The tiny smear of energy that remained from the intruders’ touch melted onto her fingers, and as fast as lightning, she knew them, and the knowledge shot her adrenaline into the stratosphere, all over again.  She knew them because she had sensed them before.  Her grandfather’s killers had returned.  The tiny smear of the killers’ energy also allowed her to glean their thoughts at the moment they had slipped through her high-end security with the ease of a breeze through a screen door–damn their bloody souls.

They hadn’t triggered any alarms, not even the motion sensors.  That frightened Maywind all over again, but for a completely different reason.  The killers were the only other people she’d ever encountered who had the ability to do the same things she could do. At least some of the same things, such as getting through a locked door without setting off any alarms.

Maywind stood there on the stoop, the cool spring air feeling suddenly icy on her arms.  Swaying a little from foot to foot, she cautiously extended her senses into her home, her heart pounding with the fear of not knowing whether the killers were still inside.

The house was quiet.  No one jumped out to grab her on the stoop.  She released her senses to move more quickly through the familiar rooms, tasting the texture of what was there. This skill was like riding a bike.  Once learned, she had never forgotten it, even if she hadn’t used it since the last time the killers had been here–on the day they’d killed her beloved grandfather.

The killers were gone.  Maywind let go of the breath she had been holding.  She stepped inside and entered the alarm codes to arm it again behind her.  Not that it would do any good.

Maywind could sense there were other thought-print fragments there in her home, a part of the filthy spoor the killers had left every time they touched anything with their bare hands.  She found the energy of their touch in every room, which meant they’d searched for something just as they had when they’d come and killed her Grandfather Douard.  Maywind had no idea what the killers were looking for, then or now.

As she moved through the familiar rooms of her home, she tried to figure out what the killers had been looking for, by how and where they had searched.  They hadn’t taken anything that she could see.  But why had they left without waiting for her?  That was an answer she really  wanted, so she looked for it, too.

Sorting through the scattered pieces of the killers’ thought-prints, it took her a number of long minutes to make sense of them.  But with effort she thought she had pieced it together.  At least she hoped she had it right.  It looked as if the killers had been pulled from their hunt for her by someone who had a great deal of influence over them.  It was someone unnamed, at least in the killers’ thought-prints, someone who they feared more than hated.  The unknown person had forced them to leave instead of waiting for her to return.  Lucky her.  Stunned, Maywind realized then that the killers had departed a mere four minutes before she had arrived at her front door.

She had nearly walked into her own death this morning.

 

Her breath was harsh in her own ears as Maywind struggled to close her overloaded suitcase.  For the last two hours, her head had been full of a silent chant— hurry, hurry, hurry—as she packed to leave.  She leaned her weight against the suitcase and wiped her forehead with her sleeve.  This was taking too long.  They could return at any moment, and she could not be here when they did.  Her anxiety climbed another notch.

There were so many things she couldn’t leave, but too much to take with her.   Maywind closed her eyes tight when panic started to squeeze her chest again.  She worked on relaxing enough to let the air slowly expand her lungs.  Her intense feelings were right there, just under the surface, waiting to overwhelm her the moment she let go, even a little.  The panic tried to take her again but she muscled it back into its cage again.

Maywind wrapped her arms around her belly.  She knew—had known, from the moment her key touched the lock—that there was only one option available to her.  She had to run for her life, had to get as far away as possible from anywhere the killers would expect to find her.

Maywind looked around the large, bright room that had served as her studio and workroom for more than half her life.  Shelves of paints, jars of brushes, a small mountain of bottles and cans, boxes and piles—all the supplies she used in her art—they surrounded her like old friends.  Her paintings on their easels, and those stacked against the wall, waited like lovers for her to pick up her brushes and return to them.  She looked longingly at all the sketchbooks filled with her drawings, a picture record of her life lived so far.

Despair gathered under her breastbone next to her heart, as she contemplated all the treasures she would be forced to leave behind, possibly in the hands of the enemy.  She levered a closed fist into her diaphragm, pushing against the painful pressure building there.  She could feel the killers’ residual energy resonating in her organs and bones alongside the despair.  She shuddered, and for a moment nearly let her feelings escape.

But she forced them down again, because giving in to her feelings seemed a lot like giving in to the murdering bastards.  Instead, Maywind ruthlessly stomped on the feelings that threatened to overwhelm her.  Not going to let a few feelings get in her way, she told herself.  She uncurled her six foot one frame until she straightened completely, and drew a deep, cleansing breath into her lungs.  Feelings are my friends…feelings are my friends…she chanted silently, and then snickered.  She would be damned before she’d let these murdering bastards come waltzing back in and find her sitting there.. emoting.  Not when she knew damned well what she had to do—which was run for her life.

