The First Prophet

by Kay Hooper

  “I thought he might be,” Brodie said gently.

  A faint grin was sent his way before Josh snapped the lighter shut and plunged them back into darkness. “My watchdog. Are you working with Cait again?”

  “Yeah. She’s at the hotel. And when I get back there, she’ll pretend she isn’t the least bit curious about who my mysterious source is—and it’s killing her. Don’t worry, though. She knows the score. She knows only what she needs to know, just like the rest of us.”

  “So if one falls, only a few more can be taken down at the same time,” Josh murmured. “Like the Resistance cells in World War Two, protecting those at the core, the few who know the identity of all the fighters in every cell. The safest way, I know. But it makes it all the more difficult for you to work effectively as a team.”

  “What choice do we have?” It was a rhetorical question, and Brodie didn’t wait for any attempt to answer it. “Thanks for the data, Josh.”

  “Let me know, any hour of the day or night, if you need anything else. And I mean anything, John.”

  “I will.”

  They didn’t shake hands or say good-bye, though both knew it might easily be months before they saw each other again.

  If they saw each other again.

  Josh slid from the car with hardly a sound, and a few moments later Brodie saw headlights come on farther back along the street. An exceptionally quiet motor purred as the dark sedan passed his own car, turned a corner, and vanished into the night.

  After a few minutes, Brodie started his own car and pulled away from the curb, his eyes automatically seeking any sign that the meeting had been noticed as he left the quiet neighborhood and headed back to the hotel and his impatiently waiting partner.

  Tucker came abruptly out of a deep sleep, his first disoriented thought that Pendragon wanted out. The cat had mysteriously vanished by the time he had been ready to bunk down on the couch, and Tucker had been reluctant to knock on Sarah’s closed door to find out whether he had somehow slipped in there with her.

  So the faint scratching sound brought him upright on the couch, filled with the sense of something left unfinished. The cat wants out. Damned cat. He blinked at the morning brightness, automatically checking his watch to find that it was seven thirty, then pushed the blanket away and swung his feet to the floor.

  It wasn’t until then that he looked toward the door and saw the knob turning.

  Even as he heard the security system beep a mild warning as the door was opened, Tucker was on his feet and moving swiftly in that direction. It occurred to him belatedly that he didn’t have a damned thing handy with which to defend himself, but that didn’t stop him.

  He almost decked her.

  Wide blue eyes took him in—fist raised, bare-chested, beard-stubbled, and wearing only a pair of boxers decorated with cartoon characters—and she let out a rich chuckle.

  “Well, I would say Sarah finally struck gold after way too much brass, but if you’re sleeping on the couch, handsome, she’s obviously still missing the train!”

  THREE

  Margo James was a redhead like Sarah, but all resemblance stopped there. She was tall and voluptuous, her gestures and movements were quick and almost birdlike, and she talked with blunt, brisk cheerfulness, contentedly misusing words and mixing metaphors right and left.

  Tucker had plenty of time to observe all these traits when he had returned from his quick retreat to shower, shave, and dress, because Margo insisted on fixing breakfast, telling him that Sarah always slept till nine at least.

  “I’m the early bird, and she’s the bat.”

  Tucker stopped himself from wincing. “You mean the night owl?”

  Margo waved a spatula. “Yeah, right. It’s amazing that we get along so well. We’re really as different as afternoon and morning. Take our antiques, for instance. Sarah has a real feeling for what’s genuine but doesn’t have a clue how things should be priced, whereas I know the value of a thing down to the penny—but can be fooled by a fake really easily.”

  “Sounds like you two are perfect partners,” Tucker commented, cautiously sipping coffee that was very, very strong and had a shot at holding a spoon upright in the cup.

  “Yeah, it’s been great. Hey, I fed that cat she’s adopted and let him out. He seemed to want out.”

  “I was supposed to let him out last night,” Tucker admitted, “but he disappeared on me.”

