He couldn’t even be angry about that because if she had told him the truth, he wouldn’t have believed her.
He had to be ready.
“You ready?”
Taige turned to look at him and realized that he still wasn’t ready. But if he waited until he was ready, then his life was never going to move forward.
He stared at the door just beyond Taige’s shoulder and nodded.
A faint smile curved her lips.
“No, you’re not.” Then she stepped aside. “Neither was Del. But she said she wasn’t ready to see you anyway.”
He blinked. “Del?”
“She said she couldn’t be DeeDee anymore. That the girl she’d been had died and she had to decide who she was going to be now. She started with a new name. She liked how Del sounded.”
“Del…” He closed his eyes, thinking yet again of that blue-eyed baby with a head of fuzzy curls, soft skin of the palest brown. Her mama was black and DeeDee was a mix of both of them. They’d named her Delilah Donelle Dawson—for both of their parents. They’d nicknamed her DeeDee, almost from the start. “Del. Sounds so grown-up.”
A hand touched his arm. He looked up, met Taige’s understanding eyes. “She’s not a child anymore. After what happened, there’s no way she can be. And I know this is hard for you, but she’d started losing her innocence even before, just because of her abilities.” Taige bit her lip, looking away. “I…look, I understand what you’re going through better than you can imagine.”
He snorted. “How can you?”
“You and I oughta sit down one day. I’ll tell you about my daughter.” Then she turned back to the door. “Now, you decide…either you’re ready to go through this door and see your daughter, face her with love, or you need to leave, because if you can only judge her, you don’t need to be here.”
It was in that moment that he remembered what Oz had said, in those moments before her silvery eyes had gone dark
Be gentle with her. She’ll need you…
He’d thought she was talking about Jay.
But it had been his daughter.
“I’ll never turn my back on my daughter,” he said quietly. “If that’s what you’re worried about, just stop.”
Del sat on the bed, staring out the window.
Some of the people here thought they were in a prison, locking them away from the world.
Del saw it differently.
It was locking the world away from her. At first it was to keep the world safe from her and it was necessary.
Sometimes the world was too big, too loud. She almost felt like little Clark Kent from the Man of Steel movie, where he heard everything, saw too much and couldn’t shut it off. It was a good thing she didn’t have that laser beam vision because if she had, she would have been doing some serious damage.
Bit by bit, day by day, the noise from everything else got quieter.
She could talk to people without going mad.
Taige came, every day.
Jay came, every day.
Neither of them battered her senses, and Taige worked with her on building shields that kept her mind from being flayed raw.
Jay worked with her on building shields that kept her from picking up every emotion that people threw out there.
And then others started to come.
A cold-eyed man who had been there in the forest.
He asked questions, a lot of them.
A black woman with dark, kind eyes—she’d introduced herself as Dez and asked about the voices Del heard.
Others came.
They gave her tests, asked questions.
They didn’t explain why and they tried to shutter their thoughts, but Del knew why they were there.
Trying to understand just what Del could do, whether she could ever be trusted.
Del couldn’t be trusted.
But she didn’t really want to be.
If they trusted her, she might be expected to leave here.
And she loved the blissful silence of this place.
Loved the serene, pale green walls of her room, and the endless blue that surrounded her when she went for walks outside the main buildings. They called the place the Osborne Foundation.
It sounded nicer than jail.
She was starting to think of it as home.
But she missed her dad. Missed her mom.
When his car came winding down the long street, she rested a hand against the window and hoped.
Had he come to see her?
Or was he just here to talk to them again? He came once a week. Mom had come with him twice and, the last time, she’d had to be carried away, tearfully sobbing.
Mom would never understand.
She’d have to lie to her mother, and Del understood that.
Mom wouldn’t understand not just what Del had gone through, but what Del had in her head.
Some people were just incapable of living with the truth.
Her mother was one of them. Del could handle that. But she wanted to see her parents, even as she feared it. She’d killed.
Now she had to look at her father with blood between them.
Even as she thought about it, she flinched.
Some of them had been innocent.
Once, while she’d been out wandering the grounds here, an agent had come to see Taige. They didn’t realize she’d seen them, and she wouldn’t tell them.
But she’d seen…and she would carry that conversation in her heart always.
“You can’t mean to train that girl. She’s a killer. She killed Oz. She killed two innocent people and she could have killed you.”
“She was terrified, and not in control. They’d almost driven her crazy. She’s being trained and once she’s trained, she won’t be the danger she was.”
The man had stared at Taige, incredulity written on his face. “So she was psycho—that means she gets away with it? Maybe we should just let the next typical killer get away with it when he butchers some kids. After all, most of the guys who go into a school to shoot it up do have some mental issues.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Taige had snarled. Then she’d looked up, seen Del standing near by. Del had a blank look on her face and her shields solidly up.
They had walked off to finish the conversation.
