“My God,” Sheridan muttered.
A flashback of stabbing Burke caused Skye’s muscles to cramp and ache. It had required much more strength than she would’ve guessed. She’d had to strike once, twice, three times before she could do enough damage to stop him, and he’d still gotten away. But not before his blood had burned like fire on her cold hands and spilled onto her sheets….
“What do I do?” she whispered. “I testified against him. The way he glared at me when they read the sentence…I don’t think he’ll forget that I’m the reason.”
“Maybe you should go into hiding,” Sheridan said.
Skye jerked up her head. “What happened to not letting fear rule our lives?”
“Just for a little while, until we see where he’s going to settle, what he’s going to do.”
“He’ll probably move back in with his family.”
“Does he still have a family?”
It was Burke’s wife who’d taken him to the emergency room the morning after Skye had stabbed him. The doctors had found his wounds so odd they’d contacted the police, which was how Burke had been caught and arrested. But Jane had supported her husband all through the trial. Skye could still hear her weeping uncontrollably when the verdict came in. “Probably. His wife insisted that he was innocent.”
“I don’t want to risk losing you, Skye. And you know what Jasmine would say. We’re her only family now. After what happened to her sister, I’m sure she’d rather you played it safe.”
Sighing, Skye rubbed her eyes. She had no business dragging Sheridan—or Jasmine for that matter—through this with her. They faced enough of their own demons. The three of them had first met at a victims’ support group, where they’d become fast friends over innumerable cups of coffee—time spent trying to come to terms with the violent incidents that had transformed their lives.
“When we started TLS, we decided to be fearless, remember? We decided to take power away from the people who’d hurt us.” Maybe she hadn’t completely accomplished that. But she was trying. She couldn’t just give up.
“But the man who frightens me most probably still lives across the country. I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be to function when you could easily stumble upon the person who tried to kill you, walking in the street or shopping in the mall.”
What was her alternative?
Skye imagined running, hiding, maybe relocating closer to her stepfather. But if Burke was truly bent on finding her, he’d be able to do so sooner or later because she refused to cut all ties with the people and places she loved, refused to let him cost her any more than he already had. Besides, she didn’t feel that close to her stepfather. He’d moved in with her mother when Skye was nine and moved out again when she was thirteen. Although her own father had died in a skiing accident when she was two, and Joe was all she’d ever really had as a replacement, they’d lived together for barely four years.
In any case, she couldn’t leave Sheridan and Jasmine to run The Last Stand alone. They were a small army fighting for the victims of senseless violence. That was the only way they could make sense of what had happened to them.
“It’ll be okay.” She straightened her spine. “It just…threw me for a minute.” What had she been thinking? She didn’t have the luxury of crumpling beneath this news. Maybe they’d failed to uncover a connection between Burke and those three murders. But they had to keep trying, especially now. Before he attacked someone else. One of the lives she saved could be her own.
“At least sell the house and buy a gated condo here in town,” Sheridan was saying. She’d been urging Skye to do that for ages, but Skye couldn’t let go of the delta house. She’d moved back home after the stabbing and spent those last years with her mother. This was all she had left of her only parent, all she had left of her childhood—that period of time when she’d been so innocent, so unaware of evil in the world. It wasn’t as if a condo was safe, anyway. When she was attacked, she’d been sharing an apartment off American River Drive and Howe Avenue with a woman who’d since moved to a small town in Utah.
“Even that’s too much of a concession. I’m going to live life on my own terms, not his.” Or come as close as she could, one day at a time.
“I understand and yet…”
“And yet you’re worried. Don’t be. If Burke comes after me again, he’ll get more than a pair of scissors in his chest.”
She heard Sheridan’s sigh. “Are you coming in today? A journalist from River City Magazine would like to speak to one of us. He’s interested in doing an article. I thought we could use it to push ticket sales for our summer barbecue, since the issue comes out in May.”
“Can’t Jasmine do it?” Skye was scheduled to teach a new shooting class at the range, something she did on the side, after which she’d planned to take some flyers to Sacramento State University in hopes of recruiting more volunteers to work on future fund-raisers for TLS. But, after David’s visit, she wasn’t sure she could concentrate on either.
“Jasmine won’t be available for a few days.”
“Why not?”
“She got a call from Ft. Bragg. A little girl’s gone missing up there. They’re hoping for some help in locating her.”
“Who’s looking for help—the parents?” Skye asked, perplexed that Jasmine’s notoriety had spread to a coastal town six hours away.
“No, the FBI.”
“No kidding? I have yet to meet a detective who’s friendly to the idea of using a psychic.” Even David seemed resistant to the possibility that Jasmine possessed certain gifts.
“I’m guessing they’re desperate, willing to try anything, but they didn’t mention her psychic abilities when they called. They asked her to profile the kidnapper.”
“The FBI has its own profilers. That’s what they’ve always told her in the past. How many times has she been turned away?”
“A lot of things are changing now that she helped solve the Ubaldi case. I think the FBI is beginning to realize she’s as good as any of theirs, maybe better.”
“We could’ve told them that,” Skye said. “So what’s happening with the missing child?”
“I haven’t heard. Jasmine couldn’t have reached Ft. Bragg more than an hour ago.” There was a brief pause. “Can you handle the journalist, Skye?”