"It's just a watch."

"Peter, it is hardly 'just a watch'.  It's something Paul has wanted for years, and I'm determined that he'll have exactly the right one."  She was anxious to feel again the gold pocket watch with the finely etched locomotive engine gracing its casing.  Twice now, she had explored the detailed design with her sensitive fingertips, savoring the rugged outline carved into the metal, cold and intricate beneath her touch.  Finally, the decision had been made.  Now, only Peter's opinion remained to be coaxed out of him, and Annie was determined to have nothing but the exactly correct opinion from her foster son.

"Mom, I'm sure if I looked, I'd find some law on the books that says prices like this are illegal. There's got to be someplace we ca -- "

The well-dressed, petite woman cocked her head and waited out the protest with exaggerated patience.

Peter Caine broke off his objection in mid-word.  He bent to drop a casual kiss of surrender on the cap of loose blonde curls on Annie Blaisdell's head, but he couldn't quite resist one final comment, "Okay, okay, but I hope Paul appreciates that we had to sell Kelly and Carolyn and both cars to pay for this thing.  I can still run the owner in for extortion if it would help."

Annie smiled, the expression only half-hidden behind the large sunglasses that camouflaged her blindness.  "I don't think you have the right crime, Peter.  But what's important is that we get what Paul really wants, not that we make a prudent bargain."

Peter sighed and glanced around at the elaborate store, the racks of diamond-encrusted display cases, the play of lights off a crystal chandelier in the center of the single row of customer space.  Mirrored walls behind the counters gave them echoed images of themselves. He hated stores like this where everything seemed to be constructed of either spun glass or priceless jewels.  It brought out the clumsiness in him and carried a specter of his tripping over his own feet into a display of Ming Dynasty vases or the Hope Diamond.

It was two weeks before Paul's birthday, though, and Annie was determined to purchase the watch that her husband had admired for as long as Peter could remember.  The object of their mission lay before them, shielded by layered glass and draped on a bed of black velvet.  Now, if one of the two clerks would abandon their dowager customers and wait on them, maybe he could get Annie out of here and home before the threatening clouds delivered on their promise of rain.  Besides, it was already late and the store should be closing any time.

"Maybe if I flashed a badge, someone would notice us," he grumbled, bending slightly to bring himself close enough to Annie so that only she could hear.  He figured it was bad form to bitch about the service if they expected to get waited on before the turn of the century.

"Behave yourself," Annie retorted around a lilt of laughter.  "You're worse than Paul.  I can dress you both up, but -- "  Her hand tightened on his arm as she sensed rather than felt the tension bow through his body.  "What is it, Peter?"

"Just stand still," her foster son gritted out through clenched teeth.

Annie felt her stomach knot.  She knew that tone of voice.  Her husband had used it more than once, and it was laced with warning and impending danger.

She reached out with her mind, tuning her ears in to the conversations murmured around her, the clink of jewelry against glass as items were inspected and found wanting by other customers, the shuffle of heels on tiled floor.  She heard nothing to warrant the reactive tensing of Peter's body where it pressed up against her side.  His instincts were excellent, though, and she trusted him implicitly.  She didn't move; nor did she release her hold on his jacket sleeve, as if she could somehow keep him removed from whatever was happening in the world beyond her blindness.

The noise level escalated and Annie was able to isolate and locate the two voices rising into an argument.  In the same instant that she picked out the words hissed in angry threat so close to them, she realized that Peter was unarmed.  This was a shopping excursion with his mother.  His gun had remained at his apartment, as it always did when he took her out.

It was a robbery, rapidly graduating into a war of wills as the clerk steadfastly refused, in an undertone, to cooperate.  Then the clerk, young by the sound of her voice, said "No!" and Annie clearly heard the scuff of her heels as she backed away, the tiny click of the alarm being activated beneath the counter.  A rustle of clothing signalled the appearance of the weapon.  That was the last distinct impression Annie had before her foster son flung her to the floor and pressed something cushioned and heavy over her sprawled body.

The night exploded into chaos.  A woman screamed -- the clerk?  Guns, more than one, spat out their deadly barks.  Glass shattered, more screams...  Annie struggled against the weight Peter had placed on her, then huddled beneath it, her hands covering her ears against the cacophony.

It wasn't until the last scream had faded to a horrifying gurgle, and there was nothing but muffled crying and a dripping sound above her like a leaky faucet, that Annie tried again to move.  This time, her hands weren't awkward with panic, and she was able to push the object away.  A chair.  Peter had used a chair to shield her.

In the distance, the tinny whine of sirens touched the silence, coming closer.

"Peter?"  She was afraid to say anything out loud but more afraid of not receiving an answer.  The drip continued, confusing her, splatting off the cushioned back of the chair she'd been lying beneath.  She brushed a hand across the material, felt the liquid.  It was sticky, thick, and she knew even before she caught the faint metallic odor that it was blood.  Someone was lying across the glass fronted counter, quietly bleeding onto the overturned chair.  From the scent of perfume that wafted down to her, Annie knew only that it was a woman, probably one of the clerks.

"Peter!"  This time, her voice was edged with panic.  He should have answered her, would have answered her had he been able.

A few feet away, a woman was sobbing incoherently.  Annie could hear her, could tell that she was uninjured by the tone of her hiccuped sobs.  She ignored her and crawled through shards of fragmented glass, her stockings shredding as she inched forward, her hands cut and sticky with blood.

The sirens were louder now, nearly here.

Her groping hand touched rough material, and she knew it was Peter by the scent of his aftershave even before her fingers traced the familiar lines of his face.  He lay, still and silent, in a pool of his own blood.  Annie knew she shouldn't move him, that anything she did might worsen his injury.  But her heart overruled her mind and she gathered her son into her arms, cradling him against her chest, rocking him as she crooned nonsense words of comfort.

*****

Paul Blaisdell stood at the window, staring blankly through the smudged glass.  Outside, a street lamp burned weakly through the foggy night, but it did little to illuminate the world outside the barrier of glass.  Only the tiny, irrelevant stir of memory told Paul that there was sound and motion outside that window, a world of ceaseless activity where nothing waited for the minor tragedies of any one man's soul.

Here, there was silence, a silence weighted with tightly guarded fears that none of the three men present were willing to share, as if voicing those fears would give them life.  Forcing the movement through a sludge of lethargy, Paul looked back into the interior of the waiting room, his eyes imprinting, then discarding the images of orange plastic chairs with their molded outlines of imagined human bodies forming an unwelcoming shell.  He scanned without registering the scattering of Time and People magazines and the tastefully appointed covers of those publications aimed at awakening the homemaker instincts of women readers.  There was a child's Bible on one scarred and pitted table in the corner, and for an absurd moment, he was tempted to pick it up and see if any comfort flowed through its garishly colored bindings.

Eventually, his eyes found one of the other occupants of the room.  With a bit of a start, he realized he didn't have a name to put with the wizened, lined face of the Ancient.  Odd.  The man was important to Peter, almost a grandfather, but Blaisdell didn't even know his name.  The old priest was wedged back into one corner of the room, his hands folded into the long sleeves of his tunic, his eyes never leaving the drawn face of the third man.

Kwai Chang Caine sat isolated in a half-lotus on the carpeted floor, a circle of silence draped over him as securely as if it had somehow achieved a physical form.  He had not spoken for the last hour, and Paul had not intruded on his silence.

For that matter, Paul had no desire to try to find words of solace for anyone else when his own heart begged to be comforted.

