She didn’t have the same sense that a vision left her with, that what she had seen was real. There was no feeling in her of inevitability. Instead, what she felt was a profound but wordless and nameless uneasiness. A fear that was purely instinctive, like the primal response to snakes and spiders and noises in the night.

Sarah wanted badly to get out of bed and go into the sitting room. To Tucker. She wanted to tell him what she thought she had seen and how it made her feel. She wanted to hear him tell her that there was nothing to be afraid of, and everything would be all right.

But she didn’t, of course. Instead, she lay back on the pillow and tried to reassure herself. You’re a grown-up and hardly as weak as you’ve been acting. You’ve got to stop leaning on him—even if you survive this, he won’t always be around. Think about it. Figure it out.

It had, likely, only been the frightened musings of her mind. And even if it hadn’t been, even if she had actually been able to tap into some kind of psychic awareness, what had she seen? Nothing really. A building. Some shadows, distorted as shadows always were, without a clear shape or texture and scaring her because…She didn’t know why. Because shadows scared her. Because her world had been turned upside down, and everything seemed to scare her these days.

Her head was throbbing, the pressure behind her eyes building.

That alien thing in her head was growing.

Tucker pushed the room service cart out into the hallway, then settled down at the desk with coffee and his laptop. But he didn’t turn his attention to the computer immediately. Instead, he brooded.

Here he was in a hotel suite with a woman he hadn’t known a week, on the run possibly for his life and hers, grappling with a puzzle the enormity of which was the stuff of paranoid fantasies…and he had hardly bothered to stop a moment and ask himself why.

The simple answer, of course, was that he wanted her to tell him about Lydia. And that was certainly the reason he had first sought her out. But from the moment he had elected to spend the night on the couch outside her bedroom because a watcher with unknown motives lurked in the dark night, he had turned a corner, and from that point there had really been no going back.

None of his friends, he thought, would be surprised to find him involved in something so bizarre. He had a reputation for getting hip-deep in things purely out of intellectual curiosity and the love of challenge, which was undoubtedly one of his motivations in this case. It was a puzzle to end all puzzles, that was for sure.

But it was more than that. Much more. During the past days, he had realized that he was with Sarah because he wanted to protect her and knew that he could. He had been certain of that.

What he hadn’t known was whether he could save her.

Now, especially, he was conscious of doubts he’d never felt before. This thing was so big, so bizarre—and so clearly deadly. Sarah was already in more pain than he had bargained for, pain that promised to get worse before it got better. If it got better.

And there was an added complication now. No matter how wary her abilities made him, the undeniable fact was that Tucker was having a tough time keeping his distance. He was so aware of her all the time, so conscious of her every movement, of the sound of her voice and the fleeting expressions that crossed her face. He wanted to touch her.

He wanted to wake up next to her.

But he couldn’t deny that he hadn’t come to terms with her abilities; after so many years of charlatans, the real thing had definitely thrown him off balance. And he also couldn’t deny that even if Sarah felt something for him—and he had no idea whether she did—she was in no shape physically or emotionally to take a lover.

He didn’t think she was quite so fragile as she had been days ago, but at times, especially when she was tired, she still seemed to him too frail and shut in herself to be able to go on much longer. When he looked at her, he had the sense of something almost ethereal. Unreal. As if some delicate creature of myth and legend had drifted out of the mist and into his life.

That’s the Celt in me.

Or maybe just the writer, steeped in mythology and legend, shaping daydreams in the mind and giving them form on paper. That man could easily imagine Sarah as an elf or faerie, native to some dreamy betweenworld and just visiting this one, vulnerable to danger, terrifyingly fragile and lovely. Enchanting him because, in ancient times, the current of love between humans and faeries had run deep and strong, even though the price demanded for such joy had all too often been death…

Definitely the Celt in me.

Her abilities might make her seem otherworldly, but Sarah was all too human, Tucker knew. Human enough to be very afraid of what she could see and the fact that she could see it. Human enough to be in pain, to want to withdraw even more when she was afraid, to push him further away.

Especially when he pushed her.

He didn’t want to push her. He didn’t want to hurt her. Didn’t want to see her fear and dread at the thought of deliberately trying to open doors she would much rather keep closed. And he definitely didn’t like seeing her draw even further away from him when he suggested she try. But Tucker was all too aware of time passing, and even more conscious of how damnably little they knew.

They needed to—had to—use their only real ace, and that was Sarah.

If the other side was after her with such grim determination because they either feared her or valued her, then Tucker thought the chances were very good that Sarah could use whatever it was they feared or desired against them. The question, of course, was whether she could do it. Whether she could even try to do it.

As much as he had learned over the years about psychic abilities and the paranormal, Tucker still felt very unsure about what to tell Sarah, about how to advise her. He was not psychic, and as he’d told her, he couldn’t begin to feel what she felt. Not even his vivid writer’s imagination could help him to help her.

Until he had met her, he had seen in the world of the paranormal very little he’d believed to be genuine. And even the few psychics who had impressed him with their abilities had been erratic not only in what they had been able to do but in their interpretations of what they had seen and sensed. That was why he had, in the beginning at least, questioned Sarah’s interpretations. But she seemed—so far—less erratic than those psychics had been, and far, far less likely to try to “fill in the blanks” of what she saw with hunches and outright guesses.

Maybe that would come in time. Maybe every genuine psychic learned to create a patchwork of vision and guess and interpretation in order to present something complete and understandable to those inquiring. Maybe it was simple human nature.

And then there were those things not so easily explained.

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

A quiet statement, offered in a quiet moment, as if it had simply come to Sarah without her bidding. A reluctant glimpse inside the mind of someone she did not know, had never known. Someone who had been gone for a very long time.

Sarah had simply known.

Her abilities, Tucker believed, were still new and raw. Unformed, in a sense. Unrestrained by the checks and guards and filters her mind would no doubt struggle in time to erect. They might at this point be beyond her ability to control, but they were also undoubtedly powerful, and the force of them was undiluted by her conscious mind. Where an experienced psychic might try to interpret what was seen, Sarah merely reported it.

This is what I see. This is what I know.