by Kay Hooper
Bailey didn’t have to explain that further.
“Are the police going to come around asking questions?” Sarah asked.
“They have to. Ellen Hodges was known to be a member of the Church, and the last time she was seen it was in the company of other church members. Her parents know that, and they’re more than willing to point the police in this direction. So if the good Reverend Samuel can’t produce Ellen’s husband or her child, he’s going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
Sarah managed a hollow laugh, even as the sense of unease she felt grew stronger. “You’re assuming the cops who come here won’t be church members or paid-off friends of the church.”
“Shit. Are you sure?”
“From something I overheard, I’m convinced enough that I say it wouldn’t be a good idea to take any local law enforcement into our confidence. Not unless somebody on our side can read them very, very well.”
“Good enough for me. But Bishop is not going to be happy about it.”
“I doubt he’ll be surprised. We knew it was a possibility.”
“Makes the job harder. Or at least a hell of a lot more tricky.” Bailey shifted the child’s weight again. “I need to get the kid out of here.”
“Wendy. Her name’s Wendy.”
“Yes. I know. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her. She has family who love her and will want her.”
“She also has an ability she’s barely aware of.” Sarah reached out once more to touch the child’s hair gently, then stepped back. “Protect her. Protect her gift.”
“We will. And you watch your back, hear? You’ve got a dandy shield of your own, but if it’s taking an effort to pretend you could belong here, Samuel or one of his so-called advisors could pick up on the fact that you’re hiding more than a bit of doubt about the good reverend and his real agenda.”
“Believe me, I know.” Something cold was spreading through Sarah’s body, and she took two more steps back, deliberately removing herself from the other woman’s protective shield. “Tell Bishop and John that at least one of Samuel’s closest advisors is a strong psychic. I’ve felt it. Not sure which one, there’s always a group of men around him.”
“Maybe you were just picking up Samuel.”
“No. With Samuel it’s just the way it’s always been, a…null field. As if he isn’t even there, at least psychically. No sense of personality, no aura, no energy signature at all.”
“That’s more than an energy shield.”
“I know. I’m just not sure what it is. I’ve never sensed anything like it before.”
Bailey shook her head. “I was really hoping that had changed, or you’d learned to read him somehow.”
“I’ve tried, believe me, every chance I’ve had. But nothing. He’s literally shut inside himself.”
“All the time?”
“Whenever I’ve been close enough to try to pick up something. But I’m not part of the inner circle, or one of his chosen women.”
“No, we haven’t been able to get anyone that close.”
“And I don’t know if we ever will. That inner circle is incredibly protective of him. And whoever the psychic is…he’s got one hell of a shield, a readable one, so it’s a given there’s something powerful generating it. But I’m not sure what he can do, what his ability is. It could be anything. Tell them to be careful. Whoever else they send in needs to be careful.”
“Sarah—”
“I’ll report when I can.” Sarah turned and hurried away, her slender form almost instantly swallowed up by the shadows of the forest.
Bailey hesitated, but only for an instant, before swearing under her breath and turning to retrace her own steps. She moved swiftly even carrying the child, and covered at least thirty yards before she heard, from somewhere behind her, a sound that stopped her in her tracks and yanked her around.
The beginning of a scream, cut off with chilling abruptness, its echo bouncing around eerily in the otherwise silent woods.
“Bailey, move.” For a big man, Galen himself moved with uncanny silence, but that wasn’t the trait she was interested in right now.
“Sarah. Galen, you have to—”
“I know. Get to the car. If I’m not there in five minutes, leave.” His weapon was in his hand, and he was already moving away, back toward the compound.
“But—”
“Do it.”
Bailey wasn’t a woman who accepted orders easily, but she obeyed that one without further question. Tightening her arms around the sleeping child and concentrating on intensifying the protective blanket of energy wrapping them both, she hurried through the woods toward the road and the car hidden there.
Galen had long ago perfected the art of moving through any type of terrain without making a sound, but he was all too aware that at least some of those who might hunt him in this forest could listen with more than their ears. Even so, he didn’t allow the knowledge to slow him down, and he made good time.
