Damned
Damned
Lisa Childs
Experience the thrill of life on the edge and set your adrenalin pumping! These gripping stories see heroic characters fight for survival and find love in the face of danger.Their only chance for salvation was each other… Born a witch, Irina Cooper was able to read other people’s thoughts. She had never known the source of her power, or her true heritage. It was police officer Ty McIntyre’s job to save her from the dark forces swirling around her.To stop the killer seeking to destroy the Cooper legacy, they must use Irina’s gift and end her family’s curse. Doing so will lead Irina to her true salvation – in Ty’s strong embrace!Witch Hunt Three sisters – magic in their blood and a killer on their trail!
“Don’t,” she murmured. “Don’tpresume to know what I think. Or what I feel, Ty McIntyre.”
She’d read his thoughts; she knew his fear. He nodded. “You’re right. I don’t have a gift, not like you.” But he was cursed all the same.
Placing her slim hands on his shoulders, she pushed him down so he sat on the edge of the rusted tub. Then she ran her fingers through his hair and over his scalp. He didn’t notice the pain, only the heat of her touch. Like her kiss, it branded him.
Sucking her bottom lip between her teeth, she murmured, “You have a few deep cuts. You could probably use some stitches. Let me clean them, at least.”
“Irina…”
“You’ve asked me to trust you. You need to trust me.”
More than once he’d requested her trust, and she’d given it. Trust didn’t come as easily for Ty.
“You think it comes easy for me?” she asked. “I don’t even trust myself.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Award-winning author Lisa Childs wrote her first book when she was six, a biography…of the family dog. Now she writes romantic suspense, paranormal romance and women’s fiction. The youngest of seven siblings, she holds family very dear in real life and in her fiction, often infusing her books with compelling family dynamics. She lives in west Michigan with her husband, two daughters and a twenty-pound Siamese cat. For the latest on Lisa’s spine-tingling suspense and heartwarming women’s fiction, check out her website at www.lisachilds.com. She loves hearing from readers, who can also reach her at PO Box 139, Marne, MI 49435, USA.
Dear Reader,
Damned is the conclusion of my WITCH HUNT trilogy for NOCTURNE. I’ve loved writing about all the “gifted” Cooper sisters, but I couldn’t wait to tell Irina’s story, partly because, as the youngest of my family, I can identify with her, but mostly because Damned is also Ty McIntyre’s story. The witch hunt has put Ty through a lot of physical and emotional trauma. He’s lost his job and a chance with the woman he thought he could love. He deserves to find the true love of his life, and he deserves to make sure justice is finally served. I hope you enjoy reading Ty and Irina’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Happy reading!
Lisa
Damned
LISA CHILDS
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Acknowledgement
To the Grand Rapids Police Department,
thank you for allowing me to participate in the
Citizens Police Academy, and thank you most
of all for your selfless service to our city.
Dedication
To my family, for your constant love
and support!
Prologue
This was home: the street. Where she slept. Where she ate—if she remembered to eat. Where she drank—if she could scrounge up enough money for a bottle. And the drugs—they were easier to score.
But even here she couldn’t hide from the voices, couldn’t drown them out. They kept whispering… in her head, the voices echoing in her mind. And it didn’t matter…what she did.
She couldn’t shut them out.
Cardboard shifted and crumpled beneath her as she curled into a ball against the wall of a brick building. The stench of moldy food and dirty diapers drifted from the Dumpster behind which she lay, but she hardly noticed. She hardly noticed anything…outside her head.
She pressed her hands against her ears, trying to block out the noise. Not the rumble of traffic from the street, nor the murmured conversation drifting from the other end of the alley where shadows crouched around a barrel with flames lapping up the rusted rim.
The noise she tried to block was already inside her head, and her efforts were futile. As the voices rose, her vision dimmed, the stars, the street lamps and the fire at the end of the alley reduced to sparks in a sea of black. Blinded, her hearing sharpened.
“Where could Irina be?”
The sparks glittered and danced against the black backdrop as she struggled to recognize the voice.
“We have to find her before he does!”
Although she didn’t think she’d ever heard either of the two soft feminine voices before, in person, they were oddly familiar. Despite the anxiety in these adult voices, each of them resonated with the echo of a child’s laughter.
Her sisters…
She’d had sisters, hadn’t she? Her parents had told her no, that she’d been an only child. That she was only theirs. But there was another life to which she belonged…and it was calling her back.
“Irina…”
“Irina!”
She’d once been called Irina, twenty years ago, before she’d been taken away from her mother and her sisters. Before she’d been adopted by a couple who had wanted her to forget who she’d once been. They’d tried to convince her that she’d been born to them, that she’d been born Heather Bowers. But they hadn’t adopted her until she was nearly five. She remembered. And even if she hadn’t, she’d heard their thoughts; she knew the truth.
She wasn’t theirs, and because of her uncanny ability to read their minds, they didn’t want her to be. They couldn’t love her. But they’d tried.
The way her sisters were trying to find her now. Why after all these years?
The sparks brightened like embers on a stoked fire as the voices quavered with fear.
“If he finds her first, he’ll kill her like he killed the others.”
“Like he killed our mother.”
She squeezed her eyes shut so that even the sparks of light disappeared. But she couldn’t shut out the voices. Others called to her, jumbled inside her head, echoes of thoughts and fears she’d already heard.
“I’m not a witch.”
“Don’t kill me! Please, don’t kill me!”
But the killer ignored their pleas, and the women’s voices rose in screams of terror and pain. Irina winced at the volume, which threatened to shatter her skull, and she cringed at the agony expressed in each shrill cry. No matter how long ago she’d first heard them, she couldn’t get them out of her head, couldn’t forget their suffering. Not only had she heard their cries but she’d felt their pain, too. The fire scorching her flesh, burning her alive. The noose chafing her skin, tightening around her throat until it cut off her last breath. The jagged rocks piled one by one onto her body, crushing her beneath their weight.
She’d wanted to help them, but she hadn’t known where the women were. She hadn’t been able to see them or their surroundings; she’d only heard them. Even if she had been able to figure out where they’d been, she would have been too late to save them. She’d wanted to help, but she couldn’t even help herself right now.
One of these screams, the first she’d heard filled with such agony and fear and so hauntingly familiar, had driven her back here…to the street. Her biological mother’s. She hadn’t heard her voice in twenty years—not in person, just many times inside her head. With that scream she’d known her mother had been killed even before she’d heard her sisters speak of her death.
Were they real? Any of them? The voices? Her memories? Or had that first scream been the beginning of some kind of psychotic break?
Before hearing that scream, just months ago, she’d been managing. She’d been living. Going to school. Working.
Now she was barely existing, just waiting…until the next scream…was hers.
Chapter 1
Were they witches? They didn’t cast spells. They didn’t heal with potions and herbs as their long-dead ancestor had. But they had special abilities and they needed to use them to save a life—just as their ancestor had tried three hundred and fifty years ago. He only hoped their efforts weren’t rewarded the same way hers had been.
With death.
Ty McIntyre cared about these two women. They sat together, holding hands, on the black leather couch in the penthouse owned by Ty’s best friend. Actually Ariel held her older sister’s hand, and Elena held the charms—a little pewter sun and a little pewter star—in her palm, combining their powers.
Their powers?
A muscle jumped in his cheek as he clenched his jaw. Skepticism nagged at him. God, he was a lawman. Even though he listened to his instincts, he relied on evidence. Tangible proof. How could he rely on something he didn’t understand, something he couldn’t trust?
Believe, he silently chanted to quell his doubts. He’d seen the proof of their powers in the results they wrought. Ariel was alive. Stacia, Elena’s daughter, was alive. Because of their intangible powers.
“Can you see anything yet?” he asked Elena, frustration thickening his voice.
She scrunched shut her pale eyes, and her forehead furrowed with concentration. The knuckles on the hand holding the charms tightened and turned white, while her fingers reddened.
“She can’t force her visions,” Ariel defended her sister as she stared up at him through narrowed eyes. “What’s up with you, Ty? You’re edgier than usual. Did you find out something you haven’t shared yet?”
He shook his head, then started pacing the marble floor of David’s living room. Like a jolt from an electrical outlet, pain traveled up his leg from his not-quite-healed wound. Maybe the doctors were right—maybe he’d had them remove the cast too soon. “No, I haven’t learned a damned thing.”
“So that’s why you’re edgy,” Ariel said. “You’re frustrated.”
“We all are,” Elena chimed in, her eyes still closed. “Since we know who the killer is, we should be able to find him.”
Donovan Roarke. The man was a private investigator, but before that he’d been a cop. Like Ty. And like Ty, he’d been suspended from the police department due to excessive force. Ty’s guts knotted, but he reminded himself he was nothing like the madman. Donovan Roarke was a sadistic son of a bitch. He might have convinced himself that by killing witches in the ways that witches had been killed centuries ago he was honoring his family legacy, the vendetta begun so many years ago. But Ty knew the guy was a psychopath, and if he wasn’t caught soon, he’d kill again.
Anger gripped Ty, but he fought it off, breathing slow and deep. Then he shoved a hand through his hair. Even though he hadn’t worn his uniform in months, he kept his black hair short, in an almost military cut. He liked his life simple, like the T-shirts and old jeans he wore. But there was nothing simple about his life now; there hadn’t been since Donovan Roarke had begun his witch hunt.
“Roarke’s clever,” Ty admitted. Or he would have found the sick bastard by now.
“He’s crazy,” Ariel maintained.
Maybe Ty was, too, because he’d actually thought this might work, that Elena would have a vision that would lead him to her missing sister, the youngest of the three of them. Since he’d come up empty in his other investigations, he’d decided to use the sisters’ powers. He had nothing left to lose.
“Let’s concentrate on Irina,” he said, which was easy for him since she was all he thought about lately.
She’d been nagging at his mind ever since he’d first seen the picture of her as a little girl. From the glass-and-marble coffee table he picked up the trifold pewter picture frame they’d found in Roarke’s office. The private investigator must have stolen the twenty-year-old portraits of the three sisters from their mother after he’d killed her.
As Ty focused on the youngest child with her loose brown curls and her big, dark eyes, a memory teased him: flashing lights, blurred before his swollen eyes; pain pounding in his skull and tearing at his arm as he fought for consciousness, for life; then a little girl’s voice calling out to him, calling him back from the brink of death.
Hers? Or the little girl who’d died because he hadn’t gotten to her in time? Was the memory an old one, buried deep with the rest of his childhood? Or was it a new one, suppressed like the rage over which his lieutenant had suspended him?
His hand shaking slightly, he set the picture frame back on the table, then turned his attention to Elena. He’d deal with his own demons later, after he’d dealt with theirs. “You’ve had visions of her before. If you can’t have another, try to remember everything you can about those, even what you might think insignificant.”
Elena nodded in perfect understanding of the gift she’d denied and fought for so long. “I’ll try to recall every detail.”
He blew out a ragged breath, relieved that she understood what he wanted. Irina. “We have to find her.” Soon.
Knowing who the killer was didn’t make him less dangerous. In Roarke’s case, Ty suspected knowing who he was made him more dangerous. Now the man wasn’t worried about concealing his identity; he, like Ty, had nothing to lose.
Having tried and failed to get Ariel and Elena, he’d concentrate all his efforts on Irina. And Ty would do the same. The others could look for Roarke; his friend David and Elena’s fiancé Joseph were out now, searching for him. Ty already knew where he was—wherever Irina was.
“In that first vision you had of her, she’s homeless.” God, he hoped Elena was wrong, but he’d investigated the lead, spending days and nights among the street people. While he hadn’t found Irina, he had found desperation and despair, reawakening memories he’d locked away in his past.
Elena shook her head. “I’m not even sure it’s Irina I’m seeing. I haven’t seen her since she was four.”
