The Innocent: FBI Psychics, Book 2 (12 page)

“Do you remember anything?”

Her lids flickered and Jay looked away.
“Very little. It’s there, but…”

Taige didn’t need anything else.

It was there for her too. She’d picked up on hazy images from Jay’s mind and they’d connected with the weird little blips she’d been seeing since they’d arrived here.

And now…

Now they just waited.

Like a page in a book, just waiting for her to look at it.

That was all she had to do.

Setting her jaw, she reached out and touched her hand to Jay’s arm, prepared herself, braced. She couldn’t entirely brace for the contact, though. Jay had been slowly rebuilding her shields, but under Taige’s touch, she eased them down and Taige felt herself caught in a whirlwind—a whirlwind of emotion and images and memory.

Jay
saw
in images. Emotion was tied into memory, events, words…things that happened in a person’s life, and all of that translated to very real, vivid pictures for Jay. Everything she picked up from another, she
felt
and if she felt it, she
saw
.

No empath experienced things the same way—psychic gifts were like snowflakes and fingerprints. No two were exactly the same.

But Taige hadn’t been prepared for just how
deeply
Jay
felt
what she saw.

It was more like Jay immersed herself in whatever she saw than anything else. Immersed herself, and lost herself, plunging head-deep into a pool that was made up of memory and pain and pleasure and laughter and tears.

If it was like this every time, no wonder she avoided touching anything, avoided being touched.

How terribly lonely that must be.

No wonder she’d grabbed onto a moment with that guy over there. She must have been starving for it.

Taige absorbed what Jay had experienced out on the rolling green lawn and her heart ached.

As she broke the connection, the gray—the nebulous darkness that would pull her in soon—swarmed closer and closer.

Sucking in a breath, she snapped her connection to Jay and shoved upright. The room spun around her. Blood roared in her ears. Was it her? Or did it seem like there were screams?

Cullen caught her arms. “Come on, baby,” he said, steadying her. Already he knew what was happening. He should. He’d been there, at her side, for this sort of thing a hundred times. A thousand. “Let’s get you off your feet.”

“Can’t…” Her tongue felt thick. A forgotten scream echoed in the back of her mind. And the girl… Her vision felt like it was no longer her own as a girl stared upward, where she could see nothing but an odd, oblong box of light, centered directly overhead. “I have to…”

“Sit.” Cullen started to walk her off to the side. “That’s what you have to do. It won’t be any use to do anything until this passes.”

Yeah. Maybe he was right.

She let him guide her off to a chair at the side in the room. As he eased her down, her belly rebelled and she thought she might be ill.

Whatever waited for her in the gray, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Chapter Eight

A taut silence greeted her.

Her head was still muddled.

Her skin prickled.

But none of that mattered, because she was painfully aware of that silence.

The sting of anger against her shields. She didn’t know who was angry, and her gut told her that was important.

Her hands felt like stiff little blocks at the ends of her arms and it took two tries to finally shove her hair back from her face. When she finally succeeded, she managed to tip her head back and looked around.

The second her gaze landed on him, she knew what the problem was.

Sometimes when normals found out what she was, they would give her this weird look. There were variations of the look, everything from
huh…that’s kind of cool
to
freak
to
fraud
to
let’s stick her under a microscope and study her
.

Linc wasn’t doing any of that.

There was nothing on his face but pure, icy anger.

His eyes, that amazing midnight blue, were remote, arctic pools and his face could have been carved from stone.

His arms were crossed over his chest and everything about him said,
stay away
.

She understood.

She’d known this would be the reaction.

She wished she could make him understand.

But there was no explaining this.

Slowly, she sat up, keeping her expression blank as she took stock. Sometimes, when her gift came on like that, it hit her like a bad case of the flu. Other times, she was so energized, she felt like she’d mainlined a case of Monster. This was somewhere in between. She was both tired and exhilarated. Ready, but she wanted to rest.

She was going to go with
ready
, because something was painfully clear in her mind now.

Linc’s daughter, DeeDee, wasn’t dead.

Her muscles fought her as she stood, but she ignored it. Searching the room, she ignored the scathing look on Linc’s face. The tremors racking her stilled as she saw Taige sitting in a chair in the corner, but the way the other woman sat, the odd, passive expression on her face made her uneasiness oddly worse.

Her gut cramped, knotted, as she crossed over there and waited by Cullen’s side.

“Is this how it works for her?” she asked quietly.

Cullen sat, his blue-green eyes on his wife’s face, his elbows propped on his knees. He gave a single, short nod.

“Should I be quiet?”

He flicked her a glance, a half smile on his face. He shrugged. “No. It won’t matter to her. She’ll…” He paused then, leaning forward.

Taige’s mouth parted.

She gasped.

Then she blinked and her hands tightened on the arms of the chair.

A second later, her entire body shuddered.

Taige came out looking like death.

Linc saw her face, ashen under the smooth, warm brown of her skin, fine lines fanning out from the corner of her eyes.

I don’t believe this.

No. That wasn’t true.

He didn’t
want
to believe this.

Both of the women had spent the past few hours locked in an odd, almost-trance state.

A few months ago, he could have brushed it off. But there was a weird feel to the air. Part of him thought he should look for a massive, cold-mist vaporizer, something that would put a chill, damp feel to the air, but that wasn’t it.

