Текст книги "The First Prophet"

Автор книги: Kay Hooper

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Tucker returned his gaze to Sarah’s face. “Her mother died a few weeks later, her aunt less than a year afterward. Lydia didn’t come home for the funerals. She never came home again. I started looking for her that summer, and kept on every chance I had. I hired a couple of private detectives in those first years, but they got nowhere, so I taught myself how to search. But I got nowhere myself. It was as if she’d dropped off the face of the earth the day she left Richmond. I spent endless hours searching birth and…death records, newspapers, tax rolls, every kind of public record I could access, beginning in Virginia and working north and south, then west. But I never found a single hint of her existence. By the time I left college the first time, I’d realized that I wasn’t going to find her that way.”

“The first time?”

“Yeah, I ended up going back. Picking up a couple more degrees in subjects that interested me.” He shrugged jerkily. “Not that any of them helped me find Lydia.”

“So you began looking for a psychic who could tell you where Lydia was.”

“I’d always been interested in the paranormal. And I had to know. What had happened to her, to the baby. I had to know they were all right. But the so-called psychics I found couldn’t tell me anything useful. It was mostly garbage, the standard you’ve-lost-your-love kind of crap they told every other customer. And even the few people I believed had genuine ability couldn’t seem to tap into anything other than my need to find her.”

“But you kept searching.”

He nodded. “More than eighteen years now. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Lydia. About our child. Lydia thought it was a boy, from the very first, when she told me. He’d probably be in his junior or senior year of high school now, planning for college—”

Sarah looked away.

Tucker swallowed hard, a dull, cold ache spreading through him. “Except he isn’t, is he?”

“No.” Sarah’s voice was almost inaudible. “He isn’t.”

Tucker closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. Steadily, he said, “Tell me. Tell me what happened to them.”

With obvious reluctance, she said, “I think…I know…the baby died very soon after birth. He just…went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Crib death, I think.”

Tucker thought of all the years spent searching. And the daydreams, sometimes reluctant but always vivid and detailed, of his child growing up somewhere. The first steps. The first baseball glove. The first bike. First day in school. First lost tooth. First kiss. First date.

All the firsts he had imagined missing. And now, to know that none of it had happened at all.

He was somehow surprised that it hurt so much, but he wasn’t surprised by the guilt. If he hadn’t run out on Lydia, would it have been different? Would their child have lived?

“It wouldn’t have ended differently,” Sarah said, still without looking at him. “If you and Lydia had married. If you had been the most wonderful husband and father possible. It would have ended the same way. I know you don’t want to believe that, but it’s true. Some things really are meant to happen just the way they happen.”

He didn’t have the emotional energy to argue with her about destiny. Not again. In any case, the idea that he could not have made a difference in his child’s short life didn’t offer much comfort.

“What about Lydia?” he asked.

Sarah shook her head slightly. “She…she’s gone too. But later, I think. A few years ago.”

Tucker never doubted that Sarah was telling him facts. There was no question in his mind. Just an overwhelming weariness and the echoes of that cold, dull pain deep inside him. And regret.

“So I’ll never even be able to tell her I’m sorry.” He leaned his head back against the hard chair and closed his eyes. “Christ.”

“She knew you were sorry.”

“Not everybody is psychic, Sarah. How the hell could she know that? There was no sign of it from me.”

“She knew you. The kind of person you were. She even knew you’d come back in a few days.”

Tucker raised his head and opened his eyes, staring at her. “Trying to make me feel better?”

Sarah was looking at him now, her eyes once more darkened and her expression intent. “No. I’m telling you what I know. Lydia knew you’d come back. She knew you’d marry her, even if you didn’t know that yourself. She knew that all she had to do was wait for you to work it out.”

“Then why the hell didn’t she?”

Sarah tilted her head a bit in that listening posture, and spoke slowly. “She realized what she was asking you to do. Give up your dreams of writing, or at the very least put them aside for a long time. She realized that what she wanted in life was not what you wanted, at least not then. She was sure she could make it on her own, raise her child alone. And she really couldn’t bear to watch her mother die. So she left.”

After a moment, Tucker rose from his chair and crossed the room to sit down on the couch beside Sarah. “How can you know all that, Sarah? What is it you’re tapping into?”