“She was almost five,” Ariel added, her turquoise eyes glistening with unshed tears. As if a year would have made a difference then.
Ariel had been nine, Elena twelve when they were taken away from their mother and separated from each other. Ty’s gut twisted at having to bring up bad memories for them both. But the pain and fear they felt now would be worth it if he were able to reunite the sisters.
Ignoring the ache in his leg, he knelt on the floor in front of the couch, the marble cold through the denim of his faded jeans. Excessive force hadn’t been his biggest hurdle in being a police officer; until his last day of active duty, he’d never had a problem dealing with suspects. His struggle had been dealing with the victims. Offering comfort—something never offered to him—hadn’t been easy for him.
Now he reached out, closing his hand over their joined hands. “We’ll find her.”
Ariel stared into his eyes, hers still shimmering with tears. “Or will I, Ty? Will the first time I see my baby sister in twenty years be as a ghost?” Like she’d first seen her mother when Myra Cooper had been killed several months ago.
That was Ariel’s gift—seeing ghosts; Elena’s gift was seeing the future. What was Irina’s? The lights flashed again, digging up the memory, but he couldn’t pull it out of his mind. Not yet. He had too many other things on it.
He swallowed hard, then reminded her, “But you haven’t seen Irina’s ghost. She has to be alive.”
His breath trapped in his lungs until she nodded her head in agreement. He shared her fear that they might not find Irina in time; it kept him from sleeping, from eating, from doing anything but search for her. Even though he had begun his quest to find the missing sister as a favor for his best friend and Ariel, it had become more personal to him. Irina was more personal to him than a twenty-year-old picture in an old pewter frame.
A moan slipped through Elena’s lips. Her pale eyes glazed, she stared not at the opulent living room of the penthouse or the view outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, Barrett, Michigan, aglow with lights in the black sky. She stared instead at whatever images played out inside her head.
“Tell us everything you’re seeing,” he prodded her, as he would have any witness.
“She’s on the street, like I saw her before,” Elena said, taunted by the old vision like the old memory that wouldn’t quite leave Ty alone.
“What do you see?” He needed some landmarks, something so he could pinpoint the place instead of wandering the streets the way he had.
“It’s dark….”
“No street lamps?”
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….”
But if she told the psychiatrist everything, the young doctor would think her even crazier than she already did.
The woman’s face flushed with pink color. “Someone’s been asking about you. At least I’m pretty sure you’re the woman he’s looking for. Maybe he’ll be able to help you remember who you are.”
He already had. But he didn’t intend to let her make any more memories. God, how had he found her so quickly? He must have followed the police car to the psychiatric hospital.
Irina strained against the bindings at her wrists, trying to vault out of the bed. “You can’t let him in here! Don’t let him near me! He’s going to kill me!”
“Why do you say that?” the psychiatrist asked, her face tight with concern. “Has he hurt you?”
Irina shook her head, tumbling her hair around her shoulders. Citrus shampoo wafted from her curls. The minute she’d been brought in, they’d washed her. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize her from the dirty street person she’d been. Maybe she could convince him she wasn’t who he thought she was.
She wasn’t a witch.
Drawing in an unsteady breath, she admitted, “He hasn’t touched me.” Yet. “But I know he’s hurt other people. He’s killed them.”
The young doctor’s mouth pulled down at the corners. “He probably has, but only in the line of duty. He’s a police officer.”
No wonder he’d found her so quickly. Even if she somehow managed to free herself and escape, he would track her down again. She had to convince him she wasn’t Irina Cooper. If she couldn’t, she was damned.
As the psychiatrist opened the door and stepped into the hall, Irina tested the restraints, tugging on her wrists. Desperation to free herself renewed her struggle, and the straps dug deep grooves into her skin.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” the young doctor, her voice soft with apology, told someone in the corridor.
Irina held her breath as she listened for his response. But she couldn’t discern his words, only the low timbre of his raspy murmur. Through the partially opened door she watched the psychiatrist’s face, which flushed pink as she gazed up at the man who stood just outside Irina’s line of vision.
The woman shook her head, shifting her braid against her back. Her hair was dark and long, like Irina’s. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I don’t want to upset her any further.”
Unable to see or hear him through the door, Irina closed her eyes and listened for his voice inside her head. But now, when she actually wanted her mind invaded with the thoughts of others, it remained empty. Instead of blackness rolling in, she squinted against the stark glare of the fluorescent lights as she opened her eyes again. What had they given her?
She struggled anew against the restraints, wanting to pull out the IV as badly as she wanted her freedom. She needed to hear the voices now; she needed to know what was going on if she had any hope of protecting herself.
“Send him in,” she yelled as the last of her strength drained from her body. The sedative had worked on her muscles as well as her mind, relaxing them so much that she couldn’t even form a fist now. But even weak, she could fight him…if she could read his mind. He wouldn’t dare to try to kill her here, in the hospital. And she’d be able to identify him. Maybe if he got close to her again, as he had in the alley, she could test her power.
Not that she’d ever had to have someone close to read his or her mind. She had no idea where those women were that he’d killed, but she’d heard their every terrified thought throughout their last moments. She shivered; her struggles to free herself had knocked her blankets to the floor, and she wore only a thin cotton gown. But her reaction was more from fear than cold.
She drew in a deep breath, reminding herself that she’d decided back in the alley that she was through running. Of course, a short while after making that decision she had run out in the street and into the path of that police car. The police officers hadn’t helped her. Since he was one of them, there was no way she could trust them. Or anyone else. She had to help herself.
“I w-want to s-see him,” she called out, her words slurred from the effects of the sedative. She blinked hard, fighting against exhaustion to keep her eyes open.
The door creaked as the man wedged his wide shoulders through the jamb and stepped into Irina’s room, which shrank with his entrance. Like his shoulders, his chest was wide and heavily muscled beneath his thin cotton T-shirt. But his size, which was more muscle than height since he hovered just under six feet, didn’t overwhelm Irina. He’d actually seemed bigger in the alley.
His intensity, apparent in his tautly clenched jaw and the hard stare of his navy-blue eyes, overwhelmed Irina. She tore her gaze from his, turning her attention to the woman who accompanied him. The psychiatrist followed closely behind Irina’s visitor, probably whispering instructions on how not to get her patient hysterical again.
The doctor didn’t have to worry about what he said to her. His thoughts were more likely to upset Irina—if she could tap into them the way she had before.
“Is she the woman you’re trying to find?” the psychiatrist asked.
The man brushed a hand through his short black hair, in which the fluorescent lights picked up glints nearly as blue as his eyes. Irina forced herself to meet his gaze, expecting the burning hatred that had scorched her in the alley. But her vision dimmed, his face disappearing into the blackness that enveloped her. Only little sparks of blue relieved the dark.
His voice a raspy whisper, he lied to the doctor. “No.” But his mind called out to her. Irina?
Her heart lurched with the shock of recognition of another kind. This wasn’t the man who’d chased her from the alley. He was the man who’d made her consider leaving it in the first place, calling her name, telling her to believe.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The psychiatrist answered for him, “This is Ty McIntyre, a police officer.”
Suspended police officer. She heard his silent amendment to the doctor’s claim. More than that, her stomach muscles tightened with the pain and pride that omission, even silent, cost him.
“You don’t recognize him?” the psychiatrist asked Irina. “He isn’t the man you claim is trying to kill you?”
Oh God, the bastard has already found her!
Fear raised goose bumps on Irina’s skin, but was it her fear or his? Irina shook her head. “No.”
He was not the man she’d claimed was trying to kill her, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t just as dangerous—or maybe even more dangerous. Her connection with him was so strong, his thoughts so compelling that she had risked leaving her hiding place of the past few months. With the killer, she had only his actions to fear; with this man, she had her own to fear. She struggled to break the connection between them, fighting her way out of the darkness.
Yet the connection remained. The anger tightening the muscles in his stomach twisted hers into knots. Tension radiated from him as he stared at her.
She shifted against the mattress, unnerved by his intent scrutiny and her own inexplicable reaction to it. Her pulse quickened, her breath grew shallow and heat licked at her stomach.
The young psychiatrist cleared her throat. “Well, then…” she prompted the man as she pulled open the door again. “Since she isn’t who you’re looking for…”
“Who is she?” he asked as if Irina weren’t in the room, as if he weren’t staring directly into her eyes.
Irina lifted her chin, pride stinging at the way he’d dismissed her. But at least her pride had returned; she’d buried it for a long time under months of dirt and delusions. The voices hadn’t been the delusion. Thinking herself crazy had been the delusion.
“Jane Doe, for now,” the woman answered Ty McIntyre. “Until we learn her true identity.”
Irina opened her mouth to tell him not the name she’d been given at birth but the one she’d been called the past twenty years. That was her legal identity but not her true one. But his anger coursed through her veins, burning her with its intensity. She didn’t dare trust him. Too many people had died already. She didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.
The faint echoes of old screams reverberated inside her head. She closed her eyes, refusing to relive the gruesome memories.
“Jane Doe,” McIntyre repeated in a murmur, but in her mind, he shouted, Irina Cooper. Irina Cooper.
Since he knew who she was, why didn’t he tell the psychiatrist? He must have a reason for keeping her identity secret. Irina wished she could read his intentions toward her in his thoughts. But she couldn’t, and fear quickened her pulse. Like the man from the alley, Ty McIntyre would hurt her if she wasn’t careful.
She intended to be very careful.
“I’m tired,” she claimed. “You can both leave.” But she couldn’t see if they complied. Black enveloped her, broken only by sparks of blue, the same dark blue as his eyes.
I have to get her out of here before he finds her!
That was his last thought, flitting through her mind, before wood snapped against wood as the door closed behind him and the doctor. Not that distance made Irina’s ability to read minds any weaker. She could be miles away and the connection just as strong as if she stood face-to-face. But usually those people had some relationship to her, like her mother, her sisters or other people who’d meant something to her. Except for the killer. And this man, Ty McIntyre, who might not want to kill her but whose connection with her was stronger than any other.
She tugged at her wrist again, but the restraint refused to give. All her struggle and she’d only worked the fabric-and-Velcro strap a tiny bit looser.
She had to find a way to free herself and get the hell out of here. Because she knew if she didn’t get out of the hospital soon, she would probably wind up in the morgue. If there was even anything left of her to examine…
The strangest sensation washed over Ty, lifting the hair on the nape of his neck. He glanced around the hallway, but the young doctor had left him. No one else stood in the wide corridor. Two nurses worked the station at the end, one on the phone, the other checking charts. Neither of them was the least bit aware of his presence. So no one watched him, yet that sensation persisted, prickling the skin between his shoulder blades as if someone’s gaze bored into him.
He checked the doors along the hall. They were all shut tight in the jambs, leaving no space through which someone could peer out. Maybe his instincts had gotten rusty since his suspension—maybe that was why Roarke had escaped him not once but twice. Roarke wouldn’t beat him again. The maniac would have to kill Ty before he’d get to Irina.
Irina…
His stomach muscles tightened as he relived his brief encounter with her. He should have been prepared for her appearance. She had the delicately featured face, the curly hair and the big Gypsy eyes, exactly as her oldest sister had described her. Yet she hadn’t looked as lost as Elena’s visions had led him to believe she’d look.
Despite the sedative the doctor had said she’d been administered, awareness had sparkled in Irina’s dark eyes. Briefly. Then she’d gotten a strange unfocused expression on her face, as if she’d suddenly gone blind. And that was when his skin had first begun to prickle as if someone were closer to him than they’d ever been. Her sisters each had a supernatural gift—or curse, as they’d first called their abilities. Did Irina have some special ability, too?
