Free Silent Fall by Barbara Freethy

shook her head. "I don’t remember. I never remember. Sometimes just for a second I hear screams in my head, and then that’s it. I wake up feeling a terrifying panic."
    "Are the screams female?"
    A flicker of doubt sparked in her eyes. "I think so. I never thought about it. But, yes, I believe they’re female screams."
    "Are you sure last night’s screams weren’t real? If something happened to Erica you might have heard her cry out. Her cabin isn’t that far away."
    "I’m certain it wasn’t Erica I heard. The screams were in my head, along with..." She stopped talking. "Along with a lot of other crap, nothing that concerns you."
    "I’m not so sure about that." He looked back at the picture. Tilting his head, he considered the lines that seemed to stand out, depending on the angle and the light. "It’s a face, isn’t it?"
    "I don’t want to talk about it or analyze it," she said quickly.
    "Tough, I do. Answer the question."
    She frowned, obviously annoyed by the order, but after a moment she said, "I think it’s a face, but I’m surprised you can see it."
    "Who is it?"
    "I don’t know."
    "I think you do." He gave the portrait several more minutes of consideration, feeling something tickling the back of his brain, some tiny detail that he recognized but couldn’t quite figure out. And then it hit him -- what appeared to be a tiny gold cross in the center of the chaos of colors. "Erica wore a cross on a necklace," he said, pointing to the tiny gold lines. "I remember thinking that it was an odd choice for a woman who didn’t seem to be the religious type." He gazed at Catherine and saw the answer in her eyes. "This is Erica, isn’t it?"
    "It could be, I guess."
    His pulse began to race. "You’re not guessing at all. You know it’s her."
    "I think it is," she admitted. "But usually I don’t recognize the faces that I paint. They’re strangers. They’re not people I’ve ever seen, or if I saw them I didn’t notice them. But they all feel like they’re calling out to me. As if they’re afraid and I’m the only one who can save them. But how can I save them when I don’t know who they are?"
    He heard the despair in her voice, and even though he didn’t completely understand what she was saying, he could see that she was very disturbed by the fact that she couldn’t seem to make her visions or her dreams work to help anyone. "This might be your breakthrough. If it’s Erica, then you can help her."
    "I don’t know."
    "Don’t doubt yourself."
    "I can’t help it. I’ve been living with these nightmares for a long time. I don’t want to be this way, you know. All my life I just wanted to be normal. But that’s not going to happen. So most of the time I try not to look too closely at anything."
    "And does that work for you?"
    She made a face at him. "Obviously not. Well, let me rephrase that. It works in the daylight, but at night, when my subconscious takes over, I have no control. I’m just along for the ride."
    "That must make for some exciting nights."
    "That I don’t remember in the morning. All I’m left with is another gruesome picture."
    "No one is completely normal, Catherine. Everyone is a little crazy. Trust me; I know. I’ve covered a lot of crazies in my life. On the scale of nutty, you’re not so bad."
    "You’re just trying to make me feel better."
    "I’m trying to make you see that just because you paint your nightmares doesn’t mean that you’re out of your mind."
    "The only difference is that I think my nightmares might be real... actually happening in the world. It’s difficult to explain, but sometimes I feel like I’m inside the head of someone who is really... evil. It scares the hell out of me. For a long time I was afraid that I was sleepwalking, that I was leaving the house and killing people in my dreams. When I was