Tucker drew a breath and opened the door, wondering how he could reach her. Wondering whether he could reach her.
It was chilly out on the deck, but not actually cold here at the end of September. In fact, it seemed warmer here than it had been in Richmond, and Tucker didn’t bother to button his shirt as he joined Sarah at the railing.
Before he could speak, she did, almost idly. “I knew when you woke up. Isn’t that strange?”
“Maybe not,” he said slowly. “Maybe not for you.”
She was fully dressed in jeans and a sweater, and definitely wide awake as she glanced at him. “That makes you uneasy.”
It did, as a matter of fact, but he denied it. “Of course not.”
Her smile, clear in the moonlight, held a twist of bitter certainty. “Oh, no? Then what about this: I’m changing, Tucker.”
“Changing how?” He was cautious, not only because of what she was saying, but because he realized he had caught her at a raw moment when she might reveal more than she wanted to.
She turned her gaze back to the lake and put her hands on the deck railing as if she needed something to hold on to. But her voice remained steady. “Whatever was born in me six months ago is…growing. Bigger. More powerful. Affecting my other senses and even the way I think. I…know things I shouldn’t know. Not because I have a vision, but just because. I feel things I don’t understand and can’t explain.”
“Sarah—”
“I’m changing. I don’t know how to stop it. And I don’t know what I’ll be when it’s over.”
Tucker had always assumed it would be a cool thing to see the future, and God knew it would be helpful and less painful to see one’s mistakes ahead of time and have a shot at not making them. At least that was what he had always thought. But he was beginning to realize that the future might not be such a cool thing to see after all. Not when monsters lurked there. Not when all you saw was death, and danger, and frightening things. He had never seen anybody with haunted eyes until he had looked into Sarah’s the night she’d had a vision of men coming to kill her.
“She never wanted to be found, you know. That’s why you couldn’t.”
That was when he had started to believe in Sarah Gallagher.
He drew a breath and kept his own voice quiet. “Maybe that’s natural, Sarah. For you.”
“You mean for what I’ve become.”
“I mean for who you’ve become. Who you’re becoming. How could you not change after what’s happened to you?”
“Words,” she said softly. “Just words. They don’t mean a lot to me these days.”
“Then tell me what I can do to help you.”
“I told you the day we met. You can’t help me.”
“Sarah, I thought we had gotten past that.”
“Then you were wrong.” She turned her head once more to look at him, and something hard and bright glittered in her eyes. “You think we’re safe here? We’re not. They’re everywhere. All around us. All the time. We’re never going to be safe until it’s over. And it won’t be over until they get me. That’s one of the things I know now. One of the things I can’t explain knowing.”
“You were wrong about Margo,” he reminded her, still holding on to that evidence of fallibility.
“Strike one. Do I get three before I’m out?” Her voice was tight and brittle.
Tucker frowned suddenly as his own instincts and senses stirred and began talking to him. Flatly, he said, “I’m not going anywhere, Sarah.”
She sent him a quick glance, then returned her gaze to the lake. Her profile was immobile, unrevealing.
“I’m not going to run away from this,” he went on steadily. “From you. I don’t believe you’re some kind of freak. I’m not afraid of you, or of anything you might see.”
“You’re lying,” she whispered. “You are afraid of what I might see. If I look inside you.”
He had never really been faced with a genuine psychic before, not one like Sarah, so Tucker had not realized, in all the years of his search, that he would in fact be wary of one. But he was. And the only thing he knew for certain was that he couldn’t lie to her about it.
“This is new to me too,” he reminded her quietly. “Give me a little time to get used to it.”
“Time is something we don’t have a lot of.”
“Maybe. But you might at least stop trying to scare me off. I don’t scare so easily.”
Almost inaudibly, she said, “What I know would scare you. What I’ve seen.”
Tucker reached out and turned her to face him, keeping his hands on her shoulders. She felt very slight to him, and there was a tremor running through her tense body.
Is she strong enough to make it through this?
“Sarah, we’re going to survive this. Both of us.”