When they’d started out that morning—she and Corrine Rossello, Nancy Ryman, and Jenny Auger—Kylie had assured them that she didn’t believe in past-life regression. However, Corrine had already made the appointments, and this little weekend together was Corrinne’s concept of a bridal party or shower—she had no interest in dance clubs and strippers. She just wanted their group to do something special together; this was her version of a bachelorette weekend.
The knife.
He’d caught hold of her and spun her around. Despite her hatred for him, she wanted to live. She begged, she pleaded, she cried. She’d have done anything, said anything, to stop him. And yet she knew, even as he held her there, that there was no chance, that the knife would fall, that she would look into the hatred in his dark eyes as he brought that blade down, ripping into her flesh again and again, she knew that he would want her to suffer even past death...
Back to the bubble. Back to the immediate past.
Kylie fought to remember where she was. Her mind was in a strange place, switching between screens, the memory of the hypnotist’s office, and the memory of the knife in the alley...
She struggled hard to stop it, not to see the image of the knife, the pain and the numbness, the look in the eyes of her murderer.
“It will be new for us! I hear it’s fun, and you’re going to love it!” Corrine had assured her, when she had first suggested it on the drive up.
Kylie had smiled through it all. She hadn’t loved it, but she did love her friend, and this was what Corrine wanted. She had been last to go under with the hypnotist; Jenny discovered she had been a Norse princess, and Nancy had ruled a pirate ship until she’d married a legitimate sea captain and lived happily on a Caribbean island.
Apparently, none of the three had been poor, nor maids or servants of any kind—or lived lives of any hardship or remarkable trauma.
Or died beneath the fury of a razor-honed blade, cutting flesh and blood and bone.
“Oh, my God!” Corrine had said, her eyes closed. She almost sat up, in love with the vision in her mind. “It’s Derrick—it’s my Derrick! He was a duke in his previous life, and now I’m running to him, and he sweeps me up and...”
Corrine’s voice faded. She lay back, exhausted—and smiling. Of course, she was smiling; she was about to marry Derrick.
A great guy, solid, but rather staid. He was working for an attorney as he made his way through law school. He was the kind of guy to give Corrine the life she wanted, with a picket fence, two-point-five children, and a cat and dog in the yard. They would settle in a suburb outside either New York City or Boston. Kylie knew that because they had all told one another their dreams often enough.
Dr. Sayers had smiled, saying, “Corrine, I’m bringing you back now. I will count slowly to ten, snap my fingers...and you will wake up.”
He was somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, Kylie thought. Neatly dressed in a blue pin-striped suit, with sleek sandy hair combed back and a surprisingly...mundane look about him. The lights in his office were kept low, but he’d had no problem with all of them sitting in for each other’s “regressions.”
The tea, Kylie thought. He had something in the tea. But that can’t be legal, can it? As the hypnotist counted, Kylie couldn’t help but think, Are they all really falling for this? Seriously?
Her friends were all professional women; they had met as freshman at Harvard, for goodness sake! Corrine was the regional manager of an incredibly popular restaurant chain. Nancy was working on Wall Street, and Jenny was head of accounting for a small group of boutique hotels. Kylie had just been hired away from the Met to manage all the newly opened Trelawny House, a museum that featured New York’s Colonial period through the present—including a historic-themed tavern.
“Ten,” Dr. Sayers said, and snapped his fingers.
Corrine’s eyes flew open and she stared around at the others. “That was amazing! I was there—that was me! Oh, I did live before, and Derrick and I... We were in love over and over again. It’s so wonderfully right!” She jumped up and caught Kylie’s hand. “Your turn, Kylie!”
And then Kylie was on the couch, and Dr. Sayers was talking to her, telling her she would never do anything that she wouldn’t do naturally, that she would search back into the hidden recesses of her mind and memory.
As she slipped under, she thought, I didn’t even drink the tea.
But then she was somewhere else.
She was someone else.
The bubble was gone; she’d lost the fight to escape whatever was happening to her. To the her she had become.
“I’m by the graveyard... It’s dark...and he has me...”
Kylie couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth, but she could see herself moving down the dirt road by the forgotten graveyard just outside the city. She shouldn’t have come this way—the road was isolated.
A cat screeched.
She knew she had made a mistake, the worst mistake of her life, the mistake that would bring about her death.
Someone was coming after her.
And she knew it was him.
When she turned and saw him, she screamed, but no one heard...
He dragged her into the cemetery surrounding the small church. She saw the old gravestones around them as he jerked her along by her hair.
For a moment, one of those little bubbles of reality broke through. Where the hell am I? Kylie wondered.
But she knew where she was. Not in the center of Salem, not where the tourists went.
The knife! Oh, God, ripping through her flesh, making that terrible noise...
They’d warned her he would kill her. And he was doing it. She could feel the numbness setting back in, a terrible cold, a horrific sense of loss...
“Ten. Wake up, Kylie.”
Her eyes flew open. They were all there—Corrine, Jenny, Nancy, and Dr. Sayers. They were staring at her with concern.
“Kylie, you scared us—you were screaming and screaming, as if you were being skinned alive!” Corrine said, her eyes wide, her face contorted with concern.
“I don’t think she met a prince or a duke or anything,” Jenny muttered, hazel eyes narrowed. Tall and slim, she had long sandy hair, a dry sense of humor, and often used sarcasm as a method of defense.
But despite her dry words, she appeared as concerned as the others.
“Miss Connelly, are you all right?” Dr. Sayers asked nervously.
Of course he was nervous. People came to him to find out they had been princesses or some kind of royalty or, at the least, had been very influential in some imaginary past life.
They didn’t come to feel knives thrusting into their bodies.