Brushing away two stray tears, Maywind selected, from among all of the precious sketchbooks, the oldest-looking one–large, leather-bound and worn around its edges.  This was the one she could never leave behind—the one that had belonged to her mother, Cassandra.  She stroked the familiar cover with gentle fingers for just a moment, feeling where the leather had been rubbed soft with age and handling.  She wrapped her arms around the sketchbook, hugging it hard against her, and worked to tuck away the familiar longing for a mother who had been gone these last twenty years.

There had been a lot of loss in Maywind’s life.  This morning was only the latest.  The killers had gotten inside her home without benefit of key or alarm code.  They had waltzed right through the ridiculously expensive, high-tech, guaranteed intruder-proof, security system.  She had the system installed after her grandfather’s murder, thinking it would keep her safe from what had happened to him. It had done nothing but give her a false sense of security for all the months since his death.

Douard Morrisey’s murder had happened ten months ago, when the killers broke in through locked doors, overpowered the elderly man, shot him, locked him in his study—from the inside, mind you—and left him there for her to find when she came home at the end of the day.  With that one heartless act, the killers had taken the only family she had left.  So she had fortified her house to the rafters.

The house security was still engaged right now—even though it hadn’t stopped the killers any better than having no system at all had stopped them before. She snorted in disgust at her misplaced trust in ‘things.’  ‘Things’ obviously couldn’t protect her from the evil that had come looking for her this morning.

Maywind longed for someone to rescue her from the evil men who were determined, from all appearances, to finish off the Morrisey line for good.  However, she knew that calling the police would be futile.  She had learned that painful lesson at the time of Douard’s murder, when the killers had staged the scene to look like a suicide.  Their spoor had been all over her home—and all over Douard’s body.  Maywind had known the truth about Douard’s death—as surely as she had known the sun would rise again, but she had been unable to convince the police that her beloved grandfather had been murdered.

She had been forced to leave it as it stood, then, with everyone in the world believing Douard Morrisey had taken the coward’s way out.  Maywind had also known, with a crystalline certainty she couldn’t begin to put into words, that he had died protecting her from the evil that had come into their lives.  There had been no choice for her except to just let it go.  There had been no way to convince the authorities of the truth without exposing herself and her unusual abilities—and with Douard already dead, that risk had been too great.

For a while after his death Maywind had hated the police—the crime scene techs and the detectives, both, with their pitying looks and smug certainty.  But she had needed to let that piece of poison go, too.  None of them could sense what she could sense, and that wasn’t their fault.

She hadn’t been willing to try to explain her unexplainable abilities to them.  Hell, even she didn’t know why she had abilities other people didn’t have, or where they had come from.  The truth was, people didn’t believe what they didn’t understand.  They were afraid of things that were outside their experience, especially if it violated their beliefs about how the world was supposed to work.  And if they were afraid of her, they would come to hate her.  She’d learned that harsh truth from the man who was to have been her husband.  She didn’t need to repeat that lesson.  As badly as she wanted the good guys to come riding up right now, she knew she would be handling this alone.

Maywind released a shaky sigh and put away the yearning for help that was not forthcoming.  She tugged her fingers through the four feet of her tangled hair that had come loose from its tether.  She smoothed the mahogany colored strands that were so like her mother’s had been, and retied it into a thick tail at the back of her neck.   She straightened her clothing and tucked her mother’s journal into her bag.

Maywind had gotten through awful stuff in her life before this, so she would just do so again.  She shook herself free of thoughts that helped nothing.  No more self-pity.  It was time to go.

She trotted through the house for the last time.  She checked for forgotten items, splashed water on the plants, and closed some curtains to protect the art that covered the walls of the only home she had ever known.  God, she loved this place.  The old townhouse had been in the family for generations.  It had made it possible for her to live in New York, a city that was drenched in art and culture, and yet was also where she could have the anonymity she needed to survive with all of her peculiar gifts.

She considered it a blessing that nobody noticed when she took a different lover at each full moon.  Or noticed when she slipped up and responded to someone’s thoughts instead of his or her words.  In fact, nobody noticed any of her odd behavior in New York City—or if they did, in the best New York fashion they simply ignored it.  This house and the city made a safe haven for Maywind.  However would she do without it?

