Broken Dolls: An Urban Fantasy (The Telepathic Clans Saga Book 3)

by BR Kingsolver

  I turned to Collin. “I know you’ve had some problems with assaults and kidnappings, so I hope you can brief me on what intelligence you have. Nigel has given me some of it. Morrighan and I plan to go after the Irish MP who originally sold Myrna. It would help if we had a construct artist, and Nigel said O’Donnell had an operative who might help us.”

  “I’m not really an operative,” Brenna began, but Collin put a hand on her arm and shook his head.

  “Miss Kendrick, do you mind my asking exactly where you found this girl in Munich?” Collin asked.

  “She was in von Ebersberg’s compound outside the city,” I answered.

  “And you just waltzed in and carried her out?”

  “Yeah. Sort of like that.”

  “By yourself? And how many people died?”

  “Huh? Oh, I didn’t have to kill anyone.”

  He shook his head. “Goddess, you may be a woman, but you’ve got more balls than I do. I want to hear that story someday.” He stared off into space for a few moments, then shook his head.

  “Anyway, when Nigel contacted me and told me what you intended,” Collin continued, “he asked if we could lend O’Byrne some assistance. Most construct artists aren’t field agents. We decided that a small team, seven people, would be the optimal size.” He turned to Brenna. “I’m hoping you can spare Rebecca for a while.”

  The look on Rebecca’s face had been growing increasingly angry as she listened to my story. At Collin’s words, her head jerked toward him.

  “Me? Why?”

  “Because they need a construct artist, someone who can travel with them and detect women who have been captured. You have more experience in providing close covert protection to succubi than anyone else. They aren’t going to do anything that will surprise you. And I think a bit of rage at this situation is a bonus. I want someone who will take it personally.”

  In spite of Collin’s calm demeanor, his face might have been carved in stone, and his eyes were strongly dilated. He was enraged and near the killing edge. I was sure he contained himself only because no target was present.

  “Besides,” he continued, “you’re one of the best kick-ass Protectors I have. Your Gifts provide a perfect complement to hers. If neither of you ladies have any objection, of course.”

  Brenna shook her head. “It’s up to Rebecca.”

  “You said they were targeting s-carriers too?” Rebecca asked.

  “Yes, an insatiable need is a benefit in forced prostitution. They can’t help themselves,” Morrighan answered.

  “I’m in,” Rebecca said.

  I regarded Rebecca. She and Brenna were very young.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty-five. I haven’t come in to my full strength yet, but I have control of my Gifts.”

