Part 7 (2/2)

”I'm sorry, Hannah,” she murmured. She touched her fingers to the girl's face and hoped that Jones would have better luck with one of his other psychic bloodhounds. She wasn't the only one, and she wasn't even their best, she knew. But Taige had a talent with kids, so that was probably why he'd come to her first. But she wouldn't be the only one he approached.

Frustrated, she shoved all the reports and pictures back into the file, and then she took the file into her office, stowing it inside the file cabinet. It didn't help much. Putting it away only put it out of her sight, not out of her mind.

She paused by her desk and stared at the empty wine bottle and the gla.s.s from last night. The alcohol seemed to call to her, and for a minute, she almost went and unearthed the merlot. But instead, she grabbed the bottle and the gla.s.s and carried them into the kitchen. She wasn't going to drink herself into oblivion before one o'clock. Even she wasn't that pathetic.

But she had to do something. Cleaning like a demon seemed to be the ticket. She opened all the windows, letting the hot summer breeze blow through the house and sweep away the musty, closed-in feel, and then she headed for the garage and all the cleaning supplies.

It was a sad, sad state when the only thing a woman could do to occupy her mind was clean.

Three hours later, the house was so clean, Mr. Monk himself would have been satisfied with it. The quirky, obsessive-compulsive fictional detective could have gone through her house with a white glove, and he wouldn't have found so much as a speck of dust or a hair on the floor.

Taige, on the other hand, was filthy. But instead of heading for the shower, she changed into her swimming suit and headed out the back door to the stretch of sand and the gentle waters of Mobile Bay. She dove into the water, swimming under the surface until her lungs threatened to burst, and then she surfaced, shoving her wet hair back from her face and treading water.

A little farther down, she could see a family playing in the sand. Beyond that, a couple of people in the shallows were crabbing. A little girl shrieked, and she turned her head to watch the family. A grin tugged up the corners of her mouth as the father threw the little girl up into the air and then caught her, laughing as the girl screamed, ”Again! Again!”

He tossed her, and she went up with a delighted shriek-Please don't hurt me.

Taige froze as a girl's voice whispered through her mind, insubstantial as mist.

Silence, child.

The man's voice didn't seem real, monstrous and inhuman. How much of that was because of the girl's fear, Taige didn't know.

Taige didn't even have to see the girl to know who it was. The delicate little black-haired darling had been invading her thoughts and dreams for more than a decade, and Taige knew her voice nearly as wel as she knew her own. Come on, honey, tell me who you are, Taige thought helplessly. How can I help you if you won't talk to me?

But it didn't work like that. She didn't even know if the girl was still alive. For all Taige knew, the girl had been kidnapped and killed before Taige was even born. She could be seeing something that happened years ago-or something that hadn't even happened yet.

She had no idea, and she knew that she wouldn't get any more than she'd already gotten until the time was right.

You don't act-you react. A ghost from her past, Cul en's voice seemed to echo in her ear as she treaded water and tried not to cry. More than a decade had pa.s.sed since he'd flung those ugly words at her, words that had cut into her like poisonous claws, and through the pain, she'd known she had to do something. She'd forced herself to go to college, she'd forced herself to learn control, to experiment with her gift and see what she could do. Things that had put her through sheer h.e.l.l and sometimes, she wondered why she'd even bothered.

Because even after all of that, there were people, children, that she couldn't save.

People just like Cullen's mother. People just like her own parents. People like Hannah Brewster.

She couldn't save them.

Useless.

NICE thing about airports that early-it was quiet. The Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta was hopping with travelers, business and leisure alike. The hour hand hadn't even edged up on five o'clock in the morning, and all the travelers were tired.

They sipped on coffee, tried to stay awake while reading the paper, and a few diligently worked on laptops. Cullen was one of them, or at least he was trying. The white screen seemed glaringly bright. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that he hadn't gotten to sleep until midnight. With a three a.m. wake-up call, it was no wonder he was so d.a.m.ned tired.

When he realized he had been staring at the same line for the past five minutes, Cullen finally gave up and shut the laptop down. The faint scratch of pencil on paper had him glancing over. The early hour wasn't affecting al of them. Nice to see.

”What are you working on, beautiful?”

Big green eyes looked up at him. Jillian was as beautiful as an angel, Cullen thought.

He'd thought so from the first time he'd seen her, nine years ago, when the doctor wrapped her tiny, red little body in a blanket and placed her in his arms. Jilly's mom had died due to complications from childbirth. She'd held Jillian for half an hour, a miserly thirty minutes, before the nurses took the baby to do a more thorough exam on the newborn. Five minutes after the nurses had taken Jilly, Kim had looked at him and smiled.

