by Eva Chase
Hidden Hearts
Alpha Project Psychic Romance #2
Eva Chase
Ink Spark Press
Hidden Hearts
Book 2 in the Alpha Project Psychic Romances series
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Digital Edition, 2018
Copyright © 2018 Eva Chase
Cover design: Melody Simmons
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989096-08-6
Created with Vellum
Contents
Free Story!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Magic Waking excerpt
About the Author
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1
Nick
I never would have expected a teddy bear to be my potential downfall.
It had seemed like such a simple return. I’d caught a glimpse of the pale blue fur, well-worn with love, in the middle of a flower bed in the park. Some toys didn’t justify bothering with—they were some cheap momentary entertainment the kid had probably forgotten about the moment it’d been out of sight. But when I’d picked up that bear and opened my mind to the impressions clinging to it, I’d been almost overwhelmed with the fierce affection of its owner.
Snuggles under a blanket, whispered thanks for keeping the bad dreams away. Daytime romps around a brightly lit yard, full of giggles and cheerful one-sided conversation. In just a few seconds, I’d known that bear meant an awful lot of someone.
I couldn’t always figure out how to return an item like that, especially when it’d belonged to a kid. The sense of a tan brick house had risen up quickly, but it had taken several attempts at delving into my impressions before a whisper had emerged of the kid hugging the bear and telling someone what street he lived on. Bingo!
I’d scoped out the street to find the right house, and then yesterday I’d dropped the bear off under the cover of night, setting it on the broad concrete front step of the narrow house in one of London’s pleasantly modest suburbs.
Little had I known the kid’s mom was some sort of social media personality. A popular one, by all appearances. She’d been so overwhelmed with gratitude that she’d posted on her blog and all over every other site on the internet about the savior who’d returned her son’s beloved “Blue Bear” to him after a week of failed searching.
So now I was lurking in the darkness behind a fence a few houses down the street, wondering just how screwed I was.
Maybe not screwed at all. It was possible the people looking for me hadn’t noticed all the social media furor. But that seemed unlikely. They’d managed to pick up on my good Samaritan practices beforehand without quite so much publicity to draw their attention.
The breeze drifted over me, cool after a warm late September day and smelling of fresh grass and fading hydrangeas. It should have been soothing, but it barely cut through my apprehension.
I held still and silent, hidden by the fence and the ash tree next to it, as a group of friends who looked to be in their early twenties ambled past, laughing and jostling each other through their chatter. A taxi pulled up down the street, and a harried man in a business suit got out and practically leapt up the steps to what I assumed was his home. A couple of teens thumped out of the house next door, the girl muttering at the guy about some other girl he’d apparently been texting.
“It was just once!” the guy protested over and over. “I didn’t even say anything!”
Their voices faded as they meandered away down the street. For a moment, the street was as still and silent as I was. I drew in a breath and let it out slowly.
Even if the people looking for me had noticed the mom’s gushing and connected it to the guy they were looking for, I didn’t know how they’d investigate. They might never come by her house at all. But it was the only point of connection they had. And people like them liked to operate under the cover of night almost as much as I did.
I didn’t really feel comfortable waiting here by the house myself, but at least this once I was grateful that I took more after various grandparents than my actual parents in looks. If my family’s enemies happened to spot me, there wasn’t much chance they’d connect me to the psychic escapees they’d spent the last thirty years hunting down, as long as I played it right. It might even be useful to get closer and work a little of my talent if I had the chance.
I was lucky I’d been tipped off to Alpha Project’s interest in my activities at all. A while back I’d made friends with a guy who worked as a bouncer at one of London’s biggest clubs. The atmosphere in those places could get overwhelming, but sometimes I enjoyed being absorbed into the huge mishmash of impressions and experiences of all those people letting go.
And they were also a trove of lost items. Dushane and I had developed a cautious understanding where he showed me any important-looking items that got left behind, and I helped him figure out if they belonged to any of the regulars.
Two Saturdays ago I’d dropped in, and he’d pulled me aside during a lull at the front door. “Hey,” he’d said. “I thought you should know. This shady guy came by a few days ago asking around if any of us had heard of a guy who was good at finding stuff. I don’t know what he wanted with the guy or how he got that idea in his head, but I think he’s got to be on to you.”
My pulse had hiccupped. “No one mentioned me, did they?”
He’d shaken his head. “No one would have thought of you except for me, and I know better. Just stay on your toes, Nick. Something’s afoot. You got any idea who’d be looking for you?”