Taige had asked later if Del had heard anything. Del had just smiled vaguely. She was good at that.
No outright lies, but no firm answers, either.
It wasn’t until late that night that she’d gotten onto the tablet PC they’d given her that she was able to find out who Oz was.
Oz, a tall, striking woman with silvery eyes, hair going to silver…the woman who’d founded this refuge where Del had found some bit of peace.
Oz…a woman who had been laid to rest five and a half weeks ago, after receiving an injury, some freakish accident while tracking down evidence that the FBI had hoped would lead to the arrest of a serial rapist and murderer, one Chief Stephen Mays.
They’d come on the scene of the crime, according to the article, to find Mays dead and Elise Oswald impaled by a piece of wood.
Only some of it was a lie.
Over the next few weeks, bits and pieces of information were unearthed and it turned out that some of the nightmare images Mays had forced into her head weren’t just disgusting fantasies. He actually had hunted, stalked, brutalized women—sometimes in front of his son. A few years ago, he’d started crossing the line and actually killing them. Several of the girls who’d been kidnapped from town had been some of his first victims, their bodies discovered, thanks to the FBI team.
None of the articles held any mention of her.
Other than her mother and father, did anybody even realize she was still alive?
The people here knew, but they were…different. Like her.
Taige liked her and Jay liked her and they were trying to take care of her, help her, but the others…
She shivered, fear rushing in on her and,
for the first time, this place really did feel like more of a prison.
She wanted to see her dad.
She wanted to have at least one person who cared about her outside of these four walls.
One person who wanted her well enough to leave. Even if she never actually managed to do it.
There was a knock at the door.
Her breath rattled in her throat and she huddled closer against the window. She didn’t even respond, just stared at the door, mentally preparing herself.
The door opened and when she saw Taige’s face, some of that tension drained out.
But then she saw her father step in behind her.
Once more terror grabbed her, held her tight.
He stared at her for a long, long moment.
Then he took a step forward and held out his arms.
Del didn’t even remember moving.
But she was caught up in his arms.
And she felt safe…loved. Once more.
Jay sat in the office.
The Osborne Foundation had been one of Oz’s more…personal sources of pride.
There were more than a few psychics in this world who were broken.
Once upon a time, Jay had been pretty damn close.
The psychics with an emotional gift could be fragile, and a girl who walks in on her father bent over her mother’s lifeless body—that’s an emotional blow in its own right. Her grief alone had all but devastated her.
But her grief, combined with his…it had been too much.
Oz had been the one to find Jay all those years ago. She’d been in rough shape, on her way to becoming a recluse, hiding inside her home, ready to flunk out of school because she couldn’t handle the interaction.
Oz had saved her.
Oz had saved a lot of people during her life.
In her death, she’d done what she could to make sure she’d be able to keep helping others.
The door opened.
She turned and looked at Taige.
“Your sugarpie is here.”
Jay fought the urge to leap up and tear off down the hall.
“My sugarpie?” she drawled.
Taige grunted and pulled out her phone. “Yeah. Your honey. The arm candy. That hot piece of man flesh. Whatever you want to call him.” She put the phone to her ear and closed her eyes. A minute later, a ghost of a smile curled her lips and she was quiet.
Five minutes passed before she put the phone down and looked back at Jay. “Why are you still here?”
“I get hot watching you listen to your messages.”
“Really? Cuz all of those were from Jilly. So you’re a sick puppy.”
Jay shrugged. “You know…you can leave. You’ve got a family. They need you.”
Taige looked out the window. “This place needs me too. I think Oz knew that.”
“Considering she named you her successor when you’ve never so much as worked for her company, I’d say you’re on to something.” Jay nibbled to the end of her pencil. A loose thread on one glove caught her eye. “What are you going to do about it?”
Taige blew out a breath. “I’ve been thinking about that…and I think what I need to do is relocate the offices.”
Jay blinked, then stared. Even as she started to protest, though, her heart started to race.
The foundation was located south of Atlanta. A lot closer to Hell than Texas was.
“Ah…what…makes you think that’s a workable idea?”
Taige pulled out a file from the tottering stacks on the desk. “The fact that it appears Oz was already looking into it.” She flipped it open and pointed to a sheet of paper with a neat stack of photos clipped to it. “This is the new office—or what I think she’d planned to be the new office. What I think she’d planned to do was open a smaller satellite here. What I’m planning to do is make this HQ and make the other the satellite. I can’t make my family move across the country. But I’ll sweeten the pot for those who can and are able to move. I’ve…well, the funds are there for me to do that.” She slid Jay a look. “Know anybody who’d be interested in helping me out there?”
Jay just made a little humming sound under her breath. “And this place?”
“Stands. As it is. Oz set it up to run smooth as silk and we’re needed only irregularly.” Taige eyed the files, rubbed her jaw. “The hardest part is going to be convincing my husband of all of this. But it can work. And I think…well. This is what I need to do.”
