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A s Morrison drove through town, Sadie gasped out loud, grabbing her arm.

“What’s the matter?” Pulling over to the side of the street, he frowned at her.

She stared at him in shock, then shook her head. “I don’t know. Something slammed into my shoulder.”

He hesitated. “I hate to ask, but is there any chance it’s your twin?”

She frowned. “I don’t know. I don’t know why it would be.” Then she looked around, bewildered. “But, yes, there is a chance that it could be, although I’ve never had a reaction that was so strong and so painful like that. It feels almost real.”

“You did say he was so angry,” he reminded her.

“He is, but why is he angry at me?” At that Morrison shrugged, and she took a deep breath. “This feels very much directed at me.”

“That changes everything. If it’s directed at you, then he knows about you, and he’s very angry and—”

“In pain,… lots and lots of it,” she whispered, without even realizing that she was now engulfed in all his pain too. Almost instantly a new wave hit her, and then another wave hit even harder. She sat here, gasping for breath in the vehicle.

He placed a hand atop her arm. “Can you push it back?”

She turned to him, knowing the pain was evident in her gaze, but struggling, desperate to do anything that would help, as she whispered, “Shouldn’t I try to follow it instead?”

He stared at her and gave a clipped nod. “If you can, yes. That’s exactly what we need.”

She nodded and pointed in the direction of the corner up ahead. “Up there, take a right. He’s going right through that building.”

“Is he in the building?”

“No,” she muttered, gasping as another wave hit her.

“Is his anger directed at you?”

“I think it’s directed at the world around me.

He’s so angry about something, incredibly angry, and I don’t know why.

” Morrison started up the vehicle. Following her instructions, he went around the corner and then another, now headed down a stretch of road that seemed to go on forever.

Meanwhile, he kept looking at her as he drove, careful to keep an eye on the road as well.

She shrugged. “Keep going. Keep going.” He kept at it, and they finally ended up at another set of apartment buildings, when she cried out, “Stop.” Then the pain eased. She straightened up, looked around, and frowned. “It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”

“The pain.”

He studied their surroundings. “Any chance he recognized that you were here?”

She gave a harsh laugh. “I don’t know very much about this stuff, so I don’t know what’s possible and what’s not. It could just be that he’s either fallen asleep or has some other way to ease his fury, and it just happened to take effect right now.”

He nodded, got out of the car, and looked around. “Just the one large building is here.”

“Whatever it was, it came from there,” she whispered.

He got back in the vehicle and phoned Terkel, then quickly explained what had happened.

“Good,” Terkel replied, “something for us to check out. Give me the address, and we’ll start running it down.”

“That’ll take a long time, and it looks as if a lot of people live here,” Morrison added. “It’s got to be twenty stories high.” But he gave him the address anyway.

Terk snorted. “Won’t take us that long. A lot of people are here in the compound, helping out on this investigation between other jobs.

Plus, we have a finder of our own, Langdon, who is on it too.

He helped us a lot with Penny. Still, doesn’t hurt to have boots on the ground.

So can you guys stay there and see if Don comes alive again? ”

“We can certainly sit here and wait a bit,” Morrison replied, wincing at Terk’s phrase and looking over at Sadie questioningly.

She nodded. “Yes, we should wait. I don’t know what’s going on, but Don’s here, or at least he was.” She frowned. “It’s possible he left too, when the pain left.”

Morrison relayed that information, then realized it was pointless and put it on Speakerphone, moving the phone a bit closer to her. “Terk, you’re on Speaker now, so I’m hoping we can get more answers.”

Terkel, his voice calm and reassuring, turned his attention to Sadie. “When the energy hit you,” he began, “can you describe what it felt like?”

“A punch,” she replied immediately. “Like somebody attacking the same spot over and over again,” she described. “Even now my arm is killing me.” She kept massaging it, then looked at it and winced. “I don’t know if this is even possible, but I think I might have a hell of a bruise tomorrow.”

“Chances are you will,” Terkel confirmed. “This often manifests in very strong physical forms.”

“No kidding.… It hurts like hell.”

“I know,” he said, his tone soothing, “feels like a charley-horse kind of pain. On the other hand, this is excellent work, and we now have another location to go on.”