Pushing away that thought, too, Maywind left a scribbled note and a check for the housekeeper, saying she’d decided to go back to London.  It would never do to have Mrs. Lazzaro call the police to report her missing.  How ironic that would be.

Maywind was a planner and she really wanted to plan right now, to figure out what was the best course of action, and how to do it.  But she really did have to go.  So she put together the simplest, most effective plan she could in the time she had, which was none at all.

First, she would run.  Then, she would hide.  While she was hiding, she would try to figure out who the killers were, what they had been searching for that they thought she had in her possession, and why they had wanted Douard dead, and now her, too.  It didn’t make sense to her—why they would kill Douard—or her—before having whatever it was they were looking for clutched in their murdering little fingers.  If she could figure that out, maybe she would be able to do something that would keep them from killing her, too.

She was sweating and breathless by the time she finished lugging the two large, and now very heavy, suitcases to the front door.  Maywind stood with her hands on her hips, trying to catch her breath while her heart continued to pound uncomfortably with fear—and anger.  How had she ended up here, right now, like this?  What had happened that started everything just a few weeks before Douard’s murder?  She wished she knew.

Maywind had been in England, reading for her doctorate when Douard had called her home.  He’d said only that he needed her.  So she had come.  By the time she had arrived in New York, Douard seemed different than the man she had known her entire life.  She had found him stressed and moody, and prone to temper outbursts, which were completely out of character.  Maywind remembered wondering if he had dementia, or a brain tumor, or something.  But no.  Douard would say only that they needed to travel to San Francisco together, to speak with someone named “Seamus,” who, Douard had insisted, was the one person in the world who could give them the help they needed.  He had refused to say what they needed help with.

By two weeks before to his death, Douard was so frighteningly out of character Maywind would have agreed to anything to get to the bottom of whatever it was that had changed him so much.  She had set about silently preparing for their trip to San Francisco because she couldn’t think of what else to do.  By two days before they were to have departed, Douard was dead.  There had been no reason to go to San Francisco, then.

As she stood in the silent hallway with her suitcases, Maywind really wished she knew what Douard had needed help with so badly.  She suspected she might need the same help herself right now.

There was one final thing she had to do before leaving, and it filled her with dread.  She needed to get some cash and her papers from the safe in the study, the room where Douard had been murdered.

Refusing to look anywhere but directly ahead, she went to the wall safe.  Opening it quickly, she emptied the contents into her tote bag without looking at any of it.

Quickly, Maywind turned to go, but a thought stopped her.  She returned to Douard’s antique desk and manipulated the intricate scrollwork to release the small, secret drawer hidden within the thickness of the desktop.  From the narrow space she lifted out Douard’s thin laptop, then slid the drawer closed again.  The laptop went into her bag with the other things from the safe and her mother’s journal.  The secret drawer had hidden Douard’s laptop from the killers as effectively as it had hidden nautical charts belonging to the eighteenth century sea captain whose desk it once was, from pirates on the high seas.

With her final task completed, Maywind’s mind cleared.  She faced the brittle certainty that her life as she had known it had ended today, never to be the same again.

Maywind had been a victim since the day her grandfather had been murdered, and she was worn thin with it.  Just as there had been no damned crying in baseball, she told herself, there was no damned crying when running for your life, either.  Crying made you a victim, and Maywind was done with feeling like a victim.

She might have to run right now to keep herself safe, but she was determined to survive.  Very soon, she would no longer be the hunted because she damn well would become the hunter.  She would find out who these evil men were and why they’d killed Douard and then had come after her.  And when she did find out—well, she wasn’t sure exactly what she would do, but she knew from the core of her being that somehow, sometime, she would settle the score.

That thought fortified her. She would call on the strengths she possessed, open herself to her unusual abilities more than she’d ever dared to do before, and she would use her brain to figure stuff the hell out.  She could do it.

To Maywind’s thinking, Douard’s trip to San Francisco constituted a clue, the only one she had.  It was why the “running” part of her plan began with her heading to the airport to get on the next available flight to San Francisco.  Once in San Francisco, she would implement the “hiding” part of her plan, and start her search for “Seamus.”  She would also try to figure out what the killers had wanted enough to kill for.  Then she would see what she would see.

After a last glance around her, Maywind left her beloved home, fervently hoping that it would not be forever.  But her eyes were dry and she was moving, not hiding.  She was determined to prevail over the evil that had taken everything from her that she loved.