“Jilly.”
The girl looked away and Joss felt a pressure he hadn’t even been aware of lift off his mind. Then, the girl looked sheepish, a red flush creeping up her neck as she stared at whoever had said her name.
Turning his head, Joss found himself staring at a ghost.
Taige . . .
“I’ll be a motherfucker.”
She slanted a narrow look at him, rueful humor glinting in her gray eyes. He grimaced and looked at the kid. “Um, sorry.”
The girl giggled.
Taige sighed and shook her head. “Long time, no see, huh, Crawford?” Then she looked back at the girl. “Jilly, sweets, you know that everybody sounds loud for you at first. Give him a break and work a little harder at blocking him out, okay?”
Jillian—
Taige—
Pieces of the puzzle started to click together, and he glanced around. Taige was married. Had a stepdaughter. Weird job a few years back—the kid had been gifted . . . shit, he hadn’t realized the girl was that gifted. The kid’s dad was a rich son of a bitch, if Joss recalled correctly.
Absently, he glanced around the room, although he didn’t really expect to see anybody. He would have felt another person . . . except, he hadn’t. There was a sixth person in the room. A man, about his age.
Joss hadn’t sensed him at all.
Instinctively, he tensed, because the guy was almost a void. A blank.
“Not many people can read him,” Jillian said.
He looked at the kid. She smiled at him, and there was something smug, yet . . . oddly endearing . . . about that smile. “He’s my dad.”
Sighing, he looked at Taige. They’d worked together a few times, and he knew she’d hear him. Hoping the kid wouldn’t, he pushed his thoughts to her. Just how strong is she?
Taige stared at him. Stronger than everybody in here, combined.
Something that just might have been apprehension settled in Joss’s gut as he looked back at the girl. A Category 5 storm, indeed. “How good is your control? Really?”
She glanced at the table, then at Dez for a long minute before looking at him. “Well, there’s really only one way to find out, right?”
* * *
“CULLEN, come on.” Taige laid a hand on his arm, ignoring everybody else. Taylor had already left. Joss was sitting at the table, slumped in a chair, looking half-asleep. Dez was sitting next to him, and Jilly was in the chair across from hers, sketching.
“Why can’t we be in here?”
Taige sighed. “If I’m in here, it’s going to interfere with what they are doing. And if you’re in here, it’s going to be a distraction—one they don’t need. Joss knows what he’s doing.”
“I don’t.” He stared at the table, where his daughter sat with her head bent over the sketchpad. “Taige, what in the hell is going on?”
“This is how she helps.” Taige held out a hand. “Do you trust me?”
Eyes the color of the ocean stared into hers. Then he looked back at their daughter.
“Baby . . . I love her. She’s my heart, and you know it. Would I ever do anything to hurt her?” Taige asked. If he didn’t know the answer to that, she thought it just might shatter something inside her. But then, the ache that had been starting to settle eased as he placed his hand in hers. God. Thank God.
As he followed her out into the hallway, Jillian looked up from her sketchbook, a sad look in her eyes.
“What’s going on?” Cullen asked once the door shut.
Taige sighed. She’d known he wasn’t just operating on blind faith. She didn’t blame him. She was a parent. She hadn’t given birth to Jillian, but that didn’t matter. She was that girl’s mother. If she had been in Cullen’s shoes, not knowing a damn thing about Joss, or what would happen . . .
“Joss is what Jones has classified as a mirror,” she said, glancing over to see the head of the FBI’s psychic task force—one that technically didn’t exist—leaning against the wall, his iPhone in hand, looking like he wasn’t aware of anything going on but what he was staring at on the screen.
She knew better.
“A mirror.”
“Yeah.” She reached up to gather her hair into a tail, smoothing the riotous curls back until they were somewhat manageable. It had been a crazy, tiring day. If she’d known this shit was coming, she’d have had the mess put into braids or something a few days ago. “His gift is . . . well. Weird. He doesn’t have a set one; what he does is mirror ours. They call it synching. He syncs to another psychic—or in this case, two—and he can pick up on their gifts. When he’s done in there, he’ll have all of Dez’s abilities and all of Jilly’s as well.”
