“I have?” She frowned again.

  “Yeah, you have.”

  “I shorted out the hair dryer?”

  “Maybe. And there have been a few other things.”

  Tasha eyed him. “You aren’t going to tell me about those, are you?”

  “Tell me about the shadow, Tasha. Did you sense a person there? Any kind of living being?”

  She was silent for just a moment, still gazing at him, then said slowly, “No. I felt what we all feel when we sense those things. Something cold and slimy. Something bad. Evil. But . . . not a person. Not a personality. Not anything living.”

  Brodie’s eyes narrowed, but with an inward-turned, thoughtful gaze. “Not anything living. I’ve never heard that as part of the feeling any psychic has gotten from the shadows. I wonder.”

  “What?”

  Slowly, he said, “I wonder if the type of shadow you sensed, one apparently set to guard, to watch, is . . . nothing more than an illusion, a projection. It’s a possibility we’ve considered.”

  “They aren’t psychic,” she objected.

  “No. But we know they have some very advanced technology, and if they have something capable of that, it’s a cinch they’d hide it well.”

  “What if it isn’t tech?” Her voice was uneasy. “What if it’s something else?”

  “Something an abducted psychic gave them?”

  “That isn’t an ability I’ve ever heard of. And I’ve done a lot of research about psychic abilities in my life.”

  “I think most of us in this have. And I agree, it’s something I’ve never heard of. But, Tasha . . . we know they’ve experimented. Trying to figure out what makes psychics tick. So maybe somewhere along the way they found something they weren’t looking for. Maybe they found a psychic capable of projecting a scary image into the minds of other psychics. A psychic or psychics powerful enough to project that scary image expressly designed to keep other psychics at a distance. To keep you rattled, frightened. Even before your dream, when we were there, you didn’t want to get close to that house.”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  His fingers tightened over hers. “I know. But I could feel it in you, Tasha. You did not want to get any closer to that house. I think your subconscious sensed that shadow then. I think that’s why you dreamed of it last night.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “You’ve never asked me about Sebring before.” Duran’s voice was measured, giving nothing away.

  “New intel.” Murphy didn’t mind him knowing that; she wanted him to be aware that they were always looking, always seeking information and answers. “She leads field operations for the other faction.”

  He nodded.

  “And that other faction is the one still torturing and experimenting on the psychics they abduct. Your faction gave that up quite a while ago. You really should have told me that, Duran.”

  “Why?”

  Instead of answering, she repeated, “Tell me about Sebring.”

  “She’s intelligent, capable. Vicious. And completely dedicated to her superiors and their goals.”

  “They still believe they can find a way to make your people psychic. Turn them into weapons able to defeat that enemy attacking your world. That’s why they’re still abducting psychics and experimenting on them. Dissecting them.”

  Duran nodded again, his gaze watchful.

  “I assume you know what goes on in their operation even if you aren’t part of it.”

  “Yes.”

  “So which side took Emma Garrick on Monday?”

  “This is not something we talk about,” he said slowly.

  “Things change. Who has her, Duran?”

  “She won’t be dissected,” he said finally.

  Murphy didn’t let her relief show. “So your side. Did you know she was on Bishop’s watch list?”

  “We haven’t talked about him either.”

  “Like I said. Things change. Did you know?”

  “No.”

  “Before Monday, she was only a latent. Since when have your people been able to determine latent ability?”

  His gaze flickered briefly down to the dead psychic. “Something Astrid was able to do.”

  “She knew Emma was a latent, but didn’t know she was on Bishop’s watch list?”

  “She didn’t tell me she knew.”

  Murphy appreciated the distinction. “I wonder how many others she lied to you about.”

  “So do I,” he said somewhat grimly.

  “Emma’s only sixteen, Duran. Bishop’s very protective of the psychics on his watch list, especially the younger ones. He cares about all psychics, of course, at least those of us with souls. But those on his watch list . . . Well, he’s very protective. I have no idea what Astrid was up to in leading your people to a young latent psychic on his list, but—” She stopped herself, instead asking, “Did you know abducting her would trigger her abilities?”

  “It has before,” he said after a moment.

  “Trauma. It usually takes trauma to trigger abilities in a latent. But you knew that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I knew that.”

  “Thanks for the reminder. Your faction may no longer dissect psychics, but you don’t mind putting them through bloody hell, do you?”

  Duran was silent, still watchful.

  “How many die in the process?”

  “Only the fragile ones.”

  For a moment Murphy didn’t trust herself to speak. When she finally did, her voice was hardly more than a growl. “Again, thanks for the reminder. He wants her back, Duran. He wants all his people back. Did you really think he wouldn’t?”

  Duran didn’t answer that last question. “Once taken, a psychic passes out of my control.”

