There were things Max didn't want to even try to identify in that space; appliances and devices hung on a pegboard on the far wall, many made up of or decorated with silver-studded black leather. There were large wooden… instruments holding various fastenings for wrists and ankles to contort a body into awkward, degrading, and painful positions; one of them was a large, upright X-shaped frame, while another looked like nothing so much as medieval stocks—and a third was a kind of wooden horse, complete with a saddle.
And there were others, apparatuses whose purpose was obvious in their shape, and those more enigmatic in design and function. But there were also tools and "toys" on shelves beside the pegboard that were easily recognizable, from multicolored dildos graphically shaped like penises of varying sizes and coiled leather whips with braided handles to wide leather paddles and black silk blindfolds.
All too conscious of his shaken exclamation, Max didn't dare look at Nell.
"Well," she said rather dryly, "at least he didn't do it in the street and frighten the horses."
A laugh was surprised out of Max. "So that's your attitude? Live and let live?" He looked at her finally to see a faint, wry smile curving her mouth.
"Why not?" she answered. "I've hunted too many rabid animals who destroyed other lives for their own sick reasons to worry much about what consenting adults do in private."
"And if they weren't all consenting?"
"That would be different." Nell looked around, her smile fading. "But I don't believe anything was done down here that the participants didn't want done."
"You don't believe? Don't tell me there's no energy signature in a place like this to tap into."
She hesitated and sent him a quick glance before answering. "I don't know yet. I've been practicing a kind of shield as one more way of trying to control the abilities."
"So you won't get blindsided."
"Exactly." She stepped away from the foot of the stairs until she stood upon the edge of the rug placed in the center of the basement. "However…"
Max took a couple of steps himself so that he could see her face as she closed her eyes and concentrated. He was becoming a little more familiar by now with her visions, so he wasn't surprised to see when she opened her eyes that they wore that fixed, glazed look of peering into some dark distance he could never himself perceive.
As always, he had a strong urge to touch her, hold her somehow, driven by the uneasy feeling that she could drift away from him without an anchor. It was so overwhelming a belief that he actually took another step toward her and began to reach out his hand to grasp her arm.
He hesitated only because she turned her head then, looking through him rather than at him, a disconcerting experience made even more so because her eyes were so dark it was like gazing into the seemingly bottomless depths of a shaded mountain lake. Seconds passed. Her expression was puzzled at first, uncertain, as though she was looking for something she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to find.
She turned her head again, scanning the room, more seconds passing, then gasped suddenly, her cheeks flooding with color that quickly receded to leave her even more pale than she had been before. Whatever she saw, it was clearly a distinct and unwelcome shock.
Max's fingers closed on her arm. "Nell?"
Like that first time in the woods, she didn't immediately respond to him. She was unnaturally still, and her unblinking eyes seemed to grow even darker and more distant.
A minute passed.
Two.
"Nell?" He caught her other arm and turned her fully toward him. She allowed herself to be moved as though she were a puppet, boneless and unprotesting, with an obliviousness to any possible danger. It scared the hell out of him.
"Goddammit, Nell—" He shook her.
She blinked, looked up at him in bewilderment as her eyes slowly lightened and resumed their normal green color. But she looked confused, and her face remained pale. Too pale. "Max? What—"
"Are you all right?"
"Of course I'm all right—" The words were barely out of her mouth when she winced and gasped, clearly in pain. She reached for her left temple, fingers massaging in an automatic motion. "No," she half whispered.
"Nell, what's wrong?"
"It doesn't happen like this, it's not supposed to happen like this—"
"Nell—"
"Not without warning," she murmured. She looked at him with the strangest mixture of anger and helplessness, then closed her eyes, gave a little sigh, and went totally limp in his arms.
Nate McCurry wasn't at all sure he had done the right thing, but he didn't see that he had much choice. He had to protect himself, didn't he? And what else could he do?
It hadn't taken him long at all to decide that he couldn't take what he knew to the sheriff. If Nate's suspicions in that quarter were right, Ethan Cole knew just as much as he did and was keeping quiet about it because he was scared too.
Which was sobering on several counts, but mostly because it was well known Ethan wasn't scared of much.
So Nate had carefully considered the remaining members of the sheriff's department and arranged a quiet meeting with the one cop he thought he could trust, the boyhood pal with whom he'd sneaked cigarettes under the bleachers in the gym during pep rallies and committed Halloween pranks that had very nearly gotten them both arrested.
That had been a long time ago, but they had remained casual acquaintances in the years since, and Nate thought if there was anybody who'd understand his fright and not condemn him for it, it was an old pal who had puked on his shoes when they'd both inadvertently witnessed, to their fascinated horror, two of their teachers passionately making out in a coat closet at school.
Nate had been about twelve at the time.
He still had nightmares about that one, and was half convinced that the sight of old Mr. Hensen's pale, freckled hands groping beneath the rucked-up skirt of Mrs. Gamble and pawing her exposed, fleshy breasts had made his own sex life as an adult something of a problem.
Not that he mentioned that, of course, even to his childhood friend.
"I know what I'm talking about," he said insistently, trying not to glance nervously around even though they were alone here in the alley behind the drugstore. "I've thought and thought, and it's the only thing we all have in common. I mean, I'm not sure about George, but the other three for damned sure. And me."
"You're wrong, Nate. You have to be. She left a long time ago."
"Did she? Or did she just leave Silence but stay close by to have her revenge on us? Peter Lynch died last summer, remember? Not so long after she supposedly left, and he'd treated her like shit, she told me so. Luke Ferrier had too, and as for Randal Patterson, she said he went way over the line, really hurt her when all she expected were a few games."
