String of tears, p.8
String of Tears, page 8
Which still doesn’t matter, considering I’ll feel horrible if something happens to him. Stefan sighed. I presume we need to put a watch on her then.
Yeah, Maddy agreed. She hesitated and then added, If I had a little more confidence in that energy, I would have put a hook in there, she noted. But I definitely sensed resistance, as if any hooks I put in would have caused some reaction, and it wouldn’t be a reaction we would have liked.
We never like any of these reactions, he muttered. And now you’re just worrying me about what else is going on, whether Jewel herself has been targeted by a serial killer or if there’s something even more bizarre. Which, considering all we’ve gone through, it’s pretty hard to imagine anything more bizarre. And yet …
I know, she agreed immediately. Anyway, I’ll let you get back to sleep, she said, with a note of laughter, presuming that you can, of course, and I will follow up in a little bit.
Only with her permission though, right?
Yes, she confirmed immediately. For some reason that’s the only way this will work.
It’s for the best. We have to keep her under watch and more. So, having her permission to go into her space will go a long way toward building trust, but, at the same time, nothing is really easy about this, if we are thinking something is going on.
Definitely something is going on, but—
I know. I know. We don’t know what. We don’t know who. We don’t know why. We don’t know anything. The usual.
Maybe contact Grant, she suggested suddenly.
He froze. Why would your husband need to be brought into this? Stefan asked curiously.
I’ll fill him in on the case, but it feels as if he needs to be a part of this.
Oh, I won’t argue that. All hands are welcome.
He won’t be terribly happy, period, she said, with a chuckle.
That’s because his hands are always full, Stefan murmured. I’m not sure you’re ever doing him a favor by bringing him into these things.
No, no favors at all, she confirmed, but, at some point in time, we have a choice to make, and, in this case, I don’t feel that we have a choice at all.
Long after Stefan had disconnected, Maddy sat here in the quiet of her bedroom alcove, a little space she had created just for herself. It wasn’t much, just one of those comfy round chairs, a tiny little coffee table, and a warm glowing light above, but the massive window that looked to the sky made this space truly hers. Sensing a presence, she turned slowly to watch Grant approach.
“You okay?” he asked.
“As okay as I can be.”
“Another one?”
She chuckled. “Always another one.”
“Yes, but some of them really bother you and yet others? Not so much.”
“I know,” she murmured. “This one’ll bother me, mostly because I’ve never seen whatever this is that I am looking at. Now, as soon as I can figure that out, then I think we can relax.”
“But, if it’s something you have to figure out,” he noted, his voice rising in alarm, “then it’s not good news.”
“I did tell Stefan that he needed to contact you,” she admitted. “I’m sorry.”
He stared at her in the darkness. “That bad?”
“Yes,” she murmured. “And I don’t know if this woman even has a clue.”
“Well, if she has you by her side, chances are she will be all right. Is her life in danger?”
Maddy paused for a moment and then replied, “It’s worse than that. Her soul is in danger.”
Chapter 8
Jewel lay there, dry-eyed, for a long moment, trying to figure out just what the heck had gone on. Who was this person, and how powerful could somebody be to do something like that from afar? When she heard footsteps coming up the stairs, she frowned. They were heavier than normal, and she immediately rolled over and dropped to the floor on the other side of the bed.
“That’s encouraging,” Hurricane noted, as he stepped forward into her bedroom. “At least you have the natural instinct to run and hide if something’s wrong.” He leaned over the bed to see her on the floor. “But you do realize that’s really not a very good hiding spot, right?”
“I heard you coming up,” she replied, “but you didn’t sound right.”
He stared at her for a moment. “In what way did I not sound right?”
She hesitated, shrugged, and added, “Heavy, uncoordinated, not all there, like you were lumbering instead of the coordinated person that I have seen up until now.”
“Interesting, maybe because I just woke up,” he murmured. “It is me, and I see you met Dr. Maddy.”
At that, she stared at him for a moment and then bolted onto the bed. “That really was her, wasn’t it?”
“It absolutely was her,” he confirmed, with a smile. “She told me that she scanned you.”
“Yeah, and what does that even mean? She was looking to see whether somebody’s energy was in there or if anything odd was going on. She couldn’t figure out some of the stuff though.”
“I heard that.”
“What do you mean, you heard that?” she asked, her eyes going wide.
“Stefan told me.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” She held up her hand. “How do these people talk without me hearing anything?”
He looked at her. “Ever hear of a telephone?” She glared at him. “Also both Stefan and Maddy can communicate telepathically.”
Her breath came out in a whoosh, and she sat down on the bed beside him. “Seriously?”
“Oh, very seriously,” he said. “The way they do it and the reason they do it is also very serious.”
“You don’t want to explain what that is, do you?” When he shook his head, she sighed. “You guys have secrets, and that’s not fair.”
At that, he gave a bark of laughter and added, “Look who’s talking.”
“But I don’t know what my secrets are,” she argued. “I don’t know what’s going on here.”
“I hear you,” he murmured. “The good news is, Maddy doesn’t know either.”
