The First Prophet (5 page)

“He can’t save me either,” she said softly, returning her attention to the stew.

“Why the hell not? He’s a cop, isn’t he? It’s his job.”

Sarah shook her head. “To protect and serve? No. There’s nothing he can do—even if
he believed me. Even if he believed you. And he wouldn’t.”

“You can’t know that.”

She turned toward him again, leaning back against the counter and picking up her coffee
cup. She was smiling. “Can’t I? Then you’ve wasted a trip, haven’t you, Tucker?”

It silenced him, but only for a moment. “You’re not going to do anything about that
guy out there? Not even report to the police?”

“Not even report to the police. I’ve learned to accept what I can’t change.”

“You accepted me awfully easily,” he said curiously. “Why? Was our meeting—meant to
be?” The question wasn’t nearly as mocking as he had intended it to sound.

“I recognized you,” she replied with yet another shrug.

“Recognized me? From where?”

“I had seen you.” There was an evasive note in her voice, something Tucker was quick
to pick up on.

“Where had you seen me, Sarah?”

There was a moment of silence. She looked steadily down at her cup, a slight frown
between her brows.
Then, finally, softly, she said, “I had seen you in my dreams. My…waking nightmares.”

“You mean you had a vision and I was in it?”

Sarah almost flinched. “I hate that word.
Vision.
It makes me sound like some cheap carnival sideshow mystic. Pay your money and come
into the tent, and Madam Sarah will look into her crystal ball and tell you your future.
All filled with hope and dreams. Except that isn’t what I do. I don’t have a crystal
ball. And I can’t get answers on demand.”

Patient, Tucker brought her back to the point. “All right, then. You had seen me in
your—waking nightmares. You had seen me in your future. So you knew you could trust
me?”

Her slight frown returned. “It has nothing to do with trust. I saw you. I knew you’d
be there. When it happens. I knew you weren’t involved in it. At least—I don’t believe
you are. But you’re there. When it happens.”

The writer in Tucker was going crazy with her tenses, but he thought he understood
her. At least up to a point. “When what happens, Sarah?”

She looked at him, finally. Her gaze was steady and her voice matter-of-fact when
she replied, “When they kill me.”

“You bungled it,” Duran said.

Varden stiffened, but there was no sign of anger in his voice when he said, “At the
time, it seemed the best idea.”

“A house fire? Guaranteed to draw law enforcement as well as numerous spectators?
How did you expect to remove her from that situation without attracting further attention?”

“Obviously, I intended to remove her before the fire was noticed.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“The fire spread faster than I bargained for.”

Duran turned his head and looked at the other man. Gently, he said, “It was an old
house. They tend to burn quickly.”

Accepting that rebuke with what grace he could muster, Varden merely nodded without
further attempts to defend himself.

Duran gazed at him a moment longer, then moved away from the window of the cramped
hotel room and settled into a chair across from a long couch. “Sit down.” It wasn’t
an invitation.

Taking a place on the couch, Varden said in a carefully explanatory tone, “I was under
the impression that the judgment of the Council demanded quick action. Tyrell said—”

“Tyrell reports to me,” Duran said with an edge to his quiet voice. “The decision
is mine.”

“You thought she could be salvaged?”

“What I thought is not your concern. You follow orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

Duran waited a moment, his gaze boring into Varden. Then, almost casually, he said,
“I want Sarah Gallagher.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re going to get her for me, Varden. Aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good,” Duran said. “That is good.”

Tucker drew a long, slow breath, trying with calm and logic to keep the chill inside
him from spreading. “When who kills you, Sarah?”

“I don’t know who they are. Whenever I try to concentrate
on them, to see them, all I see are shadows. Misshapen, sliding away whenever I try
to focus on them, impossible to identify as anything except…shadows.” She shook her
head a little, helpless. “This is all new to me, in case you didn’t know that. I was
mugged last March, and a head injury put me in a coma. When I came out of it, I started
having the waking nightmares.”

He nodded, familiar with the facts because a newspaper story had reported them—and
had brought him here. “I understand that. What I don’t understand is what, exactly,
makes you believe that someone is going to kill you. What did you see?”

The bell on the microwave dinged, and Sarah turned to set her coffee aside and get
the stew out. “Haven’t you ever had nightmares, Tucker? The surreal kind, full of
frightening images?”

“Of course I have. They made zero sense. And they sure as hell didn’t predict the
future.”

“My waking nightmares do.” She was clearly unoffended by his skepticism.

“Okay, then, tell me what you saw. Why are you so convinced you’re going to be killed?”

Sarah didn’t respond for several minutes as she transferred the thawed stew to the
pot on the stove and began stirring it as it heated. All her attention seemed to be
fixed on the task. And when she did begin speaking, Tucker thought that her voice
was very steady the way someone’s was when they were telling you something that scared
the living shit out of them.

“Because I saw my grave. Waiting for me.”

“Sarah, that doesn’t have to mean—”

She nodded jerkily. “There are other things I don’t remember, images that terrified
me. But the grave…that was all too clear. It has a tombstone, and the tombstone is
already inscribed. It has my name on it. In the…waking nightmare…I’m falling toward
it, into it, so fast I don’t see the date of—of my death. But the month is October,
and the year is this year. And just as the darkness of the grave closes over me, I
hear them applauding. And I know they’ve won. I know they’ve killed me.”

