Starblood

insubstantial qualities of Leopold's mind.
    He decided it was not necessary to bind these men or shoot them with more narcodarts. He would be at the farm before they were awake and able to send a warning. And even if the people at the farmhouse were waiting for him, what could they do to stop him? Nothing, of course. It was difficult to get accustomed to thinking in terms like "all-powerful" and "invulnerable." But they aptly described him now, and he was going to have to grasp them if he was going to use his abilities to their fullest extent.
    Which meant there was no need to use a grav-car to get to Charter Oak when he had within himself a more perfected and faster method of travel than anything man could devise—despite the species' proven cunning with machines. He could teleport…
    For a while he stood there, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. The idea of being a disarranged string of molecules, even if only for an instant, was not appealing. Yet the longer he hesitated, the more time he was giving himself to think of other things, of the future and the lonely role he would play after this Brethren thing was done with. And he did not want to think of that yet. If ever. He concentrated, recalling the picture of the farmhouse he had drawn from Leopold's mind, burning it into his cortex. He tensed… and was gone…
    He tracked along spidery filaments of blackness, a burning string of molecules cutting the pitch like a wire drawn through butter
…
    There was a singing which he heard without ears, having no ears with which to hear. It was a lonely, hollow echo, the voice of a young girl tossed into the air from the peak of some unearthly alps
…
    There was heat which he sensed without skin, having no skin.
    And the same with cold.
    If there was any odor at all, it was pepper and lemon, but he suspected that was only an olfactory interpretation of the same energy releases he heard in the form of a girl's scream
…
    Eons passed. But it was only less than a microsecond
…
    Ti materialized beneath the drooping, whiplike branches of one of the gnarled willow trees that punctuated the well-mowed lawn of the Boggs's farmhouse, facing the building that was to be the end of his quest. It was early evening, and the dark, ironed earth of the Midwest had only recently been shrouded in that impenetrable shadow that lies only on the plains. It was broken in but a few places by harsh, cold yellow-white light which came through the windows of the farmhouse and leaked like the blood of ghosts across the quiet carpet of the night world. The front porch was patterned with patches of intense pitch and brilliant light, with very little bleed-in space between them. Behind the somewhat dusty windows of the Brethren house, a shadow moved back and forth across the living room on some task Timothy could not quite discover.
    He left the shelter of the tree's canopy and crossed to the porch, drifting up the stairs. Clinging to the wall of the house, he came to rest in a darkened area from which he could examine the scene in the living room. There were three men sitting in a conversation corner of well-padded black chairs. The moving shadow was a woman—Thelma Boggs—delivering drinks from the bar where her husband, looking out of place in a lounging robe instead of coveralls, made them to order.
    Ti was about to reach into the minds of one of those three men in search of some information when he heard the slight but deadly click of someone removing the safety latch, from a dart pistol. Without moving even the slightest degree, thereby maintaining the illusion that he had heard nothing, he flushed his psionic power outward and felt it contact the mind of a man much like Baker or Siccoli. The brute was sitting on the swing, had been there from the time darkness had begun to settle over the land. It was amazing he had not shot already.
    Carefully, Ti pushed his ESP fingers into the pudding of the killer's brain, stirred through the dark mess of hideous images that ringed the plain of pure white he had experienced in Baker's mind earlier in the day. He found what he was looking for, a small nerve leading up through the back of the brute's neck. He pinched it. The man sagged, passed out, slumped on the lattice of the swing seat The gun dropped out of his hand and clattered on the floor with a noise that seemed to strike the glass darkness with a hammer, although no one inside the house seemed to notice.
    To make certain his position had