It boggled her mind even thinking about it. Jillian, alone, had too much in her head. Taige didn’t know how the girl handled it and stayed sane. How was he going to handle Dez’s ghosts on top of that?
“All?” Cullen said, his lids flickering. That was the only reaction he gave.
“All.”
“And how long does it last?”
“Until he hooks up with another psychic—does another sync. It . . .” She frowned, glanced at Jones.
“Reboots. It’s a reboot. Wipes the previous gift, or gifts, from his system and he’s imprinted with the next gift.” Jones looked up, his eyes unreadable.
“Wow. He sounds like a fucking useful workhorse,” Cullen said, curling his lip.
“Indeed.” Taylor inclined his head, his face impassive.
Asshole. He should have pummeled him a little harder. So what if he wasn’t fighting back?
“And what effect will this have on Jillian?”
Taige lifted a brow, a cool look entering her eyes. “Absolutely none.”
He stared at her.
She turned away. “I’ve worked with Crawford before. It was years ago when he was still newer at what he does, but he takes a gift in, and although it does a number on him, I didn’t feel a blessed thing. You should know better than to think I’d let her do anything that would hurt her. In any way.”
Cullen went to touch her shoulder, but she was already striding down the hall.
As she passed by Taylor, he touched her arm.
Cullen bit back a snarl as Taylor and Taige shared a long look before she pulled away and continued down the hall.
“Taige,” Cullen said.
“I’ll be back before they are done,” she said over her shoulder. “I need a few minutes.”
“Damn it, Taige.”
But she just kept on walking.
* * *
DEZ’S gift, Joss had dealt with before. He’d been imprinted with it and he’d done just fine. Didn’t like it, but the good news was, once he synced with somebody else, all her ghosts went away. He might pick up on those faint echoes, the way he had at the cemetery, the way he had at the warehouse, nothing major.
It was nothing like what Dez had to live with, though.
But he thought he’d rather have Dez’s gift, any day of the week, than live with what this kid had inside her all the time.
Endless whispers. Echoes of forgotten pain. Glimpses of forgotten pasts and yet-to-be-seen futures. All of it, she had all of that inside her head.
Where in the hell did she have room for her own thoughts?
As the weight of it all slammed into him, stretching his brain to the very limit, he was stretched as well; he fought to control his breathing, fought to control his heart rate, his fear.
And her fear.
Her terror was a living, breathing beast in his belly, a dragon growing in size that threatened to swallow him whole.
Meditation got him through these things, always, but it wasn’t doing him much good right now and he was clinging to consciousness by the skin of his teeth and it still wasn’t done.
Their faces—aw, fuck . . . their faces.
Got to help . . .
Jillian’s thoughts, her fears, they were a desperate cry in the back of his mind as face after face circled through his mind.
There was a woman. Head bowed. Dark hair streaming around her shoulders. He’s killing them . . . killing me . . . we can’t stop it . . .
We’ll stop it, Joss wanted to tell her. Look at me . . . let me see your face . . .
But then she was gone, as ephemeral as mist as, try as he might, he couldn’t bring her back.
Jillian’s voice continued to whisper, incomprehensible . . . what was she saying . . . names? It was almost a rhyme, he thought. But not quite.
Abruptly, the chaos in her mind came to a slamming halt and there was a man.
Everything stopped. And it was like time and space fell away. He and Jillian were no longer in that room, no longer in that hotel. They were somewhere else. He could hear laughter, screams. Smell the heat of the summer sun baking on the sidewalks. Cotton candy and cookies and ice cream . . .
“What is this?” he muttered.
“It was here,” Jillian said.
He flinched and looked over at the girl.
She stared straight ahead.
