Brodie interrupted her with utter calm to say, “I don’t work with partners anymore. What I risk is mine to risk. I came into this war with my eyes wide open, and I can take care of myself. I can also take care of a psychic in my charge.”
“As long as you don’t have an inexperienced partner to worry about,” Tasha murmured.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Cait was fragile. I’m not.”
ELEVEN
“Tasha,” Brodie said in a warning tone.
“Look, you’re thinking about it. Her. Remembering. I’m sorry, but I can’t tune that out.”
“You can stop talking about it,” he said with more than a suggestion of gritted teeth.
Tasha slid off the bar stool and took her iced tea into the living room, settling down at the far end of the couch. She was wondering if putting even a little distance between them would at least dim the awful images and muffle the emotions in him.
It didn’t.
She started reciting the multiplication table in her head, having a mental argument with herself about the fact that she should have paid more attention in school, because for the life of her she couldn’t remember all the nines—
“Tasha.”
She blinked, finding him sitting on the coffee table right in front of her. “Well, that’s interesting. If I really occupy my mind, maybe I can block you at least a little. Or for a little while. Because I didn’t know you were coming over here.”
“I’ll do my best to keep my mind and emotions quiet,” he told her. “As much as I can, at any rate. But leave that to me, okay? I honestly don’t know if it’s wise for you to even try to shut down the connection. Even temporarily.”
“Why not?” It wasn’t a question she found answered in his mind, which was something of a relief.
“Because one of the things we’ve figured out about all this is that experience—and pressure—tend to cause a psychic’s abilities to evolve. Sometimes get stronger. Sometimes change in ways nobody can predict. For whatever reason, what comes of it is almost always a kind of self-defense mechanism, or can be used that way. An extra weapon you might be able to use somehow to save yourself if you’re facing a threat.”
“And no matter where I go or what I do, I’m bound to face a threat,” she said. “Sooner or later.”
“It’s a war,” he said simply. “The other side wants you.”
“But you’re here.”
“I’m here. And I’ll be here as long as you need me. Unless they manage to take me out. The way they took out Cait.”
“They could never take you out that way. Not you.”
“Not that way, probably. But I’m a realist, Tasha. I’ve been in this war long enough to see a lot of our soldiers fall, some taken, some killed or otherwise destroyed. We’ve saved psychics—and we’ve lost psychics. Those of us who protect or fight are committed, and most of us are highly trained, some former military or law enforcement, or trained by others on our side once we join up. And we can be well armed when we need to be. But we’re not invincible. And not knowing their plans, their endgame, puts us at a disadvantage. All we know, all we can really be sure of, is that they want psychics.”
“But why? Why are psychics so important to them?”
“If we knew that, we could at the very least fight them more effectively. All we can really do now is try to gather information, locate and protect psychics, and keep growing our organization of . . . soldiers.”
Tasha drew a breath and let it out slowly. “You’ve been in this war . . . almost ten years. Right?”
“Right.”
“Then you must have some sense of whether we’re winning or losing. Don’t you?”
“We’re . . . fighting a holding action, most of the time. Or so it seems to me. Win some battles. Lose others. Save some psychics. Lose others. Face off with the other side rarely, in the flesh. And even when they’re right in front of us, it doesn’t seem to help. We have hardly more information about them than we had ten years ago.”
“But your army has grown.”
“It has. When I joined up, we had maybe a dozen cells, and all in this country. Now my guess is that we have close to a hundred cells. All over the world.”
Tasha knew her shock showed. “All over the world?”
“Psychics are born and created all over the world; the other side hasn’t shown a preference, really. Except . . .”
“Except?”
“We have people whose only function in our organization is to collect and assimilate information. From all over the world. To look for patterns that might identify players on the other side. To look for psychics. Computers and social media have made that easier for us—and the other side, unfortunately. But if our estimates are on target, America has a disproportionate number of born psychics. Highly disproportionate, relative to the nonpsychic population.”
Tasha frowned at him. “You’re visualizing an ocean. And that’s working, by the way. But I can feel there’s something you’ve left out. Something you haven’t told me. What is it?”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, still frowning. “I would say it’s something that doesn’t really matter with you, but . . . we’ve learned to our cost not to think in absolutes. So . . . something else we’re reasonably sure of is that new psychics, those who have suffered some kind of trauma that triggered their abilities, have about a six-month window.”
“What kind of window?”
“Before the other side really pulls out the stops trying to get their hands on the psychics. They follow, they watch, they apparently have some way of determining how strong a psychic is, what abilities exist and how they’re used, presumably by using their own psychics to probe—possibly why that window exists, because it takes them a while to be sure. Once they are . . . they act. Most of the time they take a psychic by stealth, sometimes leaving an unidentifiable body behind, or the psychic becomes just another missing person with no family to care very much. A very few, they walk away from. Don’t take, stop following, stop watching. We don’t know why.”
