by TL Schaefer
I laughed, and it wasn't a pretty sound. "Pretty sure I got the royal flush. I can feel the emotions of everyone around me." I took a deep breath. "And it's getting worse. Sometimes I can even hear what someone is thinking. I’m also having nightmares I can’t remember, but the emotions are so strong they stay with me for hours afterward. And one recurring dream, of my last day with DPD."
Summers leaned forward the tiniest bit, as if fascinated by my revelation. "When did this start?"
I'd already been down this road, racking my brain. "The closest I remember was before we met, when we were tracking Burke. I was picking things up then but didn't really understand it. I still don't. Then when the Russian latched onto me in Denver, it was like it all exploded around me. I could feel everything he was feeling, almost read his thoughts. It was fucking spooky."
Summers was nodding. "Given what I’ve seen since we restarted CASI, and some of the case files we were able to find down in the bowels of the basement, I suspect you're an empath," he said. "But I find it odd that it's manifesting this late in your life. Most of the Talented we see, to include myself, know they're talented in their early teens, usually around the time puberty hits. Do you remember anything like this happening to you in the past?"
I shook my head. "Nope. I had a totally normal childhood, then joined the Air Force when I turned eighteen, mostly to get out of Waco, to see a bit of the world."
"And barracks life didn't affect you?" Summers' tone was a bit incredulous.
"Nothing like what I'm feeling now. I've gotta tell you, doc, I need you to help me figure this out. I can't help Tori if I'm afraid I'll have a meltdown every time someone around me decides to have a brain fart."
He laughed at my imagery, as I'd intended, but Farrell sat beside me, even more stoic than usual. Was it because we'd finally confirmed what all of us had suspected? That I belonged to this school as much as Sara or Summers?
Or was it because Jonah Summers still looked at Heath as if he was something nasty on the bottom of his shoe?
The debacle in Denver had shredded old alliances and formed new ones. Heath had been on the losing end of those shifts, and he’d done it to himself by not being forthcoming with the rest of the team when it really counted. I’d do well to remember that if I ever started feeling anything other than cautious around him.
Summers was tapping his fingers on the desktop now and eyeballing me with an expression I didn't much care for. "I could put you under, see if there's some kind of hypnotic suggestion I can plant to help you control the input."
I shifted in my chair. As much as I wanted this to be over, or at least under control, I liked the idea of letting someone in my head even less.
But it was for Tori, and for her, I'd do just about anything.
Because as calm as I was pretending to be, both for myself and the others, anxiety still twisted inside me like a live wire. Tori was missing, and there was nothing in the world that would change that fact but having her back in my arms.
"All right," I said, "But I'd like Sara in here with me. Not that I don't trust you, doc," I said, and he knew I was fibbing just a bit, "I just know her lots better, and trust her judgement."
"No offense taken," he smiled, really smiled and I knew he understood my reservations. "Let's round up Sara and see if we can't help you out, and then we can start unraveling the mystery of where your little girl has been taken."
WE MET IN THE LIBRARY early that afternoon—I was spending way too much time in there. Sara brought Roney. I was happy to see that, had been banking on it, as a matter of fact. Roney'd been my friend for a very long time, since our first deployment to Afghanistan, then Iraq, then back to Afghanistan. I trusted him to have my back more than most anyone, even Sara. But Sara was Talented, knew what I was going through, had experienced it herself when she'd escaped into the big bad world and been forced to survive all on her own.
"I want you to be aware of what I'm doing, Monica. For this first round, I'm only going to put you lightly under, merely suggestible. If that works, then there's no need for anything deeper. I'm also going to ask you some questions about your childhood," he warned, "so we can figure out how you got this far without your Talent seeping through."
That sounded dandy to me. "Let's get this show on the road."
I was expecting some mumbo-jumbo with a swinging watch, but instead Summers just talked to me, talked in a low, soothing voice, and pretty soon I was more relaxed than I could ever remember being.
"Tell the thing you remember the most about your childhood, Monica." Summers' voice didn't command, it cajoled, and God help me, I responded.
"Papa dying. Leaving me and Mama alone." I stopped. He'd asked, I'd answered. Keeping it at just that made me feel better in a perverse kind of way. Sara, seated across the table from me, grinned as if she knew what I was thinking. She probably did. The fact I was answering his questions but still in control of my faculties was so reassuring it was stunning.
"How old were you?"
"Fourteen," I said. I didn't tell them how awful it had been to not only grieve for my parent, but to take control of a household and start all over in a new school when we moved in with Grammy.
Teenaged girls weren't the most compassionate of creatures. And Mama, well, she'd always been one of those women who needed to be taken care of. It worked when Papa was alive. After? Not so much. And after Grammy passed, I held the fate of the family in my hands.
"Okay, then let's go earlier. What do you remember when you were, say, five?"
"The animals," I said without hesitation. "Helping them cross the Rainbow Bridge. I wanted to be a vet." The words popped out of me, taking me by surprise. I never remembered wanting to be a veterinarian.
"What's wrong, Monica?" Sara asked, seeing my consternation.
"I don't ever remember wanting to be a vet or helping animals. I've never even had a fish, not that I remember."
