Whispered Visions (Shifters & Seers Book 3)

by Tammy Blackwell

  “They think we’re dead,” she said again because it still didn’t feel like a real, actual thing.

  “Yes.”

  “No one is coming for us.”

  “No.”

  “Then we’re screwed.”

  Chapter 8

  They were screwed.

  An hour after Lord Fancypants’s visit, a woman with no neck and bloodhound jowls came and removed all pre-packaged food from their set of rooms, which Layne had begun to think of as their apartment. An hour after that, Caroline started begging for something to eat. Since they had no way of knowing what they’d doused the food with or what effect it would have on a toddler, Pari refused to feed her. Fifteen hours after that, he and Lizzie held up a sign to the cameras agreeing to take whatever meds they gave them if they would bring the sobbing Caroline some clean food. Thirty minutes after that, Jowls returned their granola bars, gave Caroline a ham sandwich, and watched as Lizzie swallowed down a little blue pill.

  “It was Paxil,” she told him. “They must have figured out that when you mess with a Seer’s brain chemistry, you mess with her ability to communicate telepathically.”

  Which meant not only did the SHP know they existed, but they also knew about the brain-to-brain network and how it got totally screwed up by anti-depressants.

  Awesome.

  At least they finally knew why Lizzie hadn’t been able to connect to Scout.

  “We’re going back to Plan A,” he said as if shooting their way out with guns they didn’t have was an actual plan.

  “No. No killing.” Lizzie pulled her legs up into the chair and hugged her knees up to her chest. “We’ll go with Plan B.”

  “Plan B? I thought that was waiting to be rescued by the people who think we’re dead.” A fact he was trying not to think about too hard. Every time he thought about someone telling his Uncle Charlie he was dead, Layne felt like crying. Too bad he’d given up on that particular activity years ago.

  “Okay, then we’ll call it Plan C,” Lizzie said. “We’ll play along, do whatever it is they want us to do, and wait for an opening. Eventually, they’ll screw up.”

  “And if that isn’t for another five or six years? What then? Are we just supposed to keep hanging out, doing their dirty work, and flirting with British assholes for the next decade?” When she didn’t answer, not even to contradict the last part, something in him snapped. “Maybe you want to stay here,” he said, hating the words as much as the venom dripping off them. “This is what your books are about, isn’t it? Giant houses. Family secrets. Tortured aristocrats. Do you think you’re going to be the one to fix him, Lizzie? Do you think he’s going to fall in love with you and realize how wrong he was? Maybe he’ll be committed to his cause until a night of passion-fueled sex ends up with you giving birth to his perfect Seer daughter. That will make him see the light, right? And then he’ll turn away from his evil ways and let us all go free. Except for you. You’ll stay and keep living out your fairytale while the rest of us try to pick up the shattered pieces of our lives and mourn the friends we’ve lost because you wanted to just sit around and see what happens.”

  If only there was a way to reach out, grab the words, and stuff them back down his throat, he would. He hadn’t meant it. Any of it. He knew Lizzie’s plan was the best one they had, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was as committed as he was to protecting the other Shifters and Seers of the world, but she’d smiled at the douche who brought her the gloves.

  It was a horrible excuse, but he couldn’t control it any more than he could Change under a new moon. The moment she showed even the barest hint of the kindness and warmth she hadn’t shared with him in years to someone else, his brain went on vacation, allowing his anger to take the driver’s seat.

  Most of the time, he just stormed off, saving them both from whatever words were fighting to come out of his mouth, but today there was nowhere to run.

  He should apologize. He knew he should, but he didn’t know what words to use, and he was afraid if he opened his mouth, the wrong ones would come out.

  Lizzie’s eyes met his, and for a single moment, everything inside him calmed. It was like a breath of fresh air after inhaling nothing but fumes for weeks. There was a time when it was always like this when she was around. In the beginning, it was why he sought her out. After his dad died, his brain was filled with constant noise. Lizzie took the noise away. She let him think full, uninterrupted thoughts. And then one day he screwed up and she took it away. No more silence. Only a noise made louder by her absence.

