Knock, knock... (34 page)

"Oh. Good," she mumbled as she slumped against him."

"I don't have the same skills you do or that Stefan does." His voice deepened. "Is that a problem?"

"Stefan is a good friend. A great one in fact. He's also a terrific artist...and a good man." She smiled gently. "I love him. But like a friend. A brother."

He tugged her into his arms and covered her mouth with his. "I heard you the first time."

She kissed him back, and then gently retreated. "Good. Now, let me do what I need to do. Then we can put this morning behind us."

He stood up. "Am I in the way here?" He motioned to the kitchen. "I can sit further back. But I'm not leaving."

She shook her head. "Not necessary. While I'm under, just don't touch me. It will affect my energy and could snap me back too fast. And that's not good."

With that, she stretched out on the couch and closed her eyes.

***

Tuesday afternoon…

Roman stepped back, unable to leave. He'd watched her do some weird stuff lately, but he had no idea what to expect from this. She appeared to be sleeping. Except...there was an eerie stillness he didn't understand. He didn't think he'd seen anything like it before.

Her face was devoid of all expression, but there was something animated about her. No one looking at her would believe she was asleep or unconscious, yet her facial features were slack as if she were.

Whatever that meant.

He gave a quick glance around the room, realizing everything was normal looking. Needing to do something, he headed to the kitchen. Surely, he could rustle up something for her to eat when she came back. She'd had a rough morning and needed her strength.

He opened the fridge but then heard something...off. He closed the door and tiptoed back into the living room. She was still on the couch, in the same position as when he'd left her. But if so, what had he heard? Or thought he'd heard? Feeling ridiculous, he headed back and was just about to step on the tiled kitchen floor, when he thought he heard it again.

Spinning around, he searched the room.

And saw nothing unusual.

A whiff of something passed across his nose. He turned as a faint trail of...cinnamon...passed by. Or maybe that was nutmeg? He didn't know. It was there and then gone.

He spun around and studied Shay. She was still the same. Except different. And whatever caused that difference, he didn't like it one bit.

He pulled up the armchair and sat down, keeping his gaze on her. He sensed she was in danger. He had to watch over her. Only he felt helpless. He didn't know how to handle this woohoo stuff.
Who did?

Stefan.

He straightened. Grabbed for his phone and called Stefan.

"What's wrong?" came the question. No formalities. Stefan had gone straight to the point.

"I don't know." Roman growled. "She's lying on the couch. She said she had a way to see what happened to her this morning. And she seemed normal." Roman stopped, not knowing how to continue, what to say. "And then it changed."

"Right. What do you mean ‘it’?" Stefan's voice went brisk. "In what way has she changed since you were in the room last?"

"There was no smell, then there was a cinnamon scent…or maybe nutmeg." He ran his hands through his hair. "I don't know. I can't explain it. Before she looked lifeless, now there is life, but it's not nice. Like she's scared?"

"I'll take a look." Stefan hung up.

Roman stared down at Shay, the dead phone cold in his hands. "I hoped you’d say so."

The air in the apartment chilled. Goosebumps rose on his arms. He rubbed his hands up and down his arms. He searched the room. It's not like he expected to see Stefan appear in front of him. But he hoped Stefan arrived quickly.

He shivered.

What the hell?
Everything was the same except the air temperature. He could almost see his breath. He blew out a full breath and stared in amazement. He
could
see his breath.
What was going on?
He was a plain talker, and this was not normal. He stood and walked over to the thermostat. It registered 72 degrees. A normal temperature for inside on your average sunny day.

And definitely wrong. There is no way this could be right. It had to be broken.

He turned around, wanting desperately to give Shay a good shake and wake her up. Get her the hell out of here. He wanted her at his place...where she belonged.

S
hay strode confidently forward across the park-like setting of the cemetery. She'd had no problem finding her way. The funeral was in progress. She studied the energy as she had before. Because she was looking for a killer she had to open herself to the private dark energy of all these people, look under the surface at who they really were, to see what they didn't want anyone to see.

Horrible things. Often things that people didn't let others, even themselves, know about. Their deepest, darkest secrets were hanging like dirty laundry for her to see.

And as much as she didn't want to look, she had to. Lives depended on it.

So she did. Yet nothing triggered any alarms.

She followed her old path back toward the car with Roman at her side. She paused, caught that same whiff of energy, and stretched out, searching for the source. She thought the energy came from a cluster of people talking with heads bent together, in front of her, but when she moved toward them, they headed to their vehicles and took off. She watched as her body raced down the path toward the trees, only now she'd lost the trail. Damn it.
How could that be?
She ran to catch up to the energy before she lost it altogether.

Ahead and slightly off to the side, she thought she caught a glimpse of the same energy that she'd followed earlier. It was moving down the parking lot, parallel to the path she'd taken this morning.

That made total sense. She hadn't seen it earlier because she assumed she'd been following it. But she'd been following only one strand of that energy – as if the person had walked back and forth along the same path. That had allowed the person to keep track of her...somehow, and they’d circled around to catch her by surprise.

