Damned

“Don’t,” she murmured. “Don’t presume to know what I think. Or what I feel, Ty McIntyre.”

She’d read his thoughts; she knew his fear. He nodded. “You’re right. I don’t have a gift, not like you.” But he was cursed all the same.

Placing her slim hands on his shoulders, she pushed him down so he sat on the edge of the rusted tub. Then she ran her fingers through his hair and over his scalp. He didn’t notice the pain, only the heat of her touch. Like her kiss, it branded him.

Sucking her bottom lip between her teeth, she murmured, “You have a few deep cuts. You could probably use some stitches. Let me clean them, at least.”

“Irina…”

“You’ve asked me to trust you. You need to trust me.”

More than once he’d requested her trust, and she’d given it. Trust didn’t come as easily for Ty.

“You think it comes easy for me?” she asked. “I don’t even trust myself.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Award-winning author Lisa Childs wrote her first book when she was six, a biography…of the family dog. Now she writes romantic suspense, paranormal romance and women’s fiction. The youngest of seven siblings, she holds family very dear in real life and in her fiction, often infusing her books with compelling family dynamics. She lives in west Michigan with her husband, two daughters and a twenty-pound Siamese cat. For the latest on Lisa’s spine-tingling suspense and heartwarming women’s fiction, check out her website at www.lisachilds.com. She loves hearing from readers, who can also reach her at PO Box 139, Marne, MI 49435, USA.

Dear Reader,

Damned is the conclusion of my WITCH HUNT trilogy for NOCTURNE. I’ve loved writing about all the “gifted” Cooper sisters, but I couldn’t wait to tell Irina’s story, partly because, as the youngest of my family, I can identify with her, but mostly because Damned is also Ty McIntyre’s story. The witch hunt has put Ty through a lot of physical and emotional trauma. He’s lost his job and a chance with the woman he thought he could love. He deserves to find the true love of his life, and he deserves to make sure justice is finally served. I hope you enjoy reading Ty and Irina’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Happy reading!

Lisa

Damned

LISA CHILDS

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Acknowledgement

To the Grand Rapids Police Department,

thank you for allowing me to participate in the

Citizens Police Academy, and thank you most

of all for your selfless service to our city.

Dedication

To my family, for your constant love

and support!

Prologue

This was home: the street. Where she slept. Where she ate—if she remembered to eat. Where she drank—if she could scrounge up enough money for a bottle. And the drugs—they were easier to score.

But even here she couldn’t hide from the voices, couldn’t drown them out. They kept whispering… in her head, the voices echoing in her mind. And it didn’t matter…what she did.

She couldn’t shut them out.

Cardboard shifted and crumpled beneath her as she curled into a ball against the wall of a brick building. The stench of moldy food and dirty diapers drifted from the Dumpster behind which she lay, but she hardly noticed. She hardly noticed anything…outside her head.

She pressed her hands against her ears, trying to block out the noise. Not the rumble of traffic from the street, nor the murmured conversation drifting from the other end of the alley where shadows crouched around a barrel with flames lapping up the rusted rim.

The noise she tried to block was already inside her head, and her efforts were futile. As the voices rose, her vision dimmed, the stars, the street lamps and the fire at the end of the alley reduced to sparks in a sea of black. Blinded, her hearing sharpened.

“Where could Irina be?”

The sparks glittered and danced against the black backdrop as she struggled to recognize the voice.

“We have to find her before he does!”

Although she didn’t think she’d ever heard either of the two soft feminine voices before, in person, they were oddly familiar. Despite the anxiety in these adult voices, each of them resonated with the echo of a child’s laughter.

Her sisters…

She’d had sisters, hadn’t she? Her parents had told her no, that she’d been an only child. That she was only theirs. But there was another life to which she belonged…and it was calling her back.

“Irina…”

“Irina!”

She’d once been called Irina, twenty years ago, before she’d been taken away from her mother and her sisters. Before she’d been adopted by a couple who had wanted her to forget who she’d once been. They’d tried to convince her that she’d been born to them, that she’d been born Heather Bowers. But they hadn’t adopted her until she was nearly five. She remembered. And even if she hadn’t, she’d heard their thoughts; she knew the truth.