“I don’t know.” She frowned a little, looking at him and yet somehow beyond him. “It’s a…place. A sort of crossroads where everything meets. Past, present, future. A place we all pass through. We leave a…an imprint behind, a sense of what we feel and think and are. I know what Lydia left there, so I know her. Who she was, what she thought and felt. It’s all there, and I can see it.”

Tucker knew there was a theory of a universal consciousness, a kind of energy field made up of all the thoughts and knowledge accumulated by humankind in all its history, a field some people claimed to be able to tap into. Thinking of that theory was as close as he could come to understanding what Sarah was talking about. Even so, in all his study of the paranormal, he had never—ever—read or heard of any psychic with the abilities Sarah was beginning to display.

He had the feeling that if the other side really knew what she was capable of, they’d be breaking down doors to get to her, and to hell with being sneaky about it.

Sarah blinked and suddenly focused on his face. Her pupils were still enormous, but a smile played about her mouth. “Everything that was, and is, and will be is there. We’re there.”

“We are?”

She nodded. “We’re going to be lovers, you know.”

Tucker’s first response to that was purely physical and immediate, but he rode out the surge of desire as if it were an unruly bronc and did his best to control it. He hadn’t realized just how badly he wanted her until that moment. “Are we?”

Sarah nodded again. “It’s our destiny.”

Even as he watched, her pupils were returning to normal, and it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. Hypnotic. He couldn’t stop staring at her, and his voice was almost absentminded. “Destiny. We’ve talked about that, Sarah. I don’t believe our lives are planned for us.”

“Not our lives. Just some things. We will be lovers.”

“And what if I don’t want to play along with destiny?” he asked, even as he wondered why on earth he was objecting.

“You don’t have a choice. Not about this. Don’t you know? Haven’t you always known?”

His mind flashed back to the first time he’d seen her, standing before the ruins of her home in her pretty dress, and he thought he had known, even then, that they belonged together. Why else had he so instantly involved himself in her life? And why had he been so wary of her, if not because he had known immediately and instinctively what she could be to him—and he hadn’t been ready to face that?

He hadn’t been prepared to fall in love with the most complex woman he’d ever met in his life.

Tucker drew a breath. “I thought you were probably still grieving for David, but…I wanted you from the moment I set eyes on you.”

“David is dead,” Sarah said quietly. “Like Lydia. I couldn’t have saved him any more than you could have saved her.”

Tucker reached out to touch her cheek. “Maybe I couldn’t have saved Lydia, but I failed her. I don’t want to fail you, Sarah.”

She didn’t argue with him or reassure him, she just went into his arms and lifted her face with mute need.

“Sarah…”

“It’s destiny,” she whispered, just before his lips covered hers.

“Anything?” Varden asked.

Astrid frowned but didn’t open her eyes or remove the fingers pressed tightly to her temples. “If you’d stop asking me that, maybe I could make some progress.”

“It’s taking too much time.”

“You didn’t ask me how long it would take. You just asked me if I could do it.”

“And you said you could.”

She opened icy blue eyes and glared at him. “I can. But this isn’t easy, you know. No—you don’t know, do you? That’s sort of the point.” A mocking note entered her voice.

Coldly, Varden said, “Don’t forget the other point. You know only because we allow you to. Stop being helpful, and…”

He didn’t have to finish that sentence. Her boldness seeped away, and she closed her eyes once more. “All right, all right. Are you sure Duran okayed this? He must be getting desperate, if he did.”

“Don’t you know that he did?” Varden asked dryly.

“Of course not. Nobody can read Duran. Now shut up and let me concentrate…”

Sarah woke with a slight start, though she had no idea what had startled her. The bedroom was quiet, lamplit. Even as she began to relax, Tucker pushed himself up on an elbow beside her and smiled down at her.

“That was a short nap,” he noted.

She couldn’t see the clock, but an inner sense told her it was still before midnight. “I slept most of the day, remember?” And it was difficult, now, for her to sleep more than an hour or two without waking, uneasy and anxious.

Even, it seemed, in Tucker’s bed.

“Mmm.” He leaned down and kissed her, briefly but not lightly.

She reached up to push a heavy lock of fair hair off his forehead, then let her fingers glide through more of the silky stuff until her hand finally wound up at his nape. How long did they have? A few hours? This night? What would happen when tomorrow came?

