The Unwanted (A Novella of the FBI Psychics)

by Shiloh Walker

  But it was almost impossible to brush this dream away, this need away, when he was sleeping just a few yards away.

  She missed his heat.

  She missed his quiet strength and the way she felt so much steadier when she was near him.

  She just plain missed him.

  And you didn’t say a thing to stop me. Every step of the way, I waited for you to say something, Destin. Every damn step.

  His words echoed in her mind and she had to wonder, how much different would her life have been if she’d given in to that impulse? She’d always thought that he’d changed his mind.

  He’d told her that he loved her, and she’d almost believed him. Almost. But Destin had had people tell her they loved her before. Like her mom and dad. And then her abilities had started to surface and their love hadn’t been all that real, after all. They’d hated her. Feared her.

  Had even thought maybe she was as bad as some of the monsters out there. Monstrous little thing—

  It wasn’t so far a stretch for her to think that the man she’d thought she might have loved had changed his mind about them. If she had reached out to him, then, would things be different now?

  “It’s too late to worry about that,” she whispered. “No do-overs allowed.”

  He didn’t seem all that different. A few more lines around the lines and maybe a little more serious, but all in all, Caleb was just as he’d always been. Solid, strong, steady.

  She was different, though. She was completely different and if she needed any reminder of that, it was in the mirror. Stroking a finger down the scar, she closed her eyes and curled up on the bed and waited for the miserable, achy need to subside. It took too long. By the time she was able to fall back to sleep, hours had passed.

  Come dawn, she woke to hear him moving out in the sitting area; she didn’t bother trying to go back to sleep. She opened the door and almost swallowed her tongue when she saw him. He was wearing nothing but a pair of running shorts and another old T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, leaving his biceps bare.

  A fine sheen of sweat highlighted his muscles and she watched, mesmerized as he lowered himself to the floor and then pushed himself back up. Slow, steady.

  Talk about a perfect push-up. The man could have done a TV infomercial, the way he looked.

  Of course, he’d always looked good.

  Get over it, Des, she told herself. Squaring her shoulders, she made herself walk past him into the small kitchenette. She desperately needed coffee. Coffee, and a psych eval. She went about making the coffee and tried to pretend she wasn’t watching him as he did a good fifty more push-ups beyond however many he’d already done and then shifted around to lie on the ground and do crunches.

  The hotel had a perfectly good gym. Why couldn’t he do his workout there instead of in here?

  Five more minutes passed while she stayed in the kitchenette and drank her coffee. She passed the time by studying an absurdly boring abstract painting and hoped by the time she had her coffee done, he’d have his workout done.

  But she planned it a little too perfectly. He finished up his workout at exactly the same time as she finished her coffee, which meant they ended up running into each other at the refrigerator.

  “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

  Destin shrugged. She almost told him the truth, but she figured that would have just given him more of an excuse to keep talking and she wanted to go hide in her room while she got her treacherous body under control.

  He didn’t seem fooled. “I take that means yes,” he said, shifting so that she couldn’t go around him unless she brushed up against his body.

  A body that was damp with sweat and way too hard on her self-control. “I was already awake.”

  Caleb studied her face. “You don’t look like you slept well. Nightmares?”

  Shit, no. But she wasn’t about to tell him that she hadn’t slept well because she kept having lurid sexual fantasies with him as the one and only star. “Some dreams did keep waking me up, but it’s nothing I can’t handle,” she hedged.

  A sympathetic look entered his eyes and he reached out, skimmed his fingers down her arm. “Need to talk about them?”

  “No.” Talking used to help. Or rather, talking with him had helped. But no way, no how was that happening now, even if it had been nightmares keeping her awake. Nope.

  He squeezed. “You sure?”

  “If I wanted to talk about them, I’d talk about them,” she snapped. Lack of sleep, need and general moodiness were quickly eroding any politeness she might have started out with when she climbed out of bed. She jerked her shoulder away and shoved past him. “We’re not together any more, remember?”

  “Just because we’re not together doesn’t mean I can’t listen.”

  Destin stopped in her tracks and turned back to him. “Yes. It does. I laid my soul bare for you because I felt safe doing so. Then. But that’s changed now.”

  Caleb narrowed his eyes. “So that means you don’t feel safe doing it now?”

  “That’s exactly what it means,” she said. Destin rubbed her hands over her face and then drove her fingers through her hair. The words danced on the back of her tongue, fighting to be free, and for once, she decided, to hell with pride. “You left me, Caleb. You broke my heart and you left me. I don’t want to hear this shit that you kept waiting for me to ask you to stay. If you wanted to stay, then you should have stayed. I read emotions and you’ve always known how to block me out. I didn’t know what you were thinking, what you were feeling. All I knew was that you were leaving me…leaving me and breaking my heart. How could I feel safe with you after that?”

  Turning her back to him, she slipped back into her room. Then she locked the door. Pressing her back to it, she sank down to the floor and stared off into nothingness.

  All I knew was that you were leaving me…leaving me and breaking my heart.

  Caleb stared, a little dumbfounded, at the closed door in front of him.

