by L. J. Smith
She could feel astonishment and joy from Anna and Lewis, too.
And I never believed them about kundalini rising, Lewis said. Jeeeez, was I wrong.
About what? Anna asked, laughing in her mind.
Kundalini-old Chinese health concept. Relating to chi, you know. Remind me to tell you about it sometime.
Anna, still laughing, said, I will.
When they were all feeling ready to ride tigers and fight elephants bare-handed, Rob lifted his hands.
"That's enough," he said, and then added gently, "We really shouldn't stay here. I think Anna was right, and that Joyce and Mr. Zetes are alive. We need to keep moving."
"But where?" Kaitlyn said. She could stand, she found; she could even move easily.
Gabriel was on his feet, too. "Well, out of San Francisco for a start," he said, wiping his face with his dew-wet shirt. Even in the simple act of standing up he had pulled away from them all a little, mentally.
It's only to be expected, Kaitlyn told herself. Don't be disappointed. He needs his space.
"Well, of course, out of San Francisco. But then- where? Home?"
Even as she said it, she knew she couldn't go. If Mr. Zetes and Joyce survived, they would come after her. Kaitlyn knew about them now-Kaitlyn was a danger in the way that Marisol had been a danger.
They'd want to have Kaitlyn ... quieted.
And as much as Kaitlyn adored her father, she knew him very well. He was loving, impractical-vague.
Happiest in his own small world, singing and doing odd jobs. What protection could he offer her? He wouldn't even be able to understand her story, much less help her deal with it.
In fact, she'd probably be putting him in danger by going home. Nothing would be easier than for Joyce and Mr. Zetes to find her there. And once they found her, she'd be dead-along with anyone else who had heard her story.
Kaitlyn didn't have the least doubt that Mr. Zetes had ways to get people killed. He had contacts. He had clients. He would find a way.
Looking around at the others, she could see them reaching the same conclusion about their own families.
She could feel their dawning bewilderment.
"But then . . . where do we go?" Lewis said, in a croaking whisper.
"We have to do something to stop them. Not just Mr. Zetes and Joyce, but whoever else is involved.
There must be others-like that judge. We have to find a way to stop them all."
Kaitlyn felt her breath snatched away. She looked at Rob. Yes, she loved him, but really ... really, she'd just been thinking about how to keep herself and her friends safe. That was going to be hard enough.
"If we don't stop them," Rob said, turning and looking directly at her, "then they'll do it again. They'll try again, with some other group of kids."
Rob was counting on her. Trusting her. And of course, he was right.
"It's true," Kaitlyn said quietly. "We can't let that happen."
"I agree," Anna chimed in softly.
There was a pause, and then Lewis said, "Oh, jeez . . . Count me in."
They all looked at Gabriel.
"I don't even have a home," he said mockingly. "All I know is that I'm not going back into a lockup cell."
"Then come, with us," Rob said.
"You don't even know where you're going."
Kaitlyn said, "I might."
Everyone looked quickly at her.
"It's just an idea," she said. "I don't even know exactly why it's come into my head . . . but do you remember that dream, the one we were all in together?"
There were nods.
"Well, what if... what if the place in the dream was a real place? When I think about it, I get this sort of feeling that it might be. Does anybody else?"
Everyone looked doubtful, except Anna, who looked thoughtful.
"You know," she said, "I had the same feeling while I was there-in the dream, I mean. That beach felt real. It was a lot like the beaches where I live, up North. It felt almost. . . familiar. And that white house-"
"Wait," Kaitlyn said. "The house. The white house." Her brain was whirring again. She'd seen a white house somewhere else. In her mind this afternoon-could it only be this afternoon?-when Joyce had tested her with the shard of crystal.
She'd never drawn that picture-it had disappeared in a flash. But now she suddenly felt she might be able to reach it again.
Don't think-draw. Draw with your mind. Let your mind go.
