The Unwanted (A Novella of the FBI Psychics)
Page 2
“I’m sorry to interrupt your precious alone time,” Oz said, lifting a brow as she studied him. “I just have this case…a series of date rapes in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pretty little college town.”
That explained why Destin was needed. It was just up her alley. Didn’t explain why he was here. She’d been working cases like this just fine without him for five years.
“Charlottesville is a little out of the way for you,” Caleb said, absently tapping out a beat on the arm of a chair. “If you planned on sending me flying back to Virginia, why fly me down to Texas to begin with?”
Oz gave him a cool look. “I needed to make sure the job was going to click for you. I never know that until I have you in front of me, and you won’t know until you read through the files.”
She was bullshitting him over something. He could tell. But he hadn’t bought the plane ticket and he didn’t plan on buying the one back to Washington, either. With a negligent shrug, he said, “If you say so, Oz.”
The look on her face had been known to reduce people to stammers and stutters. Caleb just stared at her. He wasn’t playing her games anymore. Didn’t have to play her games. It had been made damn clear he wasn’t obligated to take this “assignment”. It might be appreciated, but it wasn’t required.
If Oz thought he’d jump just because she said so, she needed to readjust her thinking.
Of course, if he left, he wouldn’t be able to see Destin…
And he was an idiot. She was the entire reason he’d come here.
“I assume Durand is the only other one you think is suitable for the job?” Destin asked.
Caleb didn’t need to look at her to know she was scowling.
Oz settled back in her chair and plucked a piece of imaginary lint from the lapel of her navy blue suit. “Yes.” She gave him a narrow look before she looked back at Destin. “Now, I want you both aware of a few things. Officially, I’m not sending anybody out there. As of yet, there’s little reason for us to get involved and nobody has contracted for our services. The locals aren’t having much luck and, to be completely honest, there’s no reason for federal involvement on your end, Durand. It’s not entirely likely that’s going to happen, either. This guy is smart. He’s not going to do anything that will catch federal interest.”
“He caught yours,” Caleb pointed out. And just how did he do that?
“That’s true. Pity, that.” Her lashes swept down, shielding her eyes.
Something pulsed inside him and he had to wonder… Just what aren’t you telling us? She didn’t elaborate, and he suspected she wasn’t going to.
But he wasn’t wrong. He knew it, could feel it in his gut, a sharp, strong tug. Studying her face, he tried to get some clue as to what was going on, but there wasn’t one. Since he wasn’t one of the psychics who could read thoughts, he was just going to have to play her game until she decided to tell him.
He hated these games. At least with Jones, the bastard laid things out on the table.
Oz continued to watch him expectantly so he went ahead and gave her what she seemed to need. “So if there’s no reason for federal involvement, just why am I here?”
“I think a two-party team would work best,” she said vaguely. “And you’re the person who works best with Destin. In the past five years, she’s worked with all my other people and she’s never managed to click with them quite the way she clicked with you. That’s what I need on this. I need my best, which is her, and she needs all the tools I can give her.”
“But you’re still not answering why you’re bothering to put a team out there at all. Screw whether it’s me or somebody else. Why get involved? Why do you need anybody out there at all, much less one of your best?” Destin asked, shooting Caleb a narrow look.
You really don’t want me here, do you, doll?
A slow smiled curled Oz’s lips, but she didn’t say anything. Playing her cards close to her chest, Caleb thought moodily. “She’s not going to tell you anything yet, Destin. She’s having too much fun with her head games on this one,” he said, keeping his voice flat and his gaze focused on the boss’s face.
“Oh, come on now,” Oz said, her voice light, belying the hard glint he saw in her eyes. “There’s more to this than head games.”
“Okay. Then spill it.” He wasn’t holding his breath on that happening, though.
“Why…it needs to be done.” Oz smiled again, an inscrutable little curve of her lips that made his spine go tight and his gut go cold. That smile never meant good things. Oz had some sort of insight into this job.
For the past five years, he’d been working with a man who’d pushed him to his limits. Taylor Jones was brilliant. He was driven and he had a knack for knowing which of his agents was the right one for any particular job, but he had no real psychic skill.
Oz, on the other hand…
Oz was a different story. She had an erratic ability that could be as strong as an F-5 tornado one day and then she’d be unable to predict anything for months. When her visions came on, they came on strong. But they weren’t always useful. One of the weirdest visions she’d told them about had been when she’d once helped a sixty-three-year-old widow find her missing wedding ring. The vision had pulled her out of bed at night and she hadn’t been able to sleep until she found the woman, somebody she’d never met, living in a town two hours away.
Then she’d spent the next four months unable to see anything.
It also meant he had to do the job, whether he liked it or not. Maybe Jones wasn’t going to force it on him, but if Oz was having one of her gut feelings about this, there was no way he could just turn his back and walk out.
That look in her eyes wasn’t because she had an odd little feeling or she’d heard rumors, damn it all.
