The First Prophet Read online

  Even more, there was no explanation, no reason you could offer to add weight to the theory. Psychics were being taken. Why? Who was taking them? Where were they being taken?

  And—oh, by the way—how come nobody but you noticed them being taken?

  For something so vast and long-lived, this thing had left few tracks for anyone to follow and no fingerprints at all. There was no clue as to who was behind it. No clue as to the reasoning or purpose behind it. No evidence other than speculation, and precious little of that.

  There was just this growing list of dead and vanished people whose only connection to one another was the fact that each was reputed to have some sort of psychic ability. And in most cases, even that connection was very nebulous for the simple reason that psychic ability was difficult, if not impossible, to prove.

  Tucker was also just beginning to realize that, one way or another, he and Sarah were nearing journey’s end. September was all but over. Whatever Sarah had foreseen for herself, it seemed clear that the conclusion was due to take place sometime in October, possibly in the first few days of the month.

  And in, apparently, a little town called Holcomb. A town where something had ended, or would end.

  Sarah’s life?

  Tucker rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers, vaguely conscious of the dull ache there. He felt damned helpless, and it wasn’t a feeling he was accustomed to. In most areas of his life, success was a frequent if not constant companion, but he had one very bad failure haunting him, and he was beginning to fear that Sarah would be another.

  Why the hell did he always fail the women in his life?

  The question was too painful, and he pushed it away. God knew there were plenty of other questions just as pressing. Like the question of what awaited them in Holcomb. A face-to-face confrontation with the other side? The ending Sarah had foreseen, her own death?

  Tucker leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Sarah. Too much depended on her. Too much weight lay across shoulders too frail and inexperienced to carry the burden. In the next room, she lay virtually unconscious, drained by the effort of holding her own with another psychic, and when she woke he would have to push her to do it again.

  I’m sorry, Sarah. I thought I could keep you safe, that I could find out who’s behind this, but it’s beyond my ken. I’m not sure I can protect you anymore. I don’t even know how to help you. All I know how to do is watch…and wait…and push you toward some ending I’m terrified will be final…

  The sound of the bedroom door opening brought his head up, and he looked at Sarah as she stood blinking drowsily in the doorway. For once, she had not put on a robe, and the white sleep shirt she wore made her look very small, very young, and almost ethereal.

  “What?” she asked.

  He shook his head slightly and only then realized what had happened.

  “Didn’t you call me?” Her eyes were no longer as dark as they had been, the pupils normal, and her voice was slowly losing the sleepiness.

  “No.” He drew a breath. “But I was thinking about you.”

  She frowned for a puzzled moment, and then her gaze slid away from his and she came a bit farther into the room to sit down on one end of the couch. “Oh. Then obviously, I was just…dreaming.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She sat bolt upright, her fingers tangled but still in her lap, her head bent. “Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  Sarah shook her head just a little. “No. Neither do I. It’s getting even stronger. It doesn’t go…dormant…when I sleep anymore. I was asleep, not even dreaming, and…and I heard your voice very clearly. You said, ‘I’m sorry, Sarah.’ It woke me up.”

  Tucker wanted to go to her but held himself still. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  She looked at him, expressionless, but didn’t allow him to change the focus. “I’m sorry this bothers you so much.”

  “What?”

  “This situation. Me. You aren’t responsible for me, Tucker. There’s no reason to feel guilty if…if I don’t make it.”

  “You’re going to make it.”

  She ignored that. “And I don’t mind that I make you uncomfortable. Really, I don’t. It’s unnerving for me to find your thoughts in my head; it must be horrible for you to find them there.”

  “Sarah, you don’t make me uncomfortable. I’ve been…caught off guard more than once, but if I gave you the impression—”

  “You keep forgetting.” Her smile was twisted. “You’re talking to a psychic, Tucker. You’ve been very good at—at guarding yourself these last days, but I know damned well that you’ve seen or sensed this alien thing in me. This thing that’s getting stronger and doesn’t sleep now.”

  “There’s nothing alien in you. Unusual, sure. But your abilities are a part of you now, Sarah. We both know that.”

  She shrugged. “If you say so. All I know is that I’ve made you uncomfortable. And will again. And I want you to know that I really don’t mind if you need to keep some distance between us. I even—” She broke off abruptly.

  “Want me to,” he finished.

  “Expect you to.” Her gaze was steady. “I don’t want my life or…or my soul on your conscience, Tucker. I don’t want you to believe you could have done more, or something different, to change what’s going to happen. I don’t want you to carry that burden.”

  “What have you seen?” he asked slowly.

  “Nothing new. Except…a kind of clarity. The struggle with Neil Mason seems to have stripped something away. It all seems so clear to me now, so inevitable. I know that what’s going to happen is going to happen soon. Very soon. And I know that you’re going to blame yourself for what happens. You’ll think it was because of some choice you made, some decision that you could have made differently. But you’ll be wrong, Tucker. There’s nothing you can do to change what’s going to happen to me. Nothing.”

  “Because of destiny.” His voice was flat.

