She squeezed her eyes shut so that even the sparks of light disappeared. But she couldn’t shut out the voices. Others called to her, jumbled inside her head, echoes of thoughts and fears she’d already heard.
“I’m not a witch.”
“Don’t kill me! Please, don’t kill me!”
But the killer ignored their pleas, and the women’s voices rose in screams of terror and pain. Irina winced at the volume, which threatened to shatter her skull, and she cringed at the agony expressed in each shrill cry. No matter how long ago she’d first heard them, she couldn’t get them out of her head, couldn’t forget their suffering. Not only had she heard their cries but she’d felt their pain, too. The fire scorching her flesh, burning her alive. The noose chafing her skin, tightening around her throat until it cut off her last breath. The jagged rocks piled one by one onto her body, crushing her beneath their weight.
She’d wanted to help them, but she hadn’t known where the women were. She hadn’t been able to see them or their surroundings; she’d only heard them. Even if she had been able to figure out where they’d been, she would have been too late to save them. She’d wanted to help, but she couldn’t even help herself right now.
One of these screams, the first she’d heard filled with such agony and fear and so hauntingly familiar, had driven her back here…to the street. Her biological mother’s. She hadn’t heard her voice in twenty years—not in person, just many times inside her head. With that scream she’d known her mother had been killed even before she’d heard her sisters speak of her death.
Were they real? Any of them? The voices? Her memories? Or had that first scream been the beginning of some kind of psychotic break?
Before hearing that scream, just months ago, she’d been managing. She’d been living. Going to school. Working.
Now she was barely existing, just waiting…until the next scream…was hers.
Chapter 1
Were they witches? They didn’t cast spells. They didn’t heal with potions and herbs as their long-dead ancestor had. But they had special abilities and they needed to use them to save a life—just as their ancestor had tried three hundred and fifty years ago. He only hoped their efforts weren’t rewarded the same way hers had been.
With death.
Ty McIntyre cared about these two women. They sat together, holding hands, on the black leather couch in the penthouse owned by Ty’s best friend. Actually Ariel held her older sister’s hand, and Elena held the charms—a little pewter sun and a little pewter star—in her palm, combining their powers.
Their powers?
A muscle jumped in his cheek as he clenched his jaw. Skepticism nagged at him. God, he was a lawman. Even though he listened to his instincts, he relied on evidence. Tangible proof. How could he rely on something he didn’t understand, something he couldn’t trust?
Believe, he silently chanted to quell his doubts. He’d seen the proof of their powers in the results they wrought. Ariel was alive. Stacia, Elena’s daughter, was alive. Because of their intangible powers.
“Can you see anything yet?” he asked Elena, frustration thickening his voice.
She scrunched shut her pale eyes, and her forehead furrowed with concentration. The knuckles on the hand holding the charms tightened and turned white, while her fingers reddened.
“She can’t force her visions,” Ariel defended her sister as she stared up at him through narrowed eyes. “What’s up with you, Ty? You’re edgier than usual. Did you find out something you haven’t shared yet?”
He shook his head, then started pacing the marble floor of David’s living room. Like a jolt from an electrical outlet, pain traveled up his leg from his not-quite-healed wound. Maybe the doctors were right—maybe he’d had them remove the cast too soon. “No, I haven’t learned a damned thing.”
“So that’s why you’re edgy,” Ariel said. “You’re frustrated.”
“We all are,” Elena chimed in, her eyes still closed. “Since we know who the killer is, we should be able to find him.”
Donovan Roarke. The man was a private investigator, but before that he’d been a cop. Like Ty. And like Ty, he’d been suspended from the police department due to excessive force. Ty’s guts knotted, but he reminded himself he was nothing like the madman. Donovan Roarke was a sadistic son of a bitch. He might have convinced himself that by killing witches in the ways that witches had been killed centuries ago he was honoring his family legacy, the vendetta begun so many years ago. But Ty knew the guy was a psychopath, and if he wasn’t caught soon, he’d kill again.
Anger gripped Ty, but he fought it off, breathing slow and deep. Then he shoved a hand through his hair. Even though he hadn’t worn his uniform in months, he kept his black hair short, in an almost military cut. He liked his life simple, like the T-shirts and old jeans he wore. But there was nothing simple about his life now; there hadn’t been since Donovan Roarke had begun his witch hunt.
“Roarke’s clever,” Ty admitted. Or he would have found the sick bastard by now.
“He’s crazy,” Ariel maintained.
Maybe Ty was, too, because he’d actually thought this might work, that Elena would have a vision that would lead him to her missing sister, the youngest of the three of them. Since he’d come up empty in his other investigations, he’d decided to use the sisters’ powers. He had nothing left to lose.
“Let’s concentrate on Irina,” he said, which was easy for him since she was all he thought about lately.
She’d been nagging at his mind ever since he’d first seen the picture of her as a little girl. From the glass-and-marble coffee table he picked up the trifold pewter picture frame they’d found in Roarke’s office. The private investigator must have stolen the twenty-year-old portraits of the three sisters from their mother after he’d killed her.
As Ty focused on the youngest child with her loose brown curls and her big, dark eyes, a memory teased him: flashing lights, blurred before his swollen eyes; pain pounding in his skull and tearing at his arm as he fought for consciousness, for life; then a little girl’s voice calling out to him, calling him back from the brink of death.
Hers? Or the little girl who’d died because he hadn’t gotten to her in time? Was the memory an old one, buried deep with the rest of his childhood? Or was it a new one, suppressed like the rage over which his lieutenant had suspended him?
His hand shaking slightly, he set the picture frame back on the table, then turned his attention to Elena. He’d deal with his own demons later, after he’d dealt with theirs. “You’ve had visions of her before. If you can’t have another, try to remember everything you can about those, even what you might think insignificant.”
Elena nodded in perfect understanding of the gift she’d denied and fought for so long. “I’ll try to recall every detail.”
He blew out a ragged breath, relieved that she understood what he wanted. Irina. “We have to find her.” Soon.
Knowing who the killer was didn’t make him less dangerous. In Roarke’s case, Ty