Ten years before, when Peter had confronted his foster father in the den with the request for a signature on Police Academy papers, Paul had suffered his share of twinges before he touched pen to paper.  It had been inevitable, though.  When Peter decided on a course of action, resistance simply caused him to dig his heels in all the more determinedly.  There had been an undeniable sense of pride, too, Paul reflected with a tiny twitch of a smile.  But even then, he had known this particular night loomed over the horizon, an ever-present specter Peter had placed over his own head the day he walked through the Academy doors.

However, knowing there was a threat and standing here in a hospital visitor's room waiting out interminable surgery were entirely different things.

The call had brought Paul out of a meeting with his Chief of Detectives and he'd actually beaten the ambulance to the emergency room.  Too damn many trips to the emergency room.

The thought flitted away and left his original memory ready to ambush him, one he wasn't eager to relive.  He remembered all too well standing in the entrance at the emergency room, lost and confused.  He'd turned at the wheeze of the pneumatic doors and had seen the stretcher wheeled past him, one paramedic holding aloft the IV bottle, the sheet covering Peter's too-still body stained with his blood.  More blood streaked a trail of gore across the pale face and Paul hadn't wanted to consider what lay beneath the wadded up gauze covering the entire side of his face.  He had seen too much in that brief encounter; he had seen too little.

Then an orderly had led Annie in.  For a moment, Paul hadn't been able to take a step toward her.  His entire life shattered in the surrealistic image of his wife of more than twenty years, drenched in blood -- he would discover later that it was Peter's blood -- leaning heavily on the arm of the paramedic, her sightless eyes covered by sunglasses that hung askew on her ashen face.  Her expensive tweed skirt was torn and ruined by the gore that stained it, her stockings drooped in rags on her shapely legs.  She sensed him, or smelled him, or somehow recognized him with that preternatural ability that never failed to amaze him, and she released the EMT's arm.

"Paul," she whispered, a husk of sound from a throat gone dry.

In the empty corridor, the clanking echo of stretcher wheels over tile reverberating through his mind, Paul stepped forward and wrapped her in his arms.  She collapsed against him, a tiny bundle of grief and fear that he clasped to his body with desperate strength.

*****

Frank Strenlich opened the door to the waiting room and stepped aside.

Annie, wearing clean clothing that Kelly had brought from home, her face washed but still pale, moved unerringly across the room and into her husband's waiting embrace.  Paul was already murmuring inane reassurances to her as he enveloped her slim body into his sheltering grasp.

Their younger daughter, Kelly, her youthful face streaked with recent tears, glanced around the room, her brown eyes huge with expectation and fear.  Caine rose from his position on the floor with a single, graceful flow of movement, and Kelly found him an instant island of stability in the sea of unfocused terrors.  She went to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, curling into his larger body, feeling the warmth that radiated out of him.

Caine absorbed the trembling and knew a moment's gratification at the ease with which she sought out his comfort.  He brushed a hand gently through her long, dark hair, stroking it away from the drawn features.

"He's still in surgery," Blaisdell answered the unspoken question, meeting Frank Strenlich's concerned gaze over the golden halo of his wife's hair.  "We haven't heard much yet.  One bullet went through a lung and the other creased his temple."  He tried for, and almost succeeded in achieving a smile.  "I suppose I'd rather they were in performing the surgery than out here reporting to us."

"How long?"  Annie got the words out, but the effort of speaking them showed in the set of her jaw.  The tracks of her tears streaked unnoticed through the light film of makeup that survived on her cheeks.  "How long has it been?  It seems like forever."

Paul shrugged against her, and only then did he realize that he had no idea how much time had passed.  "I don't know," he admitted, feeling he had to fill the silence with some kind of answer.  "It's... I don't know."

"Three hours," Caine said softly.  "It has been three hours."

"I wouldn't think you would be governed by the constraints of time, Master Caine," Blaisdell said.  Annie tightened in his arms.  He shook his head, a harsh gesture, his face lined with weary anger.  "I'm sorry," he said, "I have no idea why I said that."

"Because you are frightened and worried, as are we all," Caine responded.

The instinctive courtesy only irritated Paul further.  Before he could say anything else, the door opened, and a tall man in stained surgical greens stood framed there just long enough to make Paul sure he was there to tell them that their fears had all come to pass.  He sucked in air, a gasp that telegraphed itself to Annie.  She swayed in his arms, her fingers becoming claws that clutched at him desperately.  Almost imperceptibly, her head shook a silent 'no', a speechless plea for him to counter her terror.

"He's come through the surgery just fine."

The words were impossible, a cruel twist of sick humor.  Then Paul realized that they actually had been spoken.  "What?" he asked, stupidly, "What did you say?"

"I said, he's doing better than we had expected.  He's in recovery."

"Doctor... ?"  Paul searched his memory, trying to find a name to go with the surgeon's face.  "Doctor Lee," he said with a grimace he had meant to be a smile.  "He's going to be all right?"

"Your son should be fine, Captain Blaisdell."  The doctor's face creased into a weary smile.  Absently scrubbing at the sweat- and blood-stained front of his shirt, he ran a hand through sandy hair.  It had been plastered to his head with the surgical cap, glued into place with sweat.  It felt like dirty straw to his fingers.  "You can see him for a few minutes if you'd like, but he won't know you're there."  He laughed, a soft explosive grunt that carried the gentleness of his spirit in its tone.  "He won't even know he's there for quite a while yet.  He's a mess, but you can see him if you don't hold us responsible for the fact that he looks like hell."

Annie dabbed at her mouth, then closed her slim-fingered hand over it as if she needed to stem the flood of words that wanted to escape.  She burrowed into her husband's shoulder, too frightened and relieved to try to express anything in words.  Kelly disentangled herself from Caine's arms and moved to her mother's side, one slim hand reaching out to hold Annie's shoulder.

"I want to warn you that I'm not kidding about the fact that he looks pretty rough.  He's got a chest tube in and the whole left side of his face is black and blue.  But you can see him for just a few minutes."

Only then did Paul remember that he was occupying a space that wasn't rightfully his.  His eyes rose to meet the hazel depths of Peter's true father.  He saw nothing there but a mirror image of his own relief and gratitude.

"Peter is Master Caine's son, Dr. Lee," Paul said, slowly and almost too quietly to be heard.  His voice roughened, then rose to a forced evenness.  "He should see him first."

"But I thought -- "  Lee shook his head, cutting his own protest off.  Whatever dynamics were at play in this room, they weren't any of his business.  His sphere of duty and authority lay with his patient only, and he didn't give a damn about the politics of the family.  Just as long as his patient wasn't affected.  "Why don't you come with me, then.  I'll take you to Peter," he offered.

With a nod to Paul and Annie, Caine left the room silently.

*****

Paul risked one last glance over his shoulder as he left the waiting room with Frank.  Annie was curled into one of the uncomfortable chairs with Kelly's arm wrapped protectively around her.  There was a touch of steel in his wife's expression that he could read even behind the camouflage of the dark glasses.  She was still preparing herself for the worst.  Kelly's young face was waxen and blank.  She looked like she was in shock.  The only time her expression changed was when she stole a sidelong glance at her mother.  Worry, uncertainty, and a fierce protectiveness replaced the hollowness then, and she would tighten her hold on Annie.  The only break in the silence had been a call to Carolyn, who had accompanied her new husband on a business trip to Atlanta, to keep her posted.

Feeling like he was deserting them, Paul followed his chief of detectives out into the hall.

"What have you got, Frank?" he asked when they were in the nearly silent corridor.  Only an occasional clank or thump, muted and echoed by distance, reached them in the dim hallway.

"There were four of them according to the only witness, a woman named Alyssa Williams."

Blaisdell's eyes darkened, his brow furrowed, and Frank answered the expected objection with, "Right now, we have only one witness, Paul.  You know that.  Until Peter regains consciousness and can talk to us, we have to hedge our bets.  You know the routine."

