Valerie bit sullenly into her burger and stared pointedly out the window as she chewed. The car continued bumping over the two-lane road, winding through the rapidly melting slush of the spring snow storm. The sun filtered through the trees, leaving odd patterns of melted and unmelted snow in the dappled shadows. The FBI agent remained stubbornly unmoved by the natural beauty surrounding them.

"You didn't have to shake me so damn hard," she muttered.

Jim looked coolly over at her, then returned his attention to the road.

"C'mon, you were zoning big time. You were lucky he recognized what was happening."

"I doubt that." She bit into her burger and chewed, then continued with her mouth half full. "Whas sis sonin', amyvay?"

"Oh man, you've been dealing with your senses for this long, and you've never zoned? Man, that is amazing!" Blair shifted forward on the back seat, leaning in between the two front seats. "A zone is what happens when a Sentinel concentrates too hard on one sense."

Valerie turned all the way around in her seat to face him. "I've never run into any information on zones."

"Not if you were just looking for info on heightened senses." Blair nearly hit Jim with his gesturing. "Most authorities are only looking for the modern application - perfumers, wine tasters, ah... anyway, mostly people with only one or two heightened senses. It takes all five senses, a true Sentinel, to get the overload on the other senses that contributes to the zone. Burton mentioned it," he paused to breathe, "the explorer, not the actor..."

"There's an actor named Burton?" Valerie's lips tugged up in a semblance of a smile. "Look, Sandburg, I know this was your field of study, but I'm not a shabby researcher myself, and I think that I've had just a wee bit more hands on experience at this than you have." She turned back to the window.

Blair turned to Jim and shrugged, hands wide - 'What now?' he mouthed. Jim just shook his head, and continued driving, eyes intent on the road.

The car had been quiet for an hour and the trio had forsaken watching the sinking sun in favor of studying the road. They'd passed countless dirt roads and paths, but the green trail of anti-freeze, a single drop every hundred yards, still led onwards. Jim was driving slowly now, but they'd only been passed by three other cars, none of the drivers of which had matched the description of one of the suspects.

He could hear Blair in the back seat, heartbeat slowing and breathing evening out. It was calming, listening to his partner beginning to fall asleep, and certainly better than trying not to listen to the FBI agent in the seat next to him. He'd just spied the next droplet of antifreeze when he was startled out of his reverie by two things.

Valerie's sudden, "Stop! Turn here!" was accompanied by the sudden stoop of a golden hawk, flashing down on the hood of the car. The hawk hunched on the black hood, wings outspread, hissing and then launched itself skyward. Jim stamped on the brake belatedly, then sat shaken, after the car lurched to a stop. Valerie darted out of the car and across the road in front of the Jeep.

"Jim! What the hell was that?" Blair lurched forward from the back seat.

"The hawk..." Jim shook his head and wrenched open the car door. "Later."

Blair almost fell out his own door trying to open it. "The things I do..." he muttered as he followed Jim across the road, setting his feet firmly in the wet slush of the road.

Jim paused by the junction of the side road to let him catch up. The air was crisp, cooling as the sun disappeared, and their exhalations were starting to become visible. He stared into the overshadowing trees, beyond Valerie, who was crouched in the middle of the turnoff. He focused past limit of normal sight, to the short pine that hid the curve of the side road as it turned and disappeared, through the intervening branches that reached out to grab his attention, and finally zeroed in on a single scrape of virulent green antifreeze, stained in a patch of snow.

A single touch of Blair's hand on his arm brought him back into himself, staving off the incipient zone. "Back that way, Chief," Jim turned for the car.

Valerie rocked back on her heels, eyes wide, and pupils almost blackening her irises. Resting neglected in her palm was a single mud-grimed bead. Her voice was a bare thread of sound as it left her. "Can you hear grass grow? Or the wool on sheep?"

Jim's shoulders tightened, and he muttered, "Come on," as he passed her without looking down. His feet crunched in the ice, slush and grit of the road.

At the car, he paused, hand on the door handle. "You couldn't see that bead from the road - it was covered with mud. The beads don't have a distinctive smell, they don't make any noise just lying there, and you can't taste or touch them until you're actually holding them."

