am?what I should have been?”
“Not a small thing, no. Not a wise thing, either. Your curiosity?and your loneliness, I think?have driven you to make a mistake.”
“Perhaps. I’ve made mistakes before.”
“And survived them. I hope you survive this one. I can see now why you kept your purpose secret for so long.”
“Yes.”
“Does Mary know?”
“Yes. I never told her, but she knows. She saw it herself after a while.”
“No wonder you love her. No wonder she’s still alive. She’s you?the closest thing you’ve ever had to a true daughter.”
“I never told her any of that, either.”
“She knows. You can depend on it.” She paused for a moment. “Doro, is there any way she could … I mean, if she’s complete and you’re not, she might be able to …”
“To take me?”
Emma nodded.
“No. If she could, she would never have lived past the morning of her transition. She tried to read me then. If she hadn’t, I would have ordered her to try as soon as I saw her. I wanted to look at her in the only way that would tell me whether she could possibly become a danger to me. I looked, and what I saw told me she couldn’t. She’s like a scaled-down model of me. I could have taken her then, and I can now.”
“It’s been a long time since you’ve seen someone you thought could be dangerous. I hope your judgment is still as good as you think it is.”
“It is. In my life, I’ve met only five people I considered potentially dangerous.”
“And they all died young.”
Doro shrugged.
“I assume you’re not forgetting that Mary can increase her strength by robbing her people.”
“No. It doesn’t make any difference. I watched her very carefully back when she took Rachel and Jess. I could have taken her then. In fact, the extra strength she had acquired made her seem a more attractive victim. Strength alone isn’t enough to beat me. And she has a weakness I don’t have. She doesn’t move. She has just that one body, and when it dies, she dies.” He thought about that and shook his head sadly. “And she will almost certainly die.”
“When?”
“When she?If she disobeys me. I’m going to tell her my decision when I go there today. No more latents. She’ll decide what she wants to do after that.”
SETH
Seth Dana came out the back door of Larkin House thinking about the assignment Mary had just given him. The same old thing. Recruit more seconds?more people to help latents through transition. Patternists liked the way their numbers were increasing. Expansion was exciting. It was their own kind growing up, coming of age at last. But seconding was hard work. You were mother, father, friend, and, if your charge needed it, lover to an erratic, frightened, dependent person. People volunteered to be seconds when they were shamed into it. They accepted it as their duty, but they evaded that duty as long as they could. It was Seth’s job to prompt them and then present them with sullen, frightened charges.
He was a kind of matchmaker, sensing easily and accurately which seconds would be compatible with which latents. His worst mistake had been his first, his decision to second Clay. Mary had stopped him then. She had not had to stop him again. He had no more close relatives to warp his judgment.
He got into his car, preoccupied, deciding which Patternists to draft this time. He started the car automatically, then froze, his hand poised halfway to the emergency brake. Someone had shoved the cold steel barrel of a gun against the base of his skull.
Startled from his thoughts, Seth knew a moment of fear.
“Turn off the ignition, Dana?” said a man’s voice.
Reacting finally, Seth read the man. Then he turned off the ignition. With equal ease, he turned off the gunman. He gave the man a mental command, then reached back and took the gun from his suddenly limp hand. He shut the gun in the glove compartment and looked around at the intruder. The man was a mute and a stranger, but Seth had seen him before, in the thoughts of a woman Seth had seconded. A woman named Barbara Landry, who had once been this man’s wife.
“Palmer Landry,” said Seth quietly. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.”
The man stared at Seth, then at his own, empty hand. “Why did I give you …? How could you make me …? What’s going on here?”
Seth shrugged. “Nothing now.”
“How do you know who I am? Why did I hand you …?”
“You’re a man who deserted his wife nearly a year ago,” said Seth. “Then suddenly decided he wanted her back. The gun wasn’t necessary.”
“Where is she? Where’s Barbara?”
“Probably at her house.” Seth had personally brought Barbara Landry from New York two months before. A month and a half later, she had come through transition. Almost immediately, she had discovered that Bartholomew House?and Caleb Bartholomew? suited her perfectly. Seth hadn’t bothered to erase her from the memories of the people she knew in New York. None of them had been friends. None of them had really cared what happened to her.