“How on earth is that good news?” Jewel cried out. “If you guys have all these kinds of skills, surely that’s not good news.”
“Oh, it depends. She could at least say that you weren’t doing something or weren’t being held hostage energy-wise.”
“Great, so she ruled out something that I didn’t even know needed to be ruled out.”
His lips twisted. “Maybe, but the bottom line is, Maddy’s not done. She’s done what she could for the moment, and she’ll check back in on your energy in a little bit.”
“Okay, but that didn’t sound terribly much like what I thought. Although she did mention that she would do that earlier.”
“It’s all right,” Hurricane reassured her. “They’re good people, and they’re there to help.”
“Maybe.”
Just then her doorbell rang. She bolted to her feet, racing toward the closet.
He caught her halfway across the loft, pulled her into his arms, and whispered, “Easy, take it easy.”
But she was shivering, staring up at him. “Dear God, I don’t even know why I’m reacting like this.”
He looked at her and nodded. “What you’ve been through would make anybody react like this. I’ll go answer the door because I want to know who’s there. If you don’t want to know, you can stay up here, while I talk to them. Then I’ll come up and talk to you. Or you can come down with me, and we’ll open the door together. I’m right here.”
She took a deep breath and exhaled. “The latter. I need to know. I need to stop reacting and instead take charge of this.”
“Yeah, that sounds perfect in theory,” he agreed, “but you need to go a little easier on yourself. This isn’t something that you can just naturally hand over control and expect to be perfect at right off the bat.”
“Maybe not.” She gave him a blunt stare. “But I remember just enough that whatever is going on is confusing me.”
*
“Confusing is an interesting term,” he noted, as he looked at her. “Come on. Let’s go down and answer the door.”
The doorbell rang again and then a third time.
He called out, “Hang on. I’m coming.”
When he got to the door and opened it, two men stood there, glaring at Hurricane. When they caught sight of Jewel, their faces cleared.
“Dear God.” They stepped into the living room, throwing their arms around her.
She submitted to their hugs, but Hurricane could see from the confusion on her face that she had no idea who they were. He studied them both energy-wise as much as he could, and, of course, their energy was locked down and not open to being shared. He wondered if it was because the two of them were partners in a community where maybe being homosexual wasn’t welcome.
When they stepped back, with big grins on their faces, one of the men asked Hurricane, “Excuse me, do you want to identify who you are?”
At that, the bigger of the two turned on him and added, “Who are you? She never told us anything about a guy being with her.”
“What did she say to you?” Hurricane asked.
He shrugged. “She left us a weird message, but we ignored it at first because it wasn’t something she would normally do.”
At that, Hurricane looked at him and frowned. “Okay, I need a bit more of an explanation.”
“You’re not getting any explanation,” the other man declared, “until we get one.”
Hurricane looked over at Jewel and asked, “Do you want to explain it or shall I?”
“I think you need to,” she said. She looked at the two men, then apologetically added, “I’m sorry. I’ve been in an accident and have amnesia. So I don’t know who you guys are.”
Hurricane watched the shock and disbelief on both their faces. He immediately believed that they knew nothing about it. He closed the door. “Come on in. I’ll try to explain as best I can.”
Both of them immediately stepped in farther, their gazes going from her to him and back again.
“How does she know you?” the first man asked.
“First off, my name is Hurricane,” he shared. “I was part of a group she had already contacted over a problem she was having,” he explained, without giving away too much information. “And since we were already friends, it seemed like a good idea to come. Unfortunately, when I got here, she was in the hospital.”
“The hospital?” the smaller of the two men repeated, his hands going to his mouth, before turning to look at her.
She gave him a wan smile. “Yeah, apparently I was found dead on the highway,” she replied, with a careless air. “They took me to the morgue, and … I woke up in a hospital bed a couple days later.”
The men just stared at her, their gazes turning from shock to horror to disbelief.
She shrugged. “I would expect that look on your faces too. Yet Hurricane’s here. He arrived in time to pick me up when I got discharged from the hospital. The detective was here earlier, and he’s the one who filled me in on what happened—or at least what they know to this point.”
At that, the larger man introduced himself. “I’m Charles. So what on earth is going on?”
“I don’t know,” Hurricane admitted, “but what she told you right now is the truth. When I saw her in the hospital, she had just woken back up again. Her body is covered in bruises and nobody knows whether somebody tried to murder her or she suffered an attack that dropped her into a very deep coma. That theory would mean that the paramedics and others didn’t check her vitals all that closely and pronounced her dead, where she was left in a body bag in the morgue.”
At that, the other man started to shake. Charles wrapped his arms around him and said, “It’s okay. She’s okay now.”
“Oh my God though,” he replied, “what she must have suffered.”
“The good news is,” Jewel noted, “I don’t remember a thing.”
“Maybe that is good news,” Charles agreed, studying her face. “You also look a little different,” he said cautiously, “not a lot different, but a little bit.”
“When you say a little bit, what do you mean?” she asked.
