“Docia,” he said, sounding pained in that way Jackson frequently did. “Just try.”

Docia huffed at him, again, in much the way she did with her brother. They both could just bite her, she thought as she closed her eyes. As far as she was concerned, there were far too many bossy males in her life already. The last thing she needed was to add to the pack.

She realized that Cleo had disappeared. Strange, that. She’d balked against everything else Ram had tried to instruct her to do so far, but suddenly she had obeyed him. Well, Docia might have just lost all respect for the other woman. Until then, she’d found Cleo pretty damn refreshing and informative. In fact, she was the only one who’d told her a single blessed thing about what was going on.

Explanations will come. Take things one moment at a time, that serene voice in her head said softly. Calmingly. It was like listening to a gentle, warmly haunting piece of music. So beautiful. Was this the queen inside of her? Explanations and changes will come when I am stronger. The transition from the Ether has taken much of my strength. But I will be here for you, as you need me. We will be here for each other. You will protect me, and I will protect you.

Ram hit send and set the ringing phone against her ear.

“Who the hell is this?” Jackson barked angrily into the phone.

“Hello?”

“Christ almighty, Docia! … Docia? Docia answer me!”

“Jackson, I will if you give me a moment to speak,” she heard herself saying calmly. There was a solid beat as her tone apparently took Jackson by surprise.

“Where are you? Are you okay? Did you manage to get away?”

“Jackson, I am fine. I’m not a child, you know. I’m sorry if I worried you. I just needed to get away. These two reporters cornered me in the street and I was upset. I figured the best thing was for me to get away and go somewhere quiet and safe.”

“Where are you? I’m coming to get you right now!”

“I’m fine, Jackson. Perfectly safe, I assure you. I’m with old friends, Jacks. And don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want you to come get me. I don’t want you to swoop in and try to take over. I’m fine. It’s quiet here. I just want to relax, sleep, and heal. And I’ll do that much better if I know you are back at work and getting on with your life. You don’t need to babysit me.”

“But … I …” Jackson was flabbergasted. “There was a dead body … and a witness. There was blood on your coat!”

“I don’t know anything about a dead body or witness. As for blood, I pulled a stitch. It’s fine. Nothing a butterfly bandage didn’t help.”

“Jesus Christ, Docia, you scared me half to death! I was sitting here thinking the worst!”

“Jackson, listen to me. I’m fine.”

She heard him exhale long and hard.

“You should have called me,” he said, sounding utterly petulant.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I won’t do it again. I’ll call you in a few hours.”

“Whose phone is this? The number is blocked. Can I at least have a number to reach you at?”

“Jacks, I’ll call you later,” she said firmly. “Don’t you trust me? Don’t you believe me?”

There was a long pause.

“Of course I do,” he said, sounding contrite. “But if

you’re safe, then that means someone else has come across foul play … and right on your damn street, Docia. So just … just be careful. I don’t believe in coincidences, and after what happened to you …”

“I’ll call you tonight. Stop worrying. I’ll be just fine. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Docia snapped the phone shut and exhaled. She swayed suddenly as a terrible and painful headache rose up around her all at once.

“Jeez!” She shook her head, as if she could shake off the pain. “What the heck was that?”

What it was was a bit scary. She had listened to the whole exchange almost as if from inside her body while someone else took it over. She had contributed things to it, things from her memory and personality that had been needed to help her be as convincing as possible to her brother, but the smooth lies and explanations that had come so quickly and believably, those had come from something else, some other person inside of her. For all intents and purposes, she’d just been hijacked.

“That was your Bodywalker, Docia,” Ram said softly near her ear, “and my queen.”

CHAPTER SIX

Jackson hung up the phone and stared at it as if it might grow teeth. Then he looked up at Leo and the room full of people, including two detectives, Dr. Hot-body Anderson, and Lieutenant Avery Landon, who had also heard the phone conversation when he had immediately switched to speakerphone out of instinct. The more people who heard the conversation, the more brains involved, the more opportunities there would be to take notice of details that Jackson alone might miss. They hadn’t had a chance to tap his phone yet in order to tape incoming calls, so it was the best they had in a pinch.

“Well, that’s a relief,” the junior detective said.

“Are you serious?” Jackson and Leo bit off at the same time.

“You heard the girl. I have to agree that she sounded fine,” the senior detective said. “Sounds like she just wanted some time on her own. Clearly what happened on the street was completely unrelated to your sister.”

“Clearly?” Jackson snapped. “Really? You know my sister so well that it was perfectly clear to you?”

“Sergeant Waverly … ,” Dr. Bitch-Who-Had-Led-Him-to-Believe-His-Sister-Was-Dead started to say.

“You shut up,” he snapped, pointing a finger— and all the rest of himself, for that matter— in her face. “Every time you have something to say to or about me, the whole world goes to shit.”

She bristled, of course. Who wouldn’t with that much male aggressiveness pouring out at her?

“I wasn’t the one on the banks of the Hudson River taking your sister’s pulse,” she said in hard, punctuated words. Then she disappointed him by drawing her temper back down. She was even more attractive when she was putting him in his place, and a sadistic side of him liked to see it. “And she did not sound stressed or as though she was lying. There were no markers I heard that would immediately cause concern for worry—”

“And how long, exactly, have you known my sister?” he demanded of her.

