AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I exhaled, relieved as he landed on his knees, drawing breath. Annalise let him be, trying to steady her shaking hand with her other one. She looked furious, but now it wasn’t Hansen that was on top of her list.
“Oh shit,” Hansen coughed. He turned around, slumping down on his back, only his bent knees showing over the table. I silently and gently took Annalise’s arm and guided her over to the chair I’d been sitting in.
“Now I get it,” Hansen wheezed from the floor. “The active versus passive thing.”
Annalise looked at me with scorn again. “Weren’t you supposed to tell him these things?”
“Haven’t had the time,” I said, taking her shaking hand in mine. “He seems to figure these things out himself anyway.”
Hansen put his elbow on the table before he eased himself up a moment later. “And I bet you used to be a mender,” he said while looking at Annalise before blinking hard several times, trying to focus properly. She had not gone easy on him.
“How’d you know?” Annalise asked.
“Your equally pleasant dispositions,” he said, pointing at us both with an unsteady finger, actually looking a bit drunk. That made Annalise snicker, though. A good sign, I hoped. He was, as a matter of fact, right. Before her academic career, she had done the same as me for years. It was one of the reasons we got along so well. We had a lot in common.
“See?” I told her and let go of her hand, walking around her chair, looking down at Hansen who was slowly getting up from the floor.
“Are you all right?” I asked, and got a thumbs-up instead of a verbal answer as he managed to get to his feet, before passing Annalise and collapsing into one of the other chairs.
Annalise turned in her chair, looking up at me, her eyes wide again. The feeling of dread managed to grow at record speed in me before she got a word out.
“My God, Maggie, you slept with a cop?”
“What?” I actually squawked the word out. Was she psychic now as well?
“Cops are to be avoided,” she said as if I hadn’t heard her earlier, and as if there wasn’t one seated three feet away from her. “You don’t do that by taking them to your bed.”
I simply gave up. Nothing got past her. “I think it was the other way around,” I murmured.
“Not the second time,” Hansen commented.
“Maggie!”Annalise exclaimed with disapproval.
“Oh, thanks for your help,” I snarled at him.
“You’re welcome.”
I sighed, exasperated, and sat down on the armrest of her chair. “How did you know?”
“I can smell your perfume on him.” She shook her head and patted my arm. “This isn’t good.”
“Calm down,” I said, looking down at her lined and worried face. “It’s just sex. And we have other problems, remember?”
“Seems we got a little sidetracked,” Hansen said, politely using ‘we’ instead of Annalise. He made a grimace of discomfort as he changed his position a little, causing less strain on his back. Other than that, he seemed fine. Not being able to breathe properly had likely been worse than the collisions with the bookshelf.
“Please, Annalise,” I tried again. “There are three young men trapped inside their bodies. I have no idea how to help them even if we do find their attacker.”
“And you think that this person will do this again?” she asked.
“Three victims is not a coincidence,” Hansen chimed in. “If there are more like them, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re in danger.”
She gave him a stern look but considered what he said nonetheless. “Are you saying you need someone to be bait?” she asked and looked up at me again. There was something in her voice that told me her help on this depended on what my answer to that was. Something more important than the three men and their current situation.
“I’m not going to deny that. This attacker goes after affiliates with very dangerous abilities. If you know about someone in town that fits into that category, they’re going to be targeted whether or not I need them as bait.”
She didn’t say anything at first. She knew I was right, of course, but there was something holding her back. She noticed her shaking hand again and moved it under her thigh. Out of sight was better, it seemed. “There is one person in town that I think might peak this attacker’s particular interests,” she said. “An affiliate who can embed images of such horrors in a person’s mind it has the possible capability of…well…”
“Scaring people to death?” Hansen asked.
