“The doctors will know more once they’ve run tox screens, but I’m betting that’s how he kept them still without having to tie them. There are drugs that do that. Keep the body completely immobile, but the mind alive, aware. And . . . slowly going crazy.”
“What about Nessa?”
“I had a look at her chart. Her pediatrician noted that she had an unusually high metabolism. Probably never cause her a health problem in her life, and she’ll stay enviably slim no matter what she eats. But she’ll also react unpredictably to most medications. Her doctor advised caution and observation whenever she was given anything she’d never taken before. My bet is that her body reacted differently to the drug he used. She realized she could move, just as she told you. And when she thought the time was right, that he wasn’t down there with them anymore, she felt her way out.”
There was a long silence, and then Dante said, “We’ll have to bring him in. Arrest him. He killed Annie Duncan. Held the others prisoner and most likely destroyed at least a few of those lives.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said.
“I doubt he’ll serve any time,” Lucas said. “If he’s as sick as I think he is, he’ll probably be sent to a critical care hospital. And die there even before charges could be brought against him.”
“Or maybe not.”
They all nearly jumped out of their skins at the new voice, and yet froze at the same time. Because somehow, he had slipped behind one of the evidence boards—and now he was behind Dante, hauling him up from his chair.
He had a gun pointed at Dante’s carotid.
And Bast Gettys was indeed a monster. His face was hideously deformed, one ear gone and the other hardly a twisted lump. His discolored head was bald with ropes of scar tissue, and the lack of eyebrows made him look vaguely surprised. More ropey scarring twisted around his face and neck, and disappeared beneath his shirt. The arm he held across Dante’s neck and upper chest was the one with fingers fused. His other hand seemed perfectly comfortable holding the gun at Dante’s neck.
“Bast, I’m the one you want.” Jonah had managed to turn his chair just a bit, but he didn’t want to rise until he had to, since it was impossible to hide the big silver gun he still wore.
“Well, I thought you were,” Bast said in a reasonable tone, his head so close to Dante’s it would have been difficult to slide a piece of paper between them. “I planned it all out. And it worked. I got the ones I wanted, the other ones you saved. I put them in a dark hole they’ll never get out of, even if you carried their bodies out.”
“Then you have your revenge, Bast.”
“Revenge? It was never about revenge, Jonah. It was about fairness. You saved them, and they were all fine. They were living good lives. You saved me, and I was—I am—a monster. But even that wasn’t unfair enough. I had to be something worse. So then I got cancer. I got this horrible black thing eating at my brain. Does that sound fair to you, Jonah?”
Dante spoke suddenly. “It sounds like life to me. Fair, unfair, we all get our share sooner or later. In this life or the next.”
“Dante,” Robbie said in a warning tone.
“What do you think, Bast?” Dante asked. “Do you think killing my friends will even the score? Do you think that’ll make your cancer and your scars disappear?”
“I think she can. The telepath. I think she can make the cancer go away. I can see into her mind a little, and I think she can—”
The only thing they could all agree on afterward was that everything happened at once. There was a boom of thunder so loud it shook the building. The lights flickered. They could all see Dante reaching for Bast’s gun, all of them knowing he would never make it before that tightening finger pulled the trigger.
All of them were rising from the table, most reaching for their guns. But Robbie held out one hand, stretching it toward the monster who was going to kill Dante.
There was another crash of thunder, this one accompanied by a bright flash of lightning.
That was what everyone said. That Jonah’s big silver gun bucked in his hand just a second, a split second, after Bast blew a horribly big hole in Dante’s neck. That Dante was falling boneless to the floor, his wide eyes already sightless, as Robbie stretched out her hand even farther and cried out an anguished, “No!”
And no one in the room said it might have been something other than Jonah’s shot that took away Bast Getty’s cancer for good. His cancer, and his scarred, scarred face and head.
Because it just exploded.
Like an overripe melon.
EPILOGUE
“Just tell me you didn’t know it would happen,” Robbie said steadily.
The storm continued to rumble around them as though trying to make up its mind whether to make an unutterably bad night even worse. The bodies of Sebastian Gettys and Dante Swann had been taken away by medics whose haunted faces were mute testimony that they had already seen too much for what had been a peaceful life in a small town.
And Bishop and Miranda had arrived.
Robbie was staring at Bishop, and he didn’t look away.
“I didn’t know it would happen. We didn’t know it would happen.” He never showed emotion much, Bishop, but the grief and anger in his pale sentry eyes were obvious, and the scar on his left cheek stood out whitely, more obvious than any of them had ever seen before.
