The First Prophet Read online

  And someone was watching him.

  Playing possum seemed like a good idea, at least until his head stopped pounding and he could think clearly. In any case, pretending he couldn’t move wasn’t a problem. He couldn’t move. He didn’t think he was tied up, but his body felt cold and leaden. Pretending he was still asleep was harder; the temptation to try to look around and find out where he was was almost overpowering.

  Gradually, as he concentrated on feigning sleep and waited for life to return to his limbs, his ears began working again. He heard his breathing, soft and even. He heard, faintly, a dripping sound. He heard a peculiar low rustling sound, almost as if…as if many people somewhere nearby spoke together in whispers.

  “I hear voices, many voices all around me, all talking at once, but almost whispering, so quiet that I can’t tell what they’re saying.”

  Because he had to, Tucker allowed his eyes to open just a slit. At first, he thought even those tiny muscles were refusing to obey him, but then he realized the truth. His eyes were open. And he couldn’t see a goddamned thing.

  Either it was very, very dark in this place—or he was blind.

  And someone was still nearby, watching him.

  FOURTEEN

  It was cold and dark, and somebody was watching him.

  Like a nightmare holding her in its grip, Sarah could feel Tucker’s waking realizations, and they chilled her to the bone. She wanted desperately to be there with him, to offer comfort, and reached out instinctively in the effort to touch him. She thought she managed it, thought he was suddenly aware of her—and then there was a sharp jab in his arm and his awareness faded rapidly, leaving her alone once more.

  She swam up out of the depths of sleep, still tired enough that the emergence was slow and gradual, her heart aching because for an instant Tucker had seemed close enough to touch.

  She couldn’t seem to get her eyes open, but her ears were working, and she heard, dimly, voices speaking downstairs. Without even deciding to, she listened with that other sense.

  “Will she trust us?”

  “I think so. What choice does she have?”

  “What about Mackenzie?”

  “She wants to go after him.”

  “When they’re holding him as bait? That’s insane. In another week or two, maybe, but—”

  “He’ll probably be dead in another week or two, Brodie. You know that. She came out of the coma in early April; this is the last day of September.”

  “I know, I know. Six months, max, and they miss their chance. If we can keep her alive and out of their hands for just a couple more weeks, Duran will back off.”

  “Maybe they won’t kill Mackenzie.”

  “And maybe the sun won’t rise tomorrow morning. But I wouldn’t bet against the probability.”

  “Dammit, Brodie, you’re so—”

  “Look, Cait, I know what I know. I’m sorry as hell Duran and his bunch got their hands on Mackenzie. I’m sorry I didn’t do my job and make contact with him and Gallagher days ago. But there’s not a damn thing I can do about that now.”

  “We can help her go after Mackenzie.”

  “Help her? Help her face down Duran and God knows how many of his goons? I don’t like the odds, Cait.”

  “The odds may be better than you think. You heard what Leigh said. Sarah Gallagher is special. She may be the one.”

  “In a year or two she may be the one. Maybe even in six months. But right now, she’s a very tired and confused lady with new psychic abilities she doesn’t understand and can’t control worth a damn.”

  “Maybe, but—”

  “Cait, Brodie’s right. Sarah’s at a very vulnerable stage right now. She needs help to make the transition, and time to make it at her own pace. If she pushes herself too hard, we could lose her. It’s…happened once before. About a year ago, before you joined. Brodie remembers.”

  “Christ, yes, I remember. And I’ll do everything in my power to make sure it never happens again.”

  Sarah opened her eyes, and instantly the clear voices in her head became the distant murmur coming from downstairs. She lay there for a moment or two, staring at the ceiling while questions and thoughts went round and round in her head.

  Finally, she threw back the blanket covering her and got out of bed. The clock on the nightstand told her it was after four in the afternoon; she had slept for hours. She washed her face in the bathroom adjoining the bedroom and finger-combed her hair, mostly ignoring the reflection in the mirror that told her she was too pale and still hollow-eyed with weariness.

  Without pausing or hesitating, she went downstairs and into Leigh Munroe’s living room.

  Three people were sitting there, and as soon as Sarah walked in, the man rose to his feet. He was a big man, physically powerful enough to give one pause, and very good looking in a dark, brooding way. He made Sarah think of a soldier; something about the way he stood, about his sharp sentry eyes and spring-coiled stillness, spoke of danger and the readiness for danger.

  “I’m John Brodie,” he said to Sarah.

  “I know.” She looked at the woman sitting beside Leigh on the couch, a younger woman with dark gold hair and friendly gray eyes in yet another face she had encountered along the way, and said, “You’re Cait.”

  “Yes. Cait Desmond.” She looked pleased, but whether it was because Sarah recognized her or just knew her name was hard to say.

  Sarah nodded. “I…heard you all talking. When I woke up. So I listened.”

  Brodie glanced at Leigh. “Did you—”

  Leigh shook her head. “No. I had no idea she was even awake. Remarkable.”

  “Who are you?” Sarah asked Brodie.

  “If you were listening to us,” he replied, “you must know.”

  “I know what I heard. I don’t know what it means.”

