by Kay Hooper
“Because yesterday drained you, because you hardly got any rest last night, and because you’ve been up since before dawn,” Hollis answered frankly.
“I look like hell?”
“You look . . . tired.”
“Good. That’s the way they’re supposed to see me, remember? Tired. Unsure. Vulnerable.”
“Yeah, but it’s supposed to be a pretense. When you’re tired, there’s a danger your shields will weaken and leave you exposed to another psychic. In this case, a psychic we’re reasonably sure can, at the very least, steal or siphon off abilities from someone else—and possibly kill with his own.”
“Reasonably sure. But no evidence we’re right.”
“I wouldn’t bet your life on the sliver of uncertainty, Tessa.”
“No.” Tessa drew a breath, trying to contain the impatience she felt even as she acknowledged the strangeness of it. “No, of course not.”
“All I’m saying is that you have to be careful. Samuel has shown a lot of interest in bringing latents into his church, maybe because he’s figured out their brains produce more electromagnetic energy than nonpsychics and sees them as another potential energy source. But we don’t know how he deals with active psychics on the inside—unless we assume from what happened to Sarah.”
“Can we assume from that? She reported her belief that at least one of Samuel’s people is a powerful psychic, right?”
“Yes. But strongly shielded.”
“Even so, if Sarah picked up on it, Samuel must have.”
“My guess is, that person is a psychic Samuel controls. Someone he’s able to dominate. But he couldn’t dominate Sarah. She was on the inside, she was looking for information, and she was getting some of those kids out. And now she’s dead. I say it’s a safe assumption she posed a threat to Samuel, either because she was a psychic he couldn’t control or because he figured out she was working against him.”
“Hollis—”
“Either way, you’re at risk. Especially when you’re tired.”
Tessa heard the concern in the other woman’s voice and appreciated it. Nevertheless, she brushed it aside. She also pushed aside the guilty awareness that she probably should have told Hollis about the previous day’s nosebleed. Or should now.
She didn’t.
“That energy you saw a few hours ago, my aura with the connection to . . . something or someone else. Do you still see it?”
“Barely. It’s just a thread now. Why?”
“Let me guess. It looks taut, not loose like before. As though something is pulling at it.”
Hollis frowned. “That’s what you’re feeling?”
“So strongly I keep expecting to see a rope.”
“Tessa, that isn’t necessarily a good thing. In fact, it probably isn’t a good thing. This could be Samuel pulling you back there. Or doing his damnedest to.”
“I never even saw him yesterday.”
“You dreamed about him last night, with all the vivid detail of a true vision. And, besides, trust me when I say you don’t have to see him to be touched by him.”
That reminder gave Tessa pause, but after only a moment she shook her head. “You said it yourself. Whatever is going on out there, it’s getting worse. People are dying, Hollis. And all these extra senses of mine are telling me to get out there. Today. As soon as possible.”
Hollis eyed her thoughtfully. “You’re a lot more confident and certain than you were earlier this morning.”
That was true enough, and Tessa knew it. However . . . “I can’t explain it.”
“I really wish you could,” Hollis said.
“Look, one thing I’ve learned is to trust my instincts. Or intuition, or clairvoyance, or whatever it is that nudges me to do something when my rational mind tells me it’s a bad idea. That’s why I’m here, right? Because John and Bishop believe my abilities can help investigate this case?”
“Yeah. That’s why you’re here.”
“Okay, then. I have to go out to the Compound. Now.”
“You told Ruth it would be later today.”
“I’ll give her ten minutes’ head start, and then I’m going.”
Faced with that clear sense of urgency, Hollis stopped arguing, but she did offer a further word of warning.
“We know you’ll be under observation most of the time you’re there; if you do manage to do any exploring on your own, don’t forget that. Someone will be watching. Count on it.”
R
uby—
It was very early on Thursday morning, and Ruby had found her attention wandering from her lessons. That clear voice in her mind brought her head up with a jerk and made her go suddenly cold.
She dared not answer; the four friends had decided weeks ago that it was dangerous, that Father could probably hear them if they practiced the abilities that had bloomed in them since October.
Ruby had cheated a bit on that agreement, though not with her friends. She had cheated because she needed to protect Lexie—but that was her cheat, her risk. If Father discovered what she had done, she’d be the only one in trouble.
In trouble. That was almost funny. Because if Father found out what she’d done, what she was still doing, the “trouble” she’d be in would be very, very bad.
And there was a good chance he would find out. He could do so much; surely, Ruby thought, he could mind-talk too. And if he knew she and her friends could do it . . .
People able to do things with their minds had a habit of disappearing from the Compound. Or else they became . . .different.
Ruby didn’t want either of those things to happen to her or to any of her friends. And she knew they didn’t either, knew that none of them would have even tried to reach out to her unless something was wrong. Very wrong.
She tried to be patient, and as soon as her mother became occupied—as usual—with her latest embroidery project, Ruby slipped from the house, driven by an overwhelming urge to go to whichever of her friends was in trouble.
But who was it? There had been no sense of identity, and the communication had ended so abruptly that she felt only the faintest idea even of the direction she should go.