The police officer who’d brought her here after she ran screaming into traffic had called her a wacko. Ty had found her through his old contacts and his constant monitoring of his police radio. She’d been right here in Barrett, living on the streets he’d searched over and over again for her. According to his old friend, she was either drugged out of her mind or stark-raving mad, blathering hysterically about reading a killer’s mind. Even though the psychiatrist hadn’t admitted it, he could tell she thought Irina was delusional, too.
But Ty knew she spoke the truth, at least about the killer; he wasn’t sure about the mind-reading part. At the moment, her ability, whatever it was or wasn’t, didn’t matter. All that mattered was Donovan Roarke’s determination to kill her.
Ty glanced at the preoccupied women at the nurses’ station, then again at the empty corridor. Despite the lock on the door separating the psychiatric ward from the rest of the hospital and the locks on the individual rooms, someone clever, with the right connections, could get to Irina pretty easily. She wasn’t safe here. He had to get her out.
He could do it the right way—get Elena and Ariel down here to identify and claim their sister. But they hadn’t seen her in twenty years. To verify the connection between the sisters, they’d have to take a DNA test, then wait for the results. Confirmation could take at least a month. If they used the same lab the Barrett PD did, probably longer. Irina didn’t have that kind of time, not with Roarke stalking her. From what she’d told the police and the psychiatrist, the madman had nearly caught her…just as Elena had envisioned. Except that Irina hadn’t been too weak to fight him off. This time.
Ty couldn’t give Roarke a second chance to grab her; he had to get her out. Tonight.
“Officer McIntyre,” a soft feminine voice called out his name.
He glanced at Irina’s door, but it was still closed tight, the heavy steel too insulated for her voice to carry through it. She was also strapped to the bed, trapped and helpless. Unless what else she’d told the officers was true—she could read people’s minds.
The hair lifted on his neck again. Was she reading his mind? No, he’d locked out everyone, even his best friend, for too many years for someone to slip inside his head without his realizing it.
An echo of a little girl’s voice whispered from the depths of his buried memories. But time had undoubtedly distorted the facts; he had no special ability. He couldn’t hear anyone inside his head.
“Officer McIntyre,” the psychiatrist called out again as she stepped from another patient’s room and closed the door behind herself. Metal jangled as she slipped keys into the pocket of her white coat. The hospital, in the old area of Barrett, was antiquated, their budget too meager for updating. Most doors were locked and unlocked the old-fashioned way. “You’re still here. Did you change your mind? Is Jane Doe the woman you’re looking for?”
From the flirtatious gleam in her dark eyes and the coy lift of her lips, she was asking him something else entirely—if his interest in Irina Cooper was personal, not professional. Or if he had an interest in her, the doctor.
He shook his head. “No. She’s not the woman I’m looking for.”
He was dedicated to finding her for her sisters, for the sake of saving her from Roarke, but not for himself. He didn’t need anyone and he fully intended to keep his life that way. Single.
She smiled and tucked a strand of dark hair that had escaped her braid behind her ear. “Then…why are you still here?”
His gut twisted as he considered leading her on with lies and sweet talk. But he’d never wasted time practicing either. So he’d probably make a fool of himself trying to make a fool of her. He drew in a bracing breath. “I told you I’m a police officer, but I didn’t tell you that I’m suspended from duty.”
Her smile remained even as the gleam in her eyes dimmed. “I know. Since you didn’t have your badge, I called the precinct before I brought you in to see her. Your lieutenant explained your suspension.”
“He did?” Ty couldn’t explain it himself, couldn’t remember all the details of his last day on the job. He had been doing a favor for Ariel, checking on one of her students. After that…
“He told me you might have another reason for being here besides looking for someone’s lost sister. All you need for reinstatement to active duty is a psychiatric evaluation.” She paused and studied him before asking, “Is that why you’re still here?”
The idea of someone messing with his head, invading his thoughts and dredging up his past had bile rising in his throat. He swallowed it down before nodding. God, he hated putting himself out there. And if it were only his future he had to consider, he wouldn’t.
“I guess it’s time,” he conceded, holding in the sigh that expanded his lungs.
“You know, it’s going to take more than one session for a complete evaluation.”
He hoped it would take only one session for him to plan how to get Irina out. He nodded his agreement, unable to spit out the words. But then he asked, “So why’d you let me into her room when you knew I was suspended?”
She smiled. “Your lieutenant vouched for you and your integrity.”
A muscle twitched in his cheek as guilt flared. But his lieutenant knew about the witch hunt, even though he didn’t entirely believe in it. They’d had to bring in the police after the attempt on Ariel’s life and then when Elena’s daughter had been kidnapped. Both those incidents could have been avoided if Ty had acted faster than Roarke. He couldn’t take the chance of the guy beating him to Irina. Again.
Irina awoke to night. Or at least she assumed it was. No sunshine penetrated the shade and heavy drapes on the window. Not even an artificial light glowed. She could have been enveloped in the blackness of other people’s thoughts, but not a single spark glittered. And the only thoughts in her head were her own, full of fear and frustration.
How long had she slept? Minutes? Hours? Days? With the drugs pumping through the IV into her veins, she had no concept of time. She would have blamed months of malnutrition instead of sedatives for her exhaustion, but she was too desperate to waste time on sleep…unless she was drugged.
She flexed her wrists, her tendons pressing against the straps that pinched her skin. She had to figure out a way to get the psychiatrist to remove the restraints. Whenever she’d spoken last to the young woman, Irina had fought to remain calm even as frustration had nagged at her. She couldn’t waste any more time trying to convince the doctor of her sanity. The killer was coming for her.
Sparks flickered before her eyes, glowing like embers on a dying fire, then his voice spoke inside her head. I have to get the charm before I get any weaker. I have to kill her. And now I know where she is. So close. So helpless…
Goose bumps rose as her skin chilled. Her breath shuddered out of her lungs, but the pressure on her chest didn’t ease. She fought against the panic. She couldn’t give in to hysteria if she hoped to ever have the restraints removed. She dragged in deep breaths through her nose, trying to calm herself.
But a big hand closing over her mouth and nose cut off her breath. Oh God, she’d slept too long. She’d missed her opportunity to escape. She had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Not anymore.
He’d found her again. And he had her now.
Chapter 3
“Shh…” murmured a deep voice close to her ear, warm breath stirring her hair across her cheek.
Irina thrashed her head on the pillow, trying to shake his hand from her mouth, but he held tight, his palm warm, like his breath, against her lips. She couldn’t open her mouth, couldn’t scream, couldn’t bite. And her arms, bound to the bed, provided her no defense. She was entirely helpless.
Physically.
Mentally she might be able to read his intentions. But she dare not close her eyes, dare not invite the blackness into her mind that already enveloped her body.
“You have to trust me,” he whispered, his voice a soft rasp.
She shivered, her apprehension not lessened even though she knew he wasn’t the man from the alley.
“I’m going to protect you.”
Because he’d failed someone else? He didn’t say anything either aloud or in his head to confirm her suspicion, but instinctively Irina knew that he had. And that failure haunted him, driving him to never fail again. So when he said he’d protect her, he meant it.
“But I have to get you out of here.”
Before Donovan Roarke does.
Her heart clenched. Donovan Roarke. That was the name of the man whose evil thoughts filled her mind, whose evil deeds had traumatized her, damning her to a life of insanity…until this man, his voice whispering inside her head, had pulled her back from the edge. Ty McIntyre.
She jerked her chin up and down in an anxious nod of agreement. She had to get out of the hospital. She knew Roarke was coming for her and she couldn’t get out by herself. She couldn’t even get up from the bed.
“You trust me?” he asked.
She moved her head in another nod, her mouth sliding over his palm. In the silence, his breath audibly caught, and his eyes glowed bright, like a blue beacon in the darkness. She was glad that he couldn’t read her mind, because once he got her out, she intended to run again. From him.
“You have to do what I say. Everything that I say,” he insisted.
While she’d forgotten chunks of her life, even before the past few months, she remembered that she’d never done well at following orders. Maybe that was another reason her adoptive parents hadn’t been able to love her.
“I’m going to take my hand away. If you scream, I won’t be able to get you out of here.” I won’t be able to save you.
Because he’d be in a jail and she’d be here. Alone. At the mercy of a madman.
Come on, Irina, trust me. That last thought, and his hand lifted from her mouth, hovering just an inch away from her lips as he waited for her to scream. While he requested her trust, he didn’t give his.
“I’m not crazy,” she assured him in a soft whisper.
He moved his hand from her face to her wrist and the restraint binding her to the bed. “I know.” I know everything.
And there was so much she didn’t know—about herself, about her sisters, about the witch hunt. But what she wanted most to learn couldn’t wait until he’d set her free. “Who are you?”
“Ty McIntyre.”
She hadn’t forgotten the psychiatrist’s introduction. But his name told her nothing. “Who are you to me?”
Why had his thoughts pushed into her mind before she’d ever met him? What was their connection?
“I’m a friend.”
Pieces of her past were missing, so much she’d forgotten or lost to drugs and alcohol. But if he’d been a friend, she would have remembered him. Ty McIntyre wasn’t the type of man any woman could forget. Instead of screaming Liar! at him, as she had at the killer, she just whispered, “No, you’re not.”
“I’m here for your sisters.” For you.
“You’re working for them?” Donovan Roarke had claimed the same thing.
“They’re friends of mine,” he said. “I’m going to bring you to them, but we have to hurry.”
“Yes.” She expelled a nervous breath. Her sisters were part of that missing past. Only faint memories of them remained, like faded photographs in an old album.
“We have to hurry,” she agreed. “He knows where I am.”
He didn’t doubt her certainty, either aloud or in his head. He just uttered the man’s name with the intensity of a curse. “Roarke.”
“If he’s the one…”
Who killed your mother. Your aunts. Who tried to kill your sisters and niece. “He’s the one.”
Scream after scream echoed through her mind. All the pain. All the horror. She trembled under the force.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told her.
For so long she’d known nothing but fear…except for when she’d lost all touch with reality. And she’d done that too long, giving up when she should have been fighting.
The thought flickered through her mind that maybe she should be fighting him…despite his intentions. He might want to protect her, but she had no way of knowing if he would be able to keep his promise. She didn’t know him. Yet somehow he seemed so familiar to her….
The restraints undone, he helped her from the bed. As she reached for the IV, pulling it from her arm, his fingers fumbled with the ties holding her gown together in the back.
Her breath hissed out as his knuckles brushed her bare skin. “Hey—”
“Shh…it’s okay,” he assured her. “You can’t go out there in this.”
“But…”
“I brought other clothes.” Before the cool air did more than brush her naked skin, he pulled a scratchy cotton shirt over her head, dressing her as if she were a child. Or helpless. She wouldn’t be helpless anymore.
“Let me,” she protested, fumbling in the darkness for the pants. But as she lifted her leg to pull them on, dizziness overwhelmed her, and she swayed…only a few inches before her back settled against his solid chest. His arms came around her, helping her tug up the pants of the scrubs he must have stolen for her, his fingers fast and sure as he stretched the elastic waistband over her hips.
Heat streaked through Irina’s stomach at the brush of his knuckles against her navel, the brush of his hard body against her softness. Her limbs still weak, she melted deeper into his warmth, into his strength.
“Irina…” His breath stirred her hair again, then his fingers as he tunneled them into her thick curls.
“What…?”
“A braid,” he said as if concentrating on his task. And perhaps he was, because she could pull no other thought from his mind despite their closeness.
“Ty?” She used just his name to question his action, not wanting anyone to overhear their conversation and learn she was awake and not alone.
Intent on her hair, he murmured, “The psychiatrist.”
“She’s helping?”
“Yes, but she doesn’t know it,” he admitted. “You’re going to be her.”
