Lisa Childs – Damned (страница 2)

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….”