The First Prophet (18 page)

“You’re so sure of that.”

“Positive.”

But I’m not. I think this is all part of the plan. We’re like rats in a maze, pleased
we’re finding our way and unaware that at the center there’s a trap instead of cheese…

Melissa Scanlan picked up the phone before it rang, and said absently, “Hi, Sue. What’s
up?”

“Don’t do that!” Susan Devries ordered in a harassed voice. “I hate it when you do
that. Let the phone ring at least once before you pick it up, dammit!”

“Sorry,” Melissa said ruefully. “I usually remember, but…never mind. We can’t go to
the dance tonight, Sue. There’s weather moving in, and we have a cow out and ready
to calve. Joe wants me to help him look for her. It’ll probably take us hours to find
her.”

“You might at least wait for me to ask,” Sue said, mild now. “Bad weather?”

“Snow. I think.”

“You’re usually right about that. Okay, I’ll tell Tom. Be careful out there, Melissa.”

“Always. Bye.” Melissa glanced out the kitchen window as she pulled on her gloves.
It was still calm out there. Too calm. The weather service said it’d stay that way,
but she knew better. It was one of the things she could predict with near-one-hundred-percent
accuracy—the Wyoming weather.

She went outside in the cold late-September air and joined her husband in the main
barn, where he already had their horses saddled.

“Still sure?” he asked, always a man of few words.

Melissa nodded. “Should start about dark. We only have a couple of hours to find her,
Joe.”

“Then let’s move.”

She swung herself into the saddle, reflecting with pleasure that Joe never disbelieved
her. And he never made her feel like a freak. His grandmother had had the Sight, and
Joe considered himself fortunate to have married a woman who also had it.

They split up not far from the house, with Joe heading off to the east and Melissa
going west. With bad weather coming, they couldn’t spare any of the hands to help
in the search; the men were already working hard to get the other stock into safer
areas. Unfortunately, the particular cow that was about to calve had a habit of hiding
herself away for the duration, and she was both very valuable and a favorite of Melissa’s.

It took Melissa half an hour to work her way out to the place where the cow had hidden
last time. It was a low-lying area, thick with brush, and the worst kind of place
for a cow and calf to be during a snowstorm. It was also an extremely difficult area
for a horse to pick its way through.

At first, that was why Melissa thought her horse was edgy. Because this was a bad
place to be stuck with a storm coming, and animals often seemed to know when trouble
loomed in their simple lives. So when her gelding shied nervously when the increasing
wind rustled bushes nearby, she didn’t worry too much about it. Especially since she
heard a cow bleat mournfully at about the same moment.

It took her ten more minutes to home in on the cow, and when she reached her she was
relieved that no calf was present yet. She reached for her rope and dismounted, and
in a soothing voice said, “You idiot cow,
what’s the matter with you? You should be close to the house, not way out here with
a calf and snow coming—”

Belatedly, she realized two things. That the gelding was backing away nervously, trailing
the reins that should have made him stand still as per his rigid and reliable training,
and that the cow was tied.

“What the hell?” Melissa took a hesitant step toward the cow, staring at the thick
rope that bound her to a tree. She very obviously was not about to calve, and the
scuffed ground all around her testified to her restless attempts to move away from
the tree.

Bait. Bait for you.

She didn’t know where that inner voice came from, but Melissa instantly dropped her
rope and turned back toward her horse, one hand reaching for her rifle and the other
for the walkie-talkie hanging from the saddle horn.

She never touched either one.

Her horse came back to his stable just minutes before the storm hit, wild-eyed and
lathered. The missing cow also returned.

But Melissa Scanlan didn’t.

When Tucker woke abruptly, his internal clock told him it was still well before dawn,
probably three or four
A.M.
He had been asleep since just after midnight and had no idea what had awakened him.
He listened intently for several minutes, one hand under his pillow grasping the .45
just in case, but heard nothing to alarm him.

He finally relaxed a bit—though not completely. He
had the idea he’d never be able to relax completely again. What he had discovered
so far about the seeming conspiracy to kill and kidnap psychics had shaken him far
more than he had allowed Sarah to see. At least, he hoped she hadn’t seen. Or sensed.
She needed him to be sure of himself, he thought. Her belief in fate was so strong
that he had to be equally strong in insisting they could avert the future she had
seen for herself.

Even if he wasn’t sure.

How in hell were they supposed to fight an enemy that was organized on a national
scale? An enemy with resources they couldn’t begin to match, with more manpower and
undoubtedly some kind of uber-efficient communications network. An enemy ruthless
enough to murder a cop—and smart enough to get away with it. How could that enemy
be fought? How?

The fire he’d built the night before was no more than glowing embers in the rock fireplace,
and he lay there on the couch watching them dim and brighten. Once awake, his mind
refused to shut itself off again.

He wondered whether Sarah was sleeping. After seeing all those news clippings, she
hadn’t had much to say. And she had kept a careful distance between them. Physically,
emotionally, and mentally.

