“Get her,” Taige said, her voice low and harsh.
He turned.
The first time he had seen DeeDee, a squalling infant with a head full of curls and eyes as blue as his own, he had been in love. She had owned him, from that first moment. Through his divorce with her mom, through the rocky trials of her teen years, that love had only strengthened. He could remember so many things—the gymnastics competitions, awards ceremonies, long-ass hours spent in Atlanta traffic so he could take her to a father-daughter dance.
Losing her had been like losing a limb. Maybe even his soul.
Now those blue eyes would never glare at him in defiance, would never glint in amusement or soften with joy as she discovered something new and amazing.
He felt broken inside, and Linc knew there was no fix for him. Even if he survived his quest to see those who had taken her from him pay, he would never heal. He didn’t think he wanted to.
As broken as he was, the last thing he needed to do was give his heart to anybody. That was why he had cut ties with Jay. That was why he should have sent her from him.
Now, as he turned, listening to those strained, low voices, he told himself he wouldn’t do anything to make Jay pull back more. He could be calm, could control himself. He could do that because she was trying to help. Trying so badly to help. Just then, she was hauling somebody up from that hellish pit and Taige reached out, caught the person who’d been trapped down there.
He should go over, he thought dully. Help.
But all he could think was that this person had been there when DeeDee…
No. He wouldn’t let himself think it through. Not yet.
He would stay here, safe, away from them. So that when Jay left, he didn’t tarnish her memories of him even more.
A harsh, keening sound escaped the thin, dirty bundle of bones. Unwittingly, he glanced over, watched as he…
No. A woman, he realized. Half naked, but he saw the strap of a bra, the curve of breast.
A woman.
They’d left a woman down there. Pity stirred inside his heart and he swallowed as the woman lifted her head, stared at him from under her lashes.
She looked at him with no recognition.
She looked at him with panic.
She looked at him in dazed confusion.
She looked at him with DeeDee’s eyes.
Reality slid sideways, for just one minute, and hope turned everything painful and shining and so very, very vivid.
He lunged for her.
“Fuck.” It came from one of the women, and then Jay rushed and cut him off. “Don’t,” she said, her hands gripping his arms. He snarled and went to shove her back.
DeeDee…that was all he could think.
DeeDee…
He came within ten feet and then something struck him full-force in the chest and sent him flying back. He never saw what it was, but it hit him with the force of a Mack truck and he hurtled back, smashing into a tree some fifteen feet away. The solid trunk of the oak was the only thing that kept him from flying even farther through the air, and he slid to the ground with a groan, darkness crowding in around him. For a few seconds, pain grabbed him, held him. And he couldn't even think.
“Shit.”
“That about sums it up,” Taige said, her voice grim and her eyes as cold as ice.
Taige and Jay stood in a careful perimeter around the girl. Jay had put her gun away, but she realized she might have to use it.
Please, God. Don’t make me do that…
It was the worst thing she could think of. This girl, broken by what had been done to her, was reacting out of an awful fear and an even worse panic. But the sheer, unadulterated power of her mind would be more than the two of them could control if they didn’t do something fast.
They needed her unconscious. Taige had hit her with enough force to send her into next week, but she’d somehow roused herself as they pulled her to the top. Instinct, Jay suspected. The same instinct that had kept her alive for all this time. She feared everything.
Jay could feel that fear and it practically laid her low.
“Ideas?” she asked Taige.
Taige’s mouth flattened to a thin, narrow line and she gave a simple shake of her head, then flicked her eyes to the right, where Linc had gone flying.
He was struggling to get to his feet now, watching them with something between shock, hope and horror. He was figuring it out. She hoped he was smart enough to stay where he was.
Jay took a deep breath and then looked back at the girl, crouched on the ground, shaking and looking around. She seemed more animal than human, and the chaos of her emotions clouded rational thinking.
Emotions.
Jay knew emotions.
