The First Prophet (27 page)

Sarah came awake suddenly, heart pounding. She was sitting up in bed, her hands reaching
out for…something. Someone. She tried to recall her dreams, but all she remembered
was the uneasy sensation of something missing. Something wrong.

A glance at the bright display of the clock radio on her nightstand told her it was
just after midnight, which meant she had been asleep only a couple of hours. The pressure
inside her head was…different. And she didn’t have a clue what that meant.

The almost-closed connecting door to the parlor showed a sliver of light, so Tucker
was obviously still up. Feeling too restless to attempt sleep again so soon after
waking, Sarah slid out of the big bed. She turned on the lamp and blinked a moment
in the light, then found and shrugged into the thick robe provided by the hotel.

When she went into the parlor, it was to find Tucker seated at the small desk frowning
at his laptop. But he looked up alertly as soon as she came in.

“What is it?”

Sarah shook her head and sat down on the couch. “Nothing. I just can’t sleep. Have
you found anything?”

He hesitated and then, reluctantly, said, “There was a woman’s body found in Richmond
a couple of days after the fire.”

Sarah felt her throat tighten up, but said steadily, “A body that could have been
mistaken for me?”

“The police description is of a white female, age thirty, five foot four, about a
hundred and five pounds, dark hair, brown eyes. The ME thinks she died sometime last
Wednesday. The day of the fire.”

“How was she killed?”

Again, Tucker hesitated. “Sarah—”

“How was she killed?”

“Smoke inhalation—though there were no burns on her body and she was found in a shallow
grave in an empty lot. Some kids playing baseball found her there.”

Sarah swallowed to fight the queasy sensation rising in her throat. “Kids. Great.
What do the police think?”

“Reading between the lines of the reports, they don’t know what to think. The woman
lived alone; her neighbors claim nothing unusual happened around the time she must
have died. The man she was dating has a solid
alibi, and nobody thinks he did it anyway; he was, according to everyone who knew
them, devoted to her. So far, they haven’t found any enemies. She was not sexually
assaulted, and was apparently laid out in the grave with some care, identification
by her side. No sign that she fought or even struggled; the ME thinks she may have
been asleep when the smoke got her; he found slight traces of a sedative in her body.”

If Tucker thought Sarah found that last a comfort, he was wrong.

“What was her name?”

“Sarah, let it go.”

She drew a breath. “What was her name?”

“Jennifer Healy.”

Sarah repeated the name in a whisper, committing it to memory. She was reasonably
sure the police would never solve the murder of Jennifer Healy. Reasonably sure that
the media would accord the crime scant attention. Reasonably sure that in time the
boyfriend would get on with his life and the friends would think of her less and less.
Reasonably sure that the people responsible for her death had already wiped her from
their minds.

But Sarah was certain that she, at least, would never forget.

“There’s no way to be sure they intended to use her body,” Tucker pointed out reasonably.
“She could have been the victim of a garden-variety killer who was motivated by reasons
we’ll never know and wouldn’t understand if we did.”

“Right.”

“And even if she did die just to give them a body they could use, it isn’t your fault.
There’s nothing you could have done to prevent her death.”

Sarah leaned her head back and closed her eyes, a weariness far more emotional than
physical washing over her. “You know, when all this started, I thought it just affected
me, that I was the target, the only one in danger. It never occurred to me that anyone
else might get hurt because of me. But then there was Margo, in the wrong place at
the wrong time. And now this poor woman, this woman I never even met. This woman who’ll
never marry, never have children, never grow old. Because of me. Who else is going
to be killed or threatened with death because I got hit on the head and turned into
a valuable freak?”

Tucker hesitated for only a moment before leaving the desk and coming to sit beside
her on the couch. She was alone again, locked inside herself where it was cold and
bleak, and he couldn’t just leave her there.

“Sarah, you are not a freak.” He reached over to cover the restless fingers knotted
together in her lap. They were cold and stiff. “And this is not your fault.”

“No?” Her eyes remained closed, her face still. “I keep thinking…there must have been
a point somewhere along the way where I could have—should have—made a different choice.
A different decision. And that would have changed everything. But then I remember
that all this is fate. Destiny.”

She opened her eyes then, raised her head and turned
it to look at him. Her eyes were darker than eyes should ever be, the pupils wide
and black and empty. And her voice was curiously toneless, dull. “This is where I
have to be. Where I’m supposed to be. You’re who I’m supposed to be with. And everything
that has happened was meant to happen just as it did. It was all…planned out for me
a long time ago. So why don’t I just accept that?”

“I don’t believe our lives are mapped out for us,” he reminded her quietly.

She looked at him a moment longer, those great dark eyes unblinking. “Then maybe I
could have saved Jennifer Healy.”

“No. That was a choice
they
made—not you. There was nothing you could have done, Sarah.”

“All right.” She didn’t sound convinced so much as weary, and turned her head away
to look vaguely across the room. “Do you— Have you found any new or useful information
about them or what they’ve been doing? Anything helpful?”

For an instant, Tucker considered not letting her change the subject, but in the end
he accepted the new one. He could only push so much, insist so often, before she would
withdraw into some place where he’d never be able to reach her. He dared not risk
that.

