“Something to look forward to,” she murmured.
Logan, frowning, brought them ruthlessly back to his original question. “Okay, so the two mediums involved were told to come here by spirits. I don’t know about yours, but mine pretty much stopped talking in midsentence and then looked anxious and afraid. In less than a minute, he looked terrified. Said something about both the living and the dead being in trouble or being hurt by this—by whatever this is. That I had to come to Prosperity, that I had to help them stop it. All of you, I assume. Then he disappeared. Then there were a whole bunch of dead people all around me in the park, just standing and staring at me, which has never happened to me before and which was creepy as hell. Felt like the fucking zombie apocalypse, except they all looked normal—for spirits. Just staring at me. And then there was a girl spirit, a young woman, who also begged me to come to Prosperity. Said I was needed here. So. If this energy has nothing to do with spirits, if the threat here has nothing to do with spirits, then how am I needed here?”
“I hate to have to repeat myself,” Hollis said, “but I have no idea. Yet. We’re very much at the speculation and information-gathering stage of the investigation. But it definitely bothers me that neither of us has seen a spirit in or around Prosperity.”
“Due to the energy here, maybe,” DeMarco said. “Or the pressure. Maybe whatever’s holding energy in this valley is also holding spiritual energy out.”
Hollis nodded slowly. “Could be. And, if so, it might explain why two mediums were summoned. It may well take both of us, if that’s what we have to do.”
“I’m not following,” Logan said.
“We open doors,” she said. “It’s what mediums do. We open doors between the world of the living and the spirit realm; that’s what allows the communication. If all this energy in the valley is somehow blocking or otherwise holding out spiritual energy, maybe we’re the only ones who can let it back in.”
Politely, Logan said, “And why in hell would we want to do that? If the spirits stay away, I’m seriously considering moving here to live. A nice, peaceful place where no dead people talk to me.”
DeMarco said, “Where seven people have died today under very mysterious circumstances.”
Still truculent, Logan said, “Well, none of them has shown up asking for my help, so why should I care?”
Hollis said, “It’s all about balance, Logan. The dead have their parts to play just like we do.” She looked at her partner suddenly. “Maybe that’s the common denominator we’ve all missed.”
“What do you mean?”
“What summoned us. And the way we were all summoned. No matter what our abilities are, we all heard, in some form, voices telling us to come here. Logan and I saw spirits who were very upset, distraught, who clearly felt threatened. You heard a voice telling you to come here. Olivia said she heard whispers, then voices telling her to come to Prosperity. Reno had a vision of a hellish place filled with hideously deformed creatures that might once have been human— and Shadow People, one of which offered her a pretty chilling warning of what could happen if we can’t stop whatever’s going on here.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Victoria said suddenly. “Shadow People. They seem to keep turning up in—popular lore. Supposedly where people are experiencing the ugly side of the paranormal. I’ve seen self-proclaimed mediums on TV saying the Shadow People are demonic.”
Almost absently, Hollis said, “More of those TV mediums than you might think are genuine.”
“Talking about demons?”
Hollis looked at her, saw her. “Dark energy. Negative energy shaped into a . . . recognizable form. Maybe even negative spiritual energy, originating from very evil dead people. Calling them demons is probably as accurate a term as any.”
“You mean they don’t go straight to hell?” Galen sounded disgusted.
Still in that preoccupied tone, Hollis replied, “Sure, some of them do. Maybe most of them.”
DeMarco glanced at the end of the table, a little amused to note that the answer had visibly disconcerted Galen. It wasn’t often that his hard face showed any emotion. It was even rarer for him to be disconcerted. By anything.
Victoria looked disconcerted as well. “There’s a hell? An actual fiery pit?”
“Something like that,” Hollis replied. “A place of judgment, punishment. Not necessarily a fiery pit, though probably for some. For others . . . punishment fitting the crime, would be my guess. I think most of us, as long as we try to make it through life in a positive way, have another chance, maybe a lot of chances, to get it right, but the truly evil find something very different waiting for them after death.”
Victoria gazed at their team leader in unconscious fascination. “Wow. I . . . did not know that. Never been very religious.”
“Me either. Religions mostly just try to explain things,” Hollis said. “In terms people can understand. Most every religion has some form of hell, limbo, purgatory. So people are warned that there are always consequences. In this life. In an afterlife. And in whatever comes after that.”
* * *
? ? ?
ARCHER RETURNED TO the station less than five minutes later, and was introduced to Victoria and Logan. He felt more weary than he could ever remember feeling, far too tired to want to get into another baffling discussion about psychic abilities, so he wasn’t about to bring up the question of what psychic “tools” had been added to the team of pretty ordinary-looking people.
He tended to weigh people quickly when first introduced, but he didn’t even try with these two. Something else claimed his attention almost immediately.
Hollis had introduced the two newest team members, her voice just a bit distant, and after making professionally polite noises at the newcomers, Archer realized that everyone in the room was watching Hollis with varying degrees of tension or concern. She wasn’t looking at any of them, just sort of staring into space as he’d seen her do earlier.
And her unusual eyes were . . . luminous.
Afraid to ask, more afraid not to, the sheriff finally said, “Somebody want to tell me what’s going on? Hollis?” He was hardly aware that it was the first time he’d used her given name unprompted.
After a moment, she blinked, then looked at him. “Hmm?”
“What is it?”
Hollis abruptly rose to her feet, startling him, and turned her gaze, frowning now, through the glass partition dividing the room from the bullpen, and past that to the lobby and the front desk.
Before Archer could ask again, there was a commotion in the lobby, a confusion of thuds and bangs combined with an unnaturally loud voice he didn’t immediately recognize. Cody Greene, the deputy manning the reception desk, was sort of scrambling to turn around, his hand on his gun in a movement that looked more instinctive than deliberate.
Matt Spencer and Kayla Nelson were the only two deputies in the bullpen, having delivered Elliot Weston to a cell in back and made sure he was being watched at all times. Both had been relaxed but rose quickly to their feet the instant the commotion began, hands also coming to rest on the grips of their service weapons.
Before anyone could react in any other way, a uniformed deputy with an armful of guns pushed open the glass door of the lobby and rushed into the bullpen—and straight back to the conference room, his wide-eyed gaze fixed on the face of the sheriff.
“Here!” He thrust the guns, several rifles and what looked like a shotgun, into the sheriff’s surprised arms, then immediately unloaded two pistols from his pants pockets onto the conference table with a clatter, and began unbuckling his belt, his service weapon still securely fastened in its holster.