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“He’s a failure. I’ll take care of this.”
“What the fuck? Stop—”
After that there were only the choked-off screams. They echoed in Luke’s head as he turned into the graveled driveway of the nondescript rental house. For a moment he sat quietly behind the wheel.
The memories of his missing night seemed to be coming back slowly in his dreams. The problem was that he had no way to separate fact from fantasy. But if even some of the bloody visions were real, he could not avoid the logical conclusion: he was a psychically enhanced assassin who had killed two people, escaped, and gone rogue. And now, it seemed, he had killed again.
This town was too small for a man with a Jekyll-and-Hyde problem. It was time to move on.
CHAPTER THREE
Talia poured aglass of wine and carried it to the dining counter. She sat down in front of her laptop, slipped on her black-framed glasses, and opened the video chat.
Pallas Llewellyn and Amelia Rivers, the other two members of theLost Night Filespodcast team, were already in the virtual room. Ambrose Drake, the author Pallas had met in the course of investigating the Carnelian case, was also there. They were a tightly knit group.
A little more than seven months ago she and Amelia and Pallas had been summoned to an abandoned hotel in the desert with the promise of job offers. The three of them had never met until that afternoon. They had parked their cars at the dusty entrance, introduced themselves to each other, and walked through the doorway of the early-twentieth-century sanatorium turned failed resort.
She remembered thinking how deep the shadows were in the lobby. With the exception of fleeting scenes in her dreams, that was the last clear memory she could summon until she and Pallas andAmelia had been awakened by the earthquake and raging fire that had destroyed the hotel.
The quake had struck in the early hours of the following morning. She and Amelia and Pallas had been roused by the tremors of the earth, the rumble of falling debris, and the smell of smoke. They had been bound to hospital gurneys in a lab that looked as if it dated from the early twentieth century.
Working together, they had managed to escape, but in the end the fire had destroyed whatever evidence there might have been that would have given them the answers they needed. No one believed their story. The only thing they knew for certain was that they had changed. The minor psychic vibe each had possessed—a preternatural sensitivity that had seemed to be little more than especially keen intuition—had been enhanced in disturbing and unsettling ways.
Ambrose had not been with them at Lucent Springs, but he had experienced a similar episode of amnesia. He had awakened on a beach in San Diego. Like Talia and the others, he had discovered that his senses had been enhanced.
The four of them were now bound together by the mystery of their lost nights and the secrets they shared. They were not only a team working to find answers; they had become a chosen family.
“We are getting a lot of response to the Carnelian case episodes,” Pallas said.
“Probably the Dark Academia vibe,” Ambrose said dryly. “That particular Gothic subgenre is big in fiction these days.”
“You ought to know,” Talia said. “You’re the author.”
The podcast series covering the Carnelian case had dropped a week ago. It had brought in a lot of new subscribers as well as some interesting leads, including the one from the anonymous informant who had contacted her.
“We got lucky with the Phoenix tip,” Pallas continued. “Ambrose and I talked to a woman named Charlotte Andrews. She’s a fan of the podcast. She remembered that Brooke Kendrick took a psych test that sounds a lot like the one the four of us remember taking back in college.”
“You were right, Talia,” Amelia said. “That old test is the through line, the one connection that links all of us.”
“Five coincidences is about four too many,” Ambrose said. “If the people who grabbed us are working from a list of names of potential research subjects, that test has to be the source. At the time we were told that it was supposed to provide career counseling, but it looks like that was a cover for what was really being measured.”
“They were searching for people who had some degree of innate psychic talent,” Amelia said. “What is equally interesting is that they must have been convinced they had a way to measure an individual’s paranormal profile.”
“Once Ambrose suggested that the people who kidnapped us had to be working off a list, I remembered that test,” Talia said. “I knew that had to be the connection.”
“What made you so sure?” Ambrose asked.
Talia shrugged. “Damned if I know. It just felt... right.”
A small but distinct thrill whispered through her. She sipped some wine and let herself take a moment to savor the positive side of her ability to find that which was lost or hidden—the flash of satisfaction that came with a successful search, at least one that did not end with a dead body. It was why she had become a librarian after graduating from college. A stint in an academic library had been followed by a string of research jobs. Admittedly, none of them had ended well—commitment issues, according to her therapist. Nevertheless, the various positions in both the private and government sectors hadall involved finding answers. She had enjoyed that part. Success had always given her a nice little rush, a sensation very different from the shock that had struck that afternoon when she had located Ray Clayton in a trash bin.
Unfortunately, tonight the dark fallout from the investigation earlier that day would outweigh the small thrill she got from confirmation that the old college psych test was the source of the list.
“Okay, we have the origin point of the list, but that doesn’t get us any closer to finding it,” she said.
“It’s a place to start,” Pallas said.
Amelia’s expression sharpened. “The question I keep coming back to is, why come looking for us now? It’s been over a decade since any of us took that test.”