  Collin choked on a laugh. “Miss Kendrick, Rebecca is experienced and has power to burn. I wouldn’t put her in a situation if I wasn’t sure she could handle it.”

  ~~~

  Chapter 22

  Our team met in a small lounge. Peter was there, and I recognized people from his team. Edwin, Davin, Julia, and Aidan. I was introduced to an American named Donny. Rebecca took charge immediately.

  “First thing, assignments,” she said. “Peter, you’re in charge.”

  I felt my neck crack as my head snapped around to look at her. I wasn’t the only one staring at her.

  “What?” she said. “You don’t expect me to be in charge, do you? I’ve been to Ireland once in my life. Peter is far more experienced and capable than I am. I don’t have a need to be in charge. Just don’t tell Collin and Nigel.”

  I laughed. The others all smiled.

  Donny shook his head. “Healy, the day you don’t need to be in charge is one I haven’t seen yet. Peter, that will last until the first time she disagrees with you, then she’ll do whatever the hell she wants.”

  “How long have you worked for her?” Peter asked Donny.

  “Over a year. She’s good, and she’ll listen, but she doesn’t follow orders very well.”

  “I do too. When they make sense. Anyway,” Rebecca continued, with a shake of her hair, “I figure Julia is used to providing close support to Morrighan.” Julia nodded. “I’ll do the same for RB.” Peter nodded. “And Peter can deploy the rest of you as he sees fit.”

  “Good luck,” Edwin said to Rebecca. “At least you can follow her into the loo. But I warn you, she’s slippery as an eel and she doesn’t play well with others.”

  Rebecca laughed and turned to me. “What’s your plan?”

  I could immediately see that I was going to like this woman.

  “Healy?” I asked. “You’re Rebecca Healy?”

  “Yes,” she said. She leaned back from the table, eyeing me warily.

  “You wrote an analysis on the trafficking of telepaths. Nigel let me read it.”

  She relaxed. “Yeah, I wrote it for Seamus. He distributed it to all of our offices and Protection teams.”

  “That was well done,” I said. “One of the most informative analyses I’ve read in a long time.”

  She smiled. “Thanks.”

  Our plans for capturing O’Driscoll were embarrassingly thin. We’d find him and the O’Byrne Protectors would take him into custody. Case closed.

  “And then what are you going to do with him?” Rebecca asked. “Do you have a prison on a deserted island or something?”

  I looked at Peter.

  “You know we don’t,” he said. “We do the same thing O’Donnell would. Rearrange his mind, implant a construct with compulsions, and turn him loose somewhere he can’t do any damage. Australia, maybe.”

  “I have an alternative suggestion,” Rebecca said with a sly smile. “He’s an MP, right? You know how difficult and expensive it is to get elected to office. Why don’t you use the construct and compulsions to control him and let him go back to his life? Use him to vote the way you want, carry your agenda.”

  I saw Morrighan’s face light up as she considered this.

  “After you neurally castrate him, of course,” Rebecca added. “We wouldn’t want him to keep that part of his personality.”

  ~~~

  Our team flew to Dublin the following day. Morrighan’s intelligence was that O’Driscoll was there and going about his duties as an MP.

  While I had crossed paths with him in Europe, the only time he had actually seen me was at night on a dark street, and my hair was dyed black. I wondered if his invitation for lunch was still open.

  I discovered that the flat across the hall and those above and below Morrighan’s were used for her protection team. “O’Byrne owns the building,” Morrighan explained. Rebecca and I took the spare bedrooms in Morrighan’s flat.

  Morrighan took us all out to dinner at a very fancy place near the Oireachtas, the Irish National Parliament. We lingered over coffee, enjoying conversation after our meal.

  “By the way,” Morrighan said, “we found Sharon Dunn’s roommate. It seems she’s on holiday in Canada visiting relatives.”

  I felt a sense of relief. It was good to know that I could cross one girl off my guilt list.

  “How did you become a private investigator?” Rebecca asked me.

  “After I graduated from university, I spent a year traveling around Europe. When the money started to run out, and I figured I should find a job, I applied to all the places that use translators. The United Nations, European Union, private corporations. I landed a job with Interpol.”

  I shrugged, taking a sip of my wine.

  “Six months of translating documents nearly drove me out of my bloody mind. I’ve never been so bored in my life. So I applied for a field operative position and got it.”

  “Did you have any training for that sort of thing?” Donny asked.

  “I spent six summers going through training at O’Byrne. The usual, how to use my Gifts and junior Protector training, just like the kids who belonged to the Clan.”

  “I was one of h
er trainers,” Peter said. “She was pretty good.” His mouth quirked. “For a girl.”

  “As I remember, you liked the girl part,” I shot back. He blushed and Morrighan raised her eyebrows, cocking her head to the side to look at him.

  “How long were you with Interpol?” Rebecca asked.

  “Three years. We were sent on a mission, and the intelligence wasn’t vetted properly by the bureaucrats in Lyon. Our contact was a telepath. I tried to tell Harry, my partner, that things weren’t right, but of course, I couldn’t tell him why I thought so. Harry was killed, and I barely escaped with my life. I quit after that, moved to London, and got my P.I. license.”

  “Is that where you got those scars on your back and chest?” Morrighan asked quietly. She’d seen me undressed, but never mentioned the scars before.

