Maybe that was luck.

Or maybe it was something else.

He had the night to complete his work. He knew very well that the search teams had returned to town, and he knew the patrol routes of Finn’s deputies, so he wasn’t worried about discovery.

And Simon would keep.

He could feel the unease of Salem, and it made him smile. Most were shut inside their homes for the night. And most were anxious but felt somewhat protected, he knew. Those with Talents counted on them to help them survive, unwilling to believe the Talents themselves might make them targets. And everyone knew about the FBI agents Finn had called in, the ones with their guns and their own Talents.

So even members of the Five, uneasy though they were, were also calmed somewhat by that knowledge. But he couldn’t allow them to feel safe. That’s what they had to understand, all of the Five and all of the very smart cops.

They had to understand no one was safe.

—

“IT’S AT LEAST possible that he is psychic,” Bishop said. “And if he’s psychic and possesses one of the very solid shields you were able to see today when you were studying auras, whatever abilities he has are likely to be hidden from us.”

“And he doesn’t have to be a member of one of the five families in order to be psychic, right?”

“We know there are psychics outside the Five.”

Diana asked, “Do we know who they are? I mean, we know the elders of the Five are elders because they’re among the strongest in their families with Talents. Has anybody kept track of psychics in other families? Their strengths and weaknesses, their particular abilities?”

“Not officially,” Miranda said.

Diana frowned at her. “How about unofficially?”

It was Bishop who said, “There’s no real way to be sure going back generations. According to Finn, there was a general awareness—maybe a psychic awareness—as recently as twenty years ago that there were maybe a score of people at that time outside the Five with abilities. Talents. Not handed down in their own families but occurring fairly randomly as psychic abilities do. Some approached members of the Five asking for help in learning to understand and control those abilities.”

DeMarco asked, “Was that help given?”

“For a while, yeah. Then Duncan Cavendish began building his power base, recruiting loyal followers, and whispers began that he was interested in Talents.”

“Scary interested?” Hollis answered her own question before Bishop could. “Yeah, I remember. Scary interested. He wanted energy, wanted other abilities for his very own. Basically wanted to use whatever he could steal in his ambition to become a god. Steal . . . fatally. If word about that got around, I imagine that would have made any psychic think twice about being open about their own abilities.”

“It did.”

“So, for the last decade or so at least, psychics outside the five families decided to keep quiet about it.”

Bishop nodded. “It was one of the reasons why we believe Cavendish targeted descendants of the Five who lived outside Salem; at least he could be relatively certain abilities were possible in them. In Salem, those who hid their abilities hid them well. Including from other psychics. Even as powerful as he was in the beginning, Cavendish didn’t dare target the five families here in Salem. He recruited some psychics from the other families and found various ways of using the abilities of both them and the few Cavendishes who were rabidly loyal to him as tools, but he didn’t kill them.”