  “We’re the good guys,” Cait said, in the tone of someone who’d wanted to say that for a long time.

  Brodie looked at her and then, dryly, said, “We left our white hats at home this morning.”

  Sarah ignored that byplay, still a bit suspicious and too anxious about Tucker to feel much humor. Looking at Brodie, she said, “You—the two of you—have been following us.”

  “Until Chicago,” he agreed. “When you traded cars, we lost you.”

  “Sit down, Sarah,” Leigh invited, gesturing toward the chair beside Brodie’s.

  She did, slowly, trying to think. To Brodie, she said, “The bug. The tracking device. It was yours?”

  He nodded, sitting down. In answer to her obvious confusion, he said, “The other side doesn’t use electronic tracking devices, so far anyway. We don’t know why.”

  Sarah thought it was interesting that he used the same phrase to describe their enemy that she and Tucker used. It was a fleeting thought, however. “But they were able to track us. They were there in Cleveland. And they got Tucker here in Portland when we’d been here hardly more than twelve hours.”

  Grimly, Brodie said, “They’re very, very good. And they seem to be all over the place, certainly in every major city.”

  Sarah was still trying to think clearly. “If they were with us all the way, why didn’t they move? Why didn’t they try to get me?”

  It was Leigh who asked, “Why do you think they didn’t?”

  “Tucker said…he thought it was because I could sense them near me. He said they’d only move against us in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping and unaware of them. And only then if they could do it without attracting attention. That was why we stayed in large hotels and kept moving in the daytime.”

  Leigh nodded. “Very wise.”

  “And they did move at night, last night while I was asleep. But I don’t understand how they were able to get Tucker. I know they weren’t in the room and I know he wouldn’t have left me alone.”

  “Not in his right mind,” Leigh murmured.

  Sarah stared at her. “You mean they…did something to him?”

  I
t was Brodie who answered that. “Probably. One of the things we know about them is that they have some psychics under their control who are sometimes able to influence the minds of others.”

  “Neil Mason tried to influence my mind,” Sarah said. “But I was able to…keep him out.”

  Leigh nodded, unsurprised by the information. “We know of him. One of their tools, or was.”

  “Was?”

  “Gone,” Brodie said unemotionally. “We checked on him periodically; as of this morning, his house was empty and the neighbors have no idea when he left or where he went.”

  “They don’t like failure,” Sarah murmured, chilled.

  Leigh nodded. “And he failed. You were getting stronger by then, and when he failed, they knew they had missed their chance to convert you that way.”

  “Why didn’t they try earlier? When I was still so confused and didn’t know how to resist them?”

  “As nearly as we can figure,” Brodie said, “they use their psychics very sparingly, always trying more…conventional means first. We think it may be because when a psychic touches another psychic’s mind, it’s like opening a corridor between them, leaving both vulnerable. They seem to avoid that whenever possible, though we aren’t sure why. It may be another reason why they decided to tap into Mackenzie’s mind instead of yours.”

  “Think. Seem. May.” Sarah heard the frustration in her own voice. “You don’t know much for certain, do you?”

  “No, we don’t.” Brodie met her gaze steadily. “Can you tell us more?”

  Her eyes fell. “No.”

  Gently, Leigh said, “Not yet, anyway. But, Sarah, we believe you may be able to tell us a great deal about them. One day. When your abilities have had the time to develop properly.”

  “And until then—what? Hide me away somewhere?”

  “No,” Brodie said. “Hiding isn’t the best idea.”

  Cait spoke up finally. “And in another week or two, you’ll be much safer from them.”

  Sarah remembered the conversation she had overheard. “Six months since I woke up a psychic. Why six months?”

  “Another thing we don’t know,” Brodie replied. “But it always holds true for the psychics like you, the ones who aren’t born with it but suffer head injuries or some other kind of trauma later in life.”

  Leigh said, “In the life of every psychic, there comes a moment when full potential is realized. Control may be lacking, knowledge almost always is, but the ability is there. For a new psychic, a person who becomes psychic abruptly when all the other faculties are fully mature, the threshold seems to occur around the six-month mark. From the evidence we’ve seen so far, it appears that once that threshold is crossed, the other side finds it difficult—if not impossible—to convert a psychic. Whatever it is they want of us, we apparently become useless to them.”

  “You become a threat to them,” Brodie corrected.

  “We don’t know that,” Leigh argued. “Not for certain.”

  Brodie let out a short laugh and looked at Sarah. “It’s another assumption of ours, based on the fact that we’re sure they continue to keep tabs on psychics long after they seemingly give up trying to take them, and because there have been several disappearances, possibly even deaths, of psychics we thought were safe.”

  “Nothing was ever proven,” Leigh said.

  “Nothing ever is,” Brodie retorted. “But there are some assumptions we’d damned well better make to keep our people safe.”

  “I don’t believe we’re of any use to them once the threshold is crossed,” Leigh argued. “Those disappearances all involved psychics who were having trouble adjusting to their new lives; they probably just wanted to drop out of sight and did just that.”

