Tucker waited patiently.
Finally, tensely, she said, “What you don’t seem to understand is that sometimes…usually…I can’t tell the difference. A vision is a very clear-cut thing, no matter how you choose to interpret it. But impulses, hunches, feelings…these damned voices in my head…how do I know what they mean? How can I tell? Is it just my fears talking to me? My imagination working overtime? Or is there a truer voice I should be listening to?”
“You won’t know unless you listen.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “I’m not the one who has to sort through all the background noise you’ll hear. But I’ll help all I can, Sarah. Just tell me how to do that.”
“I don’t know how. I don’t even know that.”
After a moment, Tucker got up and joined her at the window. “Maybe we’re both demanding too much too fast from you. Sarah, I would never do anything to hurt you. I hope you know that.”
“I know you have only the best of intentions,” she murmured.
There was no particular emotion in her voice, but Tucker nevertheless felt there was something ironic in her remark, and it made him defensive. “No matter what they say about the road to hell, we’re not moving in that direction, Sarah, I promise you.”
“You should stop making promises.” She turned her head suddenly to look at him out of those too-dark eyes. “Your track record with them isn’t very good.”
He stiffened. “No?”
“No. Lydia would know that, wouldn’t she?”
He felt a chill that went clear down to his bones, and gazing into her eyes he had the abrupt and incredibly unsettling sense of something alien. Something…unnatural.
She knew. She knew it all.
ELEVEN
Sarah’s mouth curved in a faint, curiously mocking smile. “So we’re not moving toward hell, huh? Then why do you look at me as though I might have been spawned there?”
“Sarah—”
“Oh, don’t worry about it, Tucker. I’m not evil. I’m just not normal.”
He knew—he knew—she had deliberately reached into his head and his nightmares in order to keep him at a distance. As coolly as any surgeon, she had slipped her scalpel into him with full knowledge of the effect it would cause, and now she studied him with calm assessment, her eyes distant.
This was what he got for pushing her. Sarah was pushing back. And she was a lot stronger than either of them had given her credit for.
“I don’t believe you’re evil. And normal is what you get used to,” he managed.
“Right.”
He watched her move away from the window toward the doorway to the bedroom and made no effort to stop her. He wanted to. He wanted to call her back or go after her, to try to close the very real distance between them. But he couldn’t.
Sarah had discovered his Achilles’ heel, and if only to protect herself when he pushed and keep him out, she had learned how to use the knowledge against him. Until he could bring himself to face his demons, he had no defense against that tactic.
She paused at the door and looked back at him. As if nothing had happened, she said, “The psychic we’re going to try to approach tomorrow—what did you say his name was?”
“Mason,” Tucker replied automatically. “Neil Mason.”
She nodded. “Good night, Tucker.”
“Good night, Sarah.”
Patty Lowell looked out her kitchen window for the fourth time in half an hour, just to reassure herself that Brandon was still out there playing in the sandbox with his dinosaurs, safe in their fenced backyard. He was, and she stood there for a few moments watching him before returning to her baking. It wasn’t like her to be a nervous mother, but this was the third morning in a row that her five-year-old had awakened asking her anxiously if they could hide from the bad men.
Adam thought she was crazy, but Patty was convinced that Brandon had a special gift. He had always been an intensely sensitive child, filled with wordless terrors and worries, but now that his language skills were better developed, he was able to communicate his thoughts and fears more clearly than he had as an anxious toddler.
Poor little Brandon was frequently afraid. He didn’t like the dark, or closets, or scary movies, and there was one place in the upstairs hallway of their old house that upset him terribly. “There’s a lady, Mommy. She keeps crying.” That was all Patty could get out of him. She’d never believed in ghosts, but she now gave that particular spot a wide berth.