Grace looked around, searching for the other commandos. While some of them lay prone and unmoving where they'd landed, others had begun to stir. She really didn't need more problems. Now if she could just put them all to sleep the way David had done to her …
She didn't know how. And David couldn't help her. She sensed his diminished psychic energy. He looked awfully diminished on the physical level too.
Only one idea came to her. It was a bad one, she knew.
Waldron glanced over his shoulder to flash her an evil smile. Then he returned his attention to David and his body tensed, and she knew she was out of time.
So she did it.
A gust of hurricane strength blasted outward from a central point between her and Waldron. Battaglia flipped over backward, dragging her with him into a somersault. The momentum spun her out of Battaglia's grasp. She heard men screaming and bodies cracking as they hit the ground. Oh God, how many people had she killed?
No time to think about that. No time to think, period.
The instant she stopped rolling, she sprang to her feet and ran back toward where David and Waldron had been. They were gone. She spotted her gun, though, and snatched it up as she continued running.
Sean lay exactly where he had before. She stopped to crouch beside him and felt for a pulse in his neck. It surged under her fingers, strong and regular. She saw no blood or obvious injuries. There was nothing more she could do for him at the moment.
Rising, she turned in a circle to study her surroundings. The lantern flashlights had rolled and cast wedges of light in three different directions, leaving deep patches of darkness in between. She spotted a couple of the commandos, probably a hundred feet away, lying motionless on the ground. The wind blast must've thrown the other four even farther away, out of sight.
The screams. The crunching.
Her gorge rose in her throat. She gulped it down. Given the lighting conditions, the fact that she couldn't see the other commandos didn't mean the wind had flung them so far that they now lay in crumpled and broken heaps far in the distance.
Battaglia had come to rest a good fifty feet away, sprawled on his back, at the edge of one of the lantern beams.
She marched to the nearest lantern, plucked it off the ground, and swept the beam over the landscape.
There. She backtracked with the light. It flashed over a man-shaped lump on the sand. Not David. He'd been wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The man-lump was Waldron.
David and JT were nowhere in sight.
Too many bad guys, too many dangers. Dammit. If she had a way to disable Waldron and Battaglia, then at least she would have two less dangers to worry about.
Battaglia carried zip ties, which he used like handcuffs.
As much as she did not want to get within grappling distance of Battaglia, she sprinted across the distance to him and knelt beside the unconscious muscleman. He looked no less intimidating in this condition. Nevertheless, she rifled through his pockets until she discovered a clump of zip ties held together with a rubber band. She secured one of the ties around each of his ankles and connected the two with a third tie, forming a tight shackle. Next, she rolled him over onto his stomach and bound his hands behind his back with a single zip tie.
Satisfied that Battaglia couldn't chase after, she trotted over to Waldron and bound him in the same fashion. Tracking down every one of the six commandos so she could tie them up would take too much time. Besides, judging by the two she could see, the commandos seemed out of commission.
She had to find David. Traipsing through the darkness in search of him, even armed with a lantern light, left her more vulnerable than she liked. JT was out there too, after all. The last time she saw him he looked incapable of walking, much less attacking her — but she couldn't count on it. He might have another syringe in his pocket, chock-full of power-inducing drugs.
To find David remotely, she had one option. It left her vulnerable, possibly more so than marching off into the night. But she had no choice. It was the fastest method.
She launched her mind up into the crossroads, fast as a rocket. The void enveloped her, welcomed her. Two stars glimmered brighter than the rest. One was David — and the other, she knew, was JT. The stars hung close together. Maybe that meant David and JT were close together in the physical world. She couldn't follow both paths, but try as she might, she couldn't feel which one led to David. Her mind was getting tired. She was getting tired. Her time was running out and she had to make a choice, albeit a blind one.
Down she went, plummeting faster and faster.
Then it stopped. She, her astral self, stood behind the overturned SUV. The indirect glow from the lantern light, the one she still held in her physical hand way over there, painted an eerie half light over the area. An arm's length from her, JT crouched under the rear tire with his back against the vehicle.
Wrong choice.
She wanted to fly out of there, to the crossroads, to take the other path and find David. Something tethered her here. The energy was draining out of her slowly but surely. How long she had, she didn't know. When her energy was gone, she would have no chance of finding David this way. And given how weak her body felt, finding him the old-fashioned way might not be an option anymore either.
JT moaned. His eyes were bloodshot. Deep shadows around his eyes gave them a sunken look. His hands trembled as he wiped a rivulet of sweat from his temple. He could neither see nor sense her. His hand fell to the ground, and then his entire body went limp. Though his lungs still pumped labored breaths, his eyes stared vacantly.
She started to leave, but the tether tugged at her again. No, not a tether. More like a beacon. A signal that pulsed in her soul. She followed it around the end of the vehicle — and froze.
David lay there, on his stomach, with one arm pinned beneath him and the other flung out to the side. He was facedown in the sand. A dark liquid dribbled from the back of his head.
No.
