Flashback

A splinter of his mind continued to worry over that. The rest was lost in the same primitive fear that had encompassed him before.

This time, however, he knew something about the source of that fear. Not enough to identify it, but enough to know it was to be avoided at all costs.

Stooping, he scrambled backward to get away from it. Away from the light, he realized, which must mean—

As quickly as he’d been thrust into the darkness, he was thrown out of it. This time, rather than kneeling beside his truck, he was lying on the floor of his grandmother’s parlor, the fibers of its faded wool carpet rough against his cheek.

Physically unable to move, he lay there for what seemed like hours, trying to orient himself into the present. When he had, he realized that, once again, where the flashback had taken him hadn’t been to the past. Not back to the desert. Not the war.

This had been something more immediate. Something nearer in both time and space.

He hadn’t seen the little girl. He searched the fragments of memory that lingered like smoke in his brain and found within them no trace of another presence.

He’d been the only one there. In the darkness. And whoever was coming…

Whoever.

Not whatever. Whoever. His subconscious had known that before he had consciously arrived at the phrase.

Whoever was coming…

He pushed up from the floor, feeling as if he’d been physically beaten. The flashbacks always left him dazed, almost hungover. This…this was something different. An alternative unpleasantness.

He’d been terrified again. A sick, bowel-tightening horror that revolved around whoever was going to appear out of that darkness. Despite the long years of his military career, through all the firefights and ambushes he’d survived, he couldn’t remember ever being that frightened.

Because there’s nothing you can do about what’s going to happen.

That was it exactly. Always before, he had felt that, no matter what they threw at him, he could hold his own. Maybe he would die, but if he did, it would be while giving as good as he got.

That wasn’t how he had felt crouching in that clammy darkness. He’d felt helpless. Far worse than that, he realized, he’d felt hopeless.

He took a breath, mentally fighting the return of those emotions. He put his forearm on the coffee table, using its support to push to his knees.

He waited for the room to steady before he got painfully to his feet. He had no recollection of how he’d ended up face-down on the carpet. No recollection even of why he’d been in this room.

He eased down on the couch, resisting the urge to lower his head into his hands. As much as he had hated the loss of control the flashbacks had represented, their horrific violence now seemed almost safe. Familiar. His.

The other wasn’t. And his reaction to whatever was happening there…wasn’t his reaction.

That realization was as unnerving as the reaction itself. The fact that he was somehow attuned to the feelings of the little girl he had glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.

By now he’d studied every newspaper photograph of Raine Nolan, memorizing the smiling face on the flyers that blanketed the town. And he still couldn’t decide if the child he’d seen cowering in that darkness was her.

Except, who else could it be? The timing of this, if nothing else, argued that whatever he’d experienced during the past three days must be connected to her abduction.

Or to the fact that somebody blew a good-size chuck of your brain to smithereens.

Had Eden Reddick’s question about whether there’d been someone else in the pit with the girl planted that notion in his head? Had his mind latched on to the suggestion, so that this time he’d imagined there was someone else there?

Angry with the possibility, he tried to stand. The resulting vertigo made him clutch the arm of the couch until the room righted itself.

He wasn’t crazy, he told himself fiercely. Maybe what was happening to him fell into that category, but he didn’t. And he wasn’t going to pretend he did, not to satisfy Reddick or anyone else.

Somewhere a terrified child was hiding in a darkness she didn’t understand. Hiding in fear from a horror she was only beginning to comprehend.

Through some quirk of a cruel universe, he’d been allowed to know that. To feel what she felt.

And now, no matter the cost, it was up to him to figure out what he could do about it.

Chapter Four

It’s on my way home, Eden justified as she pulled off the highway and onto the dirt road. And I’ll sleep better if I make sure.

Since she’d had a hard time keeping her eyes open during the last hour she’d spent at the office, that rationalization was an even bigger stretch than the “on my way” detour she’d just made. It was true, however, that this had been all she’d thought of as she’d tried to come up with anything they hadn’t checked out.

The caves at the end of this unpaved lane had played a role in the childhood of almost everyone who’d grown up in Waverly. And even in some who hadn’t. She’d learned about them almost as soon as she and her dad moved here.

And they’ve probably been searched a dozen times since Raine’s kidnapping. Still, since she herself hadn’t asked anyone from the department to do that, she needed to make certain it had been done.

It was only as she was climbing out of the car to begin the trek up the slope to the rocks above that she admitted the real reason she was here. The caves best fit the description Jake Underwood had given from his “vision.”

Like the Nolans, the ex-soldier had passed a voluntary lie-detector test. And the background check the Bureau had done revealed a service record impressive enough to merit the initial description of him that Winton and Dean had used.

Despite that, both the agents and her deputy chief had discounted Underwood’s story as being nothing more than the result of his head injury. After all, to think anything else would open them up to a belief system far beyond the narrow limits of their own.

Apparently, however, not beyond mine, Eden admitted, as she struggled up the last few yards to the first cave’s entrance. What was little more than a fissure in the face of the hillside hid a relatively large interior space. As she remembered it, the second nearby cavern was much smaller.

She waited a moment, giving her breathing a chance to steady. The sun was beginning to slip behind the rock face, casting the area where she stood into deep shadow.

She removed the flashlight from her utility belt, and then, the second motion more tentative than the first, her weapon from its holster. There was no telling what kind of wildlife might have taken refuge in the coolness of the cave.

Despite being armed with both a light and her Glock, still she hesitated, fighting a residual childhood fear of the dark she hadn’t thought about in years.

Check it out and then go home. Get into bed and sleep until morning. Something she hadn’t done since this case started.

She blew out a calming breath and then bent to slip though the crack. Once inside the cave, she directed the beam of her flashlight in a slow circle around its perimeter.

She could hear water dripping somewhere, its soft, regular plops the only sound in the rockbound stillness. She walked forward, redirecting her light, trying to locate the place where that moisture hit the floor. When she couldn’t find that, she raised the beam, allowing it to play over the ceiling, which was higher than she’d remembered from her one hurried, adolescent visit.

They’d gone in on a dare, she and Margaret Eames, the only two in the group who’d never been inside the caves. She’d always wondered if Margaret shared her slight sense of claustrophobia, since neither of them had remained longer than required by the taunts of their classmates.

She made one last slow circuit of the cave with her light, reassuring herself there were no hidden areas where a child could be concealed. She’d do the same in the smaller and then go home and crash.

Only when she turned toward the entrance did she realize she wasn’t alone. A dark shape obscured the narrow opening, blocking what little light had been coming in from outside.

She brought her weapon up, at the same time redirecting the focus of the flashlight. Jake Underwood flinched, lifting his hand to shield his eyes.

“Don’t.” Although Eden hadn’t been certain about the intent of his movement when she’d barked that command, she had been sure that, despite whatever lingering disabilities his wounds had left, she was physically no match for the ex-soldier.