  Margo shrugged. “Maybe he slept in Sarah’s room. She told me he does that sometimes.”

  Tucker wondered when, in that case, Sarah had let the cat out of her room, but it didn’t seem important enough to worry about.

  In a lightning change of mood, Margo said with sudden gravity, “Jeez, I was sorry to hear about Sarah’s house. She loved that place, poured her heart into restoring it.”

  “How did you hear about it?” he asked casually.

  “On TV—the news last night. That’s why I came back ahead of schedule, of course, even though she didn’t call me. Maybe especially because she didn’t call me. I know Sarah. She’s as strong as bronze—”

  “Steel,” Tucker murmured, unable to stop himself.

  “Yeah, steel. Strong as steel, thinks she can handle anything and everything on her own—but she’s had a fairly bad year, and I just don’t know how much more she can take. First that damned mugging, and then David—” Her gaze cut swiftly to Tucker. “You know about David?”

  He nodded without comment.

  Margo was obviously still trying to size up the relationship since Tucker had introduced himself only by name, and was clearly disappointed that he didn’t react in some dramatic way to mention of the last man in Sarah’s life.

  “Yeah, well. First we find out the bastard was not one of your basic in-sickness-and-in-health guys when she got hurt; he could barely bring himself to visit her every couple of days, for Christ’s sake, and made it screamingly obvious he wanted to be someplace else when he did show up. Then, when she finally comes out of the coma…”

  “Able to see the future?” Tucker supplied when her voice trailed off.

  She grimaced. “Yeah. I didn’t know if you knew.”

  Again, he nodded without comment.

  Margo flipped a fried egg—the fifth so far, with two more still in the pan—onto a plate on the counter beside the stove, and Tucker was mildly tempted to ask how many people she planned to feed. But he didn’t want her to be distracted from the subject at hand.

  “She really can do it,” Margo said, defending her friend staunchly. “It scared the hell out of her at first—still does, I guess. Well, wouldn’t it you?”

  “Definitely.”

  Margo nodded. “Yeah, me too. In fact—Well, never mind that. The point is that Sarah’s life has been hell this year. And now the house…jeez. The news said the cops suspected arson?”

  “So I understand.” He didn’t mention the stranger who might still be outside watching; he hadn’t been able to casually look out a window without drawing her attention, and he wasn’t sure how much—if anything—Margo knew.

  “That means the insurance won’t pay off for ages,” she said in a practical spirit. “Damn. She can stay here as long as necessary, of course—this place is half hers—but it would be a lot better if she could concentrate on rebuilding right away. With everything at fives and sixes like this, she’ll have way too much time to think about…stuff.”

  Tucker didn’t bother to correct her. “About what happened to David…?” he probed, wondering whether she knew that Sarah’s latest prediction supposedly concerned her own death.

  Margo’s exotic face darkened. “That son of a bitch. I know you aren’t supposed to speak ill of the dead, but if you ask me, he got what he deserved. If he’d treated Sarah with a modem of respect, things might have been different.”

  Tucker cast about in his mind and settled on modicum. Yeah—a modicum of respect.

  “But he didn’t,” Margo continued, oblivious of having misspoken. “Oh, he
was charming enough—Sarah’s a sucker for charm—but he sure as hell backed off fast enough when she got hurt. He made a pass at me while she was in the hospital. Can you believe that?” She shot Tucker a fierce look. “Poor Sarah, lying there with a head injury and the doctors shaking their heads because they don’t know if she’ll ever come out of it, and that bastard’s leering and pinching me on the ass!”

  Tucker just stopped himself from commenting that he could understand that other man’s urge, base though it had certainly been; as complimentary as he meant the words to be, he was both old enough and wise enough to know she wouldn’t appreciate them. “But things really changed when Sarah got out of the hospital?” he asked instead.