She raced toward him, falling to her knees at his side. When she stretched a hand out to touch him, it passed right through his flesh. This was no good. How could she make sure he was still alive when she couldn't touch him? How could she help him?
Dammit, she needed energy. And she needed it now. Right this second.
Was he breathing? She leaned close to his face, but through the pounding of her own heart she couldn't tell.
Now, now, now. She needed energy now.
Heat rushed through her. She felt woozy for a second as the world around her blurred and swirled. The motion stopped with a suddenness that shocked her. She knelt there for a few seconds, unable to think. Finally, she dropped her hands to her sides and curled her fingers into loose fists, scooping up handfuls of cool sand. Goose bumps prickled her arms in response to a breeze.
Her heart thudded. She looked down at her goose-bumpy flesh. Lifting her hands, she turned them so she could examine the fistfuls of sand contained in her palms. What the —
She dumped the sand and patted her arms, her hips, her thighs. They all felt real. Warm. Solid. Somehow, without even realizing it or meaning for it to happen, she had manifested. The question of how flitted through her mind, but she ignored it.
Slowly, she settled her hands on David's back. Contact. He felt warm and firm, yet soft, in a manlike way. When she pressed her fingers to his neck, a pulse throbbed against her skin. With great care, she palpated the wound on his head, parting the hair to get a better look. A scratch. It was just a scratch, one that bled profusely because of its location on the scalp. She let out the breath she'd been holding. He was alive and, unless he had another wound where she couldn't see it, he didn't appear badly hurt.
She laid a hand on his shoulder and shook it gently. He moaned. She took hold of him with both hands and, inch by inch, rolled him over onto his back. Sand clung to his face. She wiped it away. He made a little noise, halfway between a groan and a word.
Pain tore through her back. A scream lodged in her throat, choked off by the searing agony. Her back arched. Her muscles went rigid, and then gave out. She collapsed sideways.
A shadow draped over her as JT rose from his crouch behind her. He towered over her, his expression concealed by darkness, a bloody knife clutched in his hand.
He giggled with manic glee.
Pain. Hot and sharp and wet. It wasn't real. This body wasn't real.
It felt more real than any pain she'd ever felt before.
The mind is the body, David had said. Whatever happens to your metaphysical body, also happens to your physical body.
She had to get out of this body. Now.
JT raised the knife over his head. He plunged the blade down toward her chest.
Go, go, go. Her manifested body disintegrated with a pop. Like a hot air balloon cut loose from its moorings, she drifted upward. JT waved the knife through the air where she had been, his expression wild and confused. She floated ten feet above the scene.
And then she flew. At breakneck speed, she zipped through the crossroads and pitched downward to descend so quickly that the shift hit her like a physical force. Spinning. Falling. The pressure of speed wrung her like a wet towel. But it was nothing compared to the soul-crunching impact of returning to her own body.
Her knees buckled. She fell forward, throwing her hands out to brace herself. Although she recognized her surroundings, they lurched and twisted around her as if she stood on the deck of a fishing trawler during a category five hurricane. Nausea swelled inside her and she nearly vomited. Sweat ran down her face to dribble over her neck and chest, chilling her skin.
The spinning sensation decelerated. Bent over, held up by her trembling arms, she sucked in breath after breath and willed her senses to calm.
David. He was unconscious and alone with JT.
Who had a knife.
She felt a twinge in her back. It was nothing compared to what she'd felt the moment earlier, when JT stabbed her other self. But she had a horrible feeling that within moments the damage to her psychically generated body would catch up with her real body. She must help David before that happened.
A hard object lay beneath her right hand. She glanced down, felt a bitter smile curve her lips, and clenched her hand around the grip of her gun.
Through sheer force of will, David peeled his eyelids apart. It felt like a Herculean effort. Everything was blurry. He blinked until his vision cleared.
JT stood over him wielding a bloody knife.
David felt his body awakening, though not fast enough.
JT raised the knife high and thrust it downward.
A shot boomed.
JT jerked, dropped the knife, and toppled onto David. The knife plunged tip first into the sand inches from David's neck. JT's lifeless body lay draped over David's torso. A dark stain had spread outward from the gunshot wound in JT's back.
David shoved the dead man off himself. He scrambled to his knees, and then pushed up onto his feet. He spotted his savior twenty feet away, past the front bumper of the SUV. David smiled as Grace slowly lowered her gun.
Then she collapsed.
He bolted past the vehicle and straight to her. As he cradled her in his arms, he felt the warm wetness soaking into the back of her shirt. Shit.
Lifting her carefully, he carried her across the open expanse to where Sean lay unconscious. He settled Grace down on the ground beside the boy. Sean could heal her. If David could wake him. The boy was alive, he could tell that much.
David grasped Sean by the shoulders and shook. The boy's head lolled. David slapped Sean's face. The boy's eyelids fluttered, opened for a split second, and drifted shut again.
A sensation of static electricity washed over David. He recognized the feeling of psychic energy pulsing and crackling in the air. Letting go of Sean, he turned to Grace. The energy. The rising power.
It was coming from her.