He took out his phone and called the number of the landline in the Fogg Lake library.

Harmony answered halfway through the first ring.

“What can I do, Harlan?”

“Go to Olivia’s old house. I think the information I need is in the picture hanging on the wall of the living room, the one that shows Olivia as a young teen.”

“I know it. I never said anything to Olivia or her mother, but that picture always gave me chills.”

“Probably because you’re an oracle.”

“Probably. All right, what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to look into a mirror.”

CHAPTER 44

Olivia fought her way out of a nightmare featuring a maze of burning mirrors, opened her eyes and saw the monster who had murdered her mother.

Instinctively she froze, the way a child did when she realized she was in the same room as a predator. She reminded herself that she had been dreaming.

I accidentally activated the camera. It’s just a hologram.

But the monster spoke from the doorway, and she knew he was real.

“Sorry about the hallucinations,” he said. “Over the years the plants in my garden have developed powerful properties. These days when I use them to make up the sedative I gave you, they produce side effects that can be unpleasant and unpredictable—especially if the individual has a strong psychic talent.”

Rage infused her with adrenaline. She summoned every ounce of will she possessed to control her aura-reading talent and got a wobbly fix on the hot energy field of the man who lounged in the doorway. There were enough pale wavelengths to mark him as a blank—a sociopath. That was not a surprise. Neither was the fierce radiation that identified him as a very powerful talent.

The most disturbing aspects of his aura were the signs of instability. In her experience, no one possessed a completely stable energy field. Everyone had some distortions and weaknesses. But the man in the doorway was one of the human monsters, and the erratic spikes and shivering oscillations indicated he was barely hanging on to his control—to his sanity. Physically he did not look healthy, either. It had been nearly a year since her mother had taken the holographic image. It was obvious that the man in front of her had deteriorated. Her mother’s words whispered in her head. “Dead man walking in a dying garden.”

She remembered what Harlan had said when she asked him how he managed his human chameleon trick: The old saying that people see what they expect to see is true, but it goes deeper—they see what they want to see, what they need to see.

The monster in the doorway not only expected to see an oracle; he wanted to see one. He was desperate to see one.