CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Paige was in the woods again, walking anxiously, looking for her father. The trees rose up around her, arching in ways that distorted the light, dappling it and turning it into a patchwork of shadows that meant she could never quite be sure about where she was putting her feet on the path.
That path stretched away in front of her, leading her on, step by step, even though she knew that she ought to hang back, to wait for the others. She wasn’t meant to be out searching for her father like this, even if he was lost somewhere in the woods. She was meant to leave it to other people to find him. It wasn’t her job, and it wasn’t safe.
But she was his daughter, and as far as Paige was concerned, that made it essential for her to keep looking.
She stalked along the path, the trees seeming to curve in more tightly now, until every step Paige took was in half light. It was impossible to see the edge of the woods from here, and without a clear sense of the sun above, there was no way of knowing exactly which way she was going. Her father was the one who’d taught her to navigate using the sun, so that she would never truly be lost.
There were those who said that he’d just left them, just walked out on her and her mother, heading off into the woods, determined not to come back. Paige knew that wasn’t true. Her father wasn’t the kind of father who abandoned his family.
Paige kept searching, and as she did so, a sense of dread started to fill her. It wasn’t just the surrounding trees, where the branches seemed to reach out like questing fingers, determined to grasp her.
No, it was because she knew what was waiting for her. She knew what she was going to find; she shouted at herself to turn back, but that didn’t work. It couldn’t work. She was no more than a passenger within herself, carried along by footsteps that fell exactly where they had always fallen, impossible to turn aside from their appointed route.
Paige saw the marker ahead, the one where she stepped off the path, searching through parts of the woods that she shouldn’t have gone into. She was meant to stick to the paths in the woods, meant to stay in places she could find her way out of, but Paige knew with a grim certainty that she was going to step off, look deeper, even as she screamed at herself not to do it.
Some things were impossible to change, though, no matter how many times she’d seen them.
Paige stepped off the path, heading down past the great bulk of a fallen tree, looking around herself, trying to catch any glimpse of her father. This part of the woods led to one of their favorite spots, and Paige felt certain that if he was anywhere, he would be there.
At the same time, the deeper part of herself, the one that was forced to watch helplessly, knew exactly what she would find there.
A clearing lay ahead, beautiful with wildflowers, the sun breaking through in a way that it didn’t in the rest of the woodland. Yet there was nothing warm or kind about the fall of the sunlight there. It was a harsh, almost clinical light, and Paige felt cold in spite of its presence as she stepped out.
There was a single tree in the middle of the clearing, and now Paige somehow saw two things simultaneously.
Her mother was there, tied to that tree, and her father was beneath it. The same spot, and both her parents, there.
Both of them were dead.
Her father lay at the base of the tree, the blood pouring out of him onto the soil beneath, carefully cut from him by precise wounds delivered by a scalpel. Her mother hung above, trapped in the web of ropes Adam Riker had tied her in, her body lifeless without a mark on it.
No, that wasn’t what had happened. Her mother hadn’t died. Paige had gotten there in time!
Yet here and now, her mother hung above her, while Paige ran to her father in horror, exactly the way her memory told her that she had before, trying to find some sign of life in him, trying to help. In life, he’d been so big and strong, so vibrant, so seemingly invincible; yet here, like this, he seemed pale and hollow, the ghostly pallor of his corpse staring up at her with empty eyes.
Paige knelt above him, and heard her voice calling out for help, again and again, until she was hoarse with it.
She heard someone coming. Her memory told her that people had come and found her, that soon Paige had found herself surrounded by cops and paramedics, taken away to an ambulance, asked questions that she couldn’t begin to answer.
Now, though, she saw a shadowy figure on the edge of the trees. For a second, she thought that it might be Adam Riker, but it wasn’t; this figure didn’t look like him. This was someone else.
Instinctively, Paige knew that this was the man who had killed her father, and she was on her feet then, no longer a scared little girl, but someone who was training to be an FBI agent. Someone who wasn’t going to back down. Someone who had a gun in her hand, ready to do whatever it took to stop him.
Paige ran after him through the trees, trying to keep him in sight while the branches whipped at her skin, hard enough to draw blood. Paige kept running, taking twists and turns, not slowing down even as the ground got rougher with fallen trees and tangled roots. Paige fell and got up again, keeping going.
The killer was in sight again now, just a few steps ahead. Paige fired at him, and saw splinters fly from a tree near his head. She fired and fired again, but the gun clicked empty, leaving Paige just sprinting after him, trying to close the distance.
She tackled the killer, sending the pair of them sprawling to the floor. She hit out at him, then dragged him over onto his back, determined to finally confront the man who had killed her father.
A blank face stared back at her, no features there to tell Paige who he was, no hint of his identity. Paige stared down at him and screamed out in a mixture of rage and horror.
She woke up in a cold sweat, sheets tangled around her. Paige could see the light streaming in through the window and checked her clock. Five am. Earlier than she would have wanted to get up, but there was no way that she was going to get back to sleep now.
She got up and got dressed, then went out into her kitchen area and got breakfast. Her thoughts wouldn’t move away from her dream. The fact that her mother had almost been killed in the same spot where her father had been murdered lent a whole new layer of terror to the dream that had haunted her ever since she was a girl. Joining the FBI academy hadn’t changed the core of the dream; it only added new elements to her chasing after the killer.
The faceless killer was always the worst part of it, because that was the part that still hurt when Paige woke up. She still missed her father, and still hated what had happened to him, but not knowing who had killed him was the worst part.