At the Merest Glance: a military paranormal romance (Shadowforce: Psi Book 3)

by M. L. Buchman

  When Katie started to protest, he held up his hand to stop her. He’d never set out to prove that he could see around corners, usually striving to prove that he couldn’t.

  “Hold up some number of your fingers behind your back.”

  When she did, he blurred out of looking at her face, then he stepped his vision around the back of her chair.

  Katie had almost followed his motion. No one, not even Isobel could do that.

  “Not under your jacket,” he told her.

  She moved her hand into view from behind, still not visible from anyone’s position at the table.

  He couldn’t help smiling. “My, but that’s a rude gesture. Do nice English girls normally give men the bird?” She spun the rest of the way around and looked behind her. Not just behind her, but up at his face.

  He let his “vision” go and was looking at her face with his own eyes when she turned back around. “How can you be in two places at once?”

  “I can’t. But I can be here—and see from there.”

  “And,” Isobel said softly, “You can see him there, which I find utterly fascinating.”

  Katie shook her head. “No. No, I can’t.”

  But Katie could certainly feel him there as clearly as if she could see.

  “No! This is too weird.”

  “Wha’did I miss?” Michelle returned with Isobel’s beer. “Damn it. I knew I shouldn’t have left.”

  Two others trailed along behind her. A tall blond man carrying a black cowboy hat and a petite blonde carrying a white one. The woman moved with the grace that Katie recognized as that of a trained tracker.

  “Jesse, Hannah…Katie,” with a long pause before saying her name. Apparently that was Michelle’s idea of a formal introduction.

  But she hadn’t been here when Katie had introduced herself, had she? She’d hesitated, glanced at Ricardo, then known Katie’s name. Was it tattooed on his forehead in invisible ink that only Michelle could see?

  Reminding herself to be still and observe was not helping as much as it usually did.

  Michelle scooted her chair closer to Ricardo before sitting as the others crowded in. Six was the upper limit of the bowsprit table, especially with the giant sitting beside her. She made seven.

  “Evening, ma’am,” the cowboy said solemnly. “What’s your twist?”

  “I don’t have a twist,” she answered automatically. “What do you mean twist?” And she was afraid that there was a good chance she didn’t want to know the answer.

  “W’all,” his accent matched his Texas hat. “I come in and you’re sitting with a bunch of folks as have interesting abilities. I was just a-guessing like you might belong.”

  “I’m a wildlife tracker. That’s all.”

  “She trained with Tom Brown Jr.,” Ricardo said softly.

  The petite blonde looked at her sharply. “For real?”

  “For real,” Katie didn’t know what about that so interested Ricardo and Hannah. She’d never met someone who knew about Tom who wasn’t a tracker.

  “What’s the deal with Brown?” Anton asked for her.

  Ricardo and Hannah eyed each other, until finally it was Hannah who spoke. “Tom is perhaps the finest tracker alive, if you don’t count Colonel Gibson who trained the two of us. Runs a school. That’s a serious set of skills if she really pursued it.”

  “Since I was fourteen,” Katie confirmed. Her parents should never have had a child. Boarding school wasn’t enough time away, so she’d been shipped to Tom in America each summer like an unwanted parcel.

  Isobel hummed thoughtfully, “What did Mr. Brown have to say about your tracking skills?”

  Katie tried to see past the dazzle that was Isobel Manella, but it was difficult, as if she was wearing a cloak of herself. Somewhere behind those manslayer-dark eyes and serious curves was an equally serious person. It was almost like seeing-but-not-seeing Anton when he’d supposedly circled behind her.

  Isobel smiled to herself as if she knew what Katie was seeing.

  “Uncanny,” Katie used that single word because, while Tom wasn’t much given to speaking about anything other than the trail, he’d remarked on her ability that way several times.

  “I’m so surprised.” Isobel’s tone was a kindly tease. One that Katie didn’t understand at all.

  “Someone care to explain to this cowboy what in Sam Hill is going on?” Jesse’s confusion couldn’t be even half of hers.