“They?”

“The shadows.”

“Sarah, shadows can’t hurt you.”

She looked at him with old eyes. “These can. And will.”

Tucker watched her as she turned to check on the steaming stew and put the thawing
bread in the oven. There was a lot for him to think about. On the face of it, his
first inclination was to ascribe her “waking nightmare” to something she’d eaten or
a vivid imagination; as badly as he wanted to believe in precognitive abilities, he
had yet to find a genuine psychic, and years of frustration had inured him to disillusionment.

He certainly had no proof that Sarah Gallagher was indeed psychic. The information
he had gathered seemed to indicate that she was, and those witnesses who claimed to
have heard her predictions prior to later events seemed both reliable and reputable.
But there was no way to be sure that her “predictions” had not come from some
as-yet-undiscovered means of foreknowledge that had nothing to do with so-called extrasensory
perception.

Each of the “predictions” he knew of could, after all, be rationally explained, given
a few reasonable possibilities. Months before, she had been mugged on her way home
one night, and the resulting head injury had put her into a coma for sixteen days.
She could have overheard information while in that coma, for instance, and—consciously,
perhaps—forgotten where it had come from. That could explain her apparent foreknowledge
of the early birth of a nurse’s baby, which had been her first recorded prediction.
Some doctor with a suspicion of what could happen might have mentioned it within Sarah’s
hearing. And though her prediction of a Chicago hotel fire that had killed forty people
certainly seemed remarkable, Tucker had discovered that one of the men later arrested
for arson had been treated for a minor traffic injury in the same Richmond hospital
where Sarah had lain in a coma. It was a coincidence that bothered him.

Other minor predictions she had made could—with some ingenuity—also be linked to her
stay in the hospital. Tucker had utilized quite a bit of ingenuity, so he knew it
could be done. He hadn’t yet been able to explain away her apparent foreknowledge
of several murders apparently committed by a serial killer in California, but he was
half-convinced he could, given enough time.

All of which, of course, raised the question of why he had bothered to seek out Sarah
Gallagher at all.

“You want so badly to believe.” Her voice was quiet, her gaze direct as she turned
to look at him.

“Do I?” He wasn’t quite as unsettled, this time, by her perception—extrasensory or
otherwise.

Instead of directly answering that question, Sarah said, “I can’t perform for you,
Tucker. I can’t go down that list of questions you have in your mind and answer them
one by one as if it’s some final exam. I can’t convince you of something you need
irrefutable proof to believe. That’s not the way this works.”

“You mean it’s like believing in God?” His voice was carefully neutral. “It requires
faith?”

“What it requires is admitting the possible. Believing the evidence of your eyes and
ears without trying to explain it all away. Accepting that you’ll never be able to
cross every
t
and dot every
i
. And most of all, it requires a willingness to believe that science isn’t the ultimate
authority. Just because something can’t be rationally explained on the basis of today’s
science doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

“That sounds like the party line,” Tucker said dryly, having heard the same sort of
“answers” for years.

She shook her head. “Look, I never believed in the paranormal, in psychics, myself.
When I thought about it, which wasn’t often, I just assumed it was either a con of
some kind or else coincidence—anything that could somehow be explained away. Not only
was I a skeptic, I simply didn’t care; I had no interest in anything paranormal. It
didn’t matter to me.”

“Until you found yourself looking into the future.”

Sarah tilted her head a bit to one side as she considered him and his flat statement.
Then, with a touch of wry humor, she said, “Well, when you’re up to your ass in alligators,
it’s a bit difficult to pretend you aren’t involved in the situation.”

Tucker appreciated the humor, but what interested him most was a glint of something
he thought he saw in her eyes. Slowly, he said, “So, are you involved in this? Or
just along for the ride?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She turned abruptly back to the stove to check the stew
and bread, then busied herself getting plates and bowls out of the cabinets above
the counter and silverware from a drawer.

“You know exactly what I mean, Sarah. Are you resigned to dying next month because
you believe that’s your fate? Because you believe your destiny is—literally—written
in stone? Or do you have the guts to use what you’ve seen to change your fate, to
take control of your destiny?”

She didn’t answer right away, and when she did, her voice was almost inaudible. “Strange
questions from a man who doesn’t believe I could have seen my future—or anybody else’s.”

Tucker didn’t hesitate. “I’m willing to suspend my disbelief—if
you’re
willing to accept the possibility that what you saw—or at least the outcome—can be
changed.”

Again, Sarah took her time responding. She sliced bread and ladled out stew, setting
his meal before him and then placing her own so that she was sitting at a right angle
to him. She tasted her stew almost idly, then said,
“I saw a hotel fire that killed people, and I couldn’t stop it. I saw the man I loved
killed by a train, and I couldn’t stop it. I saw a serial killer commit horrible acts,
and I couldn’t stop him. A week ago, I saw my house burn to the ground, and today
it burned.”

Tucker began eating to give himself time to marshal his arguments, and in the meantime
asked a question he was curious about. “Why didn’t you call the police when you saw
your house burn?”