“A matter of strength, maybe?”
“Doesn’t seem to be. They’ve walked away from strong psychics and weak ones. Walked away from psychics with every variety of ability. So we don’t know what criteria they use to determine which psychics can be . . . useful to them. But whatever it is, once they make that determination, they move. With utter speed and ruthlessness.”
—
Annabel Blake looked younger than her ten years. But she felt old, far older than ten. It was visible in her eyes to those who could look deeply enough, past the still, placid surface she had learned to show the world. But few in her short life had seen what she hid so carefully and used only when she had to—to stay one jump ahead of her abusive foster parents.
And sometimes that extra sense failed her.
The bruises were easier to hide this time of year, when long sleeves were common. And they were certainly warmer when she chose to huddle outside, as she did tonight, barely a couple of blocks from home and sheltered from the slight breeze by the inset door of an old-fashioned specialty candy store.
It was a quiet night, peaceful. Such a change from her house, where her foster father was drunk and getting drunker. Ironically, Annabel knew she was less likely to be punished by him for staying out all night because he was drunk and would pass out eventually; sober or with only a couple of drinks in him, he usually picked out a target on which to vent his unceasing, blind rage at the world.
Annabel didn’t ever want to be that mad. Not at the world. Not at anything or anyone. It seemed a miserable way to get through life. For him and everyone around him.
But at least he would be out cold when morning came, and Annabel knew she could creep back early and get herself ready for school before he woke.
And hopefully before her
foster mother woke. She didn’t drink, but there were pills and she was . . . mean. Unpredictably mean. Annabel didn’t need to be told that her foster mother was mentally unstable, kind one day and explosively angry the next, as likely to backhand the nearest foster child as she was to order them to stand in different corners of the house for hours on end, or lock them in a closet—or buy them a new toy or something pretty to wear.
Annabel actually dreaded the unexpected gifts more, because they usually preceded one of the explosive rages. And that meant punishment. Annabel didn’t like being locked in the closet. That was the worst. She had nightmares about that. So she did her best, when she had to be in the house, to be quiet and still and no trouble. To break none of the Rules of the House—even though that was often difficult because they changed on a whim and were more often than not puzzling.
One day she was backhanded for simply asking, while in the process of clearing the table after supper, if her foster mother was ready for her plate to be taken to the sink and washed. The next day her effusive foster mother had lavished praise on her for being “such a good, sweet girl” because she had set the table for supper, carefully laying out the plates and forks and spoons as she’d been taught.
Something she had done every single day for over a year, one of her regular chores. But never before to praise.
Fosters came and went in the house, some running away or getting into trouble that sent them to juvenile facilities, and a very few lucky ones forced to live in the rambling old house only a few weeks before going to new homes where kind people wanted to adopt them.
The younger kids, usually.
Annabel had no such hopes for herself. She’d heard too often that she was skinny and ugly, that her unusually dark eyes were “witchy,” and that nobody wanted to adopt a girl like her. Her foster mother seemed to take great delight in reminding her of that daily.
All Annabel wanted to do was survive with as few broken bones and bruises as possible until she was old enough to escape. Because as bad as her situation was, she also didn’t need to be told that the foster system was overloaded and underfunded, and that there were worse places she could find herself.
Much worse places.
She had thought she could stick it out at least until she was sixteen, but she knew herself well enough to understand that the deadline was less about age than it was the lack of an escape plan. She had no way of earning money, wasn’t brave—or perhaps foolhardy—enough to try stealing from her foster parents or anyone else, and was too bright not to know that she could hardly trust to luck or a cold world to provide for her.
Still, in the last few months, Annabel had felt something shift in her lonely world. While reaching out with her extra sense one day to judge whether she could safely enter the house after the school bus let her out on the corner, Annabel had become aware that someone else nearby had an extra sense as well.
It was only a tendril, she thought that day, a brief probing much as she probed herself. She immediately wanted to seek out that person, because brief though it was, that light touch in her mind had felt warm and kind. But before she could do that, she sensed something else, another probing, and it was dark and cold and very, very dangerous.
Someone, something was . . . hungry. It wanted what it didn’t have. It needed what it didn’t have.
It wanted what that other person had.
And what Annabel had.
It wanted. And it was meaner than Annabel’s foster mother and foster father put together. It didn’t put little girls into corners or closets or hit them with an open hand or a fist unexpectedly. It did worse things, much worse things.
Annabel had been very careful after that in using her extra sense. As badly as she still wanted to seek out that first, warm contact, all her instincts warned her to keep to herself, to watch and listen and wait.
It had been hard to do that, but if her young life had taught her nothing else, it had taught her the value of patience. So she watched, and used her extra sense sparingly and briefly, and she waited.
