At least that was the way Galen saw it. He wasn't psychic in the accepted sense, but he could read people in his own way. Even dead people.

Maybe especially dead people.

He knelt beside her sprawled body, his free hand feeling for her carotid pulse even as he kept his weapon ready and visually scanned the woods all around them.

He didn't see or hear a thing.

And Sarah was gone.

Still kneeling beside her body he frowned down at her. There wasn't a mark on her that he could see, no visible cause of death. She had bundled the child well against the cold, but her own jeans and thin sweater had provided little protection, and the light color of her clothing allowed him to be fairly certain there was no blood to indicate any kind of wound.

He slipped his hand underneath her shoulder, intending to turn her over and check her back for any wounds, but paused as he realized just how she was positioned. She had been returning to the Compound, and unless she had somehow gotten turned around and changed direction, it looked as though she had been knocked backward from an attack she had run into head-on.

And yet the frozen ground around her, crystals of frost glittering in the moonlight, was very clearly undisturbed by any sort of struggle and unmarked by any footprints except for his own and Sarah's. Their footprintsarriving at this point. And Sarah's footprints continuing on. But not returning.

It was as if she had been lifted off her feet yards farther along and thrown back to the center of the clearing with incredible force.

Galen wondered suddenly if a medical examiner would find her bones so shattered they were virtually crushed, as Ellen Hodges's bones had been.