“Quentin, there’s a little girl—”
“Ruby. Yes, I know. You don’t want to go charging up there right now to save her. You really, really don’t.”
“What did you see?” Hollis asked him.
“Something I don’t want to see again. Ever. I’ll explain, but right now we need to go. We don’t have much time, because our pilot can’t be AWOL more than an hour or so.” He stepped back and gestured.
They exchanged glances, and Sawyer holstered his weapon, Tessa returned to the dining room long enough to pick up the bag that still held a sleepy poodle, and Hollis grabbed a jacket. Then they followed Quentin from the house.
After hearing that there would be a pilot, Sawyer wasn’t all that surprised to find, awaiting them in a clearing no more than a couple hundred yards from the house, a sleek green and white helicopter. His first thought was that it was a M.A.M.A. chopper: one of the Mountain Area Medical Airlift choppers seen fairly often carrying patients from accidents and smaller hospitals to the major medical center that was Asheville.
His second thought was the recognition that this was a much more powerful and unusual machine, and also that it was a hell of a nifty idea to make the aircraft look like one residents in the area wouldn’t think twice about if they looked up and saw it. Most people would make an idle mental note to check the news and see if there’d been an accident but wouldn’t be surprised if no later news report was forthcoming—patients were regularly ferried from one hospital to another, and that seldom made the news.
He was surprised at the almost eerie quiet of the machine, though it explained why they’d heard nothing. The rotors beat the air rhythmically, but that was virtually the only sound, and even that was oddly muted.
“Military?” he asked Quentin.
“They wish. Let’s go.”
Sawyer was the last to climb aboard, and it wasn’t until he settled into his seat and accepted the headphones Quentin gave himthat the pilot turned his head and offered a very faint smile.
It was Reese DeMarco.
Sawyer exchanged looks with Tessa, hoping that his eyes weren’t as wide and baffled as he felt, and then hastily put on his headphones as the helicopter lifted into the air and headed north, so low it was practically skimming the treetops.
“What the hell?” Sawyer demanded. “He’s on your team?”
“Afraid so.” Quentin sounded amused. “I know he makes a rotten first impression, but given time you’ll warm up to him.”
“I doubt that,” Sawyer snapped.
Tessa looked at Hollis, who merely shrugged.
“I’ve never met him,” the agent told Tessa. “Knew we had somebody else on the inside, but that’s as much as Bishop would tell me.”
Through the headphones, Reese DeMarco’s voice was cool. “And that was more than you needed to know.”
Hollis shot him a none-too-friendly look, then shrugged again. “Looks like all the secrets are coming out today anyway.”
After that, the passengers and pilot remained silent for what turned out to be about a ten-minute flight to a very large house perched high above Grace on the side of a mountain. What appeared to be a flat-roofed multicar garage sported a clear heliport, and DeMarco set the chopper down with a featherlight touch and switched off the engine.
Sawyer was in no mood to be impressed. He ignored their pilot as he helped Tessa out and then walked beside her across the landing pad, following Quentin, Hollis, and DeMarco into the building.
As soon as they stepped inside, Sawyer knew they were in someone’s home rather than any sort of government or corporate structure. The rooms were open and expansive, towering windows provided spectacular views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the furnishings and artwork were, clearly, both expensive and tasteful.
They passed through a huge living area, seeing a gleaming state-of-the-art kitchen off to the left, and then into what was obviously an unusually large study. A massive conference table occupied the center of the space, while at least three discreet computer workstations were scattered around the outer areas of the room, each with a stunning mountain view.
Sawyer thought the room was deserted. For an instant.
He came out of nowhere, a big man whose powerful single punch knocked DeMarco to the floor without warning.
“You shot me,” the big man bit out.
DeMarco didn’t attempt to get up. Instead, he pushed himself onto an elbow and gingerly rubbed his jaw with one hand. He eyed the man standing above him with more than a hint of wariness. “Galen—”
“You fucking shot me. Twice.”
By the time Ruth left him, Samuel felt considerably better. Not fully energized, of course, but strong enough so that he could conduct the planned afternoon Ritual with a few of his Chosen.
After that, of course, he would be fine.
He needed the cleansing of the Ritual, especially after remembering . . . her. Not that she mattered, really. What mattered was that he had truly come of age that day, discovering that he could master his God-given abilities and acquire new ones.
It had required more long years of effort and practice, of course, before he learned to be confident. Years more before he began to cautiously explore his limits—only to discover that with enough time and power he could do almost anything.
Almost.
He didn’t meditate again, because he wasn’t strong enough to endure the trip back into his complete past, but he did remain in his quarters for a few more minutes before joining those in the church for lunch.
He thought about the Prophecy.
That had been given to him nearly two decades ago, long after Maddox had found his own bloody end on the path. Samuel had gone on, but not alone. Ruth had been his first disciple. Loyal through all the years since, it was Maddox’s daughter who quite often discovered and recruited the very best of Samuel’s Chosen ones.
She had helped him through the test God had given him the previous summer, the test of his control over the Beast, though he thought she probably wouldn’t have if she had not witnessed, all those years ago, God reaching down to touch him a second time, his gift the Prophecy.