Valerie blinked, her eyes shifting back to normal. She rose and strode up to him, poking one finger into the center of his chest. "You have no idea what I see. Drop it, detective." She turned on her heel.

"I can see a whole lot more than you give me credit for."

"Jim..." Blair warned.

Valerie froze for a moment, then rounded the hood of the car and opened her door. "There are thirty-three children and a bus driver waiting for us at the end of that road. We'll discuss this later."

The road in question was fairly straight past the first bend, a series of ruts driven into the soft earth beneath the trees, and left to gather scrub and brush over the years. It stretched on in silence, and each bump and squeak of the suspension echoed in the silence of the car.

The road opened into a large clearing flanked by two long, low buildings. Both were faded grey, the weathered wood fading into the gathering twilight. The scattered grass and low bushes of the clearing were flattened and grooved by recent tire tracks, two sets of which led up to the door of one of the buildings. Jim stopped the Jeep and slowly backed it out of sight of the doors.

"There's no one else here." Valerie stated condescendingly.

"We've got at least two, possibly more kidnappers running around, and you're willing to bet the lives of those kids on your hunch?" Blair rolled his eyes.

Valerie closed her eyes and nodded, pursing her lips. "Right. Procedure. Let's get this over with."

They circled the building, guns drawn. The high windows of the first floor were closed, boarded over with sheets of plywood from the outside. The single door leading inside was chained shut, the lock and chain shiny and bright.

Valerie reached for the lock, then jerked her hand away. Blair pulled out a pair of gloves from his pocket and asked, "Don't suppose you've got a pair of bolt cutters in your car."

"It's a rental - I left the lockpicks in Frisco, too." She started feeling up around the top of the doorframe. "I'll bet they left the key here, though."

Jim stooped and picked up a rock by the door, turning it to reveal the slot on the bottom of the fake rock key-hider. "Good guess."

She met his eyes. "I don't guess, detective. I know."

"Hello?" The plaintive question was muffled by the door. "Is anyone there?"

"FBI! We'll get you out in a moment!" Valerie shouted, then nodded to the lock Blair held. "Well, what are we waiting for?"

The door swung open on a cavernous, cold room. Metal bunkbed frames were pushed up against the walls, and several of the thin mattresses from the stacks in the corner had been dragged over to the frames. Children stared up at the three officers from shivering clusters by the beds and the floor. Traces of grime and exhaustion haunted their faces, and an older, portly man moved in front of the youngest group.

"FBI?" He asked warily, looking past them.

"And Cascade police." Blair and Jim pulled out their badges in reassurance. "We'll get you home."

An hour later, the clearing between the two buildings was humming with activity. Two huge helicopters belonging to the Air National Guard hovered briefly overhead before turning back to Cascade and the waiting parents and media storm that would greet them. A trio of other, small 'copters were still on the ground, their occupants almost literally crawling over the crime site, hunting for evidence before more of it vanished under the thin falling drizzle.

Over to the side of the clearing, by the Cascade PD helicopter, Simon took a puff of his cigar and exhaled. The smoke caught the light of several of the bright spotlights illuminating the two buildings and their surroundings, and then dissipated into the cold air. "That was pretty good timing, Jim. We'd just gotten the ransom demand faxed in a half hour before you called, so the governor was still in her office. She called in the air support."

The vibrating beat of the rotors of the retreating helicopters faded. "There are some very relieved parents in Cascade tonight. Now we can worry about catching the idiots who did this."

He paused, noting that he'd lost the attention of Jim and Blair, then gestured towards the FBI helicopter nearby, where Agent Simmons and Valerie stood talking. "So what's the deal with the Fed?"

Blair sighed and studied his toes a moment, then looked up. "I don't know, Simon. Could be a Sentinel thing." He looked at Jim, who was intent on the conversation across the clearing. "Could be something else." He considered it a moment. "At least she's not a..." He bit off his last few words.

Simon stared at Blair for a moment, then turned as well to watch the blond woman across the way. "A what, Sandburg?" he asked testily.

"Alex Barnes." Blair shrugged, shivered. "Tall, blond, good with a gun."

"She's a federal agent, Sandburg. Not a murdering psychopath."