“If it needs to be done, then quit dicking around and tell me why I’m here,” he said flatly. “I wrapped up a case today, I’m tired and I’m hungry and I wasn’t planning on boarding a plane back to Virginia at the end of the day, either.”
Destin shot him a dark look.
He ignored it.
Oz just smiled. “Don’t worry…I plan on letting you catch some sleep first. The flight doesn’t head out until noon tomorrow. You’ve got time to sleep, grab a meal, all of that. You know, you used to be a lot more charming than this, Durand,” she said as she leaned forward and laid two files flat on her desk. “Is Jones working all the fun out of you?”
“He keeps me working and he does it without the mind games…so maybe. Can we get on with this?” Leaning forward, he grabbed one of the files from the front edge of Oz’s desk.
Destin leaned forward at the same time and their hands brushed against each other. Such a simple touch and electricity sparked through him. A muscle jerked in his jaw, but he managed to keep any other reaction hidden—he thought. Locked down good and tight behind his shields, even though the shields weren’t really necessary to keep the distance between him and Destin.
She could pick up on random thoughts and emotions, but she had to look for them and he doubted she’d be looking for that from him. Beyond that, her empathy was a very specific, very strange sort. It reacted to violence—specifically sexual violence, for reasons nobody really understood. Not even Destin—probably especially Destin. Caleb had his theories, but the one time he had really tried to push…well, she locked down so tight on him, pulled back. It had been the beginning of the end for them.
Settling back in his chair, he flipped open the file and studied it. Not a lot to go on, but they’d made do with less. He skimmed each report while Destin kept hers closed in her lap. He heard a soft breath and he glanced at her from the corner of his eye, watched as she laid her hands on the file, flexed them, and squared her shoulders.
Steadying herself… He didn’t know whether to be relieved or bitter. Three years they’d been together and he’d tried to get her to prepare more for the cases they’d handled, but she hadn’t once tried. She’d always jumped in, feet first and fi
sts ready. He’d been the one to pull her back time and again, to keep her from attacking suspects and totally blowing their cases straight to hell.
Three years, and she hadn’t once shown any interest in learning some caution, some self-control. But she’d gone and done it at some point. He recognized the signs well enough. He used the techniques himself and it had saved his ass more than once when her impulses bled into him during the times they worked together. If he didn’t get grounded before linking, he got lost in her, lost in her passion, lost in her fury.
He made himself focus on the file again, blocking her out. Seven rapes reported. There were probably more. Some women who were confused, scared—or in denial. Guy had been very careful. Used a rubber, so no semen samples. Bruising, minor vaginal tears for the most part… He clenched his jaw as he read each report, fought to remain dispassionate. Fought to make himself go cold.
He knew from experience that the more he could distance himself from the crime, the more he could help the victim, especially when he was working with empaths like Destin. It was hard, though, and by the time he finished reading the reports, there was a nasty, vicious headache taking gleeful bites out of his brain matter.
Destin had already closed the file. He glanced her way but she had her eyes closed. Her chest rose and fell as she took a series of deep, steadying breaths. Without opening her eyes, she asked, “You said we fly out tomorrow. I assume once we land, we get to work immediately?”
“No time like the present,” Oz said. And then she glanced at him, that strange smile on her face once more.
They both stood, Destin moving slower than him. He glanced at her as she turned to face him, then away.
The pit of his stomach dropped out as the connection hit and he stopped in his tracks, looking back at her. Her face, like her ruthlessly short nails, was naked, devoid of any color. No makeup, nothing. Just her pretty mouth, unsmiling, her eyes cold and hard…and a scar. It ran down the left side of her face, sliver thin, about three inches long, and faded.
He lifted a hand to touch her, unaware he was doing so until his fingers brushed down the slightly ridged surface of the scar. She didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch.
Caleb didn’t let himself react, although his gut was knotted with rage and he had the insane impulse to step closer and wrap his arms around, shelter her, cuddle her close. She didn’t want that from him. Didn’t need it.
“What happened?”
She stepped out of his reach and he let his hand fall to his side, closing into a fist. The need to pound on something was strong. A brick wall, a metal file cabinet—some bastard’s face—just show me who did it, baby…please… He even lowered his shields enough to try and pick up some kind of flicker, but there was nothing there.
“I was careless,” she said, her voice flat.
“What happened?” he repeated.
This time, she had some kind of reaction. She cocked a brow and smirked at him. “I told you, lover…I was careless. I dove in feet-first, like I always do, and didn’t pay attention. The guy had a knife and when I barreled in, he did this.” She trailed a finger down the scar, angling her head so he could see it better. “But that wasn’t the worst. I picked up on him when I was off-duty…you know how it happens. I put the call in to Oz and she told me to wait for backup. I didn’t. He was close, very close. And he hadn’t hurt her yet. I thought I could stop it. I was wrong. He was bigger than me, stronger, determined not to get arrested. I didn’t wait for backup and because I didn’t, he got away and he killed the girl I was trying to save. Careless.”
Chapter Two
He hadn’t looked at her much since they’d checked in for their flight. And he hadn’t said a word to her the past night after she’d told him about her spectacular failure four years earlier.
