Tuesday, October 7

"YOU HAD THAT dream again last night, didn't you?" Dani kept her gaze fixed on her coffee cup until the silence dragged on a minute longer than it should have, then looked at her sister's face. "Yeah. I had that dream." Paris sat down on the other side of the table, her own cup cradled in both hands. "Same as before?"

"Pretty much."

"Then not the same as before. What was different?" It was an answer Dani didn't want to offer, but she knew her sister too well to fight the inevitable; Paris determined was as unstoppable as the tides. "It was placed in time. Two forty-seven in the afternoon, October twenty-eighth."

Paris turned her head to study the wall calendar stuck to her refrigerator with South Park character magnets. "The twenty-eighth, huh? This year?"

"Yeah."

"That's three weeks from today."

"I noticed that."

"Same people?"

Dani nodded. "Same people. Same conversations. Same burning warehouse. Same feeling of doom."

"Except for the time being fixed, it was exactly the same?"

"It's never exactly the same, you know that. Some of it's probably symbolic, and I have no way of knowing which parts aren't literal. I only know what I see, and there are always small, sometimes weird changes in that. A word different here or there, a gesture. I think the gun Hollis carried wasn't the same one as before. And Bishop was wearing a black leather jacket this time; before, it was a dark windbreaker."

"But they're always the same. Those two people are always a part of the dream."

"Always."

"People you don't know."

"People I don't know-yet." Dani frowned down at her coffee for a moment, then shook her head and met her sister's steady gaze again. "In the dream, I feel I know them awfully well. I understand them in a way that's difficult to explain."

"Maybe because they're psychic too."

Dani hunched her shoulders. "Maybe."

"And it ended…"

"Just like it always ends. That doesn't change. I shut the door behind us and we go down the stairs. I know the roof has started collapsing. I know we won't be able to get out the same way we went in. I know something terrible and evil is waiting for us in that basement, that it's a trap."

"But you go down there anyway."

"I don't seem to have a choice."

"Or maybe it's a choice you made before you ever set foot in that building," Paris said. "Maybe it's a choice you're making now. The date. How did you see it?"

"Watch."

"On you? Neither of us can wear a watch."

Still reluctant, Dani said, "And it wasn't the sort of watch I'd wear even if I could wear one."

"What sort of watch was it?"

"It was… military-looking. Big, black, digital. Lots of buttons, more than one display. Looked like it could give me the time in Beijing and the latitude and longitude as well. Hell, maybe it could translate Sanskrit into English, for all I know."

"What do you think that means?"

Dani sighed. "One year of psychology under your belt, so naturally everything has to mean something, I guess."

"When it comes to your dreams, yes, everything means something. We both know that. Come on, Dani. How many times now have you dreamed this same dream?"

"A few."

"A half dozen times that I know of-and I'm betting you didn't tell me about it right away."

"So?"

"Dani."

"Look, it doesn't matter how many times I've had the dream. It doesn't matter because it isn't a premonition."

"Could have fooled me."

Dani got up and carried her coffee cup to the sink. "Yeah, well, it wasn't your dream."

Paris turned in her chair but remained where she was. "Dani, is that why you came down here, to Venture? Not to offer me a shoulder to cry on while I go through a messy divorce, but because of that dream?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"The hell you don't."

" Paris -"

"I want the truth. Don't make me get it for myself."

Dani turned around, leaning back against the counter as she once again ruefully faced the knowledge that she would never be able to keep the truth from her sister, not for long.

It was partly the twin thing.

Paris wore her burnished copper hair in a shorter style these days-she called it her divorce rebirth-and she was a bit too thin, but otherwise looking at her was like looking into a mirror. Dani had long since grown accustomed to that and in fact viewed it as an advantage; watching the play of emotions across Paris 's expressive face had taught her to hide her own.

At least from everyone except Paris.

"We promised," her sister reminded her. "To leave each other our personal lives, our own thoughts and feelings. And we've gotten very good at keeping that door closed. But I remember how to open it, Dani. We both do."

It wasn't unusual, of course, for identical twins to have a special connection, but for Dani and Paris that bond had been, in the words of one childhood friend, "sort of spooky." It had been more than closeness, more than finishing each other's sentences or dressing alike or playing the twin game of exchanging identities.

Dani and Paris, especially in early childhood, had felt more like two halves of one person rather than separate individuals. Paris was the sunnier half, quick to laugh and joke, invariably cheerful, open and trusting, the extrovert. Dani was quieter, more still and watchful, even secretive. She was slow to anger and to trust and far more introspective than her sister.

Night and Day, their father had called them-and he hadn't been the only one to misunderstand what he saw.

Dani and Paris preferred it that way, confiding the truth only to each other. They learned early to hide or disguise the easy mental and emotional link they shared, eventually discovering how to fashion the "door" Paris spoke of.

It gave them the privacy of being alone in their own minds, something most people never learned to value. For the twins, it had finally enabled them to at least begin to experience life as unique individuals rather than two halves of a whole.

Dani missed that former closeness, though. It might now be only a door away-but that door did mostly stay closed these days, with the twins in their early thirties and having chosen very different life paths.

Nodding slowly, Dani said, "Okay. The dream started a few months ago, back in the summer. When the senator's daughter was murdered by that serial killer in Boston."

"The one they haven't caught yet?"

"Yeah."

Paris was frowning. "I'm missing the connection."

"I didn't think there was one. Absolutely no connection between me and those murders, not with the victims and not with any of the investigators. And I never have visions about anything not involving me or the people in my life. Which is why I didn't think this dream was a premonition."

Without pouncing on that admission, her sister said, "Until something changed. What?"

"I saw a news report. The federal agent in charge of the investigation in Boston is the man in my dream. Bishop."

"I still don't see-"

"His wife is Miranda Bishop."

Paris sat up straighter. "Jeez. She's the one who told us about Haven."

"Yeah." It had been in Atlanta nearly a year and a half before. Paris and her husband were one argument away from splitting up, and Dani was between jobs and at loose ends. Neither one of them was interested in becoming a fed, even to join the Special Crimes Unit Miranda Bishop had told them about.

They didn't want to carry guns, didn't want to be cops. But working for Haven, a privately run civilian organization of investigators with unique abilities-that had sounded interesting.

Absently, Paris said, "That was the last straw for Danny, you know. When I wanted to use my abilities, when I got a job that actually required them. I saw how creeped-out he was. How could I stay with someone who felt that way about any part of me?"