  He’d gone after her. After she handed him that little gem, he’d reached for her, but she’d moved away too quick and before he could catch up with her, she’d shut the door, practically in his face.

  He swiped a hand over his damp brow and started to pace. She hadn’t said anything to him that day. He’d asked if things were ever going to change…or just stay the same. Her response had been easy and flippant… What’s wrong with how they are now?

  Well, other than all sorts of things, he guessed he understood where she was coming from. They were great in bed, they never fought and they had so much in common; it was like they’d been cut from the same cloth.

  Except it had stayed that way, just that way, for the entire time they were together. If he tried to take things deeper, she pulled away. If he tried to get her to open up to him, she closed down.

  When he’d told her he was leaving, she hadn’t said a word.

  She’d just sat by and watched him pack and she never said a thing.

  When he walked out the door, she said nothing. Like it didn’t matter. Like they didn’t matter. He had been dying inside, all but ready to beg for her to give him something. Anything.

  But it hadn’t ever happened.

  And that was just the misery on the personal front. It didn’t even tap into what was screwed up with them, hell, with Destin, period, and she wasn’t going to open up about that because she wouldn’t admit there was a problem.

  Problems…shit.

  Turning away from the closed door, he ground the heels of his hands against his eye sockets. They had problems, all right. Destin barely slept without nightmares and her nightmares bled over into him because of how tightly they’d been connected.

  Sometimes he could be five hundred miles away working with another psychic and he’d still have the nightmares. He’d even have his shields up and she’d find a way to pull him in. Yeah, he had solid shields—he had to develop them just to keep her gift from driving him insane, but while he’d been able to keep he
r from reading him, he’d never been as skilled at keeping her emotions on the outside. At keeping the two of them untangled. They’d been so twisted up in each other sometimes he forgot where he existed and where she began.

  There had been times when the line between reality and her nightmares had started to dissolve and he’d told her they needed to find a way to fix it.

  But she hadn’t seen a problem. Told him there wasn’t anything to fix. He was the one with the problem.

  But Caleb had never been assaulted.

  Destin had…although she hid from it.

  It was where her gift had come from.

  He knew it, even if she wouldn’t acknowledge it.

  When he’d tried to press her, to get her to see that there were problems, things they didn’t understand affecting their connection, it had only gotten worse.

  Physically for him, and for her. Whether it had been brought on by stress or something else, he didn’t know. But he’d started suffering from headaches that almost pushed him into blackouts. Nights passed where he didn’t sleep at all and he knew she wasn’t faring any better.

  Then that case…

  The door opened. Turning around, he found himself staring at a stranger. Cool-eyed, remote and her face void of expression, Destin stared at him. Her hair was damp and she was dressed in jeans, a skinny-strapped tank top and a pair of beat-up running shoes. She had a weapon strapped into place and a jacket slung over her arm.

  She eyed him with disdain. “You plan on doing this job wearing those clothes around the campus all day?”

  Caleb looked down and realized he was still wearing his workout gear.

  Shit, how much time had he spent staring at the door and thinking about the end of them? Thinking about what she’d said?

  “No.” He cleared his throat and turned away. “Just give me fifteen minutes.”

  Chapter Six

  “I haven’t ever seen any place where people run so much.” Destin watched yet another runner cut around them, heading up the winding streets that made up much of the area around the University of Virginia.

  “They run because there’s no place to park. Driving isn’t an option,” Caleb said blandly.

  She grimaced. It sounded laughable, but it might almost be true. Twenty minutes trying to find a parking space. “We’re calling a cab from here on out,” she said, following the ebb and flow of people.

  A police car slowed just ahead as students thronged around one of the crosswalks. “Campus police,” she murmured.

  “Yeah. The place has its own police department. So far, they haven’t found anything.”

  She gave him a sidelong look. “I figured that. If they had, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

  Sighing, he dipped a hand into his pocket to touch the ID Oz had provided for him. It would get them around on campus, but it wasn’t going to open any doors if they had to ask questions. His Bureau ID wasn’t going to help there either, because unless he had a reason to be there, people weren’t as likely to talk.

  In a smaller town, maybe. And it was always possible he could find a few people who’d talk out of curiosity, but the people who would have the answers weren’t the ones who’d answer questions just for the hell of it.

  “If you keep staring so hard at that cop car, somebody is going to notice,” Destin pointed out.

  He cut a look her way and grimaced. “Sorry. Trying to figure out how to handle this. It’s new territory for me.”

  “Wow. You mean there’s something you’re not perfectly equipped to handle?” She blinked at him as she slowed to a stop in front of a storefront. “What exactly do you suppose makes your clothes fabulously British or un-British?”

  Caleb shot a look at the display in the window. “If that’s fabulously British, then I’m going to be forever unfabulous.”

  Somebody bumped into him.

  Just one of those accidental bumps…a rush of images swelled inside his head and he whipped around to stare, the movement automatic even though it was useless.