  “Yeah. I took a bullet. It entered just under my left breast and exited through my back. Punctured a lung but missed everything else. Broke four ribs. If I wasn’t a telepath, I would have died.” I’d used an air shield tight around my body to control the external bleeding, and done what I could internally to slow the bleeding. It had been good enough.

  I don’t like talking about that night in Prague. I still have nightmares about it.

  “Is that why you prefer to work alone?” Peter asked.

  I shrugged again. No one said anything. That’s also why I’m leery of letting anyone get too close to me. Harry had been more than a partner. He was my best friend. It hurt like hell to lose him.

  Then Rebecca sent me a spear thread. *See the gray-haired man with the young girl?*

  I looked over a few tables and located the couple. I brushed both of their minds. They were norms.

  *Yes?* I asked her.

  *The girl is an escort, and she’s had several compulsions laid on her,* Rebecca explained.

  I entered the girl’s mind and easily located both the compulsions and some areas that had been wiped. A telepath had definitely done some nasty work on her.

  I turned to Rebecca, speaking aloud. “All the girls we rescued here and the ones I found in Paris were telepaths. But I did hear that Siegfried had a brothel stocked with norms at his estate.”

  “All the girls we found in the States were telepaths, too,” Rebecca said. “But we weren’t looking for norms. We don’t have the manpower to play policeman and break the entire global trafficking network. We do police the telepaths in our territory, though.”

  Peter cocked his head, “What are you two talking about?”

  Rebecca silently explained to the rest of the team. I watched his face change, his good mood gone.

  “Do you see the gorgeous dark-haired woman in the blue dress in the booth against the wall?” Rebecca asked aloud.

  We all turned to look and easily identified the woman she meant. Late twenties and beautiful, sitting with an older man. They chatted easily, and something he said caused her to laugh.

  “She’s an escort, also,” Rebecca said, “but she’s doing it by choice. See the difference between her and the other girl?”

  The girl with the compulsions was almost emotionless, responding if the man she was with said something, but otherwise there was no spark of life about her. Like a living mannequin.

  “When you see enough of it, you start noticing it,” Rebecca said.

  Morrighan nodded. “Rhiannon calls them broken dolls. So what do we do about it?”

  “We follow her home and take out the people who enslaved her,” Peter said. He turned to Rebecca. “We also police the telepaths in our territory. I wonder if she’s another victim of O’Driscoll’s.”