"You're right."  It was a weary concession, underlined by a vague wave of one hand.  "What did she tell you?"

"She's been pretty much useless so far," Frank admitted.  He dropped back to lean against the wall, his hands shoved into his pockets.  "She could give us general descriptions that fit just about every punk in the city, but not much in the line of specifics.  She's not what I'd call a real reliable witness."

"Where is she now?"

"They let her go home.  She said she had friends who would stay with her.  She's going to come back in the morning to go through the books, but I really don't count on anything from her.  She was dumped in the middle of a bloodbath and she didn't see much.  When Pete comes around... "  He glanced at Paul, almost an apology.  "When he can talk to us, we'll get something.  He's a trained observer.  You know him, he'll remember everything.  He can pick them out of the books if we've had anything on them before -- and guys like this, you know they've been run through the system."

"How many were killed?"

"Five people.  Two clerks, an elderly couple and another woman.  We've notified next of kin on all but one of the clerks and we're in the process on that."

"They have any idea how much was taken?"

"They're working on it, but it looks like they didn't get away with anywhere near what they could have.  It kinda went to hell when the alarm went off and the bullets started flying."

Paul ran a hand through his hair, letting his palm rest on his neck for a moment, feeling the tension that would eventually become a headache.  "Keep me posted, Frank," he said.  "You know where I'll be."

*****

"They take your balance away from you with all this... these machines, my son," Caine whispered.  For a second, anger swelled inside him, bile rising and receding in his throat.  He closed his eyes against the surge of violence.  When he opened them again, nothing had changed.  Peter was just as still, just as seemingly lifeless.  The machines thrummed their faithful vigil over the needs of his body.  The air in the room was silent and heavy, artificially cold and circulated by pressures similar to those that forced Peter's blood to flow through an unresponsive heart.  The harmony of his body had been turned against itself, and it took a real effort for his father not to release him from the tubes that snaked through him, trapping him in the bed.

Flecks of blood, overlooked when his face was cleaned by the duty nurse, clung to his eyelashes, grim reminders of the injury carefully concealed beneath the bandage at his temple.  Peter's skin was so pale that he nearly disappeared into the sheets tucked beneath his chin.  His eyelashes fluttered, but didn't open.  One soft moan brought his father closer to the bedside.

"Peter?"

There was no answer, just the steady, even breathing, and an occasional twitch to his face, as if he felt the pain through the heavy curtain of sedation and pain killers.

"To have come so far... "  Caine didn't hear the soft drone of his own voice as he dared to reach a hand out and stroke a long, slender finger down the pallid skin of one cheek.  "To have lost you once, and then perhaps again.  It is too much to ask."  He felt no warmth beneath his fingertips as they skimmed the milk-white face of his son, no hammering pulse of the life that was Peter beneath the unnatural stillness.  He could not consider that he was once again losing his son, and so he shunted the thought aside and sank into the chair beside the bed.  He enfolded the one free hand into his own, willing some of the warmth to flow from him to Peter.  He was lost in the effort when they came to gently urge him away from the bedside.

*****

Paul stood well back from the bed, deferring naturally to Annie's place beside their foster son.  He had a momentary twinge of guilt at being here now that Peter's father was in the next room.  He shrugged it off; Caine never begrudged Paul's place in the life of the son they shared.  It was time Paul dropped the air of discomfort it seemed to invariably give him.  Another look at Peter's ashen face reminded him that he didn't have to look for ways to imagine losing his foster son; there was a very real and present danger of just exactly that staring back at him.

Peter hadn't moved, hadn't responded even when Annie took his limp hand in her own and gently called his name.  Paul knew he was expecting too much.  The doctor had assured them both that Peter was heavily sedated.  But, somehow, he still expected Peter to hear his mother's voice and respond to it.  The unremitting silence only served to underscore the fragility of life here in this oppressive room.

It didn't take long before Paul had to leave.  He could no longer stand here and see the tracks of silent tears streaking Annie's face.  He could no longer search every plane of Peter's face hoping against hope that there would be some sign of life, some answer to their unvoiced pleas.

"Annie, I -- "  He stammered to a stop, appalled at the loudness of his voice.

Without moving her sightless watch from her son's face, Annie nodded her understanding.  "Go, do what you have to do, Paul," she said.  "Kelly will drive me home when it's time."

"I don't have to go," Paul hedged.

"Yes, you do," Annie returned.  The faintest hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.  "You help Peter in your way, and I'll help in mine.  Each to his own."

He searched for an argument, found none, since he wanted nothing more than to leave this room anyway.  He leaned to kiss her on the cheek.  "I'll be back soon," he promised, and resisted one last look at Peter's unnaturally placid face.

He found Frank in the waiting room, his arm around Kelly's shoulders.  Traces of recent tears marred her carefully placed makeup, but the look she gave her father was touchingly brave.  She couldn't quite keep the tremor out of her voice, though, when she asked, "How does he look?"

Oh, Kel, Paul thought, couldn't you have asked it any other way?  "He's sleeping comfortably," he said, then could have bitten his tongue in half when he heard the stilted, 'official hospitalese' of his answer.

Kelly couldn't possibly have missed the inanity of the response, but she merely smiled and said, "Good.  Is Mom still there?  Do you think I could go in for a minute?"

"Yes, of course," he said, although the last thing in the world he wanted was for Kelly to see Peter in this condition.

He stared into his younger daughter's dark eyes, seeing the young woman there when before he had only recognized his 'baby'.  "Kelly, your mother is -- "  The words faded.

"I won't leave her alone for a minute, Dad," Kelly assured him.  She glided past her father and vanished through the door with just the slightest touch of one hand glancing off his shoulder, a brief, nearly missed gesture of comfort.

Not daring to dwell on what his young daughter's reaction to the horror in the recovery room might be, Paul turned to his friend. 

"Frank, I want this sat on for a while.  I don't want the press or anyone else to know that we've got witnesses."

"You really think that'll keep them from being targets?" Strenlich protested.  Then, he shook off his own objection.  "I'll put a guard on his room."

"Low profile.  We don't want to draw any more attention than we have to.  I'd rather just his medical chart was on the door, not a target."

"Peter's our only solid lead on these guys.  Our other witness is next to useless.  If he can ID anyone, he's a real asset to us and a definite liability to them."

Blaisdell nodded absently, then glanced around the room, scrubbing a hand across his jaw.  "Where's Caine?"

Frank looked startled, then shook his head.  "I don't know.  He was here just a minute ago.  We should offer him a ride home, shouldn't we?"

Blaisdell laughed, a harsh, humorless sound in the quiet room.  "He won't be going anywhere.  Not until Peter's out of danger.  You and I need to head back to the station.  There are some calls I want to make, and I need you to set up a round-the-clock guard on Peter's room, as low key as you can manage it, Frank.  I don't want Annie or Kelly to go anywhere until I get back.  See that they're under guard too."

*****

"It's on TV."

"What?"

Blaisdell pushed up out of his chair and dropped the telephone receiver onto the desk.  "What the hell do you mean it's on TV?"

"I mean the reporters beat the ambulance crew to the crime scene and it's all over the news that there were survivors."

"Tell me the good news, Frank."  Paul dropped wearily into the chair.  There was no answer, and Blaisdell looked up at Strenlich's dour face.  "Tell me that there is good news, Frank," he ventured.

"There isn't any good news.  They not only identified the three survivors, they gave out the other woman's address and ID'd Pete as a cop with Metro."

"And Annie?"

"'The blind wife of a police captain'."

"Who's on at the hospital?"

"Kramer's on right now.  Duval's set to relieve him at four a.m.  Annie and Kelly were taken home about... I'd guess -- "  Frank glanced at his watch, " -- an hour ago.  I've got two uniforms with them, one outside, one in the house.  I sent an officer over to the other witness' apartment."