Summers hummed beneath his breath. "Now we're getting somewhere. Okay, now let's go to age seven."
"Papa and Mama said it makes me too sad to help the animals, so I have to stop. I don't think I can." The voice was mine, as a full-grown adult. But the words? They were the words of a child. Jesus.
Heath shifted next to me, as if uncomfortable. That made two of us.
"Age eight?" Summers asked.
"We went to Dallas that year, to see Dr. Gavin. He made the feelings go away. I was sad, but it made Mama and Papa happy." The words felt torn out of me.
Farrell grunted next to me, as if he'd been struck. Summers began talking me out of the hypnosis, one easy word at a time, and when I was finally back to being adult Monica, we all looked at each other, mostly in discomfort.
"You've always been empathic, Monica, and it manifested with animals. Have you ever had a pet? Does Tori?" Summers asked.
I shook my head. “No, we always said we were too busy for one.” I looked helplessly at Sara, then Jonah. “What could have stopped me from feeling this, all those years ago?”
"I suspect your parents did what we were just considering,” Summers replied. “They had someone repress your memories of being empathic, put in roadblocks so you couldn't and wouldn't utilize or recognize your empathy."
"And being around CASI blew those roadblocks away," I murmured. It made sense. Whatever this Dr. Gavin had done was still in my head, because I couldn’t remember any of the things I'd talked about, just that I'd said them.
"Given that you've already experienced this filter, we're going to have to figure something else out. Let me do some research while you begin your own investigation, and we'll get together a bit later."
I pushed out a deep breath. "Thanks, doc. For what it's worth, at least we know now." I couldn't blame my parents for what they'd done. They'd been simple people who would have been frightened of the voodoo their child was exhibiting. I was frightened of it, and it was happening to me.
But for the time being, I was going to have to stay away from the children, because their raw emoti
ons sent me into too much of a spiral. Gaining control of my talent was quickly becoming my second priority to finding Tori. Because when we did, there was no way in hell I was avoiding my own child.
Chapter Six
WHAT CAME BEFORE...
Mama and I stood next to the hole in the ground. It was ugly, the earth angry and red against bright green grass dotted by granite headstones. I concentrated on one of them as far away as I could see, just so I wouldn’t have to look at Papa’s casket. Beside me Mama was making little hitching noises that sounded like a hurt animal.
I tightened my grip on her hand, wishing I could help her, somehow. It felt like I should be able to help her, to soothe her pain, but instead all I could do was try to read the inscription on the grave marker three rows over. I tried and tried, until tears misted my vision and I just gave up.
Papa was dead, and I didn’t know what Mama and I would do.
Now... Colorado Springs
Summers didn't want to put me under again, at least not until he'd done some research, so that left me barricaded in a school with a dozen kids going through puberty, an enraged father and a man who had made me go on the offensive every time we met. Every single time. That thought struck me, and I took a minute to really think about that.
Given Joe’s words and the fact I’d always been attracted to Farrell, it didn’t take much for me to figure out that I’d been going on the offensive because I felt guilty about finding Heath attractive.
Didn’t matter that Joe and I had made a baby during the lowest point in my life, after too many shots of tequila on both sides. I’d been trying to drown out the pain of the camp mascot, Yar, who’d been killed by an IED. Joe’d been slumming after passing the bar, living it up away from his family.
Didn’t matter that Joe and I were pretty much done from the get-go, we’d been married, for Tori. For family.
To me, married was married, and you didn’t look at a guy’s best friend. Period. But according to Joe, that’s what Heath had been doing all along.
The concept made my head hurt.
In the short term, there wasn’t a damn thing I could or would do about it. Not until we had Tori, home in Dallas, safe and sound. Then maybe I’d devote some brain cells to figuring out what used to be a very boring, sterile personal life.
Right now I was going to do what I should have when these feelings first started crashing over me. I hit the internet. Googled "empathy." Got a shit-ton of hits back.
Separating the wheat from the chaff could take me all day, but at least it was an action...moving forward when it seemed I’d been in a holding pattern of sorts for too long.
Arin Thomas sat across the room on her phone, doing something mysterious and FBI-ish, as she leaned back in a chair, teetering on the two back legs. It reminded me so much of Tori, I actually felt a stab of pain, and brought my hand to my heart in response.
I knew the others were doing everything in their power to find Tori.
Joe and Lawrence were using every contact in their arsenal.
According to Arin, DPD was pushing hard on the hit and run, to no avail.
Heath had pulled out all the stops with Global Dynamics and had his folks fully deployed. And me? All I could do was get myself right, so I could help my kid when we found her.
I blew out a deep breath and lowered my hand, ignoring how much it was shaking, ignoring how much Thomas' simple action had skewered through me.
I blindly returned to my research, going through the motions until I found a promising site, but the actual actionable pieces were buried under so much self-awareness crap I had a hard time even getting to the nuggets. But it gave me something else to do besides obsess and fall into fear.
Sara walked in a few minutes later and sat next to me.
"Any luck?" she asked.
"Sorta." I swiveled the screen for her to see.
