Spider sense: The ability to enhance one or more of the “normal” senses (sight, hearing, smell, etc.) through concentration and the focusing of one’s own mental and physical energy.

Telekinesis: The ability to move objects with the mind. Rare.

Telepathic mind control: The ability to influence/control others through mental focus and effort; an extremely rare ability.

Telepathy (touch and nontouch, or open): The ability to pick up thoughts from others. Some telepaths only receive, while others have the ability to send thoughts. A few are capable of both, usually due to an emotional connection with the other person.

UNNAMED ABILITIES INCLUDE

The ability to see into time, to view events in the past, present, and future without being or having been there physically while the events transpire. A kind of clairvoyance; also sometimes linked to precognition.

The ability to see the aura or another person’s energy field and to interpret those colors and energies. Through experience, trial, and error, the SCU has come to a tentative understanding of what the different colors usually mean:

White = healing/protective

Blue/lavenders = calm

Red/rich yellows = energy/power

Green = unusual, tends to mix with other colors, peaceful

Metallic = repelling energy from another source or holding it in

Black = extremely negative, even evil, especially if it has red streaks of energy and power

More than one color in an aura is common, reflecting the outward sign of human complexities of emotion.

The ability to channel energy usefully as a defensive or offensive tool or weapon.

The ability to hide or disguise an object or person.

The ability to communicate with animals, which is part telepathy and part empathy—and part something else.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The first books in the Bishop/SCU series were published back in 2000, and readers have asked me whether these stories are taking place in “real” time and if, at this point, more than twenty(!) years have passed in the series. The answer is no. I chose to use “story time” for several reasons, one being in order to avoid having my characters age too quickly. Roughly speaking, each trilogy takes place within the same year, with some overlaps.

So, from an arbitrary start date, the timeline looks something like this:

Stealing Shadows—February

Hiding in the Shadows—October/November

YEAR ONE:

Out of the Shadows—January (SCU formally introduced)

Touching Evil—November

YEAR TWO:

Whisper of Evil—March

Sense of Evil—June

Hunting Fear—September

YEAR THREE:

Chill of Fear—April

Sleeping with Fear—July

Blood Dreams—October

YEAR FOUR:

Blood Sins—January

Blood Ties—April

Haven—July

Hostage—October

YEAR FIVE:

Haunted—February

Fear the Dark—May

Wait for Dark—August

Hold Back the Dark—October

YEAR SIX:

Hidden Salem—January

Curse of Salem—March

So, with the publication of Curse of Salem, the Special Crimes Unit has been a functional (and growing) unit of agents for about six years (although Bishop was searching for and recruiting psychics and building the base of his unit for at least a couple of years before the events of Out of the Shadows). Time to have grown from being known within the FBI as the “Spooky Crimes Unit” to becoming a well-respected unit with an excellent record of solved cases. A unit that has, moreover, earned respect in various law enforcement agencies, with word quietly passed from this sheriff to that chief of police that they excel at solving crimes that are anything but normal by using methods and abilities that are unique to each agent, and that they neither seek nor want media attention.