  “Apology accepted,” she said with a faint smile.

  He froze, quickly assessing the distance between their two chairs.

  “You’re not touching me.” And if she wasn’t touching him, then she shouldn’t be able to know what he was thinking. That was the way it worked. It was the way it had to work. Otherwise, she would know everything, and…

  “You’re stressed, tired, and hungry,” she said, waving her hand in the air as if to brush away his concerns. “I know how you are. You once flipped out on Maggie because you’d stayed up until two in the morning playing video games before your driver’s test and then someone ate the last of the donuts before you ventured downstairs. You didn’t mean anything just now. It was all over the I-accidentally-kicked-a-puppy look on your face.”

  Her words were breezy and logical, but the seed of unease she’d planted sprouted instead of dying an early death. Layne pulled his hand off the armrest and into his lap, trying to put as much distance between them as possible without making a scene.

  “Maggie had managed to turn one of my shirts pink and shrunk up my favorite sweater to the point I had to give it to Angel,” he said, still feeling a little guilty for making the artistic Thaumaturgic cry.

  “And I talked to the person responsible for murdering our people like he was someone I might willingly go have coffee with someday,” Lizzie countered. “I didn’t say you weren’t pissed at me.”

  He was angry with her. Sometimes he thought his anger might overpower everything else and hollow him out. Hell, he was looking forward to the day it happened. Anything was better than this constant wanting, this needing. It would be so much easier if he could hate her, but no. His heart had made up its mind to love her no matter what, and if it hadn’t changed its mind in the past three years, it sure as hell wasn’t going to do it now that she was in danger.

  “I know what he is,” Lizzie continued, unaware of the thoughts racing through his head. “He’s a zealot and a manipulator. A villain in the hero’s clothes.”

  She leaned forward, reducing the buffer space he’d put between them. It wasn’t fear he felt at her proximity though. With her face mere inches from his, all he could feel was the desire to reach out and jerk her closer.

  “But do you know what else I know about him?”

  Her eyes were locked onto his again, which made it hard to think.

  “What?”

  Her smile held no warmth. “Everything.”

  “Everything…?” And then it hit him. The idiot had grabbed her the day before. She’d been spent already, but this was Lizzie. She didn’t get drafted into the Alpha Pack when she was in middle school because she could grab a fleeting thought or hint of emotion. She was one of the strongest Seers in the world. If she said she knew everything, then it wasn’t a bluff. “What’s useful?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, sinking back. The confident Boadicea was gone. In her place was the scared, tired girl who just wanted to sit back and wait to get rescued. “It’s in there, but it’s all just…” She wiggled her fingers on either side of her head.

  “A jumbled up mess?” he guessed.

  “Exactly. Other than daddy issues and an ego the size of Texas, it’s all fuzzy. But I’m working on it.”

  And work on it she would. She would work on unraveling whatever was screaming in her head until her nose bled and she passed out. He’d seen her do it before and had no desire for a repeat p
erformance.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, trying to sound like it didn’t matter. “Daddy issues and an ego. That’s good enough. We can work that to our advantage.”

  Lizzie snorted. “Yeah, it’s a fantastic revelation. Good thing I’ve got these handy-dandy super-powers to See that Alistair is carrying the same matching luggage set of every other guy I’ve ever met.”

  “Hey, I don’t—“

  Lizzie cut him off with a raised eyebrow.

  Okay, so maybe his ego was a little on the elevated side and he might have a few issues related to his father’s death, but who wouldn’t?

  “I’ll keep filtering. Surely to God, with all the man’s thoughts and feelings banging around up there I’ll be able to find something useful.” The last part was mostly muttered to herself. Her bottom lip was caught between her teeth and her eyebrows were scrunched together. Layne knew that look. She was in her head, doing her Lizzie thing.

