Fill, suddenly, with horror.

And pain.

—

Quantico

“WHAT KIND OF situation?” Bishop asked calmly.

Finn Deverell, now chief deputy of Salem, laughed shortly. “Your kind. Hell, our kind.”

Bishop glanced at the others, then said, “You’re on speaker. A couple of my teams got a . . . heads-up before dawn this morning. We were just discussing it.”

“Not Geneva or Grayson,” Deverell said more than asked, probably assuming Bishop would have named them if so.

“No, they’re both on another case. Neither of these teams has ever been to Salem, so the connection, if there is one, is something none of us can explain.”

“That can’t be good.” Deverell sounded wary. “What Talents?”

“There’s a medium on each team, and they got the warning, if that’s what it was.”

“A Talent none of the Five has,” Deverell noted slowly. “And to my knowledge no one outside the five families has it here in Salem.”

“I remember that,” Bishop said. “I thought it was unusual when you told me, given the otherwise wide range of abilities in Salem.”

“And I never gave it a thought until you pointed it out. No idea what it means, or even if it means anything. The partners of the mediums?”

Bishop knew what he was being asked. “A very powerful telepath and seer.”

Deverell’s sigh came audibly over the line. “Most of us still call that last Talent the sight, or the farseeing. That’s how I was alerted. A Blackwood elder came to me yesterday, one whose Talent is farseeing. She’s been uncannily accurate for a long time, and what she saw is about as bad as it gets.” He paused briefly. “What kind of warning did your mediums get?”

“Very few specifics. And couched in . . . let’s call it cryptic terms, which is par for the course with spiritual warnings.” He explained, briefly, what Diana and Hollis had seen.

“Tallies with what Aylia Blackwood saw, at least in the broad outlines.”

“No helpful details?”

“A vicious murderer killing in particularly horrific ways. And fear. I’ve never seen Aylia Blackwood afraid, not like that.”

“Anything else?” Bishop asked.

“Well . . . I don’t know if it’s connected, but in the last few weeks we’ve been having unusual problems with communications in town, all through the valley. Cell phones, radio signals, satellite TV. A lot of interference. Other electronics seem to be affected too. No idea what’s causing it.”

“But something new?”

“The intensity of it, yeah. Though the valley does tend to have sporadic electrical issues, you probably remember that from last time, and summer storms here can be unusually violent.”

Those around the table exchanged glances.

Finn was going on slowly. “The interference could have affected Aylia’s farseeing, I suppose. But if your people also got some kind of warning from outside the valley . . .”

Bishop said, “Hollis and Diana—the mediums who received the warning—have expressed a certain urgency. If we can actually get there and be on-site before the trouble really gets started, it could offer us a huge advantage we’ve never had before.”