After that, she had never doubted him.
And he had taken giant steps, this past year and more, toward becoming the perfect sword of God’s wrath. He was almost there. Almost.
Only a bit more sharpening of his sword was needed, and then he would be ready.
Then the Prophecy would be fulfilled.
Then the world would be blasted clean by the pure white heat of God’s chosen warrior. And the Chosen few would go on.
Soon.
“You should be glad I did,” DeMarco retorted. “At least I knew where to put the bullets. Either of the guys with me would have gone for head shots, and not even you come back from that.”
For several beats, it seemed as though Galen was in no mood to be reasoned with, but finally he swore under his breath and extended a hand to the man he had just decked.
“Well, it hurts, just in case you didn’t know that. Getting shot. It hurts like hell.”
DeMarco accepted the hand up, still visibly wary. “Sorry. And, actually, I do know it hurts. From experience. But what choice did I have? You were too damn close to miss, and there was no way you could make it to any kind of cover in time to avoid getting shot by one of us. I had about a second to act, and the best option for both of us seemed to be to put you down, fast and hard. Don’t try to tell me you wouldn’t have made exactly the same choice if the situation had been reversed.”
“Yeah, yeah. Point taken. But it was—unpleasant. And that river was damn cold too.” The grumble was obviously more automatic than anything else.
Sawyer looked at Tessa and asked, “Am I supposed to be following any of this?”
“I wouldn’t expect so. I’m not.”
Quentin grinned at both of them. “Agent Galen was inside the Compound a week or so ago in the predawn hours and ran afoul of DeMarco and two armed church members.?
??
“Afoul?” DeMarco stared at him, brows rising. “Seriously?”
“You want to explain this?”
“Not really.”
“Then don’t criticize my choice of words.”
“Armed?” Sawyer said.
“Just handguns,” DeMarco told him. “Nothing heavy.”
Galen said, “You mean aside from that silver cannon you carry?”
“It fits my hand.”
“It’s more firepower than any handgun needs. It’s going to leave a mark—two marks, as a matter of fact—and not much does.”
DeMarco rubbed his jaw again and dryly said, “Uh-huh.”
“Oh, don’t even compare bullets with a punch.”
“I may not bruise easily, Galen, but I do bruise. How am I supposed to explain this?”
“Tell Samuel you ran into a door.”
“Funny.”
“Nobody up there is licensed,” Sawyer said, his voice a bit louder than before.
To Tessa, Hollis said, “I feel like I’m at a tennis match. With a few extra players on the court.”
“I know what you mean.”
Another player came into the room just then, drawing Sawyer’s still somewhat indignant attention. Yet another tall, wide-shouldered, and athletic man, this one moved with an easy, curiously feline grace, someone totally comfortable inside his own skin. He had jet-black hair with a rather dramatic widow’s peak as well as a streak of pure white at the left temple, very pale and extremely sharp silvery-gray eyes, and a faint jagged scar down his left cheek that kept him from being quite as good-looking as DeMarco was but helped him look twice as dangerous.
Which was saying something, Sawyer thought, as those metallic eyes fixed immediately on him.
“Chief. I’m Special Agent Noah Bishop.” The newcomer’s voice was cool and calm.
“You’re in charge?”
“Technically, you’re in charge. Your jurisdiction.”
Sawyer wondered how many times Bishop had made that little speech.
DeMarco said to Bishop, “You might have warned me Galen was on the warpath.”
“I might have,” Bishop agreed.
“Shit, Bishop.”
“Hey, he was going to take his shot. I figured it’d be easier on you if you didn’t know it was coming.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
“Anytime.”
Galen said to DeMarco, “Want an ice bag for that jaw?”
“Don’t gloat. It’s unbecoming. Especially when you blind-side a man.” DeMarco gave his jaw a final rub, then squared his shoulders, clearly throwing off the subject. “Look, I’m on a tight timetable here, so unless everybody wants to find themselves some wheels or walk back down the mountain, I suggest we get to it.”
Bishop said, “Samuel believes you’re out alone, patrolling the perimeter of the Compound?”
“He calls it prowling. It is my long-standing habit to do so at irregular intervals, something he’s accustomed to. I left word that’s what I’d be doing for the next hour or so.”
Clearly hearing or sensing something more, Bishop lifted a questioning brow.
“There are a couple of other people who’ve been paying unusually close attention to my movements recently, so I’m more than a little uneasy about being outside the Compound,” DeMarco explained. “I’d really rather not give them any reason to be suspicious of me, not at this late stage.”
“Sounds like they already are,” Quentin pointed out.
“Maybe. Or maybe Samuel’s growing paranoia is fueling it in others.”
Bishop frowned, then gestured toward the oval conference table, and most everyone moved to take seats. Sawyer was interested to see that Bishop took the head of the table and DeMarco took the foot—both instinctive power positions—while Galen chose to lean a shoulder against the side of a bookcase, apart from the group, where he could watch everyone at the table as well as keep an eye on the doorway.
Someone on guard, Sawyer thought. Probably at all times.
“Is Samuel growing more paranoid?” Bishop asked DeMarco.
