CHAPTER EIGHT
“Ah, there she is!” Nate exclaimed, as Laura walked into the bullpen inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building. It was crowded with desks and agents, most of them occupied with their own calls and computer screens. A few of them looked up and grinned at her, and a couple even clapped a few times, which only increased her sense of anxiety. She just wanted to get in and get her paperwork done, and avoid any awkward questions about how she’d found the girl.
“Here I am,” Laura replied, without any of his cheer. She tucked her hair behind her ears, hoping Nate would lower his voice. She hated being watched, being the center of attention.
“A coffee for the Bureau’s finest child rescuer,” Nate said, handing her a cup bearing the logo of a local chain. Not, thankfully, the office’s own machine. If he had tried to give her that, she would have thrown it down the sink.
“Thanks,” she said, taking it from him and taking a sip immediately to hide her face. It was only divine providence that it wasn’t burning hot. She swallowed the bitter liquid quickly, gesturing behind Nate toward their respective desks. She hoped he would take the hint.
Nate turned and led her across the room between desks stacked high with haphazard paperwork, waving a goodbye to the agent he’d been engaged in conversation with closer to the door. “So, good night’s sleep?”
“Perfect,” Laura replied. Truth be told, she’d slept the sleep of the dead. Yes, she had Amy’s fate playing on her mind—but that wasn’t enough to keep her up. Not after the exhaustion of three visions, a dead run across a field and up a hill, a physical fight with the kidnapper, and then digging Amy out of the box. It had taken all of her power to stay awake for long enough to get home and into bed. She’d woken up with a start, though, immediately filled with anxiety that someone was going to know.
It was always like this after a successful case. The fear that someone would question her methods. That they would ask a question she couldn’t answer.
“Great. You might need it.” Nate flashed her a grin as he reached their adjacent desks near the back of the cramped, busy room and lifted up a manila folder. “Paperwork.”
Laura groaned. “What is this? Payback from the boss? Extra filing?”
“Maybe,” Nate said, and laughed. “No, it’s just the standard stuff. I already started mine. Report on the events of the day, the forms to assess whether we’ve been through any trauma that might make us a liability, et cetera, et cetera. You know the drill. Might take us the rest of the morning, but it’s boring enough.”
“What a relief,” Laura sighed, putting her purse down beside the desk and her coffee cup on it. The hum of conversation in the room was already almost overwhelming, and she had no doubt it would be worse as the day drew on. The bullpen was chaotic, the space too small for so many agents in the square, uniform building of their headquarters. “If there’s one thing I love about paperwork, it’s when it’s boring.”
Nate laughed. “Here,” he said, handing a sheaf of loose papers from inside the folder to her. Their fingers brushed as she took it, and just for a moment, she felt a chill rising from the point where their skin was in contact.
Laura froze.
She’d felt that same chill with just one person before. It wasn’t quite a whole vision, not yet. It was something more distant than that. An early warning.
It was the shadow of death.
Laura couldn’t find a way to describe it, the way she might explain it to another person. It wasn’t a color. It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t something she could see, but then, it wasn’t a feeling either. It was somehow physical and yet intangible.
The first time she saw it, it was hovering over her dad.
“You okay there?” Nate asked, regarding her with a puzzled frown.
“Yeah,” Laura said, quickly sitting and placing the papers on her desk. “Clearly, I haven’t had enough coffee yet. Which my thoughtful partner has already seen fit to solve, so thanks again for that.”
Nate chuckled as he took his own seat, grabbing up a pen and going back to work.
Laura pretended to sip at her coffee and study the first page, but really she was looking over the top of her lid at Nate. She was trying to think, trying to quell the rising panic that was threatening to choke off her throat. She had never sensed death around him before. She’d had visions where he was present, yes—but in the course of a crime that they were both investigating. Never on a personal level. She’d never sensed that he was even in danger.
It was hard to imagine him ever being in danger, as well-built and tall as he was. He was sitting in his shirt sleeves now, one big hand cradling the pen as he looked down at the form he was working on.
There was no way he could be in danger. No way. And yet…
Laura swallowed a gulp of coffee past the lump in her throat and looked down, focusing her eyes on the paper. Some of it she could fill in by automatic habit, not needing to think. Her name, her ID, the date. That left her mind free to reel, to try to cope with what she’d just felt.
When she saw that shadow of death over her dad, it had been long before his diagnosis. Maybe before he’d even been sick—she had no way of knowing. But she’d felt that sick kind of resonance in the air around him whenever they touched. It had gotten so she shied away from him, shutting herself up in her room so she didn’t have to see it.
Then she had touched him one day and seen him lying in a bed hooked up to a drip on a cancer ward, and she’d known.
She’d been so terrified of what she’d seen that she’d never said a word. How could she? She couldn’t tell her parents that she’d had a vision of her father dying from cancer. Not after all the therapy they’d made her go through to stop her “hallucinations.”
But now she was faced with the same problem. Something was going to happen to Nate, and it was going to kill her, too, because how could it not? They had been partners for so long, and he was the only person she really trusted. The only person who really seemed to trust her. The only one she could rely on. She needed him. More than that, she wanted him to be around. He was strong, capable, reassuring. The one constant that never changed.
And he was going to die. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, he was going to die, and she was going to know how. Unless she avoided touching him for the entire rest of their career together, which seemed unlikely.