Time was passing so relentlessly, pushing them inexorably toward the future. Her future.

That yawning grave.

“Sarah? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She pushed the whispering little fears out of her mind, determined not to spoil tonight.

It might well be all she ever had of him.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. “It’s just…I’m surprised, that’s all.”

“Why?”

Sarah felt her cheeks warm, which was, she told herself, ridiculous. “I’ve never– That is…”

“Haven’t you?” His hand slid to her inner thigh and stroked her sensitive flesh lightly.

The warmth was spreading through her rapidly, but Sarah tried to concentrate. “No. I mean…like I said, it surprised me. To feel like that. I didn’t expect it.”

“What did you expect?” He leaned down, nuzzling the sheet aside as his lips trailed over her upper breast.

“Pleasure. But not like that.” Her fingers tangled in his hair and she shifted a bit to better feel the hard length of his body against hers. “Not like this.”

“I’m glad I could surprise you.” His eyes gleamed at her in a fleeting glance. “It’s obviously something I won’t be able to do very often.”

She wanted to tell him he was more right than he knew but had a hunch that this was not the best time to explain that the passion between them had sparked yet another aspect of her peculiar abilities.

I’m not alone anymore. You’re with me.

Something inside her had opened up to him, had flung itself wide and invited him in, and whether he knew it or not, Tucker had accepted the invitation. It was not something she had expected, or even wanted consciously, yet it was what she had needed. It was the most amazing sense of closeness Sarah had ever known, an inner warmth that seemed to wrap gently—and protectively—around her soul.

It wasn’t that she knew what he was thinking or feeling. It was more than that. Deeper than that. She knew him better than she would ever know herself, and far, far better than he would ever know himself.

What that would mean, to him and to her, Sarah didn’t know. The door that had opened so abruptly and shown her the “crossroads” where she had found the intimate knowledge of Lydia and the certainty that she and Tucker would become lovers on this night had closed just as abruptly. And since she had no idea how she had managed to tap into that place at all, she doubted the door would open again anytime soon.

“Sarah…”

“Hmmm?”

“Dammit, pay attention to me.”

She couldn’t help but smile when he lifted his head to show her a glare that was only half-feigned. “I’m paying strict attention to you.”

“You were thinking. This is not the moment to be thinking.”

“Even if I was thinking about you?”

There was a glitter of amusement in his eyes, but he frowned and held on to the playful role of sulky male. “Well, even so, if you’re able to think about anything at all, I’ve obviously lost my touch.”

His touch roamed up her inner thigh just then, and Sarah had to struggle for a silent moment to find the breath to murmur, “Perish the thought.”

“Literally? You can’t think anymore?” He had pushed the sheet down, and his lips teased her breast with single-minded intensity.

“Tucker…”

“Don’t think about anything, not even me. Just feel.”

She didn’t have a choice. He had quickly learned just how to please her, and he used all that knowledge now to keep her mindless. It was a gift, a glorious escape from fears and worries and dread of a future that loomed all too near and much too dark, and Sarah accepted it gratefully.

And just as before, it surprised her that he could make her feel so much, surprised her that she was even capable of feeling so much.

But when he came inside her, when her body surrounded him and they moved together, everything that had gone before seemed merely a prelude, a pale imitation of what they were truly capable of. The pleasure built and built and built toward some impossible peak Sarah couldn’t even imagine, and when they reached it at last it was together.

One body. One soul.

THIRTEEN

Murphy wasn’t happy and it showed; she had never been known to hide her feelings. About anything. “This is not a good idea,” she said.

“You’re ideal for the job I need you for, we both know that. You have a natural shield, and it’s the strongest I’ve ever encountered. They’ll never know you’re sharing information with me.”

“You’re trusting I won’t tell them.”

“I know you won’t.” His voice was calm. “You’ve given over your entire life, all that you are, to this war.”

After a moment, she said, “Interesting that you call it a war.”

“Don’t you?”

“Yeah. And it’s one we have to win.”

“I agree. Which is why I need someone on the inside to keep me, as much as possible, in the loop. Some information I’ll find myself, the way I found you, but there are way too many puzzle pieces still missing.”

“Just how did you find me?” That was bugging her, and it showed.