  “With David, you mean?” Margo nodded. “Oh, yeah. Well, before that, really. When she predicted the nurse would have her baby. And the hotel fire, she predicted that in front of a bunch of us, David included. He thought she was crazy when she said it’d happen. Then, when it did—he really thought she was crazy.”

  “And it scared him?”

  “I’ll say. But before he could come up with a halfway decent excuse to break it off with her, she saw his future. He lasted about a week with Sarah worrying about railroad crossings, then bolted for California so fast you’d have thought his ass was on fire.”

  “And died out there—at a railroad crossing.”

  “I didn’t grieve for him. But Sarah nearly fell apart. For weeks, she wouldn’t even leave her house, wouldn’t talk to anybody except me—and hardly to me.” Margo frowned a little as she finished the eighth and final egg and turned the burner off, then plugged in the toaster and reached for the loaf of bread on the counter. “I don’t know if she would have come out of it, except that the visions—I mean the waking nightmares—stopped for a while. It gave her a chance to get her bearings, I guess.”

  “And when the—waking nightmares came back?”

  Margo shook her head. “Well, either they didn’t come very often, or she didn’t tell me about all of them, because I only know about a few. Mostly minor things—except for that serial killer out in San Francisco. That one really freaked her out.” She paused for a moment or so, then added soberly, “But she’s been awfully quiet these last months. Awfully quiet.”

  Tucker drew a breath and said, “You’re afraid of her too. Aren’t you?”

  She looked at him, those brilliant eyes darkened, and said shakily, “Oh, I’m afraid. But not of her. I’m afraid of what she can see. Because she saw my future. And she won’t tell me what it is.”

  The morning sun was halfway to its noon position, and long shadows stretched from the west side of the building in downtown Richmond. A tall woman with short and rather spiky blond hair stood motionless on the balcony, virtually invisible in the shadows and among tall potted plants. She cursed absently as a palm frond stirred by the breeze waved in front of her binoculars, shifted her weight just a bit, then went still again as her field of vision cleared. Her attention was fixed on the rather shabby hotel across the street, and a particular room a floor below her own fifth-floor vantage point.

  The drapes at that window had not been drawn, and a generous percentage of the room was visible to her.

  Careless. Duran must be losing his touch.

  Two men were in the room. She would have given a lot to know what they discussed as they sat so casually across from each other. But there had been no time to plant listening devices, and from her angle, it was impossible even to make an attempt at lip-reading—a skill she had worked very hard to acquire.

  She lowered the binoculars, lips pressed so tightly together there was no hint of softness there, and vivid green eyes furious. “Damn,” she whispered. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  She eased back through the balcony doors into the apartment she had—so to speak—sublet and bent over a lovely Regency desk. The former occupant’s work had been unceremoniously shoved aside, and an open laptop sat in the center of the pretty floral blotter.

  “Jeez, enough with the plant motif,” she muttered, momentarily distracted as she glanced around at the very pretty, very feminine, and very floral bedroom in which she stood. Frilly was hardly Murphy’s style. Barely suppressing a shudder, she fixed her attention on the screen of the laptop.

  A section of a city map, brilliantly colored, met her intent gaze. She studied it for a long moment, frowning, then tapped a few keys to produce a close-up of the section. Her index finger traced the distance from a square representing the hotel across the street to a quieter street where former residences had been turned into small businesses.

  “Too close. Dammit, they have to know where she is.” Murphy wasn’t even conscious of speaking aloud, so accustomed to working alone that talking to herself had become a habit.

  The words had barely left her mouth when the very faint sound of a key in the lock of the apartment’s front door brought her head up alertly, and this time the curse that left her lips was a mere whisper.

  Just my luck that Ms. Bank Vice President went off this morning and left her damned lunch on the kitchen counter!

  Swiftly, unwilling to wait and find out whether the apartment’s legal occupant would choose to come into the bedroom for some reason, she closed the laptop and dropped it into the pouch hanging against her hip. Without a wasted motion, she backed out onto the balcony and slid the door closed.

