Dream Shadow Read online

  Dedication

  This is my first published book. Grace took over my imagination and demanded that her story be told. It’s dedicated to every person who ever dreamed of doing something they were told was too hard, or maybe even impossible. If you can dream it, you can achieve it. So many people helped me bring this book into reality and to all of them… Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

  Chapter One

  The sound rain made as it fell was perfect. Grace let the corners of her mouth drop into a frown as a sharp whistle shattered that perfection. Considering the thunderclouds above her, she shut her eyes and ears to any more interruptions. Tipping her head back, she smiled as the icy droplets slid across her cheeks.

  Freedom. Plain, simple and found right here where the concert of civilization ended and the forests of Washington began.

  “Grace.”

  It was amazing the way Major Jacobs could turn her name into a low growl of pure disgruntlement. Aiming her eyes into the night, Grace considered the forest with a longing that bordered on need.

  “There’s no need for a hotel, Major.” Grace looked at the forest again. “Let’s camp.”

  “I heard it’s been raining for two straight weeks. We’ll be drowning in mud.” The frustration in the major’s voice was rapidly turning into indignant male pride. The problem with having conversations with any officer was you never knew just when they would take an opinion as a slight to their authority. But male pride could often be amusing to watch.

  “I’d prefer to camp.”

  “Grace…”

  Grace raised her shoulder slightly in a shrug as she looked back at the freedom she was going to be denied. She turned on her heel and fell into step with the rest of her escort. The men of Jacobs’s unit stood impatiently, waiting for her to embrace being shoved into a hotel room—neatly stored away.

  The night was alive, and that life came sailing straight at her. The abundance of it prevented any true understanding of just what it was. Turning around, Grace faced it head on. Nothing but silence greeted her, yet the ringing echo was almost deafening.

  “What is it, Grace?”

  Snapping her head about, she regarded Jacobs. With his head slightly tilted in her direction, he stood patiently waiting for her to finish. Maybe the man was traditional enough to prefer a bed to the forest floor, but he had never forced her to abandon any vision before she captured it completely.

  Whatever floated on the wind, the scent of it somehow made the forest even more enticing. Pulling the fragments of emotion into her mind, Grace slowly attempted to force them into focus.

  The vision eluded her grasp, leaving behind an increasing hunger to track it down. Exactly why her curiosity was involved was a mystery. Caring about an assignment was trouble. Any emotional involvement would become the key to misery. Shaking her head in frustration, Grace turned back to Jacobs’s unit and the stale interior of the hotel room. None of the furnishings appealed to her, but her C.O. wasn’t going to let her escape. He called the walls shelter. She felt like they were a buffer against listening to the melody of the night.

  Too bad, for a moment life had almost begun to get interesting.

  So, they were here.

  More exactly, she was here. Brice observed the three helicopters that currently sat on the asphalt in front of what served as the Benton County Airport. It was painfully easy to pick out the woman amidst the unit of Army Rangers. Even at his current distance, her slight build was obvious compared with those of her companions.

  The men left on duty were armed to deadly precision, including night-vision sighters. They knew he was there, no doubt about it. But his cell phone hadn’t rung, so no one had their undies in a twist just yet.

  It had taken him almost two days, along with every favor that a living soul owed him on this planet, to get this bunch into Benton County. Pissing them off wasn’t a good idea.

  The instructions he had been given were painfully straightforward. The airfield was to be cleared.

  It was, but there was no way that he was going to sit by waiting for this group to run him like a dog on a leash. This was his county. He just hoped he was making the right decision.

  He turned the ignition over and pulled the jeep back on to the road. There was nothing right about this whole thing. Three years into his first term as sheriff, Brice had seen a lot of things cross his path. Child abduction just wasn’t something that he ever thought to see in front of him. A man could fail to solve a burglary, maybe even a murder, but how could you fail to find someone’s little girl?

  Brice closed his eyes for a moment. He was really reaching this time. When it got out he was bringing in a psychic, it could very well cost him his re-election next year. Benton was a small community. Nothing stayed a secret for long. By the end of next week, rumors, if not the whole story, would be all over the county. If this unit failed to turn up Paige Heeley, Brice could more than likely kiss his office goodbye.

  If this psychic bloodhound turned up the missing little girl, Brice didn’t give a damn about his office. Paige was just four years old, and Brice would gladly take the heat once the family was reunited.

  The entire idea of a psychic being helpful still stuck in the back of his throat. Swallowing that concept was going to require some hard evidence.

  This one might be different. Whatever his own feelings about the paranormal aside, he was left with one hard fact—the United States Army didn’t tend to waste its time.

  For some reason, this woman was part of a Ranger unit. Brice was about to wager a great deal on her being half as good as the rumors he’d heard about her.

  Now if they just managed to turn something up. Brice had every able-bodied man out searching, and they hadn’t turned up so much as a hair ribbon. After two weeks, any hope of recovering the child alive was almost gone. The forests surrounding them were one-hundred-percent unforgiving.

  Well, Brice wasn’t ready to give her up to the mountains. Paige Heeley was out there and maybe, just maybe, he had found the means to finding her.