Destin understood why easy enough. She had a hard time looking at herself. It had been years since Dawn Meyer’s death and she still had a hard time facing the woman she saw in the mirror every morning.
She should have saved that girl. Was supposed to save her. If she’d listened to Caleb back when he’d tried to tell her all those times that she needed to learn some modicum of control, she could have saved Dawn.
But she hadn’t learned, and because of her, a girl was dead. She’d failed the girl. Failed her unit. Almost got them all screwed.
But the worst thing was that she let a girl die. Nineteen years old. Terrified and hurt and alone, and she’d died because of Destin.
Her unit saw it differently, she knew. At least some of them. Oz had rallied around her and refused to feed her to the sharks and that was a debt Destin could never repay. There were others, too, former agents who’d refused to let some of the higher-ups turn her into the scapegoat.
They should have, though.
They should have fed her to the sharks, left her for dead…nothing would have been a suitable-enough punishment. Just how did she atone for not saving a girl? For costing that girl her life? She couldn’t. She didn’t.
If she’d listened to Caleb all those years ago…
You can’t always dive in feet-first, baby…sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in a mess that you can’t get out of.
He’d been worried she’d end up dead.
She only wished that had been the cost.
No wonder he wouldn’t look at her.
Even now. They’d only been waiting for the flight for thirty minutes or so—Oz had arranged to pick them up—one more debriefing, she’d told them, and then she’d ended up picking them up a good hour earlier than what was really necessary. Now they had nearly an hour to kill before their flight.
The silence was a little heavy, even for her. She glanced over at him. “You hungry?”
Caleb made an odd little hmmm under his breath. A man of few words. The sound could either be, Yeah, I could eat or No. Shut up so we can get this over with and I can get the hell away from you.
Destin decided it was probably the latter and she was petty enough to want to drag things out. Petty…and lonely. Damn but she’d missed him. Being close to him again, having him this near, it did the strangest things, soothed the ragged gaping hole in her heart and left her feeling a little more at peace. And it made her ache. That wound inside her that had never healed started to bleed again and she wanted to yell at him, scream at him. Beg him to come back. All of it, any of it. And there was no way she’d give in to any of those urges.
“I’m hungry,” she lied, climbing to her feet. “If you want me to bring you back something, I can.”
She couldn’t eat. But she wasn’t going to keep sitting here next to him with his silence weighing down on her and his disapproval and disappointment choking the air around them.
She needed at least a short reprieve, even if it was only for five minutes while she hid in the women’s restroom or tucked inside one of the little bars that seemed to grace every airport she’d ever been in.
Actually, a bar didn’t seem like a bad destination…
Caleb got to his feet. “I guess I could eat,” he said, his voice low and smooth, the lingering hint of the South still echoing in his voice after all these years. “What are you in the mood for?”
Solitude.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” she said, shrugging and turning on her heel. She caught the handle of her carry-on and started down the main corridor. Anything would be fine, as long as she could have a drink.
Caleb didn’t know whether to be relieved or frustrated when they ended up being seated in opposite sections of the plane. Both of them were in business class—nice of Oz, that. Destin was two rows ahead of him on the opposite side of the plane and he could see the business exec trying to put the moves on her.
And then he saw the man go rigid when Destin turned to face him fully.
Fury lanced through him as he figured out what she’d done. Using that scar as a shield. Yeah, he knew there were plenty of assholes in the world who’d back off over a thing like that. Assholes, the lot of them.
But she let people decide to make that her defining characteristic.
It pissed him off.
It wasn’t anything she wore as a badge or a mark of courage…she used it to keep people away from her. She deserved better than that.
I was careless…
Her words echoed in his mind and he closed his eyes, blew out a breath. He could find out what had happened. A few phone calls, an email or two and he’d know it all. The surface details, at least. But the information he wanted was Destin’s. He knew she wasn’t going to share it with him easily.
Maybe not at all.
Guilt lodged in his gut and part of him kept wondering, Could I have helped…
He didn’t even know. For months after he’d left Destin, he’d had to work to get his own gift back under control and it had taken him even longer to find a way to mesh with somebody other than Destin. He’d had his own screwups to deal with and those screwups were legion.
Because of those issues, it had taken more than a year before he was stable enough to work regularly in the new unit.
Now, thinking about the months that had followed his leaving, thinking back to the way she’d looked at him, and he was left wondering…had he done the right thing after all?
Chapter Three
The flight from DFW to Richmond was uneventful enough after Destin had convinced the yuppie sitting next to her that he wasn’t really interested in her. All it had taken was turning around to face him so he saw her completely.
Once she’d met his gaze, once he’d had a chance to see her scarred face, he’d decided she wasn’t really worth a quick flirtation and he’d spent most of his flight with his nose buried in an urban fantasy. She couldn’t fault his taste…she loved the author herself.
But she had given up on casual flirtations a while back. Caleb had started out as a casual flirtation and she’d tumbled head over heels into love with him, then head over heels into heartbreak when he left.