we’ll be up here all night unless you step it up.”
All night, alone with Aaron Donovan. Once upon a time, that might have been an appealing proposition. Now, it just made her head hurt. She reached up to rub the bridge of her nose, a soft “ahh” of pain escaping her lips before she could stop it.
He was by her side in a heartbeat, crouched before her so his too-handsome face was directly in hers. “Are you all right?” His hand curved around her bicep, as if to offer comfort, though it hovered inches above her skin.
She reared back, shocked at his question, at the notion that he might care even slightly about her answer.
“Sabrina?”
Pushing off the ground with her hands, she sprang to her feet, smacking her palms together to clean off the pine needles that had clung to her skin. “I wasn’t the one who waited for two hours before calling us in, Detective,” she replied, practically spitting out the title as she dusted her hands on the front of her pants. He rose slowly and lifted an eyebrow in response, the mocking look back on his face.
Shaken and not really knowing why, Sabrina spun away from him. She had no time for this—on that point, Donovan was right. She needed to step it up for Tara. With an impatient motion of her hand, she indicated for Aaron to follow her, not looking at him as she led the way to the next patch of dirt that had a couple of telltale hexagons embedded in it. Just ahead, she knew, were a few more complete versions of Tara’s prints. “Right here, Tara’s stride interval increases,” she said, her tone all business now. “That’s the distance between her footprints. Basically, that means she started to run.”
Aaron swore under his breath, a ridge forming between his dark eyebrows. Overhead, the sky darkened perceptibly, and the rumble of thunder from the east seemed to be coming closer.
Sabrina gestured with her chin to a spot up ahead, the quick movement reverberating throughout her skull. “He followed her. I think she fell.”
It had taken her team several painstaking minutes to piece together the whole grim story, but piece it together they had, and as she led him back down to where they’d left Jessie and Alex, Sabrina relayed it to the detective. Someone had been perched on a rock above Hot Spring Seven, presumably watching the girls as they’d soaked in the pool. As soon as Tara had gotten out to make her phone call, he’d started down the mountain, intercepting her as she’d made it to the clearing. There was a struggle, and Tara broke free and started to run, only to be tackled to the ground a few seconds later. Somehow, her attacker had managed to subdue her, and the heavy, scuffing partial prints they’d found as they made their way down the mountain indicated that he’d carried her down.
To the old logging road where his car had sat, waiting for them.
He didn’t say anything once she’d finished. He pulled out his radio and directed more police and the department crime scene techs up the mountain from where they stood, telling them in no uncertain terms that they needed to avoid stepping near the trail of crepe-paper stakes she’d left behind. Once the first people started arriving, he’d offered to escort her back to the logging road in a tone that she knew was more demand than request.
Back at the road, she turned to him, meeting his gaze directly—and immediately wishing she hadn’t. There was something so sad in his expression when you caught him off guard, just before he had a chance to close off again, a vulnerability that undid her more than his barely concealed hostility had.
“We have to find her,” Aaron said simply, and because she knew what frightened him, his words made her ache for him.
Without thinking, she reached for him, her hand closing around his bare wrist. “Aaron,” she said, because that’s all she could say.
Gently, firmly, he pulled his arm away, the cool, collected cop once more. “I’ll make sure someone casts that tire track,” he said. “Thanks for your help, Ms. Adelante.” Aaron turned and disappeared through the mist, heading toward his car.
As she watched him leave, the migraine hit her full force, slamming into her skull like a freight train. Her vision blurred, and she stumbled, feeling rather pathetic as she caught herself by wrapping her arms around the rough bark of a sequoia. The clouds suddenly opened, and it started raining in sheets. The cold enveloped her, seeping into her very bones and causing her teeth to chatter.
“I’m all right,” she murmured as she heard Jessie and Alex approach, willing herself to push away from the tree, to stand without support and keep looking. Her will wasn’t enough.
She felt Jessie wrap something warm around her—probably her own all-weather jacket—and felt the woman’s arms come around her. Sabrina couldn’t see a damn thing. “Shh,” Jessie said.
She heard them radio for help, and she closed her eyes, unable to deal with the piercing brightness of the sky.
“What did that man do to her?” Jessie asked Alex as she pulled the jacket’s large hood over Sabrina’s dripping hair.
“She gets migraines sometimes,” Alex said. “Bad ones.”
“Yeah, hello,” Jessie retorted. “Alex, I saw her face when that detective was talking to her. What’s his deal?”
Don’t tell her. Don’t say it. Sabrina didn’t think she could stand to hear the words. The pain in her head sharpened, and she let herself lean against Jessie’s sturdy frame.
Alex paused, probably weighing his words. “That was Detective Aaron Donovan.”
Sabrina heard Jessie gasp.
“Yeah,” Alex continued. “Rosie? That girl who went missing six months ago, around when you joined the staff? She was his daughter.”
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE had introduced the concept of the Übermensch, which many lesser minds had erroneously translated to mean superman.” However, some scholars, himself included, knew that the German philosopher had meant overman. In other words, every human aspired—or should aspire—to become over-and-above Man, someone who transcends the crude limitations of humanity.
“I teach you the Overman,” he pronounced to the shivering mortals in his audience, knowing that they, too, should aspire to become like him, an Übermensch. But they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. It took a rare, special individual to overcome limitations and evolve into a superior being. But still, he couldn’t give up. Still he had to try. “Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”
They scream, and they cry, and they refuse to see what lies before them.
“What have you done to overcome him?” he shouted back.
But they kept praying. And God was dead.
And in a universe where God was dead, he’d explained patiently, repeatedly, Man had to reconstruct himself, overcome the idea of himself as a fallen creature, slave to a moral code from on high. He has a responsibility to become something higher on the evolutionary scale. Ape created Man, and Man created Overman. And to get there, there could be no moral code. The Overman created his own moral code.
God was dead.
He took the whip from where it lay on a shelf, wrapped it around the waist of a member of his audience. He pulled it to him, and it whimpered, a small, pathetic
