Forbidden Territory

Irritated, he checked the clock. Almost four. Walters’s plane would have touched down by now and Baker would be with him, calming his fears. Baker was good at that.

McBride wasn’t.

He was a bit of a loner with secrets himself.

As he started to close the computer file, his phone rang again. He stared at it for a moment, dread creeping up on him.

Abby Walters’s photo stared up at him from the desk.

He grabbed the receiver. “McBride,” he growled.

Silence.

He sensed someone on the other end. “Hello?” he said.

“Detective McBride?” A hesitant voice came over the line, resonating with apprehension. Lily Browning’s voice.

“Ms. Browning.”

He heard a soft intake of breath, but she didn’t speak.

“This is Lily Browning, right?” He knew he sounded impatient. He didn’t care.

“Yes.”

Subconsciously, he’d been waiting for her call. Tamping down growing apprehension, he schooled his voice, kept it low and soothing. “Do you know something about Abby?”

“Not exactly.” She sounded reluctant and afraid.

He tightened his grip on the phone. “Then why’d you call?”

“You asked if I’d seen Abby this morning. I said no.” A soft sigh whispered over the phone. “That wasn’t exactly true.”

McBride’s muscles bunched as a burst of adrenaline flushed through his system. “You saw her this morning at school?”

“No, not at the school.” Her voice faded.

“Then where? Away from school?” Had Ms. Herrera been wrong? Had Lily slipped away from the meeting, after all?

The silence on Lily Browning’s end of the line dragged on for several seconds. McBride stifled the urge to throw the phone across the room. “Ms. Browning, where did you see Abby Walters?”

He heard a deep, quivery breath. “In my mind,” she said.

McBride slumped in his chair, caught flat-footed by her answer. It wasn’t at all what he’d expected.

A witness, sure. A suspect—even better. But a psychic?

Bloody hell.

Chapter Two

Heavy silence greeted Lily’s answer.

“Are you there?” She clutched the phone, her stomach cramping.

“I’m here.” His tight voice rumbled over the phone. “And you should know we don’t pay psychics for information.”

“Pay?”

“That’s why you’re calling, isn’t it?” His words were clipped and diamond hard. “What’s your usual fee, a hundred an hour? Two hundred?”

“I don’t have a fee,” she responded, horrified.

“So you’re in it for the publicity.”

“No!” She slammed down the phone, pain blooming like a poisonous flower behind her eyes.

The couch cushion shifted beside her and a furry head bumped against her elbow. Lily dropped one hand to stroke the cat’s brown head. “Oh, Delilah, that was a mistake.”

The Siamese cat made a soft prrrupp sound and butted her head against Lily’s chin. Jezebel joined them on the sofa, poking her nose into Lily’s ribs. Groaning, she nudged the cats off her lap and staggered to her feet. Half-blinded by the migraine, she made her way down the hall to her bedroom.

The headaches had never been as bad back home in Willow Grove, with her sister Iris always around to brew up a cup of buckbean tea and work her healing magic. But Willow Grove was one hour and a million light-years away.

The phone rang. Lily started to let the answering machine get it when she saw Iris’s face float across the blackness of her mind. She fumbled for the phone. “Iris?”

Her sister’s warm voice trembled with laughter. “I’m minding my own business, drying some lavender, and suddenly I get an urge to call you. So, Spooky, what do you need?”

The warm affection in her voice brought tears to Lily’s eyes. “Buckbean tea and a little TLC.”

“Did you have a vision?” Iris’s voice held no laughter now.

“A bad one.” Lily told her sister about Abby Walters. “The detective on the case thinks I’m a lunatic.” She didn’t want to examine why that fact bothered her. She was used to being considered crazy. Why should McBride’s opinion matter?

“What can I do to help?” Iris asked.

“Does your magic work over the phone?”

Iris laughed. “It’s not magic, you know. It’s just—”

“A gift. I know.” That’s what their mother had always called it. Iris’s gift. Or Rose’s or Lily’s.

Lily called hers a curse. Seeing terrified little girls crying for their daddies. Broken bodies at the bottom of a ditch, rain swirling away the last vestiges of their life-blood. Her own father’s life snuffed out in a sawmill across town—

“Stop it, Lily.” Her sister’s voice was low and strangled. “It’s too much all at once.”

Lily tried to close off her memories, knowing that her sister’s empathic gift came with its own pain. “I’m sorry.”

Iris took a deep breath. “Do you want me to come there?”