Shadow Bound

Riggs, Mom’s childhood friend and the Thorne family doctor, was on hand for discreet support. No one doubted she’d keep her evaluation of Jacob’s condition within the Thorne family. Mental illness? Drug addiction? They should be so lucky.

Patty was in the room when Jacob “kissed” Mom, witnessing the extent of Jacob’s transformation. She saw what came after, as well. Adam wasn’t proud of that. Now she still honored the friendship regardless of the risk to herself.

Ah, hell. She deserved a little honor back, not him snapping at her.

Adam exhaled his frustration and dampened his tone. “You’re a softy, Aunt Pat. Always have been.”

The Aunt Pat had Patty’s nose reddening, eyes rapidly blinking against tears. Pat with no family of her own, no family but the fucked-up Thorne brothers.

“I need to get back. Get Dr. O’Brien back in bed,” she said, voice high and broken.

“Okay. I’ll be around, say two o’clock?”

“That’ll be fine. Try to keep the tour short. She’s bound to get tired quickly.”

Adam nodded and rounded the corner from Patty’s lab to his own office. He coded himself inside. A glance at the monitor told him that over the past hour Jacob had migrated to the far corner of his cell to recline, head lolling with boredom. Which was just fine.

Then he got a good look at his desk. The files dedicated to leads on Talia O’Brien’s whereabouts could safely be shredded. Security reports had to be seen to. Budget. Correspon-dence to a half dozen field researchers. And the updated global wraith watch needed reviewing so that he was current on areas of wraith growth, movement, the establishment of supply chains and wealth.

The wraiths were organizing. They even had a friendly and innocuous-sounding name. The Collective.

Budget could wait. The Collective could not. Adam tapped the console on his desk. A three-dimensional image of the world sprang up on a cutting-edge monitor hung from the ceiling beyond his desk. Like blood trails, wraith movements spotted across the United States in red drips of varying concentrations, coagulating in big cities where feeding could be masked by the concentration of crime.

Adam ran a program to track the rate of growth. The computer produced alarming streaks of rapid development that had Adam’s chest constricting. Within—what?—a year The Collective would have a sizable force in every major U.S. city. Nothing short of war would eradicate them.

Adam sat back in his chair. Willing or not, there was no way he could allow Dr. O’Brien to leave.

“Haunted with a view or peaceful without?” Adam asked as he pushed Talia’s wheelchair out of Patty’s office.

Talia had been sullen and silent upon his arrival, dressed in khakis, pink blouse with a wavy-looking collar, and slippers. Considering the clothes’ conservative and matronly cut, Adam deduced that they were both Patty’s selections and taste, ordered and overnighted while Talia recovered. The shoes must not have fit, but Adam wasn’t about to ask and stir up trouble between the women. Only Patty could have talked Talia into the wheelchair, ready to go at two o’clock on the spot with mutiny written all over her.

“You can’t be serious,” Talia returned.

“In your line of study, surely you’ve considered the existence of ghosts.” He stopped at an elevator at the end of the hallway. The silver doors parted to reveal the vestiges of an antique iron cage, a throwback to the building’s origins. If Talia thought the ironwork odd, she didn’t voice it.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “You can’t imagine that I would actually select my own prison cell and give you any kind of false support for your keeping me here against my will. This whole ‘tour’ is a farce.”

“You’re not a prisoner; you’re a staff member.”

“I resign,” she said.

“I’ll consider your resignation when you can walk on your own two feet without turning green.” The lie sounded smooth and reasonable, even friendly, but then Adam was well practiced.

They stopped one floor up, exiting into a marble-tiled atrium over which an enormous crystal chandelier sparkled like a suspended falling star against a background of rich mahogany.

He halted there while he coded them out a set of French doors and onto a sweep of white terrace that stretched around the east side of the building.

Unkempt, overgrown lawns rambled away from the building into the tree line. The natural, rolling green collided with a dense forest of spruce and, farther east, white pine spiking along Knob Ridge. The air outside, thick with moisture and sticky heat, clung to Adam’s skin and clothes.

Talia twisted her head to look over her shoulder. Adam followed her line of sight. Segue walls climbed brick and stone, multistoried, with extended wings and terraces jutting symmetrically off at each side. Pretentious front steps led to the white-columned main entrance below them, and to the left.

“Okay, so, one more time: where are we?” Talia asked at last.

Adam grinned. “Segue operates out of what used to be the Fulton Holiday Hotel, a kind of turn-of-the- century West Virginian mountain resort for the upper crust.”

Her gaze dropped from the building to him. “The kind of place they profile on the Travel Channel? Ladies in white dresses, croquet on the lawn?”

“Something like that. Or at least until the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. The hotel was on the brink financially. Apparently, the nearby system of caves was not as much a lure as Theodore Fulton thought they’d be. When the flu hit the hotel, Fulton fell ill himself and died soon after. His sons ran out on the place. It changed hands a couple of times until it came to my family.”

Talia pushed herself out of her chair and walked slowly to the edge of the terrace. Adam followed, watchful.

He continued, “I tried to restore what little bits of the hotel I could without impinging on Segue’s needs. Found the chandelier from the foyer in a storage cellar, overlooked by the looters and vandals who stripped the place in the years after it was abandoned. Took a little doing, but this is pretty close to how it would have been.”

“It’s very—” she began.

He stepped to the edge and glanced at Talia’s profile. Her white skin glowed against the backdrop of green, the afternoon sun warming her complexion from ash to soft pink and gold marble. Stray twists of blonde tugged away from her shoulder to stream across her cheek, to lift and quiver on the light breeze.

“—remote,” Talia finished.

Lovely in profile.

She turned her black-cat eyes on him, meeting his gaze.

Disconcerting head-on.

Time to get down to it. Adam took a deep breath. “I’ve done my near-death research based on the substantial bibli-ography at the end of your paper.”

She turned away again and leaned up on the banister, all curiosity and interest suddenly shuttered behind a hard expression.

“From what I’ve read, near-death experiences often include a meeting with already-departed family, sometimes friends, but always someone in close connection with the person undergoing the experience.”

Talia didn’t answer. Kept her gaze off in the distance.

He tensed, watching her every movement for reaction. “What I can’t figure is how Shadowman fits into the near-death scenario, unless that’s a code name for someone who knows how the wraith threat began.” He kept his voice light, tone neutral, as he suggested his theory. “A ghost, maybe, like those that populate Segue?”

Her expression remained impassive.

Adam pushed harder. “It wouldn’t be so hard to believe. Jim Remy, our resident parapsychologist, is half in love with Segue’s Lady Amunsdale. Been tracking her obsessively since he caught sight of the beauty. Is Shadowman a ghost? Someone who has already passed but might have our answers?”

If that were the case, protocols would have to shift dramatically to the occult. What he needed was a confirmation, a clue, something to point him in the right direction.

The muscles in Talia’s face tensed, but she remained composed. “I’m not going to answer your questions. Thank you for saving me in the alley and for the medical attention you’ve provided. When possible, I’d like a ride into the nearest town, and I’ll go from there.”