"She's staying." Jim's voice was a little hesitant. "FBI's pulling out tomorrow, going back to California, but she's asked to stay."

They watched Valerie turn and walk back towards the building that had held the children, currently swarming with forensics technicians. Simmons stared after her a moment, then turned to round up the other agents on site.

"You going to be ok, Jim?"

Jim nodded, then slapped Sandburg on the back. "C'mon, let's see if we can't catch what Forensics is missing."

The full, pale moon was near to setting before Jim and Blair quit the clearing with the last of the forensics team from Cascade. They hadn't seen any of the Feds or locals in a few hours, so it was somewhat of a surprise to find the black Jeep still parked at the mouth of the rutted road back to town.

The car looked empty, but Jim could hear the shallow breathing of a sleeper. Valerie was curled up in the back seat, and didn't stir when Blair took the keys from Jim and slipped into the driver's seat. She mumbled and sighed when Jim sat heavily in the passenger's chair.

They sat quietly for a moment, resting dark-strained eyes, then Blair started the car. Valerie still didn't wake, remaining dead to the world until they were about a mile short of Leavenworth. She groaned, pulling herself upright, and the sound made Jim open his eyes and turn to regard her.

"Les Chateaux Motor Lodge," she said, sniffing and rubbing her eyes, "Simmons left me the keys before he took off." She settled back against the seat, and pulled her legs into a half-lotus. "Tomorrow we can continue from there." She closed her eyes. "With the case, at least."

Jim regarded her for a moment, then turned his attention to his partner. Blair made no sound, eyes fixed on the illuminated section of road in front of them.

The Leavenworth motor lodge, despite its French name, was decidedly American, and of a vintage almost thirty years gone. It was painfully clean, the worn spots on the carpet and fixtures shiny with use and abuse, unconcealed by any coating of grime. The beds were small and old and lumpy, covered with thin sheets and thinner blankets.

Jim sat on the edge of one of the beds, turning over in his hands the razor that the FBI had provided in a simple shaving kit they'd left with the keys. He and Blair hadn't had much sleep, but it was enough for the hunt. Blair was still in the closet that passed as a bathroom, trying to towel his hair dry. Outside the thin door, he could hear Valerie pacing, three steps past the door, a pause as she turned with near military precision, the sides of her shoes slapping together at the end of the turn, then six paces to the other side of the door, another military turn and brief pause.

Blair came out of the bathroom and tossed the towel on the bed. "Not great, but unless they gave us a blowdrier, it's not going to get better." He looked at Jim, the razor, and then at the door that Jim was very carefully not watching. "What's up?"

"She's pacing. Outside."

Blair rolled his eyes and took the two short steps to the door. He opened it from under the fist Valerie had raised finally to knock.

"Are you two ready yet?" She asked, eyes skittering away from meeting theirs directly.

"Sure. What's this place got for breakfast?"

Valerie turned at Blair's question, heading abruptly for the door, then turned and addressed the silent question. "Ok, no, I'm not a Sentinel, I don't have a clue what having enhanced senses might be about, and maybe you do, but people have a hell of a lot easier time accepting something scientifically provable. There's already one FBI agent nick-named Spooky."

She spun around and left, and even Blair could hear her comment regarding morning coffee and discussions. They followed her to the lodge's cafe.

Their discussion never came. Instead, the shrill ring of a cell phone broke through the pre-coffee silence, and after a breakfast of watery eggs, flaky, buttery biscuits and gravy that looked like library paste, the three found themselves on the road to Yakima, to find the owner of a set of fingerprints that forensics had managed to lift from the buildings in the clearing.

"Where's Yakima, anyway?" Valerie had relegated herself to the backseat, and sat in the middle, one leg drawn up to her chest, foot propped on the seat.

"South. We'll meet the local PD there with the warrants."

"What do we have on the suspect?"

Blair flipped open his notebook and squinted at the scribbles inside. "Jeffrey Conway, twenty-seven, arrested once in eighty-eight for grand theft auto..."

"Took his daddy's car for a spin, didn't tell dad." Jim broke in. "All the charges were dropped, naturally."

"Naturally. He hasn't had a speeding ticket since."

