Beau stepped back, gesturing for her to move closer to the easel.
She did so, looking at the sketch that certainly looked like the one she'd drawn. At the scarlet slash across Missy's delicate form. The scarlet that seemed to be... bleeding off the edge of the paper. Almost as if...
Diana took another step and bent slightly forward, looking more closely at the scarlet marring the sketch. It wasn't easy to see, because the scarlet (paint? blood?) had run, distorting the shape of the... letters?
"It wasn't clear at first," Beau said from behind her. "Just looked like a slash of color. Then, slowly, the letters began to appear. That's when I knew you needed to see this."
Absently, she said, "Why not show me on the other side of the door, outside the gray time? It's there too, isn't it?"
"It's there. Here. But it's only a slash of color, no letters. Someone suggested I take a look here in the gray time, in order to see what was really there."
"Someone?"
"Bishop."
Diana wasn't surprised. "I should have known you were a part of that team. He expected you'd see a warning, huh?"
"I think so. And said you needed to see it. He also said it would be tonight, which surprised me. After the day you've had, I didn't think you'd try this so soon."
Diana straightened with a sigh. "I don't suppose he offered any instructions for me?"
"No. Not something he often does in cases like this."
"What's really astonishing is that there are cases like this. All this time, I thought I was alone."
"You aren't."
"Yeah. I'm getting that. I just hope it isn't too late."
"If it helps," Beau said, "my window into the universe tells me that Quentin is your ace."
"I've sort of been getting that too." She drew a breath. "But he is not going to like what I have to do next."
"You know?"
Diana nodded. "I do now. Seeing this... I remember all the nightmares. All the messages Missy has been trying to send me since I got here. Even before I got here. She's been preparing for this all this time. Knowing I'd come. Knowing Quentin would be here as well. She's been... very patient."
"Some things have to happen just the way they happen. In their own time."
"Ironic that I learn that in a place with no time."
"As long as you learn it."
With a sigh, Diana said, "Anybody ever tell you that you sound a lot like a fortune cookie?"
"It has a familiar ring."
"I'm not surprised. And I don't suppose you can answer the one question I came here this time to ask?"
"Sorry."
"That too will come only in its own time?"
"Yes. Until then, you have other things to worry about, Diana. You've already been here too long."
"I know." The cold had been seeping into her very bones, and she felt stiff, almost sluggish. Even her thoughts were beginning to drift.
"Go back. Now."
Diana looked around her, frowning, and said, "I'm a long way from the door."
"Diana—"
"A long way. And I think..."
Tha-thum.
Tha-thum.
"I think it's looking for me."
Beau came awake with the suddenness of one leaving a nightmare, which was pretty close to the truth. He had to move quickly, and yet his body felt stiff and cold, and as he got himself off his bed and started toward the door, he was abruptly aware of a deeper appreciation of the colorful, three-dimensional world around him.
Stupid thing for an artist to need a reminder of, but one visit to the gray time had certainly cured him of any tendency to take this warm and living world for granted.
Even his Hyacinth Room, which he'd thought a bit too fussy for his taste when he first arrived at The Lodge, looked only pleasant and comfortable as he more or less staggered through it to the door.
Christ, he felt as though he'd walked up a mountain. With a Volvo on his back. Pounding heart, shaking legs, weak as a kitten. In thirty-odd years of psychic experiences, some of them truly horrendous, he'd never emerged from anything that had drained him this much.
He wondered if Quentin had any idea of just how strong Diana really was.
He had to traverse a long corridor and climb one flight of stairs to get to Quentin's room, and by the time he reached the door he felt he was only just beginning to function normally. He was still cold, though. Chilled to the bone.
He braced himself with one hand on the doorjamb, deciding that "normal" was probably stretching things more than a bit. Before he could rap on the door it was jerked open, and Quentin stood there. He was fully dressed, wide-awake and tense, and spoke to Beau as though the conversation between them had already started.
"She's in the gray time."
"Yeah. And I'm not so sure she can find her way out of it alone."
"Jesus. Why the hell didn't you—"
"Nothing I could do. I was just doing a version of dream-walking, not there in the flesh. And it's definitely her realm, not mine."
Quentin didn't even question that. "Where was she? Relative to our side, I mean?"
"The conservatory. But I don't know if she's still there. If her instincts are good, she's looking for a place to hide. Whatever's been doing all the killing here — I think it's after her."
"I knew I shouldn't have left her alone. Goddammit, she can't fight this thing without help."
"I don't think she even knew it would happen tonight; she just went looking for the answer to a question. But she's been in the gray time too long, especially here, and it's weakened her. Believe me, I know." He still had one hand braced against the doorjamb for support.
Quentin seemed to notice the artist's appearance for the first time. "You don't look so good."
"I'll be fine. Go after Diana. Your cop pal is still here; I'll get him to roust his people."
"What good will that do? I'm not even sure I'll be able to see her this time — I sure as hell didn't see her leave, and I've been up and wide-awake."
"Ellie Weeks, like all the other victims, was killed by a flesh-and-blood murderer. Whatever's pulling the strings from the other side, that killer's on our side of the door — and if he's hunting Diana, he's visible."
Quentin stared at him for a moment, then went back inside his room long enough to get his gun. Tucking it inside the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, he said, "And he's hunting Diana because only the mind of a powerful medium can give him something he's never had before."
Beau nodded. "A permanent way out, a means to live again in the flesh. And Diana knows it, thanks to a warning from Missy."
After working so hard, fighting her way out of the haze of medications and then struggling to come to terms with what she could do, hiding now was the last thing Diana would have chosen. But —
You have to. Don't let it find you. Not yet.
There was a plan and Diana understood it, if only in its bare outlines. What she understood even more, however, was that she was not strong enough to stand alone, not now, not on this side of the door. That would be a battle she'd lose.
Hide.
It was almost like her own heartbeat, that voice in her mind, as familiar as her own thoughts. And yet separate, distinctly apart. Something she'd heard, listened to, all her life.
Or tried to, through the medicated fog.
"Dad has a lot to answer for," she muttered, stumbling from the conservatory and toward the main building.
He was doing what he thought best.
"He was afraid. I get that."
He was trying to save your life. He'd lost me. And Mommy. He couldn't lose you too.
"There was a better way."
He didn't know that. He believed if you didn't know about me at all, it would hurt less than knowing I'd lived, and was stolen away — and died.