We stood alone in the uneven shadows, mutely straining to glean whatever details we could from the silent landscape. I kept watch on the opposite end of the lake, expecting to catch a glimpse of the uniformed officers through some of the thinner sections of the trees. They had a slightly farther distance to travel, as the trailhead had started closer to our end. However, our momentary diversion, courtesy of the lake inhabitant, should have evened out the time.
Should have, but for some reason the four patrolmen still hadn’t appeared, and a gnawing worry was starting to brew deep in my stomach.
“Something’s wrong,” I whispered to Felicity.
“You feel it too?” she half asked. “I’m freezing.”
Felicity always sensed ethereal presences as coldness, no matter what the temperature truly was. The less pleasant the energy she sensed, the colder she got. She was shivering as she leaned against me.
“The other cops. They should have come around the end of the lake by now, but I don’t see them.”
“What do you think happened?” she questioned through chattering teeth. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet that…”
I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to complete the sentence. A sixteen-pound sledgehammer, swung at full force, impacted squarely with the back of my head, shattering my skull and spilling its contents onto the path. At least I can only imagine that to be the closest example to the unbearable pain that suddenly stole away my breath, my sight, and even my very thoughts.
I doubled forward involuntarily.
Voluntarily.
With extreme prejudice.
I was willing to do almost anything to make it stop. The ripping spasm escaped down my spine and out through every nerve ending I possessed. My knees buckled, and I pitched to the ground. I don’t know if I was screaming; I might have tried, but my hearing had fled with my other senses. Pure indigo darkness tugged at my soul, insisting that I enter into marriage with it.
“ Why, Rowan, why?” Ariel Tanner stood before me shrouded in white lace, wisps of her strawberry-blonde hair floating gently on the breeze.
“ I don’t know, Ariel. I don’t understand,” I groaned.
“ Yes, you do,” her melodious voice sang. “You have always known. Tell me again, what does Rowan mean?”
I choked the answer out from behind blinding pain, “Strength…Security…Protector.”
Ariel smiled knowingly. I began to feel energy flowing from her and into my body, chasing away the ravaging spasms. It was then I realized that the question had not been hers, but my own all along, “Why me? Why was it I who had been chosen to pursue this killer?”
The answer was as simple as my name.
I returned to reality curled into a ball on the mossy ground, breathing in the loamy odor of the soil. Roger’s telltale fire still licked viciously up and down my back, but gone was the unbearable agony that had recently occupied the space where my head should have been. Clarity and focus had crept up from behind and ousted it from power.
“Rowan! Rowan, what’s wrong?!” Felicity was insistently shaking me as she whispered.
I emulated her hushed tone as I climbed to my feet. “How long? How long was I out?”
“A few minutes. You just fell to the ground and curled up into a fetal position. What happened?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. Did the other cops ever come out of the woods?”
“Not that I saw,” she shook her head. “I was a little preoccupied with you, so I wasn’t really watching.”
The night grew suddenly still and impossibly, even more silent. I looked up into the inky sky at the moon bursting into fullness then down to my wide-eyed wife. Less than forty yards away, up the hill and to the right, the fragile pane of silence was shattered into innumerable glistening shards by a woman’s terrified scream.
My heart double-skipped then settled into a steadily increasing rhythm as the adrenalin injected itself into my system. I had no idea what I was going to do. I only knew that before the piercing, horrified sound even began to fade, my legs were pistoning, pushing me up the hill toward its point of origin. Stealth was no longer an issue, and my feet were thudding loudly against the carpet of thick vegetation. I thrust my hands outward, warding off low hanging branches, which sought to assault my face with stinging, leafy slaps as I weaved through the increasingly thick woods.
Somewhat lighter, but no less frantic, footfalls echoed behind my own. I knew them to belong to Felicity as she followed me on my insane headlong rush into whatever peril awaited.
A second shattering scream pierced the air, easily overcoming the manic kettledrum my heart was creating in my ears. Thickly foliaged bushes and young trees had continued to grow more numerous as I pushed farther away from the marked path, and they now presented themselves as an almost unbroken barrier before me. Yellow flickers of light I knew to be burning candles teased me through small bare spots in the oncoming brush. A third scream followed weakly on the heels of the second, telling me I had no time to search for the clearing’s entrance.
Still clueless as to what I was going to do, I tucked my face behind the protection of my arms and plunged forward into the thicket. Burrs and needle-like spines tore and stabbed at my flesh while ground-hugging vines attached themselves ropelike around my ankles. My progress slowed as the sinewy ground cover seemed to pull against me in an attempt to drag me downward. Deep sobbing reached my ears, and I pumped my legs harder, tearing free and bursting scratched and bleeding through to the other side.
When I pulled my wildly lacerated arms from my face, the scene before me was much as I had witnessed in my vision. The young girl was laying on her back near the center of the small clearing, clad in silky white lace. Her glassy eyes stared upward through the dark green canopy of the trees, unblinking. Candles burned, red, yellow, blue, green, and white about the perimeter, black near her head. I had only a split second in which to take in the details of the display as my attention was immediately diverted by yet another fearful scream ice-picking my eardrums.
Special Agent Constance Mandalay stood transfixed on the opposite side of the clearing, her unfired sidearm tossed carelessly to the ground out of reach. Her eyes were wide in absolute terror, and her mouth trembled as thin tears wetted her cheeks. In the dimness of the shadows, I could see a sparkling halo of energy surrounding her. My eyes instinctively followed the crackling ethereal tether that whipped snakelike through the air, ending unsurprisingly at Roger Henderson’s black-cloaked form.
Once again, Agent Mandalay’s lips parted, emitting a high-pitched, unearthly sound. I wondered at why more attention hadn’t been attracted to the small clearing by her night-breaking shrieks. At the same time, I could only fear what might have happened to Ben, Deckert, and the others.
The spidery lightning bolt remained connected between the two of them, pulsing outward from Roger in a quickening pace and snapping violently against her spasmodically jerking body. Visible sparks leapt from each point of contact, hissing through the air and quickly extinguishing before reaching the ground.
She had begun to slap and claw at herself as if something were trying to rend the flesh from her bones. I don’t know what horror she was seeing; it was something meant solely for her. I only knew that whatever innermost personal fear she had kept locked away in the depths of her subconscious was now loose and ravaging her in ways unthinkable. Roger had been the one to release the obscenity, and by continuing to feed its illusory presence, he was going to kill her.