Ritual Dreams: Dreams and Reality, #15

By Hadena James

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, let me hear you scream. 

Aislinn Cain and SCTU Team Alpha heads to Tallahassee, Florida to do battle with a serial killer unlike any they have ever faced before.  The victims endure psychological as well as physical torture at the hands of this merciless murderer.  The crimes are staged as hate crimes. However, Ace and Lucas agree that each death appears to be a form of punishment, creating doubts that hate is the true motive.   

Identifying and capturing this killer is the easiest part for Ace.  Deciding if justice is being served is more difficult, as this killer doesn't fit into the black and white morality, she has constructed for herself.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hadena James
• Release date: Mar 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386059578

Book preview

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.  She sang softly as she filled another large syringe.  They were meant to give steroids to large animals like horses and elephants; however, she found they worked really well for what she wanted.  Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a scream, a moment of consciousness followed by moments of unconsciousness.  She wasn’t speaking aloud, the words were forming and moving through her mind, and she knew it.  There was some muffled groaning in the room, sound didn’t travel very well through duct tape, especially since our tongue and lips helped form words. 

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream, she sang out loud.  Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, come on give me a scream, she sang just above a whisper leaning in closely to the woman beside her.  The man in the room was already dead.  Too much too fast, she thought.  Too fast, too fast, too fast, so fast, so fast, so fast, death should not be fast, it should be slow, like the touch of a lover, caressing your soul before it takes it away.  She’d have to remember to use less next time.  Much, much less.  Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, between the two of them, they would pick the bones clean.  What bones?  Whose bones?  She wasn’t sure.  Somebody’s bones.  Probably that of a child’s considering nursery rhymes usually revolved around doom and gloom.  Whistle while you work, whistle while you work, whistling makes the work go faster, just like singing a tune did.  She let out a low whistle.  It wasn’t particularly harmonic, just a noise, a small vibration of the lips as air moved swiftly past them. 

Whistles were like screams, people inferred what they heard.  To some, a whistle could sound like words, to others a music note, to yet others it sounded like nothing but noise.  Her head was killing her.  She took a deep breath and realized it was time to put on her respirator.  The smell of the dead man was making her nostrils burn ever so slightly.  Her nostrils flared as she put the mask on.  With the respirator in place, she sung a little louder.

Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon, the little dog laughed to see such a sight, and the dish ran away with the spoon.  Because the dish was a heroine junkie that needed its fix so it would stop seeing cows jump over the moon and cats would stop playing fiddles, none of it makes any sense, she commented.  Not a bit of sense.  Unlike most nursery rhymes, Hey Diddle Diddle didn’t deal with death or destruction.  However, she had read somewhere it had to deal with pagan worship of the Goddess Hathor.  She was determined to stamp out all pagan worship.  They didn’t know the harm they caused godly folks.  Folks that believed in God and followed the rules set out by him.  She would show them they couldn’t do such things without retribution, divine retribution.  She looked at the syringe she had filled.  It had a bad smell, worse even than that of the dead man. 

Renounce your ways witch and I will let ye live, she told the woman.  The woman’s eyes grew larger than they had been.  She made noises, noises that made as much sense as that stupid nursery rhyme.  Martha couldn’t understand her, not that she wanted to.  She wouldn’t let her live no matter what she said, she just liked to give the women hope.  She never offered that choice to the men.  However, women were protectors and teachers.  They were supposed to mold their children into something better, provide a safe environment for children to grow up in.  This woman had violated that.  Even if she repented and was saved from the fires of hell, there would still be scars on her children for the rest of their lives.  Like her, they would be damaged more living their lives with this woman who pretended to be a mother than by her death.

For a moment, she battled the urge to stomp the woman’s face in.  Her hatred barely containable.  However, if she ever let it loose, she was sure she wouldn’t be able to get a handle on it again.  It would spill over onto the world as a whole and drown even the good women in its black, tarry mess.  She took a shallow breath and exhaled loudly.  Tears were running from the eyes of this less than human being.  If she wanted pity, she was wasting her tears.  All she felt was disdain and disgust.  How dare this woman consider herself a mother.

