Hidden Salem (BishopSpecial Crimes Unit #19) - Kay Hooper

PROLOGUE

Salem

Do it.

Do it now.

Mark Summers could hear the command, but not out loud. His head hurt horribly, and he had the hazy idea that the commands that kept ringing out were actually inside his head, as clear as one of his own thoughts, but . . . savage. It blocked out everything else, the people circling him, the almost overpowering scent of some kind of herb or incense, the low sounds they had been making—not exactly a chant but a weird sort of hum.

Before he’d closed his eyes, they had only been shadowy shapes flickering in the candlelight, but he’d felt their demand, like the one in his mind, insistent. Every beat of it hurt, and he had the dim sense that they had . . . done things . . . to his body. That they had hurt him, over and over.

And always the questions, the demands that hurt even more, that seemed to wrench at something inside his very skull.

“I don’t understand,” he managed to whisper, wondering vaguely what he was lying on, because it felt like solid stone. And he couldn’t move his arms or legs, even though he didn’t think he was tied down. No, there was . . . something holding him still. And he felt something else . . . wet . . . underneath him, and flowing out of him.

Do it. You know. Deep down inside you, you know.

“No . . . I don’t understand.” He felt appallingly weak, even though they’d been feeding him, more or less. Since he’d stopped on his way into Salem to help a stranded traveler and—and he didn’t remember much after that.

Summers opened his eyes for a moment, then shut them again, dizzy, because the flickering candles were moving now, all around him, and that hum grew louder, more of a chant now, and he still didn’t understand.

“Please,” he murmured. “Please let me go. I won’t tell anyone. I just want to go . . . home.”

Hot breath on his face, smelling faintly of something he almost recognized, and then a harsh voice said, “You are home, Mark. You know it’s true. You’ve come back to Salem. Back to your family.”

“I don’t have a family,” he whispered.

“Your family called you here, Mark. And now it’s time for you to do what you were born to do.”

He wanted to question, to protest, but there was a pressure building in his mind, something . . . powerful . . . pressing against the bone of his skull, and he knew, suddenly, that he would never be able to contain all that strength, all that power. It was too big for him, too much for him . . . too much . . .

He was fading, losing consciousness, but even as the blackness closed over him he identified the smell of that hot, harsh breath.

Brimstone.

ONE

TUESDAY

He passed her on one of the backstreets of downtown Salem, and if Geneva Raynor hadn’t been relaxing her shield for a bit so she could send out a few cautiously probing telepathic tendrils, she would have completely missed him. A hunter, recently down from the mountains even though it was still very early, and . . .

Oh, God, oh, Jesus, what coulda done that? I never seen so much blood, so much . . . What kind of animal coulda . . . And all that on the rocks . . . all them symbols or signs, like witchcraft . . . but in blood, I know it was in blood . . .

His horror was such that Geneva could hardly sort through and try to get a location from his scattered thoughts, and what she got was maddeningly uncertain, a vague direction at best.

Still, she waited only until he was well past, then wandered in the opposite direction, pausing now and again, against every instinct screaming at her to hurry, in order to point her camera and click to capture a beautiful bit of scenery.

Or whatever. She didn’t give a damn about the scenery.

She didn’t want to take the time to go back to the B and B and