The Innocent: FBI Psychics, Book 2

by Shiloh Walker

  Whatever waited for her in the gray, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  Chapter Eight

  A taut silence greeted her.

  Her head was still muddled.

  Her skin prickled.

  But none of that mattered, because she was painfully aware of that silence.

  The sting of anger against her shields. She didn’t know who was angry, and her gut told her that was important.

  Her hands felt like stiff little blocks at the ends of her arms and it took two tries to finally shove her hair back from her face. When she finally succeeded, she managed to tip her head back and looked around.

  The second her gaze landed on him, she knew what the problem was.

  Sometimes when normals found out what she was, they would give her this weird look. There were variations of the look, everything from huh…that’s kind of cool to freak to fraud to let’s stick her under a microscope and study her.

  Linc wasn’t doing any of that.

  There was nothing on his face but pure, icy anger.

  His eyes, that amazing midnight blue, were remote, arctic pools and his face could have been carved from stone.

  His arms were crossed over his chest and everything about him said, stay away.

  She understood.

  She’d known this would be the reaction.

  She wished she could make him understand.

  But there was no explaining this.

  Slowly, she sat up, keeping her expression blank as she took stock. Sometimes, when her gift came on like that, it hit her like a bad case of the flu. Other times, she was so energized, she felt like she’d mainlined a case of Monster. This was somewhere in between. She was both tired and exhilarated. Ready, but she wanted to rest.

  She was going to go with ready, because something was painfully clear in her mind now.

  Linc’s daughter, DeeDee, wasn’t dead.

  Her muscles fought her as she stood, but she ignored it. Searching the room, she ignored the scathing look on Linc’s face. The tremors racking her stilled as she saw Taige sitting in a chair in the corner, but the way the other woman sat, the odd, passive expression on her face made her uneasiness oddly worse.

  Her gut cramped, knotted, as she crossed over there and waited by Cullen’s side.

  “Is this how it works for her?” she asked quietly.

  Cullen sat, his blue-green eyes on his wife’s face, his elbows propped on his knees. He gave a single, short nod.

  “Should I be quiet?”

  He flicked her a glance, a half smile on his face. He shrugged. “No. It won’t matter to her. She’ll…” He paused then, leaning forward.

  Taige’s mouth parted.

  She gasped.

  Then she blinked and her hands tightened on the arms of the chair.

  A second later, her entire body shuddered.

  Taige came out looking like death.

  Linc saw her face, ashen under the smooth, warm brown of her skin, fine lines fanning out from the corner of her eyes.

  I don’t believe this.

  No. That wasn’t true.

  He didn’t want to believe this.

  Both of the women had spent the past few hours locked in an odd, almost-trance state.

  A few months ago, he could have brushed it off. But there was a weird feel to the air. Part of him thought he should look for a massive, cold-mist vaporizer, something that would put a chill, damp feel to the air, but that wasn’t it.

  As Taige surged up out of the chair, the chill and the damp was just gone, replaced by a static charge that left him feeling like there was a storm waiting to drop.

  And it all had something to do with those two women.

  He rubbed a hand down his jaw, debated on what to do, what to say.

  She stared back at him.

  Jay had moved to the window and was staring outside. If he had to guess, she was staring at the very spot where he’d found her earlier.

  That one where everything had started to go to hell.

  The familiar scents of bacon and biscuits and coffee filled the air. Robyn had retreated to familiar grounds and was working on breakfast, although he’d told her it wasn’t necessary. He wished she’d listen. He didn’t know how to handle having her here right now.

  Familiar ground.

  He curled one hand into a fist as Taige turned away.

  He had a good idea of how to handle familiar ground, he thought.

  Robyn appeared in the doorway, a wheeled tray in front of her. “I thought everybody could use some coffee,” she said, her voice bright, full of false cheer.

  Taige opened her mouth. He could see her response, written on her pale, soft features. That warm, gentle brown, those pale gray eyes. Rising from his chair, he pinned Robyn with a look. “No.”

  As their gazes cut to him, Robyn’s mouth fell open. “No,” he said again. “You can take it to the kitchen and serve them there. I need to speak with Ms. Roberts alone.”

  So now I’m Ms. Roberts…

  She fought the urge to sigh, fought the urge to rub a hand over the ache forming in her heart.

  She’d known this was coming, ever since those stark words, right before he’d taken her into that sleek, sexy shower.

  If that’s what you are, what you had to tell me…I…fuck, I’m glad that’s not why you’re here…

  It was almost like he’d chosen to be deliberately obtuse, shutting what she was out of his head so he didn’t have to think about it. She understood. She’d done that sort of thing in her life, more than once.

  She’d told him she hadn’t come for his daughter, and she hadn’t.

  But now that she was here, his daughter was her focus. It had just taken a while to get her focus on, so to speak.

  And now…whoa, was it on.

  Her vision swayed in and out, the images from her inner eye superimposing on the here and now.

  Dirt.

  Pain.

  Blood.

  Daddy—

  Jay fought those images aside, locked on Linc’s face. The poor girl was trapped, still thinking of him as Daddy.

  That was the heartbreaking thing.