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been someone she wasn’t. But she wanted it to be the last. She wanted to be Irina Cooper now. For as long as she lived.
He knelt in the darkness, and Irina felt his big hands on her feet, his skin warm against hers as he peeled off the slipper socks to pull on canvas shoes. She reached out, dizzy again, and used his broad shoulders to steady herself. Muscles rippled beneath her hands. Then he stood, his body bumping against hers.
Dizziness lightened her head again as awareness rushed through her, quickening her pulse. She dragged in a deep breath, his scent of mint and soap so fresh and clean, unlike where she’d been, what she’d been.
“And here’s her jacket,” he said, sliding the sleeves over the scrubs she wore.
A plastic tag dug into Irina’s breast while something heavy dragged down the coat pocket and knocked hard against her thigh.
“You have the keys.”
She’d like to know how he’d gotten them, but she couldn’t waste time asking, nor did it really matter. Getting out before Roarke got in was all that mattered.
“You have to let me in and out of this room and the ward and act like you’re her,” he instructed.
“But…”
“The hospital’s old. Dimly lit. The nurses’ station a distance away. We can do this, Irina.” He expelled a ragged breath. “I keep calling you Irina. You remember you have sisters, so you must remember—”
“My name?” Despite the fierce knocking of her heart against her ribs, she smiled. “I wouldn’t have asked who you are if I didn’t know who I am.”
“So you are faking.”
“Amnesia? Some of it’s real.” But she was still having trouble with that, with distinguishing what was and what wasn’t real.
Was he? She reached out, sliding her hand along the soft bristle of day-old beard on his hard jaw. Her pulse raced at the jolt of awareness, of recognition, that overwhelmed her. She heard his thoughts again.
God, he was asking too much of her, expecting too much. She wasn’t like Ariel and Elena.
Her sisters. He thought of her sisters, and in comparison, she didn’t measure up. She pulled her hand back from his face and curled her fingers into a fist to stop the tingling. Of course she wouldn’t measure up. She knew where she was, what she had become.
He asked, “Can you do this?”
“Act like the psychiatrist?” She would have been one…if she hadn’t lost track of reality. “Yeah, I can do that.”
She’d do anything to get out of the hospital before the killer got in…even trust a man who scared her as much as Ty McIntyre did.
Ty held his breath as Irina fumbled with the keys, locking her empty room behind them. At the end of the hall, one of the nurses glanced up from the desk at the station. Irina lifted her hand in a brief wave. The nurse paused, then waved back. “You’re here late, Dr. Kimber,” she called out.
Nerves twisted Ty’s guts into knots. God, it was over. This quickly. From a distance, Irina could pass for the dark-haired, dark-eyed doctor. But her voice…
She coughed as if clearing her throat. Ty dared not touch her or even whisper the warning burning his mind. Don’t answer back. Don’t.
She must not have been able to read minds, as she’d told the police and the psychiatrist, because she spoke. “Officer McIntyre wanted to double-check that Jane Doe isn’t the girl he’s looking for.”
“She isn’t,” Ty said, taking Irina’s hand as if to shake it. “Thank you for coming back tonight, Doctor.” He tugged her down the hall, away from the nurses’ station. “I don’t want to keep you.”
And hopefully neither would her coworker.
“How is she?” the nurse called out. “Does she need anything?”
Irina shook her head, then murmured the name of a drug and the number of milligrams she’d administered through Jane’s IV. “She should sleep through the night.”
“What do you think is wrong with her?” the nurse asked, rising from her chair at the desk. Her shoes squeaked against the worn linoleum.
Ty’s breath caught. He couldn’t believe that Irina had pulled off the disguise as well as she had. But if the woman got any closer, their duplicity would be discovered for sure. He’d broken into the doctor’s locker and stolen her keys and coat for nothing.
As the woman walked closer, Irina stepped deeper in the shadows of the poorly lit hall, then gestured toward him. “Let me walk Officer McIntyre out first,” she said, jingling the keys in her hand.
“Of course,” the nurse said, turning back toward the station.
Ty expelled a ragged breath as they headed toward the other end of the corridor, where locked doors separated the psychiatric ward from the rest of the old hospital.
“We’re not out yet,” Irina said, clenching the keys in her hand. “I don’t know which one….”
Neither had she for her room, but she’d found it fast enough to not draw too much attention to them. “Try the big ones first,” he advised.
She bent her head and focused on her task, her bottom lip pulled between her teeth. The tip of the first key struck the opening of the chamber but wouldn’t slide inside. The second slid in but wouldn’t turn the lock. When she reached for the third, the nurse called out again.
Ty glanced over his shoulder, and his heart slammed into his ribs. She’d gotten up from the desk and walked toward them. “Having trouble, Dr. Kimber?”
Irina shook her head, tossing the braid he’d haphazardly pulled together in the dark back and forth across her back as if whipping herself. “No, it’s just hard to see in the hall,” she called back, then cleared her throat again and added, “They have to get more light in here someday.”
“Electrical system’s too old, like everything else around here,” the nurse commented, patting her head of graying hair. A rueful smile lifted her lips. “Except for you young interns and residents.”
The lock clicked as Irina turned the third key. She reached for the knob, her hand shaking. “I’ll be right back,” she told the nurse as she slipped ahead of Ty into the outside hall. A bank of elevators stood across from them, the dull metallic doors shut tight. Ty strode over and slapped the down arrow while she relocked the door to the psychiatric ward. The keys rattled as her hands shook.
“You’re doing great,” he murmured when she joined him in staring at the doors. He glanced toward her, then to the stairwell beyond her. Dare he wait for the elevator?
“How far up are we?” she asked, her voice unsteady with nerves.
“Top floor. Eighteenth.”
Her mouth, her lips naturally red and full, pulled into a grimace. “A lot of stairs.”
“A lot of stairs,” he agreed as he pulled his gaze from her and concentrated on the elevator light. He couldn’t afford the distraction of a woman who could look the way she did with no makeup. Her lashes were naturally thick and long, framing those big, dark eyes, while her honey-toned skin revealed not a single flaw.
Was she really the same woman Elena had envisioned in the alley, unkempt and out of her mind?
Behind them, the knob rattled on the door to the psych ward. “She realized I’m not Dr. Kimber,” Irina said, her dark eyes widening in alarm.
Ty grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the stairwell. “Come on. We gotta get out of here.”
Automatic hinges held open the door to the stairs just long enough that Ty caught the arrival of the elevator and the man stepping out. He had dark red hair and eyes that burned with hatred and madness. “Oh God!”
He shoved Irina toward the stairs, gasping an anxious, “Run!”
Even though her feet hit the steps, she peered up and around him. Ty didn’t know if she caught a glimpse of Roarke before the door closed. He was more concerned about Roarke catching a glimpse of them.
“Hurry!” He caught her around the waist, half carrying her as their feet skimmed over the steps, hardly touching them as they ran down flight after flight, their frantic footfalls echoing eerily in the cement stairwell. His bad leg, broken in the collapse of another staircase, throbbed with pain as his foot hitting each step jarred the still-healing bone and muscles. He gritted his teeth, biting back the pain, forcing it from his mind to focus instead on getting her to safety.
They’d fled several stories when a door slammed open above them, metal crashing against concrete. Ty didn’t have to look up to know that the door was from the eighteenth floor and the person joining their mad dash was Donovan Roarke.
“You can’t save her!” the deranged killer yelled, his voice a harsh shout in the confined area. “All you’ll do is die with her, McIntyre.”
From his years on the force, Ty knew there was no sense in trying to deal with a lunatic. He didn’t care about Roarke’s threats against him; his total focus was on Irina. Her arm slid around his waist, her fingers clenched in his shirt as he dragged her along with him. In their haste to escape the hospital and the killer, they fell against the metal railing and bounced off the cement-block walls. Each crash jolted his leg, the pain traveling through his limb like an electrical shock. But he couldn’t slow down.
“You’re not a witch, McIntyre. You don’t deserve to die like they do. Give her to me and I’ll let you live,” Roarke yelled out his bargain between ragged pants for breath.
Ty’s life for hers? Irina had family who cared about her, who loved her. It wasn’t a fair trade.
“Go to hell,” Ty shouted back. Roarke didn’t need his condemnation, though. His actions were certain to send him there, but Ty fully intended to expedite his trip.
“I gave you a chance,” Roarke said as if resigned, then he fired.
Bullets sprayed against the concrete walls, raining dusty bits of cement onto them as they ran. “Come on,” Ty said, rushing Irina down the last flight. His hand closed over hers on the knob of the door to the first floor; together they turned it.
From the corner of his eye Ty glimpsed Roarke, flights above them, leaning over the railing, taking aim, his Glock directed at them. His hand over her head, Ty pushed Irina down as he ducked. Bullets bounced off the metal frame over them as they crawled through the partially open doorway. On the other side, Ty shoved his shoulder against the steel door, fighting the automatic hinge to push it closed. More shots fired, only the door separating the bullets from his body as the metal protruded from each hit.
“Come on!” he commanded Irina, his hand wrapped around hers as he propelled them both through the lobby, deserted at this late hour. Antique furnishings sat empty but for a faint film of dust. An old turnstile door stood between them and the canopy-covered entrance. Ty jammed them both into one section, her body soft and warm as she trembled against him.
“It’s okay,” he assured her even as more shots rang out behind them. The thick plastic of the turnstile splintered from the bullets. Ty bent over Irina, sheltering her with his body as they shoved the door forward, then stumbled out onto the sidewalk. He kept her close, her feet hardly touching the asphalt as he ran across the dimly lit lot to where he’d left his truck parked.
Hand shaking, he fumbled with his keys, clicking the automatic locks. When she moved to head around the passenger’s side, he held tight to her jacket, lifting and pushing her through the driver’s door and onto the seat. “Stay low.”
More shots rang out behind them, breaking the quiet of the night. Then, in the distance, sirens whined. At least someone had called the police. On him for helping a patient escape the psychiatric ward? Or on the madman who relentlessly pursued them, firing shot after shot at them?
Ty jammed the key into the ignition, his hand reaching for the shifter before the truck engine even sprang to life. He slammed into Reverse, tires bouncing over the curb as he pulled out of the parking spot and into the drive.
“Keep low,” he ordered Irina again as she lifted her head. He doubted she was trying to glance out the windows, though. She had that look in her eyes, that glazed-over, unfocused gaze of someone blind.
But his skin didn’t prickle; it wasn’t his mind she was trying to read—if telepathy was her ability. God, he could keep her safe from Roarke’s actions—or at least try—but he couldn’t keep her safe from the madman’s thoughts. He pushed her down, her face in his lap, her breath warm through the denim covering his thighs.
The rear window shattered, shards of glass biting into the back of his head and his neck, then raining down over them and the leather seat. “Son of a—”
He jerked the wheel, sending the truck careening back and forth across the driving lanes as he steered for the street. A moving target was harder to hit.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice thready with fear and adrenaline. “Did he shoot you?”
“No.” But blood trickled down the back of his neck from the glass splinters embedded in his skin, the sting of the cuts a faint echo of the pain throbbing in his leg.
She moved her head against his leg, but he pressed his hand on her shoulder, holding her down, out of range of the bullets and broken glass. “Ty,” she said, the fatality of her tone drawing his attention before she added, “He’s going to kill you.”
Ty glanced in the rearview mirror, at the lights dropping farther and farther behind them. He patted her shoulder. “We’re losing him. We’re going to be fine.”
