Davina sat back in her chair. “My understanding is when thenachtmahrhas taken complete control, it will force Rachel to do things she’d never consider doing, so it can feed off her fear and her horror. She’ll kill innocents, like Horace tried to do with that girl in Chattanooga. Then at some point, she’ll come after those closest to her, like the two of you.”
“Rachel would never do anything like that,” Knox growled.
“She will,” Davina insisted. “She won’t have a choice.”
Diego cursed. “How do we find this fucking thing and kill it?”
“The first part is easy,” Davina said. “It’s obsessed with Rachel, so while it might jump out for short rides in other people, like those killers in the basement of the courthouse or that therapist, it’s tied itself to Rachel for the long term. Killing it, on the other hand, is both easy…and hard.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Knox snarled, his fangs and claws coming out. He had no interest in playing riddle games with Rachel’s life.
“Like I said before, anachtmahris a malicious spirit, and spirits are damn hard to kill,” Davina said sadly. “There are only two ways to do it. You must either drown them in salt water, or incinerate them in fire. Obviously, they have to be in a host at the time and you have to do it when there aren’t any other people around, or the thing will jump to another host. That’s how the thing got from Horace to Rachel. Once it finds someone it wants, it creates a link, so it jumped from person to person like a damn parasite until it got to Rachel.”
“You have to be shitting me,” Knox whispered. “There isn’t some way to draw it out? Someone must have destroyed one of these things before.”
Davina shook her head. “I don’t know of any way to draw it out of a host—it simply jumps from one to another. And as far as someone trying to destroy it, there are two reported instances of it. One in the mid-1800s, when a sailor possessed by one took his ship alone into the middle of the Atlantic by himself and jumped overboard, and another in Hawaii in 1910, when a possessed woman ran to the top of a volcano by herself and jumped in.” She sighed. “I’m sorry, but that’s all I’ve got. You can’t get this thing out unless it wants out, and if there’s anyone else within twenty or thirty feet when you try to kill it, the thing will simply jump to their body. At least that’s what the documents I found lead me to believe.”
Davina shut down the connection shortly after that, telling them she’d keep looking, but she wasn’t holding out much hope.
Knox couldn’t do anything but sit there, staring at the blank laptop screen. “What the hell are we going to do? We damn sure can’t tell Rachel any of this. She’ll sacrifice herself without a second thought to save everyone around her.”
Before Diego could answer, Knox’s phone dinged again. He picked it up from the coffee table, expecting to see a text from Rachel saying she was heading back. He was right about who it was from but wrong about the rest.
“Shit,” he muttered, shooting to his feet.
“What is it?” Diego asked, now standing.
“Rachel just sent me a text saying Conrad and DAPS are working with Marshall, and they’re about to kill Jennifer,” he told Diego as he headed into the bedroom to grab his Glock and extra ammo clips. “She needs backup. Now!”
Chapter 15
Rachel slipped into the kitchen, pausing to let her senses take in everything around her in the huge home. She’d been at the Lloyds’ place a lot, so she instinctively knew what scents and noises were the everyday kind, but there were a lot of people she didn’t know moving around, which made things difficult.
Reaching down, she pulled out her .380 automatic from her ankle holster, wishing like hell she’d brought her Sig. Being without it felt like she was missing a part of herself—an important part with lots of large caliber ammo. The little double action she carried was okay in a pinch, but if things degraded to a shooting match with these a-holes, it would almost be laughable.
Rachel pushed thoughts of shooting matches aside as she carefully made her way through the house, silently slipping past some of the men without them seeing her. She recognized several as the DAPS guys she’d worked with over the past several days, but now it was clear their allegiance was to whomever was paying them—and right now, that seemed to be Alton Marshall.
She wished she could move faster, especially since she had no idea how much longer Jennifer had before Marshall’s men either took her away or killed her right where she was. But with so many people in the house, she was forced to duck and hide several times. The delay was frustrating as hell, but if there was a silver lining, it was that her snail’s pace would give Knox and her other backup time to get there.
Rachel heard a few of the men talking about not being able to find Addy. One even suggested she’d slipped out of the house earlier to go see her boyfriend. That wasn’t true, of course, and thankfully Rachel had no problem following Addy’s scent straight to the last guest bedroom at the end of the hallway on the second floor.
Stepping inside, Rachel silently closed the door behind her, then stood there in the darkness. A moment later, she picked up Addy’s heartbeat. The poor girl was so scared it sounded more like a hummingbird than a sixteen-year-old kid.
“Addy?” she called softly. “It’s me—Rachel.”
There was a gasp, then a rustle as the girl scrambled out from under the bed like there was someone chasing her. Rachel almost fell over backward when Addy threw herself in her arms and buried her face in her shirt, soft sobs of relief shaking her.
Rachel shushed her as quietly as she could, patting Addy’s back and hugging her. She understood the girl was terrified, but if one of those goons she’d seen below heard them,badwouldn’t even begin to describe it.
Gently pulling away, she took Addy’s hand and led her over to the window, where a patch of moonlight filtered in.
“Honey, this is going to be hard for you to hear, but it’s important you understand the situation we’re in, okay?” Rachel whispered.
Addy’s eyes widened and for a moment, Rachel felt horrible for putting her in this position. But in the end, there wasn’t a choice. Rachel had to get Addy—and her mom—out of there within the next few minutes, before it was too late.
“What’s wrong?” Addy asked in a broken whisper. “Is it my mom and dad? Are they…?”
Rachel shook her head quickly. “No, your parents are both still alive. I promise.”