  The troublesome thing was everything else she was doing.

  And dear God.

  Was she doing some serious shit.

  A spray of blood washed across her mind’s eyes.

  Why won’t you help! The girl’s tortured scream, into the mind of a boy who didn’t understand.

  If Jay hadn’t recognized the boy’s face from that impromptu search she’d done on Hell, Georgia, she wouldn’t have thought much of it.

  Another face flashed through her mind and his was familiar—he was one of the kids who’d shown up in her search, a boy missing now for seven weeks. He was one the girl knew. He’d held her wrists pinned by her head, and he’d laughed. Laughed and laughed, while another one tore at her clothes.

  Linc… She stared at him, wished she could reach out and stroke the tension from him, wished she could make him understand.

  But she didn’t even know what they were dealing with.

  Until she did, she couldn’t even offer him any kind words.

  There was, she thought, one crucial, clear image in her head.

  Darkness. Dirt walls.

  No.

  Two.

  A man, standing at the edge, staring down at her.

  And those earthen walls.

  She pushed it aside and moved to lean against the back of the couch, staring at him. “So,” she said, her voice edged with mockery. “I’m Ms. Roberts now, huh?”

  Robyn, the housekeeper, had already left, taking that life-giving caffeine with her. Cullen had also left. But Taige lingered in the door, her hand on the edge. Her presence was a silent offer of strength, but just then, Jay didn’t know whether to accept it or not.

  Blood rushed to her cheeks, suffusing her face with a wash of heat and shame settled in her belly. He’d decided to be blind, she knew.

  But she could hav
e set him straight.

  No, she hadn’t come her because of his daughter. She’d come here about their relationship and she’d stumbled into a nightmare.

  It wasn’t anything either of them had done wrong—her coming here, him unconsciously choosing not to acknowledge the truth. He’d needed to hide from it, she knew. She couldn’t blame him. It made sense, in a way.

  But she’d messed up when she hadn’t told him about her abilities.

  Swallowing the knot in her throat, she looked at Taige, waited until the woman’s pale gray eyes connected with hers.

  “Go. I made this mess. I need to clean it up.”

  Jay couldn’t communicate on a psychic level, not on her own.

  But Taige didn’t need her to reach out. She only needed the words and she’d pick them up just fine.

  For a moment, Taige didn’t do anything, then her shoulders rose and fell on a sigh and she gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. “We can’t leave. I’m filtering through what I have. It won’t take long. We’ve got a hunt ahead of us. You know that.”

  Jay didn’t respond.

  It wasn’t necessary.

  As Taige left them alone, she looked back at Linc.

  His eyes sliced into her like a blade. It was a miracle she wasn’t bleeding from it.

  “You lied to me,” he said, his voice all but soundless.

  “No.” She said that simple word, and she could say that much without lying.

  “Don’t,” he snarled.

  She didn’t let herself flinch, even managed to take a few steps forward, her eyes narrowing on his face. “I didn’t lie. You assumed after I said I hadn’t come down here for DeeDee that it meant I wasn’t psychic too. That’s your mistake, not mine. Yes, I should have addressed it, but…” She hesitated, floundering. She wasn’t going to explain that, not now. She’d stripped herself bare for him once. She wasn’t going to do it again. “I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t.” He bit it off, his voice cold and harsh, a slap against nerves still raw from the past few hours. “My daughter is gone, and who knows what happened to her, who took her, what they did to her, where they left her. And that’s all you have to offer me. You know something. I can see it. I never believed in this shit, but I can see it in your eyes that you know something. You let me put my hands on you—”

  His voice broke and he whirled away, driving the heels of his hands against his eyes as a raw, ugly sob left him.

  “Linc.”

  He didn’t seem to hear her.

  Moving across the room, she put herself in front of him but he still didn’t hear her as she said his name again.

  Reaching up, she caught his wrists, but he moved away, so sudden and fast it knocked her off balance.

  She ended up tripping. Her exhausted body and heavy feet had her on her ass and she banged her hip on the coffee table as she went down, catching her weight on her right wrist and biting back a groan as pain jolted up her arm. Yeouch… She sat there a moment, taking stock.

  It wasn’t until she felt his eyes on her that she looked up.

  He watched her, his gaze remote.

  Jay didn’t let it affect her as she climbed back up, ignoring the throb in her hip. Other than her wrist and hip, she was fine. “I don’t know what you think you know,” she said, her voice soft. “But I didn’t pick up on anything solid about DeeDee until this morning.”

  His lip curled in a sneer.

  Flexing her hand, then tightening it into a fist, she advanced on him. “If you look at me like that again, I just might knock that look off your face, tough guy. And I can do it. So keep it up,” she warned him. “You just admitted that you don’t know shit about psychics—that means you don’t know shit about psychic ability. You also don’t know shit about how I work, so you’ve got no room to cast judgment and, I can assure you, I wouldn’t have been fucking you if I’d had anything concrete about your child.”

  “Nice to know a group of charlatans have a code of ethics,” he said.

  She swung out.

  He moved, but not fast enough. She hadn’t planned on hitting him with her right.