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream, she whispered very closely.  Now, you scream.  She inserted the incredibly large, long needle into the woman’s abdomen, pushing it as forcefully as needed.  The tears ran faster.  The sounds got louder through the duct tape.  She closed her eyes for a moment and then took another breath and pressed down on the plunger with her thumb.

The noise intensified through the duct tape.  Now she was screaming, screaming with everything she could muster.  Screaming like a woman possessed and broken.  Which was exactly what she was.  Martha tried not to giggle as the woman gave a final cry before dying.  Martha pushed the woman away from her and fluids spilled out onto the floor.  It didn’t take Martha long to see the damage the syringe had caused.  The flesh was basically melting away, draining out with the stream of fluid now running from the corpse.

The man had an equally gaping wound in his neck from where the syringe had filled his body full of its contents.  He had gurgled a few times, but that was it.  He hadn’t begged or pleaded or screamed.  Possibly because he couldn’t have even if he’d wanted to.

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, Martha stood up and cut her hand open with a large knife.  She used the fingers on her opposite hand to dip into her blood and then write on the wall. 

Row, row, row, your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life’s a dangerous dream. The woman’s body spasmed a few more times as Martha wrote on the wall.  When it finished its last bone shattering spasm, Martha dug into her bag and pulled out the makeup she had brought along. 

It took her longer to paint the faces of her victims than anything else.  She wanted the world to understand they weren’t human.  They weren’t victims.  Only people could be victims.  These monsters were no longer people.  They had ceased to be people long, long ago, but their skin belied who they really were, which is why Martha felt the need to destroy it and paint their faces with death, so that everyone could see she wasn’t killing people.  She was killing monsters, monsters that walked around and pretended to be people. 

The Amazing Amber

Amber awoke with a headache.  She was sitting in the driver’s seat of her aunt’s car outside a temple.  Her hands hurt and she didn’t know why.  She was wearing a black shirt that had something to do with the number 42 and she didn’t know why she was wearing it either. 

Her aunt had given her a cell phone for these moments when she woke up in a strange place under strange circumstances.  But Amber didn’t call her.  Amber sat and stared at the steering wheel.  There was a damp spot on her shirt and when she touched it, her hand came away with a brownish tint. 

Had she stolen her aunt’s car?  Had she been in an accident?  There was a bag on the passenger’s seat.  Amber felt around in it for her glasses.  This wasn’t the first time she’d woken up next to this gym bag.  Her hands had scratches on them and they hurt.  What had happened to her? 

She found her glasses and put them on.  Her hands were red and looked raw in a few spots, not just where the scratches were but other spots as well, going all the way up her arm on one side. 

With the world in focus, she realized she was at the park just down the street from her house.  The car was perfectly parked in a spot in the lot.  Maybe her aunt had driven her here and gotten out because she was sleeping. 

Or maybe it was that horrible Caroline.  She thought Caroline was old enough to drive and Caroline often kidnapped her and left her in weird places with a car that she couldn’t drive and no way to get home except to call her aunt.  Her aunt didn’t seem to think Caroline’s consistent kidnapping of Amber was a big deal.  She said it was normal and that it was also normal for Amber to wake up scared when it happened.  It was part of Amber’s condition.

Amber could not figure out what kind of condition was treated by being kidnapped by a person she didn’t know, a teenager that her aunt seemed to hold in high regard, despite repeatedly kidnapping Amber. 

She stopped thinking about Caroline, it made her head pound worse.  She could walk home from here, maybe, depending on whether she was injured or not.  Was the brown stuff blood or was it something else?  Had she had an accident this time with Caroline and pooped her pants?  That would be unbearable.  But it didn’t smell like poop.  It smelled like burnt metal.  There were a couple of holes in her shirt too.  Not big ones, small ones about the size of the head of a thumb tack. 

They didn’t look like regular holes, they looked like a moth had eaten her shirt.  Had she been asleep that long?  No, this wasn’t the shirt she had been wearing when she went to sleep, last night, maybe?  Was this all a nightmare?  Was she really still at the hospital with the nice Dr. Abernathy who told her to draw pictures of what she was afraid of?

