something from the corner of her eye, movement, and—
Shadows.
Just before the darkness closed over her, she’d seen them, seen the shadows. Twisted, ugly, looming. Monsters. Not human.
Not human.
That was when she knew there was trouble a lot worse than just sneaking out to a party and wrecking her car. That was when the careless teenage certainty of invincibility left her all in a rush, like the strength flowing out of her as her knees buckled.
That was when she’d screamed out silently to the only mind she instinctively knew might be listening.
Bishop.
Now, eyes closed but aware she was somewhere else, somewhere that was not at all better than stranded on the side of a weirdly unfamiliar road in Kentucky, Emma Garrick understood that she had been taken, abducted.
All the things her dad had told her about why teenage girls got abducted roiled through her mind, icy-cold. Rapists. Human traffickers. Serial killers.
But none of those possibilities was the worst. Emma hadn’t known the worst, not until now. She hadn’t known there were worse things than even her dad knew about.
She hadn’t known there were real monsters that came in the dark.
Bishop . . .
EIGHT
Tasha held her voice steady. “Whatever the reason, what if this is the only one we know about because Bishop and Miranda were nearby, because I sensed the babies? What if . . . if other houses burn?”
“None have so far,” Tucker said immediately. “Not, at least, any we’ve been monitoring. We’re using a mix of different electronic devices and some of our people who are keeping their distance but able to do a thorough recon. Both our people and our devices register an automatic check-in every hour; anyone misses the check-in or reports something going on, we’re alerted immediately.” He nodded toward the far corner of this enormous living area, where a very complex-looking computer system was set up, with rows of equipment on shelves as well as on the large desk.
Equipment far too advanced to be available to anyone in the private sector. Or, possibly, even the military.
“Nothing unusual has happened except at that one house—where we’d held off installing any kind of electronic surveillance until Bishop and Miranda could check it out. We also didn’t yet have any of our people watching. We’d only discovered that house two days ago, and the ID was iffy at best.”
He added, “It’s taken most of our available resources, but we’ve kept the heavy surveillance on the other houses and clinics we’ve found so far because we knew we’d be moving the women and babies within the next week.”
Quietly, Sarah said, “Maybe Duran knows that too. Maybe keeping them away from us was more important than keeping them alive.”
“I’m not really one to give Duran the benefit of any doubt,” Brodie said rather needlessly, “but it just doesn’t fit with his usual methods, or his goals as we understand them.”