  When Isobel looked at her, Katie just shook her head. She had no idea what was happening.

  “Remember when you first found your gift?” Isobel asked the others around the table.

  Gift? The reactions were fascinating.

  Hannah and Jesse actually shuddered. Ricardo and Michelle clasped hands tightly and looked sad. Anton just shrugged. He laughed easily when she turned to face him.

  “Like Isobel, I can’t remember not knowing. I could always take my vision out for a walk.”

  “Take your vision. Out for a walk…” Her own voice sounded strained and far away, but she couldn’t seem to reel it back in.

  He pointed a big finger at the cowboy and Hannah. “They do some mighty strange things with sound. These two are telepathic. Don’t worry, only to each other.”

  Michelle’s smile quirked to the side, then Ricardo spoke up, “She says to say, ‘Seriously weird, huh?’ She’s right.”

  Unable to breathe, Katie turned slowly to look at Isobel.

  “I’m an empath. I know what people are feeling. Really feeling rather than just wish they were. Don’t worry.”

  Isobel had said that earlier. And Anton just now. Which was truly making her worry.

  “I’m not reading you. I keep my gift turned off most of the time. But because it took me a long time to learn to do that, I find facial expressions can be almost as illustrative.”

  Katie swallowed hard against a dry throat but couldn’t seem to lift her beer from the table to slake it. It took her two tries before she could speak.

  “Are you saying that I’m…” She had no idea how to finish that sentence.

  “A psychometer?” Isobel suggested with a shrug.

  “A…what?”

  “That’s someone who can sense when someone has touched something or been in a place. Added to your tracker training, I suspect that you are better at finding the most elusive animals than almost anyone.”

  Tom had indeed said something like that.

  And she’d just shrugged it off. After four full summers with him, she was practically his co-teacher. Thinking that might have been more than just a trained skill was almost as uncomfortable as having Anton looking over her shoulder…when he wasn’t.

  She wanted to pound her head on the table to make it feel better. Real.

  It didn’t take any weirdo gift to know that all it would do is hurt.

  Chapter 4

  Katie didn’t feel any better when she woke in the morning.

  She normally enjoyed waking. Even after a late night, dawn was the world’s softest alarm clock. Her tiny rented flat might not be much bigger than the bed, but it faced east toward the April dawn. She always left the curtains open to welcome the light.

  Today she yanked them closed—hard enough to dislodge the rod and it clanked to the floor.

  Worse, there wasn’t even a single blissful moment before her thoughts were overrun by the fact that she was a bloody freak.

  No, it just couldn’t be right.

  But twenty-twenty hindsight was offering her some awfully relevant memories.

  Playing football at boarding school, she always knew when someone was coming up hard from behind to the steal the ball. It had made her a killer center because she could always thread her way through the opposing team without ever losing the ball. She never had to look where her teammates were waiting for the pass, because they were always in the right place.

  Or so she’d thought until now.

  What if she somehow knew where they were and only passed them th
e ball when they were in the right place?

  She’d always assumed her childhood hide-and-seek skills were just an early expression of the tracking skills that Tom had always praised.

  But what if they weren’t?

  What if she’d earned the nickname Killjoy Katie through some weirdo “twist” that she’d never asked for?

  Were her tracking skills even real? She’d anchored the whole of her self-identity to having and honing those skills. And now she was finding out they weren’t hers at all?

  She clutched onto the bedsheets to anchor her somewhere in the storm.

  There was a knock on her door.

  “I’m not a freak!” Katie shouted out at some unsuspecting visitor, then thumped her head back on the pillow.

  The silence on the other side of the door was palpable.

  “Come in,” she called out, but couldn’t raise herself to see who had entered.

  “It’s a problem, isn’t it?” Hannah Tucker, the quiet blonde who didn’t even stand to the cowboy’s shoulder, eased into the room hardly even disturbing the air. She closed the door behind her, which was good. Katie was not at all ready to deal with Isobel, or even worse, Anton. Besides, she was wearing running shorts and an old “Trackers Do It In The Wild” t-shirt that she loved but had always been too embarrassed to wear in public.

