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 lose her camera; for one thing, she’d need it. And for another, from everything she’d heard before and since arriving in Salem, the town militia was uncanny in how swiftly and thoroughly they “took care” of little problems. Like a murdered and mutilated human body.
Possibly, she reminded herself, knowing that whatever the hunter had seen might have been something else. Maybe.
But probably he’d seen just what he thought he had. Hunters knew what dead game looked like, after all, even if it had been torn to shreds.
There had been three dead human bodies to date, if her information was correct; she had no reason to doubt that info and every reason to trust it. And she had certainly found no trace of the three missing persons she’d been sent here to ferret out. She was very good at her job; if they had been here, she would have found them, likely in the first few days but certainly in the last two weeks. They were gone. And by now, Geneva didn’t expect to find them, alive or dead.
But this one . . . if this was a fourth missing person . . . then she had the chance to see at least what the hunter had seen, get a step or two ahead of all this for once.
So she made her way from town, her pace lazy as she looked around, as usual, for what might make a good shot. She was casual when she began to follow one of the trails that led seemingly straight up a mountain, as she had done fairly often in the last couple of weeks. But this time Geneva didn’t remain on the trail long; she didn’t want to be observed by anyone in town heading in a particular direction. And she was very much aware that as soon as the hunter calmed down, or perhaps sooner, he’d be reporting to a person in authority what he’d seen—and then the militia would be on the job.
Forcing herself to think slowly and clearly even as she used saplings and sometimes harsh bushes that didn’t spare her hands to help her to climb the slope, her legs already starting to burn despite a superbly conditioned body, Geneva wondered if a fourth person had, in fact, gone missing while she’d been here in Salem. There would have been no way for Bishop to let her know. Not, at least, until he sent her partner in.
Friday or Saturday, most likely.
Until then, she was on her own. Today was Tuesday.
Geneva kept looking around, trying to find the landmarks she had gotten somewhat fuzzily from the hunter. She was able to pick out one giant boulder and another odd-shaped tree, and as soon as she knew she was in the right general area, she concentrated and opened up the lone spider sense she could claim.
At first there was nothing, and Geneva silently cursed the camera that seemed to be catching on every branch and bit of undergrowth, knowing it was a distraction she didn’t need. She paused a moment in the steep climb toward . . .
Blood.
The spider senses varied within the members of Bishop’s unit, some able to enhance all their normal senses, and some only one or two. For Geneva it had always been scent. No matter how hard she tried, she could not enhance her sight or hearing. But her scent . . . that she could do.
With a vengeance.