She looked up at him, saw him, and blinked. “No. No, thank you. I’ll just sit here a bit if that’s okay.” Fewer than half a dozen of the sidewalk tables were occupied by now, in the lull between the departure of early brunch customers and the next wave of people wanting actual lunch. An exodus that had apparently happened during her vision. Which had, she estimated, lasted little more than five minutes. Time was always different in a vision.
“Of course, ma’am.” He silently retrieved her date’s cup, saucer, water glass, and napkin, flicked a few invisible crumbs off the table with the napkin, and just as silently went away again.
Reno reached up to rub one temple briefly, then dug in her casual purse, produced a small bottle of OTC painkillers, and swallowed several capsules with a sip of water.
“Prosperity,” she murmured.
After a thoughtful moment, she reached again into her bag, this time for her cell phone, grateful not for the first time that she was one of the few psychics they knew of who was able to depend on having a charged phone for a reasonable amount of time, just like a normal person. She could even wear a watch when she wanted to, something else many psychics couldn’t do because of how they used energy.
Someone had told her once it was because she was wholly a receiver, her own energy not the sort that would blast outward and interfere with electronics of any kind.
Whatever. As long as it gave her an edge.
She keyed in the single preprogrammed number and leaned back in her chair, staring at nothing as she waited for him to answer.
“Bishop.”
“Hey, there, it’s Reno. Funny thing happened at brunch today,” Reno said. “Thought you might be interested.”
TWO
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7
“Oh, God.” Special Agent Tony Harte groaned, holding his head with both hands. “What the hell was that?”
His boss, Special Crimes Unit Chief Noah Bishop, shook his own head slightly, then grimaced and lifted a hand to rub his left temple, where a rather exotic white streak stood out starkly in his thick black hair. He was far paler than normal, and his sentry-sharp pale gray eyes were darker than Tony had ever seen them, like tarnished silver.
“Vision?” Tony demanded. “Because I’ll swear I saw colors I’ve never seen before. I didn’t pick up all that from you, surely?” He was a clairvoyant, though not a particularly strong one; even so, he had been known to easily pick up information, experiences, and even emotions from other SCU agents, especially if they were “broadcasting” for some reason.
Bishop looked down at the legal pad lying before him on the conference table in the room at Quantico where the SCU teams usually met to discuss cases, and where he and Tony had been, in fact, going over several cold cases, as they regularly did, as evidenced by a dozen or so folders scattered on the table.
“Not a normal vision,” Bishop said finally, characteristically answering only one of the questions asked. He looked at the pen in his right hand with a brief frown before dropping it into a cup of pencils and pens nearby on the table.
“That’s an oxymoron,” Tony said, scrabbling in the first-aid case he had located in a cabinet. “Normal vision. Our kind, I mean. If we’re out of aspirin, I’m gonna kill somebody.”
Special Agent Miranda Bishop, walking rather carefully, came into the room just then, a legal pad beneath one arm, holding something in that closed hand and a large bottle of OTC painkillers in the other hand. She caught Tony’s eye and tossed him the bottle.
“Try these.”
“Thanks.”
Miranda sat down beside her husband at the conference table and held out her closed hand, opening it to reveal several capsules. “Here, take these.” And before Bishop, notoriously unwilling to take anything that might blunt any of his senses, could shape a refusal, she added, “I know exactly what your head feels like. Take them. We both need to be able to think clearly.”
Bishop looked at his wife’s startlingly lovely face, now unusually pale, her electric blue eyes dark with pain, and he swallowed the capsules.
Beloved?
I’m all right. Getting there, anyway. Was worried about our connection since I couldn’t . . . feel you there for a while. But as long as that’s all right, then we’re all right.
Yes, love. We’re all right.
You couldn’t feel me either, though, could you? While it was happening?
No. But we’re fine now. Whatever that was . . . I don’t believe it intended to damage us.
Noah . . . What’s coming . . . Can it be stopped?
If it can be stopped, we’ll do all we can to stop it. We’ve been warned, and a heads-up from the universe is . . . rare.
We weren’t summoned. Not us, not directly.
No. But we were shown enough that I can’t help believing we’re meant to help those summoned. We have resources. Experience. Knowledge most of those summoned can’t possibly have.
But we can’t interfere.
Not once it really starts. Once they’re in place and it all begins to evolve. But I think we have a little time before that—otherwise, why the warning? Time to gather, to plan. Which means what we do in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours is critical.
Yes. Darling . . . if we fail, if they fail . . .
Then the world will see evil in forms only we’ve seen until now. Forms none of their armies can fight, none of their weapons can destroy.
It should have sounded melodramatic. It did not.
Her hand found his, beneath the table, their fingers twining together on his upper thigh. Because sometimes the physical connection of flesh to flesh was more comforting even than the very deep and very intimate psychic one.
Tony, a handful of painkillers in him now and oblivious of the mind talk that Bishop and Miranda tended to limit with others around so as to avoid confusion, looked at the other two. “What was that?” he asked again. “I’ve never felt anything like it in my life.”
Miranda looked at him. “What did you feel? Besides the pain, I mean.”
“Dizzy and sick, and like the skin was trying to crawl off my bones,” he replied succinctly. Then, going even more pale, he pushed himself back away from the table as he had before, rolling his chair rather than standing, and reached for a landline phone on a nearby shelf. “Shit. Kendra.”
While he checked in with his very pregnant wife, who had only just gone on maternity leave, Miranda looked at her husband. “If that affected the whole unit . . .”
“They’ll start calling in.” One of the few ironclad rules in the SCU was that if any agent experienced anything out of the ordinary that could even loosely be connected to their psychic abilities, they were to report in to base—meaning Bishop—ASAP. It was always his cell number, though most agents knew that wherever he happened to be, which could be literally anywhere in the world, he made sure he had close access to a landline or satellite phone, and that was where the call would be forwarded.
Most powerful psychics could seldom carry a working cell phone for any normal length of time; with few exceptions, the more powerful the psychic, the quicker cell phones went dead, despite all the attempts by various brilliant scientists both in the FBI and elsewhere to figure out a way to fix that sometimes dangerous problem.
Bishop leaned forward and reached out his free hand to the multi-lined conference phone on the table, keying in the preprogrammed command that would forward any call made to his cell number to any of the six separate lines shared by the conference phone and three other landline phones set up permanently in the room. The phone Tony was using was one of them; two more phones sat on small desks on either side of the door leading out to the hallway. The spacious room’s other door led out to the SCU bullpen, visible through three large glass panes along that wall.
The bullpen was currently occupied only by administrative staff, since all other SCU agents save those in the conference room were either away on leave, inactive for whatever reason, or else working cases scattered across the country.
“We’ll need a fourth agent to help man the phones in here,” he said almost absently. “At least. Preferably SCU, and not administrative.”
“Galen’s here today,” Miranda said.