Miranda stood beside him. Her fingers twined with his, and she said to Robbie, “We send teams out every time knowing it’s possible. Knowing that maybe our skill won’t be good enough—or our luck will just run out.” Her free hand lifted briefly, so briefly, to touch her lower abdomen, then fell away. “Even when we get the bad guys, we don’t always win, Robbie. There’s always a price. A price somebody has to pay. You know that.”
“You’re both here. I know that. Why weren’t you here before? Why weren’t you here in time to—to do something?”
“Man plans,” Bishop said, “and the universe laughs. We should have been here hours ago. But the wind had taken down a huge tree, and there was no other way. Not even a place for a chopper to land. We had to wait for a road crew to clear it away.”
Robbie’s arms were crossed over her stomach, and her eyes were shiny. “I don’t know if I believe you. I want you to know that.”
“We do,” Bishop said.
“What am I? Can you tell me that? What am I now?”
“You’re a telepath, Robbie. You know that.”
She drew a breath. “I know it wasn’t just Jonah’s bullet that took that monster’s head off. I know it was mostly me. What I did. What did I do?”
Miranda glanced at her husband, then said steadily, “You wanted to save your partner. And that was enough to focus the energy inside you.”
“And turn it into a weapon.”
Bishop said, “All of our abilities can be used as weapons one way or another. If we need them to be badly enough. It’s why we learn control, Robbie. It’s why we test our limits.”
Hardly louder than a whisper, Robbie said, “I should have read the fine print.”
Sarah glanced at them, and then went to Robbie and took her arm. “I have a bottle of wine and a boyfriend I can kick out for the night,” she said. “Come on.”
It seemed that Robbie would resist for a moment, but then she allowed herself to be turned and guided, and Sarah took her out of the makeshift command center.
Miranda looked at Jonah, who was sitting at the conference table with his big gun lying on it, gazing at nothing.
“Jonah, there are always monsters,” she said. She waited until he looked at her, then said, “Always. You didn’t make Bast Gettys a monster any more than we made any one of our many enemies monsters. The world makes them. Fate makes them. Life makes them. All we can do is fight the ones in our paths.”
“Do you really believe that?” he asked finally.
“I have to. There have been . . . a lot of monsters in my life. Personally and professionally. Battles I won, and battles I lost. Unbearable prices I had to pay. But I keep fighting, just like Noah fights, like our teams fight, because when we’re done, there’s usually one less monster in the world. And I can live with that.”
“Teach me that, will you?” Jonah requested with a ghost of a smile.
“We were hoping you’d ask,” Bishop said.
And Jonah had one of those feelings he’d had before, that everything was going to change.
This time, for the better.
SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT AGENT BIOS
(in order of appearance)
NOAH BISHOP—FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Unit chief, profiler, pilot, sharpshooter, and trained in martial arts.
Adept: An exceptionally powerful touch-telepath, he also shares with his wife a strong precognitive ability, the deep emotional link between them making them, together, far exceed the limits of the scale developed by the FBI to measure psychic talents. Also possesses an “ancillary” ability of enhanced senses (hearing, sight, scent), which he has trained other agents to use as well. Whether present in the flesh or not, Bishop always knows what’s going on with his agents in the field. Always.
Appearances: Stealing Shadows, Hiding in the Shadows, Out of the Shadows, Touching Evil, Whisper of Evil, Sense of Evil, Hunting Fear, Chill of Fear, Sleeping with Fear, Blood Dreams, Blood Sins, Blood Ties, Haven, Hostage, Haunted, Fear the Dark
LUCAS JORDAN—FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Special Agent, profiler, weapons expert.
Adept: Neither fully telepathic nor empathic, Luke nevertheless possesses a combination of both abilities, the sum of which enables him to quite often find people who are lost. Lost by accident, the victims of crimes, even sometimes abducted and taken far away. And yet when he is able to use his abilities, Luke can feel the pain and fear of someone in trouble, even home in on their location. It’s an ability he’s worked very hard to master, and his control has improved steadily since joining the SCU—and since Samantha came back into his life.
Appearances: Hunting Fear, Fear the Dark
SAMANTHA JORDAN—FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Special Agent, profiler—and excels at a number of esoteric skills picked up in her life growing up in a carnival.
Adept: Seer, clairvoyant. Precognition is not an ability she controls, but she is able, with astonishing power and accuracy, to pick up information by touching objects. And sometimes by touching people. She is also linked in a very real way to her husband, that contact helping him to focus his abilities—and enabling him to pull his wife from whatever distant place or time her abilities take her; each is in a very real sense the anchor for the other.
