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  “It’s a useful life, I know, but—”

  “It’s a remarkable life, Hollis. And nobody, not even you, knows what’s ahead for you. Or what isn’t. You’re on a far less-traveled path than most people even know exists.”

  “‘Two roads diverged in a wood,’” she murmured.

  “And you took the one less traveled by. Really less traveled by. It isn’t likely to be peaceful except in rare moments. It very likely leads to more horrors, like that poor lady tonight, killed so violently. And perhaps to more pain for you. But it’s your path now. It’s who you are now. I never knew that other Hollis, but I’m betting the one I do know is stronger and more courageous, and will go on saving people. Protecting people from all the things that go bump in the night, the things most of them don’t even believe are real.

  “I believe the Hollis I know is . . . amazing. I believe she’s on the path the Universe wants her to be on, has shaped her for. A path even she is more comfortable on than she realizes. Because her experiences have made her more suited to a life of danger and uncertainty, of hunting monsters. I see that in her, the drive, even the instincts, to hunt monsters. To keep beating back evil no matter what form it takes. And I believe in her ability to not only survive what fate throws at her, but to triumph.”

  Hollis was pretty sure she had never heard him say so much in such a short time, and while a part of her knew what that meant, another part was reluctant to believe it.

  No matter what he said.

  Forcing lightness, she said, “So I should pull myself together and do my job, huh?”

  “You have to trust yourself.” He didn’t seem at all bothered by her seeming dismissal of his really articulate and admiring assessment of her.

  “To do my job?”

  “To be the woman you were meant to be.”

  Hollis again looked down at his hand over hers and heard herself speak slowly. “After the attack that took my eyes and did so much damage, I knew my life would change. Had changed. I sat in the dark in the hospital room, a bandage over my eyes, for days and days, thinking about it. Even when I met Maggie, and she took away so much of the pain and buried so many memories most victims of trauma never have to deal with, I knew I was different.” She paused, then added almost conversationally, “Did you know that? That most victims who survive horrific trauma never remember what happened to them? Most lose days, even weeks of memories. They wake up not knowing what happened to them. Never remembering. But a few of us do. I did. I remembered everything. Every single minute. That’s how I really knew I was different.”

  “Hollis—”

  “Even when I could see again, I knew nothing would ever be the same. I would never be the same. And there was nothing I could do about that but . . . accept it. Maybe that’s why Maggie helped me bury so much of it, and why it stayed buried for so long. Because I had to forget, at least consciously. Just so I could . . . adjust to a new reality and move on. Just so I could function.”

  “You did more than just function. A lot more. I’ve read the case reports from the beginning of your SCU career. And I was there, at the church where we all faced and fought a . . . an almost bottomless evil, and saw you do amazing things. After that, even more amazing things with every case. You never turn away from the darkness, from evil; you turn toward it, face it, fight it. I’ve seen you channel energy, positive and negative, becoming a living conduit. I’ve seen you heal, yourself and others. I’ve seen you communicate with spirits. I’ve seen you help people, even when it was . . . so dangerous for you.”

  He paused, then added deliberately, “I’ve never seen you doubt yourself like this.”

  “I can’t explain it,” Hollis said finally, mentally tucking away all the incredible things he had said to her to think about later. When he wasn’t touching her. “Maybe because I don’t know where it’s coming from. All I can tell you is what you already know. I . . . don’t feel like myself.”

  “Could a spirit be influencing you, or a psychic unsub?”

  “Jesus, I hope not.” She frowned. “It . . . doesn’t feel like something alien, something outside myself. It just feels like something’s wrong. Wrong with me. And that’s as far as I get, feeling that, knowing that. Starting to panic. I try to look deeper, I try to think about it, and that’s all I get. This sense of wrongness in me.”

  “You’ve been able to see spirits here. Can you still see auras?”

  “Yeah, unless my shield is working at the time. If it is, I have to concentrate harder. For the record, all the auras I’ve seen have been within normal parameters, if there is such a thing. Nobody fighting off any kind of energy, or showing anything unusually negative, given the situation.”

  “Do you feel grounded? Anchored?” DeMarco asked after a moment.

  Hollis tried a laugh that didn’t quite come off. “Is that something I can feel?”

  “It should be. When we met, you were only beginning to discover abilities beyond being a medium. Beginning to explore, to reach out. I became your anchor, even though it wasn’t your choice. I’ve been your anchor, keeping you grounded when your abilities could have taken you too far.”

  “Reese—”

  “Like into Diana’s gray time.”

  Diana Hayes was a medium and had been one all her life, but a controlling and overprotective father had seen her gift as sickness, and for most of her life a parade of doctors had kept her medicated to the point that she was a medium only at the subconscious level. But even then, years before she became consciously aware of them, her remarkable abilities had taken her to a place she called the gray time, a sort of corridor between the living world and the spirit realm, where spirit guides had asked for her help in one way or another.