  “It would be nice to think so, Leigh—but I don’t. Whatever these bastards want with psychics, it doesn’t just end when you cross that threshold of yours. They’ve got something else in mind for you, I can feel it in my gut.” He laughed shortly. “I may not be psychic, but I know what I know. Taking new and inexperienced psychics is just step one of their plan. Step two involves the rest of you.”

  Leigh seemed unwillingly impressed by his certainty, but shook her head a little. “I don’t feel that. And none of the others has felt it.”

  “Maybe all of you are too close. Maybe it takes somebody without psychic abilities to see it.”

  “Maybe.”

  Sarah probably should have been disturbed by this lack of consensus among people who had fought the other side much longer than she and Tucker had, but instead it gave her an odd feeling of comfort. This entire thing was so bizarre, so inexplicable, that it felt wonderfully normal to watch and listen to people who couldn’t agree on the details—but were very clear on what the problem was.

  “What about people like you?” she asked Leigh. “You’ve been psychic from birth, right? Why are you safe from them?”

  “She isn’t,” Brodie said. “She just thinks she is.”

  Leigh smiled at him briefly, then looked at Sarah. “Like many born psychics, I had nonpsychic parents who tried their best to make me—at least seem—normal. I was always encouraged to hide what I could do, to keep to myself the things I saw. I learned secrecy at a very young age.”

  “So the other side wasn’t aware of you?”

  “So we believe. When I finally did go public, so to speak, it was with my full potential realized. They never even tried to take me.”

  But they had, Sarah knew, taken plenty of her friends through the years. That was why Leigh Munroe was involved in this. Not out of fear for herself, but out of fear for others.

  Brodie leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he looked intently at Sarah. “They outnumber us, Sarah, but we’re growing. In strength and numbers. We’re getting organized, even if it’s loosely, and we’re fighting back.”

  “How?”

  “Marshaling our own strength. Gathering what few facts and little information we can lay our hands on, so that we may be able to expose them some day. Finding and protecting psychics, keeping them away from Duran and his goons.”

  “Duran?”

  Brodie nodded. “The head goon.”

  Cait murmured, “Well, he isn’t really a goon.”

  Brodie glanced at her, then looked back at Sarah with a wry expression. “Crocodile. Shark. Smiling villain. Whatever the hell you want to call him, he’s obviously in charge, at least of their field operations.”

  “Field operations? You make it sound…military.”

  “Maybe it is. Or maybe it isn’t. Until we get strong enough as an organization, or find a single psychic who’s strong enough, we have no way of knowing. They don’t leave evidence behind them, not so far.”

  Sarah thought about it. “So that’s what you meant when you all were talking earlier? That I might be the one?”

  Leigh replied to that, this time obviously in agreement with Brodie. “We’re convinced that a strong enough psychic will be able to find a way past their mental shields and give us the information we need to fight them.”

  “What makes you believe I might be that one?”

  “I can feel it in you. The strength. The potential.” Leigh smiled. “And I gave you a little test, Sarah.”

  “What test?”

  “Earlier today, when you looked into my mind. Remember?”

  “How could I forget. You opened a door and showed me…everything inside you.”

  Leigh shook her head slightly. “You opened that door, Sarah. Something not one in a hundred psychics could have done. The door was not only closed, it was locked—and I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to make those locks strong. But they didn’t stop you. You didn’t force your way past them, you didn’t hurt me. You just opened the door as if it were no barrier at all.”

  Sarah didn’t know what to say to that.

  “You’re the one, Sarah,” Leigh said. “You’re the key to our future.”

  “Well?”

  “She’s made contact
with Munroe.”

  “And?”

  “Brodie’s there. And the girl.”

  “Then we can assume they’re making plans.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  It was unsettling, to be told she was so important in a cause she hadn’t even been aware of a week before, and Sarah wasn’t sure what she felt about it. All she knew was that a weight of responsibility was settling on her shoulders, and it was heavy.

  After a short silence, it was Brodie who spoke, his voice matter-of-fact. “Until we know who they really are and why they’re taking psychics, all we can do is fight a holding action. They don’t win—but neither do we. And all the while, for every psychic we get to in time, we lose half a dozen more.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I never realized there were so many people with psychic abilities.” She saw Brodie, Cait, and Leigh exchange glances, and added immediately, “There’s something weird about that, isn’t there?”

  With a slight smile, Leigh said, “Never use the word weird in the presence of people with psychic abilities, especially a born psychic; we’ve heard it entirely too many times in our lives.”

  “Tell me,” Sarah insisted, ignoring the wry humor. “I’m tired of being in the dark, and I have a right to know.”

  “It’s all supposition, Sarah,” Brodie said.

  “All of this is supposition, according to you. So? What is this about the number of psychics?”

  Brodie leaned back and gestured slightly toward Leigh, who spoke slowly.

  “We don’t know what’s causing it or what it means, Sarah. All we know is that the number of people with psychic abilities is increasing, not only generation by generation, but year by year. More are born. And more are, for want of a better word, made. Created. Changed from latent to active. Twenty-five years ago, there might have been one or two people who became psychic in a given year due to a head injury or some other kind of trauma; this year, so far, you are one of fifteen.”