The First Prophet

by Kay Hooper

  She was at the door of the sitting room before it occurred to her that he would have to go through the bedroom in order to get to the bathroom. She paused and looked back at him. “Don’t worry about disturbing me when you need to use the bathroom. I always…I sleep like the dead.”

  Still standing at the window, Tucker merely nodded. “Good night, Sarah.”

  “Good night.”

  Sarah tried not to think very much after that. She pushed the bedroom door to but didn’t completely close it. She thoughtfully left a light on in the bathroom when she was finished in there so that Tucker would be able to see his way. Then she shed the robe, climbed into the huge bed, and turned off the lamp.

  She wanted to sleep, to just close her eyes and let everything stop for a while. She needed that. But when she closed her eyes, the worries and questions and thoughts refused to stop.

  Who are they?

  Try to control the thing inside you. Try to see something to help us.

  Why are psychics so important—or such a threat—to them?

  There isn’t much time left. I feel that.

  Why did this have to happen to me?

  All I see is death.

  Tucker needs to find Lydia.

  Am I going to die?

  Am I going mad?

  Finally, even though she knew she was too tired and afraid to make the attempt, Sarah concentrated on closing out everything except one single, vitally important question. Who are they? She fixed it in her mind until it was so clear she could see the letters of each word.

  Then, hesitantly and very afraid, she tried to open up her mind, her senses, and invite the answer to come.

  At first, all Sarah saw was the question, bright as neon. Gradually, though, the question dimmed and all around it the blackness lightened. She saw a large, featureless building very briefly, just the flash of the image, but it made her skin crawl, as if she stood briefly at the mouth of a dark cave where something unspeakably brutish dwelled. Then she heard the low murmur of many voices, what they were saying indistinguishable but rousing in her another powerful primitive response as the hairs on the back of her neck stirred a warning.

  Wrong. It was all wrong, worse than bad…

  Then she saw the shadows. They were many, all shapes and sizes, tall and thin, short and squat, manlike and bestial. Nightmare shapes. They moved rapidly, flitting across her inner field of vision with an energy and purpose that was chilling. Arms reaching out. Hands grasping…something. She couldn’t see what they were doing. Couldn’t see what it was they caught and held so avidly. She couldn’t see their faces.

  She couldn’t see their faces.

  Panicked, Sarah wrenched herself out of it without even realizing she was going to. When her eyes opened, she found herself sitting up in bed, her heart pounding and breathing rapid and shallow, as if she had awakened from a nightmare. Was that it? Had her psychic abilities actually shown her something that was real, or had her fears and worries simply been given frightening shape by her anxious mind?

  She didn’t have the same sense that a vision left her with, that what she had seen was real. There was no feeling in her of inevitability. Instead, what she felt was a profound but wordless and nameless uneasiness. A fear that was purely instinctive, like the primal response to snakes and spiders and noises in the night.

  Sarah wanted badly to get out of bed and go into the sitting room. To Tucker. She wanted to tell him what she thought she had seen and how it made her feel. She wanted to hear him tell her that there was nothing to be afraid of, and everything would be all right.

  But she didn’t, of course. Instead, she lay back on the pillow and tried to reassure herself. You’re a grown-up and hardly as weak as you’ve been acting. You’ve got to stop leaning on him—even if you survive this, he won’t always be around. Think about it. Figure it out.

  It had, likely, only been the frightened musings of her mind. And even if it hadn’t been, even if she had actually been able to tap into some kind of psychic awareness, what had she seen? Nothing really. A building. Some shadows, distorted as shadows always were, without a clear shape or texture and scaring her because…She didn’t know why. Because shadows scared her. Because her world had been turned upside down, and everything seemed to scare her these days.

  Her head was throbbing, the pressure behind her eyes building.

  That alien thing in her head was growing.

  Tucker pushed the room service cart out into the hallway, then settled down at the desk with coffee and his laptop. But he didn’t turn his attention to the computer immediately. Instead, he brooded.

  Here he was in a hotel suite with a woman he hadn’t known a week, on the run possibly for his life and hers, grappling with a puzzle the enormity of which was the stuff of paranoid fantasies…and he had hardly bothered to stop a moment and ask himself why.

  The simple answer, of course, was that he wanted her to tell him about Lydia. And that was certainly the reason he had first sought her out. But from the moment he had elected to spend the night on the couch outside her bedroom because a watcher with unknown motives lurked in the dark night, he had turned a corner, and from that point there had really been no going back.

  None of his friends, he thought, would be surprised to find him involved in something so bizarre. He had a reputation for getting hip-deep in things purely out of intellectual curiosity and the love of challenge, which was undoubtedly one of his motivations in this case. It was a puzzle to end all puzzles, that was for sure.

  But it was more than that. Much more. During the past days, he had realized that he was with Sarah because he wanted to protect her and knew that he could. He had been certain of that.

  What he hadn’t known was whether he could save her.

  Now, especially, he was conscious of doubts he’d never felt before. This thing was so big, so bizarre—and so clearly deadly. Sarah was already in more pain than he had bargained for, pain that promised to get worse before it got better. If it got better.

