"You say she's been out for more than an hour?"
"Yeah. I tried to wake her just before I called you, but couldn't get any kind of response. Pulse and respiration are normal, and her color's good. Better than it was when she collapsed, as a matter of fact."
"Collapsed? It wasn't the usual sort of blackout? There was no warning?"
Facing the other man as they both stood before the cold fireplace, Max said, "No warning at all. We were talking, and she went out literally in the middle of a sentence. I have never seen her go out so fast or hard."
"It's been getting worse," Galen noted slowly. "More blackouts more often. Stronger pain. And I don't think she's been sleeping well at night."
"So I'm right in thinking this isn't normal for her."
Galen looked at him. "We've only worked together a few times, but from what I've been told, no, it isn't normal. Until she returned to Silence, Nell averaged a blackout no more often than every few months. She's been here less than a week, and this makes at least the fourth blackout."
"Is it because she's been using her abilities too often? Pushing herself too hard?"
"I don't know."
"You damned well should know," Max said in a harsh tone just this side of violent. "I know she feels this special unit you all belong to is something that made her life better, but that doesn't give you people the right to push her so goddamned hard—to use her up, burn her out, until she ends up in a coma with her brain fried."
Mildly, Galen said, "In case you hadn't realized it, nobody pushes Nell harder than she pushes herself. And just so you know, it's not really company policy to use tip field agents and then throw them away. Plays hell with the payroll, to say nothing of recruitment."
Max drew a breath and made a visible effort to control his temper and his anxiety. "Maybe not, but even Nell admitted that some psychics risk more than a bullet doing this work. She's obviously one of them."
"True enough. It's also true that we don't know what price Nell might ultimately pay for using her abilities in her work. But she knows the risks. And accepts them."
"Because she's got a fucking death wish."
"Is that what you think?"
Max hesitated, then said, "I think part of her does, yeah. She's convinced she comes from something evil and that her family is cursed. That she's cursed. Doomed to live her life alone in any meaningful sense. Unable to let anybody get close because she's afraid this so-called darkness inside her will hurt whoever she cares about."
Max shook his head. "Coming home just made it worse, since she found the evidence that Adam did kill his wife—and that Hailey was not only involved with sadistic men but might actually be killing them. Some family tree."
Galen debated silently, then said, "Before we came down here, Bishop—you know who Bishop is, right, Chief of the Special Crimes Unit? He told me privately that he was convinced Nell's blackouts were only indirectly caused by her abilities. He believes they have something to do with her past."
"In what way?"
"Well, that's the question. It could be some trauma she's suppressed all these years, some knowledge she hasn't been able to face directly. Probably something that is connected to her abilities, since using them seems quite often to trigger a blackout, though there's no way to be sure until we find out the truth. But the thing is, Bishop said that if he was right about that, and if this investigation somehow made Nell begin to face her past, to examine her roots here, then it would be likely that the blackouts would become more frequent or more severe—as she got closer to whatever it is causing them."
Max was frowning. "Have you reported back about her blackouts coming more often?"
"Yeah. Bishop said to consider whatever she's saying or doing when the blackouts hit. Is there some commonality? A particular place? A certain line of the in-vestigation? Anything to indicate there's something in particular her mind is resisting."
Still frowning, Max said, "I know she blacked out the day she arrived, probably here in the house. She was here today when she blacked out. But she also blacked out at the Patterson house, after one of her visions."
"The first blackout might have been as much stress as anything else," Galen suggested. "Coming home had to be incredibly difficult, especially when she knew one of the things she'd have to do was look for her mother's remains."
"No kidding." Max glanced at his watch. "She's been out an hour and a half now. That's too long."
"We'll give it another half hour. If she's not awake by then and we aren't able to wake her, there is one thing we can try. Another psychic, a telepath, can try to contact her mind directly."
"Would that be you?"
"I'm not a telepath. But we do have another team member here undercover who is." Somewhat dryly, Galen added, "Or you could try. Have you, by the way?"
"I'm not even psychic."
"No, but you're linked to her. Have you tried to use that?"
Max looked both startled and a bit annoyed, and avoided Galen's eyes when he said, "She won't let me in. Won't even let me get close. Sometimes her guard drops and I catch a glimpse, the flicker of a thought, but then—Anyway, how the hell do you know about that?"
"Sorry, but there aren't many secrets among a team of psychics, especially when so many of them are telepaths. Bishop knew she was linked to someone else and had been for quite a while. We guessed it was you."
"Bishop," Max muttered.
Not really surprised by the reaction, Galen said lightly, "I know, he can be a pain in the ass. Very irritating to have to deal with somebody who isn't often wrong. But in case you weren't sure about it, Nell isn't in love with him. He just inspires an incredible brand of loyalty from his agents. I've never seen anything like it, actually. Probably has a lot to do with the fact that he pretty much single-handedly changed their lives."
Max glanced at him, then cleared his throat and changed the subject. "You said we should consider whatever Nell might have been doing or saying when she collapsed, right?"
"It might give us a piece of the puzzle, yeah."
"Okay. Do you happen to know if the earlier blackouts here at the house came with any warning?"
"I'm pretty sure both of them did. I know the second one did, because I talked to her just before, and she warned me one was coming."
"Just the usual blackouts, the sort of thing she's experienced most of her life."
"Right."
"But when she went out at the Patterson house, and again when she went out here today, it was without the kind of warning she was accustomed to. I know she came out of the vision today with a bad headache, but she insisted it wasn't one warning of a blackout. Still, it was bad enough that she was pale and afterward more than once seemed to lose the thread of the conversation." He didn't add that she had also been less guarded, a vulnerability he had taken advantage of by pressing her to talk to him about their relationship. "She seemed… distracted, almost as if she was trying to listen to something."