Maybe that was the way to get in. The girl had known nothing but fear for so long. She had to tap into the part of her beyond emotion.
Easing her shields down, she let herself…feel. It wasn’t the same as reaching out on a psychic level. You could go fishing with a pole, or you could cast a net and hope. Jay was casting a net. And praying, hoping like hell.
“You wanted out,” she said, keeping her voice soft. “You prayed for it. Hoped. Then you gave up and just hoped you would die.”
There was no response to her words and the girl’s raging fear didn’t alter.
She continued to talk. She didn’t try to move closer. “You remember your name? It’s DeeDee. They had you for two months. You had to be very strong to survive that. You have to keep holding now…don’t give up now that you’re out…”
Time crawled by. Jay didn’t even know what she spoke of, only that she kept her voice low and soothing.
Linc stayed on the outside. Taige didn’t move. And Jay spoke…endlessly.
Abruptly, the girl’s eyes locked on Jay’s face and then she just sagged to the ground, her fingers curling into the soil as she clung for dear life.
As she started to sob, Jay moved in.
Taige tensed.
Jay shot her a warning look, careful not to let anything she felt or saw slip past her shields.
Taige relaxed, although her eyes remained wary.
Creeping across the ground, Jay sank down beside the girl, touched her arm.
DeeDee continued to shiver, to shake.
But she didn’t move.
None of that awful power slipped out of her.
Jay suspected it might be because it couldn’t.
DeeDee had drained herself.
Unloaded herself on Oz, and what little had remained, she’d used on her father.
It was going to take her a while to rebuild her strength.
That wasn’t a bad thing, considering they were dealing with the psychic equivalent of Hurricane Katrina.
He didn’t dare approach.
Linc stood where he was, frozen in place, while his mind worked to accept what, deep inside, he already knew.
It wasn’t until he heard the far-off but familiar noise behind him that he did anything.
Somebody was coming up the trail.
There were two people who knew about his daughter.
For reasons he couldn’t explain, he knew that the threat wasn’t Taige Morgan, or Jay, the woman who held his daughter’s head in her lap while DeeDee sobbed.
In a silent move, he placed himself behind Mays, gun drawn.
It was Mays’s sudden gasp that caught Taige’s attention and she was on her feet in the next breath, her own weapon, a sleek Sig Sauer P250. Her stance was steady, a two-handed grip that told Linc she knew how to use that weapon, and would. What puzzled him was the fact that she even bothered. Why didn’t she just pull that Jedi mind shit or whatever she did?
Didn’t matter. Linc pressed the muzzle of his gun to the sweet, soft spot at the base of Mays’s skull. “Get ready to die,” he said quietly.
Blayne was sobbing next to him.
“Always knew you was a coward. Ready to shoot an unarmed man in the back.”
If it would protect his daug
hter, he’d shoot a thousand men.
But it wouldn’t take a thousand. It would only take the one.
“You knew she was here,” he said. “All along.”
“She’s a fucking freak of nature,” Mays spat out. “And a killer. She killed Lem. I found him here, guts ripped out, and she was sitting down there babbling about how she kilt him. And then Royce Byrnes too. We brought him out here—he used to teach at the school, science shit, thought he could help us figure out how she was doing this, but she crushed his neck. Any time somebody got close, she killed them. We had to throw the food in because we knew we’d be next.”
Mays shot a dirty look over his shoulder, his movement limited. “You go on, you coward. Always knew you were too chicken shit to face me man to man.”
“You’d have to be a man for me to take you out like a man,” Linc said. He started to pull on the trigger. Next to him, Blayne lunged, using his body to shove his father out of the way.
“No!” the boy sobbed.
Linc swore, jerking the gun up, glaring at the boy.