“I’m no profiler. But it doesn’t take an expert to see that he’s walking a very fine line right now.”
“Between?” Sawyer asked.
“Between sanity and madness, Chief. The thing is, he’s come down on the mad side too many times already. I don’t even know how he can be sane at all, at any time, given the things he’s done. Though I suppose monsters can always find justification.”
“What’s his?”
“That he’s doing God’s work, of course. The world is overrun with sinners, and he’s helped cull a few. That’s how he looks at it. Just a warm-up for the big show.”
“What show?” There were so many questions tumbling through Sawyer’s brain that he had to start asking, and keep asking, even though he knew Tessa had only one concern right now and was impatient to steer the discussion to Ruby.
“Armageddon. An apocalypse. Whatever you want to call it. The End Times. The end of the world, Chief.” The very lack of emotion in DeMarco’s voice made his words all the more chilling. “Samuel believes he was given a Prophecy by God. And given the power, by God, to trigger the final destruction. To control it. And to survive it.”
“He’s also,” Bishop said flatly, “a serial killer.”
“Which you know,” Sawyer reminded him, “but can’t prove. Right?”
“Unfortunately.”
DeMarco said, “There’s been no confession. Not even something remotely resembling one. He might talk of culling sinners but not of killing them. What he did last summer in Boston—he did it partly just to see if he could, I think. If he could control the beast. If he could hunt and not get caught. But then the monster hunters got too close, and he set out to discover just how good they really were. He set out to explore and test the strengths and weaknesses of the only enemy he was truly afraid of.” He nodded toward Bishop.
“You?” Sawyer asked Bishop. “He’s afraid of you specifically?”
“The SCU. But, yes, me specifically. I was, thanks to the media, the public face of the task force and the SCU during the Boston investigation. So he saw me as a threat. Enough of a threat that it drove him to ground for a while. Until, as Reese said, he decided to test his limits and ours. In Venture, Georgia, this past October. And too many women died in both places before we managed to find and cage the monster.”
“One of the monsters,” DeMarco noted. “Unfortunately for everyone involved, when Samuel pushed himself—apparently in a series of attempts to steal from others psychic abilities he wanted to possess, needed to possess for this ultimate battle he believes is coming—the experiences changed him. And not for the better.”
Bishop said to Sawyer, “It wasn’t until near the end of the hunt that we realized what he might be capable of. And by then we could only react defensively, try to protect ourselves and our abilities. Dani Justice, a Haven operative, was the only one of us who possessed an ability that could be channeled and used as a weapon. She used it defensively.”
“And it hurt Samuel,” DeMarco said. “Badly. Shook his confidence and weakened him. And did something else to him. When he came back here . . . I didn’t know what had happened, at first. I was so deep undercover that my check-ins were infrequent. All I knew was that he claimed to have had a transformative experience, that he’d walked through the wilderness, through the desert, like Moses.”
“Seriously?” Sawyer asked.
“Oh, he was quite serious. And he had been changed. None of us knew how much until the rebellion that had been simmering in his flock while he was gone boiled over when he returned. One follower, a man named Frank Metcalf, had taken advantage of Samuel’s absence over those many weeks to make his case as a better leader. More than a few were willing to follow him. Until Samuel came back. Changed. And literally put the fear of God into them.”
“Is that when he killed all the animals?” Sawyer asked.
DeMarco looked at
him, no expression at all on his face. “He killed more than the animals, Chief. He also killed Frank Metcalf. He killed him without so much as laying a finger on him.”
“How?” Sawyer demanded.
“Lightning. He channeled lightning. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Fourteen
RUBY CAMPBELL had lived with her secret for such a long time that it seemed to her there had never been anything else. That she had never just been a little girl who ran and played and complained about her lessons or her chores.
It hardly seemed possible to her now that such a simple life had once been hers.
Was it ever like that? Or do I just wish it had been?
Her head ached all the time now, because she had to concentrate so much, had to think so hard about the way she needed things to be. How she needed other people to see. What she needed them to see. Even after sending Lexie away to be safe with Tessa Gray, Ruby knew she couldn’t let down her guard.
Father had noticed her. He was watching her.
And she knew now what he could do. What he had done.
Brooke . . .
There was a numb place where Brooke had been. A dark spot in Ruby’s memory of what had happened to her friend. She thought it was probably because she simply couldn’t bear to remember it just yet.
Not all of it, at least.
But Brooke was gone. She was gone, and Ruby hadn’t even been able to tell their friends about it yet.
And on top of suffering her own grief alone and in silence, Ruby was more terrified than she’d ever been in her life. Terrified that Father might know her secret. All her secrets.
He hadn’t said anything about Lexie, hadn’t appeared to notice, but that didn’t reassure Ruby. Because the really, really scary part of her secret wasn’t that she could make things look like other things or even seem to disappear. The really scary part was that she saw what was there. Even what was really underneath people’s skin.
And now she had seen what was underneath Father’s skin.
“Ruby?”
The little girl braced herself. She looked up from her afternoon lessons to see her mother standing in the doorway of the little den they’d turned into a schoolroom.