Angrily, he wiped away the tears. He took a deep breath, shouldered his backpack, started walking. Most people, he knew, would want someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on, but he was glad he was alone. Grief, he believed, was a private experience, not meant to be shared. He did not want to think about other people’s needs at this moment, whether he was soaking their good shirt with his tears, whether he was keeping them from an appointment or making them late for a meal, whether he was being too needy or too emotional or not emotional enough. He needed at this moment to be completely alone, completely selfish, so that he could feel what he had to feel for as long as he had to feel it without the influence of another person affecting his emotions.

A pickup sped past him, and a half-full McDonald’s cup splattered on the ground at his feet, coffee splashing onto the cuffs of his jeans. He heard a harsh laugh as the driver drove away.

“Asshole,” Mark mumbled.

Still, the encounter had brought him back into the real world, the practical world, and for that he was grateful.

He thought for a moment, then hurried across the highway to the opposite side. He faced the oncoming traffic, held out his thumb. He’d been heading for southern California, planning to look for construction work in Los Angeles, but now he was going to do something he should have done a long, long time ago.

He was going to go home.

The Land Rover drove down Highway 60, the driver silent, Mark still mulling over in his mind the fact that his sister was gone. He’d slept last night in the desert outside of Quartzite, and though he’d expected to spend the entire night unable to sleep, staring up at the stars, he had dozed off almost immediately after crawling into his sleeping bag and had not awakened until the sun had come up over the mountains.

The Power was fading. As long as Kristen had been alive, as long as there had been that blood connection, he had been able to tap into it, reference it, but now it was growing weaker by the hour, only a faint pulse remaining, and soon it would be gone. Already, he was having to use his own memory, to rely on his own thoughts and hunches. He was dismayed to realize how much he had relied on The Power, how much a part of him it was, and now that it was disappearing, he felt more isolated than he ever had in his life, as though one of his senses—his sight or his hearing—had been taken away.

He hadn’t even been aware of how often he used it.

That was a little scary.

He probably wouldn’t have gotten into this vehicle if he hadn’t been able to take a reading of the driver.