She knew her friends were supposed to be at their lessons and were unlikely to be out openly roaming the Compound at this time of morning, and she knew her own roaming, if noticed by just about any of the adults, would likely end with her being escorted back home—which was one reason she dared not approach any of the houses in broad daylight.
She also knew better than to approach the church; she had watched and listened, and nobody had to explain to her that cameras just about everywhere made sure that Mr. DeMarco or one of the other men knew when anybody got close to the church.
Besides, that wasn’t where she needed to be.
She followed whatever it was urging her on, and when she realized that she was nearing the barn in the west pasture, her heart sank. This was the side of the Compound nearest to the road to town, the shortest way out of the Compound.
Escape.
“Brooke, no,” she whispered, her steps quickening. All she could think was that her friend had gotten this far in her escape plan and then panicked, maybe remembering that there was a fence and more cameras between here and freedom.
But something—instinct or her five senses or one of the extra ones—warned Ruby not to just go into the barn as she usually would. Instead, she worked her way around to the back, where a split plank provided a narrow, secret view into the barn. At first, Ruby wasn’t quite sure what was going on in there. She saw Brooke—just standing there, a few yards from Ruby’s position, in the wide hall between rows of now-unoccupied stalls.
It took a moment for Ruby to make out that Brooke was shaking visibly.
It took another instant to see why.
Father.
Ruby caught her breath and instinctively put extra effort into making sure her shell was hard and thick, imagining herself encased in something unbreakable. So he wouldn’t know she
was there.
Then she realized there was an awful lot of strange in the barn. For one thing, she couldn’t ever remember seeing Father alone, not outside the church. And for another thing . . .
He was shimmering oddly.
And his feet weren’t touching the ground.
“Answer me, Brooke.” His voice was quiet, even gentle, but something about it made the hair on the back of Ruby’s neck stand straight out.
“Why would you want to leave us? Why would you want to leave me?”
“I . . . I wasn’t.” Her voice was small and broken.
He pointed silently to the ground beside her, where her bulging backpack lay.
“I . . . I . . . My aunt. I just wanted to go visit my aunt. That’s all. That’s all, Father.”
“I don’t believe you, child.”
“I . . . I swear, Father. I swear I just wanted to see my aunt.” “I wish I could believe you.”
His voice was sorrowful now, but there was something strange happening to his face. Something that made Ruby press her fists against her mouth to keep herself silent when everything inside her wanted to scream.
For the first time, she could see his true face.
The face his soul wore.
And it was something so black and hungry that Ruby had the terrifying notion it could swallow the whole world with room left over for even more.
“I would have much preferred to wait until God allowed your talents to fully blossom,” Father was saying sadly. “Until you were ripe and ready for His holy work. But you’ve made that impossible now.”
“Father, please—I’ll be good. I promise I’ll be good. I won’t even try to leave, honest, and I won’t say anything to anybody, I won’t tell my parents or my friends, or anybody—”
Her words were tumbling over one another in her frightened haste to get them all out, and her legs were so wobbly it was a wonder she was still able to stand on them. She probably would have promised anything in that moment, anything at all.
But it was no use. Ruby could see that, and she bit down on her fist without even feeling it as the scream clawed its way up out of her soul and writhed around inside her, desperate to escape.
“I’m so sorry, child,” Father said.
Brooke must have known what was going to happen, or perhaps she felt the first jolts of pain, because she opened her mouth to scream.
The sound was no more than a gurgle, a choked cry of terror and agony. As Father raised his hands, Brooke was lifted nearly a foot off the ground and hung there, her body jerking as though some invisible giant shook her angrily.
Father’s head tipped back, his mouth opened slightly—
And Ruby could see the power leaving Brooke, being sucked out of her, coming out of her eyes and going into him in crackling white-hot threads, like lightning, sparking and sizzling.
But he wasn’t burned.
He wasn’t burned.
When Ruby saw Brooke begin to smolder, she turned away from the split plank and pressed her back against the other rough boards of the barn, too terrified to even try to run away. Her fist was still pressed to her mouth, and she could taste blood but still felt no pain.
All she felt was horror.
She listened to the awful crackling and sizzling sounds for what seemed like hours but was probably no more than a minute or two. Then, abruptly, there was silence.
Ruby counted to thirty, then forced herself to look into the barn again.
Father was gone.
Brooke was gone.
There was nothing to mark what had happened inside the barn except a scorched place where Brooke had stood.
——
Sawyer had no reason except obstinacy to return to the Compound late on Thursday morning, and when he called ahead he was more than a little surprised that DeMarco didn’t offer an objection to the visit.
Maybe it amuses him to watch you fumble around and come up empty every time.
But when DeMarco met him at the Square as always, he was, if anything, more than usually stone-faced and seemed just the slightest bit distracted.
“What can I do for you today, Chief?”
“You can let me look around. Alone.” Sawyer had made virtually the same request every time and fully expected the same polite refusal.
DeMarco looked at him for an unblinking moment. Then he said dryly, “It seems to be the day for it. Reverend Samuel is meditating, and most of the children are at their lessons. The residential floors of the church are, of course, private, as are the cottages; I would ask that you respect those limitations.”