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Lisa Childs
Experience the thrill of life on the edge and set your adrenalin pumping! These gripping stories see heroic characters fight for survival and find love in the face of danger.Their only chance for salvation was each other… Born a witch, Irina Cooper was able to read other people’s thoughts. She had never known the source of her power, or her true heritage. It was police officer Ty McIntyre’s job to save her from the dark forces swirling around her.To stop the killer seeking to destroy the Cooper legacy, they must use Irina’s gift and end her family’s curse. Doing so will lead Irina to her true salvation – in Ty’s strong embrace!Witch Hunt Three sisters – magic in their blood and a killer on their trail!
“Don’t,” she murmured. “Don’tpresume to know what I think. Or what I feel, Ty McIntyre.”
She’d read his thoughts; she knew his fear. He nodded. “You’re right. I don’t have a gift, not like you.” But he was cursed all the same.
Placing her slim hands on his shoulders, she pushed him down so he sat on the edge of the rusted tub. Then she ran her fingers through his hair and over his scalp. He didn’t notice the pain, only the heat of her touch. Like her kiss, it branded him.
Sucking her bottom lip between her teeth, she murmured, “You have a few deep cuts. You could probably use some stitches. Let me clean them, at least.”
“Irina…”
“You’ve asked me to trust you. You need to trust me.”
More than once he’d requested her trust, and she’d given it. Trust didn’t come as easily for Ty.
“You think it comes easy for me?” she asked. “I don’t even trust myself.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Award-winning author Lisa Childs wrote her first book when she was six, a biography…of the family dog. Now she writes romantic suspense, paranormal romance and women’s fiction. The youngest of seven siblings, she holds family very dear in real life and in her fiction, often infusing her books with compelling family dynamics. She lives in west Michigan with her husband, two daughters and a twenty-pound Siamese cat. For the latest on Lisa’s spine-tingling suspense and heartwarming women’s fiction, check out her website at www.lisachilds.com. She loves hearing from readers, who can also reach her at PO Box 139, Marne, MI 49435, USA.
Dear Reader,
Damned is the conclusion of my WITCH HUNT trilogy for NOCTURNE. I’ve loved writing about all the “gifted” Cooper sisters, but I couldn’t wait to tell Irina’s story, partly because, as the youngest of my family, I can identify with her, but mostly because Damned is also Ty McIntyre’s story. The witch hunt has put Ty through a lot of physical and emotional trauma. He’s lost his job and a chance with the woman he thought he could love. He deserves to find the true love of his life, and he deserves to make sure justice is finally served. I hope you enjoy reading Ty and Irina’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Happy reading!
Lisa
Damned
LISA CHILDS
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Acknowledgement
To the Grand Rapids Police Department,
thank you for allowing me to participate in the
Citizens Police Academy, and thank you most
of all for your selfless service to our city.
Dedication
To my family, for your constant love
and support!
Prologue
This was home: the street. Where she slept. Where she ate—if she remembered to eat. Where she drank—if she could scrounge up enough money for a bottle. And the drugs—they were easier to score.
But even here she couldn’t hide from the voices, couldn’t drown them out. They kept whispering… in her head, the voices echoing in her mind. And it didn’t matter…what she did.
She couldn’t shut them out.
Cardboard shifted and crumpled beneath her as she curled into a ball against the wall of a brick building. The stench of moldy food and dirty diapers drifted from the Dumpster behind which she lay, but she hardly noticed. She hardly noticed anything…outside her head.
She pressed her hands against her ears, trying to block out the noise. Not the rumble of traffic from the street, nor the murmured conversation drifting from the other end of the alley where shadows crouched around a barrel with flames lapping up the rusted rim.
The noise she tried to block was already inside her head, and her efforts were futile. As the voices rose, her vision dimmed, the stars, the street lamps and the fire at the end of the alley reduced to sparks in a sea of black. Blinded, her hearing sharpened.
“Where could Irina be?”
The sparks glittered and danced against the black backdrop as she struggled to recognize the voice.
“We have to find her before he does!”
Although she didn’t think she’d ever heard either of the two soft feminine voices before, in person, they were oddly familiar. Despite the anxiety in these adult voices, each of them resonated with the echo of a child’s laughter.
Her sisters…
She’d had sisters, hadn’t she? Her parents had told her no, that she’d been an only child. That she was only theirs. But there was another life to which she belonged…and it was calling her back.
“Irina…”
“Irina!”
She’d once been called Irina, twenty years ago, before she’d been taken away from her mother and her sisters. Before she’d been adopted by a couple who had wanted her to forget who she’d once been. They’d tried to convince her that she’d been born to them, that she’d been born Heather Bowers. But they hadn’t adopted her until she was nearly five. She remembered. And even if she hadn’t, she’d heard their thoughts; she knew the truth.
She wasn’t theirs, and because of her uncanny ability to read their minds, they didn’t want her to be. They couldn’t love her. But they’d tried.
The way her sisters were trying to find her now. Why after all these years?
The sparks brightened like embers on a stoked fire as the voices quavered with fear.
“If he finds her first, he’ll kill her like he killed the others.”
“Like he killed our mother.”
She squeezed her eyes shut so that even the sparks of light disappeared. But she couldn’t shut out the voices. Others called to her, jumbled inside her head, echoes of thoughts and fears she’d already heard.
“I’m not a witch.”
“Don’t kill me! Please, don’t kill me!”
But the killer ignored their pleas, and the women’s voices rose in screams of terror and pain. Irina winced at the volume, which threatened to shatter her skull, and she cringed at the agony expressed in each shrill cry. No matter how long ago she’d first heard them, she couldn’t get them out of her head, couldn’t forget their suffering. Not only had she heard their cries but she’d felt their pain, too. The fire scorching her flesh, burning her alive. The noose chafing her skin, tightening around her throat until it cut off her last breath. The jagged rocks piled one by one onto her body, crushing her beneath their weight.
She’d wanted to help them, but she hadn’t known where the women were. She hadn’t been able to see them or their surroundings; she’d only heard them. Even if she had been able to figure out where they’d been, she would have been too late to save them. She’d wanted to help, but she couldn’t even help herself right now.
One of these screams, the first she’d heard filled with such agony and fear and so hauntingly familiar, had driven her back here…to the street. Her biological mother’s. She hadn’t heard her voice in twenty years—not in person, just many times inside her head. With that scream she’d known her mother had been killed even before she’d heard her sisters speak of her death.
Were they real? Any of them? The voices? Her memories? Or had that first scream been the beginning of some kind of psychotic break?
Before hearing that scream, just months ago, she’d been managing. She’d been living. Going to school. Working.
Now she was barely existing, just waiting…until the next scream…was hers.
Chapter 1
Were they witches? They didn’t cast spells. They didn’t heal with potions and herbs as their long-dead ancestor had. But they had special abilities and they needed to use them to save a life—just as their ancestor had tried three hundred and fifty years ago. He only hoped their efforts weren’t rewarded the same way hers had been.
With death.
Ty McIntyre cared about these two women. They sat together, holding hands, on the black leather couch in the penthouse owned by Ty’s best friend. Actually Ariel held her older sister’s hand, and Elena held the charms—a little pewter sun and a little pewter star—in her palm, combining their powers.
Their powers?
A muscle jumped in his cheek as he clenched his jaw. Skepticism nagged at him. God, he was a lawman. Even though he listened to his instincts, he relied on evidence. Tangible proof. How could he rely on something he didn’t understand, something he couldn’t trust?
Believe, he silently chanted to quell his doubts. He’d seen the proof of their powers in the results they wrought. Ariel was alive. Stacia, Elena’s daughter, was alive. Because of their intangible powers.
“Can you see anything yet?” he asked Elena, frustration thickening his voice.
She scrunched shut her pale eyes, and her forehead furrowed with concentration. The knuckles on the hand holding the charms tightened and turned white, while her fingers reddened.
“She can’t force her visions,” Ariel defended her sister as she stared up at him through narrowed eyes. “What’s up with you, Ty? You’re edgier than usual. Did you find out something you haven’t shared yet?”
He shook his head, then started pacing the marble floor of David’s living room. Like a jolt from an electrical outlet, pain traveled up his leg from his not-quite-healed wound. Maybe the doctors were right—maybe he’d had them remove the cast too soon. “No, I haven’t learned a damned thing.”
“So that’s why you’re edgy,” Ariel said. “You’re frustrated.”
“We all are,” Elena chimed in, her eyes still closed. “Since we know who the killer is, we should be able to find him.”
Donovan Roarke. The man was a private investigator, but before that he’d been a cop. Like Ty. And like Ty, he’d been suspended from the police department due to excessive force. Ty’s guts knotted, but he reminded himself he was nothing like the madman. Donovan Roarke was a sadistic son of a bitch. He might have convinced himself that by killing witches in the ways that witches had been killed centuries ago he was honoring his family legacy, the vendetta begun so many years ago. But Ty knew the guy was a psychopath, and if he wasn’t caught soon, he’d kill again.
Anger gripped Ty, but he fought it off, breathing slow and deep. Then he shoved a hand through his hair. Even though he hadn’t worn his uniform in months, he kept his black hair short, in an almost military cut. He liked his life simple, like the T-shirts and old jeans he wore. But there was nothing simple about his life now; there hadn’t been since Donovan Roarke had begun his witch hunt.
“Roarke’s clever,” Ty admitted. Or he would have found the sick bastard by now.
“He’s crazy,” Ariel maintained.
Maybe Ty was, too, because he’d actually thought this might work, that Elena would have a vision that would lead him to her missing sister, the youngest of the three of them. Since he’d come up empty in his other investigations, he’d decided to use the sisters’ powers. He had nothing left to lose.
“Let’s concentrate on Irina,” he said, which was easy for him since she was all he thought about lately.
She’d been nagging at his mind ever since he’d first seen the picture of her as a little girl. From the glass-and-marble coffee table he picked up the trifold pewter picture frame they’d found in Roarke’s office. The private investigator must have stolen the twenty-year-old portraits of the three sisters from their mother after he’d killed her.
As Ty focused on the youngest child with her loose brown curls and her big, dark eyes, a memory teased him: flashing lights, blurred before his swollen eyes; pain pounding in his skull and tearing at his arm as he fought for consciousness, for life; then a little girl’s voice calling out to him, calling him back from the brink of death.
Hers? Or the little girl who’d died because he hadn’t gotten to her in time? Was the memory an old one, buried deep with the rest of his childhood? Or was it a new one, suppressed like the rage over which his lieutenant had suspended him?
His hand shaking slightly, he set the picture frame back on the table, then turned his attention to Elena. He’d deal with his own demons later, after he’d dealt with theirs. “You’ve had visions of her before. If you can’t have another, try to remember everything you can about those, even what you might think insignificant.”
Elena nodded in perfect understanding of the gift she’d denied and fought for so long. “I’ll try to recall every detail.”
He blew out a ragged breath, relieved that she understood what he wanted. Irina. “We have to find her.” Soon.
Knowing who the killer was didn’t make him less dangerous. In Roarke’s case, Ty suspected knowing who he was made him more dangerous. Now the man wasn’t worried about concealing his identity; he, like Ty, had nothing to lose.
Having tried and failed to get Ariel and Elena, he’d concentrate all his efforts on Irina. And Ty would do the same. The others could look for Roarke; his friend David and Elena’s fiancé Joseph were out now, searching for him. Ty already knew where he was—wherever Irina was.
“In that first vision you had of her, she’s homeless.” God, he hoped Elena was wrong, but he’d investigated the lead, spending days and nights among the street people. While he hadn’t found Irina, he had found desperation and despair, reawakening memories he’d locked away in his past.
Elena shook her head. “I’m not even sure it’s Irina I’m seeing. I haven’t seen her since she was four.”
“She was almost five,” Ariel added, her turquoise eyes glistening with unshed tears. As if a year would have made a difference then.
Ariel had been nine, Elena twelve when they were taken away from their mother and separated from each other. Ty’s gut twisted at having to bring up bad memories for them both. But the pain and fear they felt now would be worth it if he were able to reunite the sisters.