She read through the first page, hemmed and hawed a bit, then traced a line with her finger. "This might be worth a try," she said.
I looked, and sure enough, it was what had caught my eye. The section talked about creating a force field of sorts, to block emotions.
"It's almost what you were already doing," Sara said. "You just weren't aware you were doing it. This might be even better, since you'll be working it intentionally."
I hadn't thought of that. But what would this force field even look like? How would I invoke such a thing? Even the thought of it made me snicker a bit, that little laugh of someone who's not comfortable with a thought, but was thinking about trying it anyway. The cynicism of a non-believer who wanted to believe, deep down.
"When you see my aura, you said it's red, right?" I asked, trying to grasp onto something, anything.
"Yeah," she smiled. "When you're in full alpha mode, it's like looking at a fire-engine. When you're in turmoil, it’s more like an oil slick, all the colors mixed together. It's actually kind of extraordinary."
"What am I now?" I couldn't believe we were having this conversation.
"Kind of a muted red." She scrunched her face up in concentration. "You may already be exerting control. When we were in Denver you were off the charts with the kaleidoscope, but since then, you've been more red than anything else. Hmmm."
"Maybe if I think red thoughts, it'll help," I mused. "Since Tori and Joe moved out, I've been trying to control it more, even when I didn't know what I was trying to do." A thought occurred to me. "The VA diagnosed me with PTSD, gave me some drugs. They made me feel like shit, but what if they can help? What if they can augment whatever I can do by myself?"
“Maybe,” Sara said, but I could hear the hesitation in her voice. “Just be really careful with any kind of drugs and your ability, okay?”
I remembered then what they’d done to her here eleven years ago, and a little shudder went through me. “They’d be my very last resort,” I promised. I wasn’t fibbing. The drugs had zoned me out to the point I hadn’t cared about anything, not even Tori, not really. There was no way I’d willingly put myself in that state again unless I absolutely had to.
Shielding it would be. I guess there was no better way ahead than practicing, and there was no time like the present.
EVEN AS I TRIED TO wrap my mind around the whole shielding thing, knowing I couldn’t really do anything else, I kept circling back to Tori. To the fact we were sitting here in Colorado Springs and still had no fucking clue where she was.
We’d done everything we could think of to find her, to little avail, besides involving the FBI. I knew that would be our next step, once everything else we’d attempted failed.
Inside, a part of me screamed to go to them right now, to call any one of the dozen agents I’d worked with in the past and demand their help.
But we had Arin in our corner, and she was shaking every tree she could. If we did go to the Bureau, we’d give them a roadmap. Because we weren’t talking about any old case. We were talking about my daughter, and there was no way in hell I was handing her future over to someone I didn’t know until I was sure our formidable set of options had been exhausted.
It may have been counterintuitive, but remembering Yar, remembering my helplessness that day in Afghanistan, helped me focus in the here and now. Helped me shape my own vulnerability into a tool with a purpose.
While Arin did her thing, I carefully directed my maternal terror over what could be happening to my child into a box. The top was off the box, so I could see and smell and feel what lived within, but it was contained within the four sides and bottom.
It was the only thing I could do as I explored my own self-improvement, so when we found Tori, she could come home with me. Where she belonged.
I was willing to do anything to make that happen. I looked at the drugs I’d thrown into my suitcase.
Even take the drugs the shrink had prescribed.
When I looked at the list the VA and my doctor had given me it was with a singular focus, with any side effects they might have at the forefront of my mind. I w
as fucked up enough already, thank you very much.
The one time I’d tried a full dosage it had made me a zombie, but what if I halved, or even quartered the pills?
Maybe that would help me tamp down some of the inputs—now hitting me at all hours—without making me one of the living dead. I still didn't like it, but I could learn how to blot stuff out later.
One thing had become clear to me as the afternoon progressed. Getting sleep last night, even with the nightmare, had restored my clarity of mind. I didn’t feel like I was swaddled in cotton anymore. If nothing else, I needed to consider starting out with a sleep aid before bed.
It was simply physiology, and I’d ignored it for too long by being pigheaded.
Having everyone near me was likely helping as well, at least from a support standpoint. Especially Summers.
In retrospect, I should've called him as soon as I started wigging out nine months ago. He was a veteran as well, a corpsman no less, who had likely seen just as much hinky shit as Roney and I had. The fact he was Talented just added a cherry on top.
He'd had to learn a massive measure of control all on his own—without drugs—while maintaining a career in the military. It was scary impressive, and something I'd be more than happy to emulate, once Tori was safe.
Maybe I'd be better off doing cram sessions with the good doctor. There was no way I was putting this shit in my system, not when we'd determined it wasn't PTSD pushing me over the edge.
Or at least not only PTSD. Because I was realistic enough to realize that anyone who had spent as much time downrange as Roney and I was likely to carry around a good amount of baggage. Yar was a good example of that. But until being drawn into this crazy world, I'd been dealing quite fine, thank you very much.
That thought calmed me down a bit.
I had been dealing. Been fine around Tori and Joe. Done more than maintain in the squad room. I'd kicked ass and taken names as a detective.
Until Burke had shown up and left a stream of bodies in his wake.