"Go on," Rob said curtly. "Don't keep us all waiting."
The horn blared again behind them.
Anna rose without any of her usual grace. Her movements were jerky, full of repressed energy. She snatched up her duffel bag and began to fumble with the door handle.
Kait sat stiffly, her shoulders tense, her head high. Her heart was pounding with defensive fury. Let Anna go if she wanted. It just showed she'd never cared for the rest of them in the first place.
Ridiculous.
The thought came out of nowhere, like a tiny glint of light in her mind, there and gone in an instant. It was enough to shock Kaitlyn into some kind of sense.
Ridiculous - of course Anna cared for the rest of them. Anna cared about everything, from the earth itself to the animals she loved to just about any person that crossed her path.
But then why was Kait so angry with her? Kait could feel all the physical symptoms. The pounding heart, the shortness of breath - the flushed face and tight feeling at her temples. More, there was a wild need to move in her muscles, like the desire to hit something.
Physical symptoms. It was another glint, surfacing from Kaitlyn's subconscious. And suddenly she understood.
"Anna, wait. Wait," she said just as Anna wrestled the door open. She tried to make her voice calm, when it kept wanting to come out panicked or seething.
Anna stopped but didn't turn.
"Don't you see - everybody, don't you see?" Kaitlyn looked around at the others. "This isn't real. We're all upset, but we're not really upset at each other. We're just feeling angry, so our minds think there must be a reason to be angry."
"It's just nerves, I suppose," Gabriel sneered. His lip was curled and his gray eyes were savage. "We couldn't possibly really hate each other."
"No! I don't know what it is, but - " Kaitlyn broke off, realizing that in addition to all the other physical symptoms she was shivering. It was cold in the van, colder than could be explained by the open door.
And there was a strange odor in her nostrils, a sewer stench.
"Do you smell that? It's the same thing I smelled yesterday when Lewis did his sleepwalking bit. And it's cold like yesterday, too." Kaitlyn could see confusion mingling with the anger in the faces around her, and she turned to the one person she trusted absolutely.
Rob, she said fervently, please listen. I know it's hard because you feel like you're angry, but just try. Something's going on.
Slowly Rob's face cleared. The smoldering fury went out of his amber-colored eyes, leaving them golden and somewhat bewildered. He blinked and put a hand to his forehead.
"You're right," he said. "It's like that psychology experiment - give someone an injection of adrenaline, and then put them in a room with someone acting angry. The first person gets angry, too, but it's not real anger. It's been induced."
"Someone's doing that to us," Kaitlyn said.
"But how?" Lewis demanded. He sounded scoffing, but not as exasperated as before. "Nobody's given us any injections."
"Long distance," Rob said. "It's a psychic attack."
His voice was flat and positive. His eyes had gone dark gold. Outside, the blaring horn had given way to several horns sounding continuously.
"Shut the door, Anna," Rob said quietly. "I'll find a place to pull over. There's something I ought to have told you before."
Anna slid the door shut. A few minutes later they had pulled over by the roadside and Rob was looking at the rest of them soberly.
"I should have mentioned it this morning," he said. "But I wasn't sure, and I didn't see any point in you all worrying. Those slug tracks... well, back at Durham I heard stories about people waking up to find those around their house. Slime trails or sometimes footprints of people or animals. They almost always went along with nightmares - people having terrible dreams the night before."
Nightmares. Now Kaitlyn remembered. "I had a terrible dream last night," she said. "There were all these people leaning over me. Gray people - they looked like pencil sketches. And it was cold - just the way it was a few minutes ago." She looked at Rob. "But what is it?"
"They said all those things were signs of a psychic attack."
"A psychic attack," Gabriel repeated, but his tone was less sarcastic than it had been.
"The stories were that dark psychics could do things even over long distances. They could visualize you and use PK, telepathy, even astral projection." His troubled eyes turned back to Kait. "Those gray people you saw - I've heard that astral projections are colorless."
