“Maybe,” she hedged, though it had felt far too real. She’d been standing in the bathroom with them; she could still smell the crisp scent of the ice. “But I don’t think so.”
The wounded look on his face tore at her heart. She didnotwant to be the one telling him this. If she believed there was the slightest chance she was wrong, she would have kept it to herself, but the dream had been far too real.
“Mike was the one pouring the ice,” she whispered.
“How do you know that? You’ve never met them. You could have been seeing two completely different men, and it wasn’t Mike and Doug.”
“I’m not sure how I know or see anything; I just do. And in my dream, I knew it was Doug in the tub and Mike standing over him.” She’d never forget the devastation in Mike’s eyes and on his face.
“Are you telling me Doug is dead?”
Charlie didn’t know what to say that would make any of it better. “Yes,” she whispered.
Jack didn’t speak as he absorbed what she was saying. He didn’t doubt her visions, but he didn’t want to believe it. “Maybe it was a vision of the future; something we can change.”
She would love to give him that hope, but she couldn’t. “I may not be able to control it, but I know my ability enough to tell the difference between the ones that reveal the future and the ones showing something that already happened. This has already happened.”
Jack could only sit and stare at her as he tried to digest her words.
“The dream was stronger than anything I’ve ever experienced before,” she said.
“The mating bond makes vampires stronger; it’s probably intensified your gift,” he said.
“Right now, it doesn’t feel like a gift. It’s never done any good for anyone.”
“And that might change.”
“Doesn’t seem like it, given what I just told you.” She rested her hand on her chest as she recalled the misery emanating from Mike. “It was like I was there. I saw details about them both that I never could have known.”
“Such as?”
“Mike’s eyes are a royal blue color, and he was smoking a cigarette.”
Jack felt as if she’d punched him in the gut. There was no way she could know those things about Mike unless she’d been there with him. His shoulders slumped as the energy drained from him. Mike and Doug were alive when he saw them on the dock; something must have happened between then and when he fled into the woods with Charlie.
“We’ve been together since we were kids. It’s been us against the world,” he whispered.
A tear slid down Charlie’s cheek as the agony in his voice tore at her. Why couldn’t she have seen something that might have saved Doug? But then, if she’d learned one thing over the years, it was that she saw what she was meant to see. She still believed the boy on his bike was supposed to have been saved, but the woman whose husband strangled her was not.
She hadnoidea why she saw some people after they were already dead, maybe it was to help find their killers or for some other reason. Charlie doubted she would ever understand the randomness of the things she saw, but she hoped to one day be able to do more with them.
Jack saw her sorrow when she lifted her haunted eyes to his. Though he didn’t want to believe it, he stopped trying to deny what she was telling him. Doug was dead.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered and threaded her fingers through his as she clasped his hand. “I wish…”
He squeezed her hand. “Come here.”
She edged around Dylan and went eagerly into Jack’s open arms. He crushed her against him as he struggled against the tears burning his eyes. It was a battle he lost.
* * *
“How willwe know if your friends are coming or when they arrive?” Kirha asked.
Jack lifted his head and gazed at her across the fire. They’d all gathered in the cavern to discuss their next move. “I don’t know, but they might have someone with them who would be able to find us down here.”
He hoped Brian would be with them; they would need his power and his ruthlessness to get out of this, but for all Jack knew, Ronan had called Brian away to work for him while they were in Canada. He couldn’t count on Brian being with Mike to help locate them, which meant they couldn’t stay hidden down here.
“How could someone find us here?” LeNae asked.
