He gazed at Sarah’s sleeping face, and a wave of aching tenderness swept over him. It was stronger than anything he’d ever felt before, so intense it was more than a little terrifying. He had known her hardly more than a week, yet he couldn’t imagine his life now without her in it. The wariness he had so often felt around her no longer troubled him. He had never felt so close to another human being, so…wrapped up in her.

And so afraid for her.

How could he protect her from the other side? How could he keep her safe?

That agonizing question had barely risen in his mind when a sudden realization struck. Jesus, not only was the pistol in the other room, but he wasn’t at all sure he’d used the dead bolt and night latch on the door after he’d pushed the room service cart back out into the hallway hours ago.

Careful not to wake Sarah, he slid from the bed and found his shorts and jeans. He would much rather have remained in bed with her, absorbing her warmth and her scent, watching her sleep and waiting patiently for her to wake so they could make love again. But things left undone nagged at him.

It was after threeA.M. but since he was wide awake now and Sarah seemed to be sleeping deeply, he figured he might as well try to get something accomplished while she got the rest she undoubtedly needed. He was hardly in the mood to wade through more statistics of dead and vanished psychics, but he could try to refine the program he’d written to look for some kind of pattern in the morass of facts and speculation.

Somewhere, there had to be a pattern, something he was missing. There had to be. Nothing this extraordinary and far-reaching could have existed for so many years without leaving evidence of its existence. Surely…

He opened and turned on his laptop first, then looked around for the gun.

And didn’t find it.

He couldn’t believe he’d left it in the Jeep, but the longer he thought about it the more convinced he became that he had done just that. He remembered shoving the pistol into the storage compartment between the Jeep’s front seats just after they’d left Neil Mason’s house. He’d been so worried about Sarah, he didn’t think he’d given the gun another thought.

“Shit. Some hero I am,” he muttered aloud. How the hell was he going to protect Sarah without the damned gun? Throw rocks at them? Oh, yeah, that would be just great.

Before he even realized he was going to, he had pulled on a sweatshirt and sat down to put on his socks and boots. He paused then, frowning, because there was something else nagging at him. But it was a distant thing, out of reach and only vaguely troubling, and he shrugged it away.

The important thing, the only thing that mattered, was to protect Sarah. He had to go and get the gun, so he could protect her.

He remembered to take the door keycard, and the keys to the Jeep. He remembered to test the door carefully after he closed it, to make sure they couldn’t get in and hurt Sarah while he was gone. He remembered to be cautious as he walked down the hallway, to be alert, and to check the elevator warily before getting in.

He even remembered to lock the elevator open on the right garage level, so it would be there waiting for him and he wouldn’t waste time. Because he had to get the gun and get back upstairs so he could protect Sarah.

The garage, like most of its kind in the wee small hours of the morning, was badly lit and filled with shadows as well as eerily silent and cavernous, so that Tucker’s normally quiet footsteps echoed hollowly off the concrete and metallic surfaces. The Jeep was parked not too far from the elevator, so it didn’t take long to walk to it, but he was nevertheless aware of a growing anxiety by the time he reached it.

He had to protect Sarah.

He was straining to listen but heard nothing. His head was throbbing oddly, and it was getting difficult to think, as if a fog crept into his brain. For a moment, as he stood beside the Jeep, he couldn’t even remember what he was doing there.

The gun. That was it. He had to get the gun and protect Sarah.

It took him several minutes to figure out how to use the keyless entry gadget to unlock the Jeep doors, and he shook his head in bafflement when he finally got the driver’s door open.

Christ, what’s wrong with me?

He leaned in and opened the compartment between the seats. The usual vehicle clutter met his puzzled stare. A couple of folded maps, some paper napkins and two paper-wrapped straws, the sunglasses he hadn’t needed today. Yesterday. A flashlight. And in the bottom, when he pushed the rest aside and searched all the way down, a tangled and gritty nest of coins, gum wrappers, and general Jeep lint.

But no gun.

Tucker stood there, leaning across the driver’s seat, and scowled. Where the hell was the gun? He’d left it right here—

Then, abruptly, with the suddenness of a soap bubble, the fog vanished from his brain, and he realized why the gun wasn’t here.

Because it was upstairs in their room.

He remembered. He remembered looking right at it when he’d gone back into the sitting room. It was on the desk, beside his laptop. Where he had placed it, as soon as they had settled into the room, so it would be within easy reach while he worked at the computer and Sarah slept. Where he had left it hours ago.

Where it had always been.

He knew then. Knew in a terrible moment of absolute clarity what they had done to him. He had underestimated them, badly underestimated them. Because they had used the one tool he had never expected them to use, the one tool he hadn’t even imagined they could use.

His own mind.

They’d crawled inside his head. They hadn’t been able to get inside Sarah’s, so they had turned to him. Somehow, they had crawled inside his head and made him think the gun was here, made him believe he had to come down here and get it, leaving Sarah alone upstairs…

“Sarah. Oh, Jesus, Sarah—”

He never heard them behind him. He only had time to realize that, once again, he had failed the woman he loved. He felt the agony of that even before the shock of the blow, the blinding pain in his head. And then nothing.

“Tucker?”

Sarah found herself sitting up in bed, the sheet clutched to her breasts and her own voice loud in her ears. There had been a dream, a warmly reassuring dream of Tucker fretting about protecting her. Then he had seemed to fade away for a long time, until a sudden burst of agony shot through her head, a terrible pain that was in his head and his heart and his voice.

“Sarah. Oh, Jesus, Sarah—”

And now…nothing.

Terror and panic were ice water in her veins, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think about anything but him. Desperately, she reached out, closing her eyes and concentrating as hard as she could, harder than she ever had before, as she tried to find Tucker.

Instantly, a cacophony beat inside her mind like the wings of a hundred birds, the chatter of a hundred voices, and she heard her own voice cry out in surprise and fear even as her eyes shot open and she instinctively slammed shut what her desperation to find Tucker had wrenched open.

It took her several moments to calm down, and longer to realize what had happened. She had reached out wildly and without any kind of focus, and what had rushed into her open mind had been the mental voices and dreams of all the people around her.

Sarah shivered, afraid to try again—and more afraid not to. The sensation of all those thoughts and dreams and nightmares was the closest she ever wanted to get to actual chaos, the most unsettling thing she had ever experienced, and she did not want to experience it again, so this time she focused her mind as narrowly as she could before opening herself up.