”Isn't she beautiful?”

It was the last thing Kim ever said. She drifted off to sleep, and while she was sleeping, she'd started to bleed again. The doctors couldn't get it to stop, and Cul en had stood there, stunned into silence, as his wife died.

It had come as a complete and total shock to everybody, including Cullen. How could he lose his wife in childbirth? Women died in childbirth a hundred years ago. Even fifty years ago. But in 1999? He just couldn't wrap his brain around it, even now.

Jilly had inherited her mother's big green eyes, rosebud mouth, and artistic talent. The girl might as well have been born with a pencil and sketch pad in hand. It had been that artistic talent that had landed her in an advanced school when she was only three years old. She had a grasp of light and shadow that many adults lacked, Cullen had been told when he'd met with Arlene Wil ington.

Fancy way of saying the girl could draw, Cul en had always figured, but Arlene was right. No matter how she said it, Jilly was gifted. Even aside from her skill with a pencil, the girl was special in ways that Cullen couldn't even begin to understand, although he wasn't exactly a stranger to it.

He studied the faces on the sketch pad she showed him and asked, ”Are they friends of yours?” Jilly had drawn three kids who didn't look familiar to him: a younger girl who was probably only five or six, and then two older ones, about the same age as Jilly. The boy was black, and he had a wide, mischievous smile. Both of the girls were white, one was probably in her early teens. It was the younger one, though, that really caught Cul en's attention. She looked like a little angel, all big eyes, long hair, and dimples. Although the pencil sketch was in black and white, he imagined the girl's hair was pale blonde. Jillian's talent amazed him. How a nine-year-old could draw something like that, so true to life, was just astounding.

Jilly shook her head. Fat, inky black curls bounced around her heart-shaped face, and she took the sketch pad back. ”No. I don't know who they are.” She reached out, stroked the tip of one finger down one penciled face. The little cherub. ”She was the first one.”

A voice came over the speaker, and a bored airline attendant announced a slight delay.

Delay. h.e.l.l, wasn't that great? Bad weather had grounded their flight yesterday, and Cullen had accepted the red-eye for today. He had a signing and some Q and A deal at a library tomorrow, and he'd really wanted the downtime. It was starting to look as though he just wasn't supposed to have any downtime.

Distracted, Cullen glanced at Jilly and asked, ”The first to what?”

”The first to disappear.”

A chill ran down Cullen's back, and he stopped, looked at the sketch pad, then back up at Jilly's face. ”Disappear from where?”

Jilly just shrugged. ”Around.” She sighed and bent back over the sketchbook, shutting her worried father out. He was used to it. When she was working on something, she worked with a single-minded focus. Normally, it didn't bother him. Today? Different story. ”Where did she disappear from, baby?”

Jilly muttered something under her breath. She caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth, and her eyes scrunched down to slits. Recognizing the signs, Cul en reached out and caught a black curl. He tugged sharply and waited for her to look up at him. At first, her eyes were foggy and unfocused. They cleared, and when he knew she was paying attention to him, he said flatly, ”Tell me about this girl.”

The firm, I-am-the-parent-and-you-will-answer-me tone still worked on Jilly, for the most part. She glanced down at the sketch pad, but Cullen knew she wasn't seeing the sketch. She squeezed the charcoal pencil so hard her knuckles went white, and Cullen felt a dark, ugly fear move through him. Not again . . . Cul en thought as he stared down at his daughter.

Special in ways he couldn't understand, that was his little girl. It wasn't until he'd had Jillian and realized just how special she was that he began to understand how terribly wrong it had been for him to blame Taige for not being able to save his mom. She'd been completely blameless, and while he guessed his misplaced fury might have been understandable, it had stil been totally wrong.

This kind of gift was sheer h.e.l.l, and it still made him sick inside to think about what he'd done to Taige and how much he must have hurt her. He'd undo it all in a second.

Often, he wondered if this wasn't the penance he had to bear for doing it, having a child who shared Taige's abilities and knowing he was powerless to protect her from the agony it would cause her.

It had been a year since he'd seen that look in Jillian's eyes, a hot, muggy summer when the little brother of Jilly's best friend disappeared. Braden Fleming had disappeared from his backyard, and he'd been missing for three days.

Cullen hadn't known anything about Braden's abduction until late, late that first night.

He'd been called to Jillian's school when his daughter collapsed out on the playground for no obvious reason. Jilly had spent two days in a catatonic stupor that had Cullen so scared he took her to the emergency room. She was admitted to the hospital, and on the second day, she had come out of it, only to look at her father and start crying. The doctors had wanted to admit her for psychiatric tests. Cul en might have agreed, but Jilly looked up at him and whispered, ”I know where Braden is.”

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