CHAPTER ONE

      A man’s scream and a loud metal-crunching crash echoed simultaneously through the narrow canyon valley. Both sounds, hard and desperate, seemed to come from everywhere, the cloud-heavy sky, the cold misting rain, the sodden ground beneath Melanie’s feet. She whirled right, then left, as did the gas station attendant and the two old men playing checkers in front of the station.

      Perhaps because of the trauma she’d been through in the last few weeks, the last few years, she immediately closed her mind to the outside influences of the world. A terrifying thought struck her. Had Chris had any part in that noise she’d heard? His talent—her curse—was growing stronger every day, partially thanks to the efforts of the scientists at the Psionic Research Institute. They had wanted to train him, and had only succeeded in frightening them both and making her life—and Chris’s—a living hell.

      Guilt stabbed her with sharp recrimination. How could she even think that Chris might be involved? Hadn’t her three-year-old had to face enough blame and fear in his young life without his mother succumbing to anxiety about what he might have done?

      But a quick look assured her that she needn’t have worried; her three-year-old totally ignored the almost preternatural silence. A soft smile played on his lips, his baby face was lit with an inner contentment and, as was usual since his days at the Psionic Research Institute, his small, chubby fingers wiggled in waving motions.

      A host of small items—a comb, a red ball, a comic book action figure, a plastic lid from a fast-food drive-in, even a tube of lipstick—danced around the interior of the car, hovering in the air, set to a tune only Chris could hear. And they were held in midair by his mind only, little puppets controlled by a small puppeteer.

      Melanie swiftly looked around to see if anyone was watching her car but didn’t relax when she saw that no one was paying her son the slightest attention. When was the last time she had relaxed? She couldn’t remember. It may have been the day before young Chris was born. And she’d been in labor then.

      Another scream rent the air and Melanie gasped. Chris’s eyes didn’t so much as flicker. His entire focus was upon his little collection of dancing objects, which whirled so effortlessly, so defiantly, in midair. He’d always had the ability to manipulate the world around him, even as early as six months old, when he’d turned the toys on the windowsill into a mobile over his bed.

      But until his days at the PRI, he’d been easily distracted and the toys would drop to the ground. Whatever they’d done to him, he’d apparently found a place to escape. Now when Chris concentrated on making his toys dance, he was totally oblivious to the rest of the world.

      Only violent shaking or abrupt body contact could snap him from this unusual withdrawal. This was what the scientists at the PRI had done for him. To him. And they would have done far more if they’d had the opportunity…an opportunity she was determined not to give them, despite their threats.

      At least, Melanie thought bleakly now, Chris hadn’t been the cause of whatever crash had taken place in these lonely mountains.

      But something had.

      In the stillness following the tremendous racket—a silence made all the more noticeable by the lack of any jays’ raucous calls—one of the old men spat tobacco juice onto the muddy pathway that served as a sidewalk flanking the gas station. The dark spittle narrowly missed a wet paint-chipped sign that had long since faded into little more than a testimony of poverty and abandonment. The sign read Loco Suerte.

      To