Page 84 of Power of the Mind

Diem

Tallus found the first one. I found the following three. Then they kept appearing, and I knew we had a problem. We separated the files marked DECEASED into their own pile and counted them.

“Diem, there are eleven of them. What the ever-loving fuck?”

“I don’t know.”

I could barely rub two brain cells together at that point, and no matter what path I took to explain the mess, I encountered a dead end. What had we found? What did it mean? After our visit with the dear old doctor, why had Hilty stormed his ex-wife’s house and confiscatedthesefiles? Who were these people? And why were over half of them marked with the word DECEASED?

My skin itched and buzzed for a cigarette, but I tamped it down and did my best to ignore the craving. Why had I given my smokes to Tallus?

“D?”

“I said I don’t know.” There was more bite to my tone than I intended, and I told myself to calm the fuck down.

“Amber and Allan both have files.”

My brow creased. “I know.”

“Do you think the rest of these people are like them? Do you think… they killed themselves?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hilty and Rowena are working together, aren’t they?”

“I… don’t know.”

“He lied to us. He said he hadn’t talked to her, but he had. This is proof. They’re back to their old games. The trial we found from the eighties was real. The judge dismissed it. Holy fuck, D. It was really real. I was right. They found a way to—”

“Tallus, shut up. I’m trying to think.” I bit the inside of my cheek, cursing my sharp tone. I clenched my fists. My body was a furnace, and the air conditioning in the Jeep was barely penetrating. A fire burned in my core. One built from self-loathing, self-hatred, regret, anger, longing, and guilt.

And it wouldn’t go out.

My mind had been in a twisted knot all day, and I’d not slept a wink in almost forty hours.

What the hell were we looking at?

When Tallus came to me about Madame Rowena, I had almost laughed him out of the office. Because it was ridiculous. Impossible. But… what the fuck had we stumbled upon?

I wasn’t laughing anymore.

“I have to put these back.” I grabbed the ones Tallus had gathered in his lap and added them to my pile.

“What? Stop. We can’t put them back. This is proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“They’re killing people with mind control.”

“There’s no such fucking thing as—”

“Okay, okay, I concede. Not mind control, but something to that effect. I don’t care what you call it. People are dead, Diem. A lot of people, and Hilty and Rowena are covering it up. You can’t ignore this.”

I scrubbed a hand over my face and did all I could to talk myself off a ledge. When I spoke, I did so slowly. “We don’t know anything. Itlookssuspicious, but it could be explainable.”

“Explainable? We should report it.”

“We’re not reporting it. We have nothing to report.”

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