"Not borrowed. Gifted."

"The eyes of a dead woman."

"The eyes of a woman who wanted someone else to see if she couldn't."

Hollis drew a breath and let it out slowly. "Yeah, I keep telling myself that. But I wonder what it'll feel like if the eyes do work-and when I look into a mirror a stranger looks back at me."

"Still your face. Still you."

"But I'm not who I was the last time I looked into a mirror. I've changed-so much. With all that and someone else's eyes as well, how will I even know me?"

Hearing and responding to the lost note of pain in the other woman's voice, Maggie leaned forward and put her hand over Hollis's tense one. "You'll know who you are, Hollis. Your mind will look through those eyes."

"Will it?"

"Yes." Maggie almost withdrew her hand, but then something flashed into her own mind, a quick, sharp image that caused a strange jolt of pain and even an aching sadness. The image was gone before Maggie could identify it, but she was left with the odd and inexplicable feeling that there was someone else here in the room.

"I hope you're right," Hollis murmured.

Maggie looked around quickly, uneasy, then said, "Hollis, why did you want me to come here tonight?" She felt the hand beneath hers tense even more.

"What you said about the paranormal sort of touched a nerve," Hollis said slowly. "I've been more open-minded about it lately because of something that's been happening to me ever since the attack."

"What?" Again, Maggie felt that flash of something, so vivid that it was almost as though for a split second she caught a glimpse of someone standing just behind Hollis. It was eerie and definitely not anything she had experienced before, yet somehow not really frightening.

"I thought it was my imagination at first." Hollis laughed under her breath. "Hell, maybe it is. It started when I was-it started right after the attack. A voice in my mind urging me to keep trying to pull myself out of that building where he'd left me. It knew my name, that voice. It helped give me the will to live, might even have saved my life. They told me afterward that if I hadn't pulled myself out of the building just then, it probably would have been hours before anyone found me. And I would have been dead."

"That doesn't sound like your imagination."

"No. I don't think I ever believed that, not really. She has such a distinctive voice, it's easy to feel she's a separate and distinct personality."

"Does she have a name?"

"Her name is Annie. Annie Graham."

It didn't sound familiar to Maggie-and yet it did somehow. Again, she caught that flash of an image, a slight figure standing behind Hollis, and this time thought to herself, Dark hair, sad face. But then it was gone.

"Maggie?"

"Sorry. I was… thinking."

"Thinking I'm out of my mind?"

"No-far from it. Do you know who she is, Hollis? Or-who she was?"

After a moment, Hollis said, "You figured it out more quickly than I did. I guess it's not easy to accept the fact that a ghost is talking to you."

"I would imagine not. I've never had any mediumistic abilities, so I don't know how it feels." Except that she could feel it now. She could feel Hollis's uneasiness and doubt, feel the slight chill of being touched by something inexplicable, the peculiar sensation of gazing into an open corridor linking the living and the dead.

"Mediumistic? The ability to talk to the dead, I suppose. Odd, somehow, that it has a name." She barely paused before saying, "But you do have paranormal abilities, don't you, Maggie?"

Maggie hesitated, then said, "They call what I can do an empathic sense."

"Empathy. You feel the pain of others. And, sometimes, you blunt the edges of the hurt or even take some of it away, don't you?"

"If I can."

Hollis's hand turned suddenly and gripped Maggie's. "If I'd known that, I never would have talked to you. Never would have forced you to feel so much of what I felt."

"I know. That's why I didn't tell you."

"I'm sorry, Maggie."

"Don't be. You didn't force me to feel anything. It's what I do, Hollis. What I'm… meant to do."

"Suffer?"

"Understand suffering." Maggie sighed. "It's all right, really. Right now I'm more interested in Annie and what she said to you. Is that why I'm here?"

"Yes. There are… things she wants me to tell you. She was the one who told me to ask for you in the first place. She didn't say why, just that I needed to talk to you."

"I had wondered how you knew my name. The police usually keep that quiet."

"Annie told me. And a few hours ago she… she pleaded with me to help her."

"Help her do what? Contact me?"

"Bring you here. Tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"Tell you about the next victim."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

John waited for Maggie where he had before, at the doorway of the waiting room on the floor where Hollis Templeton's room was. The area was as quiet as it always seemed to be, and no one disturbed his thoughts.

He almost wished someone would.

It should have been a relief to be told that his sister had not killed herself after all, that he'd been right about that much. It had been one thing he'd been determined to prove. But he still couldn't prove it. And even if he believed Maggie-

Did he believe Maggie?

It all seemed so… incredible. And yet he had seen with his own eyes her intense physical and emotional reaction to places where violence had occurred. Had seen how she suffered right along with the victims she tried to help.

And he had seen a painting of a brutally murdered woman, a woman he was certain was Tara Jameson. Yet the missing woman had not yet been abducted when Maggie had painted her horribly mutilated image while in the grip of some frightening virtually unconscious nightmare state that chilled him to even imagine.

Maggie had not been pretending or performing, he was certain of that. Even if there had been a reason for her to feign such an incredible ability-and he couldn't think of a single one-why would anyone go to the extremes Maggie so obviously suffered just to maintain an inexplicable pretense?

No, he was sure Maggie and her abilities were genuine. With every minute he spent with her, he was more and more convinced of her basic honesty and apparently karmic need to help people. And if she was telling the truth about everything else, why would she lie about Christina's death?

He realized, after considering it carefully, that he believed she was telling the truth about that as well. Something in her voice, in her face, even in her reluctance to tell him all this time what she felt, what she knew, had convinced him. He believed she had on some level shared, even felt, the moment of his sister's death.

And because he believed that, believed in Maggie's abilities, he had to also finally admit to himself that he believed several other distinctly disturbing… facts:

Someone else, possibly the man who had attacked her, was responsible for Christina's death and had, in fact, murdered her in cold blood.

Quentin really could "see" the future.

And this bastard they all wanted caught and caged, this man who preyed on women out of some obscene need no sane mind could understand, this evil beast with a human face-had lived before. And killed before.

Christ… what could a man do with that kind of knowledge?

His entire life, John had believed only in what he could see or touch or feel with his hands, what he absolutely knew to be real. Never a religious man, he had viewed faith as superstition and the so-called paranormal as nothing more than mysticism dressed up by wishful thinking and pseudoscience to look rational.

But faced with this-all this-he was beginning to appreciate just how little he genuinely understood the very nature of reality. Because if the world he lived in could produce seers and empaths and human monsters reborn to torment victims in life after life only because someone had failed to stop them when fate decreed, then all the certainties of his own life had been built upon shifting sands.