She wasn’t theirs, and because of her uncanny ability to read their minds, they didn’t want her to be. They couldn’t love her. But they’d tried.

The way her sisters were trying to find her now. Why after all these years?

The sparks brightened like embers on a stoked fire as the voices quavered with fear.

“If he finds her first, he’ll kill her like he killed the others.”

“Like he killed our mother.”

She squeezed her eyes shut so that even the sparks of light disappeared. But she couldn’t shut out the voices. Others called to her, jumbled inside her head, echoes of thoughts and fears she’d already heard.

“I’m not a witch.”

“Don’t kill me! Please, don’t kill me!”

But the killer ignored their pleas, and the women’s voices rose in screams of terror and pain. Irina winced at the volume, which threatened to shatter her skull, and she cringed at the agony expressed in each shrill cry. No matter how long ago she’d first heard them, she couldn’t get them out of her head, couldn’t forget their suffering. Not only had she heard their cries but she’d felt their pain, too. The fire scorching her flesh, burning her alive. The noose chafing her skin, tightening around her throat until it cut off her last breath. The jagged rocks piled one by one onto her body, crushing her beneath their weight.

She’d wanted to help them, but she hadn’t known where the women were. She hadn’t been able to see them or their surroundings; she’d only heard them. Even if she had been able to figure out where they’d been, she would have been too late to save them. She’d wanted to help, but she couldn’t even help herself right now.

One of these screams, the first she’d heard filled with such agony and fear and so hauntingly familiar, had driven her back here…to the street. Her biological mother’s. She hadn’t heard her voice in twenty years—not in person, just many times inside her head. With that scream she’d known her mother had been killed even before she’d heard her sisters speak of her death.

Were they real? Any of them? The voices? Her memories? Or had that first scream been the beginning of some kind of psychotic break?

Before hearing that scream, just months ago, she’d been managing. She’d been living. Going to school. Working.

Now she was barely existing, just waiting…until the next scream…was hers.

Chapter 1

Were they witches? They didn’t cast spells. They didn’t heal with potions and herbs as their long-dead ancestor had. But they had special abilities and they needed to use them to save a life—just as their ancestor had tried three hundred and fifty years ago. He only hoped their efforts weren’t rewarded the same way hers had been.

With death.

Ty McIntyre cared about these two women. They sat together, holding hands, on the black leather couch in the penthouse owned by Ty’s best friend. Actually Ariel held her older sister’s hand, and Elena held the charms—a little pewter sun and a little pewter star—in her palm, combining their powers.

Their powers?

A muscle jumped in his cheek as he clenched his jaw. Skepticism nagged at him. God, he was a lawman. Even though he listened to his instincts, he relied on evidence. Tangible proof. How could he rely on something he didn’t understand, something he couldn’t trust?

Believe, he silently chanted to quell his doubts. He’d seen the proof of their powers in the results they wrought. Ariel was alive. Stacia, Elena’s daughter, was alive. Because of their intangible powers.

“Can you see anything yet?” he asked Elena, frustration thickening his voice.

She scrunched shut her pale eyes, and her forehead furrowed with concentration. The knuckles on the hand holding the charms tightened and turned white, while her fingers reddened.

“She can’t force her visions,” Ariel defended her sister as she stared up at him through narrowed eyes. “What’s up with you, Ty? You’re edgier than usual. Did you find out something you haven’t shared yet?”

He shook his head, then started pacing the marble floor of David’s living room. Like a jolt from an electrical outlet, pain traveled up his leg from his not-quite-healed wound. Maybe the doctors were right—maybe he’d had them remove the cast too soon. “No, I haven’t learned a damned thing.”

“So that’s why you’re edgy,” Ariel said. “You’re frustrated.”

“We all are,” Elena chimed in, her eyes still closed. “Since we know who the killer is, we should be able to find him.”

