The Dark Gate

Her pulse leaped with a bone-deep if fragile hope. “Thank God.” She wrenched the door open and followed him into the living room as the newscasters appeared on the television screen.

“In our top story, two congressional interns are missing tonight. The young women were last seen leaving a pharmacy on Dupont Circle this morning with an unidentified male. The event was caught on the store’s security camera.”

Larsen watched the screen change to the grainy black-and-white videotape, then gasped as she saw him. The albino. His back was to her as he stood in the middle of the tape, but she was certain it was him. The same stark white hair, the same odd clothing.

Her heart began to pound. She hadn’t imagined him.

In the background, the two young women chatted as they walked into the store. Neither seemed to pay any attention to the white man standing feet away.

The albino lifted his arm and the pair stopped abruptly, going suddenly, unnaturally, still. The purse one carried dropped, unnoticed, to the floor.

Chills raced over Larsen’s skin as she watched the evil man step around them and leave the store, the two women turning to follow. As the three exited onto the sidewalk outside, two small figures emerged from the right and followed them out the door.

The station cut back to the newscasters, but not before Larsen got a look at the last two. Though she wore a baseball cap and a different T-shirt, one of them was the cancer girl—the girl who had shot her.

She heard the click of the remote and the television screen went dark. Larsen turned toward Jack, suddenly afraid she hadn’t hidden her reactions. Her heart sank when she met his gaze. Gone was her friendly companion of a minute ago. In his place stood an angry, hard-eyed cop.

“I want the truth, lady…and I want it now.”

Chapter 4

Jack’s sugar-spun fantasy of spending his life with the one woman who could cure his madness crumbled beneath a slug of hard reality. How could he have forgotten Larsen Vale was a liar?

She stood beside him, her fingers gripping the back of his leather sofa, her face pale, her eyes wide with guilty dismay.

He’d called her into the living room to ID the bald girl Henry had seen at the end of the tape. Instead she’d visibly jerked at first sight of the prime suspect, the latter-day Pied Piper who seemed to have led the little group right out the store.

“You know him.” The implications ricocheted across his brain.

“What?”

“The Pied Piper. The leader. You’ve seen him before.”

Something pained moved through her eyes. “No.” She unhooked her fingers from his sofa and turned to face him, raising that stubborn chin. “I recognized the cancer girl.”

She looked so damned innocent standing there in her soft pajamas, her golden hair damp and curling under her jaw. Another man might have believed the act of innocence, but not a cop. Not him. Beneath those soft golden lashes, her wide eyes crawled with guilt.

Jack slammed the remote on the table. “Don’t. Don’t lie to me. You nearly came out of your seat when you saw him.”

Larsen crossed her arms over her chest, her gaze sliding away. “If I reacted to him, it was only because of his weirdness.”

He stared at her, feeling the fragile connection between them fray and split. “How stupid do you think I am?”

She froze, then seemed to shake herself loose, her gaze shifting to the blank television screen. “I swear to you, Jack, I’ve never seen him before.”

Dammit. His fingers flexed with the need to grab her and shake her, to scare the crap out of her until she told him what he wanted to know. At the same time, he wanted nothing more than to sink to his knees and beg her to trust him.

He turned away from her, shutting his eyes over the battle raging inside him. “Go to bed, Larsen.” Before he destroyed what tenuous connection remained between them, losing his only chance at a life without madness, his only chance at a future.

Larsen paced the darkened bedroom, the room lit only by the soft wash of light slipping under the door from the hallway. She’d been pacing for more than an hour, but she wasn’t the only one still awake. Beyond the door she could hear the low sound of the television and knew Jack was still up. And probably still furious with her. What was she going to do?

She couldn’t tell him what she knew. As a kid, she’d believed she somehow caused the tragedies she foresaw. The shame and self-loathing kept her silent. Then in college, she’d done some research on visions and premonitions and realized she was just a type of fortune-teller. Seeing the future didn’t mean she was causing it. But neither did it mean others would understand, if they knew. It didn’t mean they’d accept her, not think she was a freak. It wasn’t a risk she was willing to take.

But now she didn’t know what to think. The albino saw her. He saw her. If she were merely a fortune-teller, merely a seer of the future, that wouldn’t be happening. So, what did that make her visions? What did that make her?

The old fear that she was somehow to blame clenched like a fist in her stomach. The feelings that she was evil rose like bile in her throat.

She couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell anyone. But those cop eyes of Jack Hallihan’s saw way too much. He already suspected she knew something. He had an uncanny ability to see right through her lies. He was dangerous. She needed to get away. In the morning, she’d make some calls. She wasn’t a prisoner…yet. But he certainly wasn’t going to let her walk out of here after she’d given herself away with that video.

No, she needed help. The kind one got from friends in high places, which she happened to have, thanks to her skill in the courtroom. She’d rescued the daughter of a D.C. circuit court judge from an abusive marriage just last month. She had little doubt George would put a bug in the right ear and she’d be free of Jack Hallihan before lunch.

Regret pressed down on her with surprising force.

She’d been attracted to him for months. But that mild infatuation was nothing compared to the attraction that had built over the past couple of days, catching fire in his arms tonight. Strangely, her attraction to him was more than physical. When he wasn’t playing cop, he was good company. Fun, sexy.

Her fingers trailed over her lips. And the man could win awards with his kissing. She remembered the way he’d held her, the way he’d pressed her against the sink cabinet until she’d had no doubt of his desire.

A warm rush of longing turned her knees weak and she sank down onto the bed. If only things were different. If only—

Her sight suddenly vanished. Pain split her skull.

Heart lurching with fear, Larsen grabbed her aching head as another vision hit her like a sledgehammer.

She recognized the Old West decor of Tony Jingles, a restaurant on Q Street, not far from the pharmacy where the young intern had been abducted. As before, she watched from above, as if she hovered near the ceiling, wrapped in an unnatural silence.

Dread balled in her stomach.

She didn’t want to see this.

She tried to close her eyes, tried to wake herself up or to shake herself out of the scene, but she remained rooted. Trapped.

The scene below appeared disturbingly normal. The afternoon sun shone through the slats of the window blinds, illuminating a half-empty restaurant. On the television in the corner, the Baltimore Orioles mascot bounded across the field in what appeared to be pregame shenanigans.

A flash of white caught her eye and everything changed.

The albino strode into the restaurant, turning the patrons and wait staff to stone. Forks and glasses dropped onto the tables, food-laden trays crashed silently to the floor.

The only natural movement came from a booth nearby. A middle-aged woman with a round, intelligent face stared around her in disbelief. She opened her mouth as if yelling, then began to shake the two people in the booth with her—a man Larsen presumed was her husband and a pretty young woman, probably her daughter.

The woman looked up to see the albino approaching. Her eyes widened with shock, then turned to fear as her husband’s hands closed around her throat and he began to choke her. The albino motioned to her blank-faced daughter. The girl climbed out of the booth and, like the bridesmaid before her, stood motionless as he raped her in front of her mother’s dying eyes.

With his white hair swirling around his face, his eyes glowing like yellow-green embers, the albino’s head jerked up and he met Larsen’s gaze. Through his song, he smiled malevolently.

And reached for her.

Jack paced his living room, slapping the television remote against his thigh in an agitated, bruising rhythm as the newscaster droned, becoming just one more voice in his head.

Who was she? Ice Queen or siren? Angel or devil?