Paul cradled his face in his hands for a moment, letting the weariness drain through his body.  When he looked up again, his face was lined and grey.  "How's Annie?" he asked.

"Exhausted.  Terrified about Peter.  She needs you home."

Blaisdell nodded.  "That's exactly where I should be.  I keep thinking I need to be at the hospital, too.  Can't be two places at one time, Frank, so I'm here.  Doesn't make sense, does it?"

"Caine's with him, Paul," Strenlich reminded him gently.

"Yeah."

"Go on.  I'll call you if we get anything."

Paul settled back, then nodded, and hauled himself out of the chair.  "The minute you hear anything... "

"The minute."

*****

Pain was his first awareness.  Pain that radiated from behind his eyes and seemed to seep outward through the rest of his body, trapping him in darkness.

He was afraid to move.

The darkness cloyed around him, and soon he was more afraid to remain still than he was to risk movement.  He fluttered one eye open.  The other refused to budge.

It was still dark.  Night, he reassured himself.

The one, functional eye blinked into more darkness and he tried to draw light in by force of will.  It was so quiet.

There was the sense of another presence, though, too strong to be denied, and Peter questioned the dark.  "Who... who's there?"  His voice was a croak, his throat sandpapered with dryness.  "Pop?"  But he knew it wasn't his father, or there would have been an answer even before he posed the tentative question.  His father always anticipated him, always beat him to even his own thoughts.

He heard the sound of footsteps then, soft footfalls, some kind of canvas shoe.  In a flutter of memory, he realized he was in a hospital.  He almost, but not quite, recalled why he was there, and knew without a shred of doubt that whoever was approaching his bed did not have his best interests at heart.  No nurse would have ignored a direct question from a patient.

Placing the unseen presence by sound, Peter shifted in the bed.  Drugs and adrenalin muffled the pain, though he felt it moving just below the surface of consciousness, waiting for him to make the wrong move.  He squinted against the shadows but his vision didn't clear. 

Trying to force his eyes to penetrate the crushing darkness, failing, Peter let his body simply react to the danger.  He felt fingers touch his arm, waited until they gripped the IV tube, then he yanked his arm away.  The needle popped out with a stinging jolt, and his flailing fist caught the unseen face with a satisfying thud.

Only half hearing the crash of the toppling IV bottle and the clatter as the stand clanged off the metal bedside cabinet, Peter swung his legs over the opposite side of the bed.  The movement tore a lance of fiery pain through his chest.  Tangled in a spider web of tubes and monitor leads, he felt his bare feet hit the floor.  Agony exploded inside his body and his knees buckled.  The pain that bent him double thrust everything else out of his mind.  He didn't feel his body impact with the lounge chair, nor did he notice when the cold, tile floor stopped his fall.  He was too busy trying to breathe in air that wouldn't come.  The pain was so overwhelming that he didn't have time to regret that he had no defense against the follow up attack he knew was inevitable.

Over the roaring in his ears, he heard the crash, and he curled into himself, wrapping around the pain, embracing it with weary acceptance and a fatalism that was entirely out of character for him.

*****

Caine knew the instant Peter suffered the first blinding shock of pain.

He had wandered the halls for the last hour, trying to work some of the kinks of inactivity out of his legs, and the silence had wrapped around him like a comfortable cloak.  There was no sound, no warning.  He simply knew when his son was attacked, and he spun on silent feet and ran the maze of corridors without taking a single wrong turn.

The chair in the hallway outside Peter's room was empty.  The young guard was slumped into an ungainly heap beside it, a thin line of blood traced down one side of his face.  Caine never slowed.  He burst through the door and across the room in the same long stride.  His forward momentum went unchecked.  The man was bent over Peter's huddled form, still reaching down toward him, when Caine's sandal-clad foot crashed into his right temple.  His body was flung like a 200-pound rag doll across the bed and into the monitoring equipment crowded into the other corner of the room.

"No!"

Peter's voice broke on the scream and Caine was powerless to stop his turn toward the trembling form of his son in spite of the presence of the assailant.  The second's distraction gave the man his opening, and he slammed the metal bed against the priest's twisted body.  Caine stumbled and went to one knee, wrenching himself into a painful contortion to avoid crashing down on Peter.  The effort succeeded, but it cost him his balance.  He tumbled onto the floor in a tangle of bed linens.  The intruder fled past him before he could extricate himself.

Caine was half freed and nearly on his feet in pursuit when a whispered repeat of the "No" stopped him.

He dropped back to the floor and reached for his son.  At the first touch of his hands, Peter swung blindly at him; Caine caught the looping fist at the top of its arc.

"Peter, you are all right.  I am here," he whispered, pulling his son into his arms, folding him to his own body.  The struggle vanished as the trembling body melted against him, and Caine was barely aware of alarmed voices in the corridors outside the room.  Nor did he hear the door open or see the duty nurse poke her head in.

All he heard was the panicky sound of his son's voice repeating, "I can't see, I can't see anything."

*****

Alyssa Williams threw the last of her hastily-assembled clothing into the suitcase.

Hands on hips, she looked around the huge apartment.  She was forgetting half of what she'd need.  She just knew it.  To hell with it.  If she needed anything else, she'd just buy it.  Better to waste a little money than to hang around here and take any chances on running into one of those little creeps who had turned Carew's Jewelers into a bloodbath.

A last minute impulse, a tiny, perfect diamond, and she'd nearly been left lying in her own blood on the floor of a store too expensive for her budget anyway.

"Damn," she muttered, still trying to sort through an imaginary list of the bare essentials for a week at her sister's.  She should have left as soon as they finished their endless questions at the police station.  She should never have gone into the damned store in the first place.  She should have...

She bit off the litany of self-accusation.  It didn't matter.  The cops had told her they'd protect her.  Yeah, right.  She'd seen the effectiveness of police protection up close and personal.  One of the people bathed in his own blood at the store had been an off-duty cop.  At least that's what the television reporter had told her.  She'd answered the cops' questions and then the reporter's questions, and now all she wanted to do was get the hell out of the city.  There were too many crazies here.

Alyssa caught sight of her reflection in the full length hall mirror and she squeaked out a half-scream.  Nervous laughter followed as she recognized her own image.  Vanity made her push her long, blonde hair back away from her face for just a second's consideration, then she shook off the distraction and turned back to the suitcase.

The buzzer startled her.

That meant her cab had arrived.  She didn't wait for the attendant to come for her suitcase.  Instead, she grabbed the handle and caught the elevator on the first push of the button.  Her luck held and she was alone on the ride down.

The cab was angled into the curb.  The driver, propped behind the wheel in a slouch, ignored her struggle with the suitcase.  There went that asshole's tip, she thought as she wrestled the large bag into the back seat and crawled in after it.

She didn't have the chance to give him a destination.

The driver turned in the seat to face her and smiled.  Even in the dark, she recognized him in the split second it took him to aim and pull the trigger on the silenced gun.

*****

"How long can it take to 'settle' him?"

It was a rhetorical question, and Caine ignored it.  He sat on the window ledge in the waiting room, perched in the tiny alcove provided by the sill, and watched Paul Blaisdell stalk around the room.  Every fourth or fifth step, Paul would stab a glare at the closed door as if willing it to open.

Another circuit of the room, and Paul finally collapsed onto one of the gaudy orange chairs.  He dragged in a deep, frustrated breath, then, elbows on knees, let his head drop to his hands.  He scrubbed his fingers wearily over his face, then tried again.

"Are you sure you didn't see this guy well enough to pick him out of some photos?"

