IT WAS NO USE. EVEN under optimal conditions it would have been difficult to track him across the stones and the scrub, but it had rained heavily during the night and a thick fog had settled in, which made doing so now virtually impossible. Regardless, it wasn’t until after they’d searched for the better part of a day and reconvened on the porch that the first mutterings of real defeat were heard, and these had come from a surprising source—Williams himself. It wasn’t just because he was privy to information no one else had—information in the form of a kind of telepathic voicemail left by Ank the previous night—a message which said, No, it was more than that. It was the dream and what it had portended. It was the growing suspicion that not only had they been called by someone, something