The First Prophet

by Kay Hooper

  Then, abruptly, with the suddenness of a soap bubble, the fog vanished from his brain, and he realized why the gun wasn’t here.

  Because it was upstairs in their room.

  He remembered. He remembered looking right at it when he’d gone back into the sitting room. It was on the desk, beside his laptop. Where he had placed it, as soon as they had settled into the room, so it would be within easy reach while he worked at the computer and Sarah slept. Where he had left it hours ago.

  Where it had always been.

  He knew then. Knew in a terrible moment of absolute clarity what they had done to him. He had underestimated them, badly underestimated them. Because they had used the one tool he had never expected them to use, the one tool he hadn’t even imagined they could use.

  His own mind.

  They’d crawled inside his head. They hadn’t been able to get inside Sarah’s, so they had turned to him. Somehow, they had crawled inside his head and made him think the gun was here, made him believe he had to come down here and get it, leaving Sarah alone upstairs…

  “Sarah. Oh, Jesus, Sarah—”

  He never heard them behind him. He only had time to realize that, once again, he had failed the woman he loved. He felt the agony of that even before the shock of the blow, the blinding pain in his head. And then nothing.

  “Tucker?”

  Sarah found herself sitting up in bed, the sheet clutched to her breasts and her own voice loud in her ears. There had been a dream, a warmly reassuring dream of Tucker fretting about protecting her. Then he had seemed to fade away for a long time, until a sudden burst of agony shot through her head, a terrible pain that was in his head and his heart and his voice.

  “Sarah. Oh, Jesus, Sarah—”

  And now…nothing.

  Terror and panic were ice water in her veins, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think about anything but him. Desperately, she reached out, closing her eyes and concentrating as hard as she could, harder than she ever had before, as she tried to find Tucker.

  Instantly, a cacophony beat inside her mind like the wings of a hundred birds, the chatter of a hundred voices, and she heard her own voice cry out in surprise and fear even as her eyes shot open and she instinctively slammed shut what her desperation to find Tucker had wrenched open.

  It took her several moments to calm down, and longer to realize what had happened. She had reached out wildly and without any kind of focus, and what had rushed into her open mind had been the mental voices and dreams of all the people around her.

  Sarah shivered, afraid to try again—and more afraid not to. The sensation of all those thoughts and dreams and nightmares was the closest she ever wanted to get to actual chaos, the most unsettling thing she had ever experienced, and she did not want to experience it again, so this time she focused her mind as narrowly as she could before opening herself up.

  Tucker. Just Tucker, he was the only one she wanted to find, the only one she wanted to hear.

  At first, there was nothing. Silence. Darkness. She reached further out warily, like feeling her way through an unfamiliar room without lights, probing the darkness. And finally, dimly, on the very edge of her awareness, was a sense of Tucker’s presence. No thoughts, no inner voice telling her where he was and what had happened to him, just his quiet presence. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t bring him any closer, couldn’t see him clearly, but at least he was there.

  That certainty that he was still alive quieted some of the panic racing through her. Not much of it, but some. She slid out of bed, dragging the top sheet with her instead of pausing to find something to put on, and wrapped it around her. She went into the sitting room and stood looking slowly around. All her senses flared, but carefully now, reaching out warily.

  It was one of the still-strange, new senses that sent her to the desk where the laptop lay open. She glanced once at the pistol lying in its holster beside it, but her attention was on the computer’s screen. The machine had been off earlier, she remembered, so obviously Tucker had gotten up sometime in the last hour or so and decided to do some work. The open program on the screen, she saw, appeared to be sifting through information already acquired, so apparently he had judged it too dangerous to leave his computer tethered in any way to the Internet when he was not present to monitor it. He was being as cautious as possible in how he went about gathering more information.

  So why had he left so abruptly and without a word to her? She couldn’t believe he could have been taken from this room without her awareness, so he must have left on his own. But to go where? And why?

  She frowned down at the laptop. As she watched, the program running appeared to pause, and then the screen went dark. No working program visible, no screen saver. Just a black screen.

  And then, slowly, words began to appear, brilliantly white against the darkness.

  If you want him,

  Come get him.

  Sarah sank down in the desk chair and stared at the screen until the words burned themselves into her brain.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  The first psychic on the list was one of them; this time, Sarah knew it even without getting out of the Jeep. The second psychic was not one of them, but she was also not a genuine psychic—though it took Sarah a good ten minutes of intense concentration to be sure of that.

  Fifteen minutes later, she pulled the Jeep into the driveway of a small, neat house set back from the road among tall trees. She kept the vehicle in gear and the engine running as she stared at the house and tilted her head to one side to listen intently.

  Hello, Sarah.

  She caught her breath, and her hand on the gearshift tightened. Friend or foe? This time, she couldn’t tell. But a genuine psychic, definitely, and there was something hauntingly familiar about that voice…

  I can help you, Sarah.

  She was trying very hard to keep her own mind quiet and still and closed, unwilling to give anything away when she was unsure who was trying to get inside her head. Except that this voice wasn’t probing or pushing or trying to break through her guards. It was just there, gentle and calm.

