“Yes, sir.” This time, Varden waited patiently in silence.

Duran looked absently back toward the window for a moment, his pale eyes distant. When he returned his attention to his lieutenant, his voice became brisk. “Is Mason ready for them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He understands what I want him to do?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” Duran made a slight gesture of dismissal. “See that he follows his instructions precisely.”

Varden nodded a reply and left the room.

Duran returned to the window. This time, his gaze roved, studying the lights of various buildings as if searching for a particular one. Following the neatly laid-out streets, scanning the dark patches of parks and woods. Softly, as if to someone he expected to hear his voice, he said, “I feel you out there. Nearby. You think you can save her. You think you can save them all. Sometimes…you even think you can save me.”

After a moment, he laughed very quietly, a sound that held little amusement.

Sarah came awake suddenly, heart pounding. She was sitting up in bed, her hands reaching out for…something. Someone. She tried to recall her dreams, but all she remembered was the uneasy sensation of something missing. Something wrong.

A glance at the bright display of the clock radio on her nightstand told her it was just after midnight, which meant she had been asleep only a couple of hours. The pressure inside her head was…different. And she didn’t have a clue what that meant.

The almost-closed connecting door to the parlor showed a sliver of light, so Tucker was obviously still up. Feeling too restless to attempt sleep again so soon after waking, Sarah slid out of the big bed. She turned on the lamp and blinked a moment in the light, then found and shrugged into the thick robe provided by the hotel.

When she went into the parlor, it was to find Tucker seated at the small desk frowning at his laptop. But he looked up alertly as soon as she came in.

“What is it?”

Sarah shook her head and sat down on the couch. “Nothing. I just can’t sleep. Have you found anything?”

He hesitated and then, reluctantly, said, “There was a woman’s body found in Richmond a couple of days after the fire.”

Sarah felt her throat tighten up, but said steadily, “A body that could have been mistaken for me?”

“The police description is of a white female, age thirty, five foot four, about a hundred and five pounds, dark hair, brown eyes. The ME thinks she died sometime last Wednesday. The day of the fire.”

“How was she killed?”

Again, Tucker hesitated. “Sarah—”

“How was she killed?”

“Smoke inhalation—though there were no burns on her body and she was found in a shallow grave in an empty lot. Some kids playing baseball found her there.”

Sarah swallowed to fight the queasy sensation rising in her throat. “Kids. Great. What do the police think?”

“Reading between the lines of the reports, they don’t know what to think. The woman lived alone; her neighbors claim nothing unusual happened around the time she must have died. The man she was dating has a solid alibi, and nobody thinks he did it anyway; he was, according to everyone who knew them, devoted to her. So far, they haven’t found any enemies. She was not sexually assaulted, and was apparently laid out in the grave with some care, identification by her side. No sign that she fought or even struggled; the ME thinks she may have been asleep when the smoke got her; he found slight traces of a sedative in her body.”

If Tucker thought Sarah found that last a comfort, he was wrong.

“What was her name?”

“Sarah, let it go.”

She drew a breath. “What was her name?”

“Jennifer Healy.”

Sarah repeated the name in a whisper, committing it to memory. She was reasonably sure the police would never solve the murder of Jennifer Healy. Reasonably sure that the media would accord the crime scant attention. Reasonably sure that in time the boyfriend would get on with his life and the friends would think of her less and less. Reasonably sure that the people responsible for her death had already wiped her from their minds.

But Sarah was certain that she, at least, would never forget.

“There’s no way to be sure they intended to use her body,” Tucker pointed out reasonably. “She could have been the victim of a garden-variety killer who was motivated by reasons we’ll never know and wouldn’t understand if we did.”

“Right.”

“And even if she did die just to give them a body they could use, it isn’t your fault. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent her death.”

Sarah leaned her head back and closed her eyes, a weariness far more emotional than physical washing over her. “You know, when all this started, I thought it just affected me, that I was the target, the only one in danger. It never occurred to me that anyone else might get hurt because of me. But then there was Margo, in the wrong place at the wrong time. And now this poor woman, this woman I never even met. This woman who’ll never marry, never have children, never grow old. Because of me. Who else is going to be killed or threatened with death because I got hit on the head and turned into a valuable freak?”

Tucker hesitated for only a moment before leaving the desk and coming to sit beside her on the couch. She was alone again, locked inside herself where it was cold and bleak, and he couldn’t just leave her there.

“Sarah, you are not a freak.” He reached over to cover the restless fingers knotted together in her lap. They were cold and stiff. “And this is not your fault.”

“No?” Her eyes remained closed, her face still. “I keep thinking…there must have been a point somewhere along the way where I could have—should have—made a different choice. A different decision. And that would have changed everything. But then I remember that all this is fate. Destiny.”

She opened her eyes then, raised her head and turned it to look at him. Her eyes were darker than eyes should ever be, the pupils wide and black and empty. And her voice was curiously toneless, dull. “This is where I have to be. Where I’m supposed to be. You’re who I’m supposed to be with. And everything that has happened was meant to happen just as it did. It was all…planned out for me a long time ago. So why don’t I just accept that?”

“I don’t believe our lives are mapped out for us,” he reminded her quietly.

She looked at him a moment longer, those great dark eyes unblinking. “Then maybe I could have saved Jennifer Healy.”

“No. That was a choice they made—not you. There was nothing you could have done, Sarah.”

“All right.” She didn’t sound convinced so much as weary, and turned her head away to look vaguely across the room. “Do you— Have you found any new or useful information about them or what they’ve been doing? Anything helpful?”

For an instant, Tucker considered not letting her change the subject, but in the end he accepted the new one. He could only push so much, insist so often, before she would withdraw into some place where he’d never be able to reach her. He dared not risk that.

Deliberately, he took his hand off hers and leaned back away from her just a bit. “More of the same. Supposedly dead and missing psychics in two more major cities.”

“Then…there’s no safe place?”

“Doesn’t look like it. Not in the major cities. Not in this country anyway.”

Surprised, and more unnerved than she had yet been, she said, “You don’t think this is worldwide?”

Tucker shrugged. “There’s no way to know, really. I can tap into a few data sources worldwide, but nothing specific enough to answer that question, at least not without drawing attention to myself. It’s difficult enough to stay under the radar here; the government is always looking for computer hackers, as threats and as assets. They monitor us a lot more closely than the average citizen realizes.”