Psychic Storm: Ten Dangerously Sexy Tales of Psychic Witches, Vampires, Mediums, Empaths and Seers

by Deanna Chase

  After his brief search proved I was alone, he spun on me, brown eyes blazing.

  “You fucking hypnotized me!”

  I narrowed my eyes on him, forcing myself to appear strong, hoping he wouldn’t hear my pounding heart. I just had to keep in mind, if he hadn’t wanted to let me go, at least a little bit, my nudge wouldn’t have worked. “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

  Jace swept up on me and clutched my chin hard. “Don’t play games with me.”

  Now normally, I didn’t go around blabbing about my gift, but if what he said about talking to Gomez’s ghost was true, then he wasn’t likely to call me a liar like the few other people besides Mama I’d told. Besides, he still held that gun.

  “I didn’t hypnotize you. I just nudged you.”

  Jace dropped his hand from my face but kept me backed against the door. “What do you mean, you nudged me?”

  “I told you to back off, and you did.”

  “Like you told Gomez to die, and he obeyed?”

  “That what he told you?”

  Jace nodded once.

  “Fine, yeah. But I didn’t tell him to die. I told him to stop. He’s the one who took it to the extreme.”

  His voice dropped to a low growl. “What are you?”

  “I’m a human, stupid. You’ve been watching too many of those paranormal shows.”

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

  I shrugged. “Fine. I’m kinda like a weak psychic.”

  After considering that a moment, he stepped back, giving me some breathing room, and he holstered his weapon. “Weak? What I saw tonight wasn’t weak. You commanded someone to die, and he did. I was there. I saw him go down. I questioned his ghost.”

  My anger escalated again. “You watched that man try to rape Destiny and didn’t stop him? What kind of person are you? Don’t tell me you get off on that shit.”

  “Of course not! I was just about to tranq him when you showed up.”

  “Tranq? Like tranquilizer?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t just jump in there to whoop his ass without blowing my cover.”

  “You could’ve shot him.”

  “Why would I shoot my best lead? Besides, I don’t just run around killing people.”

  “Are you judging me?”

  Jace threw his hands up in the air and paced around the room until he stopped beside my table. When he spotted the stack of mail, he picked it up and started leafing through. “What’s all this?” he asked.

  I stomped over and ripped it out of his hands. “Bills. What the hell do you think they are?”

  “But why so many? And why are they all past due?”

  “Because I’m a deadbeat. God, you’re nosy.”

  “Not nosy. I’m an investigator.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  I tucked the mail into my dresser. No Southern gentleman would think of reaching into a lady’s underwear drawer. Jace didn’t sound Southern, but he looked Hispanic, and the Latina mothers I’d grown up around knew how to raise their boys right.

  “Look, I’m going to level with you,” he said, plastering on a fake smile. Good-cop persona? “I had you checked out. Nothing. Not even an unpaid parking ticket.”

  “You had me checked out? When?”

  “What do you think took me so long to get here? I ran a background check on your ID.”

  Now that pissed me off. “Oh, really? And what did you learn about me in twenty minutes?”

  “That your license isn’t a forgery. Marley Mae Sexton is your real name. You are twenty-two years old, from a little town in the ass-end of Texas, and your mother still lives there. Your father is deceased, and you have no known siblings. You graduated high school but were only an average student. You have no criminal history. You pay your taxes, though I seriously doubt you report all your tips. And your credit score is in the tank. Just trying to figure out why.”

  I sank down onto the end of my bed. “You gonna want DNA next?”

  One side of his mouth twitched. “Already got it.”

  “What? How?”

  “The penlight you used to look at my license. It has a micro needle in it that nabbed a tiny skin sample from your finger.”

  “That’s not legal! Who do you think you are? James Freakin’ Bond?”