  There was a fire escape, which was good, but leaving the shelter of the greenery meant she was too visible, even in the shadows, for her peace of mind. Still, being seen by the wrong person was infinitely preferable to being arrested for breaking and entering, which was what likely would happen if she remained on the balcony.

  She moved quickly and quietly down to street level and, once there, paused only long enough to stow the binoculars in their pocket of the pouch containing the computer.

  The pouch was not conspicuous, resembling nothing so much as a large, if bulky, shoulder bag, but someone might well have taken notice of the binoculars.

  A quick glance around told her that none of the few people about seemed interested in her. She was just about to relax when a carefully casual glance up at the window across the street brought her to a dead stop just two steps away from the fire escape.

  Duran was at the window, and he saw her.

  He was too far away for her to recognize his face, but she knew it was him. She knew he was looking at her. And she knew he recognized her. She could feel it. Like some night animal caught unexpectedly in the light, she stood frozen, not breathing, a panicky sensation stirring deep inside her. It was not a feeling she was willing to define to herself, though if asked she would have said angrily that it was hatred. Pure hatred.

  If asked, Duran would have said the same thing.

  The moment seemed to last forever, and if a car horn had not rudely shattered the quiet of the morning, there was no telling how long she would have stood there staring up at the man in the window. But the horn brought her to her senses, and with a soft little sound more violent than a curse, she hurried to the corner and around it, taking herself out of his field of vision.

  He turned away from the window and looked across the room at the other man.

  “What is it?” Varden asked, instantly alert.

  “We’ve run out of time,” Duran said.

  Sarah?

  She was struggling up out of the depths of an exhausted sleep, frantic to wake up and get control, to be able to shut out the whisper in her mind.

  Sarah, you must—

  Her eyes snapped open, and Sarah was awake. Her heart was pounding, and she could hear her own shuddery breathing. As always, once she was awake and aware, the voice fell silent.

  That voice. God, that voice.

  It had begun only a few days before, creeping into her awareness during both waking and sleeping dreams, during vulnerable or unguarded moments. A whisper without identity, eerily insistent. She didn’t even know whether it came from inside her…or somewhere else. It felt alien to her, yet she couldn
’t be sure it was—because all of this felt alien. The dreams. These frightening new abilities. The feelings she couldn’t explain even to herself.

  All she really knew was that all of it terrified her.

  She pulled herself out of bed and went to take a shower, heavy-eyed after lying awake for most of the night. It wasn’t until she came back into her bedroom and began dressing that she heard a loud laugh and the cheerful notes of Margo’s voice.

  Margo. Dear God.

  Sarah knew she should have called her, of course. Last night. She should have called her and reassured her that it was okay, that she didn’t have to come charging back home to support her partner and friend. Anything to keep Margo safely away from here. But Sarah’s thoughts last night had been fixed on her own troubles—and on Tucker Mackenzie.

  Real. He was real. Not a figment of her imagination. Not a face in a half-remembered nightmare, probably formed out of random features drifting like flotsam in her subconscious. Real. One more indication to her that the prediction of her own future was going to come true. One more sign that it was useless to fight what had to be.

  That was what she would have said—had, in fact, said—yesterday. But Tucker hadn’t merely presented himself as a sign or a symbol or an indication. He was a real man, and being a real man, he had his own thoughts and opinions and his own agenda. He wanted to believe.

  He wanted to believe in her.

  Sarah had seen something similar more times than she could count these last months. People with anxious voices and eager eyes and desperate smiles. Asking her, begging her, for answers. The difference was, those people hadn’t wanted the truth. No, they wanted answers, but only those answers that would make them feel good, or at least better, about their problems, their lives. They wanted reassurance, comfort, hope. They hadn’t been able to find it within their own belief system, whether that be religion or something else. So they had come to her.

  Tell me my husband forgave me before he died.