The First Prophet (36 page)

It was Leigh who asked, “Why do you think they didn’t?”

“Tucker said…he thought it was because I could sense them near me. He said they’d
only move against us in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping and unaware
of them. And only then if they could do it without attracting attention. That was
why we stayed in large hotels and kept moving in the daytime.”

Leigh nodded. “Very wise.”

“And they did move at night, last night while I was asleep. But I don’t understand
how they were able to get
Tucker. I know they weren’t in the room and I know he wouldn’t have left me alone.”

“Not in his right mind,” Leigh murmured.

Sarah stared at her. “You mean they…did something to him?”

It was Brodie who answered that. “Probably. One of the things we know about them is
that they have some psychics under their control who are sometimes able to influence
the minds of others.”

“Neil Mason tried to influence my mind,” Sarah said. “But I was able to…keep him out.”

Leigh nodded, unsurprised by the information. “We know of him. One of their tools,
or was.”

“Was?”

“Gone,” Brodie said unemotionally. “We checked on him periodically; as of this morning,
his house was empty and the neighbors have no idea when he left or where he went.”

“They don’t like failure,” Sarah murmured, chilled.

Leigh nodded. “And he failed. You were getting stronger by then, and when he failed,
they knew they had missed their chance to convert you that way.”

“Why didn’t they try earlier? When I was still so confused and didn’t know how to
resist them?”

“As nearly as we can figure,” Brodie said, “they use their psychics very sparingly,
always trying more…conventional means first. We think it may be because when a psychic
touches another psychic’s mind, it’s like opening a corridor between them, leaving
both vulnerable. They seem to avoid that whenever possible, though
we aren’t sure why. It may be another reason why they decided to tap into Mackenzie’s
mind instead of yours.”

“Think. Seem. May.” Sarah heard the frustration in her own voice. “You don’t know
much for certain, do you?”

“No, we don’t.” Brodie met her gaze steadily. “Can you tell us more?”

Her eyes fell. “No.”

Gently, Leigh said, “Not yet, anyway. But, Sarah, we believe you may be able to tell
us a great deal about them. One day. When your abilities have had the time to develop
properly.”

“And until then—what? Hide me away somewhere?”

“No,” Brodie said. “Hiding isn’t the best idea.”

Cait spoke up finally. “And in another week or two, you’ll be much safer from them.”

Sarah remembered the conversation she had overheard. “Six months since I woke up a
psychic. Why six months?”

“Another thing we don’t know,” Brodie replied. “But it always holds true for the psychics
like you, the ones who aren’t born with it but suffer head injuries or some other
kind of trauma later in life.”

Leigh said, “In the life of every psychic, there comes a moment when full potential
is realized. Control may be lacking, knowledge almost always is, but the ability is
there. For a new psychic, a person who becomes psychic abruptly when all the other
faculties are fully mature, the threshold seems to occur around the six-month mark.
From the evidence we’ve seen so far, it appears that once
that threshold is crossed, the other side finds it difficult—if not impossible—to
convert a psychic. Whatever it is they want of us, we apparently become useless to
them.”

“You become a threat to them,” Brodie corrected.

“We don’t know that,” Leigh argued. “Not for certain.”

Brodie let out a short laugh and looked at Sarah. “It’s another assumption of ours,
based on the fact that we’re sure they continue to keep tabs on psychics long after
they seemingly give up trying to take them, and because there have been several disappearances,
possibly even deaths, of psychics we thought were safe.”

“Nothing was ever proven,” Leigh said.

“Nothing ever is,” Brodie retorted. “But there are some assumptions we’d damned well
better make to keep our people safe.”

“I don’t believe we’re of any use to them once the threshold is crossed,” Leigh argued.
“Those disappearances all involved psychics who were having trouble adjusting to their
new lives; they probably just wanted to drop out of sight and did just that.”

“It would be nice to think so, Leigh—but I don’t. Whatever these bastards want with
psychics, it doesn’t just end when you cross that threshold of yours. They’ve got
something else in mind for you, I can feel it in my gut.” He laughed shortly. “I may
not be psychic, but I know what I know. Taking new and inexperienced psychics is just
step one of their plan. Step two involves the rest of you.”

Leigh seemed unwillingly impressed by his certainty,
but shook her head a little. “I don’t feel that. And none of the others has felt it.”

“Maybe all of you are too close. Maybe it takes somebody
without
psychic abilities to see it.”

“Maybe.”

Sarah probably should have been disturbed by this lack of consensus among people who
had fought the other side much longer than she and Tucker had, but instead it gave
her an odd feeling of comfort. This entire thing was so bizarre, so inexplicable,
that it felt wonderfully normal to watch and listen to people who couldn’t agree on
the details—but were very clear on what the problem was.

“What about people like you?” she asked Leigh. “You’ve been psychic from birth, right?
Why are you safe from them?”

“She isn’t,” Brodie said. “She just thinks she is.”

Leigh smiled at him briefly, then looked at Sarah. “Like many born psychics, I had
nonpsychic parents who tried their best to make me—at least seem—normal. I was always
encouraged to hide what I could do, to keep to myself the things I saw. I learned
secrecy at a very young age.”

“So the other side wasn’t aware of you?”