  It was the upper cut with her left that caught him and she was more than a little satisfied to see him stagger a little.

  Her hand throbbed and she flexed it as she glared at him. “I’m not a charlatan.”

  “Yeah?” He rubbed his jaw. “What the fuck am I thinking then?”

  “Oh, please. I’m not Miss Cleo.” She turned away from him and put the length of the room between them. “And I’m not telepathic. I’m an empath—that means I read emotions, Sherlock.” Her gut was hot, tight. It wasn’t everything going on here that did it, either. Too many years spent doing this warned her what it was. “Listen, we don’t have time, so I’m going to give you a crash course on psychic skill.”

  She looked back at him, tried not to jump when she realized he’d closed the distance, stood less than three feet away. She sidestepped. He followed. “Some distance, if you would.”

  “You didn’t want it last night,” he reminded her, his voice menacing, silky.

  “Last night, you wanted to be on top of me. Today, you look like you want to wring my neck.” She stared at him pointedly. “It makes a difference.”

  He didn’t give her any more room and she suspected he wouldn’t. But there was no time. “Crash course,” she muttered. “Empathy means I pick up on emotions.”

  “Then tell me what I’m feeling.”

  She could have done that just by looking at him but she wasn’t going to lie to him. “You’re a psychic null.”

  “Is that what it sounds like?”

  “Yeah.” She had her suspicions on why but she wasn’t going into that here. “You’re basically a closed book. You don’t give anything out.” If things were different, she’d tell him how wonderful that was, how restful. But they weren’t different.

  He curled his lip. “How convenient.”

  “Do you want to hear this or not?” She inclined her head.

  “I want to know what the fuck is going on and whether it’s connected to DeeDee.” His blue eyes all but cut into her. “And I’m almost certain I never told you her name. What have you been doing, digging around for info? Is that how you…work?”

  She bit back a sigh and turned away.

  “I caught bits and pieces when I saw the picture,” she said, catching sight of it from the corner of her eye. He followed the direction of her stare and she saw his face go tight, watched as his gaze darkened. “You suspected then. You should have just asked. Asked…and been ready to hear the answers.”

  Then last night wouldn’t have happened. She didn’t know whether she should be grateful it had or not. She was going to remember that night in vivid, painful detail. And she was going to regret, bitterly, that it would never happen again.

  “You said you weren’t like her.”

  “No.” She reached up, absently stroked the rose on her neck. It was time to add more thorns. One for Linc. One for the night they’d had. One for all the nights they’d never have. “I said I hadn’t come here for DeeDee. You chose the interpretation.”

  That damned sense of urgency settled on her again. Hot and driving. Moving to the window, she stared outside at that one spot where everything had snapped into place. “I sleepwalk sometimes. I’ve done it since I was a kid. It’s not as common now—usually happens when there’s a hot case going on. The sleepwalking is tied to my abilities somehow. At least that’s what the specialists tell me. I set alarms on my house. Loud noises will wake me up. A loud noise, a bright light, a touch. Anything out of place will bring me out, but it will also disrupt the vision.”

  Vision…

  Linc wanted to laugh it off.

  It would be easier if he could.

  But she was staring at that spot again.

  The place where he’d fought with DeeDee.

  Where he’d found Jay earlier, when Robyn had touched her and she’d started to scream.

&nbs
p; “What vision?” he asked, the question ripping out of him.

  She opened her mouth to answer.

  Before she could, Taige appeared in the door.

  She’d dressed.

  Her ID was around her neck, her weapon at her side. She tossed a bag at Jay’s feet. “It’s time.”

  Jay moved slowly, almost like she was drugged.

  But in seconds, she was up to speed, grabbing her bag, moving to the door.

  “I’m not done,” he growled.

  She stared at him and then abruptly, she reached up.

  “I heard her…arguing with you,” she said. “She wanted to go out with a boy. Blayne. DeeDee was angry because you wouldn’t let her grow up. You worried because the boy was trouble. You made her go to her room, locked the door. You feel guilty over that—I can’t read that off you, but I see it in your eyes. Don’t feel guilty. She would have left anyway, at some point.”

  Unaware he’d even moved, he closed his hand over her wrist, staring at her with stark eyes.

  She…son of a bitch.

  She knew.

  She knew.

  “Tell me you can find her,” he demanded. “I want to bring her home. I want to put her to rest.”

  A sad smile curved her lips. “I plan on finding her. But Linc…it won’t be what you think. I don’t think she’s dead.”

  She pulled on clean clothes in the pretty little restroom off the side of the main hall. It looked like one of those quaint little water closets from days gone by. Hand-painted wallpaper, towels too soft and so precisely folded, even if they were a little musty from lack of use. There was a fine layer of dust along the back of the toilet.

  She suspected this restroom hadn’t been used in a while.

  Focusing on the little details was a necessity.

  It let her subconscious filter through everything.

  By the time she was ready to actually approach it head on, she’d be ready for it.

  He was coming with them.

  If he wasn’t—or if he hadn’t been—in law enforcement, she’d probably cut him out. It might require physical restraint, or clever maneuvering to lose him on the roads, but Linc had been a sheriff. He knew what they were dealing with.