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.If he’s not psychic, he could be schizophrenic, even psychotic.Tell me, have you seen any signs of either?”“No.But I’m not a doctor, shrink or medical.”“Neither am I.But I’ve known Galen a few years now, and I don’t believe there could be such a fundamental shift in his personality without those changes leaving very obvious signs.Or at the very least detectable ones.”“So you trust he’s mentally healthy?”“As much as any of us is,” she murmured.Jaylene said, “Did the voice happen to tell him why he needs to be here?”“No.”“Forgive me for sounding paranoid, but do you know that for a fact or only because he told you so?”“Because he told me.I’m not reading much of anything from anyone right now.Closed down tight as a drum, remember? The fact that Hollis got through—loud and clear, no less—before the bomb exploded says more about her strengthening abilities than about mine.”“Is she a telepath now?” Jaylene asked.“Not in the sense we understand.She can’t receive at all, as far as we can tell.But she’s gone beyond simple broadcasting because of the lack of a shield.She can send—and at full wattage, as Quentin would say.”“That could be a handy little tool,” Jaylene said, thoughtful.“Yeah, we’re hoping it will be.” Assuming all this doesn’t overload her brain…“Are your abilities changing?” Tony asked.“I mean, because Bishop was there at the church Compound, and through him, through your connection, whatever happened affected you as well?”“Yes.My abilities are… changing.And, before you ask, I’m not entirely sure just how they’re changing, only that they are.” Before they could probe more into specifics, she added, “Like I said, the others there that day were changed too.Quentin isn’t aware of it, but he’s developing a secondary ability; Paige picked up on it during the debrief afterward.”Paige Gilbert was the unit’s “Geiger counter,” as Quentin had dubbed her: a psychic whose specialities were detecting latent and active psychic abilities in others—and defining specific abilities those psychics might be totally unaware of possessing.She was always present at post-investigation debriefs, another tool Bishop used to regularly monitor the condition of his people.“What kind of secondary ability?” Tony asked.“She wasn’t sure.”“Paige wasn’t sure?” With a better than eighty percent accuracy rate, she was one of the strongest psychics on the team.“No.She said she was, for want of a better definition, getting some kind of interference when she tried to read anyone who was there at the Compound that day.Crackling, like static.And the interference hasn’t cleared up in the months since.”“I don’t much like the sound of that.”“Neither did Noah.And neither do I.”There was a long silence, and then Jaylene said, “Why do I get the feeling you didn’t bring this up just to explain some changes we might have seen in the team?”“Maybe because neither one of us believes in coincidence.There’s been something off about this case from the very beginning, and so far the only thing that keeps turning up, in one way or another, is Samuel.”“But Samuel’s dead,” Tony said slowly.“Yes.He is.But how many times have we faced the certainty that, in our world, dead doesn’t necessarily mean gone?”* Chill of FearFourteenBJ ACTUALLY ENJOYED the cat-and-mouse game, amused by the notion that all those searching the town for him believed he was the mouse.Idiots.But by the time the sun was well up and the locals began to cautiously emerge from their homes, he decided he had better things to do with his time than to play with the cops and feds.Especially with the media nosing around and mostly getting in his way.Killing one of them had not, apparently, discouraged the rest.In fact, there were more of the creatures around now that it was light.Maybe that gave them courage.Or maybe they were just dirt-stupid.He considered that idly, pausing before abandoning his post to put the crosshairs over first one face and then another, wishing he could take them out.It would be so easy.Boom.But this wasn’t the time.So he withdrew from the downtown area, smoothly and easily, all according to plan.I’m out.Good, Go check on him.He would have preferred to do almost anything else, but he knew very well what his assigned roles were in the plan.So he merely sent back an affirmative and continued on his way.Once out of the more congested—in a rural sense—downtown area, the houses and businesses were farther and farther apart, and it was easy for him to travel through them unseen.He used the usual tricks to make certain the dogs they’d finally set on his trail would find no trail to follow, amused yet again as he wondered what those experienced trackers would make of their failures.Not that he cared.At last he reached an old but well-kept farmhouse set in the middle of considerable acreage, its white-railed pasture dotted with a few beef cattle and a couple of lazy horses
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