Ignoring the ache in his leg, he knelt on the floor in front of the couch, the marble cold through the denim of his faded jeans. Excessive force hadn’t been his biggest hurdle in being a police officer; until his last day of active duty, he’d never had a problem dealing with suspects. His struggle had been dealing with the victims. Offering comfort—something never offered to him—hadn’t been easy for him.
Now he reached out, closing his hand over their joined hands. “We’ll find her.”
Ariel stared into his eyes, hers still shimmering with tears. “Or will I, Ty? Will the first time I see my baby sister in twenty years be as a ghost?” Like she’d first seen her mother when Myra Cooper had been killed several months ago.
That was Ariel’s gift—seeing ghosts; Elena’s gift was seeing the future. What was Irina’s? The lights flashed again, digging up the memory, but he couldn’t pull it out of his mind. Not yet. He had too many other things on it.
He swallowed hard, then reminded her, “But you haven’t seen Irina’s ghost. She has to be alive.”
His breath trapped in his lungs until she nodded her head in agreement. He shared her fear that they might not find Irina in time; it kept him from sleeping, from eating, from doing anything but search for her. Even though he had begun his quest to find the missing sister as a favor for his best friend and Ariel, it had become more personal to him. Irina was more personal to him than a twenty-year-old picture in an old pewter frame.
A moan slipped through Elena’s lips. Her pale eyes glazed, she stared not at the opulent living room of the penthouse or the view outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, Barrett, Michigan, aglow with lights in the black sky. She stared instead at whatever images played out inside her head.
“Tell us everything you’re seeing,” he prodded her, as he would have any witness.
“She’s on the street, like I saw her before,” Elena said, taunted by the old vision like the old memory that wouldn’t quite leave Ty alone.
“What do you see?” He needed some landmarks, something so he could pinpoint the place instead of wandering the streets the way he had.
“It’s dark….”
“No street lamps?”
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….”
But if she told the psychiatrist everything, the young doctor would think her even crazier than she already did.
The woman’s face flushed with pink color. “Someone’s been asking about you. At least I’m pretty sure you’re the woman he’s looking for. Maybe he’ll be able to help you remember who you are.”
He already had. But he didn’t intend to let her make any more memories. God, how had he found her so quickly? He must have followed the police car to the psychiatric hospital.
Irina strained against the bindings at her wrists, trying to vault out of the bed. “You can’t let him in here! Don’t let him near me! He’s going to kill me!”
“Why do you say that?” the psychiatrist asked, her face tight with concern. “Has he hurt you?”
Irina shook her head, tumbling her hair around her shoulders. Citrus shampoo wafted from her curls. The minute she’d been brought in, they’d washed her. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize her from the dirty street person she’d been. Maybe she could convince him she wasn’t who he thought she was.
She wasn’t a witch.
Drawing in an unsteady breath, she admitted, “He hasn’t touched me.” Yet. “But I know he’s hurt other people. He’s killed them.”
The young doctor’s mouth pulled down at the corners. “He probably has, but only in the line of duty. He’s a police officer.”
No wonder he’d found her so quickly. Even if she somehow managed to free herself and escape, he would track her down again. She had to convince him she wasn’t Irina Cooper. If she couldn’t, she was damned.
As the psychiatrist opened the door and stepped into the hall, Irina tested the restraints, tugging on her wrists. Desperation to free herself renewed her struggle, and the straps dug deep grooves into her skin.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” the young doctor, her voice soft with apology, told someone in the corridor.
Irina held her breath as she listened for his response. But she couldn’t discern his words, only the low timbre of his raspy murmur. Through the partially opened door she watched the psychiatrist’s face, which flushed pink as she gazed up at the man who stood just outside Irina’s line of vision.
The woman shook her head, shifting her braid against her back. Her hair was dark and long, like Irina’s. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I don’t want to upset her any further.”
Unable to see or hear him through the door, Irina closed her eyes and listened for his voice inside her head. But now, when she actually wanted her mind invaded with the thoughts of others, it remained empty. Instead of blackness rolling in, she squinted against the stark glare of the fluorescent lights as she opened her eyes again. What had they given her?
She struggled anew against the restraints, wanting to pull out the IV as badly as she wanted her freedom. She needed to hear the voices now; she needed to know what was going on if she had any hope of protecting herself.
“Send him in,” she yelled as the last of her strength drained from her body. The sedative had worked on her muscles as well as her mind, relaxing them so much that she couldn’t even form a fist now. But even weak, she could fight him…if she could read his mind. He wouldn’t dare to try to kill her here, in the hospital. And she’d be able to identify him. Maybe if he got close to her again, as he had in the alley, she could test her power.
Not that she’d ever had to have someone close to read his or her mind. She had no idea where those women were that he’d killed, but she’d heard their every terrified thought throughout their last moments. She shivered; her struggles to free herself had knocked her blankets to the floor, and she wore only a thin cotton gown. But her reaction was more from fear than cold.
She drew in a deep breath, reminding herself that she’d decided back in the alley that she was through running. Of course, a short while after making that decision she had run out in the street and into the path of that police car. The police officers hadn’t helped her. Since he was one of them, there was no way she could trust them. Or anyone else. She had to help herself.
“I w-want to s-see him,” she called out, her words slurred from the effects of the sedative. She blinked hard, fighting against exhaustion to keep her eyes open.
The door creaked as the man wedged his wide shoulders through the jamb and stepped into Irina’s room, which shrank with his entrance. Like his shoulders, his chest was wide and heavily muscled beneath his thin cotton T-shirt. But his size, which was more muscle than height since he hovered just under six feet, didn’t overwhelm Irina. He’d actually seemed bigger in the alley.
His intensity, apparent in his tautly clenched jaw and the hard stare of his navy-blue eyes, overwhelmed Irina. She tore her gaze from his, turning her attention to the woman who accompanied him. The psychiatrist followed closely behind Irina’s visitor, probably whispering instructions on how not to get her patient hysterical again.
The doctor didn’t have to worry about what he said to her. His thoughts were more likely to upset Irina—if she could tap into them the way she had before.
“Is she the woman you’re trying to find?” the psychiatrist asked.
The man brushed a hand through his short black hair, in which the fluorescent lights picked up glints nearly as blue as his eyes. Irina forced herself to meet his gaze, expecting the burning hatred that had scorched her in the alley. But her vision dimmed, his face disappearing into the blackness that enveloped her. Only little sparks of blue relieved the dark.
His voice a raspy whisper, he lied to the doctor. “No.” But his mind called out to her. Irina?
Her heart lurched with the shock of recognition of another kind. This wasn’t the man who’d chased her from the alley. He was the man who’d made her consider leaving it in the first place, calling her name, telling her to believe.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The psychiatrist answered for him, “This is Ty McIntyre, a police officer.”
Suspended police officer. She heard his silent amendment to the doctor’s claim. More than that, her stomach muscles tightened with the pain and pride that omission, even silent, cost him.
“You don’t recognize him?” the psychiatrist asked Irina. “He isn’t the man you claim is trying to kill you?”
Oh God, the bastard has already found her!
Fear raised goose bumps on Irina’s skin, but was it her fear or his? Irina shook her head. “No.”
He was not the man she’d claimed was trying to kill her, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t just as dangerous—or maybe even more dangerous. Her connection with him was so strong, his thoughts so compelling that she had risked leaving her hiding place of the past few months. With the killer, she had only his actions to fear; with this man, she had her own to fear. She struggled to break the connection between them, fighting her way out of the darkness.
Yet the connection remained. The anger tightening the muscles in his stomach twisted hers into knots. Tension radiated from him as he stared at her.
She shifted against the mattress, unnerved by his intent scrutiny and her own inexplicable reaction to it. Her pulse quickened, her breath grew shallow and heat licked at her stomach.
The young psychiatrist cleared her throat. “Well, then…” she prompted the man as she pulled open the door again. “Since she isn’t who you’re looking for…”
“Who is she?” he asked as if Irina weren’t in the room, as if he weren’t staring directly into her eyes.
Irina lifted her chin, pride stinging at the way he’d dismissed her. But at least her pride had returned; she’d buried it for a long time under months of dirt and delusions. The voices hadn’t been the delusion. Thinking herself crazy had been the delusion.
“Jane Doe, for now,” the woman answered Ty McIntyre. “Until we learn her true identity.”
Irina opened her mouth to tell him not the name she’d been given at birth but the one she’d been called the past twenty years. That was her legal identity but not her true one. But his anger coursed through her veins, burning her with its intensity. She didn’t dare trust him. Too many people had died already. She didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.
The faint echoes of old screams reverberated inside her head. She closed her eyes, refusing to relive the gruesome memories.
“Jane Doe,” McIntyre repeated in a murmur, but in her mind, he shouted, Irina Cooper. Irina Cooper.
Since he knew who she was, why didn’t he tell the psychiatrist? He must have a reason for keeping her identity secret. Irina wished she could read his intentions toward her in his thoughts. But she couldn’t, and fear quickened her pulse. Like the man from the alley, Ty McIntyre would hurt her if she wasn’t careful.
She intended to be very careful.
“I’m tired,” she claimed. “You can both leave.” But she couldn’t see if they complied. Black enveloped her, broken only by sparks of blue, the same dark blue as his eyes.
I have to get her out of here before he finds her!
That was his last thought, flitting through her mind, before wood snapped against wood as the door closed behind him and the doctor. Not that distance made Irina’s ability to read minds any weaker. She could be miles away and the connection just as strong as if she stood face-to-face. But usually those people had some relationship to her, like her mother, her sisters or other people who’d meant something to her. Except for the killer. And this man, Ty McIntyre, who might not want to kill her but whose connection with her was stronger than any other.
She tugged at her wrist again, but the restraint refused to give. All her struggle and she’d only worked the fabric-and-Velcro strap a tiny bit looser.
She had to find a way to free herself and get the hell out of here. Because she knew if she didn’t get out of the hospital soon, she would probably wind up in the morgue. If there was even anything left of her to examine…
The strangest sensation washed over Ty, lifting the hair on the nape of his neck. He glanced around the hallway, but the young doctor had left him. No one else stood in the wide corridor. Two nurses worked the station at the end, one on the phone, the other checking charts. Neither of them was the least bit aware of his presence. So no one watched him, yet that sensation persisted, prickling the skin between his shoulder blades as if someone’s gaze bored into him.
He checked the doors along the hall. They were all shut tight in the jambs, leaving no space through which someone could peer out. Maybe his instincts had gotten rusty since his suspension—maybe that was why Roarke had escaped him not once but twice. Roarke wouldn’t beat him again. The maniac would have to kill Ty before he’d get to Irina.
Irina…
His stomach muscles tightened as he relived his brief encounter with her. He should have been prepared for her appearance. She had the delicately featured face, the curly hair and the big Gypsy eyes, exactly as her oldest sister had described her. Yet she hadn’t looked as lost as Elena’s visions had led him to believe she’d look.
Despite the sedative the doctor had said she’d been administered, awareness had sparkled in Irina’s dark eyes. Briefly. Then she’d gotten a strange unfocused expression on her face, as if she’d suddenly gone blind. And that was when his skin had first begun to prickle as if someone were closer to him than they’d ever been. Her sisters each had a supernatural gift—or curse, as they’d first called their abilities. Did Irina have some special ability, too?
The police officer who’d brought her here after she ran screaming into traffic had called her a wacko. Ty had found her through his old contacts and his constant monitoring of his police radio. She’d been right here in Barrett, living on the streets he’d searched over and over again for her. According to his old friend, she was either drugged out of her mind or stark-raving mad, blathering hysterically about reading a killer’s mind. Even though the psychiatrist hadn’t admitted it, he could tell she thought Irina was delusional, too.