  “Because a sequence of events was set in motion months ago, long before I met you. The sequence has to play itself out. You can’t stop it.”

  “I can damned well try. And so can you.”

  “No, I can’t. I know that now.”

  “Goddammit, Sarah, don’t you give up on me. Not now. We’ve come too far for that. You said you needed my confidence, my belief that we could change the future. I still believe that.”

  “I don’t think so.” She hesitated, then added quietly, “How can you even look to the future when you’ve spent your entire adult life chasing the past? How can you face one when you haven’t finished with the other?”

  “Where are they?”

  “Next door.”

  “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

  “This is as close as I could get. Can you do it, or not?”

  “Yes. But it’s going to take some time.”

  “Then go ahead.”

  Tucker wanted to deny her accusation. He wanted to change the subject, to once more avoid the painful memories and painful admissions he would have to reveal to her. To push it away, turn away, as he had so many times since he had met Sarah. But somehow, in this quiet room in the quiet hours before midnight, with so much uncertainty and possible violence lying just ahead of them, somehow he could avoid it no longer.

  “You want me to ask you about Lydia,” he said.

  “I want you to tell me about her. You need to, Tucker.”

  She was right. He needed to. He had never told anyone the truth, not his family, not his best friend, and it had all been dammed up inside him for nearly twenty years. Once he began, the words poured out of him in a fast, jerky stream.

  “We were high school sweethearts. Went steady all during our senior year. Lydia had been raised by her mother and an aunt; her father had died when she was just a baby. Her mother had invested the insurance money wisely, so there was plenty for college; we were both planning to go to UVA. We…made a lot of plans.

  “A few months
before graduation, her mother became ill. Very ill. Lydia was spending a lot of time at the hospital, but her mother insisted she stay in school and graduate with the class. With finals coming up, I helped her all I could. She’d go to school, then to visit at the hospital, and every night we were together at my house or hers, studying. Or trying to. We were both under a lot of stress and we…weren’t as careful as we should have been.”

  “She got pregnant.”

  Tucker barely heard Sarah’s quiet voice, but nodded slowly. “She told me right after graduation. And she was…so happy about it. So full of plans. We’d get married right away. She’d put off college, use the money to get a little apartment near UVA, furnish it, bank the rest for living expenses. And medical expenses. I could go on to college, maybe change my major to something a little more practical than English lit and, anyway, maybe that book I was working on would sell. Her mother might live long enough to see her first grandchild and her aunt would surely help out…Christ, she was so happy.”

  “And how did you feel about it?” Sarah asked.

  He looked at her and, as vividly as if it had been yesterday, felt the shock and panic, the wild urge to run. Resentment and anger rising in him like bile, choking him…

  “I felt…trapped. As rosy as she painted the picture, I knew reality would be different. Neither of us had medical insurance and babies are expensive, so the money wouldn’t last long at all. I’d have to get a job before long, and even if I managed to finish college, I’d have to take some practical courses, just like she’d said, aim for a job that would support a family right away. Everybody knew writers didn’t make much money, and a degree in literature isn’t much good for anything. I could see my life laid out all neat and tidy ahead of me, a job I hated, a wife I resented, a child I didn’t want…and all my dreams in pieces behind me.”

  “And Lydia knew. Saw it in your face.”

  He nodded. “It had never occurred to her that I wouldn’t be as happy about it as she was. All she’d ever really wanted was to be a wife and mother, to have a little house she could take care of. She’d planned on college mostly because of me, because I wanted it, figured she’d major in child psychology or development, something like that. She didn’t want to teach. She just wanted to be a good mother.”

  Tucker drew a deep breath. “I’ll never forget the shock on her face, the way she backed away from me as if I’d turned into a stranger.”

  “You couldn’t let her go thinking that.”

  “No. I…told her it was just surprise, that she’d imagined the rest. She believed me. She wanted to believe me.” He focused on Sarah’s face and was vaguely surprised to find no condemnation there. But she hadn’t heard the worst, of course.

  Then, gazing into her eyes, he realized that she didn’t need to hear him say it. She knew. She knew what he’d done. Sarah had known for a long time. And there was still no condemnation in her face.

  Hoarsely, forcing the words out because he needed to, he said, “We made plans to elope the next week. Nobody’d be surprised, with her mother so ill. We’d just do it and then come back and tell everyone.” He swallowed. “I told her everything would be fine. I promised her I wouldn’t let her down.”

  Sarah waited silently.

  “I meant what I said. I had every intention of meeting her at her house as planned, and going to get married.” He looked away from Sarah and fixed his unseeing gaze on a lamp. It was so hard to say the rest, admit the rest, but he had to. “Then the days passed and…and it was suddenly time to do that. And somehow, instead of packing to meet Lydia, I packed to head to Florida with a buddy for a couple of weeks of sand and sun. I didn’t tell Lydia I wasn’t going to marry her. I just didn’t show up.”

  “You were eighteen,” Sarah said, not in an excusing tone, but matter-of-factly.