Appearances: Hunting Fear, Fear the Dark
MIRANDA BISHOP—FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Special Agent, investigator, profiler, black belt in karate, and a sharpshooter.
Adept: Touch-telepath, seer, remarkably powerful, and possesses unusual control, particularly in a highly developed shield capable of protecting herself psychically, a shield she’s able to extend beyond herself to protect others. Shares abilities with her husband, due to their intense emotional connection, and together they far exceed the scale developed by the SCU to measure psychic abilities.
Appearances: Out of the Shadows, Touching Evil, Whisper of Evil, Sense of Evil, Hunting Fear, Chill of Fear, Blood Dreams, Blood Sins, Blood Ties, Hostage, Haunted, Fear the Dark
ROBBIE HODGE—FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Special Agent, profiler-in-training, proficient with most firearms, and possesses a black belt in judo.
Adept: A born telepath, she’s able to read roughly half the people she encounters, and possesses the added ability to telepathically coax some memories from a willing subject. Is also, possibly because of the strength of her shield, the rare psychic able to wear a watch.
Appearances: Fear the Dark
DANTE SWANN—FBI SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT
Job: Special Agent, profiler-in-training, and has expert computer skills.
Adept: Reluctant medium, very strong shields. Dante is still coming to terms with his abilities, though he’s had them for a number of years. He enjoys the puzzles of investigative work, and though he is not dependent on his own abilities, he deeply appreciates the abilities of the psychics with whom he works.
Appearances: Fear the Dark
PSYCHIC TERMS AND ABILITIES
(as Classified/Defined by Bishop’s Team and by Haven)
Adept: The general term used to label any functional psychic; the specific ability is much more specialized.
Clairvoyance: The ability to know things, to pick up bits of information, seemingly out of thin air.
Dream-projecting: The ability to enter another’s dreams.
Dream-walking: The ability to invite/draw others into one’s own dreams.
Empath: A person who experiences the emotions of others, often up to and including physical pain and injuries.
Healing: The ability to heal injuries to self or others, often but not always ancillary to mediumistic abilities.
Healing Empathy: The ability to not only feel but also heal the pain/injury of another.
Latent: The term used to describe unawakened or inactive abilities, as well as to describe a psychic not yet aware of being psychic.
Mediumistic: Having the ability to communicate with the dead.
Precognition: The ability to correctly predict future events.
Psychometric: The term used to describe the ability to pick up impressions or information from touching objects.
Regenerative: The term used to describe the ability to heal one’s own injuries/illnesses, even those considered by medical experts to be lethal or fatal. (A classification unique to one SCU operative and considered separate from a healer’s abilities.)
Spider Sense: The ability to enhance one’s normal senses (sight, hearing, smell, etc.) through concentration and the focusing of one’s own mental and physical energy.
Telekinesis: The ability to move objects with the mind.
Telepathic mind control: The ability to influence/control others through mental focus and effort; an extremely rare ability.
Telepathy (touch and non-touch or open): The ability to pick up thoughts from others. Some telepaths only receive, while others have the ability to send thoughts. A few are capable of both, usually due to an emotional connection with the other person.
UNNAMED ABILITIES:
The ability to see into time, to view events in the past, present, and future without being or having been there physically while the events transpired.
The ability to see the aura or another person’s energy field.
The ability to channel energy usefully as a defensive or offensive tool or weapon.
BISHOP/SCU STORY TIMELINE
For readers who wish to “place” each of these stories in time, I should explain that—in order to not age my characters too quickly—I have not set these books in real time, but in “story” time. Roughly speaking, each trilogy within the series takes place within the space of a year or a bit less.
In simple terms, if you look at the information offered below, you’ll see that from the time the Special Crimes Unit was formally introduced in Out of the Shadows until the events in this story, Fear the Dark, only about five years have passed within the series. (The Special Crimes Unit was being built and developed by Bishop for about three or four years prior to that, but in Out of the Shadows the story of the unit, of Bishop and Miranda, and Bishop and his team, really begins.)
Stealing Shadows—February
Hiding in the Shadows—October/November
YEAR ONE:
Out of the Shadows—January (SCU formally introduced)
Touching Evil—No
vember
YEAR TWO:
Whisper of Evil—March
Sense of Evil—June
Hunting Fear—September
YEAR THREE:
Chill of Fear—April
Sleeping with Fear—July
Blood Dreams—October
YEAR FOUR:
Blood Sins—January
Blood Ties—April
Haven—July
Hostage—October
YEAR FIVE:
Haunted—February
Fear the Dark—May
* Hunting Fear
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