“I don’t believe in coincidence as a rule, but you happened to cross paths with one of my team whose ability is detecting other psychics. She was probing because we were on a case. She picked up on you. With a little luck and a lot of effort, I was able to find you, obviously. You aren’t completely off the grid, just mostly.”

“Yeah? And what about you and your team? You’ve got a good shield yourself, Bishop, but that doesn’t mean one of your people or one of the bad guys you go after might not pick up on more than either one of us can live with. Literally.”

“I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen. Aside from myself, the only other team member who knows anything about what’s going on is Miranda, my wife.”

“And I’m supposed to trust you on that?”

“Yes. You are.” He paused, then added, “It’s a two-way street. I can be a source for you, especially when it comes to information you might need on various…factions…of the government. I can get information for you more quickly than you could ever get it on your own.”

“And all I have to do in return is keep you informed.”

“I need to know what you know, Murphy. If for no other reason than I need to be sure that my team is safe, that Haven operatives are safe. I have to be certain none of them are targets, and that means I need all the information you can give me.”

She drew a breath and blew it out impatiently. “That’s sort of the point of this setup, you know; the fewer people who know everything, the less damage done if somebody goes down. I’m not planning to go down, but let’s just say I do. Now I’ve got knowledge about you and your teams.”

“No more knowledge than you could find tapping into any law enforcement database. The other side has to know about the SCU and Haven. That’s why I need more information from you and the people you’re working with. As far as I can tell, none of my psychic agents or operatives have been targeted. Yet. There must be a reason for that.”

“Yeah, I imagine there is. But I can’t give it to you.”

“Not directly, no. But over time the information you can provide me will be pieces of the puzzle. Until I can put it all together.”

She scowled. “Look, my source says you can be trusted, but my trust has to be earned.”

“I understand that. Ours is a relationship I hope to build on.”

“It may take a while,” she warned.

“That’s all right,” Bishop said. “I’m a very patient man.”

It was several hours later when Tucker woke. He propped his head on one raised hand, the better to watch Sarah as she slept, but otherwise didn’t move. He still felt a bit shaky, and it wasn’t only because his muscles had been pushed to their limits tonight. Something else had been pushed to its limits, maybe beyond them. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew he’d never be the same again.

He gazed at Sarah’s sleeping face, and a wave of aching tenderness swept over him. It was stronger than anything he’d ever felt before, so intense it was more than a little terrifying. He had known her hardly more than a week, yet he couldn’t imagine his life now without her in it. The wariness he had so often felt around her no longer troubled him. He had never felt so close to another human being, so…wrapped up in her.

And so afraid for her.

How could he protect her from the other side? How could he keep her safe?

That agonizing question had barely risen in his mind when a sudden realization struck. Jesus, not only was the pistol in the other room, but he wasn’t at all sure he’d used the dead bolt and night latch on the door after he’d pushed the room service cart back out into the hallway hours ago.

Careful not to wake Sarah, he slid from the bed and found his shorts and jeans. He would much rather have remained in bed with her, absorbing her warmth and her scent, watching her sleep and waiting patiently for her to wake so they could make love again. But things left undone nagged at him.

It was after threeA.M. but since he was wide awake now and Sarah seemed to be sleeping deeply, he figured he might as well try to get something accomplished while she got the rest she undoubtedly needed. He was hardly in the mood to wade through more statistics of dead and vanished psychics, but he could try to refine the program he’d written to look for some kind of pattern in the morass of facts and speculation.

Somewhere, there had to be a pattern, something he was missing. There had to be. Nothing this extraordinary and far-reaching could have existed for so many years without leaving evidence of its existence. Surely…

He opened and turned on his laptop first, then looked around for the gun.

And didn’t find it.

He couldn’t believe he’d left it in the Jeep, but the longer he thought about it the more convinced he became that he had done just that. He remembered shoving the pistol into the storage compartment between the Jeep’s front seats just after they’d left Neil Mason’s house. He’d been so worried about Sarah, he didn’t think he’d given the gun another thought.

“Shit. Some hero I am,” he muttered aloud. How the hell was he going to protect Sarah without the damned gun? Throw rocks at them? Oh, yeah, that would be just great.

Before he even realized he was going to, he had pulled on a sweatshirt and sat down to put on his socks and boots. He paused then, frowning, because there was something else nagging at him. But it was a distant thing, out of reach and only vaguely troubling, and he shrugged it away.