Whether it was the recent contact with the great crystal, or simply desperation, she'd never know. But her mind began to draw, sketching with easy, fluid strokes. Vigorous clean strokes. She didn't even have to think about what colors to use. They simply appeared before her, shimmering, in a picture that was completed in a few heartbeats.
A white house, yes. With red roses growing at the door. A lonely house, but an eerily beautiful one. And a face in the window-a caramel-colored face, with slanting eyes and softly curling brown hair.
The man who'd attacked her-but had he attacked her? He'd grabbed her and tried to talk with her when she was waiting to meet Joyce. He'd grabbed her in the backyard of the Institute-and she'd hit him. And then he'd called her reckless and told her she never thought.
She was thinking now. Whoever he was, he had been in the house in her dream. And he had showed her a picture of a rose garden, with a crystal in the fountain.
She hadn't recognized it as a crystal then. But when she'd seen the big crystal, that monstrosity that Mr.
Zetes had owned, she'd almost remembered.
The crystal in the rose garden hadn't looked ... perverted. It had been clean and clear, with no obscene growths sprouting out. It had looked . .. pure.
So what did it all add up to? Kaitlyn didn't know, but she took a deep breath and tried to explain it to the others.
When she was done, there was a silence.
"So we're following our dreams," Gabriel said with mock sentimentality, his lip still slightly curled.
The words pleased Kait somehow. "Yes," she said, and smiled at him. "And we'll see where they take us."
"Wherever it is, we're going together," Rob said.
Kaitlyn looked at him. She was cold and battered and she knew that the danger was just beginning. And they had no clear idea of which way to travel and even less idea of how to travel.
But somehow it didn't matter. They were all alive, and all together. And when she looked into Rob's golden eyes, she knew that it was going to be all right.
THE POSSESSED
For Rosemary Schmitt,
with thanks for all her good wishes
and support
CHAPTER 1
"Hurry!" Kaitlyn gasped as she reached the top of the staircase. And she added with her mind, in case it might make more of an impression that way: Hurry.
From four different directions she felt acknowledgment, and an urgency just as strong as her own. Felt it with a sense that wasn't one of the ordinary five, but that was like seeing music or tasting color.
Telepathy was strange.
But sometimes comforting. Right now Kait was grateful for Rob's presence in her mind. It burned with a strong golden glow that warmed and steadied her. She could sense him in the next room, working fast but without panic, flipping through drawers and stuffing jeans and socks into a canvas bag.
They were leaving the Institute.
Not exactly the way they'd intended to, when they'd come to be part of a year-long psychic research project. Kaitlyn had expected to leave the Zetes Institute next spring with a band playing, a college scholarship under her arm, and her father looking on proudly. Instead, she was scrambling in the middle of the night to get her belongings together and get out before Mr. Zetes caught up with them.
Mr. Zetes, the head of the Institute, the one who wanted to turn them into psychic weapons and sell them to the highest bidder.
Only maybe now he just wanted them dead. Because they'd found out what he was up to and fought back and beaten him. Im
possible as that might sound, with all Mr. Z's power, they'd won. They'd left him knocked out cold in the secret rooms of his San Francisco mansion.
When he woke up he was going to be mad enough to kill.
"What are you taking?" Anna asked, and her usually calm voice had a hurried sound.
"I don't know. Clothes—warm clothes, I guess. We don't know where we'll be sleeping at night." Kait repeated the last thought mentally, so Rob and Lewis and Gabriel could hear. Warm clothes, everybody!
A mental voice answered her, sharp as a knife and cool as midnight. And money, it said. Take all the money you can get your hands on.
"Always practical, Gabriel," Kaitlyn murmured and stuffed her purse into a duffel bag, recklessly piling jeans and sweaters and underwear on top of it. She took her lucky hundred dollar bill out of a jewelry box on the dresser and jammed it in her pocket.
"What else?" she said aloud. She found herself grabbing crazy things: a velvet cap with gold embroidery, a necklace that had been her mother's, the paperback mystery she'd been reading. Finally she jammed in her smallest sketchbook and the plastic box that held her oil pastels and colored pencils. She couldn't leave without her art kit—she'd rather go naked.