Donovan Roarke. The man was a private investigator, but before that he’d been a cop. Like Ty. And like Ty, he’d been suspended from the police department due to excessive force. Ty’s guts knotted, but he reminded himself he was nothing like the madman. Donovan Roarke was a sadistic son of a bitch. He might have convinced himself that by killing witches in the ways that witches had been killed centuries ago he was honoring his family legacy, the vendetta begun so many years ago. But Ty knew the guy was a psychopath, and if he wasn’t caught soon, he’d kill again.

Anger gripped Ty, but he fought it off, breathing slow and deep. Then he shoved a hand through his hair. Even though he hadn’t worn his uniform in months, he kept his black hair short, in an almost military cut. He liked his life simple, like the T-shirts and old jeans he wore. But there was nothing simple about his life now; there hadn’t been since Donovan Roarke had begun his witch hunt.

“Roarke’s clever,” Ty admitted. Or he would have found the sick bastard by now.

“He’s crazy,” Ariel maintained.

Maybe Ty was, too, because he’d actually thought this might work, that Elena would have a vision that would lead him to her missing sister, the youngest of the three of them. Since he’d come up empty in his other investigations, he’d decided to use the sisters’ powers. He had nothing left to lose.

“Let’s concentrate on Irina,” he said, which was easy for him since she was all he thought about lately.

She’d been nagging at his mind ever since he’d first seen the picture of her as a little girl. From the glass-and-marble coffee table he picked up the trifold pewter picture frame they’d found in Roarke’s office. The private investigator must have stolen the twenty-year-old portraits of the three sisters from their mother after he’d killed her.

As Ty focused on the youngest child with her loose brown curls and her big, dark eyes, a memory teased him: flashing lights, blurred before his swollen eyes; pain pounding in his skull and tearing at his arm as he fought for consciousness, for life; then a little girl’s voice calling out to him, calling him back from the brink of death.

Hers? Or the little girl who’d died because he hadn’t gotten to her in time? Was the memory an old one, buried deep with the rest of his childhood? Or was it a new one, suppressed like the rage over which his lieutenant had suspended him?

His hand shaking slightly, he set the picture frame back on the table, then turned his attention to Elena. He’d deal with his own demons later, after he’d dealt with theirs. “You’ve had visions of her before. If you can’t have another, try to remember everything you can about those, even what you might think insignificant.”

Elena nodded in perfect understanding of the gift she’d denied and fought for so long. “I’ll try to recall every detail.”

He blew out a ragged breath, relieved that she understood what he wanted. Irina. “We have to find her.” Soon.

Knowing who the killer was didn’t make him less dangerous. In Roarke’s case, Ty suspected knowing who he was made him more dangerous. Now the man wasn’t worried about concealing his identity; he, like Ty, had nothing to lose.

Having tried and failed to get Ariel and Elena, he’d concentrate all his efforts on Irina. And Ty would do the same. The others could look for Roarke; his friend David and Elena’s fiancé Joseph were out now, searching for him. Ty already knew where he was—wherever Irina was.

“In that first vision you had of her, she’s homeless.” God, he hoped Elena was wrong, but he’d investigated the lead, spending days and nights among the street people. While he hadn’t found Irina, he had found desperation and despair, reawakening memories he’d locked away in his past.

Elena shook her head. “I’m not even sure it’s Irina I’m seeing. I haven’t seen her since she was four.”

“She was almost five,” Ariel added, her turquoise eyes glistening with unshed tears. As if a year would have made a difference then.

Ariel had been nine, Elena twelve when they were taken away from their mother and separated from each other. Ty’s gut twisted at having to bring up bad memories for them both. But the pain and fear they felt now would be worth it if he were able to reunite the sisters.

Ignoring the ache in his leg, he knelt on the floor in front of the couch, the marble cold through the denim of his faded jeans. Excessive force hadn’t been his biggest hurdle in being a police officer; until his last day of active duty, he’d never had a problem dealing with suspects. His struggle had been dealing with the victims. Offering comfort—something never offered to him—hadn’t been easy for him.

Now he reached out, closing his hand over their joined hands. “We’ll find her.”

Ariel stared into his eyes, hers still shimmering with tears. “Or will I, Ty? Will the first time I see my baby sister in twenty years be as a ghost?” Like she’d first seen her mother when Myra Cooper had been killed several months ago.