But Ty knew she spoke the truth, at least about the killer; he wasn’t sure about the mind-reading part. At the moment, her ability, whatever it was or wasn’t, didn’t matter. All that mattered was Donovan Roarke’s determination to kill her.
Ty glanced at the preoccupied women at the nurses’ station, then again at the empty corridor. Despite the lock on the door separating the psychiatric ward from the rest of the hospital and the locks on the individual rooms, someone clever, with the right connections, could get to Irina pretty easily. She wasn’t safe here. He had to get her out.
He could do it the right way—get Elena and Ariel down here to identify and claim their sister. But they hadn’t seen her in twenty years. To verify the connection between the sisters, they’d have to take a DNA test, then wait for the results. Confirmation could take at least a month. If they used the same lab the Barrett PD did, probably longer. Irina didn’t have that kind of time, not with Roarke stalking her. From what she’d told the police and the psychiatrist, the madman had nearly caught her…just as Elena had envisioned. Except that Irina hadn’t been too weak to fight him off. This time.
Ty couldn’t give Roarke a second chance to grab her; he had to get her out. Tonight.
“Officer McIntyre,” a soft feminine voice called out his name.
He glanced at Irina’s door, but it was still closed tight, the heavy steel too insulated for her voice to carry through it. She was also strapped to the bed, trapped and helpless. Unless what else she’d told the officers was true—she could read people’s minds.
The hair lifted on his neck again. Was she reading his mind? No, he’d locked out everyone, even his best friend, for too many years for someone to slip inside his head without his realizing it.
An echo of a little girl’s voice whispered from the depths of his buried memories. But time had undoubtedly distorted the facts; he had no special ability. He couldn’t hear anyone inside his head.
“Officer McIntyre,” the psychiatrist called out again as she stepped from another patient’s room and closed the door behind herself. Metal jangled as she slipped keys into the pocket of her white coat. The hospital, in the old area of Barrett, was antiquated, their budget too meager for updating. Most doors were locked and unlocked the old-fashioned way. “You’re still here. Did you change your mind? Is Jane Doe the woman you’re looking for?”
From the flirtatious gleam in her dark eyes and the coy lift of her lips, she was asking him something else entirely—if his interest in Irina Cooper was personal, not professional. Or if he had an interest in her, the doctor.
He shook his head. “No. She’s not the woman I’m looking for.”
He was dedicated to finding her for her sisters, for the sake of saving her from Roarke, but not for himself. He didn’t need anyone and he fully intended to keep his life that way. Single.
She smiled and tucked a strand of dark hair that had escaped her braid behind her ear. “Then…why are you still here?”
His gut twisted as he considered leading her on with lies and sweet talk. But he’d never wasted time practicing either. So he’d probably make a fool of himself trying to make a fool of her. He drew in a bracing breath. “I told you I’m a police officer, but I didn’t tell you that I’m suspended from duty.”
Her smile remained even as the gleam in her eyes dimmed. “I know. Since you didn’t have your badge, I called the precinct before I brought you in to see her. Your lieutenant explained your suspension.”
“He did?” Ty couldn’t explain it himself, couldn’t remember all the details of his last day on the job. He had been doing a favor for Ariel, checking on one of her students. After that…
“He told me you might have another reason for being here besides looking for someone’s lost sister. All you need for reinstatement to active duty is a psychiatric evaluation.” She paused and studied him before asking, “Is that why you’re still here?”
The idea of someone messing with his head, invading his thoughts and dredging up his past had bile rising in his throat. He swallowed it down before nodding. God, he hated putting himself out there. And if it were only his future he had to consider, he wouldn’t.
“I guess it’s time,” he conceded, holding in the sigh that expanded his lungs.
“You know, it’s going to take more than one session for a complete evaluation.”
He hoped it would take only one session for him to plan how to get Irina out. He nodded his agreement, unable to spit out the words. But then he asked, “So why’d you let me into her room when you knew I was suspended?”
She smiled. “Your lieutenant vouched for you and your integrity.”
A muscle twitched in his cheek as guilt flared. But his lieutenant knew about the witch hunt, even though he didn’t entirely believe in it. They’d had to bring in the police after the attempt on Ariel’s life and then when Elena’s daughter had been kidnapped. Both those incidents could have been avoided if Ty had acted faster than Roarke. He couldn’t take the chance of the guy beating him to Irina. Again.
Irina awoke to night. Or at least she assumed it was. No sunshine penetrated the shade and heavy drapes on the window. Not even an artificial light glowed. She could have been enveloped in the blackness of other people’s thoughts, but not a single spark glittered. And the only thoughts in her head were her own, full of fear and frustration.
How long had she slept? Minutes? Hours? Days? With the drugs pumping through the IV into her veins, she had no concept of time. She would have blamed months of malnutrition instead of sedatives for her exhaustion, but she was too desperate to waste time on sleep…unless she was drugged.
She flexed her wrists, her tendons pressing against the straps that pinched her skin. She had to figure out a way to get the psychiatrist to remove the restraints. Whenever she’d spoken last to the young woman, Irina had fought to remain calm even as frustration had nagged at her. She couldn’t waste any more time trying to convince the doctor of her sanity. The killer was coming for her.
Sparks flickered before her eyes, glowing like embers on a dying fire, then his voice spoke inside her head. I have to get the charm before I get any weaker. I have to kill her. And now I know where she is. So close. So helpless…
Goose bumps rose as her skin chilled. Her breath shuddered out of her lungs, but the pressure on her chest didn’t ease. She fought against the panic. She couldn’t give in to hysteria if she hoped to ever have the restraints removed. She dragged in deep breaths through her nose, trying to calm herself.
But a big hand closing over her mouth and nose cut off her breath. Oh God, she’d slept too long. She’d missed her opportunity to escape. She had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Not anymore.
He’d found her again. And he had her now.
Chapter 3
“Shh…” murmured a deep voice close to her ear, warm breath stirring her hair across her cheek.
Irina thrashed her head on the pillow, trying to shake his hand from her mouth, but he held tight, his palm warm, like his breath, against her lips. She couldn’t open her mouth, couldn’t scream, couldn’t bite. And her arms, bound to the bed, provided her no defense. She was entirely helpless.
Physically.
Mentally she might be able to read his intentions. But she dare not close her eyes, dare not invite the blackness into her mind that already enveloped her body.
“You have to trust me,” he whispered, his voice a soft rasp.
She shivered, her apprehension not lessened even though she knew he wasn’t the man from the alley.
“I’m going to protect you.”
Because he’d failed someone else? He didn’t say anything either aloud or in his head to confirm her suspicion, but instinctively Irina knew that he had. And that failure haunted him, driving him to never fail again. So when he said he’d protect her, he meant it.
“But I have to get you out of here.”
Before Donovan Roarke does.
Her heart clenched. Donovan Roarke. That was the name of the man whose evil thoughts filled her mind, whose evil deeds had traumatized her, damning her to a life of insanity…until this man, his voice whispering inside her head, had pulled her back from the edge. Ty McIntyre.
She jerked her chin up and down in an anxious nod of agreement. She had to get out of the hospital. She knew Roarke was coming for her and she couldn’t get out by herself. She couldn’t even get up from the bed.
“You trust me?” he asked.
She moved her head in another nod, her mouth sliding over his palm. In the silence, his breath audibly caught, and his eyes glowed bright, like a blue beacon in the darkness. She was glad that he couldn’t read her mind, because once he got her out, she intended to run again. From him.
“You have to do what I say. Everything that I say,” he insisted.
While she’d forgotten chunks of her life, even before the past few months, she remembered that she’d never done well at following orders. Maybe that was another reason her adoptive parents hadn’t been able to love her.
“I’m going to take my hand away. If you scream, I won’t be able to get you out of here.” I won’t be able to save you.
Because he’d be in a jail and she’d be here. Alone. At the mercy of a madman.
Come on, Irina, trust me. That last thought, and his hand lifted from her mouth, hovering just an inch away from her lips as he waited for her to scream. While he requested her trust, he didn’t give his.
“I’m not crazy,” she assured him in a soft whisper.
He moved his hand from her face to her wrist and the restraint binding her to the bed. “I know.” I know everything.
And there was so much she didn’t know—about herself, about her sisters, about the witch hunt. But what she wanted most to learn couldn’t wait until he’d set her free. “Who are you?”
“Ty McIntyre.”
She hadn’t forgotten the psychiatrist’s introduction. But his name told her nothing. “Who are you to me?”
Why had his thoughts pushed into her mind before she’d ever met him? What was their connection?
“I’m a friend.”
Pieces of her past were missing, so much she’d forgotten or lost to drugs and alcohol. But if he’d been a friend, she would have remembered him. Ty McIntyre wasn’t the type of man any woman could forget. Instead of screaming Liar! at him, as she had at the killer, she just whispered, “No, you’re not.”
“I’m here for your sisters.” For you.
“You’re working for them?” Donovan Roarke had claimed the same thing.
“They’re friends of mine,” he said. “I’m going to bring you to them, but we have to hurry.”
“Yes.” She expelled a nervous breath. Her sisters were part of that missing past. Only faint memories of them remained, like faded photographs in an old album.
“We have to hurry,” she agreed. “He knows where I am.”
He didn’t doubt her certainty, either aloud or in his head. He just uttered the man’s name with the intensity of a curse. “Roarke.”
“If he’s the one…”
Who killed your mother. Your aunts. Who tried to kill your sisters and niece. “He’s the one.”
Scream after scream echoed through her mind. All the pain. All the horror. She trembled under the force.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told her.
For so long she’d known nothing but fear…except for when she’d lost all touch with reality. And she’d done that too long, giving up when she should have been fighting.
The thought flickered through her mind that maybe she should be fighting him…despite his intentions. He might want to protect her, but she had no way of knowing if he would be able to keep his promise. She didn’t know him. Yet somehow he seemed so familiar to her….
The restraints undone, he helped her from the bed. As she reached for the IV, pulling it from her arm, his fingers fumbled with the ties holding her gown together in the back.
Her breath hissed out as his knuckles brushed her bare skin. “Hey—”
“Shh…it’s okay,” he assured her. “You can’t go out there in this.”
“But…”
“I brought other clothes.” Before the cool air did more than brush her naked skin, he pulled a scratchy cotton shirt over her head, dressing her as if she were a child. Or helpless. She wouldn’t be helpless anymore.
“Let me,” she protested, fumbling in the darkness for the pants. But as she lifted her leg to pull them on, dizziness overwhelmed her, and she swayed…only a few inches before her back settled against his solid chest. His arms came around her, helping her tug up the pants of the scrubs he must have stolen for her, his fingers fast and sure as he stretched the elastic waistband over her hips.
Heat streaked through Irina’s stomach at the brush of his knuckles against her navel, the brush of his hard body against her softness. Her limbs still weak, she melted deeper into his warmth, into his strength.
“Irina…” His breath stirred her hair again, then his fingers as he tunneled them into her thick curls.
“What…?”
“A braid,” he said as if concentrating on his task. And perhaps he was, because she could pull no other thought from his mind despite their closeness.
“Ty?” She used just his name to question his action, not wanting anyone to overhear their conversation and learn she was awake and not alone.
Intent on her hair, he murmured, “The psychiatrist.”
“She’s helping?”
“Yes, but she doesn’t know it,” he admitted. “You’re going to be her.”
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been someone she wasn’t. But she wanted it to be the last. She wanted to be Irina Cooper now. For as long as she lived.
He knelt in the darkness, and Irina felt his big hands on her feet, his skin warm against hers as he peeled off the slipper socks to pull on canvas shoes. She reached out, dizzy again, and used his broad shoulders to steady herself. Muscles rippled beneath her hands. Then he stood, his body bumping against hers.