  The gray time was a realm Diana was very familiar with, a place where, at least for the first part of her life, she had been strong and certain and in control of her abilities. Usually. But the gray time was also never meant to be a place for the living, and an “off the books” experiment between the two mediums had left Hollis with something of a link to a place that was far more dangerous for her than it would ever be for Diana.

  Reese had been her anchor long before she’d accepted that she needed him to be, and he had most certainly pulled her from Diana’s gray time at least twice in potentially deadly situations.

  “I should probably thank you for that,” she murmured.

  DeMarco shook his head slightly, his gaze still intent. “You needed an anchor, and I knew it was me. In Diana’s gray time. And when you poured everything you had into the effort to heal her, to heal Miranda.”

  “Bishop said my sense of self-preservation would have pulled me back before it was too late.”

  NINE

  “Bishop is wrong.”

  Hollis felt a curious little shock and realized only slowly that she had never heard anyone say that before.

  Whether he was reading her or aware of her thoughts in any sense, DeMarco simply said, “We both know I was your anchor when you stood in the doorway of an energy vortex. Your anchor, and maybe something more.”

  “You kept me safe,” she murmured. “When it was necessary. When I needed your strength, your energy as well as mine.”

  “So that’s it,” DeMarco said, his tone less of realization than of confirmation.

  “What?”

  “I think maybe I made a mistake in letting you delay a very important conversation. We should have talked about this months ago.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” She tried her best to put conviction in every word.

  DeMarco unknotted her hands and held them in each of his. “This,” he said. “This connection between us. It’s real, Hollis. Even if we’re not touching. Even if there’s some distance between us. It’s real, and it will always be there. We’ll always be connected.”

  “You don’t have to—”

 
“You believe this is a chore for me, a burden? Something I’m reluctant about?”

  “I read your file. I know about your background. You’re . . . a very private man. You wouldn’t have developed that double shield otherwise, we both know that. You were always a loner.”

  “I was. And then I met you. I couldn’t be a loner anymore. Why else do you think I joined the team fully, came into the unit instead of requesting another undercover assignment?”

  She tried to pull away, tried to look away from those too-intent blue eyes, but could do neither. “I think . . . you didn’t have a choice,” she said finally. “I think you got stuck with me.”

  “And you got stuck with me?”

  Hollis hesitated again. “No. I didn’t mean—”

  “We’re partners, Hollis. Not because either one of us got stuck with the other, but because we naturally complement each other. Because I have excess energy and you sometimes need that. Because we both have the baggage of people who know what trauma feels like. Because I can protect you in my shield while yours is getting stronger.”

  She forced a laugh. “It sounds like a very one-sided partnership, if you ask me. You give and I take.”

  “It’s a question of balance, and the balance is always going to shift between two people. That’s true of every partnership in the SCU, and you know it. It’s not a question of taking turns, but one partner’s abilities are almost always more necessary to resolving a specific case than the other partner’s are. Bishop and Miranda are probably the only partners who balance each other perfectly most if not all the time, and they had to go through hell, separately and together, to get to that point.”

  “I’ve already been to hell,” she said almost involuntarily. “I’d rather not go again.”

  “Me either.” He smiled faintly. “My hell was war. Yours was being brutalized. I have memories I don’t want to touch just like you do.”

  “Nobody’s telling you that you have to remember, have to face those memories.”

  “Nobody has to. Every murder victim we see, every mutilated body, every autopsy photo brings it all back. I remember because I can never forget. That was never an option for me.”

  Hollis had never thought about that, had never considered how war had to haunt him, and she suddenly felt more than a little bit ashamed of herself. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Neither one of us has been all that good at sharing things we should have.”

  “You’re doing a pretty good job of it now,” she managed, trying not to look as self-conscious as she suddenly felt.

  He looked down at the slender hands he was holding, then back at her face. He thought he knew her face better than he knew his own. “Because now it’s time. Partnerships develop step-by-step. Relationships develop step-by-step.”

  “And this is the next step?” And before he could answer that, she hurriedly added, “We’re in the middle of a case. To say the timing is lousy is an understatement.” She really hoped he’d follow her lead. But that hope was dashed when he didn’t.

  “You don’t ever want to feel vulnerable. Neither do I. But everyone has to be able to feel vulnerable sometimes. We have to just let go, expose ourselves, let someone else see who and what we really are. At least one other person. You and I can be that for each other. All it takes is trust.”

  “Trust.”

  DeMarco nodded.

  “I already trust you,” she said.

  “Not that much. Not yet.”

  Defensive, she said, “What about you? Do you trust me that much?”

  “Yes. I knew that when you faced off with the evil in Georgia—and all I could do was stand back and watch. I started accepting it even before, when you channeled pure negative energy and all I could do was be your anchor and just hold on.”

