The First Prophet (8 page)

The morning sun was halfway to its noon position, and long shadows stretched from
the west side of the building in downtown Richmond. A tall woman with short and rather
spiky blond hair stood motionless on the balcony, virtually invisible in the shadows
and among tall potted plants. She cursed absently as a palm frond stirred by the breeze
waved in front of her binoculars, shifted her weight just a bit, then went still again
as her field of vision cleared. Her attention was fixed on the rather
shabby hotel across the street, and a particular room a floor below her own fifth-floor
vantage point.

The drapes at that window had not been drawn, and a generous percentage of the room
was visible to her.

Careless. Duran must be losing his touch.

Two men were in the room. She would have given a lot to know what they discussed as
they sat so casually across from each other. But there had been no time to plant listening
devices, and from her angle, it was impossible even to make an attempt at lip-reading—a
skill she had worked very hard to acquire.

She lowered the binoculars, lips pressed so tightly together there was no hint of
softness there, and vivid green eyes furious. “Damn,” she whispered. “Damn, damn,
damn.”

She eased back through the balcony doors into the apartment she had—so to speak—sublet
and bent over a lovely Regency desk. The former occupant’s work had been unceremoniously
shoved aside, and an open laptop sat in the center of the pretty floral blotter.

“Jeez, enough with the plant motif,” she muttered, momentarily distracted as she glanced
around at the very pretty, very feminine, and very floral bedroom in which she stood.
Frilly was hardly Murphy’s style. Barely suppressing a shudder, she fixed her attention
on the screen of the laptop.

A section of a city map, brilliantly colored, met her intent gaze. She studied it
for a long moment, frowning, then tapped a few keys to produce a close-up of the section.
Her index finger traced the distance from a square representing the hotel across the
street to a quieter street where former residences had been turned into small businesses.

“Too close. Dammit, they have to know where she is.” Murphy wasn’t even conscious
of speaking aloud, so accustomed to working alone that talking to herself had become
a habit.

The words had barely left her mouth when the very faint sound of a key in the lock
of the apartment’s front door brought her head up alertly, and this time the curse
that left her lips was a mere whisper.

Just my luck that Ms. Bank Vice President went off this morning and left her damned
lunch on the kitchen counter!

Swiftly, unwilling to wait and find out whether the apartment’s legal occupant would
choose to come into the bedroom for some reason, she closed the laptop and dropped
it into the pouch hanging against her hip. Without a wasted motion, she backed out
onto the balcony and slid the door closed.

There was a fire escape, which was good, but leaving the shelter of the greenery meant
she was too visible, even in the shadows, for her peace of mind. Still, being seen
by the wrong person was infinitely preferable to being arrested for breaking and entering,
which was what likely would happen if she remained on the balcony.

She moved quickly and quietly down to street level and, once there, paused only long
enough to stow the binoculars in their pocket of the pouch containing the computer.

The pouch was not conspicuous, resembling nothing
so much as a large, if bulky, shoulder bag, but someone might well have taken notice
of the binoculars.

A quick glance around told her that none of the few people about seemed interested
in her. She was just about to relax when a carefully casual glance up at the window
across the street brought her to a dead stop just two steps away from the fire escape.

Duran was at the window, and he saw her.

He was too far away for her to recognize his face, but she knew it was him. She knew
he was looking at her. And she knew he recognized her. She could feel it. Like some
night animal caught unexpectedly in the light, she stood frozen, not breathing, a
panicky sensation stirring deep inside her. It was not a feeling she was willing to
define to herself, though if asked she would have said angrily that it was hatred.
Pure hatred.

If asked, Duran would have said the same thing.

The moment seemed to last forever, and if a car horn had not rudely shattered the
quiet of the morning, there was no telling how long she would have stood there staring
up at the man in the window. But the horn brought her to her senses, and with a soft
little sound more violent than a curse, she hurried to the corner and around it, taking
herself out of his field of vision.

He turned away from the window and looked across the room at the other man.

“What is it?” Varden asked, instantly alert.

“We’ve run out of time,” Duran said.

Sarah?

She was struggling up out of the depths of an exhausted sleep, frantic to wake up
and get control, to be able to shut out the whisper in her mind.

Sarah, you must—

Her eyes snapped open, and Sarah was awake. Her heart was pounding, and she could
hear her own shuddery breathing. As always, once she was awake and aware, the voice
fell silent.

That voice. God, that voice.