“So we believe. When I finally did go public, so to speak, it was with my full potential
realized. They never even tried to take me.”

But they had, Sarah knew, taken plenty of her friends through the years. That was
why Leigh Munroe was
involved in this. Not out of fear for herself, but out of fear for others.

Brodie leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he looked intently at Sarah.
“They outnumber us, Sarah, but we’re growing. In strength and numbers. We’re getting
organized, even if it’s loosely, and we’re fighting back.”

“How?”

“Marshaling our own strength. Gathering what few facts and little information we can
lay our hands on, so that we may be able to expose them some day. Finding and protecting
psychics, keeping them away from Duran and his goons.”

“Duran?”

Brodie nodded. “The head goon.”

Cait murmured, “Well, he isn’t really a goon.”

Brodie glanced at her, then looked back at Sarah with a wry expression. “Crocodile.
Shark. Smiling villain. Whatever the hell you want to call him, he’s obviously in
charge, at least of their field operations.”

“Field operations? You make it sound…military.”

“Maybe it is. Or maybe it isn’t. Until we get strong enough as an organization, or
find a single psychic who’s strong enough, we have no way of knowing. They don’t leave
evidence behind them, not so far.”

Sarah thought about it. “So that’s what you meant when you all were talking earlier?
That I might be the one?”

Leigh replied to that, this time obviously in agreement
with Brodie. “We’re convinced that a strong enough psychic will be able to find a
way past their mental shields and give us the information we need to fight them.”

“What makes you believe I might be that one?”

“I can feel it in you. The strength. The potential.” Leigh smiled. “And I gave you
a little test, Sarah.”

“What test?”

“Earlier today, when you looked into my mind. Remember?”

“How could I forget. You opened a door and showed me…everything inside you.”

Leigh shook her head slightly. “You opened that door, Sarah. Something not one in
a hundred psychics could have done. The door was not only closed, it was locked—and
I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to make those locks strong. But they didn’t stop
you. You didn’t force your way past them, you didn’t hurt me. You just opened the
door as if it were no barrier at all.”

Sarah didn’t know what to say to that.

“You’re the one, Sarah,” Leigh said. “You’re the key to our future.”

“Well?”

“She’s made contact with Munroe.”

“And?”

“Brodie’s there. And the girl.”

“Then we can assume they’re making plans.”

“Yes.”

“Good. That’s good.”

It was unsettling, to be told she was so important in a cause she hadn’t even been
aware of a week before, and Sarah wasn’t sure what she felt about it. All she knew
was that a weight of responsibility was settling on her shoulders, and it was heavy.

After a short silence, it was Brodie who spoke, his voice matter-of-fact. “Until we
know who they really are and why they’re taking psychics, all we can do is fight a
holding action. They don’t win—but neither do we. And all the while, for every psychic
we get to in time, we lose half a dozen more.”

Sarah shook her head. “I never realized there were so many people with psychic abilities.”
She saw Brodie, Cait, and Leigh exchange glances, and added immediately, “There’s
something weird about that, isn’t there?”

With a slight smile, Leigh said, “Never use the word
weird
in the presence of people with psychic abilities, especially a born psychic; we’ve
heard it entirely too many times in our lives.”

“Tell me,” Sarah insisted, ignoring the wry humor. “I’m tired of being in the dark,
and I have a right to know.”

“It’s all supposition, Sarah,” Brodie said.

“All of this is supposition, according to you. So? What is this about the number of
psychics?”

Brodie leaned back and gestured slightly toward Leigh, who spoke slowly.

“We don’t know what’s causing it or what it means,
Sarah. All we know is that the number of people with psychic abilities is increasing,
not only generation by generation, but year by year. More are born. And more are,
for want of a better word, made. Created. Changed from latent to active. Twenty-five
years ago, there might have been one or two people who became psychic in a given year
due to a head injury or some other kind of trauma; this year, so far, you are one
of fifteen.”

“What?”

Leigh nodded. “Fifteen that we know of.”

“How many did you get to in time?”

“Three. Not counting you.”

“The others…they were taken?”

Leigh nodded again. “One of them was snatched almost under Brodie’s nose. He wasn’t
happy.”

With a grunt, Brodie said, “I hate to lose.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Cait told him loyally. “The guy couldn’t bring himself to
believe he could be involved in something so bizarre. He just didn’t believe in the
threat against him.”

“We lose some because of that,” Brodie agreed. “Psychic abilities vary; sometimes
the people we’re trying to help have no way of knowing the truth of what we try to
tell them. They don’t know they can trust us. So they run. Right into one of Duran’s
traps.” He looked at Sarah. “That’s why we had to be so careful with you, why we held
back the couple of times we got close enough to make contact. It was my decision,
and I’ve learned never to approach a wary psychic in the dark. Makes a bad first impression.”

Sarah smiled slightly. “Yes, it would have.”

He nodded. “But we’re here now. You do know you can trust us, or at least you’re giving
us the benefit of the doubt. And you do know what we’re up against.”

Softly, Cait said, “And you know, now, how valuable you are.”

Sarah drew a deep breath. “If all this was intended to persuade me not to go after
Tucker—it failed.”

“Sarah, you can’t fight them.” Brodie’s voice was steady.