  I felt a sense of relief. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I’ve been telling myself for the past month that it wasn’t my job to clean up the trafficking. But I feel guilty as hell about all the women I haven’t helped.”

  ~~~

  Chapter 23

  Edwin and Davin stayed to follow the girl and her date. Around one o’clock in the morning, Davin called and told Peter that a car had come and picked up the girl. We piled into two vans and headed toward the port section of the city.

  We entered a district with a lot of warehouses. Driving slowly, we pulled into a street and stopped as Davin stepped out from the shadows.

  “We should leave the vans here,” he said when Julia stopped and rolled down the window. “The girl went into a warehouse around the corner.”

  He showed us the building. It looked like all the others in the area, a three-story brick warehouse with a single steel door in the front and no windows. I counted eight cars parked in front. Davin told us Edwin was watching the back. There was another door there, a loading dock with a garage door, and three cars.

  “There are twenty-one people inside,” Davin said. “Eleven women and ten men. One of the women and one of the men are telepaths. The man who drove the girl is one of the norms.”

  As we watched, a car came down the street and parked in front. A man emerged from the car and rang a bell by the door. Someone opened it and admitted him. A short time later, a different man came out and got in a different car. Peter entered his mind and stopped him when he got to us. He had just paid two hundred euros to have sex with a woman who worked in the brothel inside the warehouse.

  He didn’t have much information that was useful, so we blurred his memory and sent him on his way.

  I cautiously scanned the inside of the building, identifying the people Davin mentioned. Seven of the men were customers. I stayed out of their minds, assuming the madam and pimp were probably sifting through their heads. It was the two non-telepathic employees who interested me.

  I entered the mind of one, and discovered he was the one who had driven the young woman we’d seen at the restaurant. He and the other norm were employed as bouncers and drivers, and he seemed to be operating under his own free will.

  *Rebecca, I’m in the mind of one of them. Can you join me?* I sent.

  We searched through his mind and learned the layout of the building as well as the identities of the other people inside. Ten of the women were prostitutes. The other woman was the madam and boss. The telepathic man was her second in command, but the woman was clearly in charge.

  *RB, look at this,* Rebecca told me, pointing out several unusual things in the man’s mind.*Those are compulsions. I don’t think she’s messed with his memory, but I think one of the compulsions is dormant, with a trigger. I can’t tell what will trigger it, but I’d bet talking to the Garda, or something like that, would.*

  *So, even though she’s pretty much left his mind alone, she makes sure she controls him.*

  *Exactly.*

  The ‘she’ was Chantelle Norton, telepath, madam and dominatrix.

  We gathered to discuss what to do next.

  “According to the employee we read, she rarely goes out. We could wait days,” Rebecca laid out our options. “Unless we’re willing to spend more time on this, we probably need to go in now.”

  I shook my head, as I saw another man leave the brothel and two more go in. “The place is full of customers. If we wait until morning, the traffic will thin out.”

  Peter agreed with me. We set up a watch rotation, and I took the opportunity to catch some sleep in one of the vans.

  It seemed I’d barely fallen asleep when Aidan shook me awake. I sat up and looked around. The sun was coming up. I looked at my watch. It was 6:45. I wished we’d had the foresight to bring some coffee.

  “The last customer just left,” Aidan said, leaning over me to wake Rebecca.

  She sat up, running a hand through her hair, looked around, and said, “We didn’t plan this very well. We forgot the coffee.”

  I chuckled in agreement. Coffee or not, she hit the ground and started giving orders.

  “Donny, seal the street. No one in or out. We need to send someone to play customer. Davin and Edwin are still dressed for the part. The other one should cover the back. Julia, stay here in the van with Morrighan. Start the engine and be ready to go. Aidan, start the ot
her van. If we need to get out of here in a hurry, I don’t want to spend time looking for the damn keys.”

  “I thought Peter was in charge,” I laughed.

  It didn’t faze her. “He is. I’m just helping,” she said, giving Peter a wink.

  We had spotted security cameras pointed at the doors both in front and back. We didn’t know if there might be others, so we couldn’t set up too close to the building.

  Edwin took the third van, drove it around the corner and parked in front of the building. He rang the doorbell, and after a couple of minutes, someone answered the door. We had found the names of some regular customers in the bouncer’s mind. Our plan was to have Edwin give one of those names as a referral.

  It seemed to work, as Edwin was admitted and the door closed. Less than a minute later, the door opened slightly and something propped it open.

  *Go,* Edwin sent to us. Peter, Rebecca and I raced for the door.

  A man’s shoe propped the door open. The inner door was propped open by a man’s body wearing only one shoe. I drew my pistol, realizing that the others already had theirs in hand.

  *I have the other bouncer,* Edwin sent.

  The first room we entered was a sitting room or parlor, large with rather shabby couches and a small bar on one side. The room was empty, and I rushed through the next door. I was presented with a long hallway with open doors. Edwin stood at the end of the hall and turned toward me.

  *It’s clear. There’s no one on this level.*

  That wasn’t entirely true. A man with a blank face stood motionless in the hall. I touched his mind and found Edwin already in charge there.

  *The two telepaths and the girls are upstairs,* Edwin sent. *Be careful, RB. Go slow.*

  Peter climbed the stairs to my left, moving far more quietly than anyone that large should be able to. Rebecca stood at the bottom, holding her pistol with both hands and aiming it at the top of the stairs. When Peter got to the top and opened the door, I nudged her.

  *Go,* I sent, taking her place and aiming my pistol past her. She flowed up the stairs like a cat, low and fluid.