The important thing, the only thing that mattered, was to protect Sarah. He had to go and get the gun, so he could protect her.

He remembered to take the door keycard, and the keys to the Jeep. He remembered to test the door carefully after he closed it, to make sure they couldn’t get in and hurt Sarah while he was gone. He remembered to be cautious as he walked down the hallway, to be alert, and to check the elevator warily before getting in.

He even remembered to lock the elevator open on the right garage level, so it would be there waiting for him and he wouldn’t waste time. Because he had to get the gun and get back upstairs so he could protect Sarah.

The garage, like most of its kind in the wee small hours of the morning, was badly lit and filled with shadows as well as eerily silent and cavernous, so that Tucker’s normally quiet footsteps echoed hollowly off the concrete and metallic surfaces. The Jeep was parked not too far from the elevator, so it didn’t take long to walk to it, but he was nevertheless aware of a growing anxiety by the time he reached it.

He had to protect Sarah.

He was straining to listen but heard nothing. His head was throbbing oddly, and it was getting difficult to think, as if a fog crept into his brain. For a moment, as he stood beside the Jeep, he couldn’t even remember what he was doing there.

The gun. That was it. He had to get the gun and protect Sarah.

It took him several minutes to figure out how to use the keyless entry gadget to unlock the Jeep doors, and he shook his head in bafflement when he finally got the driver’s door open.

Christ, what’s wrong with me?

He leaned in and opened the compartment between the seats. The usual vehicle clutter met his puzzled stare. A couple of folded maps, some paper napkins and two paper-wrapped straws, the sunglasses he hadn’t needed today. Yesterday. A flashlight. And in the bottom, when he pushed the rest aside and searched all the way down, a tangled and gritty nest of coins, gum wrappers, and general Jeep lint.

But no gun.

Tucker stood there, leaning across the driver’s seat, and scowled. Where the hell was the gun? He’d left it right here—

Then, abruptly, with the suddenness of a soap bubble, the fog vanished from his brain, and he realized why the gun wasn’t here.

Because it was upstairs in their room.

He remembered. He remembered looking right at it when he’d gone back into the sitting room. It was on the desk, beside his laptop. Where he had placed it, as soon as they had settled into the room, so it would be within easy reach while he worked at the computer and Sarah slept. Where he had left it hours ago.

Where it had always been.

He knew then. Knew in a terrible moment of absolute clarity what they had done to him. He had underestimated them, badly underestimated them. Because they had used the one tool he had never expected them to use, the one tool he hadn’t even imagined they could use.

His own mind.

They’d crawled inside his head. They hadn’t been able to get inside Sarah’s, so they had turned to him. Somehow, they had crawled inside his head and made him think the gun was here, made him believe he had to come down here and get it, leaving Sarah alone upstairs…

“Sarah. Oh, Jesus, Sarah—”

He never heard them behind him. He only had time to realize that, once again, he had failed the woman he loved. He felt the agony of that even before the shock of the blow, the blinding pain in his head. And then nothing.

“Tucker?”

Sarah found herself sitting up in bed, the sheet clutched to her breasts and her own voice loud in her ears. There had been a dream, a warmly reassuring dream of Tucker fretting about protecting her. Then he had seemed to fade away for a long time, until a sudden burst of agony shot through her head, a terrible pain that was in his head and his heart and his voice.

“Sarah. Oh, Jesus, Sarah—”

And now…nothing.

Terror and panic were ice water in her veins, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think about anything but him. Desperately, she reached out, closing her eyes and concentrating as hard as she could, harder than she ever had before, as she tried to find Tucker.

Instantly, a cacophony beat inside her mind like the wings of a hundred birds, the chatter of a hundred voices, and she heard her own voice cry out in surprise and fear even as her eyes shot open and she instinctively slammed shut what her desperation to find Tucker had wrenched open.

It took her several moments to calm down, and longer to realize what had happened. She had reached out wildly and without any kind of focus, and what had rushed into her open mind had been the mental voices and dreams of all the people around her.

Sarah shivered, afraid to try again—and more afraid not to. The sensation of all those thoughts and dreams and nightmares was the closest she ever wanted to get to actual chaos, the most unsettling thing she had ever experienced, and she did not want to experience it again, so this time she focused her mind as narrowly as she could before opening herself up.