Caine simply shrugged.  He'd answered this question already, more than once.  It was simply the police captain's way of sidetracking his imagination, trying to keep at bay the unanswered questions about Peter's condition.  Questions neither of them were sure they were ready to have answered.

It had been over an hour since the doctor had arrived and taken over Peter's care from the frightened nursing staff.  Forty-five minutes since Paul had stormed into the hospital to find his guard in a separate room with a concussion and a potential sentence of blindness imposed on his foster son.  Even now, Paul was torn between his need to be here with Peter and the terror that had coursed through him as he had turned his wife and daughter over to the two uniformed officers at his home.

It could be temporary.

That had been the best Lee could offer.

It hadn't been a whole lot of reassurance.

When they'd tried to take him from his father's protective embrace, Peter had panicked and had to be sedated before he could hurt himself more.  At least I was spared witnessing that, Paul thought through a genuine twinge of guilt.  I should have been here.  That was the one charge he levied on himself without mercy.  He should have been here rather than at the station shuffling papers and chasing down phantom leads.

"We are doing what we can for Peter."  Caine's quiet voice broke through the turmoil of his thoughts.  "Each in our way.  With our own talents."

Any other time, the priest's uncanny ability to zero in on another's thoughts would have irritated Paul.  Now, it was a balm to his troubled spirit.  Damn, now I'm thinking in mystical terms.  He shook his head.  "I'm just not used to feeling so useless," he said, spreading his hands.  "So helpless."

"We would take his pain if we could," Caine agreed.  "But we cannot."

"So what the hell do we do?"

"We wait.  We hold him when he needs to lean on us."

"That's easy to say."

"Yes."

"Hard to do."

Caine nodded, that sideways cant to his head saying more than any words could.

"Waiting isn't something Peter does well."

"Then we must do it well for him."

Paul smiled ruefully and admitted, "Peter's not the only one who doesn't wait well."

Caine's face mirrored the expression.

The door, finally, blessedly, opened.  Dr. Lee didn't hesitate or make any attempt to soften the blow.  He looked tired and discouraged.  "We just don't know."

Paul got to his feet with deliberate slowness, as if he were afraid his balance wouldn't hold if he moved too quickly.  "Don't know?"  It was not a question, more a desperate demand.

"It was difficult to conduct a thorough examination.  He was scared, in pain.  As a rule, we don't recommend assaults on patients convalescing from surgery."  He grimaced at his own attempt to lighten the situation, then continued, "We had to sedate him, so our results aren't what I'd like them to be."

"Can he see?"

It was no comfort to Paul to note the quiver in Caine's voice when he uttered the question.  Somehow, it was all the more terrifying to realize that the usually serene and unflappable priest was as uncertain as he, himself, was.

"Not at this point."

"What the hell does that mean?"  The words exploded from Paul, but he didn't try to recall them.

"Like I said, the tests aren't conclusive, but apparently, he has no ability to see even light or dark or shapes.  That's not to say that it's permanent.  It could be anything -- shock, pressure, even hysterical blindness.  When the swelling goes down, his sight may return."

"It may not?" Caine asked.

"It could be permanent.  We just don't know at this point, and there was no sense in putting him through anything else tonight.  He's worn out.  The second bullet went through the left lung, as you know.  We repaired that damage, but he's very weak, and the emotional trauma isn't helping."

"May I go to him?"

Lee considered the priest, debated the request against his better judgment, then nodded.

Caine turned to Paul and offered, "Would you come with me?"

Blaisdell shook his head.  "No.  I'd better see if Frank's got the new arrangements in place, then get back to the station.  Tell him I... "  He looked at Caine, then away, then back.  "Tell him I'll be back as soon as I can.  Tell him his mother's safe."  He brushed again at his face, his hand dropping away into a half-completed gesture that died before it could express what he really wanted to say.  He grabbed his coat off the back of the chair and hurried past the doctor.  Lee turned and followed him down the hallway.

Caine watched Blaisdell's retreating back until the other man disappeared around a corner.

"I will tell him that you love him," he answered the unspoken plea to the empty corridor.

*****

The coffee in his cup had cooled beyond drinking at least a half hour ago, and Paul still couldn't pry himself out of the dining room chair.  Annie had finished the dishes, having turned down his help.  Palance, the officer on this shift, roamed through the living room, a ghostly presence behind Paul.

The rest of the house was uncannily quiet.  Kelly had been sent to visit her aunt in Florida, amid half-hearted protests.  It was a mixed blessing to the young woman who adored her aunt but didn't want to leave her mother or Peter.  It had taken a hastily-whispered reassurance from her father that it would be easier on her mother if she didn't have to worry about more than one child at a time to get Kelly onto the plane early in the morning.

The attack on Peter had settled it for Paul.  Two guards were on the hospital door, two were on the house.  He had sent a guard to the Regency apartments to take up a post on the other witness, Alyssa Williams.  The guard had returned.  Ms. Williams had checked out without notice in the middle of the night.  A check of airports and bus lines was being conducted, but so far no word on the missing witness.

Paul made the mistake of taking another sip of coffee, grimaced and finally got out of the chair.  Annie was going to the hospital to sit with Peter's father, and he might as well head for the office himself.  It was better to do something than to sit in the silent hospital room and contemplate a life of darkness for his foster son.  It was the easy way out.

He felt like a coward.

*****

"I just want it to go away.  I want to wake up and have everything back where it belongs."

Annie Blaisdell nodded her understanding, and that was when it hit her for the first time.  How many times had other people made gestures or nodded their heads, then had to remind themselves that she was blind and couldn't see them?  They would dutifully speak up then and provide her with a verbal answer to her statement or question; but the hesitation never failed to mark the moment's lapse as they automatically expected her to be just like them, able to see, able to respond to the myriad things that vision prompted.  It had never really bothered her.  It was just an observation that occasionally intruded on her thoughts.

Now, she was doing the very same thing.  Nodding to Peter, as if he could see her movements.  Her heart twisted and her voice lodged momentarily in her throat, preventing her answer.  She didn't want him to be blind!  If she were given the option of protecting him from only one thing, it would be this.  She was powerless to do anything but help ease his way into a world that might very well be eternal night.

She forced her voice past the constriction in her throat.  "Peter, you're stronger than this.  You're stronger than anything life can throw at you."

"I don't feel very strong right now," Peter admitted.

She reached across the sheets and found his hand, enfolding it into hers.  "That's why we're here, for you to lean on until you feel strong again.  Let us help, Peter.  Don't let your pain push away the people who love you."

"I don't like feeling... "

"Helpless?"  She laughed.  "Go ahead and say it, Peter.  If anyone can understand, surely I can.  You've never had to censor what you say to me.  Don't start now."

"They said it might be temporary."

Annie didn't miss the generic 'they' he had slipped into, and she instantly recognized the depersonalization he was attempting to thrust onto those around him -- those who had imposed sentence on him.  "And you think you can count on that?  I thought you were more of a fighter than that."

"Fighter?"  The word was a harsh, bitter exhalation from between clenched teeth.  "How do you expect me to fight this?"

"By doing as the doctor tells you to do.  By not giving up.  You're not the only one suffering here, Peter, or did you miss all the love that surrounds you?"

"Love isn't going to make me see!"

"Then you are more blind than I ever thought you could be."

"That isn't fair."

"No, it isn't."

Peter laughed, a light snort that thrilled her because she could hear some of his spirit in it.  "That was a dumb thing to say, wasn't it?"

"Pretty dumb," Annie agreed.

"Okay, Mom, I give up.  You win.  What do I have to do?"

"You have to start by cooperating with the doctor.  Or he's never going to let you out of here, and you'll never eat another hot dog with all those wonderfully tasty carcinogens all over it again."

"Damn.  I guess I'd better get cooperative, huh?"

