He had to protect Sarah.
He was straining to listen but heard nothing. His head was throbbing oddly, and it was getting difficult to think, as if a fog crept into his brain. For a moment, as he stood beside the Jeep, he couldn’t even remember what he was doing there.
The gun. That was it. He had to get the gun and protect Sarah.
It took him several minutes to figure out how to use the keyless entry gadget to unlock the Jeep doors, and he shook his head in bafflement when he finally got the driver’s door open.
Christ, what’s wrong with me?
He leaned in and opened the compartment between the seats. The usual vehicle clutter met his puzzled stare. A couple of folded maps, some paper napkins and two paper-wrapped straws, the sunglasses he hadn’t needed today. Yesterday. A flashlight. And in the bottom, when he pushed the rest aside and searched all the way down, a tangled and gritty nest of coins, gum wrappers, and general Jeep lint.
But no gun.
Tucker stood there, leaning across the driver’s seat, and scowled. Where the hell was the gun? He’d left it right here—
Then, abruptly, with the suddenness of a soap bubble, the fog vanished from his brain, and he realized why the gun wasn’t here.
Because it was upstairs in their room.
He remembered. He remembered looking right at it when he’d gone back into the sitting room. It was on the desk, beside his laptop. Where he had placed it, as soon as they had settled into the room, so it would be within easy reach while he worked at the computer and Sarah slept. Where he had left it hours ago.
Where it had always been.
He knew then. Knew in a terrible moment of absolute clarity what they had done to him. He had underestimated them, badly underestimated them. Because they had used the one tool he had never expected them to use, the one tool he hadn’t even imagined they could use.
His own mind.
They’d crawled inside his head. They hadn’t been able to get inside Sarah’s, so they had turned to him. Somehow, they had crawled inside his head and made him think the gun was here, made him believe he had to come down here and get it, leaving Sarah alone upstairs…
“Sarah. Oh, Jesus, Sarah—”
He never heard them behind him. He only had time to realize that, once again, he had failed the woman he loved. He felt the agony of that even before the shock of the blow, the blinding pain in his head. And then nothing.
“Tucker?”
Sarah found herself sitting up in bed, the sheet clutched to her breasts and her own voice loud in her ears. There had been a dream, a warmly reassuring dream of Tucker fretting about protecting her. Then he had seemed to fade away for a long time, until a sudden burst of agony shot through her head, a terrible pain that was in his head and his heart and his voice.
“Sarah. Oh, Jesus, Sarah—”
And now…nothing.
Terror and panic were ice water in her veins, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think about anything but him. Desperately, she reached out, closing her eyes and concentrating as hard as she could, harder than she ever had before, as she tried to find Tucker.
Instantly, a cacophony beat inside her mind like the wings of a hundred birds, the chatter of a hundred voices, and she heard her own voice cry out in surprise and fear even as her eyes shot open and she instinctively slammed shut what her desperation to find Tucker had wrenched open.
It took her several moments to calm down, and longer to realize what had happened. She had reached out wildly and without any kind of focus, and what had rushed into her open mind had been the mental voices and dreams of all the people around her.
Sarah shivered, afraid to try again—and more afraid not to. The sensation of all those thoughts and dreams and nightmares was the closest she ever wanted to get to actual chaos, the most unsettling thing she had ever experienced, and she did not want to experience it again, so this time she focused her mind as narrowly as she could before opening herself up.
Tucker. Just Tucker, he was the only one she wanted to find, the only one she wanted to hear.
At first, there was nothing. Silence. Darkness. She reached further out warily, like feeling her way through an unfamiliar room without lights, probing the darkness. And finally, dimly, on the very edge of her awareness, was a sense of Tucker’s presence. No thoughts, no inner voice telling her where he was and what had happened to him, just his quiet presence. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t bring him any closer, couldn’t see him clearly, but at least he was there.