“It wasn’t a vision. Nothing from the future.”

“Then the here and now. What was it?”

“I have a question first.” Samantha looked at her fellow agents one by one. “Anybody else feel anything unusual up there?”

Rather surprising everyone, including herself, Robbie immediately said, “Some kind of energy. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stirring. And really faint, there was sort of an uncomfortable crawly sensation in my skin.”

“Any idea what kind of energy?” Luke asked her.

Robbie shook her head. “I haven’t really learned to differentiate. “But . . .” She drew a quick breath. “For just a few seconds, I could hear whispers.”

“Saying what?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know. I was caught off guard. It happened too fast, and they were too faint.”

“Sam?” Luke was watching her steadily. “What did you sense?”

“Something dark,” she replied slowly. “Something really, really dark. And really, really hungry.”

FIVE

Jonah didn’t quite understand when Luke told him that they would need to wait until the following day to again approach the site where Simon Church’s abandoned car had been found.

“Sam might get something from the car, though,” he added. “After she’s rested a bit.”

“I don’t need to rest,” she protested, getting herself out of the Jeep under her own steam and rather relieved when her legs remained steady. “And even if trying again here is useless for the time being, we still have four other sites where people disappeared. One of us could pick up something at any of them. The judge was next, right?”

“Right,” Jonah said.

Telling herself she was only reading the frustration on his face, Robbie said, “It’s like static electricity.”

“What?”

“When psychics pick up on an energy signature. If it’s a place, then tapping into that energy once is like—walking across carpet in your socks and touching something metal. You get shocked the first time. But then the static has to build back up for the same thing to shock you again.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “I get that. I think.”

“We’re happy to answer questions as we go,” Luke told him. “But when we get to the areas where people are likely to be all around the site of a disappearance, we might want to be discreet.”

“We definitely want to be discreet,” Jonah said. “Sarah is the only one of my people who knows about your unit; nobody else at the station could even access the law enforcement FBI database, because it’s password-protected. And I’ve told nobody in town. As far as they’re concerned, you’re FBI agents, period.”

“Probably for the best,” Robbie said. “Prevents those what-kind-of-freak-show-have-I-wandered-into glassy-eyed stares.”

Jonah looked at her but didn’t comment.

Before the silence could become obvious, Luke said, “Sam, why don’t you ride with us to the second site.” It wasn’t really a question. Or a suggestion.

“I told you I’m fine.”

“Still.”

“I didn’t get a nosebleed. And I’m not tired. Stop fussing.”

“Since when was that an option? Come on, let’s go. We’ll be losing daylight soon.”

Samantha sighed but climbed back into the Jeep’s backseat while Luke went around to the front passenger seat and Dante and Robbie returned to the black SUV. In just a couple of minutes, they were turned around and headed back toward town.

“Who’s the lady in the cast?” Samantha asked.

Without looking as they passed the house, Jonah said, “Mildred Bates. If it weren’t for that cast, she’d have joined us back there.”

“Town busybody?” Sam guessed.

“Yeah, pretty much. She’s not malicious, but she does like to know what’s going on. Sounds awful to say, and no pun intended, but it’s a break for us she’s laid up with that cast.” He paused, then changed the subject. “What was that about nosebleeds?”

“I get them sometimes,” Sam answered readily. “If I push too hard. Reach too far.”

Luke said, “Most of us pay some kind of price for our abilities, Jonah. They always come with strings. Pounding headaches and nosebleeds are fairly common. Especially—”

Jonah glanced over at him as the fed broke off. “Especially?”

Sam leaned forward, an elbow resting just below the headrest of Luke’s seat, and said, “Especially for those of us not born with our abilities,” she said.

“Sam, you don’t have to,” Luke said without turning his head.

“Oh, I’m not going to offer details. No offense, Jonah, but I don’t know you that well.”

“Okay,” he said, obviously puzzled. “No offense taken.”

“It’s just that those of us not born with psychic abilities, even latent ones, usually have them triggered at some point in our lives. Almost always because of trauma. Emotional, psychological, physical. Sometimes all three. The more traumatic the trigger, the stronger the abilities tend to be.” She paused, adding, “As Luke told you, I have strong abilities.”

Jonah heeded the warning and didn’t question her about that. All he said was, “Are any of the four of you born psychics?”

“I am,” Luke said. “Though I didn’t know about it in the earliest years of my life.”

“Sometimes,” Samantha murmured, “we’re latent as children, born with . . . possibilities. The abilities are there, often full-blown, but we don’t know about them unless and until we experience some kind of trigger.”

Jonah glanced at Lucas but didn’t ask. “Okay. Anybody else?”

“Robbie is. And she was aware of being different pretty much as soon as she could understand the concept.”

“That must have been . . . difficult,” Jonah ventured.

“Most of us don’t exactly look back on rosy childhoods,” Samantha said matter-of-factly. “One way or another, these abilities can and usually do put us through hell.”

Lucas exchanged a look with his wife, then said to Jonah, “Both Robbie and I are able to tap into very specific energy signatures. Unlike Sam and Dante, who have more diverse abilities, we tend to focus very narrowly in order to use our abilities effectively.

“Robbie’s a telepath, able to read about half the people she encounters, at least when she does her version of dropping her shields. That’s a high average; most telepaths are lucky if they can read a quarter or less of those around them.”

“And you?” Jonah asked after a moment.

Luke said, “What I am doesn’t really have a name. It’s partly telepathic and partly empathic. What I do is home in on the specific electromagnetic energy signature of fear.”

“And his specialty,” Sam said, “is finding lost people.”

“People who are afraid,” her partner and husband said. “People who are in pain. Even before I joined the FBI and the SCU, I was using my abilities to find lost people, though in those days I barely had any control at all. I’m better now, thanks to Sam and the SCU.” He paused, but instead of elaborating on that, he added steadily, “But I can’t find people who don’t want to be found. And I can’t find the dead, at least not by using my psychic abilities.”

Jonah asked slowly, “Do you feel the difference? I mean, would you know if the missing person just didn’t want to be found—or was dead?”

“Sometimes.”

“Then—”

But Luke was shaking his head. “No, I haven’t picked up anything here, not so far.”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe nothing. We haven’t been to all the sites yet. I haven’t been here long enough to get a sense of the place, and I usually need to do that. And . . . I’ve never been able to read anything, feel anything, from people who are drugged or otherwise unconscious.”

“Unless they’re having nightmares,” Sam reminded him quietly.

“Yeah. I do pick up on nightmares sometimes. But like any other psychic, I have abilities that are limited. People often mask or suppress their fear, especially men. I’m less likely to tap into those people. Like all the other psychics in the unit, my abilities also limit themselves, and no matter how much I practice, how hard I try, how hard I push, I can’t get past those boundaries. There are some people I just can’t read, no matter how much pain they’re in or how afraid they are.”