As Taige surged up out of the chair, the chill and the damp was just
gone
, replaced by a static charge that left him feeling like there was a storm waiting to drop.

And it all had something to do with those two women.

He rubbed a hand down his jaw, debated on what to do, what to say.

She stared back at him.

Jay had moved to the window and was staring outside. If he had to guess, she was staring at the very spot where he’d found her earlier.

That one where everything had started to go to hell.

The familiar scents of bacon and biscuits and coffee filled the air. Robyn had retreated to familiar grounds and was working on breakfast, although he’d told her it wasn’t necessary. He wished she’d listen. He didn’t know how to handle having her here right now.

Familiar ground
.

He curled one hand into a fist as Taige turned away.

He had a good idea of how to handle familiar ground, he thought.

Robyn appeared in the doorway, a wheeled tray in front of her. “I thought everybody could use some coffee,” she said, her voice bright, full of false cheer.

Taige opened her mouth. He could see her response, written on her pale, soft features. That warm, gentle brown, those pale gray eyes. Rising from his chair, he pinned Robyn with a look. “No.”

As their gazes cut to him, Robyn’s mouth fell open. “No,” he said again. “You can take it to the kitchen and serve them there. I need to speak with Ms. Roberts alone.”

So now I’m Ms. Roberts…

She fought the urge to sigh, fought the urge to rub a hand over the ache forming in her heart.

She’d known this was coming, ever since those stark words, right before he’d taken her into that sleek, sexy shower.

If that’s what you are, what you had to tell me…I…fuck, I’m glad that’s not why you’re here…

It was almost like he’d chosen to be deliberately obtuse, shutting what she was out of his head so he didn’t have to think about it. She understood. She’d done that sort of thing in her life, more than once.

She’d told him she hadn’t come for his daughter, and she hadn’t.

But now that she was here, his daughter was her focus. It had just taken a while to get her focus
on
, so to speak.

And now…whoa, was it on.

Her vision swayed in and out, the images from her inner eye superimposing on the here and now.

Dirt.

Pain.

Blood.

Daddy—

Jay fought those images aside, locked on Linc’s face. The poor girl was trapped, still thinking of him as Daddy.

That was the heartbreaking thing.

The troublesome thing was everything else she was doing.

And dear God.

Was she doing some serious shit.

A spray of blood washed across her mind’s eyes.

Why won’t you help!
The girl’s tortured scream, into the mind of a boy who didn’t understand.

If Jay hadn’t recognized the boy’s face from that impromptu search she’d done on Hell, Georgia, she wouldn’t have thought much of it.

Another face flashed through her mind and his was familiar—he was one of the kids who’d shown up in her search, a boy missing now for seven weeks. He was one the girl knew. He’d held her wrists pinned by her head, and he’d laughed. Laughed and laughed, while another one tore at her clothes.

Linc…
She stared at him, wished she could reach out and stroke the tension from him, wished she could make him understand.

But she didn’t even know what they were dealing with.

Until she did, she couldn’t even offer him any kind words.

There was, she thought, one crucial, clear image in her head.

Darkness. Dirt walls.

No.

Two.

A man, standing at the edge, staring down at her.

And those earthen walls.

She pushed it aside and moved to lean against the back of the couch, staring at him. “So,” she said, her voice edged with mockery. “I’m Ms. Roberts now, huh?”

Robyn, the housekeeper, had already left, taking that life-giving caffeine with her. Cullen had also left. But Taige lingered in the door, her hand on the edge. Her presence was a silent offer of strength, but just then, Jay didn’t know whether to accept it or not.

Blood rushed to her cheeks, suffusing her face with a wash of heat and shame settled in her belly. He’d decided to be blind, she knew.

But she could have set him straight.

No, she hadn’t come her because of his daughter. She’d come here about their relationship and she’d stumbled into a nightmare.

It wasn’t anything either of them had done wrong—her coming here, him unconsciously choosing not to acknowledge the truth. He’d needed to hide from it, she knew. She couldn’t blame him. It made sense, in a way.

But she’d messed up when she hadn’t told him about her abilities.

Swallowing the knot in her throat, she looked at Taige, waited until the woman’s pale gray eyes connected with hers.

“Go. I made this mess. I need to clean it up
.
”

Jay couldn’t communicate on a psychic level, not on her own.

But Taige didn’t need her to reach out. She only needed the words and she’d pick them up just fine.

For a moment, Taige didn’t do anything, then her shoulders rose and fell on a sigh and she gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod.
“We can’t leave. I’m filtering through what I have. It won’t take long. We’ve got a hunt ahead of us. You know that.”

Jay didn’t respond.

It wasn’t necessary.

As Taige left them alone, she looked back at Linc.

His eyes sliced into her like a blade. It was a miracle she wasn’t bleeding from it.

“You lied to me,” he said, his voice all but soundless.

“No.” She said that simple word, and she could say that much without lying.

“Don’t,” he snarled.

She didn’t let herself flinch, even managed to take a few steps forward, her eyes narrowing on his face. “I didn’t lie. You assumed after I said I hadn’t come down here for DeeDee that it meant I wasn’t psychic too. That’s
your
mistake, not mine. Yes, I should have addressed it, but…” She hesitated, floundering. She wasn’t going to explain that, not now. She’d stripped herself bare for him once. She wasn’t going to do it again. “I didn’t.”