"Sarah"

"I'll report when I can." Sarah turned and hurried away, her slender form almost instantly swallowed up by the shadows of the forest.

Bailey hesitated, but only for an instant, before swearing under her breath and turning to retrace her own steps. She moved swiftly, even carrying the child, and covered at least thirty yards before she heard, from somewhere behind her, a sound that stopped her in her tracks and yanked her around.

The beginning of a scream, cut off with chilling abruptness, its echo bouncing around eerily in the otherwise silent woods.

"Bailey, move." For a big man, Galen himself moved with uncanny silence, but that wasn't the trait she was interested in right now.

"Sarah. Galen, you have to"

"I know. Get to the car. If I'm not there in five minutes, leave." His weapon was in his hand, and he was already moving away, back toward the Compound.

"But"

"Do it."

Bailey wasn't a woman who accepted orders easily, but she obeyed that one without further question. Tightening her arms around the sleeping child and concentrating on intensifying the protective blanket of energy wrapping them both, she hurried through the woods toward the road and the car hidden there.

Galen had long ago perfected the art of moving through any type of terrain without making a sound, but he was all too aware that at least some of those who might hunt him in this forest could listen with more than their ears. Even so, he didn't allow the knowledge to slow him down, and he made good time.

Unfortunately, not good enough.

Then again, he acknowledged grimly, he had probably been too late at the first note of Sarah's scream.

She lay on her back in a small clearing, in a pool of moonlight so bright and stark it was like a spotlight. The agony contorting her features seemed an almost unreal Halloween mask of horror. Her wide eyes gazed directly up at him, terrified and accusing.

At least that was the way Galen saw it. He wasn't psychic in the accepted sense, but he could read people in his own way. Even dead people.

Maybe especially dead people.

He knelt beside her sprawled body, his free hand feeling for her carotid pulse even as he kept his weapon ready and visually scanned the woods all around them.

He didn't see or hear a thing.

And Sarah was gone.

Still kneeling beside her body he frowned down at her. There wasn't a mark on her that he could see, no visible cause of death. She had bundled the child well against the cold, but her own jeans and thin sweater had provided little protection, and the light color of her clothing allowed him to be fairly certain there was no blood to indicate any kind of wound.

He slipped his hand underneath her shoulder, intending to turn her over and check her back for any wounds, but paused as he realized just how she was positioned. She had been returning to the Compound, and unless she had somehow gotten turned around and changed direction, it looked as though she had been knocked backward from an attack she had run into head-on.

And yet the frozen ground around her, crystals of frost glittering in the moonlight, was very clearly undisturbed by any sort of struggle and unmarked by any footprints except for his own and Sarah's. Their footprintsarriving at this point. And Sarah's footprints continuing on. But not returning.

It was as if she had been lifted off her feet yards farther along and thrown back to the center of the clearing with incredible force.

Galen wondered suddenly if a medical examiner would find her bones so shattered they were virtually crushed, as Ellen Hodges's bones had been.

He hesitated a moment longer, weighing the pros and cons of taking her back with them. It wasn't in his nature or training to leave a fallen comrade behind, but the incredibly high stakes in this situation forced him to reconsider. Someone had killed her, and that someone would expect to find her body here. If she didn't remain where she was expected to be

"Shit," he breathed almost without sound, the curse a small cloud of cold mist. "Sorry, kid. I"

It was his instinct to look someone in the eye when delivering a hard truth, and so he looked into Sarah Warren's dead eyes when he began to tell her he would have to leave her body here to be recovered by her murderers.

Her eyes were changing. As he watched, they slowly fogged over, the irises and pupils at first dimmed and finally completely obscured by white. And in the bright moonlight the angles of her face seemed sharper, the planes becoming hollows, as if more than her life had beenwas beingsucked out of her.

Galen had seen many dying and dead over the years, but he had never seen anything like this before. And for one of the very few times in his adult life, he felt suddenly vulnerable. Nakedly vulnerable.

His gun couldn't protect him here. Couldn't even help him.

Nothing could.

He found himself withdrawing his hand from under her shoulder and was conscious of an almost overwhelming urge to leave, now, to get as far away from this place as he could, as fast as he could.

But once again, he wasn't quite fast enough.

He was still rising, just beginning to turn, when he saw the three men only a few yards away, moving swiftly through the woods toward him with a silence that was uncanny.

The one in front, a tall man with wide shoulders and a stone-cold expression, already had his weapon out and raised and offered neither warning nor any chance at all. The big silver gun bucked in his hand.

Galen felt the bullet slam into his chest before he heard the muffled report, felt the frozen ground hard beneath him, and was dimly aware of his own weapon falling from nerveless fingers. He couldn't seem to breathe without a choking sensation, and blood bubbled up into his mouth, sharp and coppery.

Christ, what a cliche. I can't think of something better?

Apparently he could not. He had a mouth full of warm liquid metal, and he could literally feel his life ebbing from his body. Not sucked out as Sarah's had been but just leaving him, the way his blood flowed from the gaping wound in his chest and soaked into the cold ground. For a few brief seconds he looked at the bright moon, then the light was blocked out as the three men stood over him.

He focused with an effort on the taller one, the one whose stone-cold killer's face he could not now make out. Just a silhouette with gleaming eyes, silent, watching him.

"Son of a bitch," Galen managed thickly. "You sorry son of a"

The big silver gun bucked again, hardly more than an almost apologetic sneeze of sound escaping the silencer, and a train slammed into Galen, and everything went black and silent.

"What if he was a cop?"

"What if?" Reese DeMarco knelt briefly to pick up the automatic from the ground beside the outstretched arm of the man he had shot, adding in the same unemotional tone as he rose, "Search him. See if he's carrying I.D."

The man who had asked the question knelt down to gingerly but thoroughly search the body. "No I.D." he reported. "No harness or holster for the gun. Not even a damn label in his shirt. Shit, you really nailed him. Two dead-center in the chest. I would've expected body armor and gone for the head shot."

"I doubt he expected armed opposition. Probably just a P.I. hired by one of the families with no idea what he was getting into." DeMarco thumbed the safety on the confiscated weapon and stuck it into his belt at the small of his back. "Amateurs."

The third man, who had stood silently scanning the woods, said, "I don't see any sign of the kid. Think she ran off?"