Kay Hooper - Blood Sins

So far.

"But you need to get out there." Hollis said, early on the afternoon that Sarah Warren's body was found in the river.

Tessa was still grappling with that, and it wasn't easy. It was the first time she'd ever been on assignment when a fellow Haven operative had lost her lifethough not the first time it had happened.

The stakes were high.

And Tessa accepted that, got that. No operative joined the organization without being warned repeatedly, by John and Maggie Garrett, cofounders and codirectors of Haven, and by Bishop, another cofounder as well as Chief of the FBI's Special Crimes Unit and someone who certainly knew better than most what price could be demanded of the soldiers in this war.

That was the most unsettling part of the death of a fellow operative, the stark reminder that this was war, that people could and did die fighting what they all believed were necessary battles. They were none of them superheroes; being psychic hardly made them invulnerable. In fact, it was often the opposite.

Depending on the ability and its individual quirks, being psychic could be a weakness at best, and an active liability at worstespecially some of the least common and even unique abilities, and most especially when those abilities were held by operatives or agents with erratic control.

Unfortunately, those with erratic control far outnumbered those with a better mastery over their capbilities.

Tessa was uncertain of where she fell on that score, since her own ability had not really been tested under fire. She knew she was considered to possess excellent control, but who knew what might happen under extreme and dangerous circumstances? She was trained to handle a gun and was licensed to carry a concealed firearm. But she wouldn't be going into the Church of the Everlasting Sin's Compound carrying a weapon of that sort. Worse, she had to appear and act like an extremely vulnerable woman who was ripe to be dominated by stronger people, stronger minds.

A terrifying prospect, especially since they weren't at all sure how Reverend Samuel achieved his seemingly absolute domination over his flock. If he was using psychic ability to control them, Tessa had no way of knowing whether that same control would work on her.

Until she put her shields to the test by exposing them to the church Compound. And Samuel.

"The police will probably be there," she objected finally.

"Not necessarily. They haven't identified the body yet."

"But we have."

"Yeah. It's Sarah, no question."

"Did you see?"

"Her spirit? No." Hollis frowned. "I seldom see the spirits of team membersor people I know, for that matter. I wonder why." It wasn't a question so much as it was an acknowledgment that the universe was arbitrary in its choices.

Tessa waited a moment, then asked, "How can we be sure it was Sarah's body?"

Hollis pushed aside her musing with an almost physical gesture. "Hoping for a mistake in identification? Don't. We have someone else in the area, and the I.D. of her body is confirmed."

"By someone I'm not supposed to know about, I gather."

Patiently, Hollis said, "What you don't know, you can't communicateon any levelto anyone else. Tessa, I don't even know for certain how many of our agents and Haven operatives are working this case. And right now, I don't care. Someone is killing people, about as viciously as I've ever seen. As inexplicably as I've ever seen. And everything we know or think we know suggests Reverend Samuel is the one responsible. We believe he's doing that killing using no weapon or tool except for the power of his mind, using paranormal abilities we haven't been able to count, far less define and understand. I don't know about you, but that scares the hell out of me."

"I just I never knew psychic ability could be like that. Could be used as a weapon."

"It's rare, but we have at least one agent who can channel and focus energy well enough to make it a destructive force. And Haven has at least one operative who can do it."

"And if there are two on our side"

"There are likely to be at least a couple on the other side, yeah. We've had evidence in the past of psychic abilities in some really evil and twisted bad guys who could do some scarily remarkable things psychically. Look, we haven't discovered our own limits yet. But it only makes sense that in the wrong hands, driven by the wrong intentions, at least some psychic abilities could be corrupted. Dark energy channeled in ways more powerful than anything we've experienced so far."

"And used to kill. But why?"

"The question we desperately need answered, Tessa, especially since we have no direct evidence so far pointing to either Samuel or his church, not evidence that would stand up in court. We know precious little, but what we do know from interviewing the very few defectors we've found tells us that Samuel built himself a church because something very seriously traumatic happened to him more than twenty years ago, something so mysterious or terrifying even the defectors wouldn't or couldn't talk about it, and whatever it was, it changed him forever."

"Problem is, we don't believe he was all that stable to begin with. It's difficult to know for certain, because the early background info we have on him is sketchy, to say the least. Can't even find a reliable birth certificate on him, though we've found half a dozen phony ones. In any case, he had a few early run-ins with the law, so he's on record as having a troubled childhood. His mother was apparently a prostitute, and not of the high-class variety."

"I'd call that a troubled childhood," Tessa said.

"Yeah. We can't find attendance records, so if he even went to school it was rare and sporadic. We haven't been able to find any evidence that he started fires or tortured animals or displayed other signs of a budding sociopath, but there's so little solid information on him that we can't rule anything out."

"Except that he grew up to become a cult leader."

"Except that," Hollis agreed.

Tessa shook her head. "I read up on cults and cult leaders when I got this assignment, and just the regular, run-of-the-mill leaders without psychic abilities are more than scary. The patterns of behavior they follow, the power trips and growing paranoia, the isolation, the need to dominate and control their followers and the means they use to impose that controlis all so"

"Deadly, in many cases. Certainly in this one. We know women, men, and even a few children have gone missing from that compound in the last year, all vanished without a traceand that none of them was reported missing by the church or any of its members. What we don't know is why. Why his own have been targeted, and why these people in particular."

Tessa frowned. "Maybe he's culling. Weeding out those of his people he can't trust."

"That could very well be. Except that it doesn't really explain the kids, does it?"

"No. We're sure kids have gone missing?"

"We're sure. No reports to the local police, but we're sure."

"And we're not talking about the kids Sarah got out?"

Hollis shook her head. "No. Creepy thing is, one or both of the parents of at least two of the missing kids are still church members. Not only did they not report the kids missing, but they don't seem to miss the kids."

"What?"

"Either they don't remember or don't care. I'm guessing it's the former. And we have no idea how that's even possible. If Samuel can affect people's memories, especially the sort as deeply rooted and emotional as the memory of a child"

She really didn't have to finish that.

Tessa drew a breath and let it out slowly, trying to fight off a chill that was seeping into her very bones. "The missing people, kids included, weren't all psychics, I assume?"