"Probably a good idea."

Peter reached for her face, and Annie sensed the warmth of his groping hand.  She captured his fingers and brought them up to her cheek, then to her lips so that she could kiss them.

"What's Paul doing?  Lurking in the hall waiting for you to make me behave?" Peter asked, his voice sounding once more familiar to her ears.

"Are you kidding?" she laughed.  "He's down in the lounge watching the hockey game.  I'm supposed to go down and make my official report in just a few minutes."

"Mom, I'm scared."

Annie pressed his hand to her cheek again, rubbing his long fingers between her hands, enjoying the feel of the small bones beneath her touch, the suppleness of his skin.

"Me, too," she admitted.

*****

"Paul, you're going to have to question him."

Blaisdell peered up over his reading glasses at his chief of detectives.

Strenlich leaned wearily against the filing cabinet, idly watching the oil slick on the surface of his coffee as he swirled it around in the cup.  "If you'd rather, I'll do it."  He looked over at his boss... and best friend.  "Paul, he's the only one we have access to who saw anything.  These guys killed five people, nearly killed Peter, could have killed Annie."  He let the words sit between them for a moment, then added, "If we don't get something soon, this whole case is going to dry up and blow away."  Nothing.  No response.  Just that blank stare leveled at him.  Frank shrugged and tried again.  "Paul, he saw them.  I know that's a sore point right now, but he can remember and he can talk and he can describe them to us.  While we're all sitting around trying not to upset Peter, they're out on the streets, fully capable of trying for him again.  Maybe even trying for Annie."

Paul snorted and flopped backward in the chair.  "Oh, the papers and the coverage were very complete.  They know Annie can't identify anyone.  They played up the 'poor blind woman' image for all it was worth."

"I hate to say it, but that's good," Frank pointed out.  "It gives her a buffer of safety."

"Well, Peter, unfortunately, has that same buffer now," Paul said, anger laced over resignation in his tone.  "The papers had a field day with that fact, too."

"At least we were able to make them leave it at 'blinded' and not 'possibly blinded'.  They were cooperative at that anyway."

"Cooperative, hell," Paul growled.  "We never mentioned any possibilities of recovery.  We told them he was blind.  Period.  They never had a chance to speculate.  And I'll be damned if any reporter is going to get past the guard on his door to find out any different."

"The fact still remains that he has to be questioned."

Paul scrubbed at his jaw, a habit Frank knew well.  "What about the Williams woman?  Any lead on her?"

"Vanished.  Probably scared to death.  Don't blame her, but it puts a crimp in our case even though her effectiveness was marginal at best."  Frank considered the coffee, then decided against pouring any more of the liquid acid in on top of his already roiling stomach.  "You're dodging the issue.  Someone has to see what we can get out of Peter."

"I know."  Paul leaned forward over the desk, his fingers idly picking at the pen-scratched blotter.  "I know," he repeated, "but I don't want anyone else doing it.  I'll talk to him."

"Soon, Paul," Strenlich pushed.

"Soon."

There was the weight of resignation in the single word and Frank couldn't shake the feeling that he was only adding to the burden.  There was still a job to be done, though, and no matter how heavily it weighed on Paul, Peter and Annie's safety might well depend on that job being done.

*****

It had all the earmarks of a conspiracy.

Paul couldn't shake the feeling that they were ganging up on Peter.  The questions had to be asked, and, hopefully, answered.  And Paul had brought the most effective back up he could think of:  Kwai Chang Caine.  The priest sat gently on the edge of the mattress and picked up Peter's hand, closing his fingers over it into a pocket of warmth.

"Pop?"

Peter's voice was brittle.  The chest tube had been removed, but his right arm was still pinioned with the IV tube.  Paul was relieved at the absence of the monitors, but his foster son could have hardly looked more defenseless than he did at that moment.  There was virtually no color in the unbruised side of Peter's face.  His left eye was still swollen shut beneath the modified bandage over his temple.  His breath came in harsh, shallow rasps.  He was obviously afraid to try breathing normally; Paul could imagine the pain that would meet any such effort.  The hand in his father's grasp was limp and fish-white.  Peter made no attempt to return the clasp of Caine's fingers.

Paul forced himself to ask, "You feel up to talking, Peter?"

"Talking?"

"We've got to try and get a description, Peter.  You saw them.  We've got nothing to go on right now but your memory.  We still haven't located the other witness.  It's up to you, kid."

"You want me to run through the mug books, Paul?" Peter retorted.

"He wishes you to describe the men who injured you, Peter," said Caine with admirable simplicity.

"And what good would that do?  A description isn't worth anything without an ID after you pick someone up."         

"We can get an artist in here," Paul said.  "Get a composite.  Run it through the system and see what comes up.  It will give us a place to start."

"I don't remember anything," Peter countered and there was enough petulance in the tone that even he recognized it.  He shook his head, gingerly, afraid to reawaken the headache that had finally eased off, and said, "I really don't remember much.  It happened too fast."

"Not too fast for a trained observer," Paul insisted.

"It won't work."

Caine again spoke up.  "You must try."

Peter turned toward the voice, the one eye that would open vacant and unfocused.  The effort to center on something through the darkness was obvious -- and painful to watch.

"You have been trained all your life, Peter," his father continued, "to see with more than your eyes.  First at the Temple, then in your work."

"I don't have any work any more.  Don't you understand that?  It doesn't exist any more."

"Peter -- " Paul began only to be cut off as Peter jerked his hand away from his father's gentle hold.

"No!  You tell me what use the 101st has for a blind sharpshooter and I'll reconsider it.  Everything I am... "  He broke off, groping for the words.  "Everything I am, I can't be any more."

Caine reached for the hand, countered the resistance and held it.  "If you accept this with anger, then you are right, my son.  To embrace an evil before it is yours, is to live it whether you must or not."

"I really don't feel like listening to any Shaolin shit right now, Pop."

"That's enough!"  Paul let his own anger filter into his voice, anger at the situation, anger at Peter's stubborn defiance.  It effectively shut Peter up.  Not about to let the sudden silence be wasted, Paul continued, "You will not be disrespectful to your father.  You will cooperate with the police artist.  And you will straighten up your act, right now.  You're not the only one suffering, and it's time you remembered that."  He hesitated only long enough to pull in a deep breath.  "We almost lost you.  There's not a person who loves you who isn't feeling every bit of your pain, every bit of your... rage... at what happened."  The anger drained out of Paul's voice and there was a catch in his breath as he reached out to touch Peter's chin and turn his face slightly so that he could peer into the sightless brown eye.  "I know you're terrified, kid, so are we.  Don't push us away.  It'll only hurt worse that way."

Peter turned his head away, and Paul let his hand drop.  He waited, watching the shallow rise and fall of Peter's chest as he tugged in shaky breaths of air.

When Peter finally spoke, it was in a broken voice barely above a whisper.  "Can Angie do it?  I always liked her pictures."

Paul puffed out held-in air.  "I'll have her here in fifteen minutes," he agreed with a conspiratorial nod at Caine.  The faint echo of a smile touched his face then, and he added, "Peter just likes Angie because she used to draw cartoon characters for him when he was a kid."

"The Green Lantern perhaps?" Caine asked, mirroring the smile.

"As a matter of fact, yes, that was a particular favorite," Paul agreed, pleased at finding yet another piece of common ground.  Now, if they could only keep their son alive long enough, they might well discover others to share.

***** 

"Peter, you're not concentrating.  You can do better than this."  Angie DeLancie chewed on the eraser of her newly sharpened pencil.  The vague form on her sketch pad still didn't resemble anything other than a generic white male.

Peter vacillated between impatient and uncertain.  He altered his impressions and memory constantly, too quickly for Angie to keep up with between tentative pencil strokes and multiple erasures.