"Astral projections as in letting your mind do the walking? Leaving your body behind?" Lewis asked, cocking an eyebrow. The atmosphere had changed; the web was no longer quivering with animosity.
Kait thought that everyone looked like themselves again.
Rob was nodding. "That's it. And I've heard that psychic attacks can make you weak or nervous - even make you think you're going crazy."
"I thought I was going crazy just now," Anna said. Her eyes were large and bright with unshed tears.
"I'm sorry, everybody."
"I'm sorry, too," Kaitlyn said. She and Anna looked at each other a moment and then simultaneously reached forward to hug each other.
"Sure, everybody's sorry," Gabriel said impatiently. "But we've got more important things to think about.
A psychic attack means one thing - we've been found."
"Mr. Zetes," Rob said.
"Who else? But the question is, who's he gotten to do it? What psychics are attacking?"
Kaitlyn tried to visualize the faces in her dream. It was impossible. The features had been too blurred.
"Mr. Z had a lot of contacts," Rob said wearily. "Obviously he's found some new friends."
Anna was shaking her head. "But how can he have found such powerful ones so fast? I mean, we couldn't do what they're doing, and we're supposed to be the best."
"The best of our age group," Rob began, but Kaitlyn said, "The crystal."
Understanding flared immediately in Gabriel's eyes. "That's it. The crystal is amplifying their power."
"But it's dangerous," Kaitlyn started, and then she shut up at an ominous glance from Gabriel.
Intent on his own thoughts, Rob didn't seem to notice. "Obviously, they don't care about the danger, and while they're using the crystal they're much stronger than we are. The point is that we've got to be prepared. They're not finished with us - and the attacks will probably get worse. We've got to be ready for anything."
"Yeah, but ready how?" asked Lewis. "What can you do against that kind of attack?"
Rob shrugged. "At the Durham Center I heard people talk about envisioning light - protective light. The problem is that I never really listened. I don't know how you do it."
Kaitlyn let out her breath and sat back. The others were doing the same, and a sense of apprehension ran through the web. Apprehension - and vulnerability.
There was a long silence.
"Well, I suppose we'd better get back on the road," Kait said finally. "It's no good sitting around and thinking about it."
"Just everybody be on the lookout for anything unusual," Rob said.
But nothing unusual happened on the rest of the drive. Anna took the wheel and they resumed their beach-scanning, agreeing that nothing on the Oregon coast looked like the place in their dreams. The rock was too black - volcanic, apparently - and the water too open.
"And it's still not north enough," Kait said.
They stopped that night at a little town called Cannon Beach, just below the Washington border. It was already dark by the time Anna pulled the van into a quiet street that dead-ended on the beach.
"This may not be legal, but I don't think anybody's going to bother us," she said. "For that matter, I've hardly seen anybody around here."
"It's a resort town," Rob said. "And this is off season."
It certainly seemed like off season to Kaitlyn. The sky was clouding over, and it was cold and windy outside.
"I saw a little store back there on the main street," she said. "We've got to buy something for dinner - we ate the last of the bread and peanut butter for lunch."
"I'll go," Anna said. "I don't mind the cold."
Rob nodded. "I'll go with you."
It was only once they were gone that Kait wished Lewis had gone, too. She was getting worried about Gabriel.
He seemed tense and distant, staring out the window into the dark. In the web Kaitlyn could feel only coldness and a sense of walls - as if he were living in a castle of ice.
He put the highest walls up when he had the most to hide, Kaitlyn knew. Right now she was worried that he was suffering - and that he wouldn't come to her for help.
And she'd noticed something else. He was still sitting in the front passenger seat. The rest of them had changed places every so often, but Gabriel always stuck to the front.
I wonder, Kait thought, if it could have anything to do with the fact that I always stick to the back.
She was getting fairly good at screening her thoughts when she concentrated. Neither Lewis nor Gabriel seemed to have heard that.
Rob and Anna returned windblown and laughing, clutching paper bags to their chests.
"We splurged," Rob said. "Microwave hot dogs - they're still pretty hot - and Nachos and potato chips."