  Maybe it was simple frustration that drove Grace to seek out the vision again. Maybe it was pure distaste for the stale confines of her motel room. Whatever the cause, Grace slid from the bed just half an hour after lights out and sat poised on her knees while she tried to assemble the bits of feeling she held into a recognizable picture. It needled her, refusing to be completely shut out by the walls surrounding her. Like a song that you could almost hear, the melody was familiar but the lyrics were muffled.

  Major Jacobs could get his six hours of sleep. She knew better than to care about a mission, but she’d already committed the sin of curiosity. Letting that small scrap of emotion get into her head was going to keep any type of sleep well and truly separated from her tonight. Part of her just didn’t care about the consequences.

  There was too much emotional bleed-out from the community. Anger, fear, hope and half a dozen other feelings were floating through the night. Grace couldn’t just feel it—she was almost drowning in it. She inched closer to the window and the night air blew in. Chilly and full of the scent of the forest, it filled her senses and turned the volume of the music up to full blast.

  Grace forced her mind into sharp control. She needed to focus to keep it all from blurring. This time, the connection with her mind was clear. The vision blossomed into full color commanding her complete attention. It was like a bubble and she happily stepped into it.

  She could see every single hair on her target’s head. The emotion of curiosity crumbled away and left Grace with the unmistakable feeling of need. Her vision wasn’t a target any longer. It became a child, and Grace could see her as clear as day. The night was literally singing. Grace was impatient to become a part of the harmony.

 
Holding the vision at bay, she stood and moved toward the room’s door. Her feet faltered as she sensed one of the Rangers. There was always a perimeter sentry posted at night. The spinning, music-filled bubble floated away from her, dropping her harshly into reality.

  It was like being kicked in the gut. She wanted to get back inside the vision, needed it with the same force of an addict’s addiction.

  Slipping alongside the window, she pulled the curtain away a bare inch to catch sight of the man. It wasn’t that she held any true dislike for Clark, but the man thought she was a witch. He wasn’t alone in that. Half the men that made up Jacobs’s unit thought she was some sort of devil’s handmaiden.

  Tonight, the ugly label stirred her temper. She didn’t want to share the pure innocence of her vision with men that wanted to condemn her as a heathen. She wanted to connect with this child, immerse herself in the uncomplicated bliss of early childhood.

  The unit could be damned. Grace wasn’t in the mood to be judged and she wasn’t going to wait for daybreak. Reality stung while the vision promised bliss. She concentrated on escaping. It wasn’t about right or wrong, reconnecting had become a need.

  One she intended to feed.

  The feel of the truck was as suffocating as the motel room had been, but Grace needed the machine and the speed it could give her. She forced herself to maintain enough of her rational mind to control the vehicle.

  It wasn’t what she wanted.

  This vision was almost painfully clear. For some reason, she was drawn to it with absolute dedication. She really didn’t care what repercussion might result from following her instincts.

  Reality was too harsh. She didn’t want to ignore the opportunity to indulge herself in something else.

  The sweet blue eyes were so clear. Innocence radiated from her in thick waves, that cheerful bliss that children alone seemed to have rights to.

  Something Grace didn’t have any memories of anymore. Details of missions and more missions crowded inside her head until there was no room for anything else.

  She was sick unto death of it.

  Reaching the end of the road, Grace abandoned the truck. She preferred to walk anyway. The smell of the forest was rich with life, intensifying the clarity of her link with Paige. She took only a moment to grab the most basic of survival gear and shrug the backpack on.

  Now she could follow her yearnings. Let them take her away from the dull ding of reality.

  The slight sound of the night creatures kept her company as she moved through the darkness. Time melted away as Grace gave her attention completely to her link. It had been so long since Grace’s tracking skills had led her to anyone that she’d wanted to find.

  Grace’s fascination with her vision made her pace swift. There was still an hour remaining until dawn when she stopped in front of her target. While her vision of Paige was overwhelming in its sweetness, the wall that surrounded it reeked of something different. Just exactly what intruded eluded her grasp, but it was enough to cause a wave of wariness to cross her mind. Casting her eyes over the cabin that sat some two hundred feet away, Grace drew back from Paige for a moment.

  She might not like reality, but it had its uses when it came to not walking into a trap. Her muscles ached but Grace ignored her fatigue. Something else was here.

  And it stank of hatred.

  Considering her target, she probed further into it. Emotion was twisted around the cabin in front of her like a squid’s tentacles. Maybe Grace found the target desirable, but that didn’t mean she was going to walk into a kidnapper’s hideout.

  Besides, the emotions and the facts weren’t making sense. Why would someone abduct a child if they hated her? Murder was the obvious result of such a blaze of emotion.

  Grace ran an eye over the surrounding forest. The cabin was quite literally in the middle of nowhere. Paige wasn’t going anywhere. The clouds were beginning to lower again with the promise of rain.

  Perfect. A good downpour would cover Grace’s tracks very efficiently. Time was something she needed. Time to watch and listen.

