Emotion surged into Darby’s throat. She resisted the impulse to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. “I need your help,” she said tightly.
“You seek the children, do you not?”
Darby nodded. Tears stung her eyes. How could she know? She started to ask but changed her mind. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she could help. Darby didn’t have to wonder, she knew the answer, felt it to the very core of her being. This woman was the real thing.
“I’ve seen him,” Darby whispered. “I just don’t know how to focus. I don’t know where he is.” She shrugged. “The woods…water. I don’t know.”
“I’ve searched for him myself,” Madam Talia admitted. “But he eludes me. But then you understand that, don’t you?”
Darby shook her head. “I don’t understand any of it.”
The older woman took her hand. A rush of energy shot up to Darby’s shoulder. She trembled at the intensity of it.
“We see what we’re destined to see. At least most of us do. I’m not so sure about you. You’ve spent too much time blocking…suppressing your gift. You may have a much larger gift than the rest of us.”
Darby tried hard to restrain the shaking that had started in her limbs, but she wasn’t entirely successful. “I dream sometimes. See things that don’t always make sense. That’s all.”
Madam Talia laughed softly. “You have no idea what you’re capable of, my dear. You’ve come to me for guidance, for focus and yet you possess a gift far more powerful than my own.” She reached for Darby’s other hand. “Let us meditate a moment.”
Madam Talia closed her eyes. Darby moistened her lips and tried to calm her racing heart, but that wasn’t happening this side of the grave. Still uncertain of herself, she closed her eyes as well and tried to relax, tried to open her mind to the sensations she knew were out there…waiting.
Energy whirled around her…around them. She could feel its power; it was like standing too close to an electrical plant’s substation and feeling the tiny hairs stand up on your skin.
The images came in clipped flashes, too fast to interpret. Fast and furious. Children, the woods, the water, the flowers growing in pots. Lots and lots of posies growing in pots on the porch of a dilapidated old shack. Near the water.
Her breath stalled in her lungs when she looked directly into clear gray eyes. The scar stood out in stark relief on his cheek. The stubble of two days’ beard growth darkened his jaw. He taunted the children, laughed at their cries.
Ring a-round the roses. Pocketful of posies.
Sensation after sensation slammed into Darby. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.
She was there.
The children.
Anna…the boy…and another girl.
But Darby had to hurry.
The hum of energy died as abruptly as it had started. Her eyes opened and Madam Talia stared directly at her.
“What did you see?” she asked, her voice weak, frail. She looked weary.
Had joining hands with Darby done that to her?
Suddenly the vision came back to her in one rapid whoosh. The cabin, the flower pots, the children.
“I know where they are.”
The words were scarcely a whisper, a thought spoken.
Darby was on her feet before the command left her brain. She had to find them.
“No,” Madam Talia said, her voice firm now, her expression hard. “You go to the police. Let them find the children. Do not go into the woods, Darby Shepard. Go home.” Her eyes widened and she looked suddenly afraid. “Better lock your door.”
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Darby walked into the precinct office at Jackson Square. She remembered the detective who’d questioned her last evening. Still had his card.
Her movements awkward as if she no longer held dominion over her muscles, she walked up to the duty desk and said, “I need to see Detective Willis.”
The uniformed sergeant didn’t look up from the papers he was busily shuffling. “Detective Willis is a busy man. How can I help you?”
Darby moistened her lips and summoned her courage. The shaking wouldn’t subside. She just couldn’t stop it. “Please, sir, it’s urgent that I speak with Detective Willis.”
He looked up at her then. “Like I said, lady, it’s me or nothing. Now, how can I help you?”
She took a breath, nodded stiffly. “All right…I…just…” Her gaze locked with his. “I think I know where the children are.”
Chapter Three
Center
Ghost Mountain
Colorado
Governor Kyle Remington shook his head at the collection of newspapers on the conference table before him. Center and its advanced work were the most tightly kept secrets in the nation. How could this happen? “Tell us how this happened, Director O’Riley.”
His gaze shifted from the dozen or so papers and settled solemnly onto Richard O’Riley. The other members of the Collective seated around the long conference table turned their attention in his direction as well. O’Riley was the man whose primary responsibility was to protect the nation’s top scientific research facility.
“There is no easy explanation,” O’Riley stalled. He had gotten the first ripples of intelligence on this matter at dawn this morning. Dupree, Center’s senior intelligence analyst, had picked it up on the Net. Not the Net as in the Internet, but Center’s Net, a specialized surveillance system that monitored all sources of mass communication—the World Wide Web, telephones, satellites and the like. Certain key words triggered the Net and the source of the key words was then recorded and analyzed for relevant data.
More than a dozen Louisiana newspapers had rushed to change copy at the crack of dawn to include a break in a big case involving missing children in New Orleans. By 7:00 a.m., every single one of those front pages had recounted a story right off the pages of a science fiction novel. Psychic Teacher Leads Police To Child Killer…Teacher Uses Special Gift To Find Missing Student…etcetera, etcetera.
Eve was all grown up.
For sixteen years, Center had assumed her case to be a failure. But now they knew differently.
The