“You…” Tears leaked out of his eyes. “You can’t. It’s my fault. I brought her out here. She ran away from me. Fell down there. I was…I would have hurt her. It’s my fault. I…” His eyes wheeled around in his head and he gasped, all but choking as he searched for the words. “I would have told somebody but I started having nightmares. It was like she was whispering to me. All the time. I started thinking I was going crazy. Maybe I didn’t do what I thought I did and none of it really happened. I came out here, to see if she was really here. And she…”
He stared at the pit blindly. “It was like she picked me up. Threw me. But she was still stuck down there.” Blayne looked back at Linc, his eyes wide, desperate. “I was so scared. I ran. Told my dad and he didn’t believe me. I brought him out here and she did the same thing to him. She didn’t throw him as far…maybe cuz she was tired, or he’s bigger. We haven’t gone close since. The…the others, I think they went too close. She…she…”
Blayne just ran out of steam and Linc bent down, grabbed the front of his shirt, hauled him up. “You’re not helping your case, son.” He spun around and slammed the boy against the tree, dragging Mays along. “You left my daughter down there. Alone. It’s been two months. Why is she even still alive?”
“I…” Blayne’s eyes were wide, stark on Linc’s face. “I brought her water. Food. I had to throw it in because when you get close, she hurts you. But I didn’t want her to starve.”
“You just wanted her to stay trapped.”
Blayne’s head hung low. “No. I just didn’t know how to get her out.” The nervous glance he sent his father had every last hair on the back of Linc’s neck standing on end.
“What?” Linc growled, shaking the boy.
Blayne went white.
“You’ll tell me now, son,” Linc said. “Or this starts all over again.”
“Dawson, you need to dial it back.” Taige’s voice was low and deadly.
He whipped his head to stare at her.
And just past her shoulder, he saw his daughter.
Her gaze was locked on them.
Or, more importantly, the Mays men, standing so very closely.
In the next moment, the trees parted behind them.
Jay didn’t know if the problem had gotten better or worse.
The skin along the back of her neck crawled.
She had thought DeeDee had completely drained herself.
Psychics could hit burnout and, considering how she’d been running herself on full throttle for so long, DeeDee should be running to flame out at any second. It wouldn’t surprise Jay if she hit rock bottom and was never able to so much as foresee a rainstorm.
But just then, none of that mattered.
Her gaze had locked on the Mays and that was the only thing that mattered.
It didn’t matter that Taylor Jones—Taige’s boss—and the cavalry had just pushed through the trees and it didn’t matter that Linc had lowered his gun.
It only mattered that DeeDee had focused on the men who had hurt her and in that moment, she was a locked, loaded weapon, ready to strike.
“Taige.”
“I can’t help.” Taige’s face was a mask of stone. “I’m about on empty. I’m about burned out from keeping everything under control earlier and I’m still…” Her eyes flicked toward DeeDee and then Mays. “One wrong move and this all goes to hell. I’m about done.”
Jay didn’t bother looking at the agents who stood there, watching with unreadable eyes, taking everything in.
With her heart hitching in her throat, she focused on DeeDee. “You need to pull it in, baby,” Jay said. “I know you want to hurt him and I understand. But you’ve already lost control and it’s time to start learning how to throttle it in.”
DeeDee just stared. It was like a cobra’s stare, fixed on prey and nothing else mattered.
No sign of anything else.
“DeeDee, if you hurt him, can you stop it after that? Look at who is standing next to him.” She willed the girl to see, willed the girl to feel something more than the pain. She dropped the shields she carried around her and let herself feel.
The girl’s lids flickered.
“It’s your dad. He’s lived and breathed for nothing else since you were born. Do you want to hurt him?”
DeeDee opened her mouth.
The words that came out were low and raspy, barely even human. “They hurt me.”
And she turned her head, focused on Jay. Jay fumbled for her shields, got them up just in time in time to catch what the girl had to show her without it tearing into her with jagged hooks.
The boy had raped her.
Fury and rage ripped Jay apart, even though she’d suspected. DeeDee had meted out her own form of justice, because she had shoved every bit of suffering she’d felt into the boy’s mind. No wonder he was so remorseful. Now he felt as she had felt.