Deliberately, he took his hand off hers and leaned back away from her just a bit.
“More of the same. Supposedly dead and missing psychics in two more major cities.”

“Then…there’s no safe place?”

“Doesn’t look like it. Not in the major cities. Not in this country anyway.”

Surprised, and more unnerved than she had yet been, she said, “You don’t think this
is worldwide?”

Tucker shrugged. “There’s no way to know, really. I can tap into a few data sources
worldwide, but nothing specific enough to answer that question, at least not without
drawing attention to myself. It’s difficult enough to stay under the radar here; the
government is always looking for computer hackers, as threats
and
as assets. They monitor us a lot more closely than the average citizen realizes.”

“Great. Something else to be paranoid about.”

“We live in dangerous times. And…there were some pretty damned intrusive laws passed
after the towers fell.”

It was clear he took exception to at least some of those laws, and Sarah hoped they’d
have a chance to sit and discuss it all. She really did hope they’d have that time.

But for now, there were more imperative things to discuss.

“So you don’t know if this thing could be worldwide. If it is…”

“If it is,” he said steadily, “we’ll find out eventually. For now, we’ve got all we
can handle.”

“More than we can handle.”

“We’re doing okay. We’re still alive and on the loose.” He tried to sound positive
and wasn’t at all sure he’d pulled it off.

“Are we? Or are we just rats in a maze?”

He frowned slightly. “Is that what you feel?”

“Stop asking me what I feel.”

“I can’t do that, Sarah. Your feelings can guide us.” Without giving her a chance
to argue with him, he repeated, “Do you feel we’re rats in a maze? Honestly feel that?
Or is it frustration talking?”

Sarah got up from the couch and went over to the window, where the partially drawn
drapes offered only a narrow piece of the night. She stood there looking out, and
for a long time she didn’t say anything.

Tucker waited patiently.

Finally, tensely, she said, “What you don’t seem to understand is that sometimes…usually…I
can’t tell the difference. A vision is a very clear-cut thing, no matter how you choose
to interpret it. But impulses, hunches, feelings…these damned voices in my head…how
do I know what they mean? How can I tell? Is it just my fears talking to me? My imagination
working overtime? Or is there a truer voice I should be listening to?”

“You won’t know unless you listen.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “I’m not the one who has to sort through all the background
noise you’ll hear. But I’ll help all I can, Sarah. Just tell me how to do that.”

“I don’t know how. I don’t even know that.”

After a moment, Tucker got up and joined her at the window. “Maybe we’re both demanding
too much too fast from you. Sarah, I would never do anything to hurt you. I hope you
know that.”

“I know you have only the best of intentions,” she murmured.

There was no particular emotion in her voice, but Tucker nevertheless felt there was
something ironic in her remark, and it made him defensive. “No matter what they say
about the road to hell, we’re not moving in that direction, Sarah, I promise you.”

“You should stop making promises.” She turned her head suddenly to look at him out
of those too-dark eyes. “Your track record with them isn’t very good.”

He stiffened. “No?”

“No. Lydia would know that, wouldn’t she?”

He felt a chill that went clear down to his bones, and gazing into her eyes he had
the abrupt and incredibly unsettling sense of something alien. Something…unnatural.

She knew. She knew it all.

Sarah’s mouth curved in a faint, curiously mocking smile. “So we’re not moving toward
hell, huh? Then why do you look at me as though I might have been spawned there?”

“Sarah—”

“Oh, don’t worry about it, Tucker. I’m not evil. I’m just not normal.”

He knew—he
knew
—she had deliberately reached into his head and his nightmares in order to keep him
at a distance. As coolly as any surgeon, she had slipped her scalpel into him with
full knowledge of the effect it would cause, and now she studied him with calm assessment,
her eyes distant.

This was what he got for pushing her. Sarah was
pushing back. And she was a lot stronger than either of them had given her credit
for.

“I don’t believe you’re evil. And normal is what you get used to,” he managed.

“Right.”

He watched her move away from the window toward the doorway to the bedroom and made
no effort to stop her. He wanted to. He wanted to call her back or go after her, to
try to close the very real distance between them. But he couldn’t.

Sarah had discovered his Achilles’ heel, and if only to protect herself when he pushed
and keep him out, she had learned how to use the knowledge against him. Until he could
bring himself to face his demons, he had no defense against that tactic.

She paused at the door and looked back at him. As if nothing had happened, she said,
“The psychic we’re going to try to approach tomorrow—what did you say his name was?”

“Mason,” Tucker replied automatically. “Neil Mason.”

She nodded. “Good night, Tucker.”

“Good night, Sarah.”

Patty Lowell looked out her kitchen window for the fourth time in half an hour, just
to reassure herself that Brandon was still out there playing in the sandbox with his
dinosaurs, safe in their fenced backyard. He was, and she stood there for a few moments
watching him before returning to her baking. It wasn’t like her to be a nervous
mother, but this was the third morning in a row that her five-year-old had awakened
asking her anxiously if they could hide from the bad men.