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    It had been a long time since she’d used charms or trinkets to help focus her ability, but it seemed as if she didn’t need them these days. All too easily, she slid into that calm, quiet place where her sight could soar.
    And though she was aware of the chair beneath her, of Silas’s warmth beside her and the balmy heat of the hot springs air, her mind told her she was somewhere else. An intricate place, dark but for the skein of vibrant threads coming together in a monstrous tangle.
    Jessie had never figured out why she saw life like a thread. It just was. Each gleaming skein was a person, each a thing or concept or idea. The world was full of them, connecting people to each other, to places.
    All she had to do was concentrate on the one she wanted, and she could find it.
    She pictured Lillian as she’d known her—an elegant woman with summer gold hair kept in a chignon and eyes that hovered between green and gold. She was an aristocratic woman by nature, clad in tailored suits and possessing a no-nonsense kind of demeanor. But she loved her wife and son.
    Lillian’s image rose easily to her mind.
    Her thread did not.
    Jessie frowned. Summoning her will, she thought again of Lillian. Remembered the way she’d exchanged loving smiles with Gemma Clarke, and the way she’d sobbed when her wife had died.
    But her thread, if it was there, didn’t come to the surface.
    This wasn’t a good sign. Stomach twisting, she stared at the pulsing ball of light and energy and hoped to hell Lillian wasn’t dead.
    She took a deep breath, smelled sulfur and Matilda’s sweet tea with one part of her but nothing with the other. At the moment, her vision was just that, sight. It formed as a one-way glass, a way to look at the world.
    Unless she was feeling spiky, in which case she could sink deeper into the world she spied upon, but doing so had a nasty habit of back-lashing on her. She’d done it once with Silas, accidentally. His Mission tattoo, the seal of St. Andrew, had flung her out of his space so hard she’d been violently ill. Jessie had never tried to affect the skein of threads directly, and something told her that doing so wouldn’t be worth the consequences.
    But there was more than one way to find someone.
    She summoned the energy to travel, to think of the Mission and their cells. She turned to Silas—her body didn’t turn, but the formless part of her that she embodied now was aware of him.
    Threads dangled from his . . . no, not his body. More like his soul , his essence. They spread out. Thin ones that bound him to Matilda, even to Joel. A solid band connected to Jessie, and she smiled upon seeing it. Sensing it. Another glowing, pulsing thread vanished back into the house, the thread that linked him so strongly to Naomi.
    There were others. Thinner skeins, some so fine they were all but invisible. Everybody had them; connections, ideas, emotions that bound them to people and places. When she concentrated, like she did on Silas, they shimmered into focus.
    The thread uniting her to Silas was the brightest and thickest of the connections attached to her formless self. There should have been a second. One that bound her to Caleb, her brother.
    She hadn’t seen that one for a long time. Her vision shuddered. Shimmered as if a heat wave rolled across her eyes.
    Stop it . Her own emotional state could affect everything, and she tamped back on a surge of fear. Of anger. Her little brother frequently made her feel both.
    Sifting through his threads, she found one that would take her where she wanted and seized it with her mental hand.
    The scene abruptly shattered, fading to stark white walls and a row of metal doors. The Mission quarters. Mid-low, Jessie figured, given the somewhat shabby state of her surroundings.
    A female witch hunter she didn’t recognize strode by the bank of cell doors, her coffee-colored skin sallow in the cheerless light.