Time to arrange a meeting with his sister.
* * * The shrill ringing of the telephone jerked Sam awake. She rubbed her eyes and glanced at the clock. It had just turned eight in the evening. She must have dozed off while reading the riveting account of Wetherton's life.
She blindly groped the coffee table behind the sofa arm and finally picked up the receiver. "Yeah?"
"Samantha? Doctor O'Hearn here."
O'Hearn was the nonhuman and rare species specialist she'd been sent to by Gabriel and Stephan. Apparently, if anyone could sort out precisely what she was, it would be this woman.
A sliver of tension ran through her. Surely it was too soon to have reliable results back? She'd been told it could take months of checking and crosschecking. "Hi doc. What can I do for you?"
"I want your permission to discuss your case with Karl Morgan."
Karl? Gabriel's friend? "Sure, but why? Karl's an herbalist healer. How would he be able to help?"
"He also happens to be the Federation's resident expert when it comes to extinct races. I think he might be able to help make sense of some of these test results."
Obviously, O'Hearn had been unable to match the gene coding in the test samples with any known races if she was now considering extinct ones. "Was there any match to what's supposedly on my birth certificate?"
"Oh yes. There are traces of shifter and changer, as I mentioned earlier. We've also pinpointed the partial code of the were-people. But there's something else, something I've never seen before."
If she had come from Hopeworth, that wasn't altogether surprising. "I want to know the minute you come up with anything."
"Of course."
Sam hung up and yawned. What she needed was an early night. She shoved the folders to one side and got ready for bed.
Sleep came. So, too, did the dreams.
She was in a large, white room. Lights glared above her, their brightness as warm as the sun and almost as blinding.
Sweat trickled down her face and her back. She was standing alone in that room, but she was being watched. Down the far end was another room. Men in white stared at her from behind the safety of shatterproof glass.
Joshua was with them, his small form dwarfed by the doctors. Silent but not afraid. Josh was never truly afraid.
"Feel the heat. Draw it in," the man with the dead gray eyes commanded.
Just hearing him speak made her shudder. Not because of the threat in his tone—though she knew from experience the threat all too often became reality—but because of what lay underneath his voice and his words. Evil soaked his very essence. Just being near him sickened her.
She looked at the fire, but she saw only flames, dancing brightly. She couldn't do what he wanted. He was asking the wrong person.
"I can't."
The lights grew brighter, burning her skin as fiercely as the flames. She couldn't back away, couldn't move. They'd chained her down this time.
"Become one with the fire. Feel its power. Use its power,"
dead eyes said.
The urge to scream ran through her. It wouldn't matter to them if she did. It never did. Her gaze met Joshua's.
You have to do something, or they'll kill you, his voice whispered into her mind, calm despite the anger she could almost taste.
Fire is not my element.
No. They are fools who do not look beyond the obvious.
You have other abilities. Use those instead.