  And it had been there before.

  Please, Sarah. Come in.

  She hesitated but finally put the Jeep in park and turned off the engine. This could be the biggest mistake she’d made yet, but she wasn’t willing to run away without trying to find out who the placid, compassionate inner voice belonged to.

  She was aware of no particular sense of danger as she went up the walkway to the front door. Wind chimes hung beside it, tinkling softly in the slight breeze, and hanging baskets and pots of flowers decorated the porch—an awful lot of flowers for the end of September, Sarah thought.

  Before she could knock on the door, it swung open. A woman stood there smiling at her. She was about Sarah’s height or a little less, very slender, with delicate bone structure and long black hair, and looked about sixteen years old. Except in her eyes. They were dark and fathoms deep and old as time.

  “Hello, Sarah. I’m Leigh.”

  Sarah drew a breath. “You’ve been…trying to talk to me for a long time now.”

  “Yes. I have.”

  Leigh Munroe led the way into a comfortable living room filled with overstuffed furniture and glowing lamps, where a fire burned and hot coffee waited, and this time Sarah didn’t hesitate to accept a cup. The need to find Tucker was clawing at her, but she forced herself to be patient. She had to do this first.

  Her sense of the other woman was mostly positive—but oddly…incomplete. She knew she was in the presence of power, yet the power was muted and controlled and curiously distant. There was no strong impression of a personality as she felt with Tucker, of emotions and thoughts shifting like quicksilver beneath the surface; there was just a peaceful surface and what seemed to be utter calm underneath. There was goodness, but also the feeling of something dark lurking, and it made Sarah wary.

  “You haven’t eaten anything today,” Leigh
said gently, pushing a small plate of cheese and crackers across the coffee table to her guest. “You have to eat, Sarah. The more you use your abilities, the more energy you’ll need.”

  Vaguely, Sarah wondered whether that was why her abilities had gotten so much stronger in the last week, because Tucker had made sure she’d eaten on a regular basis; before that, she had been very prone to skipping meals.

  “He took care of you by instinct,” Leigh agreed, her tone casual as though part of the conversation had not happened silently. “That’s rare, you know. He values what you can do, even if he’s still adjusting to it. He’ll never ask you to be less than you are. And—he’s a bit psychic himself, though he isn’t aware of it. You couldn’t have chosen a better champion.”

  Champion. An old word, used the way Leigh used it, but Sarah knew it fit. She ate a cracker absently and said aloud, “I didn’t choose him. I just…accepted him when he came.”

  Leigh smiled. “Is that what you did?”

  “It’s what I thought I did. I thought I was just…following the path I had to follow.”

  “But that was your choice, wasn’t it? To follow the path?”

  “I suppose. Except…I always had the feeling that even if I tried to do just the opposite, I’d still end up on the path somehow.”

  “You might have. Fate has a way of being insistent about some things, no matter what we do. In any case, you haven’t followed blindly, Sarah. You’ve struggled and questioned. That’s important. We do control our own destinies, you know. In the end. Often imperfectly, but our lives and our fates are what we make of them.”

  Sarah frowned. “Then what I saw, my vision…”

  “Was a possible future. But not the only one.”

  “Someone told me that there was a difference between prediction and prophecy. That one might come true—but the other always does.”

  “An arguable point, I suppose. But it’s been my experience that the future is a series of infinite possibilities. Each step we take toward it, each choice and decision, alters the possibilities. This journey is important for you. We all have at least one in our lives, a path that leads us to a crossroads where we have to make the decisions that will determine our future. It’s a path you have to follow.”

  Sarah felt a stab of uneasiness. The other woman was smiling, but there was still that darkness lurking and this talk of destiny…“But you said we controlled our destinies.”

  Leigh laughed softly. “Sarah, hasn’t it occurred to you that what you foresaw was your future as you decided it would be?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Think about it. You saw a series of images, of symbols. You saw a journey culminating in—what?”

  “Death. My death.”

  Leigh didn’t seem surprised. “It’s quite likely that was purely symbolic. In visions, the death of the seer often represents a sudden and drastic change in one’s life. A crossroads where a choice must be made. The end of a way of life, of a way of thinking.”

  That didn’t reassure Sarah terribly since she had some idea of what would happen if the other side got their hands on her.

  The end of a way of life, indeed.

  “All right. But you said—it was my future as I decided it would be?”

  “Sarah, even the best and strongest of psychics must see through intensely subjective eyes. You might be objective when seeing someone else’s future but never when it’s your own. You know yourself, know your thoughts and wishes and hopes and dreams, and everything you see is filtered through that knowledge even if only subconsciously. So when your mind leaps through time to peek at the future, it’s with the total awareness of your own nature.”

  “I still don’t…”

  “All right. Think about Tucker. Do you really believe that you accepted him and his help because destiny insisted you should? Or had your mind looked ahead, seen him, known how it was in your nature to respond to him—and offered you a future possibility in which you did just that?”

  Sarah thought about that for a long time, turning it over in her mind. She was hardly aware of Leigh’s steady gaze, or of absently eating two more crackers and finishing her coffee.