  And there was an added complication now. No matter how wary her abilities made him, the undeniable fact was that Tucker was having a tough time keeping his distance. He was so aware of her all the time, so conscious of her every movement, of the sound of her voice and the fleeting expressions that crossed her face. He wanted to touch her.

  He wanted to wake up next to her.

  But he couldn’t deny that he hadn’t come to terms with her abilities; after so many years of charlatans, the real thing had definitely thrown him off balance. And he also couldn’t deny that even if Sarah felt something for him—and he had no idea whether she did—she was in no shape physically or emotionally to take a lover.

  He didn’t think she was quite so fragile as she had been days ago, but at times, especially when she was tired, she still seemed to him too frail and shut in herself to be able to go on much longer. When he looked at her, he had the sense of something almost ethereal. Unreal. As if some delicate creature of myth and legend had drifted out of the mist and into his life.

  That’s the Celt in me.

  Or maybe just the writer, steeped in mythology and legend, shaping daydreams in the mind and giving them form on paper. That man could easily imagine Sarah as an elf or faerie, native to some dreamy betweenworld and just visiting this one, vulnerable to danger, terrifyingly fragile and lovely. Enchanting him because, in ancient times, the current of love between humans and faeries had run deep and strong, even though the price demanded for such joy had all too often been death…

  Definitely the Celt in me.

  Her abilities might make her seem otherworldly, but Sarah was all too human, Tucker knew. Human enough to be very afraid of what she could see and the fact that she could see it. Human enough to be in pain, to want to withdraw even more when she was afraid, to push him further away.

  Especially when he pushed her.

  He didn’t want to push her. He didn’t want to hurt her. Didn’t want to see her fear and dread at the t
hought of deliberately trying to open doors she would much rather keep closed. And he definitely didn’t like seeing her draw even further away from him when he suggested she try. But Tucker was all too aware of time passing, and even more conscious of how damnably little they knew.

  They needed to—had to—use their only real ace, and that was Sarah.

  If the other side was after her with such grim determination because they either feared her or valued her, then Tucker thought the chances were very good that Sarah could use whatever it was they feared or desired against them. The question, of course, was whether she could do it. Whether she could even try to do it.

  As much as he had learned over the years about psychic abilities and the paranormal, Tucker still felt very unsure about what to tell Sarah, about how to advise her. He was not psychic, and as he’d told her, he couldn’t begin to feel what she felt. Not even his vivid writer’s imagination could help him to help her.

  Until he had met her, he had seen in the world of the paranormal very little he’d believed to be genuine. And even the few psychics who had impressed him with their abilities had been erratic not only in what they had been able to do but in their interpretations of what they had seen and sensed. That was why he had, in the beginning at least, questioned Sarah’s interpretations. But she seemed—so far—less erratic than those psychics had been, and far, far less likely to try to “fill in the blanks” of what she saw with hunches and outright guesses.

  Maybe that would come in time. Maybe every genuine psychic learned to create a patchwork of vision and guess and interpretation in order to present something complete and understandable to those inquiring. Maybe it was simple human nature.

  And then there were those things not so easily explained.

  “She never wanted to be found, you know. That’s why you couldn’t.”

  A quiet statement, offered in a quiet moment, as if it had simply come to Sarah without her bidding. A reluctant glimpse inside the mind of someone she did not know, had never known. Someone who had been gone for a very long time.

  Sarah had simply known.

  Her abilities, Tucker believed, were still new and raw. Unformed, in a sense. Unrestrained by the checks and guards and filters her mind would no doubt struggle in time to erect. They might at this point be beyond her ability to control, but they were also undoubtedly powerful, and the force of them was undiluted by her conscious mind. Where an experienced psychic might try to interpret what was seen, Sarah merely reported it.

  This is what I see. This is what I know.

  When she looked—even absently without her full attention—she saw.

  He had to make her look. No matter what it cost her.

  No matter what it cost him.

  The usual crowd populated Venice Beach, but it had been a slow day for Daisy Novak. Plenty of curious looks were directed toward her kiosk, but not many seemed eager to pay twenty bucks to get their fortunes told.

  Absently, she polished her crystal ball with her sleeve and watched the people wander past. It was nearly dark, but there were plenty of lights around, and still plenty of people, and Daisy hesitated. She was stiff after sitting here so long. Damned arthritis. But just another twenty bucks or so would mean she probably wouldn’t have to work on Saturday. Another hour, then. But no longer; her cat, Moses, would be waiting for his supper.

  She reached under the draped table and flipped the switch that turned on the light under her crystal ball. A nice effect, if she did say so herself. Especially since her kiosk was in one of the dimmer areas of the boardwalk. The light shone upward through the crystal, and she knew it made her face look nicely spooky and unearthly.

  And it was effective too. Within minutes, a customer sat down on the other side of the table.

  “Twenty dollars for ten minutes?” She pushed a bill across the table.

  Daisy smiled and slid the bill into her voluminous blouse. “Yes, indeed. Do you have a preference, Megan? Tarot, palm reading, crystal ball?”