  “I’m not a freak,” was the only greeting she could think to offer.

  Hannah nodded and sat on the foot of the bed. She did it so smoothly that the old mattress didn’t even creak.

  “How did you learn to do that?”

  “Ever hear of the US Army’s Delta Force?”

  “You? I thought they were like super warriors.”

  “We super warriors come in all sizes.”

  “And genders.” Katie liked that idea.

  “I was one of the very few women. But yes.”

  “And you can…” Katie shrugged. She didn’t credit anything she remembered from last night.

  Someone snapped their fingers close by her right ear.

  Katie twisted, but there was no one there. God help her for even thinking it, she couldn’t sense anyone having been there either.

  “Though for my gift to have any volume, I have to be in contact with Jesse. He acts like an amplifier. I always thought that I was just particularly skilled at the evasion portion of Delta training.”

  This time there was a crack of a branch in Katie’s wardrobe, making her twist to see.

  During that momentary distraction, Hannah had risen and moved silently to stand at the window. And, someone save her, Katie had known that even before she’d turned back to see it.

  “It takes some getting used to. Are we freaks? We don’t know. There are six of us. That’s all we know about. Seven now.”

  “Seven? No! Hold on just a moment.” Katie shoved herself upright. “So not! Six! You, are six!”

  Hannah didn’t argue. But neither did she conveniently evaporate into thin air along with any memory of her being there to begin with. Instead she picked up the curtain rod and rehung it across the window.

  “Six,” Katie emphasized.

  Hannah simply shrugged. “Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll go for a walk? It’s a beautiful morning. Though still a little cool. You may want a jacket.”

  Katie tried to find a reason to argue, but nothing came to mind. She gathered up her clothes and went down the hall to the shared bath to clean up and get changed.

  Anton hated running. Guys who were six-five were either built for lifting, like him, or they were pencil-necks built for running.

  That hadn’t stopped Ricardo and Jesse from rousting him before the crack of dawn this morning—midnight in San Antonio. “You have ta get yourself switched on over to the right clock.”

  He’d rather die peacefully in bed, but they hadn’t let that be an option.

  His attempts to beg off had only extended the run. They’d started with a stiff climb out of town on Mousehole Lane, Maw-zel. He was soon trapped. Ricardo’s sense of direction was Delta Force honed. He and Jesse had flown helicopters in the service. Put him up at a fifty meters and clipping along at a couple hundred klicks an hour, and he’d be on it.

  Running through these twisting English lanes, at midnight Central Daylight Time, and he knew where he was for about the first thirty seconds. After that he was up shit’s creek.

  Eventually the sunrise had told him what direction was east for all the good it did him. Somewhere out there lay the town of a mouse’s hidey hole—where he should be waking up to a lazy breakfast and coffee—but it could now lie north, south, or east. The only reason he knew it wasn’t west was because the only thing east of Mousehole was the English Channel.

  Anton double-checked, just because his head was so messed up, but he was definitely running, not swimming. So, he wasn’t east of Mousehole.

  “This is where they must have minted the word bucolic,” Jesse offered without the least huff of breathlessness. The big-shouldered cowboy loped along easily beside him.

  It was hard not to agree.

  Whatever “road” they were on hadn’t had a signpost at the turn. Neither one was much more than a paved one-lane track. Close by either side of the pavement ran aged, dry-laid rock walls. Some were shoulder-high, some once had been. They were thick with bramble and birdsong, until suddenly the hedges dropped away. The fields that showed through those gaps ranged from the size of Pa’s big, kitchen garden to a space big enough to land a handful of helos.

  Some fields were brilliant yellow with rapeseed for making canola oil. Some were busy with flocks of sheep. Big fluffy beige balls with black faces cropped the grass. Knee-high lambs bounced about like rubber balls on a hard floor.

