A healthy dose of adrenaline dumped into my central nervous system and swept through my body. The first expression to rush across my face, the one that escaped before I could catch it, was fear. Panic. I immediately reined that in and let a look of mild disinterest settle in its place.
Time to make a new friend.
“Do you mind?” I asked, gesturing toward the guardhouse. I went to step around him, but he matched my step, staying locked between me and safety. I prayed he didn’t know the guard wasn’t there and forced my poker face to stay put. No sense in letting him see how scared I was. How my insides were churning with terror. If I knew anything about people who preyed on what they saw as a weaker specimen of the species, it was that they liked to see the fear on their victims’ faces. They liked to hear it in their thundering heartbeats and their quivering voices.
So I schooled my expression to stay neutral, stopped, and offered him my best look of bored annoyance, the one I’d most recently learned from Kenya.
“Are we going to do this all day?” I asked. “Because I have places to be.”
“Looks like it.” He surveyed the fence I was just about to climb. Or attempt to climb. No idea if I would have succeeded, and now I’d never know.
I sighed to emphasize how boring I found him. “Are you going to turn me in or what? If so, let’s get on with it. Like I said, I have places to be.”
I sidestepped again before spotting the glint of light off a blade in his hands.
“This won’t take long,” he assured me.
Fear gripped me so hard, my lungs struggled under the weight of it. If I died, would everyone die? Was it really that cut and dried? That ridiculously simple? Surely God wouldn’t let that happen. Surely the fate of the world didn’t rest on the condition of my heart. But I’d seen it with my own eyes. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Possibly millions. It was like a switch had been flipped and I didn’t know how to unflip it.
He took a menacing step closer.
“The guard is right there,” I said, gesturing with a nod.
Wade laughed softly. “Don’t worry. He won’t be bothering anyone for a very long time.”
I gasped and dropped my bag with every intention of running toward the guardhouse to check on the man. Was he in it? Did Wade hurt him? After reading his emotions in my vision, I wouldn’t put it past him.
But Wade stepped in my path once again. And getting closer to him would put me that much closer to the knife.
“You are all I’ve heard about my whole life,” he said, his tone suddenly angry, his words taut. Forced. “Growing up, my parents didn’t brag about me, but you. The last prophet. Hallelujah, the last prophet had been born at last!” He raised his hands in the air and waved them, mocking churchgoers everywhere. “The girl who’s going to save the world.” He leveled his cold stare on me again. “They thought I wasn’t listening,” he said, tapping the knife against his leg. “I was.”
“Prophet?” I said, projecting the best look of absurdity in my arsenal. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He lowered his head and glared at me from underneath his lashes. “If you lie to me again, I’ll draw this out as long as I can.”
“You have the wrong perso—”
He held up a finger. “Before you go there, I just want you to know, I only want what’s inside you. You I don’t care about in the least. You can either die quick and painlessly, or slow and, well, with lots and lots of pain.”
His words caused my throat to cinch shut. My pulse raced, barreling toward the finish line, apparently. “Just because you’re disillusioned doesn’t mean you have to kill me.”
“Disillusioned?” He acted insulted. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like growing up in the shadow of a girl you’ve never even met? Who your parents had never even met?”
His parents? How did his parents know about me? “Let’s say I am who you think I am. I am this prophet. How did you know?”
“I told you.” He kicked the dirt at his feet in anger. “My parents have been raving about you since I was a kid.”
“Who are your parents? Are they members of the Order?”
“Members?” he scoffed. “More like worshippers of the great Lorelei McAlister. You should have seen them when they got the call.” He spit into the darkness at his side, his features twisted into a fanatical rage. “They were going to get to drive you here. To keep watch over you while you were here.”
My jaw fell open in surprise. “The Hamptons? Your parents are the nice couple who drove me here?”
“Nice? Did you get a sense of how much they worship you when they picked you up?”
I did, actually, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.
“You’re Paul?”
He spread his arms wide, the knife in his right hand gleaming in the moonlight. “The one and only. What’d they tell you? To search me out? That I’d keep an eye on you?” He laughed softly. “Trust me, I did. I never took my eyes off you.”
How did such a nice couple have such a psychotic son?
He was so angry. I had to get through to him somehow. Perhaps a little honesty would go a long way. “Okay, you’re right. I am who you think I am, and I have no idea what you’ve gone through, but let me explain something.” I showed my palms in an act of surrender. “There is a war on the horizon. It is going to happen and it’s going to happen soon. I’ve seen it. And it started the moment you put that note in my pocket.”