And her drawings weren't just recreation; they were far more important than that. They were how she told the future.
Hurry, quick, she thought.
Anna was hesitating, looking at a carved wooden mask on the wall. It was Raven, the totem of Anna's family, and it was much too big to take with them.
"Anna…"
"I know." Anna touched the blunt beak of the mask once with graceful fingers, then turned from it. She smiled at Kaitlyn, her dark eyes serene over high cheekbones. "Let's go."
"Wait—soap." Kait dashed into the bathroom and snagged a bar of Ivory, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Nothing like as serene as Anna—her long red hair was in elflocks, her cheeks were flushed, and the strange blue rings in her eyes were burning smokily. She looked like a feverish witch.
"Okay," Rob said as they all met in the hall. "Everybody ready?"
Kaitlyn looked at them, at the four people who'd become closer to her than she would have imagined any people could be.
Rob Kessler, all warmth and color, gold-blond hair and golden eyes. Gabriel Wolfe, arrogant and handsome, like a drawing done in black and white. Anna Eva Whiteraven, her expression gentle even under pressure. Lewis Chao with his almond-shaped eyes glittering with anxiety, slapping a baseball cap onto smooth black hair.
Thanks to Gabriel's power going out of control, they were linked by a telepathic web. None of them would ever be alone again—unless they could find a way to break the link.
"I want to get something from downstairs," Gabriel was saying.
"Me, too," Rob said, "and I need Lewis to help. All right, let's get moving. You all right, Kait?"
"Just breathless," Kaitlyn said. Her heart was pounding, and there was a shakiness in every limb that made her not want to stand still.
Rob reached to take her duffel bag with the ruthless courtesy of his North Carolina lineage. For just an instant their hands touched; his strong fingers wrapped around hers.
It'll be all right, he told her in a swift private communication meant for no one else.
The feeling that flooded Kaitlyn was almost painful. For God's sake, not now, she thought and ignored the sparks that swarmed where he'd touched her skin.
"Be careful, you—healer," she said and started down the stairs.
Lewis kept glancing over his shoulder. "My computer," he mourned softly. "My stereo, my TV set…"
"Why don't you go back and get them?" Gabriel asked nastily. "What could be more inconspicuous?"
"Keep moving, "Rob ordered. At the bottom of the stairs he said, "Lewis, come with me."
Kait followed them. "What are you doing?"
"Getting the files," Rob said grimly. "Okay, Lewis, open that panel."
Of course, Kaitlyn thought. Mr. Zetes's files, the ones he kept in the hidden room here under the stairway. They were full of all kinds of information, most of it cryptic, some of it undoubtedly incriminating.
"But what can we do with them? Who can we show them to?"
"I don't know," Rob said. "But I want them anyway. They prove what he's been up to."
Lewis was running sensitive fingertips over the dark paneling on the wall. Kaitlyn could feel what he was doing, trying to locate the spring release with his mind. "It's not easy to perform on demand like this," he muttered, but then there was a click and the panel slid back.
"Mind over matter," Rob said, grinning.
Hurry, Kaitlyn told him sharply.
She didn't wait to see him start down into the dimly lit hallway behind the door. She took her duffel bag into the front laboratory where Anna was opening a wire cage.
"Go on," she was saying. "Go on, Georgie Mouse, go on, Sally Mouse…" She knelt to hold the cage by the open side door.
"You're letting them out?"
"I'm sending them away, telling them to find a field. I don't know what Mr. Z will do to them," Anna said. "I don't even trust Joyce anymore." Joyce Piper was the parapsychologist who actually ran the Institute for Mr. Zetes, the one who'd recruited Kaitlyn. Even now, Kaitlyn couldn't think about her without feeling a twinge of betrayal.
"Okay, but hurry. We don't have time to waste," she said and moved restlessly back into the hallway.
Lewis was tugging at his baseball cap nervously.
Gabriel, in the small bedroom beyond, was going through Joyce's purse.