  Megan blinked, then smiled. “You’re pretty good.” She was young, in her twenties, and pretty, dressed as casually as everyone around her in shorts and a skimpy top, and she had that I-dare-you expression that Daisy easily recognized. “Let’s try out the ball.”

  Automatically, Daisy cupped her hands around the base of the crystal and peered at it intently. Now she regretted turning on the light; the damn thing made her eyes water. “Past, present, or future?” she murmured. “The crystal shows all.”

  “Suit yourself,” Megan said.

  Daisy glanced at her, noted the challenging expression, and felt irritated enough to reach a bit deeper than usual. So this one was a skeptic, was she? Well, then, Daisy would just give her her money’s worth.

  Briskly, Daisy said, “I see buildings, with young people walking all around—ah. You’re a graduate student. Economics.” She sneaked a glance up and saw Megan blink again. Good. A direct hit. “Single, but you have a boyfriend who is…a musician. You spend weekends with him. Hmmm. Doesn’t like the missionary position much, does he? Wants you to do all the work whenever possible. And he just bought a book with more positions illustrated for next weekend—”

  “All right, that’s enough about that.” Megan’s face was flushed. But there was an eager light in her eyes now. “My future. What’s my future?”

  Daisy peered more intently, but she wasn’t looking into the crystal. She was looking inward. “I see…a man. He’s…he’s in the shadows. He’s giving you something. Money. He’s paying you.” Daisy felt a chill spread through her and was only half-aware that her voice had grown anxious. “Don’t, Megan. Don’t go to him for your money. He’s…there’s something wrong with him. With all of them. Don’t become a part of their plans. He—they—want you to do something bad. Helping them is a bad thing. Don’t do it—”

  She reached across the table instinctively to grasp Megan’s hand and only then realized that the girl had fled.

  More than a little unnerved herself, Daisy turned off the crystal’s light and packed up to go home. Jeez, what had she seen? A guy in the shadows, a guy she’d felt was somehow not normal. This was California, for Christ’s sake—nobody was normal here. So why had it scared her so much?

  Daisy tried to push it out of her mind, but she was still nervous as she walked home, jumping at shadows and noises. She told herself to calm down, reminded herself that this was a safe route home and always had been. But that reading bothered her.

  She was half a block from home when a shadow loomed out at her from an alleyway, and she didn’t jump quite fast enough. A hand like iron grabbed her arm and pulled her into the alley.

  Daisy should have screamed. But the moment he touched her, coldly terrifying images flooded her mind so vividly that they stole her breath.

  “Hello, Daisy,” he said gently.

  She looked up at his shadowy face, and in the moment granted to her for understanding, she suddenly knew what he was.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  She never saw the knife.

  By noon the next day, Tucker’s laptop was sorting through the most recent download of media information and official reports, which left him and Sarah with nothing to do. They had both awakened early, breakfasted quietly, and said little to each other during the hours since. It had been agreed that they would remain here until early afternoon, leaving this hotel and continuing their journey to the next stop. Syracuse.

  That destination was not so arbitrary as it might seem; one of Tucker’s tasks this morning had been to begin putting together a list of psychics living in the northeast, and the first name on that list belonged to a man who lived in Syracuse. Since that city was along their general route northward, they had decided to make that their next stop.

  Whether they contacted the psychic would be decided later.

  “Why don’t we go downstairs and have lunch in one of the restaurants?” Tucker suggested as his laptop hummed quietly. “You must be more than ready to get
out of this room.”

  Sarah, who had occupied herself by restlessly watching the news and mostly not watching one old movie on television, was definitely ready. “That sounds good.”

  They left the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door to prevent housekeeping from cleaning the room while they were gone; Tucker didn’t want his laptop disturbed.

  Sarah found herself looking around warily as they crossed the vast lobby to one of the restaurants, but nothing awoke suspicion. Everybody around them looked and acted normal and unthreatening.

  But so did Sergeant Lewis.

  “You’re very quiet,” Tucker said, after they’d given their order to the waiter.

  “Am I? Sorry.” Her head no longer hurt, but that unsettling pulsing sensation was still present, that heartbeat throb behind her eyes.

  “You don’t have to apologize for it, Sarah.”

  “Okay,” she said absently.

  “Is anything bothering you? I mean, anything in particular?”

  She looked at him for a moment, then smiled impersonally and allowed her gaze to slide away and roam idly past the low wall defining the restaurant and out into the lobby. “No, not really.”

  The restaurant was fairly busy and the lobby more so. She watched people moving about, many of them wearing business suits and name tags as they clustered in the various seating areas and walked briskly toward whatever seminars they were due to attend in the nearby meeting rooms.

  “Are you sure? You seem a bit…preoccupied today.”

  “Do I?” One man caught her attention, and it didn’t surprise her that he would have. He was extraordinarily handsome, for one thing—and despite what she thought was a scar down his left cheek. Very distinctively, his black hair sported both a widow’s peak and a streak of pure white at the left temple.

  He was clearly powerful physically, broad-shouldered and athletic, and more than one passing woman did a double take. He was sitting alone in a seating area designed for two, the second glass on his table mute indication that he was not as alone as he appeared.