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  “What if the person was near death? Jonas’ other victims were in comas. Only one survived. The rest were too far gone by the time they reached the hospital.”

  “A weakened person is close to the veil of life. During illnesses, many of my tribe have reported seeing loved ones and more before they returned to the living.”

  “Hmm.” An idea bubbled into my head, so outrageous I dismissed it immediately.

  “What?” Mayes asked.

  “Is there anything you don’t see?” I jammed my hands back into my pockets, allowed the smooth gemstones to roll across my fingertips. “I had an idea, that’s all. It has no basis in fact, no reason to be The Answer.”

  “From what you said, Jonas Canyon was racing to meet another woman. She could be his next victim. I want to hear your idea.”

  “What if Jonas offers his services as a pain-free way to kill yourself? What if all those people in his house wanted to die? What if it was a living energy bank?”

  “No way.”

  “How many suicide calls does your emergency services field each month?”

  “More than I’d like to admit, but the callers never go through with it. Their attempts are cries for help, cries for attention from the world and loved ones.”

  “You’re right. It does sound preposterous. But if I’m right, we could find out where Jonas meets these prospects and corner him there.” I shot Mayes an innocent look. “If only we had a victim to interview.”

  Mayes snapped his fingers. “The woman from the hospital, Lizella Tice. She was moved over to rehab yesterday.”

  “Didn’t someone already interview her?”

  “Duncan and Reyes. They spoke with her. She doesn’t remember anything except awakening in the hospital. Jonas originally claimed she was his mom, but she looks much older than that. He must have lied about her identity to confuse us.”

  “Maybe her memories have returned,” I suggested. The more I thought about it, the more likely it was that this woman could aid our investigation. “We need to talk to her. She may know more about what happened in that house than she realizes.”

  “We’ll head there next. Retracing our steps is a valid investigation strategy.”

  He fell silent, and the woods did too. It felt as if a heavy weight were bearing down on me. I gazed to the western sky and saw a bank of dark clouds approaching. A storm. Perfect. We’d get drenched at dusk when we rescued Charlotte and the others.

  Strange emotions rolled off Mayes. How did he manage to integrate his various roles? He’d risen through the ranks of the police to become the chief deputy, and from all indications he held a position of respect and leadership among the Cherokee.

  Any way I looked at it, he was a force to be reckoned with. And he’d made sure to keep me close. Was that for my benefit or his?

  “About White Feather …” he began.

  I backed away from him, palms raised defensively. “I can’t do a dreamwalk in front of all those people.”

  “Say what you mean. You can, but you won’t.”

  Heat rose from my shirt collar. “You’re right. I won’t. I have this thing about being seen as a one-trick pony. What I do is private and the fewer living people who know about it, the better.”

  “Will you ride to the morgue with her?”

  “No. Get her to the morgue, and I’ll try it there. From past experience, I know it’s too soon to get much from her. The newly dead need time to adjust to their changed status. Once she figures out where she is, she will either be happy about it and move on, or she’ll stew in anger until someone like me hears her case.”

  He pinned me with a look. “Are there others like you?”

  His intensity made me uneasy, so I glanced away on the pretense of studying the changing sky. In the distance, a woodpecker tapped out a fast beat. The forest must be returning to normal now that the disturbing element had moved on.

  I was stalling. I knew it, and Mayes knew it. Dreamwalking was more than a hobby or a vocation: it was everything. Ever since my father passed the reins to me and I’d become the Dreamwalker, I felt whole in a way I never had before.

  The clouds held no answers. I glanced at Mayes and shrugged. “What are the odds I’m unique? The title I inherited from my father is County Dreamwalker, only I’ve never met another full-fledged Dreamwalker. Some of my father’s friends can cross the veil, but they are limited in their abilities.”

  His eyes gleamed. “I would like to meet your father’s friends.”

  “Come to the coast for that. It is a rarity for any of us to leave home like this.”