Valerie nodded. "Any known associates?"

"Maybe a girlfriend, Yakima PD's helping us with the background check."

"No." Valerie pronounced. "Not likely. The abductors were male. Accessory at most..." She shook her head. "No, it doesn't taste right."

Blair met her eyes. "Why choose a Sentinel as a cover?"

Valerie dropped her forehead to her knee. "I was already at Quantico before I realized that I couldn't not use my gift. I'd done a paper in college on enhanced senses - I've got a fairly good sense of smell, though nothing really on the level you described in your thesis - it was... let me think, something about the credibility of witness testimony with regards to extra-normal sensitivity..." She sat back in the seat, glancing briefly at Jim. "It seemed like a good idea at the time, give my superiors a mountain of scientifically gathered and proven data to support a false, though reasonable explanation," her tone shifted, becoming pained. "Or tell them I was some sort of hippie flake flower child psychic wandering around predicting the future with crystals and cards and beads.

"The Bureau isn't exactly a fountain of warmth and support when it comes to the paranormal."

Blair stifled a chuckle that came out as a snort.

"So you're a psychic." Jim was watching her in the rear view mirror.

She avoided his gaze, and watched the trees whip by. "I'm a seer. I think that's the closest translation of voelva - what my great-grandmother was."

"'Voelva?' What tradition is that?"

"Norse, Viking, I'm not quite sure. I see things that way - Ellison here has rainbows under his feet." She grinned.

"Rainbows?" Jim didn't seem exactly pleased.

Blair's eyes unfocused. "Rainbows... the Bifrost bridge?"

She nodded, "Heimdall was the guardian of Valhalla, he could see a thousand miles, hear grass growing." She finally met Jim's eyes in the mirror, and he looked away.

"That's a little beyond the realm of possibility." Blair sounded skeptical, but Valerie just shook her head.

"Heimdall was a god. And you don't exactly have Hunin and Munin sitting on your shoulders." She looked back out the window. "Maybe we should call Yakima again, and find out more about Conway."

Jeffrey Conway's house was a small white house on the end of his street with a somewhat shaggy yard and an old green Buick in the driveway. A black and white sat at the mouth of the long cul-de-sac, the logo on its doors blocked by the low boxwood which served for fences. Accompanied by the two local uniformed cops, they approached the front door cautiously.

Halfway up the walk, both Jim and Valerie froze. Jim's nostril's flared. "Around the back!" Drawing his gun, he jumped the low hedge and ran in a half crouch to the corner of the house. Blair followed him, while Valerie broke for the other side of the house, gesturing for the locals to follow her.

Jim paused at the corner. "He hasn't gotten rid of the van yet. He's calling his buddies." The sound of a car starting filled even Blair's ears, and they popped around the corner, sidling along the windowless wall until they could see the corner of a silver van. Jim halted again, putting a cautionary hand on Blair's shoulder.

"FBI! Freeze!" Plastic hit concrete with an odd crackle, and then the slap of running feet hit Jim's ears. Jim stepped out around the corner, gun leveled, and a tall, thin youth skidded to a stop. The barrel of the gun pressed against his forehead, and the young man's eyes crossed and widened as he slowly spread out his hands.

"D-d-d-don't shoot!"

Jim reached out and turned him against the wall as Blair covered him. A semi-automatic was stuck in the waistband of the suspect's jeans, and Jim holstered his own gun and removed it. The clip slid out, empty, and when he racked the slide, the chamber too, was empty.

"Nice work, detective." Valerie, still trailed by the two cops, raised her eyebrows at the sight of the empty gun Jim held up. "I hope the others are as easy."

Blair started the litany with a smile. "You have the right to remain silent..."

The silver van sat in the alley behind the small white house, a spreading pool of nuclear-chartreuse anti-freeze in the gravel below it, and a horde of Yakima forensics technicians in and around it. Jeff Conway sat silent and sullen in a black and white while Jim and Blair watched the techs. Valerie stood talking on the phone a few feet away.

"Something's bugging me about the trail we followed." Jim's eyes were fixed on the pool as it crept minutely in the dusty gravel. The scent of it clung to his nostrils.