No, she wasn’t having a nightmare, that wouldn’t have made her head hurt.  After a moment of indecision, Amber got out of the car.  The car looked okay, it didn’t look like it had been in a wreck.  Maybe she had been attacked by a cat.  Cats could really scratch you up and make you bleed a lot.  Maybe she had wrapped her scratched hands in her shirt and the brownish stuff was her blood?  Maybe it wasn’t dry yet because it hadn’t happened very long ago. 

Dr. Abernathy had told her she had some kind of sleeping sickness.  Often when she fell asleep, she forgot what she had done while awake and there was Caroline to deal with.  Dr. Abernathy had tried to explain Caroline to her, but Amber hadn’t really understood.  She didn’t want to tell Dr. Abernathy that though, because she was afraid Dr. Abernathy would get mad at her for it. 

Dr. Durant had gotten mad at Amber a lot.  He had yelled at her.  He had even shaken her a few times while yelling for her to let go of Martha.  Amber didn’t know who Martha was, but she got Amber in trouble a lot and Amber didn’t know why.  She had once asked someone else at the hospital who Martha was and the person had said they didn’t know a Martha. 

No one seemed to know who Martha was.  Her aunt said she didn’t know.  Dr. Abernathy had asked her repeatedly how she had heard about Martha and then Dr. Abernathy had gotten mad and gone off to yell at Dr. Durant. 

Dr. Durant had responded by yelling at Amber some more.  Eventually, Amber had stopped admitting that she didn’t know what she had done.  She had begun to tell Dr. Abernathy and Dr. Durant about the weird dreams she occasionally had, the ones that happened before the headaches and they accepted those dreams as proof that Amber was aware of what she was doing all the time. 

Dr. Durant had stopped yelling at her and he never mentioned Martha again.  Then her aunt had come to the hospital and taken Amber away.  Amber had been so happy.  She had thought she was going to get to go to school and make friends and enjoy being a teenager. 

But she hadn’t gone to school, her aunt had decided to homeschool her instead.  She didn’t mind that so much, she liked her aunt and her aunt had a lot of friends that were always coming over to the house and they were nice to her. 

She still would have preferred to go to school, but she guessed that wasn’t possible since she had fits of amnesia and often fell asleep while doing things.  Once in a while, she woke up dressed in a work uniform and was expected to know what to do.  Those days were nightmares, but they were getting fewer and fewer.  She didn’t know why she sometimes seemed to have a job.  She was too young to work and she couldn’t drive herself yet.  She didn’t even have a driver’s permit to practice driving.  She still had 3 years before she’d get one of those.  But she looked older. 

She was tall and had boobs and she wore a size extra large in shirts and a size 8 in jeans.  She wished she’d lose some weight, but when she tried to lose weight, she would occasionally wake up to find herself eating enough food for a dozen people.  Pigging out on things like pizza or burgers, which was weird, because the thought of eating meat grossed her out. 

Her aunt or maybe her mom had read her a book called The Jungle and it had been about slaughter houses.  She didn’t remember who read it to her exactly, just that she wouldn’t have been able to read it to herself.  She didn’t understand all those big fancy words.  Her aunt was working with her to improve her reading level, but she was way behind and she knew it.  Other kids her age were reading books like Harry Potter, but not Amber.  Amber found it hard to concentrate on Harry Potter, and it was such a long book, how was any 12 year old supposed to get through it?

Amber sat down in the grass in front of the car and looked at her hands.  Her left one looked fine, which was weird.  Amber was a lefty, she did everything left handed.  And because she was left hand dominant, normally when she got a cut it was on the left hand. 

Amber sighed.  This was obviously more of Caroline’s doing.  Maybe she’d talk to her aunt about Caroline the Awful again.  Maybe this time when they talked about Caroline, her aunt wouldn’t tell Amber there was nothing she could do about it.  Maybe she would show her aunt the cuts and holes in her shirt and she would force Caroline to leave her alone.