  “I accept your invitation.” He glanced at the sun before he gave me his full regard. “Your star shines bright among your people and among women, Baxley Powell.”

  I was nearly blinded by his praise. His face seemed to shed years, and his eyes glowed with approval. The heat that followed surprised me even more. Masculine appreciation. Aye-yi-yi. I wasn’t ready to deal with a suitor. Although I was officially a widow, my husband wasn’t among the dead. I’d searched for him repeatedly and come up with nothing. Which meant I wasn’t really a widow.

  Not a subject I wanted to get into with a man I barely knew.

  “Uh, shouldn’t we get back?” I asked.

  He gestured with a hand. “After you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The low-slung rehab center looked as if it had been built to withstand the mother of all hurricanes. The stucco exterior was the reddish-yellow tint of Georgia clay. With rounded evergreens flanking the bland architecture, the building should have seemed pleasant. Instead, it pulsed with something not quite right.

  The harried woman behind the thick glass window told us the center was closed to visitors due to a flu outbreak. Deputy Mayes flashed his badge. “Official police business,” he said. “We’re here to see Ms. Lizella Tice.”

  “Let me check my list.” We waited while she perused a paper list. “You’re in luck. As of this morning, Ms. Tice is in the healthy cohort. She’s in Wing B, Room Twelve.” The woman handed us hospital masks through the security slot and made us sanitize our hands. “I hope you’ve both had flu shots. Staff and residents are coming down with flu symptoms in droves.”

  “How long has this been going on?” I tucked my clean hands in my pockets. Touching a door or anything solid wasn’t part of my visitation plan. My extra senses were shielded, but a casual touch of an inanimate object could still jar me, if the person who’d touched it previously had been in the grip of a strong emotion. No telling what emotions were layered on these doorknobs and furnishings. Best to avoid them altogether.

  “A few days. Normally we wouldn’t miss an aide or two out sick, but a third of our staff are feeling ill effects. The rest are working double shifts to get us through the crisis. Watch out for the box of fire extinguishers in the hall. Our safety officer was supposed to exchange these expired canisters for new ones, but he called in sick today.”

  The door buzzed open, and the first thing I noticed inside the facility was that the shiny corridors were deserted. This place resembled a ghost town. A box of fire extinguishers sat just inside the doorway. I had no trouble avoiding them, but the sadness in this place had me missing a step.

  I shuddered, picturing living out my final days so removed from my normal routine. Institutions were great stopgaps, but I hoped my future didn’t require one. People with paranormal sensitivities needed natural and holistic environments.

  “You okay?” Mayes asked as we branched off into the B Wing, passing a deserted nurses’ station.

  “I’m not a medical center kind of gal. They give me the willies.”

  “We worked hard to get a place like this here.” His voice rang with pride. “The next nearest rehab facility is an hour away.”

  “Nothing against this place in particular. I prefer to be outdoors.” I shot him a curious look. “Do you have hypersensitivity to pain meds?”

  “Never had any.”

  My feet quit moving.
“Never?”

  He stopped a few paces away. “I’ve always had a healthy constitution.”

  I pondered that for a moment. “I guess tribal confidence would wane if the medicine man was sick.”

  “Ah, you’re mistaken. I’m no medicine man. He is a healer.”

  “So, you’re a shaman?”

  He shook his head. “Shamans are from other cultures. In some Native American tribes, the medicine man and the holy man are the same person. Outsiders called them shamans, a mystic tradition that hails from Siberia, but we never call our spiritual leaders by that name.” He took a long breath. “I’m not a holy man either. Merely a tribal member.”

  “Who can do amazing things like facilitate the sheriff’s energy transfer.”

  He put a cautionary finger to his mask. “My extra abilities are known only to a select few.”

  “Why?”

  He chose not to answer.

  “Are you ashamed?” I asked.

  “Never.” His eyes glittered with emotion. “It’s better this way. You, on the other hand, are too reckless for your own good. You nearly sent us all adrift yesterday.”