Automatically, he followed the line of her sight, startled to realize he could actually do it—it was so fucking real. Nothing like this had ever happened before when he’d synched to anybody. Blips of memory, yeah, but this wasn’t a blip. This was like a 3-D flashback from hell.
“It was here when I saw him. That was when it all started,” Jillian said. She shivered and crossed her arms over her chest. Thin arms, skinny, narrow body, hovering just at the verge of womanhood. She looked so young, Joss realized. So afraid.
It was instinct that made him turn his head and look down at her, wrap his own arm around those narrow shoulders. “Who is he?”
“The one who takes them.” She swallowed, staring at the back of the man’s head. It was a bright, cheerful place . . . and yet all Jillian could hear were screams. All she could feel was pain. It was like the man had an imprint of his own, and Jillian was keyed into it. And because she was, now Joss was as well. “He takes them. He sells them. He buys them. He gives them away. It’s like we’re nothing but toys to him. And I can’t see him well enough to stop him.”
A harsh sob ripped through her, and she covered her face with her hands. “All I had to do was run up there and look at him, but I was too afraid.”
Joss rubbed his hand down Jillian’s narrow back. “Does he sound like that when you look at him? Feel like that?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s awful.”
“Then you did the right thing. There’s no way I’d go running up to somebody like that, if I were in your shoes. You called for the big guns.” He hugged her tight.
“I could have found Mom. Said something to her. She could have tried to find him . . .”
“Hey, I said you called in the big guns. Your mom is a tough cookie, but when you’ve got a big monster, you go for the biggest weapon you have. That’s Jones.” He continued to stare at the man, committing everything he could to memory, although he knew this was just a memory—a child’s memory—and it was entirely possible, and likely, that Jillian wasn’t recalling things clearly.
White male. Blond. Possibly around six feet, but hard to say from a distance. Lean build. Suit.
“A monster,” Jillian whispered again. And the chaos of her mind returned, and the crystalline clarity of the memory started to fracture. It hazed, covered by a wash of blood.
He’ll kill them . . .
That whisper echoed through him, growing in volume until it was a roar. And then, just like that, it was done. Over and done.
It was one thing he couldn’t quite define, knowing the sync had completed, that he’d been fully imprinted with the needed gift. Maybe it was just an instinctive thing, but as Jillian’s voice continued to echo through his mind, he tore away from her, shoving away from the table. He stumbled exactly three steps before he went to his knees.
Then his hands came out, just barely catching himself before he would have smashed his face into the ground.
He’ll kill them, Joss . . .
For long moments, he hovered there, the neurons in his brain all but shrieking from the overload. Too much, too much, too much—
Cold whispers danced down his spine, and he shoved a wall up. No time to deal with the ghosts just yet, and fortunately, that was one mess he knew how to handle. He could shut it off better than Dez could, too, maybe because he was a callous son of a bitch who wouldn’t have to handle having a ghost haunt him for the rest of his life.
Groaning, he eased into a sitting position and buried his face in his hands while the voices continued to shriek in his mind. Too many. Coming from everywhere.
Even Jillian’s carefully soft voice was too loud.
Dez was at the table, staring at him, and through her eyes, he was treated to a visual of how he looked—Damn, he’s white as a ghost himself now. What in the hell . . .
Her mental voice was just too loud, though. Too loud, too much. Had to shut it down. Carefully, he eased up thicker shields, although it just barely managed to muffle the louder voices coming from Dez and people out in the hallway and surrounding rooms.
“How do you block them out?” Closing his eyes, he tried to focus on that one minor thing. Had to do that first or he’d go crazy. Everybody worked differently and he needed to know what worked for her.
“Doors,” Jillian said simply.
He nodded and pictured one giant, motherfucking door, slamming shut. The cacophonic noise inside his head faded to a dull roar.
“Thank God.” He swiped shaking hands down his sweating face. It wasn’t enough, nowhere near enough, but it was a start. The second he closed his eyes, he saw that flash again, that man. And he wondered if Jillian could sleep without nightmares about him.
