And he was reasonably sure those tales were true, because he’d heard more than one of them from an actual witness, one of the few to have survived the purge of Duncan’s more fanatical followers.

So the Talents Nellie possessed had to be taken into account; he knew that.

She had, after all, defeated Duncan.

If the crows were following someone’s orders, it almost had to be hers. Not so surprising; she’d worked with the feds before. With Finn before. So maybe she’d set the crows to searching the valley and the slopes.

For Megan? How could she—how could any of them—know about Megan? Aylia Blackwood’s farseeing, rumor had it, warned only that something bad was stalking the Five. And rumor was garbled as hell when it came to more than that, as was normal for rumor, especially rumor driven by fear.

So how had they known to search for Megan? She wasn’t the one he’d left for them to find.

That bothered him. It made him uneasy. But even so, he wasn’t willing to change his plans. Certain things had to happen in a certain order.

Finding Megan didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter at all.

—

QUENTIN AND DIANA moved around the odd pile of granite boulders that were stark and gray surrounded by the heavy branches of evergreens rising all around and forming a sort of screen that gave the small clearing a hidden, secret look. Both held their weapons ready, moving cautiously, halting abruptly when they saw what waited for them in that small, secret clearing.

In the still, cold air, the acrid smell was seared flesh and blood. So much blood.

Diana felt her stomach clench and churn, and fought to keep the sickness down as she slowly holstered her weapon. She had seen more than one dead body in her years with the SCU, but it was not something she had ever gotten used to. And this . . .

The first visual impression was overwhelmingly one of raw flesh, and jagged white bones, and blood.

To say that this victim had been tortured did not begin to define what had been done to him. He was quite literally in pieces, bloody flesh and bones, some of the bones clearly and brutally broken and others showing the hauntingly clean edges of some cutting tool. It looked as if the skin had been removed, torn from the body at some point and cast aside in strips that showed blackened, seared edges.

The head sat by itself in the center, a horrific centerpiece of bloody muscle and sinew barely covering the skull. It had been scalped, the eyes gouged out, the open mouth showing jagged, broken teeth.

The internal organs had been removed and, bizarrely, were draped, glistening wetly, over a single small, flat-topped boulder to one side of the clearing, the intestines dangling over to touch the ground. Also bizarrely, several of the long bones, stripped of flesh and muscle, had been jabbed upright into the ground around the rest as though marking the outer edges of the killing field, the dump site.