Or maybe the mental distance he felt was due to his own wariness. The more convinced
he grew that Sarah was a genuine psychic, the more he could feel himself getting…still
inside. And watchful. He didn’t want to withdraw from her but couldn’t seem to help
himself.

Pushing that out of his mind for the moment, Tucker
thought of all the charlatans he had met over the years, so many of whom cheerfully
plied their trade in carnivals and malls and psychic “fairs” around the country, and
knew those people were not threatened by anything but the occasional suspicious police
officer. He was certain, however, that if he had been able to meet any of the people
on the growing list of dead and missing, he would have found them genuine. The fakes
and phonies stood in no danger from this; people with true psychic abilities were
the targets.

Which meant, he thought, that the people behind this had some way of determining the
genuine from the fake. Or…did they simply watch and wait, as they had apparently watched
Sarah, until they could decide? That was possible, maybe even likely. He thought of
watchers all over the country observing potential psychics, checking off items on
a list until the total added up to “genuine,” and felt a spreading chill.

Jesus Christ—the
enormity
of the thing.

And it was so damned inexplicable. Why psychics? Were they a threat to someone, or
did their abilities make them somehow valuable? That was the question he felt needed
to be answered, and it was the most elusive—because dead or missing psychics offered
no answers, and as far as he could tell, nobody else had bothered to ask.

He could remember reading of long-ago experiments in this country and others, when
it had been theorized that psychics could be used in some fashion as weapons or deterrents
to weapons, but those experiments—as far as he knew—had proved worse than useless.
Only a
handful of genuine psychics had been able to control their abilities in any real sense,
and nobody had really known what to do with them. They could not, after all, stop
bullets or prevent bombs from blowing up. And their predictions had been erratic at
best.

But that had been back during the Cold War, when paranoia and suspicion had compelled
more than one government to attempt unconventional means of attaining and maintaining
power over others. Things were different now.

Weren’t they?

Tucker shifted restlessly on the couch. Whoever was killing and taking them, the list
of psychics was turning into a long one. No wonder Sarah had grown so quiet. In his
research so far, she was one of a much smaller list made up of psychics who had lived
normal lives well into adulthood before some trauma—usually a head injury—had left
them struggling to understand new and baffling abilities. That alone would have been
enough of a strain for anybody without finding out she was also a target of some mysterious
conspiracy.

And on that smaller list of new and untried psychics, most had wound up dead in some
“accident” within months of the birth of their new abilities.

Tucker turned over onto his back and stared at the dark, beamed ceiling. Sarah was
in deadly danger. And the only thing standing between her and the people who would
kidnap or kill her was him.

“So how’re you gonna stop them, Mackenzie?” he muttered aloud.

He didn’t know.

Realizing suddenly that sleep was not going to return, he sighed and sat up. Glancing
toward the bedroom door automatically, he stiffened when he realized it was open.
He was on his feet before he decided to be, gun in hand and senses flaring.

If they had snatched her right out from under his goddamned nose—

A moment later he relaxed. One step away from the couch had brought the sliding glass
doors into view, and through them he saw the moonlit deck and Sarah standing at the
railing gazing out over the lake.

Tucker hesitated, then stuck the automatic into the waistband of his jeans at the
small of his back and shrugged into the flannel shirt he’d earlier removed. His boots
were nearby, and he put those on as well before heading for the glass doors.

He paused there, his hand on the handle, and for several moments studied her through
the glass. She stood much as she had the first time he’d seen her, with her arms crossed
over her breasts and hands moving slowly up and down her upper arms as though to warm
chilled flesh. But she hadn’t been cold then, not from the weather. From something
inside her. And it was the same inner chill now, he realized. Sarah wasn’t cold.

She was alone.

For the first time, he realized that for all her passive acceptance of his company,
Sarah had never stopped being alone.

She was as shut in herself as she had been that first day,
isolated within walls of wariness, remote in a way he didn’t really understand. And
inside her were thoughts and feelings and terrors she had not put into words. Perhaps
had not dared put into words. But they were there. Buried deeply. Locked away from
him and anyone else who wanted to be close to her. Looking at her, he had the sense
of things moving slowly and with terrible deliberation underneath a frozen stillness,
like an ocean under ice.

Tucker drew a breath and opened the door, wondering how he could reach her. Wondering
whether he could reach her.

It was chilly out on the deck, but not actually cold here at the end of September.
In fact, it seemed warmer here than it had been in Richmond, and Tucker didn’t bother
to button his shirt as he joined Sarah at the railing.

Before he could speak, she did, almost idly. “I knew when you woke up. Isn’t that
strange?”

“Maybe not,” he said slowly. “Maybe not for you.”

She was fully dressed in jeans and a sweater, and definitely wide awake as she glanced
at him. “That makes you uneasy.”

It did, as a matter of fact, but he denied it. “Of course not.”

Her smile, clear in the moonlight, held a twist of bitter certainty. “Oh, no? Then
what about this: I’m changing, Tucker.”

“Changing how?” He was cautious, not only because of what she was saying, but because
he realized he had caught her at a raw moment when she might reveal more than she
wanted to.