Gabriel! Kait said. She could feel her shock reverberating in the telepathic web, and she tried to muffle it.
He merely slanted her an ironic glance. "We need money."
"But you can't—"
"Why not?" he said. His gray eyes were so dark they looked almost black.
"Because it isn't… it's not…" Kaitlyn could feel herself sagging. "It's wrong," she said finally.
Gabriel didn't admit to concepts like "wrong."
"Joyce is our enemy," he said shortly. "If it wasn't for her, we wouldn't be running away in the middle of the night in the first place. It's necessary—and you know it, don't you, Kait?"
It was dangerous to look into Gabriel's eyes for more than an instant. Kaitlyn turned away without answering, then turned back to hiss, "All right, but don't take any credit cards. They can trace those. And don't let Rob know, or he'll go ballistic. And hurry."
That one word had begun to pound relentlessly in her brain: hurry, hurry, hurry. Faster than a heartbeat.
She had a feeling—no, a certainty—that every second they stayed here was too long.
A premonition? But she didn't have that kind of premonition. It was only by drawing that she could get an image of the future.
Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.
Trust yourself, she thought suddenly. Go with your feelings.
"Gabriel," she said abruptly, "we've got to leave now." She added in an urgent mental shout, Lewis, Rob, Anna— we have to leave! Right now, this second! Something's going to happen— I don't know what, but we've got to get out of here—
"Take it easy." She felt Gabriel's hand on her arm and only then realized how agitated she was. As soon as she'd spoken her feelings out loud, she'd realized how strong they were, how urgent.
"I'm all right, but Gabriel, we've got to go…"
He looked into her eyes briefly and nodded. "If you feel like that—come on."
In the hallway Rob was hurrying out of the open panel with an armful of file folders. Anna was emerging from the lab.
"What's wrong? Is someone coming?" Rob asked.
"I don't know, I just know we have to hurry—"
"We'll take Joyce's car," Gabriel said.
Rob hesitated, then nodded. "Come on, out the back door." He hustled Lewis and Anna ahead of him.
Kaitlyn followed right on his heels, feeling she couldn't move fast enough.
"We'll just use the car to get out of the area,
" Rob was saying, when a wave of adrenaline broke over Kaitlyn. It left a metallic taste of fear in her mouth.
Behind her the front door burst open.
CHAPTER 2
Kaitlyn looked back.
Mr. Zetes.
Light from the porch shone behind him so he appeared as a dark silhouette, but somehow Kait could still see his face. When she'd first come to the Institute a week ago, she'd thought that Mr. Z was a handsome, aristocratic old gentleman—like Little Lord Fauntleroy's grandfather. Now she knew the truth, and the leonine head with its shock of white hair appeared completely evil to her. Those piercing dark eyes seemed to burn like—
Like a demon's, Kaitlyn thought. Except he's not a demon, just an insane genius, and we've got to get out of here…
They were all paralyzed. Even Gabriel, who was in front of Kaitlyn now that she had turned around, closer to Mr. Zetes. Something about the man stopped them all dead, drained the will out of them.
They were held by pure fear.
Don't look at him, Rob's voice said in Kaitlyn's mind, but it was faint and distant. The terror reverberating in the web was much stronger.
"Come here," Mr. Zetes said. His voice was strong and rich and utterly commanding. He stepped forward and Kaitlyn could see him more clearly in the living room lights. There was blood in his thick white hair and on his starched shirt collar. Gabriel's mental attack had done that, knocked him out, made him bleed. But Gabriel was exhausted now…
As if he were part of the web and could hear her thoughts, Mr. Zetes said, "You're all tired. I don't think you can use your powers any further tonight. Why don't we sit down and talk together?"
Kait had been too frightened to speak, but this struck fire in her. "We don't have anything to talk about,"
she said caustically.
"Your futures," Mr. Zetes said. "Your lives. I realize that I was too harsh earlier tonight. It was a shock to find you'd gotten yourselves into a permanent telepathic link. But I still think we can work together.