“Well, I—”

“Not at all, right? So how the hell do you know anything about it? You are just as clueless now as you were when you walked me into that office and told me she was dead.” Okay, so maybe some small part of Jackson knew he was being irrational and completely unfair, but it was a very small part.

“I don’t know how much I can possibly apologize for that, Sergeant Waverly! I was only acting on orders and information given to me by someone else.” She took a calming breath. If Jackson weren’t so worried about Docia right then, he’d have been utterly turned on. Oh, hell. Maybe he was anyway. She was standing up to him as though she weren’t the least bit afraid of him, standing up for herself because she was right. In the end, Jackson knew it wasn’t her fault that someone down the chain of command had screwed the pooch. But she was the one who had been in front of his face that day, and she was the one in front of his face right now. He just wasn’t done dealing with her or the fallout of how he had felt in those horrible, horrible minutes. Two hundred and seven of them, to be precise. And now Docia was in danger again, her life hanging in the balance, and she was going in the opposite direction, trying to make everyone else there think she was fine when she most certainly was not fine.

“Fine,” he growled at her. “Did you hear it? How many times she said it? ‘I’m fine.’ Everything’s fine. If you knew a single damn thing about Docia, you’d know how she turns phrases, and she most certainly doesn’t say she is ‘fine,’ and even if she did, she most certainly wouldn’t repeat it eight times in a single conversation. Docia is one of those quirky people who likes to say the same thing in different ways instead of sounding like a repetitious parrot.”

Marissa and the rest of the room, sans Leo, looked at him as if he were in serious need of an intervention. Perhaps a vacation. A long one. On some secluded farmhouse in the mountains staffed with lots of doctors and nurses.

“Leo, help me out here,” he said through his teeth.

“Right as rain,” Leo said softly, his rich voice starting low and slowly growing in power. “Super-duper. A-okay. Five by five. Happy as a pig in shit. All in one piece. Okie-dokie. Running on all four cylinders. Peachy keen. It’s all good. Marvelous. Splendiferous. Super-frigging-califragilisticexspialidocious! Do you. Get. The picture?” He was staring down Landon. “She would have said ‘safe as houses,’ not just ‘safe.’ She would have been profuse in her apologies. And Docia … as weird as she is … she uses all of what we’re telling you to cover up her awkwardness. To pretend she isn’t as shy as she is. She’s not assertive, she just throws a storm of words at people so that they think that she is. God. You guys have all eaten in her kitchen, helped her around the house … Christ. Farley, you even tried to date her once, didn’t you?”

The junior detective paled as though someone had sucked all the iron out of his blood. He stuttered, looking at Jackson.

“I— I … n-no, I— I w-w-w-w-w … no, Jackson. I never—”

“Relax, Farley,” Jackson said forgivingly. The detective sighed in relief. Jackson smiled. “I’ll kill you later.”

“I … w-well, they have a— a point,” Farley said in a choke of words. Jackson didn’t care if he was switching sides to suck up to him in hopes he wouldn’t kill him for trying to date Docia. Every cop there knew he had outright promised to kill any cop who tried to date his sister. He didn’t want the life of a cop’s wife for her. She deserved to be happy and safe and not worrying if her husband was going to come home at night. Bad enough she worried about him.

“I’m not going to devote time and resources to finding a woman who just said she doesn’t want to be found,” Landon said shortly.

“And a mutilated body just happened to show up on her street the same time she disappears?” Leo scoffed. “Screw this, Jacks. I’ll help you find her, and I promise you it’ll be twice as fast as anything these stiffs can manage.” He grabbed for the midnight-blue leather jacket he’d slung off the corner of a nearby chair and marched out of the room without so much as looking back. Jackson was overwhelmed with the desperation that was bleeding into him.

“I’m asking for you to help me do this. You’re my brothers. If you told me this, I’d take you at your word. I’d do whatever you needed to put your mind at rest. All I want to do is find her and lay eyes on her. If she turns up fine and I’ve wasted your time … I’ll work the equipment cage for a week.”

“Make it two and you have a deal,” Landon said, the smirk in his eyes telling Jackson he probably would have helped him without the offer. But his boss could never get anyone to work the cage without bitching about it or fighting him tooth and nail, and he wasn’t about to lose an advantage like this.

“I’ll make it three if you find her in under an hour,” Jackson countered.

“Two is sufficient. You have a dog to train, Waverly. So let’s do this. Want to go at your witness again?” he asked, nodding his head in the direction of the man-child who was sitting at Jackson’s desk pretending to be a cop and entertaining the rest of the bullpen with his antics.

“I have a better idea. Didn’t the town mount traffic cameras on 9W? If these ‘friends’ of hers had wanted to get out of there fast, they would have driven north on 9W and through town toward I-87.”

With the Esopous River on the west side and the Hudson on the east, Saugerties was literally cut off in any other direction, save north and south, and there was only one main drag to be found.

“Agreed. The only other way out of town is south on 9W and that would be way too slow for anyone in a hurry. Either way, north or south, they still have to pass a mounted camera. Of course, if they’ve hit I-87, and considering the time window they’ve had, they can now be anywhere between here and eighty miles from here.”

“Let’s get the feed from those cameras. Maybe it caught the car. And even if we can’t figure it out from those cameras, every single exit off of I-87 is a toll exit and you can bet they went through one of them and got their picture taken.”