“Where were you?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
She closed her eyes and lowered her head, resting it on the table. “Disney World. Mom and Dad took me to Disney World. We were by the castle when I saw him.”
He wanted to puke.
The memory of her terror, as she stood in a place that should have just held joy.
Just a kid.
But he realized she was right. She had more control than he did, because she’d been living with that horror in her mind. Somehow. And it hadn’t broken her.
The weight of her gift was a pressure inside his skull, stretching and moving inside him like a leviathan, and he didn’t know if he could contain it. Even with the presence of that door in his mind, he could feel everybody, and it was too much.
Dez, Taige, Jones. An odd blank spot that he recognized as Jillian’s father, only because he’d inherited that recognition from Jilly. Spread out, all around him, like stars in the night sky, were others.
“Show me how you shut your door,” he said gruffly. He’d work on the technique until he had one that suited him, but for now, he’d take the cues from her.
Jillian’s mind opened for him. Welcomed him. And he saw the door . . . it was like a stone gate, massive and immense, one that moved easily at her command. And when it was in place, the presence of others settled into the background.
Carefully, he climbed to his feet, still staring at Jillian.
Before she opened her mouth, he knew she would ask.
And even as the words formed in her mind, he knew the question.
“Can you stop him?” she was asking . . .
Even as he was answering, “I don’t know. But I’ll do it or die trying.”
She nodded.
Dez, unaffected, rose from the table.
There was a heavy, strained silence as she moved to open the door for him. As she turned to give him a sympathetic look, he kept his focus on his feet. On the floor. Just one step, then another. That’s it . . . one step, then another . . .
All the way down the hall, to the elevator.
He kept that right up until he was in his room, right up until he hit the nicely stocked minibar.
There, he hit the alcohol and did it without feeling any shred of guilt at all. With a norm
al sync, it could take a good twelve to twenty-four hours to adjust, sometimes more. This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t even in left field. It shot clear past left field, hurtling into unknown territory. For all he knew, he’d be a wreck for the next week.
No. Not acceptable, he thought dully. Not with all these screams. Not with all this pain. Not with the whispers of the dead dancing across his skin.
But he could damn well take a few hours and get shit-faced drunk as he struggled to deal with this, while he tried to process the horror that the little girl had been living with . . . combined with the cries of the ghosts that haunted Desiree Jones.
If he got through this without losing his mind, or without turning into a bona fide alcoholic, it would be a fucking miracle.
EIGHT
"YOU going to talk to me?”
It was hours later.
Jillian had fallen asleep, and Taige had stayed by her side until she knew the girl was sleeping.
Even now, she was having a hard time not going into the teen’s room to check on her. Should have stayed in there, she thought sourly as Cullen cut her off just outside their daughter’s room.
Chicken. Damn straight.
Sometimes it wasn’t always a bad thing to back away from an ugly fight. Especially when she knew she might say things that would leave bruises. Or when she’d hear things that would bruise her.
But he wouldn’t leave it be, so fine.
They’d have their fight.
Carefully, she closed the door, reaching out once more with her mind to check on Jillian. The girl was asleep, sound asleep, probably for the first time in months. A lash of guilt hit Taige, full across the heart. It wasn’t unusual for Jillian to have problems sleeping. Between her gifts and her nightmares, she’d have spells when the restlessness got bad, when she’d sleep for only a few hours. So they’d take her to her therapist, do whatever they could to help get her through whatever was bothering her.
And they’d done that.
But it hadn’t been enough because Taige hadn’t seen just how much worse it was this time. Over the past few years, Jilly’s gift had grown so much and her shielding . . . hell. She left Taige in the dirt and she’d been hiding so much of this. What Taige didn’t understand was why she’d been hiding. Although considering how Cullen had reacted to today’s events? Yeah. Maybe she did understand why.
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