  A deft change of subject, and it hit the bull’s-eye of my guilt button. “I’m sorry. I already apologized to my parents, and I meant to say something to you earlier. That was my first time as a donor in the circle.”

  “It showed.”

  His censure rattled me. “It won’t happen again. I learned my lesson.”

  “Good. No harm was done. The outcome could have been tragically different.”

  My turn to go mute. We’d dodged a bullet, thanks to his skill, experience, and patience. “You don’t know my history, but I’m also new to dreamwalking and police consulting. I’m a quick study though, and I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

  “We have to stay focused here. Let’s talk to Ms. Tice and get out of this place. I can’t chance you coming down with the flu.”

  A masked healthcare worker came out of a room near us and staggered into the wall. Her face glowed with perspiration, and her aura seemed off. Thinner, less visible. I backed away. Every instinct told me to run, not walk, out of this building.

  Mayes stepped between me and the young woman in lavender scrubs. “She’s ill. Keep your distance.” He hustled me into Room Twelve across the hall.

  The curtain was drawn, but a low-wattage fluorescent fixture above the bed provided illumination. The humidity seemed higher, making it harder to breathe through the mask I wore.

  The brunette on the bed looked less emaciated than the last time I’d seen her, but her features remained drawn, her face skeletally thin. Her wan skin had the sickly sheen of a fever sweat. Even with the naked eye, her energy levels appeared to be fluctuating.

  “We shouldn’t be in here,” I said, latching onto Mayes’ arm. “She’s sick.”

  The woman stirred. Her brown eyes flashed open, a wild look in them. “Help me. I need help.”

  Mayes stepped forward, but I grabbed him. “We’ll call a nurse,” I said, pulling him out of the room. To his credit, he left without protest.

  The infected nurse lay slumped against the wall. I wanted to help her, but I had no medical training. “Hurry,” I urged Mayes, keeping hold of his arm.

  He seemed to be receiving an inaudible message. “We should help them,” he said. “We should stay here and contain the situation.”

  “Fresh air. That’s what we need.” I stopped before the door. “Open it.”

  He did, and we sailed outside into the weak sunlight. I kept us moving until we made it through the parking lot to the street. With each step, I felt stronger and more clear-headed.

  I ripped the mask from my face. Mayes did the same. “What happened?” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what happened. Once we started down that last wing, I knew something was off, and I’m not talking about illness or contagion. The vibe felt like Jonas Canyon’s house on Bear Claw Lane. I had the sense of bodies in cold storage, slowly ebbing away.”

  Drawing back, Mayes studied the leaden clouds in the pewter sky. “You think Jonas was in there?”

  “Don’t know of anyone else who can suck the life out of people, but definitely an energy vampire has been in there. May be there still.”

  Mayes reached for his phone. “We should see about moving our survivor. It wouldn’t do for her to fall under Jonas’ spell twice. I should have my deputies search the place for Jonas.”

  That went so well last time. To my credit, I didn’t voice that negative thought. “What was it about you and the survivor woman? You wanted to touch her, even after we saw she was sick.”

  “I wanted to help her.” His radio squelched, the sudden noise startling and attention-getting. Mayes tapped the button. “Mayes. What you got?”

  “Deputy Pruitt, sir. Hall County came through with their cadaver dog. We searched the grounds of that house on Bear Claw Lane. Got nothing. Then we came out to the old tree in the backside of Meese Park and hit the mother lode. You won’t believe this.”

  I perked up at the sound of a female voice on the radio. Other than Twilla Sue, all the other deputies I’d met to date had been male. Nice to know she’d hired a woman.

  “Try me.”

  “The dog indicated a body. We dug and found human remains. Then the dog lit up again. And again. So far it looks like at least four bodies here, maybe more.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “Copy that. And … Mayes?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We can’t reach the state archaeologist lady, Dr. Bergeron. You know anything about her whereabouts?”

