He pushed the blankets back and put his feet on the floor. All he had on was a pair of gray drawstring pajama pants.
"No, listen. I won't hurt you," he said. "I can't believe you're standing here, but I don't know how to tell you all this. It would take forever."
"I've got some time."
"There's a faster way." His face was guarded now.
"No."
"I want to help you!" he almost shouted. "Please… put the gun down and come here. Aren't you curious? If you just got inside my head for two seconds, you'd believe me. Please."
I didn't move.
"You need to see my thoughts when we aren't running," he rushed on. "I've been dreaming about this since that first morning when you reached inside my head."
Reached inside his head? He had pushed into mine.
"I can read everybody's thoughts." His voice was shaking. "No one but you can read mine."
How should I answer? Somehow, on some level, his words meant something to me. It's hard to explain. I still hated him for what he had helped do to Maggie, but I couldn't stop listening to him.
"You can read other people's thoughts?" I asked.
"Yes, everyone's." He nodded excitedly. "I can… Eleisha, just come here. We don't have to use words."
Slowly, I put the gun down. He looked tall and slender and white-blond-almost like an angel sitting there in his pajama pants. An angel. What a joke.
"What now?"
"Just sit down," he said.
"Don't touch me."
"I don't have to. But if you're standing you might fall… like earlier. It doesn't have to be like that."
When I didn't move any closer, he dropped down on the carpet. "Here, come sit on the floor."
It's strange how he judged me by normal mortal reactions, mortal fears. What did he think I was afraid of? That he'd rape me? Is that what he thought? I'd been playing the frightened little street urchin so long that maybe it just emanated from me. What would he think if he knew what I was really afraid of? That he'd find out I was undead. That I lived off the blood of others. What would he do when he found out about William?
"You don't have to show me anything," he said quickly, as though reading my face. "Just learn to focus. Just search inside me, and I can show you all of the past six weeks. I can show you pieces of my whole life."
It was urgent for me to learn about him and about Dominick, why they were here, how much they knew, what they wanted.
Crossing over, I knelt down on the floor. Wade's features were animated, excited. We didn't say anything. For a moment we didn't do anything. Then, with my mind, I reached out cautiously and tried to see through his eyes. For nearly an hour, that's the last conscious thought I had.
Chapter 9
Wade
Wade Sheffield was born in North Dakota in 1977, the fourth son of a wheat farmer. He was seven years old before realizing that no one else could hear other people's thoughts. His older brothers thought him weak because he cried while helping with daily chores like delivering baby calves or butchering chickens. His sisters sometimes cried when chickens were killed, but the men in his family couldn't figure tears over a new calf.
"She hurts so much," he would say, stroking the heifer in labor.
At the age of twelve, he began responding verbally to people's thoughts. This made several of his teachers nervous-especially the ones who quietly hated teaching, and Mr. Rhinehard, who was sleeping with a fifteen-year-old student named Phyllis Dunmire.
Wade knew all this. He knew what they thought of him. Most of the boys hated him because he was different, and most of the girls wouldn't be seen with anyone so unpopular. Lisa McKendrick had a secret crush on him for a few years, but she also worried much of the time about her private nose-picking habit.
By reading the thoughts of animals, he could always tell when a storm was coming. Animals knew a lot about weather.
One year, when he was fourteen, he stopped off for hamburgers with two of his brothers and mentioned to Mr. Masterson and Mr. Hinthorn that they should bring their cattle in early because of a thunderstorm. The weatherman on the radio had predicted no storm.
That night, every farm within a seventy-mile radius of the Sheffields' lost half their wheat. In anger and frustration, people blamed Wade because he'd warned them.
Within a week, three farmers caught him alone on the way to school and beat him with pitchfork handles until his left leg and four ribs were broken. His oldest brother, Joshua, put him in the back of a Ford pickup and drove him to the Whitman County Hospital, where he was also diagnosed as suffering from a concussion. The next few weeks were hazy. He didn't remember much besides a lot of bright lights, but when he woke up, a miracle happened.
Dr. Geoffrey Van Tassel leaned down over him and smiled.
"Welcome back," the round-faced man said. "Tell me what I'm thinking."
Wade had grown practiced at hiding the extent of his gift, but now he picked up bits and pieces of very focused thought patterns. "A garden," he whispered. "Strawberries that your mother planted a long time ago."
The eyes above him grew warm. "I have an interesting proposition for you, young man, when you're feeling better."
Wade often viewed that moment as the real beginning of his life. Six weeks later, he arrived at the Psychic Research Institute of Northern Colorado, on a set of rented crutches, and began to realize his own self-worth. Suddenly, being able to do something no one else could do had turned into a plus instead of a severe minus.
Dr. Van Tassel was often with him then. Apparently, Wade talked a good deal while in his state of delirium. He'd been speaking aloud whatever the nurses happened to be thinking. Sheila Osborne, a young nursing student from the Psychic Institute, had been working on her internship at the Whitman County Hospital during Wade's stay.
The night before first seeing him, she'd experienced the worst blind date of her life. The guy her best friend had fixed her up with looked like he belonged on the cover of Muscle Fitness. He wouldn't eat the popcorn she bought at the movies because it had salt and butter. He called her babe and lectured her most of the night about the best kind of workout for slimming down her thighs. And then he actually expected her to sleep with him after his cellulite comment.
Slamming bedpans into the cupboard of a hospital room, she heard soft murmuring from the bed.
"I don't have cellulite. And I was wearing Levi's. What would he know?"
She stopped in shock. A semiconscious young man on the bed was rolling slowly in sweat-soaked sheets and whispering her recent thoughts. Forgetting her own hurt vanity, she leaned over him and wiped his face.
"Yeah, I had Levi's on," she said. "What kind of shirt was I wearing?"
"No shirt-that pink sweater your mom bought you last Christmas."
His voice was barely audible, but she heard him. Ten minutes later, she was on the phone to Dr. Van Tassel in Colorado. "I think you'd better come up here. There's someone you need to see."
That was the beginning. Sheila returned to the institute and remained his friend. Although he never did remember much about his stay at Whitman County, she related an embarrassing story about him exposing an affair between a prominent neurologist and his youngest male lab assistant. That hadn't gone over well in North Dakota.
Wade found some of the experiments he participated in to be pointless. But he continued high school with other young people like himself. Well, not quite like himself. No one in the history of the institute had demonstrated anything close to Wade's telepathic ability. He was the golden boy. Everyone wanted to be like him. But as the years passed, they kept asking him a lot of redundant questions.
"What do you see in my mind, Wade? Do you see words or pictures?"