"Yet there are genuine satanic rites practiced."

"Even genuine satanic rites don't involve murder. You have to get beyond…conventional…Satanism and really out on the fringes to find that sort of thing."

"Seriously? There are fringes beyond Satanism?"

"You'd be surprised." He really did have the most amazing eyes. She hadn't known eyes came in such a pale shade of green. Not human eyes, at any rate.

"So if we have occult activity here that involved a ritual murder, it isn't likely those responsible are satanists?"

"Some fringe groups call themselves satanists. So it's still possible. Or it's some other group calling themselves something else. Or it's window dressing to hide a murder." Riley sighed. "And then there's rumor, and speculation, and people with their own agendas who keep fanning the flames, who do their best to take a spark of truth and build it into a bonfire of trouble."

"For instance?"

She shook her head. "I once opened my front door to find a young woman who was attempting to raise money for her church. The spiel was that our children were being threatened by devil worshippers and her church needed money to fight this evil army. She was deadly serious about it. It was in a sweet little town where the worst I ever saw happen was egging a few houses at Halloween, and that poor woman was jumping at shadows and imagining that demons straight out of hell were a breath away from grabbing her babies."

"People will believe in the damnedest things."

"Especially if the authority figures in their lives tell them something is real."

"Which is why," Ash said, "I still believe our best bet is to treat all this as a series of bizarre hoaxes."

"Even the murder?"

"You said the killer could be using all the occult trappings just to throw us off the scent."

"I said it was possible. And it is. But until we know who that victim was, we can't know who might have wanted him dead."

"Are you going to suggest that to Jake?"

Riley once again had the vague sense of undercurrents, of some kind of long-simmering tension between Ash and the sheriff, but couldn't bring it into focus enough to even be sure whether it was professional or personal.

Something there, though. Definitely something there. And strong, if she was aware of it even with all her senses out of whack.

Mildly, she said, "I imagine Jake's cop enough to know the basics without needing to be reminded."

Ash returned his gaze to his menu. "Jake's a politician."

"I can't tell him how to do his job, Ash."

"No, I suppose not."

His tension was still there. She could feel it.

Barely.

Where's my clairvoyance when I need it? Hell, where are any of my senses?

They were still dulled, blurred, as if she saw and heard and touched and smelled her surroundings through some kind of wispy veil. It felt weird and cold and scary, this sensation of being distanced from the world.

Being unconnected.

She was alone, that much she could sense.

Even stranger, her head was hurting again, but not in any way that was familiar to her. Not a dull ache of tension or weariness, nor the rare "hangover" head-in-a-vise agony of having pushed herself way beyond her limits, but sharp little bursts of pain every few seconds, one after the other, in random spots from just above her eyes over the top of her head and back to the nape of her neck.

Riley'd had a tooth go bad once; it was that sort of pain, like a nerve or nerves pulsing.

In her tooth, the nerve had been dying.

She was afraid to even think about what might be happening inside her brain.

And here she was, in the middle of a tangled situation she didn't remember or understand, painfully aware that a killer or killers on the loose almost certainly knew a hell of a lot more about what was going on than she did.

As independent and self-reliant as she was, Riley had never felt so unsure of herself. She was adept at role-playing-it was one of her strengths-but this? This was a very, very dangerous game of blind man's bluff, and the one wearing the blindfold-her-had cotton in her ears and a clothespin on her nose as well.

With the exception of Gordon, she didn't know who to trust, and he could offer little more than moral support since, if she had even reached any conclusions or formed any theories since arriving here, she had not confided them to him.

As for the other man she was intimately close to…

"Riley? Ready to order?"

She looked across the top of her menu at this pale-eyed stranger whose bed she apparently shared, and ignored the cold knot in the pit of her belly to say calmly, "I'm ready."

It was the second time she'd said that in the last couple of hours. She only hoped it was true.

3 Years Previously

"You realize what this will mean?" Bishop said.

A little amused, Riley said, "You're a telepath; you know I realize what it will mean."

"I'm serious, Riley."

"Are you ever anything else?" She got a sudden flash of a strikingly beautiful face and electric blue eyes, understood in an instant who the woman was and what she meant to Bishop, and her question suddenly didn't seem so funny anymore.

"Never mind," he said. "We all have our ghosts. And not many secrets between a telepath and a clairvoyant."

"You really must believe we can do some good," she said slowly. "To…willingly expose yourself to so many of us."

Deadpan, he said, "I didn't think it through."

Riley had to laugh, but she shook her head and got the conversation back on its original track. "I do understand what you're asking of me. I know it could take months. Will, probably."

"And you'll have to work alone, at least to all appearances."

"Well, if you're right about how this killer chooses his victims, and right that the first sign of a task force or police focus is what causes him to change towns, then the only way to track him is alone and off the official books. Assuming I can do that."

"I believe you can. I believe you're the best-equipped of anyone in the unit to track him. And to make sure he's caught. But, Riley, you don't get too close. Understand?"

"He only kills men."

"So far. But a cornered animal can kill whatever's threatening it. And he's smart. He's very, very smart."

"Which is why I hide in plain sight. And don't threaten him."

"Exactly."

"That's what I do best," Riley said.

Present Day

In the small part of her mind not occupied with the strain of pretending everything was normal, Riley had struggled to come up with some reasonable excuse for ending up, at the conclusion of this date, in her beach house alone. Short of telling Ash the truth-which she still wasn't ready to do-nothing seemed likely to work without rousing either his suspicion or his anger.

Her senses might be AWOL, but that earlier brief flash of memory plus her instincts as a woman told her he had every reason to expect to spend the night with her-and, despite his calm and almost detached manner during their date, quite definitely the desire to do so. Still, right up to the moment they walked inside the house and he closed the door behind them, Riley believed she might yet come up with a reasonable, acceptable excuse.

She was going to offer coffee or a drink but never got the chance.

Ash picked her up and carried her to the bedroom.

The sheer suddenness of the action, never mind its high-handedness, should have roused some sort of negative reaction in Riley. She was almost sure it should have. Instead, what she felt was an overwhelming sense of familiarity and the first flush of sensual heat sweeping her body.

There was, she realized dimly, something incredibly seductive in the certain knowledge that a man not only wanted you but wanted you now, with no patience for small talk or any of the other social niceties. He wasn't interested in coffee or conversation, he was interested in her, and she was left in absolutely no doubt of that fact.