“No,” I’d told him, but I’d been lying. Thirty years ago my parents had escaped from that underground lab that had experimented on people like us—people with psychic talents—under the name Project Alpha. We hadn’t even been sure they were still around, let alone still cared that Mom and Dad had gotten away, after all the time we’d spent on the run. But this past spring, my older brother, Jeremy, had caught their notice.
They knew we were still out there. And they obviously wanted all of us back under their control.
Somehow they’d caught wind of items being returned here and there in London too often to be a coincidence. I’d kept an even lower profile than usual since then, but the social media storm around the Blue Bear…
No, I didn’t really believe they could have missed it.
I rested my hand against the dry wooden boards of the fence. Even that mundane object had impressions clinging to it. I let my mind open to them just a little, just to occupy me while I waited.
The whir of a saw cutting the board into shape. The holler of one of the workers who’d constructed the fence as he’d motioned for another nail from a colleague. The hasty passing of a cat that had scampered along that th
in top as it chased after a squirrel.
My phone buzzed in my pocket—the burner phone that I only used for family communication. I focused back on the present and tugged it from my pocket.
My youngest brother, Liam, had sent a quick message. No unusual activity around those online posts so far. I’m still keeping my eye out!
What time was it even, over there in Tokyo? But Liam kept some pretty odd hours. Sometimes I got the feeling he never completely disconnected from his various computing devices, even in his sleep.
But the hacking skills he’d developed had been good for us. Right now he was checking whether any of the posts the mom had made got comments or replies that seemed probing, so he could follow-up on those leads. The more we knew about the people who were after us, the easier we could stay ahead of them.
Thanks, I wrote back. I owe you one. Or probably more like a thousand. No unusual activity right here at the house, either.
Set up a spy cam and I can cover that for you too, he replied with a winking emoji.
He was just joking, but I knew the idea of running surveillance in person made him as edgy as it made me. But my power came through touch. I was used to finding my way by holding things in my hands. So despite my nerves, there was also something reassuring about being here with the house just a few seconds’ walk away.
It was coming up on midnight. Not many people just strolling along the street at this hour. I was alone for another ten minutes until a middle-aged woman and a teenaged girl I guessed was her daughter hurried past, the mother frowning and the girl’s eyes bright with excitement. What was their story?
My gaze followed them as they hustled past—and caught on a younger woman approaching on the other side of the street.
The young woman wore a black top and dark jeans that almost blended into the shadows between the street lamps. But when she passed through the brighter streaks of light, it was impossible not to notice her. Her thick black curls were pulled back in a ponytail that cascaded between her shoulder blades. The glow caught on every plane of her smooth bronze-brown skin. Her deep-set eyes drifted along the road warily enough that I’d bet she had some bad experiences in her history. She moved with an athletic grace, soft but confident strides of her long lean legs.
I would have simply enjoyed the view for the brief time she was passing by, except she wasn’t just passing by. She slowed as she came up on the house where I’d left the teddy bear last night. My shoulders tensed.
The young woman came to a stop by the front walk. She scanned the yard and the house, and then the street around it. Her full lips had pursed.
Was she with Alpha Project? There wasn’t any reason she couldn’t be. I waited, expecting her to go up to the house, maybe check around the front step for any evidence I might have left behind. But after she’d checked the street around us, she just stayed where she was, looking toward the house again. The mother-and-daughter pair had disappeared into one of the other homes. It was just the two of us, and she didn’t know I was there.
Something strange came over the woman. Her body sagged just slightly, her jaw dipping. Her face seemed to go slack. Her eyelids drifted half shut. She looked as if she’d gone into a daze.
An uncomfortable prickle ran down my back. What was she doing? If I hadn’t known better, I’d almost have thought she was drawing on some inner power of her own. Liam’s expression went like that when one of his visions came to him.
Did I know better? The Alpha Project scientists had kept my parents and so many others like them as if they were lab rats, prisoners in cells to be tormented for their research. I couldn’t imagine any of those “subjects” willingly helping their captors. But what if in the last thirty years they’d learned enough from that research to activate powers in some of their own people?
Our talents were the one thing we’d been able to count on to stay ahead of Alpha Project. How the hell could we survive if they turned talents of their own against us?
My jaw set. I knew what I had to do. I couldn’t answer any of those questions without getting at least a little closer to the woman who was standing dazed on the other side of the street.