She sat on the grass for over an hour and made a plan of action.  She was going to purge her room of the weird things she kept finding and the clothing that she hated, starting with that ugly yellow sun dress that her aunt said she bought for Caroline and the myriad of books that Amber was never going to read; Danielle Steele and Robert Louis Stevenson and Leo Tolstoy.  Maybe that would make her feel better, make her feel well enough to forget this horrible morning.

One

We had been named SCTU Alpha Team and we had all been on administrative leave for the last month or so while the NSA, FBI, US Marshals Service, Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice had investigated us, all of us.  It turned out the bones were those of Lucas’s parents and they had been executed with a single gunshot through the back of the head.  A re-creation of the wound showed that they both would have been on their knees for the shots to go in at that angle.  The bullets that were found in the skulls did match FBI issue ammunition and the striations confirmed it was Director Belmont’s weapon.

There was just too much overlap for most people to believe that we weren’t personally involved in any of the killings and incidents that had taken place in the days immediately following our escape from Raphael Henders.  The bunker had been taken apart by the Army, dismantled piece by piece, every square inch had been dusted for fingerprints and swabbed for DNA.  It had been expensive and time consuming.

But it had also been worth it as former FBI Director Belmont’s DNA had been found in multiple locations within the bunker and his blood was among those found on the walls of the horror room.

DNA from my book had been a match to myself and Director Belmont, and as it turned out, I had left a scar on his hand when I bit it as a child.  He had a hard time explaining all of these things and an even harder time explaining his trophy collection and why he had my hair, hair that had not been dyed and didn’t contain any naturally grey hairs. In other words, not a recent chunk of my hair.  In my original statement, the one I gave to Lucas’s father, I had mentioned that when I was abducted my kidnapper had pulled out a small clump of my hair, and twenty years later, that clump was found in Director Belmont’s collection and still had the roots attached to it, so they were able to prove it was my hair.

He had admitted to paying someone to kill Donnelly and Isabelle because Donnelly suspected he was killing teen and young adult women in my hometown.  He had also admitted to hiring Callow to kidnap me in order to derail the serial killer investigation that Donnelly had been working on at the time.  He told the NSA that he had ended up having to do the kidnapping because Callow had chickened out at the last minute.  He was afraid to even have me in his house, which is why he hadn’t done to me what he had done to the other children he had kidnapped. 

Upon learning that Director Belmont was in the custody of the US Marshals, Raphael had started talking, or rather, writing down everything he knew.  He had been deposed for more than seven hours.  And when Belmont was confronted with Raphael Henders’ confession he cracked and decided to plead guilty to all charges and asked that he be put into protective custody within the Fortress, he said it was so he wouldn’t be murdered by my fan club, but I had a feeling it was more because Eric was inside the Fortress once again.

Peter West and Harry Burns had kept their silence throughout the investigation, although as I understood things, they were the ones that had helped Patterson escape my custody.  Peter had confessed his role in the escape one night after the dust had started to settle.  He and Malachi had joined Mom, Badger, and I for dinner and he had confessed over my mom’s meatloaf.  Mom and I both were willing to ignore it considering the reason he had helped Patterson escape was to make catching Director Belmont easier and that the reason no one had been able to find Patterson for a while was because he had been given a new identity by Peter West and stuck in a house right down the street from Belmont to watch his movements.

I had also ignored the fact that I had gotten a post card from Patterson.  The post card hadn’t had his name on it, just a smiley face.  But I had no doubts about it being from him.  It was obvious to me, unless I now had fan club members in Mexico.  The post card had come from a small town in Mexico known for its Mayan ruins on the Yucatan Peninsula.  The common language wasn’t Spanish but a Mayan dialect that wasn’t spoken anywhere else in the world.  I didn’t know if Patterson knew Mayan, but he seemed like the type that could pick it up.

In other words, it had been a long month for all of us.  Lucas had gotten confirmation that his parents had been murdered and hadn’t just abandoned him to his fate, which was

Reviews for Ritual Dreams

[bisoy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amazing series I really loved Aislinn cain one of my favourite characters in any book I’ve ever read and her development as a character was very enjoyable to read. Thank you for such a great book. Five stars ?