It had begun only a few days before, creeping into her awareness during both waking
and sleeping dreams, during vulnerable or unguarded moments. A whisper without identity,
eerily insistent. She didn’t even know whether it came from inside her…or somewhere
else. It felt alien to her, yet she couldn’t be sure it
was
—because all of this felt alien. The dreams. These frightening new abilities. The
feelings she couldn’t explain even to herself.

All she really knew was that all of it terrified her.

She pulled herself out of bed and went to take a shower, heavy-eyed after lying awake
for most of the night. It wasn’t until she came back into her bedroom and began dressing
that she heard a loud laugh and the cheerful notes of Margo’s voice.

Margo. Dear God.

Sarah knew she should have called her, of course. Last night. She should have called
her and reassured her that
it was okay, that she didn’t have to come charging back home to support her partner
and friend. Anything to keep Margo safely away from here. But Sarah’s thoughts last
night had been fixed on her own troubles—and on Tucker Mackenzie.

Real. He was real. Not a figment of her imagination. Not a face in a half-remembered
nightmare, probably formed out of random features drifting like flotsam in her subconscious.
Real. One more indication to her that the prediction of her own future was going to
come true. One more sign that it was useless to fight what had to be.

That was what she would have said—had, in fact, said—yesterday. But Tucker hadn’t
merely presented himself as a sign or a symbol or an indication. He was a real man,
and being a real man, he had his own thoughts and opinions and his own agenda. He
wanted to believe.

He wanted to believe in her.

Sarah had seen something similar more times than she could count these last months.
People with anxious voices and eager eyes and desperate smiles. Asking her, begging
her, for answers. The difference was, those people hadn’t wanted the truth. No, they
wanted answers, but only those answers that would make them feel good, or at least
better, about their problems, their lives. They wanted reassurance, comfort, hope.
They hadn’t been able to find it within their own belief system, whether that be religion
or something else. So they had come to her.

Tell me my husband forgave me before he died.

Tell me my runaway daughter isn’t walking the streets somewhere, or lying dead in
a gutter.

Tell me I’m right to choose my lover.

Tell me my mother didn’t suffer.

Tell me there’s no hell.

Tell me there is a heaven.

Tell me I have a future.

Tell me life doesn’t just end.

Tell me…please tell me…

Sarah had discovered for herself that hope was a fragile thing, difficult to hold
on to in the harsh face of day-to-day living. She blamed no one for trying to hold
on to it, or reach for it again after it had been lost or driven away. But she was
helpless to offer hope to others when all she saw was bleak and dark and violent—and
without promise.

She had expected Tucker to ask her for hope. But that wasn’t what he wanted from her.
He wanted the truth. He didn’t care whether it proved to be a dark and bleak truth.
He didn’t care whether it caused him pain. He just had to know the truth.

She could have given him most of what he wanted of her within the first hour of knowing
him. That she had not was due to several reasons. Though he would doubtless disagree
with her assessment, she knew he was not yet ready to hear the truth he needed to
hear. Not yet ready to listen and understand. Proof of that had been his shocked reaction
to the tiny glimpse of the truth she had shown him just after they said good night.

And then there was his part in the sequence of events
that all these new instincts of hers told her had already begun. His arrival told
her that the countdown had started. With his truth revealed to him, he would no doubt
turn away from her, and she knew it wasn’t yet time for him to do that. There was
another reason for him to be here with her. They had…some place to go together. Some
place where it was cold and…bleak.

Her rendezvous with death.

And that was the final reason why she had not offered him his truth. Because he had
intrigued her with his challenge. With the possibilities of what he saw. He was so
sure. So sure that fate could be changed. That destiny was merely the sum of one’s
choices.

Sarah needed his certainty. She didn’t want to die. There were things she hadn’t done
yet, places she hadn’t seen, experiences that eluded her. She was not ready to leave
life, at least not willingly. But she had no hope of her own left, no certainty that
her path could be chosen by her.

All she saw was darkness.

If he was right—if there was even a small chance he was right—then Sarah needed his
help to attempt to change her destiny. She needed his certainty to keep her going,
his hope to replace the hope she had lost.

It was thoughts such as these that kept Sarah awake long into the night, but when
she heard Margo’s buoyant voice in the other room, thoughts of her own dim future
were cast aside.

Margo was home. In Richmond.

The last place on earth she needed to be today.

When Sarah came out of the bedroom to greet the other two, her first glance and tentative
smile at Tucker met a somewhat guarded response. She knew why, of course. Even a brief
glimpse into someone else’s soul left that soul feeling disturbingly naked.

Psychic eyes aren’t so fascinating when they’re aimed at
your
soul, are they, Tucker?