Too startled to hide it, Sawyer said, “No problem.”
“Fine. Then look around to your heart’s content, Chief.” DeMarco half-turned away, then paused to add even more dryly, “Say hello to Mrs. Gray for me.”
“She’s here?” There were several cars parked around the Square; he hadn’t noticed hers.
“Like you, she wanted to . . . wander around. Get a feeling for the place. Ruth didn’t see the harm.”
And you were too late to stop her without being obvious about it?
“I don’t suppose you’d know where Mrs. Gray is now?” Sawyer fully supposed he did.
DeMarco almost smiled. “I actually don’t, Chief. Though Ruth did say she believed Mrs. Gray wanted to see what we call the ‘natural church,’ where Reverend Samuel preaches when the weather is . . . just right. It’s up on the hill behind the Compound. Follow the path through the old pasture. You’ll have no trouble recognizing the place.”
“Thank you,” Sawyer said warily.
“You don’t play poker, do you, Chief.” It wasn’t a question.
With deliberation, Sawyer replied, “No. Chess is my game.”
“You’ll have to give me a match sometime. Enjoy your wanderings. I’ll be in my office.”
Sawyer gazed after the other man until DeMarco disappeared into the church, then set off on a direct path past the church and toward the pasture that lay behind the cottages on the north side of the Compound.
He was under no illusions; escort or no escort, neither he nor Tessa Gray would be unobserved anywhere within the Compound.
He wondered if she knew that.
It took him no more than five minutes to reach the pasture gate, closed despite the lack of stock. Since he’d been raised in a rural area where livestock was plentiful, Sawyer passed through but left the gate as he’d found it, securely fastened.
The path up the hill was faint but visible, and he followed it, forcing himself to stroll rather than walk briskly, to pause and look around, not quite idly. At least twice he paused to look back down the hill, studying the layout of the Compound.
It would be expected.
Not that there was anything unusual to see, at least as far as he could tell. The Compound was quiet, peaceful. No kids in the playground, but it was not yet lunchtime and they would be, as DeMarco had said, inside their homes at their lessons.
He had wondered briefly why the church didn’t just build its own school as part of the Compound but had decided it was a simple matter of wanting to avoid the red tape and regulations that even a private school had to contend with. Better to have the children of the church home-schooled by a parent; as long as the children passed the necessary state-mandated periodic tests, no one was going to interfere in the matter.
“Bad day?”
He hadn’t realized he was scowling. Even more, he hadn’t realized until she spoke that he had reached the “natural church” just barely over the top of the hill.
It resembled a natural amphitheater, with a wide, solid granite ledge just to his right that would no doubt make an excellent stage—or pulpit. On the gentle downward slope below, curving terraces looked to Sawyer as though they’d been cut into the hillside, artificially set with scattered, mostly chair-sized boulders supplemented by numerous rustic benches.
Natural church my ass.
Unlike a true amphitheater, the shape was inverted, so that
rather than gazing downward, all his followers would have to look up at Samuel while he preached.
Wonder if he does the loaves-and-fishes bit. And where the hell is the microphone?
“Chief?”
She was sitting on one of the larger boulders on the third terrace down. Casual in jeans and a sweater, her cheeks a bit rosy from the morning chill and big gray eyes solemn, she looked even more fragile than he remembered. The sight of her made something inside his chest tighten.
Don’t be an idiot. She’s your dead childhood friend’s widow—and a recent widow at that.
“Bad week,” Sawyer replied finally. He made his way down to her but hesitated rather than join her on the wide boulder. “I imagine services here would be impressive,” he said.
“Probably. And I imagine it cost them a pretty penny to make all this look so . . . natural. Rather than man-made.” Her voice was quiet, thoughtful.
He was a little surprised, but pleasantly so.
So they haven’t quite got their hooks into her yet. At least not completely.
Still, he kept his tone if not his words neutral when he said, “Keep the audience entertained and they’ll be back.”
Tessa smiled faintly. “I was just thinking something along those lines. Have a seat, Chief.”
“Sawyer.”
“Have a seat, Sawyer. Please.”
He joined her on the cold and not-very-comfortable boulder, turning just a bit so he could look at her as they talked. The slight breeze brought him a very pleasant herbal scent that he realized must have been her. Her hair, he guessed. He wanted to lean toward her, and fought the urge. “I was surprised when DeMarco said you were up here.”
“Did he tell you?” She frowned briefly. “I suppose Ruth had to report to him. They all seem to, don’t they?”
“He does run things for Reverend Samuel,” Sawyer replied, still cautiously feeling his way with her. “Security, at least.”
Tessa nodded. “She didn’t exactly say so, but I think Ruth was reluctant to let me explore on my own. Without his permission, I mean.”
“Yeah, well. I got his permission. Which is unusual.”
She turned her head and regarded him, those big eyes still solemn. “Maybe he wants to put your suspicions to rest. Let you wander around on your own, and if—when—you don’t find anything, you’d have no reason to come back here.”