Angie was ready to give up.  She kept glancing over at Paul and shaking her head, a conspiracy of silence that insisted that this was a hopeless project.

"Give him another chance, Angie," Paul said with a shrug of one shoulder.  "The doctor said he'd have trouble remembering anything about the actual incident.  It'll take time."

"He's exhausted, Paul," Angie insisted.  "And I'm getting pretty tired myself.  Maybe if we let him rest."

"Perhaps I may help?"  The priest rose from his seat at the foot of the bed.

"I can't do it," Peter snapped.  "I told you I can't do it."

"But you can, Peter," Caine said gently, his tone a direct contrast to the tension in his son's voice.

Caine stepped to the side of the bed and sat beside, and behind, Peter as closely as he could fit between his son and the raised mattress.  He wrapped his arms around his son's body and, from behind, took a grip on both wrists.

"Pop... "

"Quiet, Peter.  Clear your mind.  Let the anger and tension wash out of your body.  Do not try to see with your eyes."

Almost against his will, Peter sank against the cushion of his father's body and rested his head back on Caine's shoulder.  The voice at his ear was soothing, an oasis of calm in the turmoil of his mind.

"You are in the store with your mother.  You turn and see the men who are arguing... "

Caine let his hands follow the indication of his voice.  He turned Peter slightly to the left, carefully, gently.

"You push your mother away to protect her.  But you see their faces.  One man turns to you.  He raises a gun toward you... "

".357 magnum," Peter said, his voice trancelike, faint.

"You see his eyes before he pulls the trigger... "

"Blue.  His eyes are blue.  He has blond hair, short, almost a buzz cut, but a little longer.  Deep set eyes, a long, thin nose... "

Angie's pencil translated the memory into form on the blank sheet of paper.

*****

"Honey, I know this is hard on you, but I... "

"Paul Blaisdell, don't you dare tell me you understand how I feel."  Annie glared at her husband through milk-blue eyes, the customary sunglasses noticeably absent.  She shifted her position on the orange hospital chair.  They were alone in the tiny waiting room, the only place Paul could find with any privacy.  "And the very last thing you are to do is tell Peter that you understand how he's feeling.  That would only give him a weapon to fight you with."

"Fight me... ?  What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about our son.  He's not going to be able to accept this.  Not at first.  Not even the thought of it.  You've got to be very careful not to give him anything to fixate on.  He'll use it to avoid facing what he has to face."

"You're not giving him a lot of credit, are you?"

"I know him.  Peter protects the world, not the other way around.  He doesn't suffer helplessness well."  She gave a huge sigh.  "Read your own reference books, Paul.  In a situation like this, he's a prime candidate for putting his own gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger."

"Annie!"  Shock and anger raced through the single word.  Paul drew away from his wife and stared at her.

"We've got to face it, Paul, or we can't help him, and Peter is going to need us more than he ever has in his life."

"But it may not be permanent.  The doctor said there's a good chance -- "

"Chance," Annie repeated.  "Do you think Peter is even going to hear that word?  He's going to see darkness, and unless we can get him past that, it's all he's going to see."

"What... what can we do?"

"We can get him out of here just as soon as possible."

Paul looked down at the gentle beauty of his wife's face.  If any of them would truly comprehend what their son was going through it would be Annie, and she was the only one with enough resolve in her to force him to accept it.  For just a second, he felt sorry for the kid.  Peter wasn't going to be a match for his mother.

Annie raised a hand to his face and Paul smiled.  She echoed the smile as she felt the alteration of his expression beneath her fingers.

"I suppose you intend to tell the doctor that you're going to take him home?" he asked.

"Of course," she agreed, "just as soon as I tell Peter."

*****

"I'm not sure I want to discharge him quite so soon."  Dr. Lee leaned back against the window sill in the makeshift office he had gathered his patient's family into when Annie Blaisdell approached him about releasing Peter to her care.  If pressed to it, he would have to admit to some misgivings about turning over a traumatized patient to a blind woman.  And he had yet to come up with any tactful way to mention that.  He tried skirting the issue.  "He's still very weak from the lung injury.  Any exertion and he's going to feel like he's suffocating.  There are stitches that could be pulled.  We've just removed the IVs and he -- "

"Is there any reason that he needs to be here, Doctor?" Annie interrupted.  "Other than that he has to be careful?"

Lee tugged his glasses off and considered the three people watching him -- even the one who was staring at him from behind impenetrable glasses with an intensity that transcended the limits of her blindness.  Okay, he thought, there's something else to consider in case anyone has forgotten.

"What about the attack the other night?  He's still in danger, isn't he?"

"We have officers assigned to the house, inside and out," Paul answered.  "For that matter, the press has provided him the best safety net he could have with the report that he's blind."

For the first time, Caine spoke up.  "He must be where he feels safe.  Who better to be with than his mother?"

"I'm not arguing that point," Lee protested.  "The sooner he starts dealing with his situation, the better.  But he's still physically weak, he's still heavily into denial.  I'm just not sure this is the best avenue to take."

"Peter's a fighter," Annie said.  "He can do this."

"Unfortunately he sometimes chooses the wrong foe," Caine countered.  "Peter often opposes those who would help him."

Annie laughed.  "What Master Caine is saying, is that our son is stubborn, and when you start pushing him to 'accept that which cannot be changed', he'll only dig in his heels.  But he won't fight me.  I'm uniquely qualified to deal with this on any level Peter chooses."  She folded her hands and placed them in her lap.  "And if the worst happens, and it's permanent, then I am the one who can teach him to live with it, to go beyond blindness."

Lee pushed up from his half-seat on the window sill and turned to look out beyond the glass.  It looked cold outside, cold and dark.  Wind-driven leaves spiraled from the dying branches of the trees lining the walk, a promise of rain in the air.

He shivered and turned back.  "Okay, I'll release him.  From this group, I don't think he has much choice but to adapt no matter what happens."

*****

"I can't just lie here.  I have to -- "

Annie pressed one small hand against her foster son's chest and held him against the mound of pillows propping him up in the bed.

"You have to lie here, Peter.  You have two options, and the other one is to be taken back to the hospital where they will strap you to the bed if you get out of line.  I think, in the long run, you'll prefer my bedside manner."

There was no answer, just a renewed tension in the muscle beneath her hand.  Not a good sign.  Annie knew very well that her son required some release for his nervous energy even in a good situation; usually he achieved that through constant motion -- or, she thought with a wry twist of affection, constant talk.  He was literally trapped in the bed -- there went his outlet of choice.  His thoughts, she knew, weren't what he wanted to share or even consider, himself, right now -- there went the alternative release valve.

It was going to be a very long night.

*****

"If you wish, I could stay with them while you return to work."

Paul glanced up from his duties as tea-brewer and considered the offer.  The priest would certainly be more protection than any uniformed cop Blaisdell could assign to the house.  And more company for Annie, he admitted.  Paul didn't envy his wife's self-assigned chore of policing their son.  Under the best of conditions, Peter was a notoriously bad patient.  He was twitchy at the very thought of sitting still, much less allowing his body sufficient time to recuperate from whatever latest insult he had inflicted on it.  Now, with the specter of permanent blindness hovering over him like a prison sentence, he was going to be worse than usual.

No, the office was a much preferred alternative to riding herd on Peter.

The vision of offered escape met the brick wall of guilt as Paul decided his rightful place was with his son and wife.  His mouth was open to decline when the ringing of the phone caught him up short.

"Excuse me," he said, abandoning the tea and snatching up the receiver of the kitchen extension.  "Blaisdell."

"Captain, we found Alyssa Williams."  Frank Strenlich's voice echoed hollowly over the line, telling Paul that he was talking on a cellular phone.

