“What else did you both experience?” Bishop asked.
“You mean aside from pain, nausea, a dandy color light show, and the unpleasant sensation of our skin wanting to depart our bodies?”
“Yeah. Aside from all that.”
“Prosperity,” she said distinctly. “Reese got it via a voice in his head. I got it from a very upset spirit who popped out of nowhere—well, you know what I mean—insisting we had to go to Prosperity, that something awful is going to happen unless we stop it. She was crying, and by the time she popped away again, I was too.” The last few words held a slight quaver as well as irritation, and she added, “Oh, damn, this empath thing is hard. Why do I have to feel what spirits feel as well as the living? What have I done to piss off the universe?”
Rightly judging those to be rhetorical questions, Bishop said, “I gather you and Reese both felt a sense of urgency?”
“Well . . . yes and no. The urge to start packing, but not the urge to take off right this instant.”
“Where are you?” he asked. They had been taking accumulated annual leave time and hadn’t checked in for more than six weeks.
“You mean you don’t know? I thought this sat phone had a GPS locator in it. As a matter of fact, I’m sure it does.”
“Yes. But I took Reese at his word when he said you didn’t want to be disturbed and that you two would go looking for a deserted island or cave where I couldn’t find you even if I retasked a satellite.”
“I’m not entirely sure I believe you,” she told him with characteristic frankness. “But thanks for not bothering us these last weeks.”
“You’re welcome. Where are you?”
Reese replied to that one, his voice still calm. “The Bahamas. One of the virtually uninhabited islands. We would have aimed for an entirely deserted one, but Hollis doesn’t camp.”
“You can say that again. My idea of roughing it is no room service. Which we don’t have here, but it turns out Reese can cook, so he’s been my room service.” There was a brief silence, and then she laughed and added, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
Bishop looked at Miranda and Tony, both of whom were smiling, and said dryly, “Okay. Are you two planning to answer that summons?”
“Summons?” Hollis’s voice was interested now. “Is that what it was? Who’s calling?”
“We aren’t sure yet,” Bishop replied. “We’re expecting most of the unit and some psychics on our watch list to begin checking in. We should know more after that.”
“You and Miranda had a vision?”
“Yeah. And got six names of psychics who were summoned, none of them current SCU members. We also got that whatever is going to happen—or not happen or is already happening—will be in Prosperity.”
Clearly unsurprised that Bishop didn’t offer more details of the vision, Hollis merely said, “It’s another seemingly peaceful little mountain town, isn’t it?”
“In North Carolina,” he confirmed.
“Huh. They seem to get more than their fair share of monsters, don’t they?” There was a brief silence, during which she undoubtedly consulted with her partner, and then she said, “Okay, we’re in. You want us to go straight to Prosperity?”
Bishop exchanged a glance with his wife, and said, “No, the mountain house. It’s large enough and near enough to Prosperity to serve as our command center. And since we don’t yet know what, if anything, has happened in Prosperity, or which psychics will answer the summons, it’s as good a place as any to meet up, put our heads together, and figure out a plan.”
“A plan?” Hollis was politely incredulous. “You think we’re actually going to have a plan this time, Yoda?” She was the only agent who had ever been heard to assign him a rather mocking—if amused—nickname.
Being Bishop, he ignored that, as well as her question. “I gather Reese flew you two to your island on a chopper?”
A brief laugh escaped her, but she didn’t push. “Yeah. So we can be at the mountain house in a few hours.”
“Wait until tomorrow morning to start,” Bishop said. “Assuming most if not all of the psychics on our list decide to come, it’s going to take some time just for them to get to the mountain house. One of them is in Alaska.”
“Must have taken a hell of a lot of power to reach that far,” Hollis said slowly. “Unless we’re talking individual power sources all around us. Which I don’t much like the idea of, just so you know.”
“Neither do I,” Bishop said.
Reese spoke up then to ask, “Anybody you need us to pick up along the way?”
“I’ll let you know by tomorrow morning. Call in before you take off.”
“Copy that.”
Hollis said, “See you guys tomorrow.” And hung up.
Bishop reached over to tap the conference phone to cut the connection on his end, and said almost absently, “Depending on who calls in and when, it may take a tight scheduling of both jets to get everybody to the airstrip near the mountain house within a reasonable amount of time.”
Tony eyed him. “You seem to be very sure that most of those summoned are going to come,” he said.
“Yes,” Bishop said. “I am. One way or another, I believe they’ll all come.”
Before Tony could question that, the multi-lined phones in the conference room began ringing all at once. Every line showed a blinking light.
“Here we go,” Bishop said. “We need to take notes on every call. Who, where they are, what they felt and what the local time was—exactly, if possible—and what they feel now.”
“And if they ask what they’re supposed to do now?” Tony lifted a brow at the unit chief. “What do we tell them?”
“For now, we tell them to stand by their phones,” Bishop answered immediately. “What we tell them when we call them back will depend on all the calls.”
THREE
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7
Chief Deputy Katie Cole had lived in Prosperity for less than a year but had settled in to the town and her job quickly and without fuss. She had an easy manner and the knack of both talking to people and listening when they needed to talk, so even though she wasn’t a native, she had been accepted completely.
As far as she could tell, anyway.
Even though it was a smallish town, and fairly isolated, Prosperity was not entirely off the beaten path; no major highway was close, but the town was located in a section of the Appalachian Mountains considered particularly scenic, so it was the rule rather than the exception that plenty of sightseers and other tourists drove through pretty steadily from spring right up to winter.
Some of them even stopped for a few days or at least a long weekend, enjoying one of the two very nice hotels in the main part of town, good food, the scenery, and local crafts sold for reasonable prices in small shops staffed by smiling, friendly people.
Crime was practically nonexistent, in part because Sheriff Jackson Archer was a good cop and a highly respected, homegrown citizen of the town, and in part because Prosperity was . . . well, a prosperous small town. So there were enough jobs to go around and good schools that not only educated the kids but offered plenty of after-school and summer activities. On the whole the citizens were happy.
Which was maybe, Katie thought, why it struck her as so odd to feel a very unusual tension as she strolled along Main Street, stretching her legs and having a look around. She’d been vaguely conscious of an uneasiness she couldn’t pinpoint for more than a week, but now there was nothing vague about what she felt.
Except a good reason for it.