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  HAVEN

  HAVEN

  KAY HOOPER

  BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

  establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over

  and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2012 by Kay Hooper.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  Cover photograph by Annette Shaff / Shutterstock.

  Text design by Kristin del Rosario.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

  electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of

  copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  FIRST EDITION: August 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hooper, Kay.

  Haven / Kay Hooper.—Berkley hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58737-9

  1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. North Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.O587H383 2012

  813’.54—dc23

  2011051899

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  At the request of many readers, I decided to place this note at the front of the book rather than after the story, so as to better inform you of the additional material I am providing for both new readers and those who have been with the series from the beginning. You’ll find some brief character bios, as well as definitions of various psychic abilities, at the end of the book, information that will hopefully enhance your enjoyment of this story and of the series. I promise to do my best to avoid spoilers!

  This is #13 in the Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series, but I assure new readers that if this is your first experience with the series, you need not fear being lost in a sea of characters you’re expected to already know or an ongoing plot whose threads were woven into the story six or eight books back.

  This series is made up of trilogies, each connected not by plot but by a theme or idea I chose to explore, usually indicated by a keyword I use in each of the three titles. (The only exception to this rule is the Blood trilogy, which is connected by a single plot thread.) There are some recurring characters in virtually every book, but I trust I provide enough information in the text so that you’re able to enjoy the story without the need for extensive background on those characters. I do provide a few footnotes throughout the story when a reference is made to an earlier event important to a recurring character, but, again, it is not necessary to have read all the previous books to understand and hopefully enjoy this one.

  That said, if you are interested in reading the series from its beginning, a complete list of the titles, in order of their publication, may be found at my website: www.kayhooper.com.

  If you are a new reader, welcome to the world of the Special Crimes Unit and of Haven, where psychic abilities are used and useful as investigative tools, and the people who live with those abilities are all too human, with strengths and weaknesses and the courage to hunt human monsters.

  And if you’ve been with me from the beginning, or joined in somewhere along the way, welcome back. I know it’s been a while, but let’s go see what Bishop and the extraordinary people he’s brought together are involved in this time.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  PROLOGUE

  In the first few minutes of Catherine Talbert’s escape, she did her very best to be as quiet as possible. She thought he was gone, but she wasn’t at all certain of that, and in her terror she just wanted to run.

  But she crept instead, out into the darkness, not daring to take the time even to look for something to cover her naked body. If there was a moon, it was hidden behind a heavy cloud cover; either way, Catherine had no idea where she was. Strain her eyes though she did, she couldn’t see any sort of artificial light anywhere that might have meant a house nearby.

  Stupid. Of course there’s no house nearby. Someone would have heard you screaming.

  Surely someone would have.

  She was dizzy, faint with hunger and exhaustion, and sore to the bone with bruises and internal injuries from the beatings, but all she felt was the desperate drive to escape. She chose a direction at random and struck out from her prison, moving as quickly as she could manage and still remain quiet. With no road to be seen—or, more accurately, felt—beneath her bare feet, she just made her way toward the deeper darkness of the looming woods, instinctively seeking the closest cover in which to hide herself from him.

  There was a shallow stream she splashed through as quietly as she could, beyond worrying about snakes or mud or anything else the girly girl she used to be would have concerned herself with.

  She wanted to live. That was all.

  She just wanted to live.

  Past the stream, the terrain changed, and she realized she was working her way up into the mountains. Mountains that had seemed so pretty to her when she had come to admire them. But now…Her bare feet were bruised and scraped by the granite jutting up unexpectedly here and there, and rough roots exposed by the heavy spring rains weeks before caused her to trip and stagger. Sometimes she fell.

  But she kept getting back up.

  Branches tugged at her as the undergrowth resisted her efforts to move through it, and she was vaguely aware that fresh wounds were being added to the cuts and bruises her body already bore.

  The night was almost unbearably still and quiet, with not the s
lightest breeze to relieve the oppressive heat, and all Catherine could hear for what seemed a long time was her panting breaths. Then a brittle fallen branch cracked loudly beneath her foot, panic rushed through her in a surge of adrenaline, and she threw caution to the wind.