Dizziness lightened her head again as awareness rushed through her, quickening her pulse. She dragged in a deep breath, his scent of mint and soap so fresh and clean, unlike where she’d been, what she’d been.
“And here’s her jacket,” he said, sliding the sleeves over the scrubs she wore.
A plastic tag dug into Irina’s breast while something heavy dragged down the coat pocket and knocked hard against her thigh.
“You have the keys.”
She’d like to know how he’d gotten them, but she couldn’t waste time asking, nor did it really matter. Getting out before Roarke got in was all that mattered.
“You have to let me in and out of this room and the ward and act like you’re her,” he instructed.
“But…”
“The hospital’s old. Dimly lit. The nurses’ station a distance away. We can do this, Irina.” He expelled a ragged breath. “I keep calling you Irina. You remember you have sisters, so you must remember—”
“My name?” Despite the fierce knocking of her heart against her ribs, she smiled. “I wouldn’t have asked who you are if I didn’t know who I am.”
“So you are faking.”
“Amnesia? Some of it’s real.” But she was still having trouble with that, with distinguishing what was and what wasn’t real.
Was he? She reached out, sliding her hand along the soft bristle of day-old beard on his hard jaw. Her pulse raced at the jolt of awareness, of recognition, that overwhelmed her. She heard his thoughts again.
God, he was asking too much of her, expecting too much. She wasn’t like Ariel and Elena.
Her sisters. He thought of her sisters, and in comparison, she didn’t measure up. She pulled her hand back from his face and curled her fingers into a fist to stop the tingling. Of course she wouldn’t measure up. She knew where she was, what she had become.
He asked, “Can you do this?”
“Act like the psychiatrist?” She would have been one…if she hadn’t lost track of reality. “Yeah, I can do that.”
She’d do anything to get out of the hospital before the killer got in…even trust a man who scared her as much as Ty McIntyre did.
Ty held his breath as Irina fumbled with the keys, locking her empty room behind them. At the end of the hall, one of the nurses glanced up from the desk at the station. Irina lifted her hand in a brief wave. The nurse paused, then waved back. “You’re here late, Dr. Kimber,” she called out.
Nerves twisted Ty’s guts into knots. God, it was over. This quickly. From a distance, Irina could pass for the dark-haired, dark-eyed doctor. But her voice…
She coughed as if clearing her throat. Ty dared not touch her or even whisper the warning burning his mind. Don’t answer back. Don’t.
She must not have been able to read minds, as she’d told the police and the psychiatrist, because she spoke. “Officer McIntyre wanted to double-check that Jane Doe isn’t the girl he’s looking for.”
“She isn’t,” Ty said, taking Irina’s hand as if to shake it. “Thank you for coming back tonight, Doctor.” He tugged her down the hall, away from the nurses’ station. “I don’t want to keep you.”
And hopefully neither would her coworker.
“How is she?” the nurse called out. “Does she need anything?”
Irina shook her head, then murmured the name of a drug and the number of milligrams she’d administered through Jane’s IV. “She should sleep through the night.”
“What do you think is wrong with her?” the nurse asked, rising from her chair at the desk. Her shoes squeaked against the worn linoleum.
Ty’s breath caught. He couldn’t believe that Irina had pulled off the disguise as well as she had. But if the woman got any closer, their duplicity would be discovered for sure. He’d broken into the doctor’s locker and stolen her keys and coat for nothing.
As the woman walked closer, Irina stepped deeper in the shadows of the poorly lit hall, then gestured toward him. “Let me walk Officer McIntyre out first,” she said, jingling the keys in her hand.
“Of course,” the nurse said, turning back toward the station.
Ty expelled a ragged breath as they headed toward the other end of the corridor, where locked doors separated the psychiatric ward from the rest of the old hospital.
“We’re not out yet,” Irina said, clenching the keys in her hand. “I don’t know which one….”
Neither had she for her room, but she’d found it fast enough to not draw too much attention to them. “Try the big ones first,” he advised.
She bent her head and focused on her task, her bottom lip pulled between her teeth. The tip of the first key struck the opening of the chamber but wouldn’t slide inside. The second slid in but wouldn’t turn the lock. When she reached for the third, the nurse called out again.
Ty glanced over his shoulder, and his heart slammed into his ribs. She’d gotten up from the desk and walked toward them. “Having trouble, Dr. Kimber?”
Irina shook her head, tossing the braid he’d haphazardly pulled together in the dark back and forth across her back as if whipping herself. “No, it’s just hard to see in the hall,” she called back, then cleared her throat again and added, “They have to get more light in here someday.”
“Electrical system’s too old, like everything else around here,” the nurse commented, patting her head of graying hair. A rueful smile lifted her lips. “Except for you young interns and residents.”
The lock clicked as Irina turned the third key. She reached for the knob, her hand shaking. “I’ll be right back,” she told the nurse as she slipped ahead of Ty into the outside hall. A bank of elevators stood across from them, the dull metallic doors shut tight. Ty strode over and slapped the down arrow while she relocked the door to the psychiatric ward. The keys rattled as her hands shook.
“You’re doing great,” he murmured when she joined him in staring at the doors. He glanced toward her, then to the stairwell beyond her. Dare he wait for the elevator?
“How far up are we?” she asked, her voice unsteady with nerves.
“Top floor. Eighteenth.”
Her mouth, her lips naturally red and full, pulled into a grimace. “A lot of stairs.”
“A lot of stairs,” he agreed as he pulled his gaze from her and concentrated on the elevator light. He couldn’t afford the distraction of a woman who could look the way she did with no makeup. Her lashes were naturally thick and long, framing those big, dark eyes, while her honey-toned skin revealed not a single flaw.
Was she really the same woman Elena had envisioned in the alley, unkempt and out of her mind?
Behind them, the knob rattled on the door to the psych ward. “She realized I’m not Dr. Kimber,” Irina said, her dark eyes widening in alarm.
Ty grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the stairwell. “Come on. We gotta get out of here.”
Automatic hinges held open the door to the stairs just long enough that Ty caught the arrival of the elevator and the man stepping out. He had dark red hair and eyes that burned with hatred and madness. “Oh God!”
He shoved Irina toward the stairs, gasping an anxious, “Run!”
Even though her feet hit the steps, she peered up and around him. Ty didn’t know if she caught a glimpse of Roarke before the door closed. He was more concerned about Roarke catching a glimpse of them.
“Hurry!” He caught her around the waist, half carrying her as their feet skimmed over the steps, hardly touching them as they ran down flight after flight, their frantic footfalls echoing eerily in the cement stairwell. His bad leg, broken in the collapse of another staircase, throbbed with pain as his foot hitting each step jarred the still-healing bone and muscles. He gritted his teeth, biting back the pain, forcing it from his mind to focus instead on getting her to safety.
They’d fled several stories when a door slammed open above them, metal crashing against concrete. Ty didn’t have to look up to know that the door was from the eighteenth floor and the person joining their mad dash was Donovan Roarke.
“You can’t save her!” the deranged killer yelled, his voice a harsh shout in the confined area. “All you’ll do is die with her, McIntyre.”
From his years on the force, Ty knew there was no sense in trying to deal with a lunatic. He didn’t care about Roarke’s threats against him; his total focus was on Irina. Her arm slid around his waist, her fingers clenched in his shirt as he dragged her along with him. In their haste to escape the hospital and the killer, they fell against the metal railing and bounced off the cement-block walls. Each crash jolted his leg, the pain traveling through his limb like an electrical shock. But he couldn’t slow down.
“You’re not a witch, McIntyre. You don’t deserve to die like they do. Give her to me and I’ll let you live,” Roarke yelled out his bargain between ragged pants for breath.
Ty’s life for hers? Irina had family who cared about her, who loved her. It wasn’t a fair trade.
“Go to hell,” Ty shouted back. Roarke didn’t need his condemnation, though. His actions were certain to send him there, but Ty fully intended to expedite his trip.
“I gave you a chance,” Roarke said as if resigned, then he fired.
Bullets sprayed against the concrete walls, raining dusty bits of cement onto them as they ran. “Come on,” Ty said, rushing Irina down the last flight. His hand closed over hers on the knob of the door to the first floor; together they turned it.
From the corner of his eye Ty glimpsed Roarke, flights above them, leaning over the railing, taking aim, his Glock directed at them. His hand over her head, Ty pushed Irina down as he ducked. Bullets bounced off the metal frame over them as they crawled through the partially open doorway. On the other side, Ty shoved his shoulder against the steel door, fighting the automatic hinge to push it closed. More shots fired, only the door separating the bullets from his body as the metal protruded from each hit.
“Come on!” he commanded Irina, his hand wrapped around hers as he propelled them both through the lobby, deserted at this late hour. Antique furnishings sat empty but for a faint film of dust. An old turnstile door stood between them and the canopy-covered entrance. Ty jammed them both into one section, her body soft and warm as she trembled against him.
“It’s okay,” he assured her even as more shots rang out behind them. The thick plastic of the turnstile splintered from the bullets. Ty bent over Irina, sheltering her with his body as they shoved the door forward, then stumbled out onto the sidewalk. He kept her close, her feet hardly touching the asphalt as he ran across the dimly lit lot to where he’d left his truck parked.
Hand shaking, he fumbled with his keys, clicking the automatic locks. When she moved to head around the passenger’s side, he held tight to her jacket, lifting and pushing her through the driver’s door and onto the seat. “Stay low.”
More shots rang out behind them, breaking the quiet of the night. Then, in the distance, sirens whined. At least someone had called the police. On him for helping a patient escape the psychiatric ward? Or on the madman who relentlessly pursued them, firing shot after shot at them?
Ty jammed the key into the ignition, his hand reaching for the shifter before the truck engine even sprang to life. He slammed into Reverse, tires bouncing over the curb as he pulled out of the parking spot and into the drive.
“Keep low,” he ordered Irina again as she lifted her head. He doubted she was trying to glance out the windows, though. She had that look in her eyes, that glazed-over, unfocused gaze of someone blind.
But his skin didn’t prickle; it wasn’t his mind she was trying to read—if telepathy was her ability. God, he could keep her safe from Roarke’s actions—or at least try—but he couldn’t keep her safe from the madman’s thoughts. He pushed her down, her face in his lap, her breath warm through the denim covering his thighs.
The rear window shattered, shards of glass biting into the back of his head and his neck, then raining down over them and the leather seat. “Son of a—”
He jerked the wheel, sending the truck careening back and forth across the driving lanes as he steered for the street. A moving target was harder to hit.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice thready with fear and adrenaline. “Did he shoot you?”
“No.” But blood trickled down the back of his neck from the glass splinters embedded in his skin, the sting of the cuts a faint echo of the pain throbbing in his leg.
She moved her head against his leg, but he pressed his hand on her shoulder, holding her down, out of range of the bullets and broken glass. “Ty,” she said, the fatality of her tone drawing his attention before she added, “He’s going to kill you.”
Ty glanced in the rearview mirror, at the lights dropping farther and farther behind them. He patted her shoulder. “We’re losing him. We’re going to be fine.”
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Lisa Childs
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Experience the thrill of life on the edge and set your adrenalin pumping! These gripping stories see heroic characters fight for survival and find love in the face of danger.Their only chance for salvation was each other… Born a witch, Irina Cooper was able to read other people’s thoughts. She had never known the source of her power, or her true heritage. It was police officer Ty McIntyre’s job to save her from the dark forces swirling around her.To stop the killer seeking to destroy the Cooper legacy, they must use Irina’s gift and end her family’s curse. Doing so will lead Irina to her true salvation – in Ty’s strong embrace!Witch Hunt Three sisters – magic in their blood and a killer on their trail!