Tucker. Just Tucker, he was the only one she wanted to find, the only one she wanted to hear.

At first, there was nothing. Silence. Darkness. She reached further out warily, like feeling her way through an unfamiliar room without lights, probing the darkness. And finally, dimly, on the very edge of her awareness, was a sense of Tucker’s presence. No thoughts, no inner voice telling her where he was and what had happened to him, just his quiet presence. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t bring him any closer, couldn’t see him clearly, but at least he was there.

That certainty that he was still alive quieted some of the panic racing through her. Not much of it, but some. She slid out of bed, dragging the top sheet with her instead of pausing to find something to put on, and wrapped it around her. She went into the sitting room and stood looking slowly around. All her senses flared, but carefully now, reaching out warily.

It was one of the still-strange, new senses that sent her to the desk where the laptop lay open. She glanced once at the pistol lying in its holster beside it, but her attention was on the computer’s screen. The machine had been off earlier, she remembered, so obviously Tucker had gotten up sometime in the last hour or so and decided to do some work. The open program on the screen, she saw, appeared to be sifting through information already acquired, so apparently he had judged it too dangerous to leave his computer tethered in any way to the Internet when he was not present to monitor it. He was being as cautious as possible in how he went about gathering more information.

So why had he left so abruptly and without a word to her? She couldn’t believe he could have been taken from this room without her awareness, so he must have left on his own. But to go where? And why?

She frowned down at the laptop. As she watched, the program running appeared to pause, and then the screen went dark. No working program visible, no screen saver. Just a black screen.

And then, slowly, words began to appear, brilliantly white against the darkness.

If you want him,

Come get him.

Sarah sank down in the desk chair and stared at the screen until the words burned themselves into her brain.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

The first psychic on the list was one of them; this time, Sarah knew it even without getting out of the Jeep. The second psychic was not one of them, but she was also not a genuine psychic—though it took Sarah a good ten minutes of intense concentration to be sure of that.

Fifteen minutes later, she pulled the Jeep into the driveway of a small, neat house set back from the road among tall trees. She kept the vehicle in gear and the engine running as she stared at the house and tilted her head to one side to listen intently.

Hello, Sarah.

She caught her breath, and her hand on the gearshift tightened. Friend or foe? This time, she couldn’t tell. But a genuine psychic, definitely, and there was something hauntingly familiar about that voice…

I can help you, Sarah.

She was trying very hard to keep her own mind quiet and still and closed, unwilling to give anything away when she was unsure who was trying to get inside her head. Except that this voice wasn’t probing or pushing or trying to break through her guards. It was just there, gentle and calm.

And it had been there before.

Please, Sarah. Come in.

She hesitated but finally put the Jeep in park and turned off the engine. This could be the biggest mistake she’d made yet, but she wasn’t willing to run away without trying to find out who the placid, compassionate inner voice belonged to.

She was aware of no particular sense of danger as she went up the walkway to the front door. Wind chimes hung beside it, tinkling softly in the slight breeze, and hanging baskets and pots of flowers decorated the porch—an awful lot of flowers for the end of September, Sarah thought.

Before she could knock on the door, it swung open. A woman stood there smiling at her. She was about Sarah’s height or a little less, very slender, with delicate bone structure and long black hair, and looked about sixteen years old. Except in her eyes. They were dark and fathoms deep and old as time.

“Hello, Sarah. I’m Leigh.”

Sarah drew a breath. “You’ve been…trying to talk to me for a long time now.”

“Yes. I have.”

Leigh Munroe led the way into a comfortable living room filled with overstuffed furniture and glowing lamps, where a fire burned and hot coffee waited, and this time Sarah didn’t hesitate to accept a cup. The need to find Tucker was clawing at her, but she forced herself to be patient. She had to do this first.

Her sense of the other woman was mostly positive—but oddly…incomplete. She knew she was in the presence of power, yet the power was muted and controlled and curiously distant. There was no strong impression of a personality as she felt with Tucker, of emotions and thoughts shifting like quicksilver beneath the surface; there was just a peaceful surface and what seemed to be utter calm underneath. There was goodness, but also the feeling of something dark lurking, and it made Sarah wary.