That was Ariel’s gift—seeing ghosts; Elena’s gift was seeing the future. What was Irina’s? The lights flashed again, digging up the memory, but he couldn’t pull it out of his mind. Not yet. He had too many other things on it.

He swallowed hard, then reminded her, “But you haven’t seen Irina’s ghost. She has to be alive.”

His breath trapped in his lungs until she nodded her head in agreement. He shared her fear that they might not find Irina in time; it kept him from sleeping, from eating, from doing anything but search for her. Even though he had begun his quest to find the missing sister as a favor for his best friend and Ariel, it had become more personal to him. Irina was more personal to him than a twenty-year-old picture in an old pewter frame.

A moan slipped through Elena’s lips. Her pale eyes glazed, she stared not at the opulent living room of the penthouse or the view outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, Barrett, Michigan, aglow with lights in the black sky. She stared instead at whatever images played out inside her head.

“Tell us everything you’re seeing,” he prodded her, as he would have any witness.

“She’s on the street, like I saw her before,” Elena said, taunted by the old vision like the old memory that wouldn’t quite leave Ty alone.

“What do you see?” He needed some landmarks, something so he could pinpoint the place instead of wandering the streets the way he had.

“It’s dark….”

“No street lamps?”

She squeezed her eyes closed, then shook her head. “Not here. The buildings are too tall. They block the light. So does the Dumpster.”

“Then it’s not a street. It’s an alley.” And he’d searched most of those in Barrett. But just because Irina had been adopted in Barrett didn’t mean she still lived in the city, so he’d searched some surrounding areas, too. His gut twisted again at the thought of Irina in any of those dangerous areas, alone. “Tell me about the buildings. Describe them to me.”

Elena’s brow furrowed. “It’s dark. All I see are walls of dark brick, maybe red, maybe brown—”

“A sign. Something—”

“Just the Dumpster. The name of the company’s worn off the side. She’s hiding behind the Dumpster.”

Had she been in one of those alleys he’d searched, hiding? Had he been that close to finding her, to protecting her from a killer?

Come on, Irina. Come out. Stop hiding. Let me find you. Let me save you.

As she’d saved him? He shook his head, amazed that the thought had occurred to him, all wrapped up with the old, nagging memory. But looking into his past wouldn’t help him find Irina; only looking into her future would.

“You have to concentrate. Focus on what’s around her!” His agitation raised his voice above the usual rasp of his damaged vocal cords.

“Ty…” Ariel warned.

He expected Elena to protest, too, to remind him that her gift didn’t work this way, on demand, as if she directed a camera onto a scene she’d orchestrated.

Her breath audibly caught, and she flinched at whatever scene played out inside her head. This wasn’t just a memory; she was in the midst of a vision. “Oh my God…”

“What?” he asked, his guts twisting again.

“She—she steps out from behind the Dumpster, she drags herself out of there. But it’s too late.” Her voice rose with a hint of hysteria. “She tries to run, but he catches her. He grabs her so hard. He’s hurting her! She’s too weak to fight him…too weak to save herself….”

Damn Donovan Roarke to hell! As soon as Ty tracked him down, he intended to send him there.

“It’s okay,” Ariel said, wrapping her arm around Elena’s thin shoulders. “Your visions are of the future. This hasn’t happened yet.”

“But—”

“It hasn’t happened yet,” Ariel insisted.

“And it won’t,” Ty maintained. He wouldn’t let Roarke get to Irina.

Maybe as desperate to convince herself as her sister, Ariel said, “He doesn’t have her.”

Yet.

“I’ve had this vision twice now,” Elena reminded them, her voice cracking with emotion, her pale eyes shimmering with unshed tears and fear. “He’s going to find her before we do. And we all know what he’s going to do to her.”

Kill her.

She had had that vision, too. The one of Irina dying just as horrifically as their mother had. Elena had gotten good at recounting her visions, but she had yet to find a way to deal with what she saw. She was shaking.

And so was Ty.

As Ariel had said, Elena’s visions were of the future. Donovan didn’t have her yet, but Ty suspected the madman was closer to finding her than Ty was. He had to beat the killer to her, because once Roarke got his hands on Irina, Ty would be too late to save someone. Again.

