DEZ’S gift, Joss had dealt with before. He’d been imprinted with it and he’d done just fine. Didn’t like it, but the good news was, once he synced with somebody else, all her ghosts went away. He might pick up on those faint echoes, the way he had at the cemetery, the way he had at the warehouse, nothing major.
It was nothing like what Dez had to live with, though.
But he thought he’d rather have Dez’s gift, any day of the week, than live with what this kid had inside her all the time.
Endless whispers. Echoes of forgotten pain. Glimpses of forgotten pasts and yet-to-be-seen futures. All of it, she had all of that inside her head.
Where in the hell did she have room for her own thoughts?
As the weight of it all slammed into him, stretching his brain to the very limit, he was stretched as well; he fought to control his breathing, fought to control his heart rate, his fear.
And her fear.
Her terror was a living, breathing beast in his belly, a dragon growing in size that threatened to swallow him whole.
Meditation got him through these things, always, but it wasn’t doing him much good right now and he was clinging to consciousness by the skin of his teeth and it still wasn’t done.
Their faces—aw, fuck . . . their faces.
Got to help . . .
Jillian’s thoughts, her fears, they were a desperate cry in the back of his mind as face after face circled through his mind.
There was a woman. Head bowed. Dark hair streaming around her shoulders. He’s killing them . . . killing me . . . we can’t stop it . . .
We’ll stop it, Joss wanted to tell her. Look at me . . . let me see your face . . .
But then she was gone, as ephemeral as mist as, try as he might, he couldn’t bring her back.
Jillian’s voice continued to whisper, incomprehensible . . . what was she saying . . . names? It was almost a rhyme, he thought. But not quite.
Abruptly, the chaos in her mind came to a slamming halt and there was a man.
Everything stopped. And it was like time and space fell away. He and Jillian were no longer in that room, no longer in that hotel. They were somewhere else. He could hear laughter, screams. Smell the heat of the summer sun baking on the sidewalks. Cotton candy and cookies and ice cream . . .
“What is this?” he muttered.
“It was here,” Jillian said.
He flinched and looked over at the girl.
She stared straight ahead.
Automatically, he followed the line of her sight, startled to realize he could actually do it—it was so fucking real. Nothing like this had ever happened before when he’d synched to anybody. Blips of memory, yeah, but this wasn’t a blip. This was like a 3-D flashback from hell.
“It was here when I saw him. That was when it all started,” Jillian said. She shivered and crossed her arms over her chest. Thin arms, skinny, narrow body, hovering just at the verge of womanhood. She looked so young, Joss realized. So afraid.
It was instinct that made him turn his head and look down at her, wrap his own arm around those narrow shoulders. “Who is he?”
“The one who takes them.” She swallowed, staring at the back of the man’s head. It was a bright, cheerful place . . . and yet all Jillian could hear were screams. All she could feel was pain. It was like the man had an imprint of his own, and Jillian was keyed into it. And because she was, now Joss was as well. “He takes them. He sells them. He buys them. He gives them away. It’s like we’re nothing but toys to him. And I can’t see him well enough to stop him.”
A harsh sob ripped through her, and she covered her face with her hands. “All I had to do was run up there and look at him, but I was too afraid.”
Joss rubbed his hand down Jillian’s narrow back. “Does he sound like that when you look at him? Feel like that?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s awful.”
“Then you did the right thing. There’s no way I’d go running up to somebody like that, if I were in your shoes. You called for the big guns.” He hugged her tight.
“I could have found Mom. Said something to her. She could