2
Carina
The house didn’t look like much. A cookie-cutter duplicate of half the others on the street: two stories of tan brick with white trim, sharply peaked roof, big awning over the front door.
It was the step under that awning where my target had left the toy bear. The woman who owned this house had gushed about it in detail: how she’d tucked her little boy into bed feeling despondent about her helplessness to find his favorite companion, her startled joy the next morning when she’d opened the door to collect the newspaper and found the bear sitting next to it.
The scene was a lot less horrifying than the one his brother had left in San Jose. A little shudder rippled through me at the memory of the wreckage in that warehouse, the bloodstain on the floor from the guard who’d died trying to defend the meeting Jeremy Keane had crashed into.
But just because this Keane brother seemed to be making innocuous use of his talent, that didn’t mean I could let down my guard. The whole family, from every story I’d heard about them, was vicious down to the bone. My hand crept up to clasp my necklace, the one thing I had left that my parents had given me. The cool surface of the moonstone pendant steadied me.
The guy I was after had come in the night. Last night. It shouldn’t be too hard for me to reach back to that time. The more recent the past, the easier for me to focus my talent.
I dragged the cool night air into my lungs and let my gaze detach from the present. My mind eased back through the past as my vision blurred.
Last night. Darkness, a moon nearly as full as the one above me now, the leaves on the sapling in the yard just starting the yellow around the edges in anticipation of autumn. Somewhere in that span there should be movement, a figure creeping up the front walk…
There. I trained my mind’s eye on the images spilling out before me, ignoring the faint buzzing sensation in my ears that always came with this intent a search.
A man came into view, a bundle tucked under his arm. The bear. He walked softly but swiftly along the sidewalk and then up to the house’s front steps. Without a second’s hesitation, he set the toy down, leaning it against the door. His head swiveled as he left, checking again for any witnesses, I guessed.
He couldn’t have imagined that someone might witness his actions from the future, as if I’d been standing right here watching him back then.
Or maybe he could have. The guy had been awfully cautious, whatever he’d anticipated. He wore a hooded jacket with the hood pulled low to shadow his face, and a thin scarf obscured all his features from the eyes down as well. Between that and the darkness and the fuzziness around the edges of my vision that made my glimpses of the past not quite so vivid as the present, I couldn’t tell much about him other than he was definitely a guy.
Average height, although he was hunching his shoulders, so it was difficult to get a totally accurate read even on his size. Those shoulders were fairly broad, and he walked as if he had a fair bit of muscle on him. I couldn’t even make out what color his hair was with that hood, but his skin was on the paler side. Caucasian.
Nothing I didn’t already know. I’d watched him once before, at the scene of another returned item my colleagues had been able to identify. This was obviously his MO: slipping in and out under the dark of night, his appearance hidden. Even if he hadn’t had any idea we might be hunting him, I supposed he’d have wanted to avoid security cameras and accidental witnesses too. Too many questions raised about how he’d found the items he had, how he’d known where to return them.
Whatever his reasons for this little hobby, he was a menace, and we needed to bring him and the rest of his family in. That was all I needed to know about it.
My forehead furrowed as I pushed my mind back and concentrated on the guy’s arrival again. I followed his movements a second time, hoping for some
little clue I’d missed. But this Keane brother was good at being subtle. I guessed he had to be, considering he’d kept ahead of Alpha Project for twenty-some years.
I blinked, clearing the past from my eyes and coming back to the present. My hands had clenched. Frederick, my supervisor, was going to be disappointed that I’d discovered so little here. I was disappointed. Such a perfect lead, but it’d lead pretty much nowhere.
We would bring the Keane family down in the end. They couldn’t get away with all the ways they’d hurt so many people. I’d keep tracking them to the ends of the earth if I had to.
A warm baritone voice broke through my thoughts. “Hey, are you okay?”
I startled and spun around. A guy was standing on the sidewalk just a couple feet away from me—I hadn’t heard him coming up. My heart kept thumping, but after that first instant it wasn’t just because of nerves.
The guy was fine. Like, in the most positive sense of that word. He couldn’t have been much older than me, late twenties maybe, with tawny hair and dark blue eyes that seemed to promise all sorts of hidden depths. With that chiseled face, he could have been in movies. The only flaw was his nose, which had a tiny crook in it, like it’d been broken once and never set quite right. But that just stopped him from being too perfect, gave him a little edge.
He was at maybe half a foot taller than me, and I was no shorty, but something about the way he held himself stopped his height from being imposing. The vibe he gave off was concerned but also warm like his voice.