“Your skin is whiter than white,” he stated, “but I guess maybe hanging out in a body bag will do that.” He grimaced, an odd look on his face. “I really don’t know.”
“The hair?” she asked.
“You changed your hair just before whatever happened to you,” he stated. “Maybe you don’t remember that.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t remember that.”
“I asked you about it, and you got a little put off and didn’t say anything.”
“When did you see her last?” Hurricane asked Charles.
“Four days ago, probably right before whatever happened to her.”
“Where did you see her?”
“Right here, at her place. She was working on some jewelry, and she told me that she was feeling off and just needed a break. I asked her if I could help her with anything. Jewel said she was fine, just really tired. So I left her alone, fairly early on that evening,” he explained, frowning. “Now I’ll feel terrible, thinking, if I’d stayed, I could have stopped whatever happened.”
“Or maybe you would have been hurt too,” Jewel stated, reaching out and gently patting him on the cheek. “We can’t have that. What would Lucas do without you?”
At that, Lucas looked over at Charles, and his bottom lip trembled.
Hurricane held back saying anything, but she clearly remembered them both. Charles had introduced himself, but she had identified the other guy on her own.
Charles reached out a hand, gripped Lucas’s hand, and stated, “I’m fine. Nothing happened.”
Lucas nodded. “I get that, but still …”
They both turned and looked at Hurricane. “So now what?”
“We’re here, trying to piece back together her life,” he shared. “Did she tell you whether she was being followed, was worried about something, or anything along that line that would have made you suspicious?”
At that, Charles and Lucas both shook their heads. “No,” Charles replied. “Honestly I would have stayed to help if I thought something was going on.”
“And they would have,” Jewel confirmed from the sidelines. “We’ve known each other for years.”
At that, Lucas looked at her eagerly. “You remember that much, right?”
She gave him a half smile. “I remember all kinds of things,” she said, “and none of it is particularly useful. For instance, I clearly remember last Halloween, when you went as a hula girl and lost your skirt.”
Immediately his face flushed. “Why, out of everything, do you remember that? So humiliating.”
She burst out laughing, and even Charles groaned, then added, “Honestly, I thought it was terribly cute.”
Lucas shot him a look and said, “Yeah, that’s just because you were entranced with getting an eyeful.”
“Didn’t need an eyeful,” Charles noted cheerfully. “I get an eyeful all the time. But the fact that you were so embarrassed was pretty damn cute.”
“Humiliating,” Lucas muttered. He turned and glared at Hurricane. “Why would she remember that?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, with a headshake. “What else do you remember?” he asked Jewel, turning to look at her.
She shrugged. “Lots of evenings with coffee and herb tea.” She frowned, looked over at Charles. “You like peppermint.”
“I do,” he admitted, looking at her carefully. “Anything else?”
“Bits and pieces, events that we went to, musicals we’ve attended together.” She hesitated, pondering it. “I mean, it seems like we were always busy and having fun.”
“Exactly,” Charles agreed, “always busy, having fun. We always promoted your jewelry designs, and you were always there for us, for our artwork.” He turned and looked at Hurricane. “Both Lucas and I are artists. We’ve been together for many, many years, and we’ve known Jewel for almost as long.”
“Good.” Hurricane nodded. “She needs friends, and right now she’ll need you even more.”
At that, Lucas turned to him. “Do you think whoever attacked her will come back?”
“We don’t even know whether she was attacked or, shall we say, spending an evening with somebody….and maybe it just went bad.
“But why wouldn’t they have taken her to the hospital?” Charles pointed out.
But Lucas offered, “They wouldn’t have, if they couldn’t afford to have anybody question them. Then the question really is, do we know who she might have been dating in this last while?”
At that, Hurricane emphatically nodded. “Exactly, any information you can tell us about her previous days or weeks would be a big help.”
The two men looked at each other, and then Lucas shrugged and replied, “Honestly I don’t think she was dating anybody.” He turned to look at her. “Ever since you broke it off with Darren, you’ve been reticent about hooking up again. We kept trying with lots of our friends, but nothing seemed to work out.”
She nodded. “I kind of remember that. A bit of a running joke, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Charles agreed. “We wanted to see you happy, and you kept pushing us away, telling us that you were happy alone because being alone was better than being with somebody terrible.”
She smiled. “That sounds very familiar.”
“Good,” Charles declared. “At least if you remember that much, we know you’re still there with us.”
“No, I’m definitely here,” she stated. “I just don’t know what happened. However, the detective did suggest this weird coma disease thing, which might leave holes in your memory at the same time,” she noted. “I haven’t … I haven’t figured out enough of it yet to understand all the implications.”
“Whatever it is”—Charles shivered—“it sounds terrible.” And, at that, Charles walked over and wrapped his arms around her. “I’m so sorry,” he muttered. “We would never want anything bad to happen to you.”
Hurricane watched as she wrapped her arms around him and held him close. “We’ve been friends for a long time. I’m so glad that you popped back into the loft right now,” she said. “I was starting to wonder if anybody in my world was out there.”