"Good.  Where?"

"Not good," Frank countered.  "She's dead.  Half her face is blown away."

"Damn.  Where did you find her?"

"In the back seat of a taxicab about ten miles out of town.  It looks like a robbery, Paul, but I'm just not sure I'm willing to accept that."

Paul turned to lean against the kitchen counter.  The cold of the tile penetrated the thin material of his shirt, uncomfortable, hard-edged against his spine.  He very carefully avoided meeting Caine's eyes.  "The weapon?"

"That's part of what makes it look like a robbery.  It's nothing that was used in the jewelry robbery.  Her purse is gone, her suitcase has been rifled through.  Can't tell what's missing from it, but it's been torn apart and dumped beside the car."

"What do you think, Frank?"

"I think it's what it looks like, Paul.  This was one unlucky woman.  Talk about being in the wrong place... "

"Contact her family, then get it out to the reporters," Paul said.  "I want it out there that the only witness to the robbery is dead."

"Okay.  You going to meet me at the station?"

"I'm on my way."

"What about the house?  You want a guard posted out there?"

Paul met the hazel eyes that had been calmly studying him through the phone call.  "No, I've got the best protection they can have already here.  I'll be at the office in a half-hour, forty-five minutes."

*****

"You're in your old bedroom, Peter.  You know where everything is.  You're upstairs, so you have to be careful when you do get out of bed.  Be sure you know where you are, or that I'm with you."

Annie felt like she was delivering a civil defense lecture, but Peter's continued, stubborn silence was a direct challenge.  Maybe if she talked him to death...

"There's a pitcher of water and a glass on the bedside table on your right side.  The phone is next to the pitcher.  There's a chair on this same side of the bed that I'm sitting in now, so I don't want you trying to get up for the first time without some help.  You need to be able to take time to orient yourself if you try -- "

"Stop it!  I'm not six years old.  You don't have to treat me like I'm helpless.  I know where I am.  I'm blind, not stupid."

Hmmm.  Maybe the silence was preferable.

"If you'll stop acting like you're six years old, I'll stop treating you like it," Annie retorted, letting her voice carry more censure than she felt.  What she wanted to do was put her arms around him and tell him everything would go back to normal, it would be all right.  That was the last thing he would allow -- or needed -- right now.  "I won't have you hurting yourself any more than you're going to have to, Peter, so you're going to listen to what I tell you.  Learn from me."

"I don't need you."

Even as he spoke, Peter regretted it.  Annie heard the pain in his voice, knew he wanted to recant the words.  She didn't give him time to retreat into an apology.

"You do need me," she said.  "You simply have to face that fact, Peter.  You need me... us.  And you're going to have to live with it, at least for a while."

"Leave me alone."

Annie sat up straighter in the chair.  "Is that what you want?"  She worked hard to keep her voice level.

Obviously, she succeeded.  For almost a full minute, Peter was silent, then he finally repeated, "Leave me alone."

"Okay," she said with forced cheerfulness, "all you have to do is call for me and I'll be here.  Remember that, Peter.  No matter what, I'm here as soon as you're willing to admit you need me."

*****

Peter listened hard as she crossed the carpet and gently closed the bedroom door, trying to be sure she was actually leaving.  There was no hesitation in the sound of her footsteps, but, then, in this house, there never was.  He was a little disappointed when he realized that she had, indeed, left him alone.

The apology had caught in his throat, held back by stubborn pride, and then it was too late.

Okay, so I'm blind.  That doesn't mean I'm helpless.

He'd just have to show them that he could do things for himself.  It was doubly embarrassing to have his mother taking care of him.  Peter had always felt a strong protectiveness toward Annie; he wasn't ready for a reversal of roles.

I can at least get my own damned water, he groused silently.  What had she said?  Right hand side.  Non-gun side.  No problem.  His fingers reached for and found the edge of the bedside table.  He felt the lace cloth covering the small table and walked his fingers across the surface.  His hand clunked against the pitcher, then beyond it.  He found the lip of the glass and tugged it forward.  It tipped, and water sloshed across his hand and the table top.  Damn it!  She didn't say it was full already.  She should have... this is stupid.  It's only water.  Clean the damned mess up.

Whenever Annie expected Peter to spend the night in his old bedroom, she always put out towels and wash cloths on the dresser.  It was a habit.  They'd be there now.  All he had to do was make it out of bed and to the dresser, clean up the water, and no one would ever know he hadn't even been able to manage this simple task.

Gingerly, he slid his feet out of the bed and planted them firmly on the carpet.  He tested his breathing before he tried to stand.  It didn't hurt too much, a dull throbbing ache through his chest, but the feeling of suffocation didn't return with the movement.  Nothing to it, he assured himself, then pushed up off the edge of the mattress.

He made it to his feet.

Pain lanced through his head.  The darkness spun into an eddy of confusion and he tried to turn.  Vertigo hit him with a physical force and he reeled backward, groping for the bed, finding nothing.  Darkness became height; fear sparked into life and dizziness cost him his balance.  He didn't hear the sound of his own voice as he dropped to the carpeted floor.  Only the terror of falling, even as his mind told him he wasn't falling, couldn't be falling.  His flailing hand struck something hard and toppled it, then the floor came up to meet him and his breath was lost in an explosion of pain.

*****

Paul and Caine were up the stairs before the final thud sounded.  They found Annie leaning weakly against the door frame, her face ashen.

She held up a hand and said softly, "No.  Don't go in.  He has to ask for me.  He has to give in, at least that much."

Paul started past her, one hand reaching for the door knob.  A steel-fingered hand clamped onto his upper arm and he turned to face the priest.

"It is his mother that he needs," Caine said, his voice barely more than a whisper.  "Our task is more difficult.  We must release him to her care."

"Mom?"

The word was muffled through pain and fear, and Annie reacted instantly.  Lightly, she touched Paul's arm, then stepped past him and opened the bedroom door.

Peter was huddled on the floor, inches from the bed, curled in on himself, his breath coming in hoarse, pain-laced gasps.  Annie went unerringly to him and dropped to her knees.  She allowed herself the momentary luxury of enfolding him in her arms, absorbing the tremors shuddering through him.  She stroked his hair, and said, "Peter, stop being afraid.  Think.  You know this room as well as I do.  Better.  Get past the panic and see the room in your mind, then find out where you are in it."

"I can't."  The words came on a shiver.

"See it, Peter," she demanded.  "Use your memory.  See the room, and then you can move through it."

"I want to get back in bed."  It was the voice of a child, and Annie's heart ached at the lost quality of her son's voice.

"No, you don't.  Where were you trying to go?"

Her hand continued to weave through the silky, dark hair, a caress that soothed and calmed.  She waited on the answer, and it finally came.

"The dresser.  I spilled the water.  I was... I wanted... "

"You wanted the towel.  Get up and get it, Peter."

"I can't.  I don't even know where I am now."

"You're in your room.  You're beside the bed.  Use your hands, Peter.  See through touch."

"I can't."  It had become a litany of denial.

"Peter Caine, I have too much to do to sit here and baby you.  I've never done it before and I'm not ready to start now."

"I know."  It was a whisper, interwoven into a sigh.  "I'm sorry, Mom, for what I said."  Peter leaned into her shoulder and Annie kissed the top of his head.  "I didn't mean it."

"I know you didn't," she agreed, "now get up and clean up your mess."

"How can I even find the dresser?"

"Objects have a cushion of air around them just like walls do."  Annie spoke slowly as she helped Peter get to a shaky stand.  He leaned against her as a blur of dizziness fogged its way through his head.  "You have to be quiet and listen."

"You want me to listen to the dresser?" Peter protested.