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  “No!” Adam said. “She’s not who you think she is. She’s my—”

  “I don’t care what you do with her, that’s none of my business. I’m just supposed to— Hey!” he said.

  Standing where he was, Adam watched in disbelief as the man slowly lowered the arm holding the gun. Truthfully, it looked as though he couldn’t help himself, as though his right arm was being controlled by something outside of himself. When Adam turned to look at Darci, he saw that she had that look of intense concentration on her face that he’d seen before. Last night, he thought. He’d seen her look like that at that old couple when she’d wanted them to move out of “their” booth. What was it she’d said? She was going to apply her True Persuasion to them.

  Even as Adam was thinking these things and making these observations, he wondered why he wasn’t making a move. Why wasn’t he leaping forward to take advantage of whatever was causing this man to lower his gun?

  But, oddly enough, Adam didn’t feel as though he could move. It was as though his entire body from the neck down had turned into a statue and he was frozen where he was. He could slowly move his neck and look from Darci to the gunman and back again, but he couldn’t seem to move the rest of his body.

  After several long moments, Darci, without losing concentration, without taking her eyes off the gunman, slowly walked toward him and took the gun from his hand. She held it by the grip, her hand on the trigger, for all the world looking as though she knew how to use the thing, and she aimed it at the gunman’s head. “Now take off that mask,” she said.

  But then Darci sneezed.

  And the sneeze broke her concentration. And when her concentration was broken, the hold over both the gunman and Adam was broken. The gunman didn’t try to take the gun from Darci. Instead, he took off running through the woods. “You’re a witch, lady,” he called over his shoulder. “And they can have you!”

  It took Adam a couple of crucial moments to recover his senses, both in his mind and his body, then he ran after the gunman. But it was too late. Besides, the man knew the woods and Adam didn’t. As though he’d disappeared in a puff of smoke, the gunman was gone.

  Slowly, Adam walked back to Darci. She was sitting on a log, the gun on her lap, and she was white with exhaustion. Her shoulders were shaking, and she looked as though she might pass out at any moment.

  Adam knew he should offer her some comfort because, obviously, what she’d just done had drained her. But, for the life of him, Adam couldn’t bring himself to comfort her. Nor could he think of anything to say to her. For one thing, he wasn’t sure about what he’d just seen—and felt. What he’d felt was the most unbelievable. Somehow, Darci had used her mind to paralyze two grown men.

  “Your sweater is on backward,” he said after a moment of looking down at her.

  “Oh? Is it?” She removed the gun from her lap, set it on the log beside her, then, slowly and carefully, she stood up, pulled her arms out of the sweater, and turned it around.

  Adam picked up the gun and held it behind him. “You ready to go?” he asked quietly. “I don’t think we’ll find out any...more.”He added the last because, though he wasn’t yet sure, he thought that, maybe, he’d just found out more than he wanted to know.

  He remembered what Helen the psychic had said about Darci: “She’s not what she seems, not what she thinks she is, not what you see her as.” And the psychic had laughed after she’d said it.

  Adam walked behind Darci to the car, ready to catch her if she fell, but he didn’t touch her and he didn’t speak. Once she was in the car, she leaned her head back against the seat, closed her eyes, and looked as though she’d fallen asleep. But when Adam got into the driver’s seat, he glanced at her and thought that she was awake but too depleted to speak.

  He started the car and pulled onto the highway. Police, he thought. After all, they’d just been held at gunpoint by a masked man. But Adam knew that the police would ask too many questions. What were they doing in the woods before dawn? If they had been in a city, they might get away with the lie of saying they were out for a walk. But in this tiny town he had no doubt that every person knew what they were interested in.

  As he drove, Adam glanced at Darci. If he took her with him to the police, if there was an investigation and the man was caught, then what? Would the man tell about what Darci had done to him? Adam knew in his heart that Darci was the person whom the murderer of those young women had been looking for. If they went to the police would that be putting Darci in even more danger?

  When they got to Camwell, he parked in front of the grocery store and started to open the car door.

  “Are you angry with me?” Darci whispered hoarsely. “I didn’t mean to—”

  He put up his hand to cut her off. “How about if I go in and get us some breakfast and we take it back to the guest house? I think that we should have a nice, long talk, don’t you?”

  “A talk about you or about me?” she asked with a tired little smile.

  “You,” Adam said firmly. “Definitely you. Compared to you, I’m an extremely boring fellow.” He was trying to remain cool and act as though what he’d just experienced was something he’d seen a thousand times. After all, he was a man of the world, wasn’t he? But, truthfully, there was part of him that wanted to get out of the car and run as fast and as far away as he could get. “You don’t set things on fire, do you?” he asked softly, half as a joke but at the same time seriously.

  “I haven’t managed to do so with you yet,” she said with such resignation that Adam laughed. And with the laughter, his feelings of, well, creepiness, left him. She was just Darci. She wasn’t a sideshow freak or a character in a horror novel. She was a funny little thing who just happened to have an extraordinary ability.

  Smiling, shaking his head in disbelief, he got out of the car, then leaned back in through the window. “I want you to remain in this car while I’m in there. Understand?”

  Darci nodded. She was still pale, still listless.

  “And I don’t want you to True Persuade anything to anyone. Got it?”

  Again she nodded, but she looked so glum that he was beginning to feel sorry for her. Smiling, he said, “Before you arrived, I bought some delicious cinnamon rolls at this store. How about a bag of them, some freshly squeezed orange juice, and milk? What kind of fruit do you want?”

  “Something good enough to say thank you to me for saving your life,” she said, but she didn’t look at him.

  Adam was taken aback for a moment and started to defend himself, but then he stood up and shook his head in wonder. Maybe she had saved his life. He wasn’t yet sure how she’d done it, but she had, somehow, stopped a gunman. And him. Ms. Darci T. Monroe could use her mind to freeze people in place.

  Still shaking his head, still in a state of disbelief, Adam went into the grocery and returned fifteen minutes later with four bags, one full of buns, juice, and milk, and three bags containing one of each fruit the store had.

  10

  “NOT EVEN FOR CHOCOLATE chiffon pie with raspberries on top of it,” Darci said fiercely, then added, “I saw that in a magazine once. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Think the diner—”

  “We can ask,” Adam said, annoyed. “Look, I just want to do one more test and that’s all. I want to see if you can—”

  “What?” she snapped. “Talk to animals? Is that what you’re going to ask me next?”

  “No, of course not. That’s absurd. You ...you can’t,can you?” Adam asked.

  Darci glared at him. “I’m going for a walk. A long walk. By myself.”

  “Sounds good,” Adam said cheerfully. “I think I’ll join you.”

  “I said I want to be alone.”

  Adam gave her a false smile. “The only places you’ reallowed to go alone are to the bathroom and to get on an airplane. And even then I’ll choose your destination. But if you stay here, you stay near me; no walks alone.”

  “And to think that I thought you were—”