Sentinel Event

Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

Dr. Ana deTarlo ignored the stares of Williams's staff and flight crew as she paced up and down the asphalt of the tarmac next to the car. Her cell phone was glued to her ear and her heels clicked severely. She'd called everyone she could think to, and was getting nowhere.

"Why don't you just ask the Passers where they are?" she had demanded of Chester earlier when they realized they had lost Dreamer and Aidriel. Williams was sitting in the front passenger seat of the car, tapping furiously on his tablet device.

"I'll ask Rod when it finds us, and Kara," he answered without looking back. "But they might not know where they went either. Even if the Passers did know, they wouldn't tell us. I don't think the spirits want us anywhere near the guy."

Williams had been receiving important phone calls himself, and had boarded the plane to use a more comfortable environment while he worked. He would get off the line with one of his employees just to have another call and tell him the same news. They'd been trying to get a hold of him since the story broke.

"Tell deTarlo to get on board right now," he told his assistant, his phone lowered against his neck as he was still on the line. He hadn't taken the time to locate his Bluetooth earpiece.

It had required one of the security guards to get involved before Ana reluctantly obeyed and clambered precariously up the steps to the plane.

"We can't just leave without them," she argued immediately. "What if they just got lost?"

"Shut up," Chester hushed her, focusing his attention back on his call. With an icy glare, deTarlo stood over him and waited impatiently for an explanation. When he finally hung up with a troubled sigh, she demanded, "Well?"

"Within the last twenty-four hours," Williams explained sullenly, "a strange migration of Passers has begun in Asia, Europe and South America, possibly the other continents as well. Seems that all the spirits are inexplicably disappearing entirely or abandoning their charges and heading for the U.S."

It didn't appear to sink in for deTarlo at first, and she just stared at him without speaking.

"What does this sound like to you?" he asked. "Things turn intense for our guy after the sentinel event, and all of a sudden, Passers are becoming violently bipolar and are now traveling great distances to get here."

"Are you telling me that every single ghost on the planet is coming here after Aidriel Akimos?"

Chester looked grim, a flash of panic setting his eyes aflame.

"If they do," he said, "that will be over a billion Passers converging on a single person. He'll be like a piece of tissue paper in a hurricane."

Stunned, deTarlo sank into a chair and let the hand gripping her cell phone flop into her lap. What could be done? She desperately wished Dreamer would answer her cell phone, or that they could somehow warn Aidriel about what was coming. It was truly meltdown worthy, but the shrink calmly took her clipboard out of her shoulder bag and began writing feverishly. Her report had to hit the press before this happened. Soon, the entire world would hang on her every word.

Dr. St. Cross leaned his elbow on the arm of his wheelchair with his head in his hand, his green eyes tensely following the movements of Todd, a thirty-something male nurse barely out of school. Andrei looked on from nearby, harboring a similar annoyance toward Todd, but for a different reason. The nurse was not a believer in taking Passers' word as gospel.