  “Doink-doink-doink!” he called in rhythm to a lamb springing along the other side of the rock wall.

  It looked sideways at him in alarm without stopping its forward progress. In moments it was ass over teakettle, then sprinting for its mother with a sharp bleat. It took about three heartbeats for all of the sheep to decide he was “the wolf” and go stampeding off to the far side of the enclosure.

  “So much for bucolic,” Jesse laughed.

  “Dumb as chickens,” Anton huffed out as they followed Ricardo back in between more towering hedges.

  “Are chickens dumb?”

  “Cluck stupid. Only dumber critter on God’s green Earth is a turkey; they’ll stare up into the sky when its raining as if they can’t figure out what in tarnation this wet stuff is. I don’t know what old Ben Franklin was thinking about when he wanted them to be the national symbol. Thought you were bread-and-buttered on a farm? How come you don’t know that?”

  Jesse tipped back his hat. “Daddy runs a ranch, a Texas ranch. We have horses.”

  “They smart?”

  “Don’t rightly know about that. Not smart like Ricardo and me,” Jesse’s grin said the tease of leaving out Anton was friendly, so he ignored it…and vowed to get Jesse back later. “Your average horse is actually more smart like Isobel. They know a hundred yards off if you’re the afraid-type, intermediate, or an expert horseman. Know how you’re feeling long before you do.”

  “Now you’re saying I’m as dumb as a stupid horse?”

  “No,” Ricardo slowed until they were running three abreast up the road. “Horse knows what he’s feeling. Back of the line for you, Anton.”

  Since that was more words than he usually spoke in a day, Anton responded with, “What are you yabbering on about, Ricardo?”

  They reached an intersection. Ricardo led them to the right for no reason Anton could see other than the short steep climb the road made between higher fields. Punishing him for asking? Probably.

  “What made you follow Katie to the badgers?”

  “I was out in central nowhere, off toward Sennen Cove, just, uh…” he hadn’t meant to reveal that. “Just taking a lookabout.”

  “Just trying to get a one-up on us by pre-scouting the site,” Jesse nodded. “Good move. Wish I�
�d thought of it. ’Course I could point out that Hannah distracted me some yesterday evening so I’ve got no complaints a’tall. Expect your dram-sister did much the same for Ricardo.”

  Ricardo’s silence confirmed that as he leaned into the hill.

  “Must be tough being a single-type person. Why you doing it, pard?”

  “Who says I want to settle down any?” Anton managed to gasp out as they neared the hillcrest. “Even if I did, I’m not finding anyone that kind of special crossing my path.”

  Ricardo just made a disgusted sound and kicked ahead for the top of the rise.

  Jesse paced him easily.

  Anton dug deep and held his position off their beam…until he cleared the top.

  The road turned northwest and inland somewhere. Instead, Ricardo led the way to a path that plunged south down to the sea, then climbed back up the far side of the jagged cove. From their vantage, Anton could see that the path plunged and rose many times between here and the tiny islet in the hazy distance that marked the entrance to Mousehole harbor. At least he hoped it was the same islet or he was so screwed.

  Chapter 5

  Katie grabbed her normal sausage-and-fried-egg bap and to-go coffee from the Four Teas Cafe.

  Hannah didn’t say a word as she led them to a bench along at the north tip of the small harbor. To the right was the sweep of Grenfell Street past the market and Ship Inn, before it ducked back into the granite buildings that made up the waterfront and the wharf. To their left, the big seawall arced in from either side. As it was a busy April weekend, the wall tops were packed with their limit of about twenty cars apiece.

  Low tide. The harbor itself, seventy-five meters wide and twice that long, was damp sand and flat rock except for close by the gap in the seawall. Fifty-odd pleasure and fishing boats dotted the exposed seabed and waited for the four-meter tide to refloat them. Any working fisherman would have left on the midnight high tide.

  They sat quietly while Katie ate her breakfast. Hannah appeared to simply be enjoying the morning sun shining off the sea. It was the most relaxed Katie had been…in a long while.