  “And is taken to your lab. Where they aren’t dissected. Which means there are two labs, then. One where psychics are tested and pushed beyond the breaking point, and the other where they’re literally taken apart to see what makes them tick.”

  He was silent.

  “Do you know where the labs are?”

  “We operate as you do, Murphy, with information on a need-to-know basis. I don’t need to know where the labs are.”

  “Oh, I imagine you could give us a place to start looking.”

  After a long moment, he said, “I might, perhaps, be able to do that.”

  “Is that an offer, Duran?”

  “It was a statement.”

  “Yeah. Tell me something. Would you stop all this if you could? The abductions, the experiments, all the rest of it?”

  “My superiors—”

  “Never mind them for the moment. Take them out of the equation. If it were just you in charge. Just you deciding whether to continue all those useless programs. Would you stop it all?”

  After a moment, he said, “I told you once before, Murphy. I’m fighting to prevent the extinction of my people.”

  “The original mission.”

  “It’s why we came here.”

  “Yeah. But it’s too late to save them. Back on your homeworld. It was too late long before you were born.”

  He stiffened. “You can’t know that.”

  “Can’t I? The problem with obsession is that it blinds you. And when an obsession is carried over from generation to generation, the blindness grows even stronger. Your people came here to accomplish a goal. A long, long time ago. So long ago that none of you noticed that goal no longer mattered.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Bishop came out of his and Miranda’s bedroom into the sitting room of their suite, frowning down at the notes on the legal pad he carried. His “roaming” psychics had been searching half a dozen western states, the area almost overwhelmingly huge. They had all reported in at various points, some placing phone calls to him and others simply reaching out to touch his mind.

  Today, Friday, for the first time, the search area could be reduced to one state.

  Wyoming.

  Bishop. Shadows.

  On the move?

  No. Fixed. I think in the northern part of the state.

  I need an exact location.

  On it. For what it’s worth, the shadows feel like an illusion to me. Not real. Not alive.

  No threat?

  Guards, I think. Something to scare away nosy visitors and other troublemakers. But don’t worry. I don’t scare so easily.

  Be careful. Don’t approach the location. Just find it and report in.

  Copy.

  Bishop’s mind was fixed on that mental conversation, and on dealing with his own desire to call Matt Garrick and tell him his daughter was not dead.

  He couldn’t do that. Not yet. Not until he could be absolutely sure she wasn’t dead. Until he had her safe.

  But . . . Christ, they were about to have a funeral for her—

  Halfway into the sitting room of the suite, he stopped, caught by surprise. Which was a very rare happening for him.

  “Miranda, we have a visitor,” he called over his shoulder.

  She joined him just inside the sitting room, both staring at the blue-eyed black cat perched casually on the broad arm of a chair at right angles to the couch.

  You usually call her beloved.

  Bishop lifted an eyebrow as he looked at his wife and partner. “Did I imagine that?”

  She could hardly help but smile, even as she studied the extremely odd cat. “You don’t imagine things like this. And neither do I. Clearly he’s an even more unusual cat than we thought. How in the world did he get in?”

  I slipped in when room service was removing your lunch cart. Nothing magic about it.

  Miranda addressed Pendragon directly. “And how did you get inside the building and up to this floor?”

  I’m a cat. We specialize in stealthy.

  A rare laugh escaped Bishop. “Well, he’s right. That is an attribute of cats.” He paused, adding, “But if you’re only a cat, Pendragon, then I need to reexamine my knowledge of cats.”

  Labels. Boxes. You humans always want things defined, don’t you?

  “Afraid so. We find it easier to deal with life that way.”

  Pendragon lifted his chin slightly, and both humans watching him would have sworn he was smiling. A bit like the Grinch.

  All right. I’m not only a cat. I am, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the only one of my kind to survive and escape those beings you call the other side.

  “Survive what?” Bishop asked slowly.

  Experimentation. The two of you should sit down. It’s a long story, and I need you to hear it all.

  * * *

  • • •

  “You keep coming back to that,” Duran said, his voice unusually tight. “The original mission. You’re so sure it’s already a failure. That what we’ve done was all for nothing. I’d like very much to know how you can be so sure of that.”

  “Would you? Hmm. I told you our strongest psychics heard the screams of those taken, sometimes even felt the terror and pain. That’s been happening for . . . a long time now. And what our psychics came to realize was that a larger percentage of the psychics your teams reached first did not cry out. Did not appear to be terrified or in pain. From most of them, all our psychics could read, if they read anything at all, was fear—and surprise. And then nothing except shadows.”

  She smiled faintly. “A dandy distraction, those shadows.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, of course you do, Duran. It bothered me from the beginning that all the people from your side we encountered were, to all appearances, people. Just people. Like you. If I knew nothing of your ancestry, I’d guess that you were a highly intelligent and successful businessman of some sort. Interesting. Actually very handsome. But just a man.”

