He wondered whether Sarah was sleeping. After seeing all those news clippings, she hadn’t had much to say. And she had kept a careful distance between them. Physically, emotionally, and mentally.

Or maybe the mental distance he felt was due to his own wariness. The more convinced he grew that Sarah was a genuine psychic, the more he could feel himself getting…still inside. And watchful. He didn’t want to withdraw from her but couldn’t seem to help himself.

Pushing that out of his mind for the moment, Tucker thought of all the charlatans he had met over the years, so many of whom cheerfully plied their trade in carnivals and malls and psychic “fairs” around the country, and knew those people were not threatened by anything but the occasional suspicious police officer. He was certain, however, that if he had been able to meet any of the people on the growing list of dead and missing, he would have found them genuine. The fakes and phonies stood in no danger from this; people with true psychic abilities were the targets.

Which meant, he thought, that the people behind this had some way of determining the genuine from the fake. Or…did they simply watch and wait, as they had apparently watched Sarah, until they could decide? That was possible, maybe even likely. He thought of watchers all over the country observing potential psychics, checking off items on a list until the total added up to “genuine,” and felt a spreading chill.

Jesus Christ—the enormity of the thing.

And it was so damned inexplicable. Why psychics? Were they a threat to someone, or did their abilities make them somehow valuable? That was the question he felt needed to be answered, and it was the most elusive—because dead or missing psychics offered no answers, and as far as he could tell, nobody else had bothered to ask.

He could remember reading of long-ago experiments in this country and others, when it had been theorized that psychics could be used in some fashion as weapons or deterrents to weapons, but those experiments—as far as he knew—had proved worse than useless. Only a handful of genuine psychics had been able to control their abilities in any real sense, and nobody had really known what to do with them. They could not, after all, stop bullets or prevent bombs from blowing up. And their predictions had been erratic at best.

But that had been back during the Cold War, when paranoia and suspicion had compelled more than one government to attempt unconventional means of attaining and maintaining power over others. Things were different now.

Weren’t they?

Tucker shifted restlessly on the couch. Whoever was killing and taking them, the list of psychics was turning into a long one. No wonder Sarah had grown so quiet. In his research so far, she was one of a much smaller list made up of psychics who had lived normal lives well into adulthood before some trauma—usually a head injury—had left them struggling to understand new and baffling abilities. That alone would have been enough of a strain for anybody without finding out she was also a target of some mysterious conspiracy.

And on that smaller list of new and untried psychics, most had wound up dead in some “accident” within months of the birth of their new abilities.

Tucker turned over onto his back and stared at the dark, beamed ceiling. Sarah was in deadly danger. And the only thing standing between her and the people who would kidnap or kill her was him.

“So how’re you gonna stop them, Mackenzie?” he muttered aloud.

He didn’t know.

Realizing suddenly that sleep was not going to return, he sighed and sat up. Glancing toward the bedroom door automatically, he stiffened when he realized it was open. He was on his feet before he decided to be, gun in hand and senses flaring.

If they had snatched her right out from under his goddamned nose—

A moment later he relaxed. One step away from the couch had brought the sliding glass doors into view, and through them he saw the moonlit deck and Sarah standing at the railing gazing out over the lake.

Tucker hesitated, then stuck the automatic into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back and shrugged into the flannel shirt he’d earlier removed. His boots were nearby, and he put those on as well before heading for the glass doors.

He paused there, his hand on the handle, and for several moments studied her through the glass. She stood much as she had the first time he’d seen her, with her arms crossed over her breasts and hands moving slowly up and down her upper arms as though to warm chilled flesh. But she hadn’t been cold then, not from the weather. From something inside her. And it was the same inner chill now, he realized. Sarah wasn’t cold.

She was alone.

For the first time, he realized that for all her passive acceptance of his company, Sarah had never stopped being alone.

She was as shut in herself as she had been that first day, isolated within walls of wariness, remote in a way he didn’t really understand. And inside her were thoughts and feelings and terrors she had not put into words. Perhaps had not dared put into words. But they were there. Buried deeply. Locked away from him and anyone else who wanted to be close to her. Looking at her, he had the sense of things moving slowly and with terrible deliberation underneath a frozen stillness, like an ocean under ice.

Tucker drew a breath and opened the door, wondering how he could reach her. Wondering whether he could reach her.

It was chilly out on the deck, but not actually cold here at the end of September. In fact, it seemed warmer here than it had been in Richmond, and Tucker didn’t bother to button his shirt as he joined Sarah at the railing.

Before he could speak, she did, almost idly. “I knew when you woke up. Isn’t that strange?”

“Maybe not,” he said slowly. “Maybe not for you.”

She was fully dressed in jeans and a sweater, and definitely wide awake as she glanced at him. “That makes you uneasy.”

It did, as a matter of fact, but he denied it. “Of course not.”

Her smile, clear in the moonlight, held a twist of bitter certainty. “Oh, no? Then what about this: I’m changing, Tucker.”

“Changing how?” He was cautious, not only because of what she was saying, but because he realized he had caught her at a raw moment when she might reveal more than she wanted to.

She turned her gaze back to the lake and put her hands on the deck railing as if she needed something to hold on to. But her voice remained steady. “Whatever was born in me six months ago is…growing. Bigger. More powerful. Affecting my other senses and even the way I think. I…know things I shouldn’t know. Not because I have a vision, but just because. I feel things I don’t understand and can’t explain.”

“Sarah—”

“I’m changing. I don’t know how to stop it. And I don’t know what I’ll be when it’s over.”

Tucker had always assumed it would be a cool thing to see the future, and God knew it would be helpful and less painful to see one’s mistakes ahead of time and have a shot at not making them. At least that was what he had always thought. But he was beginning to realize that the future might not be such a cool thing to see after all. Not when monsters lurked there. Not when all you saw was death, and danger, and frightening things. He had never seen anybody with haunted eyes until he had looked into Sarah’s the night she’d had a vision of men coming to kill her.

“She never wanted to be found, you know. That’s why you couldn’t.”

That was when he had started to believe in Sarah Gallagher.

He drew a breath and kept his own voice quiet. “Maybe that’s natural, Sarah. For you.”

“You mean for what I’ve become.”

“I mean for who you’ve become. Who you’re becoming. How could you not change after what’s happened to you?”

“Words,” she said softly. “Just words. They don’t mean a lot to me these days.”