"What did she see at the Patterson house?"
"A very intense vision in which Hailey, as a young girl, was… involved… with a man who liked to play sadomasochistic games."
Galen nodded. "Today she was with you and the sheriff at the Lynch house. A vision, but no blackout, at least not immediately. All she told me when she filed her so-called report after you guys got back here was that she had a vision apparently unrelated to Lynch's death. A vision that told her Hailey and Sheriff Cole had been involved at one time. She said the vision was odd, that it felt different, but she didn't explain just how."
"The commonality seems to be Hailey," Max said slowly. "Hailey and her relationships."
"You sound doubtful."
"It doesn't feel right somehow. I can barely accept the possibility that Hailey might be hiding somewhere nearby taking out the men who treated her like dirt. But that doesn't explain Nell's blackouts. Both times she went out with little or no warning, the visions she had recently experienced were unusual in some way: the intensity of the vision in the Patterson house, and then—what was odd about this latest vision—seeing Ethan and Hailey in a completely different place."
"So you think it's not so much what she saw as how she saw it that might have triggered the blackouts?"
"All I know is that Nell is experiencing things she never has before. It's not just a case of the blackouts getting more frequent and more intense, it's also that the visions themselves are changing. But even that doesn't make a lot of sense. Sometimes it seems her abilities are getting more and more powerful, and at other times they seem almost weakened… muffled."
"As if there's some outside influence at work?
Someone or something blocking her at least part of the time?"
"Is that possible? I've read a lot about the paranormal, but the research on anything like that is sketchy—"
"The official research, yeah. Luckily, we have our own. And, yes, it is definitely possible for a psychic to be blocked or influenced by another psychic. And we do have reason to believe that this killer, whether it's Hailey or someone else, is a pretty powerful psychic."
Max stared at him for a long moment, then said, "Then maybe that's it. Look, what if we're all—even Nell—looking at this whole thing the wrong way? What if we're only seeing what somebody wants us to see? What if Nell is so certain it's Hailey because that's what the real killer wants her to believe?"
Slowly, Galen said, "The original profile said the killer was likely to be a cop. Mix investigative knowledge and savvy with a psychic's ability to manipulate, and—"
"And you've got a killer leading you around by the nose," Max finished grimly.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nell.
She wanted to ignore the summons. The pain wasn't so bad here where it was dark and peaceful and she wasn't worried about anything. Not about killers or her own evil bloodline, or even whether it was possible for her to walk away from Max this time. None of that bothered her. Everything was fine.
You have to wake up, Nell.
A stab of pain sliced through her mind like a burning knife, and Nell winced, tried to retreat further into the darkness. If that whisper would just go away and leave her alone…
There isn't much time left.
She could feel herself being pulled, drawn relentlessly from the peaceful darkness toward the cold uncertainty of consciousness, and she resisted as hard as she could.
You need—
Nell opened her eyes and sat up in the same motion. Her head throbbed immediately, but at least it was a dull ache, soreness rather than pain. Her entire body felt sore, now that she thought about it. The question was, why?
Rubbing her temples gingerly, Nell murmured, "What the hell happened?"
She was in her lamplit room, on her bed. Covered by a quilt, still dressed except for her shoes. When she managed to bring her watch into focus, it told her only that she had been out for at least an hour and possibly longer.
Probably longer.
Jeez, what had set her off this time? She had been downstairs talking to Max, hadn't she? Sitting drinking coffee. Or had they been standing? He'd insisted they talk about them, about their relationship, and her head had really been hurting then, and—and what?
Another of these weird and sudden blackouts, apparently. Either she was simply more tired than she had realized—or her brain was getting seriously fatigued from the too-frequent use of her abilities.
The latter possibility was more than a little frightening, but Nell shoved it grimly aside. There was nothing she could do about that now. Nothing.
Nothing?
The whisper was so soft she was almost certain she hadn't really heard it. Almost certain. Still, she listened intently for several moments, and all she heard now was, faintly, the murmur of voices downstairs, male voices. She didn't really have much extra energy to enhance her hearing, but what little she could use allowed her to be fairly sure that Max was talking to someone.
Galen.
"Oh, great." Not exactly the last two men in the world she'd want discussing the situation—and, undoubtedly, her—but close enough.
Nell pushed the quilt away and slid carefully from the bed. A shower, that's what she needed. A long, hot shower to wash away the cobwebs and soreness. Maybe then she could at least start to figure out what was wrong with her.
Then again, maybe she already knew.
"She's awake," Max said.
Galen nodded, then listened for a moment. "In the shower. You know her better than I do, but I'd say she won't be too happy to find us down here talking."
"She'll be prickly as hell," Max agreed. "But I think we both agree it's time to put at least some of our cards on the table. Especially if there's even the possibility that Nell's being influenced by someone else."
"That's the part she's going to hate."
"Yeah. I know." Max shook his head. "The question is, who's doing the influencing? Even with the profile… is it more or less likely that it could be Hailey rather than a stranger?"
"On the face of it, more likely. The kind of influence and control we're talking about is rare even among psychics, seldom possible except between mates or blood siblings."
"But?"
"But, aside from the fact that Nell's certain Hailey was never psychic, over the years we've encountered more than a few predators whose psychic abilities were seemingly enhanced by the sheer twisted evil of their minds. They were capable of some incredible things— including forms of mind control."
"It makes sense. And I guess the killer began trying to influence Nell because he became suspicious of her. But what would have given her away?"
"There's no way to be sure about that." Galen hesitated, then added, "But we've known almost from day one that the killer was watching Nell, or was at least once." He explained about the photo Shelby had taken and the consensus as to its probable meaning.