Living with the Dead

HOPE





After getting all she could from the officer in the coffee shop, Hope made a pit stop at the True News office. Checking in, getting her mail . . . Hardly critical under the circumstances, but if Robyn was a fugitive and Hope was her best friend in L.A., eventually the cops were going to find their way to her door. And when they did, she might need to prove she’d been going about her day, business as usual.

After that token appearance, Hope and Karl returned to the club. He stood watch as she circled the exterior trying to find the place closest to the crime scene. If she could find it, she might catch a vision of what had happened last night. It took some fine-tuning to pinpoint the spot, but eventually the vision came.

Hope saw a dark room, with Portia leaning over what looked like a table. Doing lines, it seemed. She was anxious, worried about being caught, feeling guilty, telling herself this would be the last time. At a noise, Portia had jumped, a small burst of chaos exploding. She wheeled to see someone in the doorway.

“Hello?” she said, forcing attitude into her voice. “This room’s taken.”

Whatever she saw, Hope didn’t. A vision wasn’t like the reconstruction of an event, where she could move around and see the whole thing. It was a single-camera scene. What she saw is what she got—whatever angle, clarity and length.

As usual, her focus was on the victim.

“I need to use your cell phone,” the intruder said. It sounded like a woman, the voice pitched high with stress, the waves flowing off her twice as strong as Portia’s.

“Like hell. There’s a pay phone in the—”

“I need your cell phone.”

“Buy your own, bitch. Now get the hell out before I call my bodyguard.”

“You didn’t bring one. You only take one when you want to show off.”

Portia inhaled sharply, chaos blasting off her. “Wh—what—”

“It’s called a gun. Now give me the f*cking cell phone.”

Portia opened her mouth. Only a split-second shriek escaped. Then the chaos surged, so strong it blocked the rest of the vision. Hope had to replay it twice to see the ending. Portia started to scream, reeling back, then the first bullet hit and the scream died in her throat. A second bullet struck as she was already going down, the silenced shots barely more than loud puffs of air.

It was over quickly, the chaos surge brief but powerful, that final explosion . . . exquisite.

The first time Hope had seen a vision of a recent death, there’d been no pleasure in it. Too intense. Too uncomfortable. She’d taken solace in that. It was one thing to get a thrill from hearing strangers arguing. But to enjoy another’s death? She wouldn’t know how to deal with that.

Soon she had to. As her powers grew, she started to enjoy death. It was the purest, most perfect chaos imaginable. The ultimate high.

Even if she stopped chasing weird tales for True News and investigating rogue supernaturals for the council, she couldn’t escape the experience of death. Passing the site of a recent car crash was enough. Short of locking herself into a room for life, she had no choice—she had to learn to deal with it.

With Karl’s help, she was learning to accept the demon in her. She’d come to think of it that way: the demon. That didn’t mean it was a separate entity—she could never make that mistake. It was as much part of her as Karl’s wolf was of him. But it didn’t need to rule who she was. She had to learn to appease it and control it. Accept the demon, master it and use it to her advantage, to protect herself and help others.

If it sounded like she had it all worked out, she didn’t. Intellectually, she understood the lessons Karl taught her about acceptance and control. But that didn’t keep her from feeling like a ghoul.

When Karl came looking for her behind the club, she was huddled against the alley wall, hugging her knees, forcing herself to replay the vision over and over, through that endless cycle of bliss and self-loathing until she’d wrested every last clue from it, fighting and cursing when he hefted her over his shoulder and carried her away.

So, no, she didn’t have it worked out. And she was starting to think she never would.