Then she leaned back and pinned Jay with a stare. “Speaking of guys and such. I advised him to keep the first visit short. It’s been twenty minutes. You might want to move.”
Jay thought about pointing out that she hadn’t said anything about wanting to see him.
But why lie?
She went through the back way and headed straight to his car in the visitor parking lot.
The visitor parking was small.
The Foundation was technically a hospital, but it held only five patients at a maximum.
No more than two visitors at any given time were allowed.
They only had three patients in residence now and one of them had no known family.
He was a sad sort of case, one that broke Jay’s heart.
Dr. Mel Grady, one of the doctors who worked for Jones’s unit with the Bureau, was the doctor for the Foundation, and she wasn’t particularly hopeful about the kid, either.
The third patient was…unpleasant. One of the psychics who didn’t see the harm in using her abilities however she chose. And she chose to mind-fuck people, repeatedly. She was a victim of some serious abuse from the time she was a baby and Grady was hoping therapy would reach her.
For now, their only choice was to keep her here where she couldn’t hurt anybody.
She had her own personal bodyguard, somebody who could deflect her abilities and keep her from using her talent against others. She did have family, but he was serving a twenty-year term for the abuse he’d heaped on her.
The only one who’d gotten any visitors at all was DeeDee—no, Del.
Just as Jay leaned her hips up against the hood of the car, Del’s most frequent visitor came outside, staring at his feet, his shoulders slumped, head bowed.
Linc Dawson looked completely worn out.
She wanted to wrap her arms around him, guide his head to her lap and just let him rest.
But every time she’d tried to give him comfort, he’d pushed her away.
When she’d tried to call, he’d refused to answer.
When she’d gone to his house, he hadn’t answered the door.
Now, here he was…and if he pushed her away this time, she’d have her answer.
In a number of ways.
She’d have that answer for Taige and she’d have the answer for herself too.
If he turned away this time, then she was done.
She knew the very moment he sensed her.
He hadn’t even looked up.
But he stopped in his tracks.
His shoulders tensed. Slowly, that slump left them. He sucked in a breath of air and she watched as tension rippled through him and, in the next moment, energy seemed to crash into him and the exhaustion died away, replaced by a taut, pulsating rush that had her catching her breath before he so much as lifted his head.
Twenty feet remained between them.
But his eyes caught hers, held hers and he stared at her, his gaze a palpable stroke against her senses.
She gripped the metal at her back. If she had superhero strength, that car would have the indentations from her fingers at this point. As Linc started to walk toward her, she had to remind herself that not only was breathing a good thing, it was kind of necessary.
The dull ache that had lived inside her for the past couple of months seemed to spread as he came to a stop a few feet away.
He didn’t say anything and the silence gnawed at her.
When in doubt, she thought, fall back on attitude.
It had gotten her through
many, many things.
“I take it you saw Del,” she said.
His only answer was a short nod.
Sighing, she hooked her thumbs through her pockets and tried to figure out just what to say to him.
He echoed her posture unconsciously, rotating his neck like he’d been carrying a lot of tension there. She imagined he had. He was here every week, like clockwork, on Tuesdays at eleven. Once he’d been here with Del’s mother but that hadn’t gone over well. Now Del’s mother called daily, although none of them had told Del or Linc that. The calls weren’t going over well and the woman ranged from desperate to threatening and none of them could tell her the real reason Del was there.
Did they tell her that Del was a powerful psychic who could kill dozens if she left before she was ready?
Or did they tell her that Del didn’t want to leave?
Either of them were true, but neither of them were the truths the woman would listen to. It was even worse, though, that the woman had every right to be angry, worried, scared, frustrated. It was even worse when Del had screamed at her so loudly everybody in the Foundation had heard. “Get out…! You don’t understand and I can’t make you understand…just get out! I don’t want to see you!”
“She’s doing a lot better.”
Now, finally, a response. A faint smiled curled his lips and he nodded. “I know. I can see it.” Then he looked away. “She doesn’t want to leave, though. I asked her if she thought she was ready and she said didn’t ever want to leave here.”
Jay closed her eyes. “She can’t stay forever.”
“I can pay whatever—”
“It’s not that,” Jay said gently, shaking her head. Then she gave him a faint grin. “Although we will be billing you. The families and patients who can pay, we try to collect. This place is maintained through a trust, and through…unusual funding and endowments that Oz was able to set up. But the money won’t last forever so we’ll bill those who can pay.” She looked around, her gaze resting on the walkway that led to the watergardens not quite visible from where they stood. “We can only have five people here at a time. Usually there are two or three at any given time, but there will come a day when Del is able to maintain, and we’ll need her bed for somebody who is…broken. She won’t always be fragile. We can’t turn somebody away because she just feels safer here.”
The Innocent: FBI Psychics, Book 2 Page 13