“Great. Something else to be paranoid about.”

“We live in dangerous times. And…there were some pretty damned intrusive laws passed after the towers fell.”

It was clear he took exception to at least some of those laws, and Sarah hoped they’d have a chance to sit and discuss it all. She really did hope they’d have that time.

But for now, there were more imperative things to discuss.

“So you don’t know if this thing could be worldwide. If it is…”

“If it is,” he said steadily, “we’ll find out eventually. For now, we’ve got all we can handle.”

“More than we can handle.”

“We’re doing okay. We’re still alive and on the loose.” He tried to sound positive and wasn’t at all sure he’d pulled it off.

“Are we? Or are we just rats in a maze?”

He frowned slightly. “Is that what you feel?”

“Stop asking me what I feel.”

“I can’t do that, Sarah. Your feelings can guide us.” Without giving her a chance to argue with him, he repeated, “Do you feel we’re rats in a maze? Honestly feel that? Or is it frustration talking?”

Sarah got up from the couch and went over to the window, where the partially drawn drapes offered only a narrow piece of the night. She stood there looking out, and for a long time she didn’t say anything.

Tucker waited patiently.

Finally, tensely, she said, “What you don’t seem to understand is that sometimes…usually…I can’t tell the difference. A vision is a very clear-cut thing, no matter how you choose to interpret it. But impulses, hunches, feelings…these damned voices in my head…how do I know what they mean? How can I tell? Is it just my fears talking to me? My imagination working overtime? Or is there a truer voice I should be listening to?”

“You won’t know unless you listen.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “I’m not the one who has to sort through all the background noise you’ll hear. But I’ll help all I can, Sarah. Just tell me how to do that.”

“I don’t know how. I don’t even know that.”

After a moment, Tucker got up and joined her at the window. “Maybe we’re both demanding too much too fast from you. Sarah, I would never do anything to hurt you. I hope you know that.”

“I know you have only the best of intentions,” she murmured.

There was no particular emotion in her voice, but Tucker nevertheless felt there was something ironic in her remark, and it made him defensive. “No matter what they say about the road to hell, we’re not moving in that direction, Sarah, I promise you.”

“You should stop making promises.” She turned her head suddenly to look at him out of those too-dark eyes. “Your track record with them isn’t very good.”

He stiffened. “No?”

“No. Lydia would know that, wouldn’t she?”

He felt a chill that went clear down to his bones, and gazing into her eyes he had the abrupt and incredibly unsettling sense of something alien. Something…unnatural.

She knew. She knew it all.

ELEVEN

Sarah’s mouth curved in a faint, curiously mocking smile. “So we’re not moving toward hell, huh? Then why do you look at me as though I might have been spawned there?”

“Sarah—”

“Oh, don’t worry about it, Tucker. I’m not evil. I’m just not normal.”

He knew—he knew—she had deliberately reached into his head and his nightmares in order to keep him at a distance. As coolly as any surgeon, she had slipped her scalpel into him with full knowledge of the effect it would cause, and now she studied him with calm assessment, her eyes distant.

This was what he got for pushing her. Sarah was pushing back. And she was a lot stronger than either of them had given her credit for.

“I don’t believe you’re evil. And normal is what you get used to,” he managed.

“Right.”

He watched her move away from the window toward the doorway to the bedroom and made no effort to stop her. He wanted to. He wanted to call her back or go after her, to try to close the very real distance between them. But he couldn’t.

Sarah had discovered his Achilles’ heel, and if only to protect herself when he pushed and keep him out, she had learned how to use the knowledge against him. Until he could bring himself to face his demons, he had no defense against that tactic.

She paused at the door and looked back at him. As if nothing had happened, she said, “The psychic we’re going to try to approach tomorrow—what did you say his name was?”

“Mason,” Tucker replied automatically. “Neil Mason.”

She nodded. “Good night, Tucker.”

“Good night, Sarah.”

Patty Lowell looked out her kitchen window for the fourth time in half an hour, just to reassure herself that Brandon was still out there playing in the sandbox with his dinosaurs, safe in their fenced backyard. He was, and she stood there for a few moments watching him before returning to her baking. It wasn’t like her to be a nervous mother, but this was the third morning in a row that her five-year-old had awakened asking her anxiously if they could hide from the bad men.

Adam thought she was crazy, but Patty was convinced that Brandon had a special gift. He had always been an intensely sensitive child, filled with wordless terrors and worries, but now that his language skills were better developed, he was able to communicate his thoughts and fears more clearly than he had as an anxious toddler.

Poor little Brandon was frequently afraid. He didn’t like the dark, or closets, or scary movies, and there was one place in the upstairs hallway of their old house that upset him terribly. “There’s a lady, Mommy. She keeps crying.” That was all Patty could get out of him. She’d never believed in ghosts, but she now gave that particular spot a wide berth.

Brandon had also startled her more than once by carrying on casual conversations with “the people.” The people were not, apparently, connected to this house, since he talked to them on the playground and at his cousins’ house and even at the Atlanta church where she took him to Sunday school. And they didn’t seem to be threatening people, since Brandon displayed no anxiety at all about them.

But the flesh-and-blood people around him were beginning to notice. Her sister had made a remark just the other day about Brandon and his imaginary friends. And some of his little friends were beginning to tease him. Brandon, always a shy child with a mostly solitary nature, was becoming reluctant to get out of sight of his mother.

Adam said she was spoiling him, catering to his “childish fears and overactive imagination” by sticking close to him, but Patty didn’t care. She was worried. Brandon was convinced that the “bad men” were coming to take him away, and it frightened him so much that it frightened her even more.

He could never tell her who these bad men were or even what they looked like, and since Patty’s questions had only upset him further, she had stopped asking. Just bad men, was all he knew or could say. Bad men in the dark.

That thought sent Patty back to the window. And as soon as she looked out, her throat closed up and shards of ice stabbed at her heart.

“Brandon?”

She rushed out the back door, staring at the empty sandbox and then looking wildly around the backyard. The gate was still closed; she could see the lock still fastened. But Brandon was nowhere to be seen.

“Brandon!”

Sarah gazed out the car window and murmured, “A nice, normal little house in a nice, normal little neighborhood. I guess Neil Mason’s neighbors don’t know he’s psychic.”

“Or don’t care,” Tucker said.

“If they know—they care,” Sarah said out of bitter experience.