  Chapter Two

  Brice pulled into the Riverbend Lodge’s parking lot from the back entrance. It was almost dawn. His one and only contact with this group had informed him they would be ready to move out at sunrise. Brice intended to be with them.

  A slight grin touched the corner of his mouth briefly. He doubted that his opinion was going to be considered, but he’d deal with that soon enough. His deputies were continuing to search, but he was going to be riding shotgun with the newly arrived Rangers.

  He shrugged into his rain jacket as he stepped away from his jeep. Another wave from the storm front had been waiting to break all night and it looked like it was just about to descend upon them.

  Setting his shoulders, Brice began a steady pace that would lead him to the room the woman had been shown to. Sometimes it amazed him the number of people in Benton that regularly pulled their curtains aside. It had taken him just one phone conversation with Jeff Dalton, who ran the lodge, to discover exactly which room out of the eight she had gone into.

  Brice kept his pace even. He didn’t doubt for an instant that there would be someone on duty. He continued forward as dawn cast a gray light through the storm clouds and waited for the command to halt.

  “He’s clear.”

  The voice that issued the command came out of nothing but darkness. The sentry holding him under guard snapped to immediate attention, drawing back to his original position opposite the door that Brice had attempted to knock on.

  The man that stepped out of the hallway caused Brice to raise an eyebrow. Recognition was almost instant. A man of Jason Jacobs’s size wasn’t easily forgotten. At six feet four inches, Brice didn’t come up short often. Major Jason Jacobs was one of the true exceptions. The man was immense, from his height of six eleven through his heavily muscled shoulders and impossibly long legs. The man’s hands even looked huge, but in fact they were simply proportioned with the rest of him.

  He was also family. The man’s sister had just married Brice’s cousin, Grant. Frustration snaked through Brice briefly. It had taken him a nerve-racking forty-eight hours to contact a man whose phone number he kept stored on his home computer.

  “Small world sometimes. But it’s good to know Sarah knows how to keep her mouth shut.”

  Jacobs extended his hand out along with his attempt at humor. Brice met it with his own while giving the man a slightly sour look.

  “Your sister knows what you do?”

  Jason shrugged. “She knows enough. But it looks like she didn’t share that info with her husband or I would have gotten a call directly from you.”

  “Only because it’s a kid and I’m not about to give up without exhausting all avenues.” Brice looked past Jacobs at the closed door. “As it would appear that you are not going to have me shot, Major, why don’t you fill me in?”

  Jacobs sent him a grin that he recognized from his own service days. In this unit, they didn’t answer questions. They asked them.

  “Seems you already know the score,” was the only comment Brice got.

  Brice cocked his head to the side. He understood the major just fine. No one had promised him any information, just that their psychic bloodhound would bring back the rabbit. “Just wondering if it was the truth talking or the beer.”

  Jacobs raised an eyebrow in response. “You’re a good man, Brice, but I want to know who has a loose tongue.”

  “Relax, Major, this isn’t a leak you need to plug. I had clearance at the time.” Brice nodded toward the door. “Can she perform, or are we talking she gets it right some of the time?”

  “We deliver.”

  The hard certainty of that response gave Brice the first real hope he’d felt in days. Whatever Jacobs was planning, he seemed to have complete confidence in a favorable outcome. Jacobs’s hand cut across the morning air in a sharp salute as his men began filtering out of their rooms and into the hallway. It was done in c
omplete silence as the Ranger unit prepared for deployment.

  “So, do I get to meet your operative? Or does she bite?”

  Jacobs gave a low laugh. He turned around and laid a solid knock onto Grace’s door. “Grace doesn’t waste time on biting. But she’ll kick your teeth down your throat if you let your guard down for half a second. Don’t touch her and keep your questions muzzled. Our operative is a unique individual.”

  The major’s description drew more than one snicker from the group. Brice snapped his head about, but whichever one of the men held so little respect for one of their own seemed also wise enough to wipe his face clean before being discovered.

  Jacobs’s eyes turned hard, but his attention remained on the closed motel room door. He cast a long look at the posted sentry before sliding a key into the lock and disappearing inside the room. Brice stepped into the doorway. He considered the untouched bed.

  He could feel the wind coming through the open window and followed the tracks, noting the neatly removed pane of glass from the tiny window above the bathtub. Not a single man in the unit would have fit through the slim rectangle, but a slim female wouldn’t have gained a scratch.

  “Your operative seems to have an attitude issue with taking her unit along,” Brice observed.

  “The problem is my perimeter guard didn’t see her leaving.”

  Brice frowned. “Is that part of her uniqueness?”

  “It’s part of her almost-perfect performance record.” He shot Brice a hard look before leaving the motel room

  “Your perimeter was breached. I suggest you find a way to join your operative instead of listening to my conversations.” Jacobs barked at his men.

  Activity was instant. The Ranger unit fell into practiced efficiency. Each man knew his task and the result was a machine oiled to perfection. Jacobs watched the precise actions of his men before he slid his gaze toward Brice.

  “Grace was fussing with a link last night. I thought it could wait until morning. That was my mistake.”