  “An anchor is everything,” she said slowly. “Without you, I could never have done that.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Positive.” Realizing something else, she looked down at their hands and then met his steady gaze again. “That was when the connection between us grew stronger. When we became . . . something more than partners.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Why didn’t I know that?”

  “You knew, even if you weren’t ready to face it. You knew when, for a very brief time, I was able to see the spirits you saw.”

  Hollis had almost forgotten that. “But, if that was through the connection between us, then why was it temporary?”

  “My best guess, and it is a guess, is that all the energy you channeled had temporarily . . . overloaded the connection. Once that extra energy dissipated, it went back to what it was meant to be. A connection we can use when we want to or need to.”

  Slowly, she said, “So we won’t always share abilities the way Bishop and Miranda do?”

  “I don’t think so. Though we may from time to time.”

  “Because their connection is deeper?” It was a difficult question to ask.

  “Because it’s different. They’re both extremely powerful telepaths, so that’s the way their energy works, mind to mind, sharing their innermost thoughts. Being lovers, I would think, only intensifies that.”

  Hollis wanted to look away from his intent gaze but discovered she couldn’t. Any more than she could stop herself from asking the question. “What would that do for us? Being lovers?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied simply.

  “Guess.”

  “Our primary abilities are different; I’m a telepath and you’re a medium. We use energy differently, interpret it differently. You interpret a much wider range of energy than I do, and in different ways. How our energy would merge . . . I’m sure it would strengthen the connection between us. I’m not sure how. Build more trust. Maybe even forge a different kind of connection. Whatever it is, you can be sure it’ll be unique to us.”

  “All positive. No negative?”

  “There’s always negative. Balance. The most obvious negative would probably be that our timing is never going to be perfect. The last months at Quantico were a bit unusual and we both know it. We’re usually working, often without time enough even for food or sleep. But we’re also human, and it may be that we have to steal moments for ourselves even in the middle of a case. That we’ll need to.”

  Hollis nodded slowly. “And?”

  “That vulnerability we were talking about. You’re vulnerable to a lover in a way you are to no one else. For some people, it’s a temporary thing, in the moment and no more. It won’t be for us.”

  “It won’t?”

  “No.”

  “Because we’re already partners? Already connected?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  Hollis realized that they were both speaking as if becoming lovers was simply going to happen, and she didn’t quite know how she felt about that. Except nervous.

  “Reese, I haven’t . . . been with anybody for a long time. Since before the attack.”

  “I expected as much. Even with Maggie’s help, scars like yours take a long time to heal.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready.”

  “I am. And you will be too. When you’re ready.”

  “Baby steps,” she murmured.

  “That’s the way we’ve been moving toward each other all along, in case you hadn’t noticed. Personally, I mean.” He lifted her hands for a moment. “Just don’t forget this. We already have a connection, and nothing is going to break it. You are not alone; you never have to hide any part of yourself from me. And I am a very patient man.”

  Releasing her hands finally, he rose and replaced the chair at the small desk. He was smiling faintly.

  “How’s the headache?”

  Surprised, Hollis said, “It’s gone. Who did that, you or me?”

  “Let’s call it a te
am effort and not look too deeply for now. We both need to get some sleep. Breakfast at seven?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I’ll knock on your door. Good night.”

  “Good night.” She watched him return to his room, pushing his side of the connecting door without completely closing it. She sat there for a time, just looking at the door and thinking.

  Thinking about a lot of things. Because she knew he wasn’t reading her right now, that he had deliberately withdrawn inside both his shields—to allow her the privacy she couldn’t yet count on inside a shield of her own. He might have done that only to prove a point, but Hollis thought that wasn’t his reason.

  She thought about that, about vulnerability, about sharing more of herself than she had ever shared with anyone in her life. Then she got up, quickly and methodically unpacked, stowed her empty luggage in the closet, and went to have a shower.

  She came out of the bathroom ready for bed, turning off lights until only the lamp on the nightstand was still burning. And it wasn’t until she was reaching to pull back the covers that she saw the foil-wrapped chocolate on her pillow—and a folded piece of paper underneath.

  She unfolded what she recognized as a sheet of the hotel’s stationery, and even though she hadn’t seen it very many times, she also recognized DeMarco’s printed but curiously light and fluid handwriting. Just a few words, a brief quotation that really needed no explanation, not for Hollis.

  Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

  —KHALIL GIBRAN

  Hollis looked at the quotation, realizing absently that he must have slipped back into her room while she was in the shower, just long enough to leave her this . . . gift.

  She thought about it for a long time, reading the words over and over. Finally, she opened the drawer of the nightstand where she almost always kept her e-book reader for sleepless nights, and put the folded piece of stationery in there as well, the foil-wrapped chocolate on top.