Now he suffered as she had.
But the boy’s father…
Mays was unable to feel remorse. He lacked the ability because he didn’t care.
And when she’d reached out to touch his mind, she’d picked up on the most vile thoughts. He’d realized, too, what she was doing, and he’d taunted her. Pushed despicable images into her head. Raped her mentally, broke her that way. Every vile thought, every sickening fantasy he’d had, he’d let her be party to.
The problem was, though, he’d fucked himself.
DeeDee was too young, too inexperienced to realize the difference.
He hadn’t been showing her just fantasy.
“Yes,” Jay said, her voice trembling. “He hurt you. And he hurt others.”
“I know that. We can’t stop him.”
Jay looked over at him, and then at Taylor Jones. He inclined his head questioningly. “Yes, we can. I know a guy who can pretty much stop him in his tracks…and more, he can send his ass to jail.”
Those words didn’t matter, though.
What mattered was Mays looking at her, his lip curled, a sly look on his face.
“Son of a bitch,” somebody next to Jones whispered. Jay didn’t look to see who it was.
She reached out to DeeDee, but at that moment, it didn’t matter.
DeeDee went to her knees, screaming. “No, no, no!”
Taige snarled, her face ashen. She staggered, blood trickling from her nose.
Mays gasped, his head arching back.
And then there was a crack.
Taige hit the ground.
Jones and his men rushed forward.
One of the agents swore, glaring at the girl curled up on the ground. “Damn it! You can’t do that shit when there is another psychic linked with—”
“Shut up!” Jay snarled. She put herself between DeeDee and the unit from the Bureau. All that mattered now was protecting the girl. Taige was breathing, slow, even breaths, but she was breathing. She’d be okay, Jay knew in her gut.
DeeDee, though�
�
Linc appeared in front of her.
His face was stark, his eyes pure hell.
As he went to his knees, one hand reaching out, Jay shook her head. “Not yet,” she said softly. “We have to get her mind protected first.”
“I thought I was…what did you call it?”
“A null.” She smiled weakly. “You are. But your daughter is…unique.”
Chapter Eleven
It had been nearly six weeks since he had seen DeeDee.
Before he’d walked away in that clearing, if anybody had told him that when he found out that his daughter was alive, instead of grabbing her and holding her tight, he would then walk away from her, he would have told that person they were crazy. But then he realized just what was going on with his daughter.
Linc was a basic sort of guy. He believed in what he could see, what he could touch. He hadn’t ever really believed in such shit as psychic ability…and his daughter, his beautiful little girl was psychic. Apparently, she was such a strong psychic that her abilities could kill people.
He followed Taige Morgan down a long hallway. The walls were blue, meant to be peaceful and soothing, he supposed. There were lights on the walls, covered by rainbow bits of glass. The speakers were hidden, and the music that drifted from them was peaceful and lovely and yeah, he imagined it was soothing.
Everything here was meant to be soothing.
He wondered if DeeDee realized she was in a prison.
Oh, they had it prettied up. But he had seen the guards. They didn’t wear uniforms and, somehow, he suspected they were nothing like the sort of guard you’d find at any run-of-the-mill prison. Those people were like Taige. And…Jay.
Another woman he’d walked away from. No, actually, he’d pushed her away. His gut twisted and his heart ached. He’d pushed her away when she’d tried to come to him later that day and each time she’d tried to call, he’d hung up on her. Those first few days, he just hadn’t known how to handle what he was dealing with.
Then the calls had stopped coming and when he’d tried to get in touch with her, her home number had changed. At first, he’d resisted sending her an email because the words he had to say to her weren’t the sort of words you said so impersonally. He wanted to go and see her, but when he finally managed to go do that, the apartment where she’d told him she lived was vacant. It dawned on him that maybe that had been a false address. Not a lie, exactly, right? But the life she lived wasn’t the standard one and she’d given him shadows and shades of the truth.
The Innocent: FBI Psychics, Book 2 Page 12