Kay Hooper - Hunting Fear

"Free will?"

Samantha smiled wryly. "That is the point. I wouldn't like to think my every move and decision had been mapped out before I was born. But I do believe the universe puts us in a position to make decisions and choices that will determine the next fork in the path. Change your decision-and you find yourself on a different path."

"Is that why we're here in Golden right now?"

Samantha drank more of the tea, frowning.

"Or you could just tell me to mind my own business."

"It is your business. You're here too."

Ellis smiled faintly. "So… are we here because of your path, or Luke's?"

With a slight grimace, Samantha replied, "Six of one and half a dozen of the other."

"So you're both on the same path?"

"No. Our paths just… intersected. The way they did once before. And I'd really like to be able to move on this time without feeling like I've… dropped acid and been half eaten by a lion."

Both Ellis's brows shot up. "Lovely imagery. Dropped acid? That's more my generation than yours."

Samantha frowned. "Maybe I picked it up from you. But, anyway, the gist stands. When it was over, I felt like I'd been out of my mind and got mauled because of it. By something with teeth and claws."

"I wouldn't have thought Luke was that ferocious."

"You weren't close to him."

"Were you?"

After a moment of silence, Samantha drained her mug and handed it back to Ellis. "I think my break is over. If you'll please tell the next client he or she can come in, I'll let you go off and check on the concessions." Ellis oversaw food and snacks at the carnival as well as serving as their nurse.

She got up without protest, saying merely, "You can avoid the question when I ask, Sam, but you'd better be honest with yourself. Especially now. Because I've got a hunch it would have taken a pretty strong reason for you to deliberately cross paths with Luke again. Like maybe… a life-and-death reason? And when a moment like that comes, the decisions are pure instinct, straight from the gut and the heart."

"Lovely imagery," Samantha muttered.

Ellis smiled. "The gist stands." She turned toward the front doorway of the booth, adding, "Your turban's crooked."

Swearing under her breath, Samantha reached up to straighten the hated thing. Her fingers lingered on the old, fragile purple silk and skimmed over the glittering rhinestones, and she sighed.

Credibility. Or the lack thereof.

Luke and the rest of the Special Crimes Unit had the respected might of the federal government behind them, and even if the long history of the FBI had at times been somewhat checkered, respect for the men and women who served had certainly survived.

Behind Samantha was the Carnival After Dark, loud and colorful and intended as pure fun. Games and rides and sideshows. Like hers.

Like her.

But what had been her choices in the beginning? Precious few. One, really. One choice. One decision. Invent Zarina, with all her seductive mysticism and drama-or starve.

She'd been fifteen the first time she put on the turban. She had begun hanging around the Carnival After Dark when it passed close to New Orleans, where her hitchhiking had taken her. Offering to tell people's fortunes on street corners had done little except get her arrested once or twice even in the Big Easy, and she'd thought a carnival might need or at least want a fortuneteller.

Leo had agreed-once she'd told him somewhat pugnaciously that his mother had been an opera singer, his father a doctor, and that the carnival's knife-thrower had a drinking problem, would nick his assistant's ear at that night's show, and was going to kill somebody if his knives weren't taken away from him.

All correct, at least up to her prediction of that evening's show; after that, he fired the knife-thrower.

And Samantha had joined the Carnival After Dark. She had, over the years, honed and refined her "act." Draping herself in swaths of colorful fabric, and clinking fake gold jewelry, applying heavy makeup to look older-and borrowing a turban Leo's mother had worn on some of the finest stages of Europe.

Samantha hadn't set out to become a carnival mystic. She wasn't at all sure why she hadn't, somewhere along the way, opted out and chosen to do something else with her life, especially once she'd gained confidence and had a little savings and the fear of starvation had left her. Because it had been easier, she supposed, to drift along day after day, year after year, being with people she liked and doing work that demanded little of her. Isolated and insulated in her own little traveling bit of the world.

At least until Luke had come along.

Looking down at her hands folded atop the satin-draped table, she heard the swish of sound as Ellis brought the next client in and then disappeared silently through the curtain behind Samantha.

Beginning her usual spiel, Samantha said, "Tell Madam Zarina what it is you wish to know about-" She had been about to add "tonight" but didn't bother when a ring dropped onto the table near her hands.

"I heard it helps if you touch things." The woman's voice was even, controlled. "So I brought that. Would you touch it, please?"

Samantha looked up slowly, knowing at once that this was one of the desperate ones. She had lost something, someone. She needed answers, and needed them badly.

A brown-eyed blonde of about thirty, she was pretty and casually dressed. And she was haunted. Her face was drawn, her hands writhed together in her lap, and her posture was so tense she practically trembled from the strain of holding herself still. She wanted to do something, was driven to take action, any action. This action.

Samantha looked at the ring. A birthstone, she thought. Opal. Plain band with the stone inset, small size. A child's?

She returned her gaze to the woman and said, "Some lost things can never be found."

The woman's mouth quivered, then steadied. "Will you try? Please?"

All Samantha's instincts told her to refuse, to make some excuse, refund this woman's money, and stop this now. But she found herself reaching out, picking up the ring.

The darkness swept over her immediately, and the cold, and she was choking, drowning.

Samantha was never sure afterward if it was the instinct for self-preservation or just the utter certainty of how the vision would end-and how she would end if she remained caught up in it-but whichever it was caused her to drop the ring. And just as suddenly as she'd been drawn into the vision, she was yanked out of it.

She stared at the ring lying on the table, then looked at her palm, where a circular white line now lay across the fading red line that was all that was left of the earlier frostnip.

"Shit." She lifted her gaze to the woman and found her pale, her eyes both shocked and eager.

"You saw something. What did you see?"

"Who are you?"

"Don't you know? Can't you-"

"Who are you?"

"I'm-Caitlin. Caitlin Graham. Lindsay's sister."

Despite the clear skies and bright moon, Lucas and Jaylene were having a frustratingly slow and difficult time of it. Not to mention exhausting. And judging by the intermittent radio and cell contact with the other two teams, they weren't the only ones; the terrain in these isolated spots was so rough it was as though they had been swallowed up by some more-primitive time, the strained roar of their vehicles' engines alien. When they could use vehicles, that was.

Sometimes, it was literally hacking their way through clinging, thorny underbrush.

Jaylene held the flashlight to illuminate the map spread out on the hood of their vehicle, and Lucas crossed off the second property on their list.

"At this rate," he said, "we don't have a hope in hell of covering all these places by tomorrow afternoon."