"So what'd she expect from you, Nate?"
Nate grimaced. "A good time, far as I could tell. But she was just weird, you know? Intense one minute and laughing like a hyena the next. Really something between the sheets, I'll give her that, but… She was more than I could handle, and I don't mind admitting it."
"So you dumped her."
"It wasn't like that. I just told her she wanted more than I could give her. And she laughed when I told her that. Laughed and tossed her head and said I'd be sorry. She said that, actually said I'd be sorry."
"And I guess you are, Nate."
"Oh, Christ, am I ever. And it makes sense, right? That it's her? That she came back to get even and now she's after all of us?"
"Nate—"
"Don't give me that pitying look, goddammit. I know it's her, and one of you cops should know it too. I know everybody says this is about punishing men for their secrets and sins, and I'm saying it's the sin of being with her and then treating her like dirt that we're all supposed to pay for. She's making damned sure we do."
"Do you have any proof of that, Nate, or is this just you being paranoid?"
"It's your job to find proof, isn't it? And you can do that now that I've told you where to look. You can find proof, and you can find her, and the whole damned sheriff's department will throw you a big fucking party. Especially Ethan Cole. Hell, he'll probably throw you a fucking parade."
"Why would he do that?"
"Because he's probably worried about his own ass. He's been in her bed too."
It was characteristic of the blackouts that Nell woke abruptly, without the drowsy sensation that usually accompanied waking from a true sleep. One moment she was out cold, deep in an utterly dreamless unconsciousness, and the next her eyes were open and she was completely alert.
So when she woke, her first very clear realization was that she was in a strange house.
She was lying on a comfortable bed, fully dressed but for her shoes and jacket, and was covered by a thin blanket. A couple of open windows brought in the light of a dying day as well as a cool breeze. And the muted sounds of voices.
Nell threw back the blanket and slid from the bed. A glance at her watch showed her she'd been out for a little less than an hour, which was usual. It was just after five. She looked around the room, studying the gleaming dark wood furniture, the beautiful old rug covering much of the wood floor. There were no photographs she could see, but several very good oil landscapes lent the room a peaceful, old-world quality.
And, faintly, she could smell Max's cologne.
"Oh, hell," she muttered beneath her breath, more unsettled than she wanted to admit even to herself.
She went to one of the windows, standing to one side to carefully peer through the gauzy curtains. This second-floor room was at the front of the house, so Nell found herself looking down onto the front drive and a neat, well-cared-for yard.
A sheriff's department cruiser was parked in the drive.
The two deputies stood on either side of the car, both facing Max, seemingly relaxed and casual in that deceptively unthreatening posture most cops had when they were intent on not looking as tough as they actually were. And Max stood near the front of the car, not quite blocking their access to the house, arms crossed over his chest in body language that was guarded at best—and hostile at worst.
The murmur of voices was indistinct at first, and Nell concentrated, focusing on sight and hearing so she could channel a bit of extra energy to enhance those senses as she'd been taught to do. Bishop was the best at it, using what Miranda had long ago nick-named his spider sense, but he had taught most of his agents to use a form of the same ability. And it did come in handy at times. Like now.
"… so we're not picking on you, Max," Deputy Venable was saying matter-of-factly. "Sheriff's got us checking on everybody in the area."
His partner, the gorgeous Lauren Champagne, added in the same tone, "The whole town is jumpy, you know that. So we're providing the most visible police presence we can muster."
"And visiting every house individually?" Max demanded skeptically.
"The outlying ones, sure." It was Lauren who answered, smiling faintly. But her dark eyes were watchful. "And we're asking everyone to report anything they consider odd, no matter how insignificant it seems."
"Most of us are pulling double shifts so we have more patrols out at all times," Kyle Venable added. "Just give us a call, and we can be here within minutes."
"Okay. I'll do that. If I notice anything odd."
Nell grimaced, recognizing a dismissal that couldn't have been more blunt unless he'd told them flatly to get the hell off his property. The two deputies exchanged glances again, then shrugged in tandem and got back into their cruiser.
Without waiting to watch them leave, Nell went into the adjoining bathroom to splash water on her face and finger-comb her hair into its usual unfussy style. She wanted to avoid even glancing into the mirror over the vanity, but in the end stared somewhat grimly at her reflection. She was aware that she was too pale but was far more disturbed by the faint purple shadows beneath her eyes.
They hadn't been there yesterday.
And today, for the first time ever, she had blacked out twice, the second time with a warning of only a minute or two instead of the twenty or so minutes she was accustomed to.
What was happening to her?
Like most of the other psychics she knew, Nell lived with the knowledge that the very sensitivity to and ability to interpret electrical energies and magnetic fields that was genetically hardwired into her brain might eventually damage that brain. Especially if she pushed herself and those abilities, used them too often, or for too long at a time.
No one really knew what might happen, but the possibilities were scary.
And for the psychic members of the SCU, there was also the awareness that the very work they had chosen to do could well increase their risk of, as Nell had flippantly put it to Max, waking up one day with their brains fried. Unlike psychics not involved in law enforcement, they didn't have the luxury of allowing their abilities to control them, of waiting around passively and merely allowing the abilities to come when they would.
No, the SCU psychics struggled always to master and use every ability they possessed, often under extremely stressful and dangerous situations and frequently pushing themselves to their limits—and beyond—because that effort could mean the difference between catching the monsters they hunted and allowing those animals another day, or week, or year of freedom in which to destroy more innocent lives.
For some of the psychics, it was likely there would be a heavy price demanded sooner or later. Certain psychic abilities required a great deal of physical stamina, for instance, while others appeared to actually create increasingly powerful electromagnetic fields within the brain itself.