  A girl on the ground. Struggling. Hands gripping her wrists while a man laughed. Grunts, more laughter, a little ragged this time, while the girl whimpered. She went to scream, but it was cut off by a cruel hand against her mouth.

  The images flooded him, drowned him.

  And as quick as they came on, they were gone.

  Whenever he did have a solid connection, it always hit him like this—just like this. Too insubstantial for him to link on, like trying to grip cotton candy, and it was already fading away.

  “Caleb?”

  Her hand touched his and he heard her quick, startled breath, followed by her hand closing around his wrist as he dropped his shields. She had already done the same.

  He couldn’t process this the way Destin could but they merged their abilities too late. It was already gone.

  “Where did he go?” she asked, her fingers still gripping his arm.

  Still trying to clear his head, Caleb turned his head and stared. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice tight and rusty while a headache started to pulse at the base of his skull.

  “Damn it.” Destin shot him a narrow look. “You up for a walk?”

  He grimaced. “Doesn’t matter if I am or not.”

  A look flickered across her face as she studied him and then she reached into her pocket, pulled out a little tin box. “Here. Tylenol. I expected I’d need them, not you.”

  He took a couple and tossed them back dry as they started to walk. “We’re looking for a needle in a haystack here,” he said. There was still an annoying tightness in his throat and the headache was swelling to massive proportions. Pressing the heel of his hand to his eye socket, he dodged a group of laughing girls and met back up with Destin as she stopped at a crosswalk.

  “Yes.”

  Maybe he was off-balance from the connection. Maybe it was from the headache. Or maybe he needed to see a reaction from Destin, he didn’t know. But he looked over at her and instead of trying to find a subtle way to say it, he just threw it out there. “You know, we might be able to work this a lot faster if your boss wasn’t holding back on us.”

  Her spine went straight and tight. Slowly, she turned her head to look at him, her mouth flattened out into a thin, flat line. Her eyes flashed cold fire at him. “Excuse me?”

  “She’s hiding something.”

  “Oz knows how we work,” she said coldly. “She’s given us everything we need to do our job.”

  The kid next to them looked at them strangely and Caleb moved in, grabbing her arm. “Keep it down.”

  She jerked her arm away. “Kiss my ass.” Spinning on her heel, she said, “I’ve been doing my job solo a long time and I’ve been working with her a lot longer than you have. She gave us what we need. If we need more? It’s up to us to find it.”

  It went from nothing to overload in the blink of an eye.

  That wasn’t the case, not really, but it sure as hell seemed that way, and all because of that one moment on the street. If it had been her who’d gotten bumped instead of Caleb, she could have already found that connection, she knew it. Still, even with their fumbling around, they were getting closer.

  “It won’t be much longer.” Destin could feel it, the dark, ominous weight hovering around her. Each day they’d returned to the same area and Destin had gone unshielded each time, hoping to catch something. She’d caught something, all right, a headache from the sheer amount of stimuli. She was tuned into the vibes from sexual predators, but she was still psychic and nobody had emotions running on high the way college students revved up on life, nerves and caffeine did.

  But that wasn’t what she needed.

  What she needed was…this. This dark, ugly connection that was just out of her reach.

  But so close.

  She just needed one thing to close that gap.

  “I feel like something is missing.” The second she said it she wanted to kick herself.

  Caleb said nothing, just continued
to stare out over the campus.

  It had been a quiet two days. They’d both watched the police reports, listened to the radio. And Destin slept unshielded. Because she did, she knew he was doing the same. Heaven help her if she picked up on a rape in progress. Her control was paper-thin right now, but she’d get through it without losing control again, because she had no choice.

  Caleb’s words came back to haunt her.

  Something is missing…

  We might be able to work this a lot faster if your boss wasn’t holding back on us… Was there more going on than what Oz had led them to believe? Shit, of course there was, but did Oz know more?

  It was enough to make her head hurt even more than it already did and after the past two days, it hurt plenty. She’d taken to carrying around an entire bottle of Tylenol, plus the medications that had been prescribed for migraines. She hated taking those because they left her head all muzzy, but if a migraine grabbed her, she’d be at the mercy of her gift and that wasn’t acceptable in a place where there was a rapist running free.

  She had to be logical about this.

  Could Oz be holding something back on her? Loyalty tried to insist no. There was no reason for that, right? What reason did Oz have for holding anything back?

  Destin knew there was something out there, a missing piece that she needed to make that connection, but it could be any number of things. She was working blind. She hadn’t talked to a victim yet. Hadn’t even tried. Hadn’t talked to any law enforcement. Hadn’t tried to do that, either. Hadn’t tried to talk to any of the suspects and that would have been easy enough too, thanks to Oz’s list.

  All she’d done was wander the town and visit the crime scenes.

  And they’d hit the mother lode at the first crime scene. Alleged crime scene, a sardonic voice inside her head reminded her. To that voice, she said shut up. She wasn’t an agent anymore and she knew the rapes had happened. She felt the vibe in the air, felt the hum in her blood. She didn’t have to worry about all the legal trappings of alleged, didn’t have to worry about those lines anymore. Caleb did, but she didn’t.