  He might not have left. He might be right behind me. And this is his place, his home; he knows it, I’m sure…Oh, God…

  Faster. She had to move faster.

  As fast as she could.

  As far as she could.

  Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness just enough that she was able to keep from running headlong into a tree, but otherwise all she really saw were varying shades of black.

  Still, she climbed as fast as she possibly could, grabbing rough, knobby branches and leafy bushes and stinging brambles to help herself along, at first not even feeling the slashes of thorns or the raw friction of bark and spiky leaves sliding through her fingers. Her breathing came in sobbing gasps now and her legs burned as she climbed and climbed and climbed. There was no path; there was just an unyielding steep incline studded with granite boulders and towering trees whose roots snaked out far and wide to anchor them to the mountain, and when she wasn’t tripping over the roots, she was fighting her way through the thick underbrush.

  She reached the top of a ridge, clung dizzily to a sapling for a few moments, then pushed herself onward. Downhill should have been easier but wasn’t, because now she could feel the pain of her bruised and scraped feet, the hot pain all over that told her just how much the thorns and branches had torn at her naked flesh, and still she had to push on, through even more of the treacherous undergrowth. And now she had to fight to keep her balance because there was the danger of falling and rolling, of losing her footing and not being able to catch herself.

  She lost track of time. She climbed to the top of one ridge only to stumble down with wavering balance and find another, again and again. She thought hours had passed, must have. Her breath rasped and muscles burned.

  Gradually, the adrenaline of her escape wore off, and exhaustion pulled at her. She staggered, weaving left and right. Falling down, getting up.

  Climbing.

  Always climbing, maybe to the top of the mountain.

  She didn’t know anything except the drive to keep going.

  Her raw hands grasped whatever might help her to climb, whatever might help keep her on her feet, but more and more often when she did go down, she stayed there for a while.

  Resting, she told herself.

  She breathed in the musty smell of the earth, her scraped cheek pillowed only by broken branches, rotting leaves, and sometimes granite. She was so tired she didn’t really care. She might have dozed now and then before picking herself up and going on.

  It occurred to her, finally, that her escape might well leave her lost in these woods forever, lost and unable to find help.

  That realization drove her to her feet again, and she grimly pulled herself up. Hours. Hours, which meant the sun would be up soon. And surely she could find help once there was light.

  Surely.

  Because she wanted to live. To survive this, and remake what had been a fairly useless life so far, a careless and unthinking life. She wanted more now. She wanted to have a family, have children and grow old and forget about horrible darkness and agony and terror, and the face of unspeakable evil.

  She wanted to live.

  She was working her way up yet another slope, squinting because she fancied she could see a lightening of the darkness. And the undergrowth seemed to be thinning out.

  One step at a time, pulling herself with numb hands and leaden arms, she climbed. She thought she was near the top of the ridge, and told herself she would rest there, maybe sit for a while and wait for the sun to rise and tell her that, despite everything, she was going to live to see another day.

  It caught her unawares even so. She pulled herself on, and a pale orange beam of light struck her in the face, blinding her.

  It was warm, and so, so bright after the darkness of hours. The darkness of days. It was wonderful.

  She wanted to come fully into the light. To bathe herself in it.

  She wanted to feel warm again.

  If anything, she pushed herself harder, grasping another sapling to drive herself on, into the light, but this time the tree was stiff and snapped forward with more force than she’d expected, propelling her, almost launching her. And her numb feet gave her no warning that this time, a sharp granite edge meant more than the top of another ridge.

  It was a cliff.

  She didn’t even have a chance to catch her balance, a chance to save herself. Catherine Talbert left the ground and flew, aware of a sensation of absolute, glorious freedom, and for an instant she almost believed it would be possible to land safely.

  For an instant. Just that.

  She fell, bathed in the light of dawn, making no sound because her terror of him was stronger than anything else, still. Her last thought was that even this was better than what she had escaped from.

  Catherine Talbert was twenty-one years old.

  ONE

  Baron Hollow

  JUNE 22

  Emma Rayburn shot bolt upright in bed, at first conscious of nothing except her heart pounding and the suffocating sense of being unable to breathe. Then she sucked in a gasp and slumped, her gaze darting around the room. Her room. Her bedroom, lit only by the pale light of dawn.

