“Enough of this,” Reese said in a voice few had probably heard since his military days.
“No.” Hollis’s voice was quiet, but no less fierce. “She’s planning it now. I can’t get her thoughts, just those awful feelings. Her mind’s full of blood, just blood. We have to get closer to the school.” Her eyes were . . . odd. Almost glowing.
“Except for vehicles there’s no cover,” Galen said in a calm voice that would have deceived anyone who didn’t know him.
“Then vehicles will have to do,” Reese said.
“Archer—” Sully began.
But Hollis was shaking her head. “Not yet. We have to get close enough to know for certain what’s going on there before we call in the troops. If we call them in. Trained negotiators are too far away, and you know that’s what he’ll want. Never mind that it won’t work. Never mind that you can’t negotiate with evil. Kids are going to die unless we stop this. And we have to be quiet. He wants a big show. He wants a lot of cops. Media. Panic. He wants his bloodbath.”
“Who?” Reno asked. “Who’s controlling her?”
“I think it was . . . what started as a . . . mindless evil. It just wanted to kill, to torture. To destroy.”
“But you said he seemed familiar—”
Dalton said to Reno, “Explanations later. I say we pile into two of the vehicles we have here and haul ass to that school.”
She stared at him. “You’re picking up thoughts.”
“Well, of course I am,” he said irritably, grabbing her arm to hustle her into the light-colored BMW that was closest.
Getting to the school was quick and easy, in part because Galen, leading the way in the black SUV with Hollis, Reese, and Olivia, tended to imprint maps in his head after exploring, and so took secondary roads where no traffic or traffic light slowed them down.
And the school itself was as Galen had described, a modern building designed to keep children safe inside. There were numerous exits, of course, but every single member of Hollis’s team knew that their best chance of getting all the children out alive would be to instantly incapacitate the female teacher even now being urged by a powerful force to slaughter as many of them as she could.
They gathered initially behind the hulking cover of the black SUV, and one glance was enough to show that both Sully and Dalton were being all but overwhelmed by the thoughts and emotions battering them.
“Kids,” Sully muttered. “Somebody for God’s sake teach me how to tune out kids. It’s utter chaos.”
Dalton nodded agreement, but his eyes were clearer and he was frowning.
“Stay mad,” Hollis told him softly. “It’s working.”
He sent her a quick glance. “Figured out my secret, huh?”
Hollis was still being all but held upright by her partner, but it appeared both her nose and ears had stopped bleeding. “Enough,” she told Dalton. Then she added to him and Sully, “You two need to circle the building. Slowly. Do your damnedest not to be seen. We need to know exactly where she is. We can’t afford to make a mistake.”
“Copy.” Both Sully and Dalton moved out, cautiously.
Reese was looking at his partner. “She has guns.”
“We’re going to make sure she never fires one of those guns.”
“How are we going to do that?” Reese asked politely.
“We’re going to depend on our rookies.”
“Hollis—”
“You said it yourself. Bishop said it. They were summoned, just like we were. They were meant to be here, meant to have parts to play in all this. We can’t stop this without them. Every one of them has a gift we can use. Every one of them.”
After a moment, Reese said, “Archer’s going to shoot all of us.”
“It all happened so fast,” she said in an innocent tone. “We just had to act.”
“Right.” Then Reese frowned. “I think Dalton’s getting close.”
“Good. Judging by the way she’s feeling, we’re running out of time.”
“If you start bleeding again—”
“I won’t. You’re sharing energy with me. Thank you, by the way.”
“You’re welcome. And stop scaring me like that, will you?”
“I’ll do my best.” She turned her head to watch as Sully and Dalton slipped back through the cars in the lot until they reached the SUV.
“We maybe caught a break,” Dalton said. “She’s in a fairly small classroom at the very end of a hallway. But it’s packed with kids, little kids. I managed to catch a glimpse of a heavy-looking duffel bag half hidden behind her desk. She looks . . . I don’t think it’s going to be much longer.”
“Not much longer at all,” Sully added. “There isn’t just one voice in her head; there are dozens, hundreds, all whispering the same insane shit. I doubt we’ve got more than a couple of minutes before she digs into that bag and starts shooting.”
“Okay, then we move.” Hollis gestured for Galen, Olivia, Logan, Reno, and Victoria to draw closer. “And this is what we’re going to do.”
* * *
? ? ?
WHITNEY NEELE KNEW, deep, deep down inside of her, that what she was thinking, what she was going to do, was insane. She knew that. Somewhere deep inside. But wherever that place was, she couldn’t seem to reach inside and grab hold of anything that would allow her to grip her own sanity. It seemed to have gone spinning off into some dark, noisy place.
So there was just here.
Just her usual classroom with her usual, really very noisy students all talking and laughing at once. Even though they were supposed to be paying attention to her. Even though she had already told them more than once to take their seats and listen to her.
She had told them.
She had.
The voices in her head were adding to the cacophony until she could barely hear herself think. Until she couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but, finally, give in and just stop fighting the voices. What was the use, after all? The voices would win. They would always win.
Always.
* * *
? ? ?
HOLLIS AND VICTORIA made it all the way down the interior hall to Miss Neele’s classroom without being seen. Both knew they were on borrowed time, not only because Whitney Neele’s face looked curiously plastic, curiously without expression, but also because Reno and Logan were in the school office hopefully buying at least a little time with some unbelievable explanations that surely wouldn’t hold the principal long.
Sully waited just outside the windows, ready in an instant to burst through them, and Reese had found his way into a supply closet that opened right into the classroom near the teacher’s desk.
“I can’t,” Victoria whispered for at least the tenth time. “I’ve never been able to—”
“All you have to do is keep her still,” Hollis whispered back. “Just for a few seconds, just long enough for me to get my hands on that bag. Once the guns are out of her reach, either one of us can take her.”
“Hollis—”
“Just concentrate, Victoria. I promise you, you can do this.”
Victoria was pretty sure nobody had ever bet their life on her before, and she was damned sure nobody had bet the lives of dozens of kids on her, so she drew a deep breath, concentrated as hard as she could, and stopped Whitney Neele from ever touching one of the guns in her bag.
* * *
? ? ?
HOLLIS THOUGHT ARCHER was honestly too stunned by what had so nearly happened at the school to have thought of most of the questions he should have asked. And Katie helped along with that, encouraging the kids to tell their self-important stories at the top of their lungs even though not a single one of them had any clue as to what had so nearly happened.
And Hollis, having picked up a few slippery tricks from Bishop over the years, managed to get herself and her people off school grounds and back to the even more necessary task of searching the valley for a doorway or portal for evil. And without explaining a single word more than she had to.
“You’re dangerous,” Dalton told her.
“Only on odd Thursdays. Besides, it worked, didn’t it?”
“You’re a brave man,” Dalton told DeMarco.