But right now, tonight, she was just really tired. Really, really tired. She needed to sleep. And she was so tired that she did, even in that chilly doorway. She curled herself into the smallest ball she possibly could, and she slept.
—
“That’s the . . . disappearances, the bodies burned or mangled beyond recognition. That?” Tasha asked, already knowing the answer.
He nodded. “That. After that point, or if it’s a psychic like you, born with abilities, the actions of the other side become less . . . predictable. It becomes more difficult for us to figure out who their real target is and when they’re most likely to act, especially if we know they’re watching at least a dozen psychics.”
“And are they?”
“At least. Virtually all the time. Just in this country.”
Tasha felt herself frowning. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to bring this up now, except that she hadn’t gotten anything from him to know whether it was something he was aware of.
And she needed to know.
“You know, that’s been bugging me. If this thing is as huge as you believe, we have to be talking about an awful lot of psychics. I mean a lot, especially over years, decades. Plenty with their abilities triggered by trauma, but even more born with their abilities. And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that a fairly recent thing? I mean, fifty or sixty years ago, we didn’t have nearly as many psychics, did we?”
“You’re quick,” he said matter-of-factly. “Most don’t seem to pick up on that.”
The ocean in his mind was very calm and very blue. Impenetrable.
“So what’s the deal? Accidents I get, though I don’t see how they could arrange an accident that just happens to trigger psychic ability in someone. A greater danger of killing them, I’d say.”
“We don’t believe they arrange accidents to trigger psychics. Just that they . . . monitor accident victims searching for psychics.”
“Okay. What about those of us born with this stuff? There are more than there used to be, aren’t there? I mean, generations ago, a psychic was either incredibly rare or amazingly good at hiding it.”
“Information wasn’t as readily available fifty years ago,” he pointed out. “It traveled much more slowly than today. No Internet. No twenty-four-hour news cycles. The world was still a big place. A place where secrets could be more easily hidden than today.”
“Okay. But tell me I’m wrong. There are more psychics being born now than there were fifty years ago.”
“We believe so.”
Tasha could feel herself getting tense and she wasn’t even sure why. Except, maybe, something she felt in Brodie even beneath the calm surface of an ocean he was holding in his mind, and the memory of what Elizabeth had told her. She attempted a laugh that didn’t quite come off. “So what is it? Why so many of us now?”
Brodie looked at her steadily, then spoke in the same calm tone, as if what he was saying weren’t absolutely insane.
“Tasha, we have evidence to support the theory that the other side is breeding psychics. And has been for decades, at least.”
Tasha pushed aside the first thought that entered her mind, and instead went with the second. “How could you—we—know that? What kind of evidence?”
“No courtroom would buy it,” he admitted wryly. “But we have bits and pieces of information some of our psychics have picked up. Not from the other side—the shadows. But from psychics they’ve taken, in the early days, before . . .”
“Before?”
“Before they’re taken or put beyond our reach. Physically, maybe. Psychically. We’re not sure about that. But for a little while, some of them are still able to reach out to us. Are strong enough even through their fear to try to warn us. Tell us what they can. And from what they’ve told us, and a few other sources of information, w
e’re all but certain one of the goals of the other side is to breed psychics.
“Maybe it’s because we’ve been more successful than they expected at protecting psychics or because they simply need a lot more than are naturally born or triggered; either way, it seems they decided at some point to embark on a program of . . . eugenics.”
“Positive eugenics,” Tasha said a bit numbly. “Breeding to encourage, not eliminate. Breeding for psychic ability. Which makes a born psychic—”
“Extremely valuable to them,” Brodie finished. “Assuming, of course, that psychic ability is genetic. That it can be passed on from one generation to the next.”
“It can,” Tasha said. “At least I believe it can. I did a lot of research years ago when I realized what I was. I don’t know if it’s genetic or something else, but psychic ability does tend to run in families. I didn’t find any evidence of it in mine before me, but that happens too.”
She was remembering what Elizabeth Brodie had told her, that Elizabeth and Eliot Wolfe were supposed to be together, according to him, because they were a genetic match. Both born psychics.
Brodie said, “It’s because that happens that we aren’t sure if they’re choosing psychics based on genetics or something else. We’ve mapped the human genome, but so far no scientist we know of has isolated a gene controlling psychic ability. Probably few if any are even looking. In any case, there are too many families with only one psychic on the tree to be able to declare genetics is everything.”
“Maybe so. But, to them, to the other side, it must still seem like a good idea to match up two born psychics and expect at least some psychic offspring. It’s just common sense . . . breeding.”
“True enough,” he said.
She drew a breath and let it out. “What do they do with the children?”
“We don’t know. Our guess is that the psychic couple lives on the surface a normal life. Probably married, or posing as married. Jobs or careers, a comfortable house or apartment. And they raise their child or children. Whether those children are taught or trained in how to use their abilities, we don’t know.”