“Which is?”
“I don’t know.”
After a moment, Tucker drew a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m spending the night,” he said flatly.
She looked back over her shoulder at him, her eyes flickering again. “To guard the door? To keep the monster out? Don’t bother. You can’t save me from him.”
Her fatalistic attitude irritated Tucker. “At least I’m willing to try, which is more than I can say for you. Where’s the phone? This is something Sergeant Lewis should know about.”
“He can’t save me either,” she said softly, returning her attention to the stew.
“Why the hell not? He’s a cop, isn’t he? It’s his job.”
Sarah shook her head. “To protect and serve? No. There’s nothing he can do—even if he believed me. Even if he believed you. And he wouldn’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
She turned toward him again, leaning back against the counter and picking up her coffee cup. She was smiling. “Can’t I? Then you’ve wasted a trip, haven’t you, Tucker?”
It silenced him, but only for a moment. “You’re not going to do anything about that guy out there? Not even report to the police?”
“Not even report to the police. I’ve learned to accept what I can’t change.”
“You accepted me awfully easily,” he said curiously. “Why? Was our meeting—meant to be?” The question wasn’t nearly as mocking as he had intended it to sound.
“I recognized you,” she replied with yet another shrug.
“Recognized me? From where?”
“I had seen you.” There was an evasive note in her voice, something Tucker was quick to pick up on.
“Where had you seen me, Sarah?”
There was a moment of silence. She looked steadily down at her cup, a slight frown between her brows. Then, finally, softly, she said, “I had seen you in my dreams. My…waking nightmares.”
“You mean you had a vision and I was in it?”
Sarah almost flinched. “I hate that word. Vision. It makes me sound like some cheap carnival sideshow mystic. Pay your money and come into the tent, and Madam Sarah will look into her crystal ball and tell you your future. All filled with hope and dreams. Except that isn’t what I do. I don’t have a crystal ball. And I can’t get answers on demand.”
Patient, Tucker brought her back to the point. “All right, then. You had seen me in your—waking nightmares. You had seen me in your future. So you knew you could trust me?”
Her slight frown returned. “It has nothing to do with trust. I saw you. I knew you’d be there. When it happens. I knew you weren’t involved in it. At least—I don’t believe you are. But you’re there. When it happens.”
The writer in Tucker was going crazy with her tenses, but he thought he understood her. At least up to a point. “When what happens, Sarah?”
She looked at him, finally. Her gaze was steady and her voice matter-of-fact when she replied, “When they kill me.”
TWO
“You bungled it,” Duran said.
Varden stiffened, but there was no sign of anger in his voice when he said, “At the time, it seemed the best idea.”
“A house fire? Guaranteed to draw law enforcement as well as numerous spectators? How did you expect to remove her from that situation without attracting further attention?”
“Obviously, I intended to remove her before the fire was noticed.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“The fire spread faster than I bargained for.”
Duran turned his head and looked at the other man. Gently, he said, “It was an old house. They tend to burn quickly.”
Accepting that rebuke with what grace he could muster, Varden merely nodded without further attempts to defend himself.
Duran gazed at him a moment longer, then moved away from the window of the cramped hotel room and settled into a chair across from a long couch. “Sit down.” It wasn’t an invitation.
Taking a place on the couch, Varden said in a carefully explanatory tone, “I was under the impression that the judgment of the Council demanded quick action. Tyrell said—”
“Tyrell reports to me,” Duran said with an edge to his quiet voice. “The decision is mine.”
“You thought she could be salvaged?”
“What I thought is not your concern. You follow orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
Duran waited a moment, his gaze boring into Varden. Then, almost casually, he said, “I want Sarah Gallagher.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re going to get her for me, Varden. Aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” Duran said. “That is good.”
Tucker drew a long, slow breath, trying with calm and logic to keep the chill inside him from spreading. “When who kills you, Sarah?”
“I don’t know who they are. Whenever I try to concentrate on them, to see them, all I see are shadows. Misshapen, sliding away whenever I try to focus on them, impossible to identify as anything except…shadows.” She shook her head a little, helpless. “This is all new to me, in case you didn’t know that. I was mugged last March, and a head injury put me in a coma. When I came out of it, I started having the waking nightmares.”
He nodded, familiar with the facts because a newspaper story had reported them—and had brought him here. “I understand that. What I don’t understand is what, exactly, makes you believe that someone is going to kill you. What did you see?”
The bell on the microwave dinged, and Sarah turned to set her coffee aside and get the stew out. “Haven’t you ever had nightmares, Tucker? The surreal kind, full of frightening images?”
“Of course I have. They made zero sense. And they sure as hell didn’t predict the future.”
“My waking nightmares do.” She was clearly unoffended by his skepticism.
“Okay, then, tell me what you saw. Why are you so convinced you’re going to be killed?”
Sarah didn’t respond for several minutes as she transferred the thawed stew to the pot on the stove and began stirring it as it heated. All her attention seemed to be fixed on the task. And when she did begin speaking, Tucker thought that her voice was very steady the way someone’s was when they were telling you something that scared the living shit out of them.
“Because I saw my grave. Waiting for me.”
“Sarah, that doesn’t have to mean—”
She nodded jerkily. “There are other things I don’t remember, images that terrified me. But the grave…that was all too clear. It has a tombstone, and the tombstone is already inscribed. It has my name on it. In the…waking nightmare…I’m falling toward it, into it, so fast I don’t see the date of—of my death. But the month is October, and the year is this year. And just as the darkness of the grave closes over me, I hear them applauding. And I know they’ve won. I know they’ve killed me.”
“They?”
“The shadows.”
“Sarah, shadows can’t hurt you.”
She looked at him with old eyes. “These can. And will.”
Tucker watched her as she turned to check on the steaming stew and put the thawing bread in the oven. There was a lot for him to think about. On the face of it, his first inclination was to ascribe her “waking nightmare” to something she’d eaten or a vivid imagination; as badly as he wanted to believe in precognitive abilities, he had yet to find a genuine psychic, and years of frustration had inured him to disillusionment.
He certainly had no proof that Sarah Gallagher was indeed psychic. The information he had gathered seemed to indicate that she was, and those witnesses who claimed to have heard her predictions prior to later events seemed both reliable and reputable. But there was no way to be sure that her “predictions” had not come from some as-yet-undiscovered means of foreknowledge that had nothing to do with so-called extrasensory perception.
Each of the “predictions” he knew of could, after all, be rationally explained, given a few reasonable possibilities. Months before, she had been mugged on her way home one night, and the resulting head injury had put her into a coma for sixteen days. She could have overheard information while in that coma, for instance, and—consciously, perhaps—forgotten where it had come from. That could explain her apparent foreknowledge of the early birth of a nurse’s baby, which had been her first recorded prediction. Some doctor with a suspicion of what could happen might have mentioned it within Sarah’s hearing. And though her prediction of a Chicago hotel fire that had killed forty people certainly seemed remarkable, Tucker had discovered that one of the men later arrested for arson had been treated for a minor traffic injury in the same Richmond hospital where Sarah had lain in a coma. It was a coincidence that bothered him.