  Once upon a time, Lizzie and Layne had been the very best of friends. In hindsight, it was only a few brief weeks, but they had squeezed a lot into such a short amount of time. They told each other things they never mentioned to another soul. During those days of nonstop conversation, Lizzie had tried to explain her powers to Layne. She was frustrated because she couldn’t reach into a person’s head and grab what she needed like Talley, the Stella Polaris. They’d been walking around the garden that stretched behind the old Den in Romania when Lizzie reached her tipping point, kicking innocent rocks and de-leafing blameless bushes as she ranted about how useless her Sight was.

  “Talley gets to figure out your social security number while all I have is the noise, the noise, the noise. And if there is one thing I hate, it’s the noise.”

  “Calm down there, Mr. Grinch,” Layne said, prying her fingers off a rose blossom. In those days, she never wore gloves. She wasn’t afraid of what might come out of the noise then. “You keep trying to compare yourself to Talley, but what you do is totally different.”

  Even though she was fourteen to his thirteen, he felt responsible for taking care of her. Or maybe it was more accurate to say they were responsible for taking care of each other. Either way, it was Layne’s job to pull her out of her self-doubt spiral and make her see exactly how awesome she was.

  “We’re both Soul Seers,” Lizzie argued as she ripped the crushed petals off the rose one by one.

  “Liam and I are both Shifters, but I don’t see anyone offering me their neck,” Layne countered. “What you and Talley do is similar, but not the same. Talley’s Sight is like a scalpel, and your’s—“

  “Is like a wrecking ball?”

  “No, not a wrecking ball,” he said. “That doesn’t work for this metaphor at all. I was going to say an ice cream scoop.”

  Lizzie quit destroying yet another rose to shoot him a look. “An ice cream scoop? How flattering.”

  “Hear me out. Talley goes into someone’s brain, finds what she wants, and takes a tiny little sliver of information. But not you. Tiny slivers of information isn’t your thing. Instead, you go in a scoop out entire chunks of someone’s mind. You don’t just have one emotion, you have all of them. You don’t just get a social security number, you’ve got the moment of their birth, what their parents looked like, and every address they’ve ever called home. Talley gets thoughts and emotions. You get everything.”

  Roses completely abandoned, Lizzie smiled up at him. “Everything, huh?”

  “Most everything,” he amended. She was good, but he didn’t think she was that good. Yet.

  “It would be a lot more useful if I could understand even half of what that everything was.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out someday.”

  And she did. Not completely, of course, but she began practicing, using different members of the Alpha Pack as guinea pigs. Turned out, Layne was right. She was taking large chunks of a person’s mind at a time, and with effort, she was able to slowly start separating out individual bits of information.

  During those practice sessions, they also discovered Lizzie’s brain was like a digital storage unit. Once she uploaded something from someone else, it was hers forever. She simply had to concentrate on pulling it back out again. Sometimes she couldn’t do it, but if she had something to bind her to that person, like a shirt carrying their scent, it was easier.

  Layne figured living as a captive in Alistair’s house was enough to keep his file easily accessible.

  Since there was nothing he could do to help her do her brain thing, Layne sat back in his chair and watched her. Her eyes were closed as she concentrated on the noise banging around in her head. It hurt her. The pain was etched in the lines around her mouth and eyes. Occasionally, she would flinch, and every time she did, he reached for her.

  Still, even while fighting the demons only she could hear, she was beautiful. The sun coming through the window caught her hair and turned it into flames. Her neck was a long, slender column, decorated with the same freckles covering the rest of her body. He wanted to count each and every one of them, chronicle every dot.

  Layne knew how teenage crushes worked. He had friends, and he knew the way they fell in and out of lust every other week. So why the hell was he still obsessed with the same girl after three years of torture? Shouldn’t his libido find a new set of lips and hands to dream about?

