Amanda looked at his handsome face and saw a hint of something that bothered her, the same artificial cheer that Derek had always carried around terminal patients.
“You’re Peter Pendergen.”
“That I am,” he replied, in the same curt voice that had ruffled Mia over the phone. “Which pretty sister are you?”
“Amanda.”
“Ah yes. The formerly incarcerated. Glad to see you guys got out of that fix in one piece.” His gaze wandered to Theo, still lost in a harrowed daze. “Mostly.”
Mia took the farthest easy chair in the cluster. “So . . . what happens now?”
“Now we talk of a great many things. If you like what I have to say, then we move on together. If not . . .” He forced a nonchalant shrug. “We go our separate ways with no hard feelings.”
Zack perched on the arm of Mia’s chair. “You sure it’s safe to talk here?”
“Normally it wouldn’t be, but you did a good thing by coming on Commemoration. I paid off the few security guards on duty. We have the whole building to ourselves.”
He looked to David, shuffling restlessly behind a love seat. “Have a seat, lad. I don’t bite.”
“It’s okay. I’d rather stand.”
Theo moaned with pain and bedlam as the sisters walked him to the sofas. His consciousness had become a rapid-fire montage of premonitions, all as vivid and real as the present. He dodged falling debris in San Francisco and lay dying on a street in Washington, D.C. He danced at Zack’s wedding and cried at Mia’s funeral. He shouted with joy as he watched Amanda soar above him on butterfly wings of aeris. He saw Hannah in more iterations than he could count. She stood tall and proud over every corner of his future.
This man in front of him stood nowhere.
As Theo cast his bleary eyes on the brown-haired stranger, his foresight screamed at him. He fell to his knees and screamed back.
Hannah and Amanda dropped to his side. “Theo!”
“What happened?”
He gritted his teeth, curling his fists. “Not him . . .”
The man rose to his feet, peering at Theo over the cushions. “What’s the matter with him?”
“We were hoping you knew,” Zack said.
“That’s why I asked you for painkillers,” Mia complained.
He threw a quick and helpless glance at the upper railings, then turned back to Theo. “Look, why don’t we get him to the sofa, all right?”
Amanda felt his sweaty forehead. “He’s burning up.”
“Just get him to the sofa and stay here. I’ll find a first aid kit.”
“Not him,” Theo wheezed. “That’s not Peter.”
Now the other five Silvers eyed their host in wide alarm. He stopped and turned around, his hands raised defensively.
“Look, I don’t know what your friend is suffering, but I assure you I’m Peter Pendergen. I can prove it. Just let me . . .”
David caught a reflective glint on the balcony. His eyes popped wide.
“GET DOWN!”
“Hannah!”
Theo pulled her down just as a hissing bullet struck the floor beyond her. A second shot shattered the lamp next to Zack. He fell off the chair.
Mia barely had a chance to process the gunfire when she saw the false Peter run away in a speedy blur. Her mind stammered with shock. He shifted. He shifted. He’s a—
Zack grabbed her and yanked her down, just as a bullet cracked the arm of her chair. He pulled her under the coffee table.
Amanda’s thoughts turned white, and a geyser of tempis erupted from her hands. It quickly bloomed into a crude but massive shield that covered the sisters and Theo. She had no idea if tempis could stop bullets until she heard two gunshots and felt a pair of agonizing stings in her thoughts, like hot knitting needles. She shrieked and toppled to the ground, her barrier vanishing in a blink. A pair of crushed bullets dropped to the marble.
David was the last to stand his ground, caught like a pinball between reason, panic, and rage. For the boy who could dredge up the past, it was easy to look back thirty-one hours and relive his recent errors. He’d hurled a gunshot noise at an armed and twitchy Dep, a foolish move that cost him two fingers. Now he waltzed right into an ambush, ignoring his instincts as this false Peter Pendergen tried to get him to stand still for the rifle scopes.
No more mistakes, he thought, and then dredged up the past again.
The lobby suddenly filled with screaming people and flames, a spectral re-creation of the great blaze that engulfed Battery Place in August 1931. Firemen in tin helmets ran back and forth with axes while smoldering wooden furniture lay juxtaposed among the sleek sofas of the present. The images were so realistic that Hannah shrieked with pain when her arm fell into fire. It took three full seconds to realize she wasn’t burning.
“What’s happening?!”
Amanda seized her arm, shouting above the ghosted din. “It’s David! He’s giving us cover!”
“Where is he?”
The pair frantically looked around, but they couldn’t see anything through the eighty-year-old smoke. Amanda flinched when a burning woman ran through her.