“And yet it’s not that helpful because I can’t see or feel Don now. I don’t know where he is, and this is a huge building. Hundreds and hundreds of people could be in there,” she noted.

“That doesn’t matter, but now we also know that he’s connected to somebody there,” Terk pointed out.

“That means everybody gets a heavy perusal. I’ve got every available person here on it, and I’ll contact the government and MI5 and get them on it too.

I don’t want to start evacuating the building until we know for sure that Don’s in there.

It is a possibility that the reason your pain stopped was because he left the building.

Maybe something about that location makes him angry. Maybe he works with somebody in there.”

“Oh.” She frowned at Morrison. “It didn’t occur to me that maybe he left. I didn’t feel the energy move.”

“Maybe there’s something to that too,” Morrison said. “Another reason to not evacuate an entire building just because of it.”

“No, of course not,” she agreed. “I will feel terrible if I turned out to be wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” Terk confirmed, “but interpreting the messages is the challenge.” Terk then terminated the call.

Sadie frowned and shook her head, not knowing what else to say.

Morrison asked her, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.… I mean, my arm still hurts, but it’s good. How is that even real? I had no idea it could manifest in a real form like this.”

He shrugged. “I don’t understand how a lot of this stuff works,” he admitted, “but I think the trick is not necessarily to understand but just to accept that it works and go with it. Too often we get bogged down needing to know exactly how something works, but it’s just a tool.

So, if you learn how to make good use of the tool, it doesn’t really matter how it works.

Think about it. You don’t look at a light switch and try to figure out how or why it works.

You know it supplies electricity, so you just flip the switch. ”

“That simple, huh ?”

“Yes, sometimes it really is. That’s exactly what this is. Energy is a tool, and when we have the ability to use it, you just do. It’s another tool in our toolbox, and you’re lucky enough that you can wield it.”

“But I’m not wielding it,” she wailed. “I’m being wielded on.”

At that, he stopped and frowned at her. “That is a very interesting statement.”

She blinked at him several times. “But is it a good one?”

He gave her a small smile. “Maybe not from your point of view, but I definitely need to let Terkel know.” He quickly texted him.

“Don’t you want to call him?”

“I could, but the door is closed.”

She stared at him. “What? Hey, you’re the one who does energy work. I’m the newbie.”

He nodded. “When I think about texting or phoning Terk, I get an almost immediate wall, which means he’s busy, like maybe he’s on the phone and can’t respond.

I can send him a text, and he’ll get back to us in a minute.

” She let out a breath, and he huffed. “Look. That’s not unusual.

You do it all the time with other people.

You just don’t realize it. You think about calling, then get this mental note and decide to wait,” he explained.

“That’s all this is. It’s that same process you use all day, every day, without even thinking about it. ”

“Sure,” she quipped, with a note of humor, “but everybody does that. I wouldn’t have put it in psychic terms.”

“Maybe it doesn’t belong in psychic terms, but surely it fits within the realm of intuition, if that’s a better word for you.”

She looked over at him and smiled. “For somebody who doesn’t talk about energy very much, you sure talk about it a lot.”

“I talk about it when I need to,” he noted, shrugging it off. “And I’m not sure this is the best time, but, considering you brought up Terkel and that you’re getting hit by your twin brother’s energy,” he pointed out, “talking about it seems appropriate.”

“That works,” she conceded. “This definitely came out of left field.”

“Do you…” He hesitated, then waved his hand.

“For want of a better way of putting it, do you have any protective energy up? Do you put up a barrier, besides that general stay-away atmosphere—which comes through loud and clear, by the way. But do you put up any protective barrier to stop things like this from happening?”

“No,” she replied. “I wouldn’t have anyway because I was trying to reach out to Don.”

“Maybe he’s reaching out to you but either doesn’t know what he can do or is incredibly powerful and isn’t modulating it well—”

“Or he’s very powerful, and this is a getaway kind of thing.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing, and he’s just punching out at the world because he’s so angry.”

“That feels more like it,” she said. “It feels very much as if I got caught in some backlash. I wasn’t looking for it. It was looking for me. Now, whether he’s seeking somebody like me, I don’t know,” she added. “I think he’s just…” She pondered it, then shrugged. “ Reacting .”