  Not a dark forest. Not running and pain and terror.

  Not a soaring end off the edge of a cliff.

  Emma heard a soft whine, and leaned forward to pet the dog lying on the foot of her bed. “It’s okay, girl,” she murmured. “Just a dream. Just another bad dream.”

  Her heartbeat was returning to normal, but the oppressive weight of dread she felt had hardly diminished at all. She looked at the clock on her nightstand, saw that her alarm would be going off in another hour anyway, and tossed back the covers to get out of bed.

  She went to her dressing table across the room and turned on one of the small lamps. With cold hands, she removed a journal from the top drawer and looked through several pages before turning to a fresh page and reaching for a pen to make a simple entry.

  June 22

  Another nightmare, in the woods this time. Different: She was running.

  Trying to escape.

  But the same ending. Always the same ending.

  Another dead girl.

  Emma stared at the entry for a long time, then slowly looked back through the earlier entries. They went back nearly two years, with casual entries of a day lived in uninteresting habit interspersed with stark dates and brief descriptions noting a nightmare of death.

  The death of a girl or woman she never recognized, virtually all of them taking place in a dark, featureless room. Not a room she recognized, and yet she was absolutely certain it was somewhere in this area, in or near town. Near home. She didn’t know why she was so sure, but the knowledge was as absolute as the awareness of her own heart beating.

  In less than two years, she had dreamed of a dozen girls and women dying. Dying violently.

  Emma didn’t need the first diary entry to tell her when the nightmares had begun. They had started after what had seemed a simple and fairly common accident.

  Her family home, now a well-respected and popular inn known as Rayburn House, offered its visitors various means of exploring the Appalachian Mountains surrounding this little valley where the small town of Baron Hollow was situated, and one of those means was guided trail riding on horseback.

  Emma didn’t ride often; she seldom had the time. But that day she had decided on the spur of the moment to go along with a group from Rayburn House. The trail ride had gone fine, just the same as it always did. Until…

  Afterward, she had never been able to remember what had spooked her horse, but he had shied violently, catching her off guard, and Emma had fallen. Which wouldn’t have done much harm, probably, except that her head had struck a granite boul
der.

  That casual decision to go riding had cost her more than a week in the town’s small hospital, and gave her an almost invisible scar above her right temple that was easily hidden by her dark hair. The doctors had been concerned because she had been unconscious for hours. They had worried about bleeding into the brain, they’d told her. But that hadn’t happened. The injury, they told her, had merely bruised a section of her frontal lobe.

  Not like that had sounded scary or anything. Oh, no.

  The list of symptoms she’d been warned to watch out for had been sobering, everything from difficulty concentrating or completing complex tasks she’d found easy to do before the accident, to changes in her personality or even loss of simple movement of body parts.

  Paralysis.

  None of that had happened, thank God, in the two years since the accident. Nothing had changed at all.

  Except for the dreams. The nightmares.

  “They’re likely simple manifestations of the violence of your injury, Emma. That’s all,” Dr. Benfield had told her when she had finally found the nerve to ask him about it. “It’s not uncommon after a head injury to experience in some sense a reliving of the pain and fear.”

  “But it seems so real,” she had protested. “I feel the terror, the pain. The panic.” It doesn’t just seem real. It is real. I know it.

  “Because it’s what you felt when you had the accident.”

  “Yeah, but—” I also feel them die.

  “Have you talked to Chief Maitland? Are there missing women being reported, bodies being discovered? Deaths corresponding with the nights when you dream?” His tone had been professional, but she had fancied a note in there somewhere of a doctor humoring his patient.

  “No, nothing like that,” Emma had answered reluctantly. “I mentioned it to Dan after that girl went missing last summer, even checked on the Internet and back issues of the newspaper at the library, and other than her, there really hasn’t been anything in the county. No reports of other missing girls or women who didn’t turn up later somewhere. Anyway, I don’t think I dreamed about that particular girl; there was a picture supplied by her boyfriend for the search parties. And he thought that she just hiked out of the mountains and caught a ride with someone after they argued. I heard later that was the case.”