  Mayes’ eyes met mine. “She got called out of town. An urgent matter. She’ll return this evening.”

  I nodded my approval of his truthful answer. It didn’t ring false, even to my truth-sensitive ears. Well done, Mayes.

  “What do we do?” Pruitt asked. “Protocol is to have the coroner pronounce victims dead before we move them. With our coroner out of town, we used the coroner from the next county over for the body earlier today when we couldn’t locate Dr. B. The borrowed coroner’s tied up in autopsy. We don’t want Grayley Beckett, and Foster Winkle from Rabun County is still on his honeymoon. What should we do? Call in the staties?”

  I elbowed Mayes. “I know a coroner … my dad.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Maybe he can fill in temporarily until relief arrives.” Mayes turned to me in the parking lot after he relayed the information to Deputy Pruitt. “One thing’s for certain. We were stretched to capacity with two murders. Dealing with a mass grave site will exhaust our resources, even if the same guy is responsible. I’ll have to call in the GBI.”

  I didn’t want additional exposure of my abilities, especially to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but even I could do the math. A small police force was no match for the horror happening here. We’d had Jonas in custody, and yet he’d put the sheriff out of commission and escaped.

  “Do what you have to,” I conceded. “Just don’t let the big guns keep us from our appointment with the Little People at dusk or let the GBI sink their teeth into me. We have to get our people back.”

  “Trust me, I want them back as much as you do. Call your father while I begin notifying the outside authorities. Tell your dad we’ll meet him at the site. I’ll text him the GPS coordinates of Meese Park.”

  “Uh, my dad’s not that high tech. He’ll need the roads-and-turns kind of directions.”

  Mayes looked up from his phone. “What? Oh. Okay. Give me a sec.”

  While he was busy on his calls, I contacted my father and brought him up to speed. He agreed to drive back early from Luanne’s farm. Even better, Luanne knew where Meese Park was.

  “Lacey and Larissa will drop me off at the site,” Dad said. “If I can catch a ride home with you and Mayes, that’d be great.”

  “Sure.” Too late I remembered about the dusk meeting with the Little People. Oh well, we’d cross that bridge when we came to
it.

  “Any word on Charlotte and her hot date?” my father asked.

  “Charlotte? Yes, Charlotte.” I grimaced. “Haven’t heard a peep out of her. She’s probably having the time of her life.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut at the realization I’d skirted the truth with my dad. It felt wrong for him to be left out of the knowledge loop. But I couldn’t burden him with this, not when he had a mass gravesite in his immediate future. “How’s Larissa doing?”

  “Happy as June bug. She did a bit of everything at the farm today, even drove the tractor.”

  “I feel bad that I didn’t get to take her paddleboarding yet.”

  “Don’t fret. We still have time to do that, and she hasn’t mentioned it again.”

  I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Thanks for that, Dad. See you soon.”

  Talking with my father helped ease the chill in my bones. This day kept going downhill. So many things had happened that it was hard to take it all in.

  How could Jonas be stopped? How many would die or be sidelined because of him? How many lives had he already taken? The vision I’d had from the broken branch on the trail replayed in my head. Jonas believed he was helping these people, that they wanted him to take their energy. A “gift,” he’d called it when he’d taken life from White Feather.

  My head ached when I tried to understand how that could be. Life was sacred. Throwing it away was wrong. Dead wrong. Appalled at my brain’s poor choice of words, I choked back a laugh.

  “You all right?” Mayes said, opening his car door.

  Like a trained seal, I trotted around to the passenger side and got in. “No. I’m not all right. Everywhere we go, people are dying and being drained of their energy. I’m worried sick about Charlotte, and my thoughts are crashing into each other.”

  He cranked the car and eased away from the rehab center. “Normally, I’d offer an overwhelmed colleague a visit to my sweat lodge to restore clarity, but we don’t have time to recharge naturally. I’ll make a quick stop on the way to Meese Park. The dead can wait ten more minutes.”