"The anti-freeze?" Blair snapped his eyes back from a pretty brunette checking out the driver's side door. "What about it seems so special? How is it different?"

"Smells more like the woods, not quite so chemically as the regular stuff."

"Could be a special brand, maybe that pet-safe stuff we saw at the hardware store last month."

"That was a promotional thing..." Jim trailed off. "No, you're right, that's exactly what it was. I remember - the guy had a dog lick the stuff."

Blair frowned. "Right. The little Lab mix. That was just the stores in Cascade, though, wasn't it?"

"We're going back to Cascade," Valerie announced on the heels of Blair's question. "I've arranged for Mr. Conway to join us later, but the number he called was an apartment on Green Street." She dangled the keys to the car. "And I think the roads are clear enough for even me to drive."

A cluster of flashing lights greeted them at the entrance to Green Street, and the trail of police vehicles continued around the four-story apartment house, completely encircling it. The light show glanced off the dull windows, and glowed sickly on the building's faded orange sides. Megan Connor and Joel Taggart seemed to be riding herd on the group of officers, which oddly, included FBI agents Clark and Lewis.

Megan led them inside. "Sandy, Jim. Heard you'd been doing walkabout in the bush."

"Something like that." Jim answered. "Who's in there?" He nodded toward the open apartment door as they paused in front of it.

Joel joined them. "Serena's checking it out, but there's no sign of Eddie Baugh. Get this, though, his roommate is Thomas Conway, your guy's brother. But no one's seen him since Wednesday."

Valerie ducked past them into the apartment, heading straight for a battered desk by the shaggy, sagging couch. She passed her hands over the bare spot on it, past the dangling power cord, and then picked up a blank pad of paper next to it.

Blair moved into the doorway as Jim brushed past him, forestalling the other two FBI agents from entering the quickly filling apartment.

"He was sitting here when he got the call," Valerie's voice was almost a whisper, "and he wrote something, closed up his laptop, and left."

Jim tested the surface of the desk. "Not too long ago - the wood's still warm." She offered him the paper, and he skimmed the tips of his fingers over the blank white page. It was a light impression, from a felt-tip pen, but the chemicals from the ink had seeped through, and his fingers tingled.

"Vancouver. He's meeting Conway at a post office tonight." Jim turned and strode for the door. "C'mon Chief."

"Whoa, hang on there. Vancouver?" Blair laid a hand on Jim's chest before he could barge through the crowd in the hallway. "Call your Mountie friend - let them pick him up. We don't exactly have jurisdiction in Canada."

The interior of the small Vancouver post office was clean and spare, the dull finish of the metal mailboxes almost shining in the cool lighting. A few customers drifted in and out, checking their boxes or waiting only briefly in the small line at the counter. In one corner of the post office was a short wooden bench, where a young man sat waiting, reading a thin paperback book.

The spine of the book was broken, and the edges of the pages were tattered and yellowed. The young man turned the pages unseeing, pausing sometimes minutes between pages, other times turning two pages at once. He kept a wary eye on the door, glancing up every once in a while, and shifted uncomfortably when he noticed the clerk at the counter looking at him.

A woman in jeans and a sheepskin coat stepped through the glass doors and walked to the counter without a side glance. She leaned over the counter and spoke to the clerk. She nodded once and moved to the bench. "May I sit, please?"

The man on the bench hid his face back in his book, but slid over. He glanced up again, as two more men came in and moved toward the counter. The woman next to him spoke softly, and he turned toward her, puzzled.

"Huh? Scuse me, what did you say?"

"Are you waiting for someone?"

"Um, yeah." He turned back to his book.

"Edward Baugh, perhaps?"

He turned toward her, startled. "Yeah... no - who?"

She nodded, smiling. "Thomas Conway?"

"Uh..." He nodded, stunned.

"Your friend was arrested a few hours ago, trying to enter the Dominion of Canada illegally. We've returned him to the custody of the American FBI." She gently closed his book, removed it from his frozen hands, and then proffered a badge.

"If you would please accompany me, Mr. Conway." Constable Kinsey of the RCMP asked.

Conway stood obediently with her, and the two men at the counter moved to flank them. "Uh..."

"Thank you kindly, sir." They escorted him from the post office.