"I'd settle for just one or two I can hang my hat on," Marc told her. "Dammit, Dani, you nearly died. Nothing touched you, nobody laid a finger on you, and you nearly died."

There was more than anxiety in his voice, and she heard it and wished she could wrap herself in it and in him and just stop everything else. For a while. Just a while. But the clock in her head refused to stop ticking, and even though she squeezed Marc's hand again, she forced herself to concentrate on what Bishop was saying.

"Which is why an SCU guardian is on the way here to keep watching. Over you."

"I don't need a guardian."

"Dani-"

"But someone else does, if I'm right. This guardian of yours, what's his ability?"

"Her ability. I choose guardians carefully; among other things, she has a shield she can extend around someone else."

"Psychic protection. Good. Then I need her to stand guard over Paris."

Bishop was frowning but nodded immediately. "Done."

He thought he owed her, Dani thought. And she wasn't at all sure he wasn't right about that.

She looked at Marc. "I have a hunch you won't be getting too far away from me for the duration, right?" It was more than a hunch.

She knew.

Marc was nodding. "Bet your ass. But I'm no psychic guardian, Dani. I can't protect you from another attack like this one."

She wasn't so sure about that, but all she said was, "I think he went after Paris a lot harder than he did me. And I think I know why. I'm not sure about the timing of everything, but I get the motive. I think. Anyway, unless the vision dream changes drastically the next time around, I'm there at the end. Paris… never was." She looked back at Bishop. "Like you said."

He was silent.

"But Miranda was there. Or, at least, I thought she was, even if I never actually saw her. Which, I suppose, should have told me more than it did." Dani didn't pause to explain that, instead asking, "Is she safe?"

Bishop nodded. "I took the threat very seriously. She's as safe as I can possibly make her. She has exceptionally strong shields and is guarded around the clock by other psychics with strong shields. We have several guardians in the unit."

Dani remembered something else. "You're connected, the two of you. Telepathically."

Bishop didn't hesitate. "Yes."

"I'd close that connection, if I were you."

"Easier said than done." He shrugged. "We can narrow the link, but the only thing we've found to shut it down completely severs it."

"Death?"

"Death."

She made a mental note to ask for specifics on that story if they all survived, and said, "Well, my advice is to narrow the link as much as you can. He used the one between Paris and me to attack both of us, and I have a hunch he didn't use all his strength to do it. Hollis warned me just in time, and I was able to deflect him at least a little. But even though my connection with Paris is as much blood as it is psychic, it's also an old one; it hasn't been active in any real sense for years. If yours and Miranda's is as… deep as I believe it is, he could use it against the two of you. He knows you're here, so all he has to do is follow the connection back to Miranda."

Half under his breath, Marc said, "You make it sound like a road."

"It is, psychically speaking," Dani told him.

Bishop's mind was moving along a different pathway. "Dani, what do you know about this killer that I don't know?"

She drew a deep breath, and said, "If I'm right, I know the one thing he really, really doesn't want you to know. We're not just dealing with a vicious serial killer who's psychic. This enemy is your enemy. This trap I've seen from the beginning? The one we all walk into even knowing what it is? It's a trap set for you."

"I'M SORRY ABOUT PARIS," Hollis said to Jordan as they waited in the conference room for the others to arrive. "Yeah, so am I." He shook his head. "Jesus, it was creepy being with her when it happened. Remember when I said I didn't know if it was a relief or a regret, me not being psychic? Well, I've made up my mind. It's a relief."

Hollis smiled wryly. "We are more vulnerable to negative energy than a nonpsychic is, and it has been a problem in the past. But attacks like that one-they're rare. Very rare. We just haven't found many psychics who can affect other psychics in even minor ways."

"No Jedi mind control, huh?"

"Afraid not. Or, at least, not that I know of." She turned her chair to face the board, where photographs of the three known victims in Venture were pinned, and brooded for a moment in silence. "Bishop has always said that if ever a psychic is born who can completely control his or her abilities, the whole world will change."

Jordan grunted. "Think he ever considered the psychic might be playing for the other team?"

"I never thought about it before, but Bishop wouldn't be Bishop if he didn't consider something from every angle he could find. So I'm guessing it was a possibility in his mind from the get-go. Which could explain at least part of his urgency these last years in putting the unit together and co-founding Haven."

"Building a psychic army?" Jordan suggested, in a tone not quite as light as he'd intended.

Hollis turned her chair around again and smiled at him. "We don't want to take over the world, honest."

Jordan felt his face getting hot. "I know that. Seriously, I do. It's just… seeing what that bastard did to Paris, knowing now it's possible to attack someone without laying a finger on them or even being within sight, is… scary as hell."

"Yes," Hollis said. "It is." Then she frowned as the trained investigator in her considered the matter. "But… we don't actually know he wasn't close enough to see her. You were here in town, right?"

"Yeah. We'd just stopped for coffee after talking to another of the bank tellers. Fruitlessly, before you ask; she wasn't even working last summer when Karen Norvell may or may not have been followed."

"Well, it was a potential lead that had to be explored."

"Even to a dead end. Christ, I hate dead ends. Anyway, we were just coming out of the coffee shop, and I'll swear Paris was completely blindsided. I mean, one minute she was laughing and running through a string of dumb metaphors for fruitless searches, and the next she was on the ground."

"She didn't say anything?"

"Hollis, she was in the middle of a word. And then dropped like a stone. I thought she'd been shot and was braced for the sound. But it never came." He frowned as his own words brought a realization. "Wait a minute. Why would our killer attack somebody like that, even assuming he's psychic and could? It's hardly his M.O.-here or in Boston. Way too bloodless a crime for him, I'm thinking."

"Yeah, that's been bugging me."

"Have a theory you want to trot out?"

"Not really."

Jordan sighed. "I can't tell you how much I hate hearing you say that."

"Sorry."

"Uh-huh." After a moment, Jordan added, "We're just whistling in a graveyard here, aren't we?"

"Pretty much."

"Yeah, that's what I thought."

Dani wasn't about to leave the hospital without seeing Paris. The doctors weren't crazy about her leaving at all, but since her vital signs were utterly normal and she politely but firmly insisted she was fine and was ready to leave now, they really didn't have much choice in the matter.

Once she was dressed, Marc and Bishop stuck close, escorting her to the IC unit, where Paris lay hooked up to the machines monitoring her faint life signs.

Bishop's "guardian" was already there, sitting in a chair by the bed, and rose to be introduced simply as Bailey. She was unexpectedly fragile-looking, a tall, slender brunette with large dark eyes so calm and deep they were almost hypnotic.