A new voice echoed in her head now, louder than all the others she’d heard before. And full of hatred. He talked about killing people, about making them suffer.

Irina knew about suffering, and lately not even the drugs or alcohol could relieve hers. She’d been weeks without and felt no different sober from inebriated. Except for the shaking. She couldn’t stop shaking.

Summer had fled quickly from western Michigan, leaving early autumn cold, the nights chilly enough that she lost feeling in her fingers and toes. She might have to find someplace warmer than the alley to sleep. But then she’d have to deal with people.

Fear gripped her. Fear of the man inside her head. Because even though he hadn’t said her name, like the women who called for her, she knew he intended to kill her as he had the other witches. He thought she was a witch and he wanted the charms he thought her mother had given her and her sisters two decades ago. He believed they were powerful, that they would heal the pain that reverberated inside his head.

And hers. She winced, pressing her palms against her eyes, blinded from the voices and the pain. Like the women he’d killed, she felt his torment as acutely as theirs. The hammering at the base of her skull and her temples. Her body reeled from the onslaught, and she writhed in agony on her makeshift bed behind the Dumpster.

She had to deal with the pain the best she could. She had to let go of reality and slip into the abyss, into the calm where her mind and spirit left her tortured body, where she ceased to exist as she had these past months.

But as she started slipping away, a raspy voice called out to her. “Irina…”

She moaned and shifted again on the bed, drawing her knees to her chest to curl into a ball. She resisted the compulsion to open her eyes, refusing to come back into a world where she knew only pain and suffering.

“Irina, come out….”

But he was just as stubborn, refusing to let her go. She heard the determination in his voice, along with a trace of desperation. She recognized that more readily, as it called to her own.

“Irina, let me save you….”

His raspy whisper raised goose bumps on her skin. Was he nearby? Or even closer, inside her head?

She opened her eyes and blinked, clearing the sparks and the sea of black from her vision. All that loomed before her was the big Dumpster, the distant glow of the street lamps glinting off the rusted metal.

The cold reduced the stench, so only a faint odor of coffee grounds and mold drifted from it. But her stomach churned even though it was empty of everything but nerves. What had she done to herself? What had she become?

God, she’d been desperate for so long, desperate for a peace of mind she would probably never know.

“Irina, we need you….” called out a feminine voice, cracking with emotion. “We need our baby sister.”

Another woman added her thoughts. “The only way we can stop the witch hunt is with all three charms….”

Charms?

She peered up at the sky, at the sliver of crescent moon that hung high above the buildings, high above the earth. Out of Irina’s reach, like the memory from her childhood of her sisters, of her mother…that last time she’d seen them before their family had been ripped apart. Pain and fear were all she remembered as she trembled under the renewed force of those emotions. She’d only been five then and she’d survived. She hadn’t given up.

Until now…

Tears stung her eyes, tears of shame blinding her, but she could still see the alley. She could still see the bedraggled mess she had become…because she’d stopped fighting. Those other women—they hadn’t given up. They’d fought for their lives, and two of them had survived and had saved those they cared about, one of them a little girl. Her cries had haunted Irina as much as her mother’s. But the little girl had been brave, far braver than Irina.

Hadn’t they survived? Or had she only imagined their courage? Either way, she envied it and had to emulate it if she were to survive, too.

She had to get out of the alley, get something to eat, a safe place to sleep—get her life back while she still had it. The drugs she’d taken had been prescription ones—some painkillers, some for schizophrenia—but even those hadn’t stopped the voices. Maybe it was time she accepted that they were real. But if the voices were real, so was the killer. Dare she leave the alley? Dare she trust anyone?

“Believe,” the raspy-voiced man murmured. But was he speaking to her or himself? What did he want to believe? Who was he? He’d called her name, as her sisters had. He wanted to find her, too. Why? For them or for himself?

She closed her eyes, sparks of deep blue glowing against the insides of her lids. Instead of fighting his voice, she blew out a breath and immersed herself in his mind. He didn’t say anything else. The blackness remained, thick and impenetrable, with undercurrents of barely suppressed anger.

