“Would you believe me if I said yes?” I asked with a wry curve of my lips.
“No,” he replied, mirroring my smile. Pausing, he caught my wrist, making me stop and face him. “You don’t have to do this. No one is asking you to.”
“Yes, I do. I have to know what’s happening. I need to know if these dreams, visions, whatever the hell they are, are somehow a link to Samson, or if I’m just going insane. If there’s even some small chance that this could help you catch that crazy bastard, it’s reason enough.”
For a moment Holbrook looked like he was going to argue the matter, perhaps even walk me back out to the SUV himself and lock me inside, but then his shoulders slumped just a little and his lips spread in a thin smile. It was an expression I was all too familiar with, my grandfather had worn it often whenever he inevitably gave in to my grandmother’s wishes, no matter how much he was against them.
“Anyone ever tell you you’re stubborn?”
“As a mule,” I replied, grinning.
Looking ahead, I saw Dr. Cole waiting at the end of the hallway in front of a large set of doors, the garish fluorescent lighting overhead gleaming on the brushed metal, distorting her reflection.
“Everything all right?” she asked as we approached, my steps still echoing with hesitancy.
“Fine,” Holbrook and I chimed in tandem, though neither one of us sounded very sure of our answer.
Quirking an eyebrow at our response, Dr. Cole moved to push open the door, and then paused. Turning to look at me she asked, “You’re not a fainter are you?”
“Umm…no?” I replied. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“Good. The last civilian I had in here was a fainter. Cracked his head on the floor. Blood everywhere. It was a damn mess.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
The scent of disinfectant was almost overpowering in the exam room. The smell seemed to crawl up my nose and camp somewhere in the back of my throat, coating my tongue with an oily film that made me want to take a scrub brush to it. And maybe a gallon of mouthwash.
The body laid out on the slab was a portrait of brutality painted in shades of deathly grey and brilliant slashes of red where someone had torn his skin to ribbons. I’d seen enough episodes of CSI to know that the dark red and purple bruises marking the underside of his body were from the blood pooling during rigor mortis. Savage lacerations had turned his face into a bloody ruin, exposing the stark gleam of bone and muscle beneath. Dread settled, cold and heavy, in my stomach at the sight of him. Even through the bloody mess of his face I could recognize him from my dream. Dreams, visions, whatever they were: I had some kind of link with Samson.
Bile rose up the back of my throat, bitter and acidic on my tongue, before I could force it back down with an audible gag.
“If you’re going to vomit, please try to get it in the trash can,” Dr. Cole said, gesturing across the room.
Shaking my head, I swallowed again and said, “Just give me a minute. I’ll be fine.”
I’d witnessed the inevitable end for us all more times than I cared to count. I’d even seen images of Samson’s savagery before, but bearing witness to it in person was different. The young man who lay cold and broken before me was a stranger, and yet I felt a kind of twisted kinship to him. That could have been my body on the slab eight years ago; it could have been my grandmother standing in my place, looking down at the atrocity Samson had wrought.
“Do you recognize him?” Holbrook asked, his words holding far more weight than their simplicity would suggest. He stood closer than I remembered, a hand hovering at my elbow, not quite touching me, but close enough to send flickering sparks of energy along my skin.
My nod was little more than a minute dip of my head, but Holbrook’s stiff stance let me know he had caught it. “Yes, he’s the last one I saw.”
Straightening my shoulders and curling my hands into fists as my sides, I stepped up to the metal exam table. The overhead lights gleamed on the brushed metal surface of the table, the refracted light making his skin almost appear a normal shade. If I ignored the gruesome injuries marring his face and abdomen, I could almost believe he was merely sleeping. Before I knew what I was doing, I had uncurled the fingers of one hand and raised them to brush a lock of hair back from his forehead, revealing the white gleam of an old scar just above his eyebrow.
“How old was he?” I heard myself ask as though I was listening to someone else, my voice distant and thick with emotion.
After flipping through the man’s chart, the rustle of papers loud in the otherwise silent room, Dr. Cole answered, “Twenty-six. His name was Nicholas Evans.”
Just two years younger than me.
“Nicholas,” I said, stroking through the soft curls of his hair. “Did your friends call you Nick? I bet your mom called you her Little Nicky.”
Holbrook stepped up beside me to lay a gentle hand on my elbow. “Riley…you don’t have to do this.”