  He waited, silent and apparently unaffected.

  “Still, there had to be some physical differences. Minor ones, when all’s said and done. Mostly on the surface, but not so many at the biological level. Because what science, what biology tells this very bright mind of mine is that a natural mating is not going to take place between two species as dissimilar as humans—and those shadows our psychics see when they try to look more closely at your people. When they try to read your people. Try to focus on a psychic you’re using, the way you used Astrid. Nothing like those shadows could have mated naturally with a human.”

  She paused for only a moment before asking, “Or were you created in a petri dish?”

  Murphy had a fairly good idea that in pushing Duran as hard and as far as she had during this meeting she was risking a lot. Maybe everything. But stronger instincts told her the timing was right, and that the future of many psychics, perhaps including some they had believed lost forever, might well be decided by what she could learn from Duran today.

  Even if she had to break him open to learn what she needed to learn.

  “No,” he said finally. “I was not.”

  “A natural mating, then. No medical . . . intervention.”

  “No.”

  Not betraying so much as a flicker that she was ticking off those boxes in her head, Murphy simply said, “Well, I won’t ask for intimate details. Too much information even for me. I’ll just assume your parents met somehow, spent an enjoyable night or three together, and you were conceived.”

  “And so?”

  “And so that makes you a rare bird, Duran. A very, very rare bird. A male hybrid from the original line that stretches back to your first ones. It also makes you living proof that our two species really aren’t that different after all.” She barely paused. “And living proof that those on your side of the schism didn’t view a hybrid as a threat, but possibly as an asset. A face our side can recognize as being akin rather than . . . alien. And no doubt stopped our side from taking that one more step into our imaginations from wondering why you wanted psychics so badly to wondering just what you were. And where you came from.

  “I do wonder now, though, if those on the other side of the schism did see you as a threat. If, maybe, they eventually looked for ways to undermine your confidence even then, when you were so young and not yet in command of anything.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your mother, Duran. You’ve always been suspicious of her death. It’s the major reason your loyalties have so often been divided, which is perfectly understandable. But once you were in the field, once you reported to those whose goals you understood, you began to see . . . more than they expected you to see.”

  “Are you getting anywhere near a point?” he asked, betraying real impatience for the first time.

  “My point, Duran, is that you began to see signs of a schism you hadn’t known existed until you were out in the field. Until we were damning you for torturing psychics when that was never something you had done. Never something you had ordered done. Something you had no knowledge had ever been done. Oh, you were ruthless. Any good commander has to be sometimes.”

  Murphy glanced down at Astrid’s body briefly then met his intent gaze again. “We do what we have to in order to protect our own. Or avenge our own.”

  It was a long moment before Duran spoke, and when he did it was in a careful tone. “I know very little about Sebring and her operations.”

  “Just that she answers to the other faction’s leaders and is dedicated to their cause.”

  “Yes.”

  Murphy frowned slightly. “She leaves evidence whenever possible that it was you, your people. She studied the methods you use to abduct psychics, and she replicates them. Except that the psychics she takes are tested with methods a hell of a lot more invasive and destructive than those your side uses.”

  “Yes,” he repeated.

  “Do you know where her base is?”

  “That’s not something I ever tried to discover. My impression has been that she stays mobile, as I do.”

  “Your superiors didn’t want to know that?”

  He hesitated long enough to make it obvious, then said, “They’re convinced the other . . . faction . . . will see sense. Eventually. That whatever Sebring and her people do now will be forgiven and forgotten.”

  “Especially if she can bring them some helpful intel? Some elusive fact found only in torturing and dissection?”

  “Perhaps,” he admitted. “Probably. They want answers.”

  “And don’t care that psychics are being killed. The subjects of horrific experiments.”

  “They’re single-minded,” Duran said evenly. “They believe we’ll soon have enough psychics under our control to defeat our enemy. The original mission. Beings with psychic abilities they were able to use offensively defeated that enemy on other worlds. We had proof of that. We wanted to give our own people those weapons if at all possible. Or . . . obtain psychics from other worlds to help us.”

  “With or without this Supreme you’re all after?”

  Duran nodded once. “A Supreme would have been the ultimate weapon. But . . . lesser psychics would still be effective weapons.”

  FIFTEEN

  “So the numbers do matter. And then? When you have enough psychics?”

  “What are you asking me?”

  Murphy considered him for a moment, a slight smile playing about her lips. “I need to know where to find this Sebring, Duran.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  She ignored that. “I need to know where the labs are. Theirs—and yours. I have a hunch there are probably only two of them, given what goes on in them. And they have to be isolated. Hidden. Secret.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Of course you can.”