This man was no different than the other—full of rage. A killer. He wasn’t going to save her. She couldn’t trust him.

Could she trust herself? Could she trust her sanity?

She had to; she couldn’t go on as she had, barely existing. She opened her eyes, then reached for the Dumpster. Her fingers clawed at the rusted metal as she sought handholds to pull herself up. Her knees shook, threatening to fold, but she locked them and stood. Physically she was weak, but emotionally she was stronger than she’d been in a long time.

Her sisters were looking for her but couldn’t find her. So she had to find them. Urgency rushed through her veins. Like those other women, the ones who hadn’t survived, they were in danger. She remembered her sisters’ voices calling out with fear and pain. But they had fought for their lives; they hadn’t died, like their mother. They were still alive.

And so was Irina.

For the first time in a long time, she realized that. All the pain she’d felt, it hadn’t been hers. She was fine, just weak. She staggered toward the street, but before she could leave the alley behind, a dark shadow stepped in front of her. She shrank back toward the Dumpster, not because she thought the hulking man one of the homeless who lived on the streets as she did but because she knew he wasn’t.

The pain in his head pounded in hers as he silently spoke to her. Witch, you weren’t easy to find. If only she’d stayed hidden a little longer…

She shouldn’t have let that raspy voice call her out of hiding. She shouldn’t have listened to him.

She glanced behind her, toward where flames licked up the sides of the barrel at the end of the alley. No one stood around it, as they did every other night, as they had earlier that night.

“Help me!” she called out, praying they would emerge from the shadows where she was certain they hid, frightened of the stranger. They had no reason to fear him, not as she did. “Help me!”

“Shh,” the man murmured aloud. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Liar,” she yelled at him, her throat scratchy from disuse. “Liar!”

He lifted his hands palms up, holding them out to her. “I’m here to help you,” he insisted. “Your family sent me to find you.”

She didn’t hear what he spoke aloud, though. She read his demented mind. Now that I have you, I can get the rest of your family. I can get the other charms. Then I’ll kill all the witches.

“No!” she screamed as she continued retreating from him. Her back, beneath the heavy wool sweater she wore over a threadbare T-shirt, warmed as she neared the burning barrel. Sweat, from fear and the heat, dribbled down between her shoulder blades.

“Come with me, Irina,” the man said, his voice soft and low as if soothing a frightened animal. “I’ll bring you to your sisters.”

Then I’ll kill all of you! Hang the redhead. Drown the blonde. Crush her daughter. And you, since you’re the spitting image of your mother, I’ll have to burn you at the stake, just like I burned her.

“Killer!” she shrieked at him. “You’re a killer!”

“Shh…” he said again, for the first time glancing uneasily around at the shadows bouncing off the walls of the buildings that flanked the alley. “I’m a private investigator. I told you—your family sent me.”

“I can hear you,” she said. “Not what you’re saying but what you’re thinking. I can hear you!”

His dark eyes gleamed eerily as he stared at her. “You can hear me?”

“I know what you did. I know what you intend to do,” she insisted.

But she wasn’t going to let him. She whirled around to the other side of the barrel, then kicked over the rusted metal cylinder. The barrel broke apart, and the flames leaped toward him.

Throwing his arms up over his face, he shrank back against the wall of one of the buildings. Cowering as the barrel rolled toward him, sparks flying, he screamed, “No!”

Taking advantage of his distraction and distance, she ran from the alley, the heels of her worn shoes pounding the asphalt and scattering tin cans and paper debris as she headed toward the street. Her long skirt tangled around her legs, slowing her frantic dash.

You witch! When I catch you, you’ll suffer. She heard his thought first, then his ragged breathing as he chased her.

Propelled by fear, she didn’t dare stop running when she reached the curb, so she hurled herself into traffic. Tires squealed, brake pads burning, but the driver didn’t stop in time. The metal bumper glanced off her thigh, knocking her onto the asphalt.

He would get her now; she couldn’t run anymore. As big hands reached for her, closing around her arms, she screamed, her throat straining, her voice rising with hysteria. “Don’t kill me! I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!”