“Is that what they taught you?”
“What does it matter who taught me? I can teach you. I can make the pain go away.”
“And keep me alive?”
“Of course.”
“And what’s the price, Neil? What did you sell them to keep yourself alive?”
“Isn’t life worth any price?”
“No. Not any price.”
“That’s what you think now. But one day—soon—you’ll discover you’re wrong. Life is worth whatever you have to pay for it, Sarah. Life is worth any price.”
“What did it cost you?”
He smiled suddenly. “What if I said my soul?”
“Then I’d say you paid too much,” she whispered.
“I said stop it.” Tucker crossed to Sarah’s chair in two long steps and grasped her arm, holding the pistol pointed at Mason with his other hand. “Sarah, we’re leaving.”
She rose to her feet readily enough, but her gaze remained locked with Mason’s and she was trembling.
In a conversational tone, Mason said, “Go on running if you have to. But it’s no use, Sarah, you know that. They’ll win. They always win.”
“You mean the mysterious enemy that doesn’t exist?” Her voice was still only a whisper.
His mouth twisted. “Yeah. Them.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Mason looked away suddenly. “So am I. Oh, put the gun away, Mackenzie. You have nothing to fear from me. Go on, get her out of here.”
Tucker got her out of there. But he didn’t take Mason’s word for it that he was no threat, keeping the gun in hand until he and Sarah safely reached the street. He was wary even then, half-expecting long black cars to be waiting for them out there. But the neighborhood looked as quiet as before.
He put Sarah in the passenger side of the Jeep, one glance at her face telling him that she was in bad shape. She was so pale that her skin had a bluish cast, and her too-dark eyes were enormous and unseeing, the pupils so dilated that only a rim of gold showed around them. He got a blanket from the backseat and covered her because she was shaking so violently, then quickly got in the driver’s seat and got the engine and heat going. He also didn’t waste any time in driving away from Mason’s house.
“Sarah, are you all right?”
She didn’t move, didn’t look at him.
“Sarah? Goddammit, say something or I’m taking you straight to the nearest hospital.”
As if the effort demanded was almost too much, she turned her head and looked at him then, and her voice was whispery when she said, “They couldn’t help me. The doctors. They wouldn’t know what was wrong. I just need…to rest. Sleep. I’ll be fine after I sleep.”
He wasn’t so sure about that, but in any case he had to ask, “What the hell went on back there?”
“It was…a skirmish.”
“A skirmish? Jesus, Sarah…”
“Just a skirmish,” she insisted wearily. “He wasn’t even one of them, really. He was a tool they tried to use against me. A…pale echo of what they are. And even so, as ineffective as he is compared to them…look what it did to me to fight him. Look what it cost me just to hold my own with one of their tools.”
“It was your first…skirmish,” he reminded her. “You’ll be better at it next time.”
A little sound escaped Sarah, not a laugh or a cry but something in between. “No, I won’t. I can’t do that again.”
“Sarah—”
“I can’t. You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it does to me.”
Tucker was beginning to understand but nevertheless said, “What was all that about kids?”
“I wanted to find out if he knew,” she murmured.
“Knew what?”
“That they’d taken another child. Early this morning.”
“How do you know?”
Starkly, her voice full of horror, Sarah said, “I heard him scream. In my mind.”
Tucker nearly pulled off the road, every instinct urging him to put his arms around Sarah and offer some kind of comfort. But he kept driving. For one thing, something in her posture warned him that right now she didn’t want to be touched by anyone. And since she had kept from him this knowledge of another abducted child, he was even more sure that she especially didn’t want to be touched by him.
But he could, and did, change the subject to what he thought was a lesser horror. “You said that Mason was trying to get into your head—why?”
“To…convert me. To try to make me think the way they want me to.”
“Which is?”
“That I can’t fight them and win. That they’ll always be stronger. That I already belong to them. That I’m…destined to lose.”
Tucker glanced at her quickly, then turned his attention back to the road ahead of them. “But he failed.”
“He didn’t get inside my head.”
“Did you get inside his?”
Sarah was quiet for a moment, then said, “Not enough to help us.”
Tucker sent her another glance, this one a bit hard. More secrets. “What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing that matters.”