  Finally, she said slowly, “That’s…a lot more complex than I thought it was. And confusing. How can I trust any of what I see if it’s all so subjective? What’s the good of being able to see the future if there are so many possible interpretations of what I see?”

  Leigh smiled faintly. “Did you really think this was a good thing?”

  Sarah gazed into those old, old eyes and slowly shook her head. “No. No, I didn’t.”

  “It’s neither good nor bad,” Leigh told her. “It’s just another sense, like sight or hearing; your eyes and your ears can be fooled. So can this. You can mistake what you see or hear; you can mistake what this sense tells you as well. You can strain your eyes in bad light or too much light, or hurt your ears listening to loud noises; you can injure this sense too.”

  “How?”

  “By overworking it. By misusing it. By not allowing it the time and quiet to develop properly.”

  Sarah heard a warning and shook her head. “I don’t have time. You know that.”

  “You have to find Tucker.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s alive,” Leigh said.

  “Yes. But they have him.” It was the first time that the other side had been mentioned, and Sarah watched Leigh intently to judge her reaction.

  She wasn’t sure what that reaction was. Those old eyes met hers squarely, but the quiet that lay behind them gave nothing away.

  “They, Sarah?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know who I’m talking about.”

  “All right. I won’t. And I won’t pretend that I believe you can confront them on your own. That won’t get Tucker away from them. They’ll just kill him and take you.”

  Sarah drew a breath. “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you?” Tentatively, Sarah tried to reach in past those quiet dark eyes.

  Without a word aloud, Leigh let her in.

  The pain was nearest the surface and came first, the awful, tearing pain of friends and loved ones lost, of tragedy and failure. It was dark and vast, an emptiness that ached and would never be filled. Then the emotional struggle of being different, the sense of isolation, the shame and loneliness. The battle for understanding, for control. For acceptance.

  The years were there, many more years than Sarah had imagined, and they were filled with conflict and secrets and commitment. People coming here briefly with desperate faces and frightened eyes, and then passing on out of her hands. Other people coming here and talking with quiet courage and utter dedication. Plans discussed, arrangements made. Clandestine lines of communication formed and broken and altered.

  And finally, deep, deep inside, there were the shadows, lurking like the worst nightmare her mind could conjure. They loomed and flitted and filled all the dark corners. They brought terror with them and left destruction as they passed, and they were many, so many…

  Slowly, Sarah opened her eyes. She felt utterly exhausted with the effort of looking inside Leigh’s mind and with the trauma of what she had found there. “My God.”

  “That’s all we see,” Leigh said. “Shadows. Even the strongest psychics we know have been unable to learn anything about them, not who they are, or where they’re based, or what’s behind their actions. We don’t know how they’re able to block us, but somehow they can—possibly by using the psychics they’ve already taken. But we can sense that shadowy part of them, and sometimes it helps us identify them; if you come into physical contact with one, you’ll see or sense the shadows. But as you’ve already found out, they also use tools, other psychics and ordinary people, and those are not so easy to identify.

  “And touching them is usually not a very good idea.” Leigh’s smile was twisted. “By that point, it tends to be too late to escape them.”

  Sara
h drew a deep breath. She understood, now, where the darkness inside Leigh Munroe came from. “You keep saying ‘we.’ Who are you talking about?”

  “You aren’t alone, Sarah. We aren’t alone. There are people, psychics and nonpsychics, who are trying very hard to find a way to fight and defeat the other side.” She shook her head slightly, and her voice gentled. “We’ll talk about that. But right now, you need to rest.”

  “I can’t rest. Tucker—”

  “Sarah, you can’t help Tucker if you’re exhausted. You need to sleep, for a few hours at least, and then you need to eat. Then we’ll talk about what to do.”

  Bitterly, Sarah said, “I obviously can’t do very much at all if two minutes of effort costs me this much.” She was almost swaying with weariness.

  “Those two minutes were rather remarkable, if you only knew.” Leigh came over to take her arm and urge her gently to her feet. “Come on. I have a very comfortable bed upstairs.”

  Sarah didn’t want to go to sleep. She needed to find Tucker. But just getting to her feet, even with Leigh’s help, was almost more than she could manage, and the stairs left her weak and shaking.

  She was asleep even before Leigh could cover her with a blanket.

  Leigh stood gazing down at her sleeping guest for a long moment, then went slowly downstairs, frowning. She gathered the tray from the living room and took it to the kitchen. A glance at the clock made her frown deepen, and she reached for the phone on the breakfast bar. The number she punched in was a familiar one.

  “Hello.”

  “It’s Leigh. She’s here.”

  “At last. Were we right?”

  “She looked into my mind as if through an open door, all the way to the center. And she has no idea what she did. She may well be the one we’ve been waiting for.”

  “Good. I’ll send them immediately.”

  “Tell them to hurry. She won’t sleep long.”

  The first thing Tucker was aware of was a pounding headache. Next came the thought that someone had filled his mouth and ears with cotton. He was awake yet couldn’t seem to get his eyes open or hear anything at all, even his own breathing. He thought he was lying on his side on something marginally softer than the floor, and he had the sense of a lot of space around him.