September 13th, 1985, 2:00 pm

The Winston Arms Apartments- Park Slope, Brooklyn

The girl, barely three years old and already beautiful, ran to the living room, choking on the thick smoke as she went. She could see flames in the kitchen as she passed it. The temperature was already nearing one hundred and thirty degrees in the apartment.

Her mother was napping on the couch, and it took little Lisa precious seconds to rouse her from sleep.

The mother was instantly alert, as she scooped up her daughter and ran for the doorway to the hallway. It wasn't until the doorknob burned the skin from her hand that she realized the fire was even hotter outside the apartment.

Frantic now, she turned back to the apartment, looking for an escape route, already knowing in her heart that there was none. The fire had blocked off any chance to reach the bedroom windows, which faced out onto the street and possible rescue.

Her dress and the child's dress caught fire, and she used her hands to damp out the child's flames. She realized then that it was too late. As the choking smoke filled her lungs, she thought of her husband, and how devastated he would be that she had let this awful thing happen to their precious child.

She sat down on the floor, the girl held tightly in her arms. She saw the flames reach her arms and legs, yet strangely she did not feel it. Poor Dom. He would be so unhappy to lose them.

The air was too hot to breathe in now, so she closed her eyes for the last time, clinging tightly to her daughter. There was no pain now, not even from the flames that consumed them. Just sorrow, for what might have been.

* * * *

The Department of Commerce Offices- 26 Federal Plaza, New York City

The young man in the drab cubicle was completing his second assignment for the day--a complex statistical analysis of data surrounding the continuing flight of working classes to the suburbs. The focus was on the predominance of white, non-minority blue-collar workers making this shift. The secondary conclusion was the increasing preponderance of the underclass minority workers as the inheritors of the crumbling inner city infrastructure.

He loved this work, and because of that, such drab Commerce analyses were falling on his desk with increasing frequency. No one else wanted to do it, and the bright young statistician was still new enough to be eager to please, finishing his drudgework assignments early. And with precision. Or at least as much precision as the practice of statistical analysis permitted. It was a guessing game, of course. A sophisticated guessing game, to be sure, but still...

He was something of a loner, this twenty four year old number cruncher, and odd, in some indefinable way. But his sunny outlook and willingness to do the tasks nobody else wanted to do more than compensated for his strangeness.

On this day, he had already completed a difficult projection on an unrelated subject. Now he had only one task left, an easy one for him, and then he could wrap up for the day and take the subway back to Brooklyn, to his equally young wife and three year old daughter.

So it was a surprise when this quiet worker made an agonized scream that stopped the entire office in its tracks. People came running to his cubicle, concerned that something dreadful was happening to him.

It was, but they couldn't see it. No one could see it except the young man, and he was so agonized that he couldn't talk about it.

The stricken look on his face convinced his co-workers that he was suffering intensely, but without an obvious cause.

This tableau went on for several minutes, until finally the young man collapsed in a swoon that left him crumpled on the floor.

Someone found the smelling salts in the rarely used First Aid Kit, and within minutes, with his head cradled in the arms of an older woman who enjoyed her role as office mother, he started to come around.

Before the young man could take up his agony again, the supervisor knelt beside him and began a series of sharp questions. He wasn't trying to offend him--he just felt he had to penetrate the man's pain if they were to help him.

"Dominic, are you hurt? Answer me, Dominic!"

Dominic's eyes were glazed now, in spite of the powerful smelling salts, and he shook his head.

"If you're not hurt, are you having a seizure?"

Again the almost imperceptible shaking of his head.

"Dom, help us out here. Do you need a doctor?"

In a voice that was little more than a croak, Dom finally spoke. "It's my wife and daughter. A fire. They're in a fire."

The supervisor, a practical older man who had no illusions about life or his place in it, was mystified.

"Where are they, Dom? Where are your wife and daughter?"

"I have to get to them. They're burning up. I have to get home." With that, he made a lunging effort to rise, only to feel faint again, and fall back into the arms of the supportive co-worker.

"Take it easy, Dom. I'm sure they're fine. We'll call them right away. You just relax now."

At that moment, the receptionist came running in. "I just heard on the radio. There's an apartment fire in Brooklyn. In Park Slope. A lot of people are trapped in the building."

Dominic had heard her. "Too late now. They're dead. My family is dead." He slumped back onto the floor.

The supervisor was completely confused now. "Dom, how did you know? Are you sure?"

"I saw them. In my mind, I saw the fire, saw them as they tried to escape. They called out to me. But I couldn't help them. I couldn't help them."

BOOK ONE

Chapter One

Fifteen years later. Saturday, December 13th, 2000 9:45 am

Dom Gabriel took the stairs out of the subway station two at a time, emerging into the bright December sunshine at 61st and New Utrecht Avenue and a bitter wind that had people scurrying for shelter. There were Christmas shoppers everywhere, but wind chills in the single digits kept them from interacting as they might during the happy frenzy of the coming holidays.

It was just as well. He needed to focus, and even simply nodding to every passing shopper was a distraction.

Not that he was a curmudgeon about Christmas. God knew he had every reason to be, but he wasn't. In spite of the monastic cell that his life had become, he maintained an outward aura of good will that belied what had become his lot in life.

The grieving for his long lost wife and daughter remained his most significant and dominant memory. In spite of more than 15 years since their sudden tragic departure, there was no day that passed that he did not weep for them. Not visible tears. He had gotten beyond that. But inside, where it mattered, the enormity of their deaths remained as raw and painful as ever. He had constructed an imaginary model of his daughter growing up, just as she might have, had she lived. Pre-school, the elementary school years, high school and the prom, even university. He had watched her grow and learn and develop into a stunning young woman.

This fantasy life was exclusively his own. He had never shared it with anyone, even Margo, his spiritual mentor and advisor. Margo who taught him not only to live with his psychic gifts, but also to use them to help people. Seeing Lisa Ann grow and prosper, in his mind's eye, was a lifeline for him, a link between his sanity and the psychic world that had gradually become a major part of his life.

It was that world that propelled him through the dirty winter streets on this cold morning. He had come to believe such efforts were his reason for continuing to live, in spite of his constant desire to join his wife and daughter.

Not that this morning's session was very important, on the grand scale of things. A simple one-on-one with a middle-aged woman who needed guidance about her budding romantic life. A psychic reading, in her words.

It was important to her, of course. As a forty-something widow with a grown daughter, she was traumatized with fear that her relationship with the new man in her life would end badly.

She was a friend of a friend, and she had sought Dom's help as her relationship gained in importance through intimacy, something she had not imagined happening to her again. The daughter was chipping away at her mother's confidence, trying in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to discourage her mother's revived interest in companionship and especially, in sex.

As he neared the brownstone where she lived, he could feel his senses come to attention, almost of their own volition. He knew the stakes were not significant here. He knew there was little cosmic interest in this tiny melodrama. Yet this was what he did, and he also knew that he did it better than anyone else. For the next hour, he would help a person in need of help, and that was enough for him. He pressed the doorbell button and permitted his mind to be engulfed by the emanations coming from the house.