“I don’t want to try,” Logan responded sharply. “All this energy in the air is bad enough without adding in spirits.”
“Hey, guys,” Hollis said, rather glad that no deputies were near enough to overhear. Although she wasn’t at all sure the psychic abilities of her team wouldn’t be an open secret, among the deputies at least, very soon. They’d all learned in their everyday lives to hide or at least keep quiet about their abilities, her non-SCU team members, but they had never been called upon to work as a team, or work with law enforcement without giving away the details of how they acquired the information they did, and they didn’t have the experience the SCU agents had with a whole lot of strange and crazy.
She and DeMarco sat down across from them, and Hollis smiled faintly at Logan’s stubborn expression. Her gaze turned to Victoria, who was looking a bit impatient but otherwise not giving away much.
Without wasting time, Hollis asked both of them, “What are your impressions of the energy?”
“I can barely feel it,” Victoria replied. “Sort of a tingle on the back of my neck, and I’m more tense than usual for me, but that’s pretty much it.”
Hollis nodded. “About what I expected. Logan?”
“What?”
She laughed under her breath, undisturbed by his snapped response. “I gather you haven’t seen any spirits since getting here?”
“No.” He eyed her, then added, “It’s been a nice break.”
“I hear that. You can obviously feel the energy in this valley; could either of you see it on the drive here?”
Victoria said, “Bishop asked us to stop at one of the overlooks when we could see the valley and find out if we could see what you did, but it looked normal to me.”
“Logan?”
“Normal.”
“Okay. What about now? What, exactly, are you feeling?”
“Not much,” he answered. “Skin’s tingling a bit. And there’s pressure, I think. Faint.”
“But no spirits.”
“No spirits.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Hollis said, “but you always see spirits. Right?”
“Yeah, since I was a kid.” He could remember the very first instance. He’d been three, and his grandmother had been smiling at him. Standing beside her open casket.
“Everywhere you go? In a broad range of places and circumstances?”
“Yeah.” He hesitated, then said, “Didn’t see any on the jet, which is usual, but there were some around the airport in San Francisco, also usual. And—that’s the last time I saw any. None at the airstrip near Bishop’s base, and none at the house. None along the drive here. None here.”
“Have you gotten any sense at all of spiritual energy?”
Logan frowned. “I generally don’t. I mean—I don’t really differentiate when it comes to energy.”
“How do you know you’re looking at a spirit and not a living person?”
“I just know. Look, Bishop wanted me to learn about some of this shit, but I wasn’t all that interested because I didn’t believe it would make a difference for me. I see dead people. They talk to me. They follow me around. Usually they want me to do something for them.”
“And do you?” Hollis asked.
“Sometimes. If I can, which is pretty much limited to anonymously alerting officials of something or other.” He grimaced. “I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time over the years calling police departments all over the country to tell them where to find bodies. First using pay phones and nowadays using burners. Probably spent a fortune on the damned things. But the last thing I wanted was to get involved in some murder or missing-persons investigation just because a spirit told me where to find their bodies.”
Hollis was frowning slightly. “You’ve moved around a lot, according to Bishop. When you saw spirits in whatever town or city you were in, were they local?”
It was his turn to frown. “Now that you mention it, yeah, they were. Or, at least, what they asked me to do was local. I hadn’t thought about that before. Why? Is that important?”
“I don’t know what’s important yet,” she told him frankly. “But this is a big valley holding several thousand people. And the town was founded over two hundred years ago. That’s a lot of people living and dying here over time.”
Galen spoke up then to say mildly, “Graveyards at every church I saw while I was driving around. Half a dozen or more. And two big cemeteries outside the city limits, one north and one east of the town. Everything very well tended, both the church grounds and the cemeteries. Nothing neglected. Even the oldest graves look to have been taken care of.”
“So, respect for the dead.” Hollis was frowning. “I don’t know if that matters either. I’ve only ever seen one spirit in a cemetery, and she wasn’t buried there. Logan?”
“I stay away from cemeteries and graveyards,” he said flatly.
Her frown faded, and she smiled at him. “Unless you’re different from every other medium I know, you don’t have to avoid graveyards or cemeteries; the dead don’t seem to want to hang around those places. Although you generally see a few in churches, and definitely hospitals.”
He blinked, and asked almost unwillingly, “Do spirits always ask you for help?”
“A few have. A very few have helped in investigations. But mostly I just see or sense them around. Off in the corners, the shadows of some house or building usually. Not really coming forward. I think most of them aren’t interested in interacting with the living. Unless, as you’ve discovered, they need the help of the living.”
“At any hour of the day or night,” he said somewhat bitterly. Then he eyed her. “Maybe it’s different for— You aren’t a born medium, are you?”
“No, I was triggered a few years ago.” She could say it easily now, without horrific memories clawing through her mind. And other than a couple of nightmares when she and Reese had first arrived at their island, those had stopped as well.
Hopefully for good.
Thoughtfully, Hollis added, “It probably is different for born mediums, though every one I know is unique in some way. I didn’t have any kind of a shield at first, and I broadcast, which was . . . disconcerting. But other members of the SCU helped me. And it got better.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her. “Recruitment speech?”
“Of course not, Logan. Would I do that?” Her tone was mild.
“I have no idea what you’d do,” he told her. “But if Bishop couldn’t persuade me, I doubt you could.”
DeMarco murmured, “Don’t be so sure.”
Logan looked at him, but before he could say or ask anything, Hollis was speaking again, briskly.
“Okay, look, guys. We were all summoned here, and there is definitely something weird and crazy going on. Some very deadly weird and crazy. Since nothing else has stuck out so far, we can be fairly certain at least for now that the energy in this valley has to be the cause. And since neither Logan nor I have seen any spirits, we probably aren’t dealing with spiritual energy.”
“Have you before?” Victoria asked.
“Dealt with spiritual energy? Oh, yeah. But if the spirits want to get involved in this, they aren’t saying.”
Politely, Logan asked, “Then why are we here? Why am I here? I don’t have a secondary ability. I see spirits. If there are no spirits here, if none are involved in—whatever the hell this is, then why am I here?”
“It’s a good question,” DeMarco said.
Hollis looked at her partner. “Yeah. But I still don’t know what it means. A very upset spirit told me I had to come to Prosperity. I’m guessing Logan was told the same way.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Although he wasn’t initially upset. I mean, not about that. He was upset because his girlfriend had been wrongly accused, he said, of poisoning him.”
It was Hollis’s turn to blink as she looked at him. Then she turned her gaze to her partner again. “How come I don’t ever get stuff like that?”
“Give it time,” DeMarco said.