“No! No! This can’t be!”
“May The Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon your soul.”
I cannot move.
I can hear the scraping of a match against stone.
I cannot scream.
I can hear the explosive spark as the match ignites.
Somebody please help me!
I can see the faint shadows cast as the flame on the match head flares and settles to an even burn.
NO! THIS ISN’T HAPPENING!
I am crying.
Thunder crashes in my ears as the kerosene ignites.
Hot yellow agony licks across my body.
“He’s posturing.” The distantly familiar female voice pierces my nightmare. “Look at his hands.”
“GODDAMIT, ROWAN, NO!” I can hear the deep voice now. The one called Ben. “You’re NOT gonna make me tell Felicity you’re dead!”
Fire clings to me in a vicious shroud. I’m holding my breath as the flame washes over my face furiously catching my hair and blossoming upward with yet another loud crash.
I want to scream as the angry blaze literally cooks my flesh.
A sudden roar mixes with the rush of the fire and marries with a high-pitched grind before fading away on the night.
Flames consume all that is.
A sharp sting ripped through my left cheek.
Of all the hurt I was experiencing, this was the least. At the same time, it was the worst.
There was something different about it.
Sizzling noises.
Crackling noises.
I know that they are coming from me.
The gag is burning.
A pair of pantyhose melting into my skin.
I can’t hold my breath any longer.
Maybe I can scream.
I gasp.
Liquid fire rushes down my throat.
Expanding through my lungs.
I choke.
No sound comes past my seared lips.
The bizarre, piercing discomfort attacked me again. This time, my right cheek reported the sensation. Off in the control center of my brain, a series of comparisons took place. A vague recollection of something called the plane of physical reality was suddenly rushed to the forefront.
I snapped my eyes open.
I awoke to find myself sprawled on a metal table in what I knew to be an autopsy suite at the city morgue. Ben was towering over me, one meaty paw entwined in the front of my shirt, the other reared back in preparation to impart a serious-looking backhand to my face. Just as I started to cringe, I caught a swift motion from the corner of my eye and saw Doctor Sanders reach out to grab his wrist.
“Hold it, Storm!” she barked as she leaned in and brought her concerned gaze to meet mine. “Mister Gant, can you hear me? Are you all right?”
I felt Ben’s hand relax and release my shirt immediately following my gravelly-voiced answer, which simply came out as “I could really use a drink.”
CHAPTER 7
My hands were still shaking as I poured myself a second drink from the bottle of Gentleman Jack. Under normal circumstances I would have preferred Scotch to bourbon, but obviously, the word “normal” wasn’t something that one would readily apply to what had just transpired. At this particular point I wasn’t about to argue, and since Tennessee whiskey was what Doctor Sanders had hidden away in her desk drawer, it would have to do. At least it was good bourbon.
My shakes weren’t blatantly obvious, but they were perceptible, and very little escaped Ben Storm’s scrutiny. A veteran witness to my sometimes sudden, supernormal departures, he stood mute on the other side of the office, holding up the wall with his back and nursing a drink while patiently waiting for me to continue. Doctor Sanders, on the other hand, while knowing of my perceptions, was a novice in this arena. Seated opposite me at her desk, she was still staring in wide-eyed amazement. Every now and then she would shift her gaze from me to Ben then back. Having only recently been baptized by fire, so to speak, she had done little more than listen and tend to her own libation as I relayed the experience to the best of my ability. No matter how hard I searched, I was unable to find words that could truly describe what I had just shared with the tortured soul of a dead woman.
Tossing my head back, I downed the second three-finger measure of the brown liquor and set the highball glass back onto the desk, taking care to place it on the notepad I was using for a coaster.
“Like I said, I never saw his face… I… She…never had the chance.” As if to punctuate my statement, the handful of ice cubes in the tumbler clinked musically as they settled. “I’m pretty sure I’d recognize his voice if I heard it again, though.”
“And you’re pretty sure on the identity of the corpse too, right?” Ben turned up the notebook he held at his side and glanced quickly down at it. “Kendra Miller. Middle name, Darlene.”
“That’s what he called her.” I nodded as I wrapped my hand around the neck of the bottle of bourbon. “He stated her full name when he passed judgment and informed her of her sentence.”
“You think maybe she knew him?” he asked. “Sure sounds like he knew her.”
“I didn’t get that impression,” I answered. “She was very confused… And she was afraid of him, that’s for sure. But I don’t think she knew who he was, or I would have picked it up. His familiarity with her was probably from afar. He might have stalked her…” I shrugged. “I don’t know. At any rate, the fact that he knew her full name was a formality. It was kind of a ‘legal necessity’ shall we say, for when he passed his sentence on her. Just like it would have been during the time of the Inquisition.”
“By all means, let’s make sure the legal necessities are all friggin’ covered,” Ben muttered sarcastically. “Any possibility this one might’ve been a hooker too?”
I touched the mouth of the bottle to the rim of my glass and carefully splashed another double over the melting ice. “I don’t know. I can guarantee you of one thing about her though… She was guilty as charged. Kendra Miller was a practicing Witch.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Doctor Sanders hesitantly broke her self-imposed reticence. “I mean if I understood you correctly, the killer’s proof was the necklace. It might not have even belonged to her.”
“Oh, it belonged to her all right. No doubt in my mind.” I twirled the alcohol in the tumbler while watching the light glow through its amber translucence and then rested the glass on my knee. I had hammered the first two drinks, and on an empty stomach they had quickly served their purpose by chasing away my trembles with their liquid courage. I was beginning to feel a mildly warm tingle creeping along the back of my scalp and decided I had better take it easy with this one. “I’m sure she was of The Craft because of the strength of the vision and the force with which I was drawn into it. I had a similar experience with Ariel Tanner when she was murdered… Only the spirit of a Witch could have pulled me in like that.”
“Amazing,” she muttered before taking a sip of her own drink.
“You said this asshole told ‘er he got the evidence-the necklace-from her apartment recently. Right?” Ben pressed.
“Yeah. That’s what he said.”
“But ya’ don’t know how long she was left alone?”
“The whole thing was pretty disjointed,” I confessed. “I really couldn’t determine any type of reference point for time, so I guess the answer would be no. Why do you ask?”
Ben set his drink atop a nearby filing cabinet, and his now free hand went up to smooth his hair then slid easily down to begin massaging his neck. “Just curious. I thought maybe once we found ‘er apartment, we could determine a radius or somethin’. An area where this wingnut might be operatin’ out of. But if ya’ don’t know how long he was gone…” He let his voice fade.