  “Yeah, well, my father was eighteen when he married my mother, and nineteen when I was born. He was responsible, worked his ass off, and as far as I can see, never regretted any of it. I was old enough to be a father, so I was damned sure old enough to be responsible for the child I’d helped create. Some things can’t be excused by youth. I was a cruel, selfish bastard to run out on her like that. And without a word, without even telling her I was sorry or that I’d help with the baby even if I couldn’t marry her. Nothing.”

  “You came back a few days later,” Sarah said.

  He nodded. “I wasn’t having much fun down in Florida; all I could think about was the way I’d run out on her. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and came home. But it was too late. Lydia was gone. She’d left a note for her aunt, taken her college money and her car. Her mother was in a coma by then, and never knew what had happened. Her aunt was devastated. She showed me the note. Lydia hadn’t mentioned the baby, or blamed me in any way. She just said she couldn’t watch her mother die, that she had to get away, start a new life somewhere else. And to tell me…she was sorry, but that I’d be better off without her.”

  Tucker returned his gaze to Sarah’s face. “Her mother died a few weeks later, her aunt less than a year afterward. Lydia didn’t come home for the funerals. She never came home again. I started looking for her that summer, and kept on every chance I had. I hired a couple of private detectives in those first years, but they got nowhere, so I taught myself how to search. But I got nowhere myself. It was as if she’d dropped off the face of the earth the day she left Richmond. I spent endless hours searching birth and…death records, newspapers, tax rolls, every kind of public record I could access, beginning in Virginia and working north and south, then west. But I never found a single hint of her existence. By the time I left college the first time, I’d realized that I wasn’t going to find her that way.”

  “The first time?”

  “Yeah, I ended up going back. Picking up a couple more degrees in subjects that interested me.” He shrugged jerkily. “Not that any of them helped me find Lydia.”

  “So you began looking for a psychic who could tell you where Lydia was.”

  “I’d always been interested in the paranormal. And I had to know. What had happened to her, to the baby. I had to know they were all right. But the so-called psychics I found couldn’t tell me anything useful. It was mostly garbage, the standard you’ve-lost-your-love kind of crap they told every other customer. And even the few people I believed had genuine ability couldn’t seem to tap into anything other than my need to find her.”

  “But you kept searching.”

  He nodded. “More than eighteen years now. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Lydia. About our child. Lydia thought it was a boy, from the very first, when she told me. He’d probably be in his junior or senior year of high school now, planning for college—”

  Sarah looked away.

  Tucker swallowed hard, a dull, cold ache spreading through him. “Except he isn’t, is he?”

  “No.” Sarah’s voice was almost inaudible. “He isn’t.”

  Tucker closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. Steadily, he said, “Tell me. Tell me what happened to them.”

  With obvious reluctance, she said, “I think…I know…the baby died very soon after birth. He just…went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Crib death, I think.”

  Tucker thought of all the years spent searching. And the daydreams, sometimes reluctant but always vivid and detailed, of his child growing up somewhere. The first steps. The first baseball glove. The first bike. First day in school. First lost tooth. First kiss. First date.

  All the firsts he had imagined missing. And now, to know that none of it had happened at all.

  He was somehow surprised that it hurt so much, but he wasn’t surprised by the guilt. If he hadn’t run out on Lydia, would it have been different? Would their child have lived?

  “It wouldn’t have ended differently,” Sarah said, still without looking at him. “If you and Lydia had married. If you had been the most wonderful husband and father possible. It would have ended the same way. I know you don’t want to bel
ieve that, but it’s true. Some things really are meant to happen just the way they happen.”

  He didn’t have the emotional energy to argue with her about destiny. Not again. In any case, the idea that he could not have made a difference in his child’s short life didn’t offer much comfort.

  “What about Lydia?” he asked.

  Sarah shook her head slightly. “She…she’s gone too. But later, I think. A few years ago.”

  Tucker never doubted that Sarah was telling him facts. There was no question in his mind. Just an overwhelming weariness and the echoes of that cold, dull pain deep inside him. And regret.

  “So I’ll never even be able to tell her I’m sorry.” He leaned his head back against the hard chair and closed his eyes. “Christ.”

  “She knew you were sorry.”

  “Not everybody is psychic, Sarah. How the hell could she know that? There was no sign of it from me.”

  “She knew you. The kind of person you were. She even knew you’d come back in a few days.”

  Tucker raised his head and opened his eyes, staring at her. “Trying to make me feel better?”

  Sarah was looking at him now, her eyes once more darkened and her expression intent. “No. I’m telling you what I know. Lydia knew you’d come back. She knew you’d marry her, even if you didn’t know that yourself. She knew that all she had to do was wait for you to work it out.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t she?”

  Sarah tilted her head a bit in that listening posture, and spoke slowly. “She realized what she was asking you to do. Give up your dreams of writing, or at the very least put them aside for a long time. She realized that what she wanted in life was not what you wanted, at least not then. She was sure she could make it on her own, raise her child alone. And she really couldn’t bear to watch her mother die. So she left.”