Unfortunately, not good enough.
Then again, he acknowledged grimly, he had probably been too late at the first note of Sarah’s scream.
She lay on her back in a small clearing, in a pool of moonlight so bright and stark it was like a spotlight, and the agony contorting her features seemed an almost unreal, Halloween mask of horror. Her wide eyes gazed directly up at him, terrified and accusing.
At least that was the way Galen saw it. He wasn’t psychic in the accepted sense, but he could read people in his own way. Even dead people.
Maybe especially dead people.
He knelt beside her sprawled body, his free hand feeling for her carotid pulse even as he kept his weapon ready and visually scanned the woods all around them.
He didn’t see or hear a thing.
And Sarah was gone.
Still kneeling beside her body, he frowned down at her. There wasn’t a mark on her he could see, no visible cause of death. She had bundled the child well against the cold, but her own jeans and thin sweater had provided little protection, and the light color of her clothing allowed him to be fairly certain there was no blood to indicate any kind of wound.
He slipped his hand underneath her shoulder, intending to turn her over and check her back for any wounds, but paused as he realized just how she was positioned. She had been returning to the compound, and unless she had somehow gotten turned around and changed direction, it looked as though she had been knocked backward from an attack she had run into head-on.
And yet the frozen ground around her, crystals of frost glittering in the moonlight, was very clearly undisturbed by any sort of struggle, and unmarked by any footprints except for his own and Sarah’s. Their footprints—arriving at this point. And Sarah’s footprints continuing on. But not returning.
It was as if she had been lifted off her feet yards farther along and thrown back to this clearing with incredible force.
Galen wondered suddenly if a medical examiner would find her bones so shattered they were virtually crushed, as Ellen Hodges’s bones had been.
He hesitated a moment longer, weighing the pros and cons of taking her back with them. It wasn’t in his nature or training to leave a fallen comrade behind, but the incredibly high stakes in this situation forced him to consider. Someone had killed her, and that someone would expect to find her body here. If she didn’t remain where she was expected to be…
“Shit,” he breathed almost without sound, the word a small cloud of cold mist. “Sorry, kid. I—”
It was his instinct to look someone in the eye when delivering a hard truth, and so he looked into Sarah Warren’s dead eyes when he began to tell her he would have to leave her body here to be recovered by her murderers.
Her eyes were changing. As he watched, they slowly fogged over, the irises and pupils at first dimmed and finally completely obscured by white. And in the bright moonlight the angles of her face seemed sharper, the planes becoming hollows, as if more than her life had been—was being—sucked out of
her.
Galen had seen many dying and dead over the years, but he had never seen anything like this before. And for one of the very few times in his adult life, he felt suddenly vulnerable. Nakedly vulnerable.
His gun couldn’t protect him here. Couldn’t even help him.
Nothing could.
He found himself withdrawing his hand from under her shoulder, and was conscious of an almost overwhelming urge to leave, now, to get as far away from this place as he could, as fast as he could.
But once again, he wasn’t quite fast enough.
He was still rising, just beginning to turn, when he saw the three men only a few yards away, moving swiftly through the woods toward him with a silence that was uncanny.
The one in front, a tall man with wide shoulders and a stone-cold expression, already had his weapon out and raised, and offered neither warning nor any chance at all. The big silver gun bucked in his hand.
Galen felt the bullet slam into his chest before he heard the muffled report, felt the frozen ground hard beneath him, and was dimly aware of his own weapon falling from nerveless fingers. He couldn’t seem to breathe without a choking sensation, and blood bubbled up into his mouth, sharp and coppery.
Christ, what a cliché. I can’t think of something better?
Apparently, he could not. He had a mouth full of warm, liquid metal, and he could literally feel his life ebbing from his body. Not sucked out as Sarah’s had been, but just leaving him, the way his blood flowed from the gaping wound in his chest and soaked into the cold ground. For a few brief seconds he looked at the bright moon, then the light was blocked out as the three men stood over him.