She ran faster. And came around the trees to find another group of people in her way.
Damn it.
Why were there so many people here? She was ready to scream. Had she been so focused this morning that she hadn't taken note of them? She whipped around the tree.

And ground to a stop just in time to watch her body fall. It appeared to be dragged under a tree bough. By itself.

She stared in shock. She couldn't see the person who was doing the dragging. She saw a weird, pinkish energy, as in her own energy distorted. As she couldn't see the other person, she had to assume they were either invisible, God she hoped not, or like Stefan had suggested, they were using her energy to hide themselves.

Maybe wrapping her aura around their body.

She stood in shock, watching. Her energy chilled, yet kept her rooted to the spot.

Only barely understanding, she studied the energy around her body, hoping her attacker would show himself. The pink vision was dispelling, the energy fraying at the edges. She concentrated, pulling more of her own energy into the vision to try and see something useful. As she stood there, desperate for anything meaningful to be revealed, she reached out a hand, and watched in horror as a hand reached toward her.

Oh God.

Stefan.

Shocked, she stared up at her best friend's face.

"Shay." His hand reached out and touched her. "Time to go home."

"No. I haven't found what I need to find."

"And you can't. Not now."

"I have to." She reached further, spreading her fingers and clutched at a wisp of the distorted energy, sucking the very essence into her space, hoping to examine it later.

He shook his head. And with an odd flick of his fingers, Shay was snapped back through time to land with a heavy groan into her body on the couch.

She opened her eyes to find Stefan, in astral form, leaning over her. "Are you okay?"

She blinked. Confused and disoriented, she murmured, "What happened?"

"That's what I'd like to know." Roman leaned over her. His energy blended with Stefan's.
What the hell?
She blinked and tried to clear her vision. Then Stefan moved. And she could see them both.

Thank God.

***

"Would you like to explain what the hell happened just now?" Roman carried Shay’s full mug of coffee into the living room and set it down on the coffee table. "I don't understand that...but I want to."

Shay sat up in a movement reminiscent of his grandmother’s before she passed away. Slow and sluggish, like every muscle had to work overtime to make her body do what she wanted it to do. Eventually Shay reached forward to accept her coffee then slumped back into the corner.

"Is it always like this?"

She looked up in surprise. "Uhm, no. Usually I recover much faster. But I was pushing the limit this time, got confused, and didn't exactly have an easy homecoming."

"Why not?"

"Stefan sent me home, actually. And that was probably a good thing. I seemed to have been frozen there – as in, locked in place and unable to move."

"There?" Roman took a deep breath. "Please, tell me – what is
there
?"

She stared at him with a hypnotic expression in her eyes that made him want to reach out, snag her up, and hold her close. Yet he’d been warned not to touch her while she did energy work and when she was recovering.

And the sharing of her experiences was all new to him. He suspected Stefan was a special friend
because
he understood her and what she went through. To do the stuff she was doing and to be alone, with no one to talk to about it, couldn't be easy.

He wanted to be one that she could talk to. Open communication was important to him.
Or was it?

Inside, he winced as he thought about his paintings and what he kept from her.

***

Shay wondered if a washing machine felt as worn out after a busy wash weekend as she did after this trip. She hadn't even had a chance to sort through what happened. She'd been paralyzed on the spot. Hadn't been able to move, was barely able to think, and had been getting colder by the second.

The first attack had been on her body, but the attack while she'd been looking for more information…that attack had been on her ethereal body.

Like how freaky was that?

And if she felt like she'd entered the twilight zone, she could only imagine how Roman would feel if she told him details of her experience.

He said he wanted to know. She just wasn't sure he could handle knowing.

And she wanted to know about that energy she'd tried to grasp. She'd caught a touch of it, enough to know something about it, but she needed to be sure. She stared at her closed fist and stalled...

The phone rang, giving her a chance to put off making a decision. She dragged her cell phone out of her pocket. "Stefan? What the hell happened?"

She gave Roman a reassuring smile. "Stefan, I'm going to put you on speaker phone. Roman needs to hear this, too."

His voice filled the room. "Except I don't have an answer. I found you frozen at the scene where you were hit. There was no one around. At least not any longer. Not on any plane that I could find, but your energy was draining off too fast for me to do anything to stop it, except to break your trance and send you home."

"And how did you know to find me?"

"Thank Roman for that." Stefan paused then added heavily, "I think whoever did this was related to Darren."

She gasped. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. Look at what you're holding in your hand. Like really look. Drop all your fears, your insecurities and see what is really there. You brought home a piece of that energy. The only way you could have done that was if you had some kind of connection. Darren."

Taking a deep breath she opened her mind and switched on her inner vision and looked. There was something there, but… Grabbing onto her fears, she breathed love and light into them, releasing the fears to the ethers. Then she went deeper than she'd gone before.

And saw it. She gasped as a familiar signature shimmered in her hand. Familiar…and yet not. This signature was similar to Darren's but wasn't his. It filled her palm, quivering in place. She whispered, "It is a family member."

"It's got to be the twin." Roman said. "There is no one else."

Oh God. She bowed her head.
Damn.
"Ronin needs to know what's going on. He needs to find the twin. He has to be in this vicinity. In the city, close to me."