  One of her bourbon-colored eyes popped open. “You’re staring at me,” she said.

  “I’m watching to make sure your brain doesn’t leak out of your ear.”

  The other eyelid lifted. “And what are you going to do if it does?”

  Scream. Panic. Cry.

  “Try to scoop it up and shove it back in?” Layne shrugged as if he couldn’t care less. “I don’t know. I just thought it would be cool to see.”

  For most people, sighing was an afterthought, a natural human instinct. But not Lizzie. Lizzie had perfected the sigh, turning a thoughtless noise into an art form. She could convey a million different thoughts and judgements with a single exhale. For example, the sigh escaping her lips as she dropped her head to rest on the arm of the chair said, “Just when I thought I had completely exhausted my mental capabilities on my own, I tried to have a conversation with Layne Hagan and realized I could, in fact, become even more exhausted.”

  Layne was an ass. He didn’t mean to be. Well, not always. The problem was, when it came to Lizzie, he always did the exact opposite of whatever it was he should be doing. He felt like an idiot, which pissed him off, which made him act like an even bigger ass. It was a problem.

  He knew he should do something to make things easier on her. Find some aspirin. Bring her some hot chocolate. Drape a blanket over her and convince her to take a little nap to regain her strength. Any of those things would be the right thing to do.

  “Well, what did you get?” he asked as his brain screamed for him to shut up and let her rest.

  “Not much. I was too tired when he touched me to focus, so it’s a big, tangled mess. Mostly some random childhood memories and general father-related angst,” she muttered into the worn velvet of the chair. “But I think I’ve figured out why we’re here.”

  “You mean other than because he’s a bigoted asshole who thinks killing the people we care about would be doing the world a favor?”

  “Actually, he doesn’t want to kill us. For Alistair, it’s all about control.” Lizzie massaged the inch of flesh between her eyebrows. “He thinks he’s one-upping his father by having a Shifter and a Seer at his disposal.”

  “And just how does he plan to dispose of us?”

  “I… I don’t know.” He would have heard the lie without the stutter, but he didn’t press her on it. “He wants to hurt you,” she said, “but that is hardly news.”

  No, not news at all. Layne could feel the threat of violence pouring off the Duke of Douchebaggery from the moment they laid eyes on each other.

  “Well, that’s good news, because I would like to do some significant da
mage to him,” he said, already anxious for the moment. Life would definitely be a whole lot sunnier after he planted his fist in Alistair’s face.

  Lizzie pulled herself back up to a sitting position. In his head, he was telling her not to do that, to get the rest she needed. In the real world, he simply crossed his arms across his chest and leaned back, putting more space between them to decrease the chance of any accidental skin-on-skin encounters.

  “You don’t understand. He doesn’t just want to black your eye or break a finger. He’s…” Something dark passed over her expression. Her gaze was focused somewhere miles - or months - away. “Caroline’s finger. He wasn’t just there. He’s the one who…” She tucked her hands against her sides as if that could stop their trembling. “He enjoyed it. That poor baby was screaming and crying, and he liked it.”

  With a blink, she was back in the present. “Don’t provoke him,” she said. “Yes, you’re stronger, and faster, and all around a better fighter, but he’s broken, Layne. He’ll do horrible things you can’t even imagine. You can’t win against someone like that.”

  He could, and he would. But first, he had to cut down the risk of collateral damage.

  “The moment you get out of this house, you run.” He didn’t even recognize his own voice. It was lower and rougher. Every emotion, including the apathy he worked hard to inject into every word, was gone. If he didn’t know any better, he would say it wasn’t him but his coyote talking. “You run, and you don’t look back.”

  “No.”

  “Once you’re gone—“

  “They know they can’t control you without me, so once I’m gone, they’ll kill you. I’m not going to let that happen.”

  She was once again Boadicea. Brave. Strong.

  She also happened to be a complete idiot.

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Were you not listening to the part of the conversation where I just explained how you can’t?”