As he ended the call and slipped the bulky phone into the pocket of his jacket, Miranda said, “Reception is better up here than down in town.”

“Definitely,” Bishop agreed, moving to join her as she gazed at the distant town that was beginning to fade with darkness approaching rapidly.

“Jill and Sam?” Jill Easton was a skilled doctor and forensic specialist based in Asheville who was part of the statewide network of physicians able to be called in to act temporarily as a medical examiner. She was also clairvoyant, one of those psychics Bishop had located who was already settled and happy in a chosen profession. Sam Norris was her usual partner.

“Yeah. I notified the network last night and requested Jill if she was available. Both she and Sam are.” They had long ago discovered that it was best to work with those “outsider” medical and other auxiliary technicians who understood and were familiar with the SCU as a unit; Jill had been the ME called in on several recent cases, and the fact that she was psychic was a plus.

Especially as far as Bishop was concerned.

Miranda smiled slightly, thinking about that. She was well aware that within the unit Bishop’s almost uncanny ability to find and recruit—in one way or another—psychics was viewed with something rather like awe. Probably at least in part because so many psychics had felt and often had literally been alienated and alone in their lives before Bishop had found them, they’d had no idea just how many psychics had lived in the same secrecy and often quiet desperation.

She wondered idly how those within the unit would react to the knowledge that there was in truth an astonishingly vast and far-flung underground network of psychics who had found one another, coming together long before the SCU had been created, to fight a different kind of war. It was a network Bishop had discovered while searching for psychics, and his and his wife’s participation in the fairly recent game-changing battle of that fight was something no one else within the SCU was aware of.

Probably.

There were, after all, few secrets within a unit of psychics, many of whom were telepaths who read minds and clairvoyants who could pluck bits of information out of the very air around them. But if the knowledge Miranda and Bishop had agreed to keep to themselves had been discovered by one or more of their team, at least the need for secrecy had been respected.

Though those within the unit might well begin to wonder when a few seeming leaps in technology would likely make their lives somewhat easier in the coming years, especially in the areas of communication and the gathering of intel. If, that is, the work being done by a handful of Bishop’s trusted scientists bore the fruit he expected.

Miranda pulled her mind back to the here and now. “We won’t be able to climb farther tonight. It’ll be too dark to see soon, especially in unfamiliar terrain. I remember from Gray and Geneva’s reports that it can be black as pitch in these woods up here. And there’s no moon tonight.”