He focused on the taller one, the one whose stone-cold killer’s face he could not now make out. Just a silhouette with gleaming eyes, silent, watching him.
“Son of a bitch,” Galen managed thickly. “You sorry son of a—”
The big silver gun bucked again, hardly more than an almost apologetic sneeze of sound escaping the silencer, and a train slammed into Galen, and everything went black and silent.
“What if he was a cop?”
“What if?” Reese DeMarco knelt briefly to pick up the automatic from the ground beside the outstretched arm of the man he had shot, adding in the same unemotional tone as he rose, “Search him. See if he’s carrying I.D.”
The man who had asked the question knelt down to gingerly but thoroughly search the body. “No I.D.,” he reported. “No harness or holster for the gun. Not even a label in his damned shirt. Shit, you really nailed him. Two dead-center in the chest. I would’ve expected body armor and gone for the head shot.”
“I doubt he expected armed opposition. Probably just a P.I. hired by one of the families, with no idea what he was getting into.” DeMarco thumbed the safety on the confiscated weapon, and stuck it into his belt at the small of his back. “Amateurs.”
The third man, who had stood silently scanning the woods, said, “I don’t see any sign of the kid. Think she ran off?”
“I think she was carried off.” The words had barely left DeMarco’s lips when faintly they all heard the sound of a car’s engine, revving and then fading within seconds into silence.
“Amateurs,” DeMarco repeated.
“And heartless, not to come back for their dead.” It was said with absolutely no sense of irony, and the man still kneeling beside the bodies looked down at them sorrowfully for a moment before lifting his gaze again to DeMarco. “I didn’t hear Father say—does he want them brought back?”
DeMarco shook his head. “Dump the bodies in the river, Brian. Fisk, help him. It’s nearly dawn; we need to get back.”
They obeyed the clear order, holstering their weapons and bending to the task of lifting the large, heavy man from the frozen ground.
“Over a shoulder would be easier,” Fisk said as they struggled to manage the dead weight. “Fireman’s carry.”
“You can if you want to,” Brian told him. “Not me. I go back covered in this guy’s blood and my wife is gonna ask all kinds of questions.”
“All right, all right. Just lift your share, will you? Shit, Brian—”
DeMarco looked after them for a long moment until they disappeared into the forest, and he could measure their progress only by the continuing complaints and fading grunts of effort. Finally, he returned his weapon to the shoulder holster he wore, and knelt beside the body of Sarah Warren.
He didn’t have to check for a pulse but did it anyway, then gently closed her eyes so the frosty whiteness was no longer visible. Only then did he methodically search her to make certain she wasn’t carrying identification—or anything else that might cause problems.
It was a very thorough search, which is why he found the silver medallion hidden in her left shoe. It was small, nearly flat, and on its polished surface was carved a lightning bolt.
DeMarco held it in his palm, watching the moonlight shimmer off the talisman as he moved his hand. Finally, becoming aware of the not-exactly-silent return of his men, he replaced Sarah’s shoe, got to his feet, and slipped the medallion into his own pocket.
BANTAM BOOKS BY KAY HOOPER
The Bishop Trilogies
Stealing Shadows
Hiding in the Shadows
Out of the Shadows
Touching Evil
Whisper of Evil
Sense of Evil
Hunting Fear
Chill of Fear
Sleeping with Fear
Blood Dreams
The Quinn Novels
Once a Thief
Always a Thief
Romantic Suspense
Amanda
After Caroline
Finding Laura
Haunting Rachel
Classic Fantasy and Romance
On Wings of Magic
The Wizard of Seattle
My Guardian Angel (anthology)
Yours to Keep (anthology)
Golden Threads
Something Different / Pepper’s Way
C.J.’s Fate
The Haunting of Josie
Illegal Possession
IF THERE BE DRAGONS
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam Loveswept mass market edition
published December 1984
Bantam mass market edition / September 2008
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1984 by Kay Hooper
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Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
* * *
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90564-9
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