  “Something like that.” Jace drew out my only kitchen chair and straddled it. It whined out a loud groan. Jace wasn’t a big man. Five foot ten or so. Lean build. But he had at least fifty pounds on me, and I couldn’t be sure my wobbly chair was up to the added stress. “And the DNA sample is for a wider criminal history search. Marley Mae Sexton doesn’t have a record, but maybe your other aliases do.”

  “Do what? Mister, you are barking up the wrong tree here. I already admitted I nudged that man, but there ain’t a court in the land that would convict me on it. They won’t believe I’m psychic any more than they will believe you’re a...”

  “Medium.”

  “Whatever. So what is it you really want with me? I’m not sorry I killed your guy, but it wasn’t intentional.”

  “Commanding someone to die seems pretty intentional to me.”

  “I’ve never been able to nudge someone like that before. Didn’t reckon it was even possible. Telling that man to stop was nothing but knee jerk reaction. Feminine instinct. Besides, men who’ll do that once are bound to do it again. No such thing as rehab for sex offenders. The world is better off with him out of the picture.”

  I was feeling pretty proud of myself, but Jace worked his hands like he was trying to hold himself back from strangling me. Don’t know what his problem was. I didn’t bust into his home at bedtime to poke around in his business.

  “Listen, mister, we don’t seem to be getting anywhere. You obviously suspect me of something, so why don’t you go on and tell me what it is so I can deny it and get on to bed?”

  His face tightened like he might be weighing his options. Finally, he said, “I suspect you are a psy agent working for El Caos. I think you were planted in the club to knock off Gomez.”

  Well, that was quite a leap. My mouth just sort of hung open for a moment while I processed his words. Then I cleared my throat to answer. “Well...first off, I have no clue what a psy agent is. And I started working at The Henhouse three months ago because the club I worked at before lost its liquor license and closed.”

  His stare weighed heavy on me, but I refused to break eye contact for fear he’d see it as an admission of guilt. By the time he glanced away, my eyes were dry and watery all at the same time.

  “A psy agent,” Jace explained, “is someone who uses her psychic abilities in various clandestine ways.”

  “Like a spy?”

  “Sometimes. And sometimes like an assassin.”

  A sick feeling filled my belly. An assassin? He thought I was a professional killer? Hey, I admit, I might be morally ambiguous at times, but I ain’t never killed nobody. Uh...well, before tonight anyway.

  “I swear, Jace. I’m not a hired killer. That’s just insane! I couldn’t even go along to put our old dog to sleep.”

  “You had no problem putting Gomez down.”

  “When I told him to stop, I thought he’d stop hurting Destiny long enough for her to get away. Like I said, my nudges aren’t very strong. It’s not my fault the guy took me so literally.”

  Jace’s stare was so hard, I could feel him thinking.

  “A decent psy agent wouldn’t have spilled her guts until she was sure she wasn’t being recorded.”

  My heart hiccoughed. “Wait, you recorded me?”

  His lips twisted into a sly grin. “Of course. It’s evidence.”

  A jury might not believe I can nudge a man to death, but a recorded confession could go a long way toward convincing a person.

  “Jace, please.” I stood and grasped as his arm. “I didn’t mean to do it. I’m sorry I ruined your case. Don’t turn me in. I swear I’ll never hurt anyone ever again.”

  His hard eye
s studied my face. “I won’t turn you in. For now. But I’m still not convinced you weren’t hired to take out Gomez.”

  Jace shook off my hand and strode to the door.

  “So that’s it? You’re just going to leave? You think I might be killing people, and you’re just going to leave me to it?”

  With his hand on the open door, Jace’s eyes scanned me from head to toe. “I’ll see what your DNA turns up. Don’t leave town. I’d just have to track you down, and that’d piss me off. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Jace, wait!” I called to him as he started down the steps.

  He gazed up from half a flight below. “What?”

  “Are you going to tell me who you’re working for?”

  He grinned. “Right now? I’m working for myself.”

  He knocked once on the handrail and vanished down the steps into the darkness.

  Chapter 4

  JC

  I didn’t lie to her. I really was handling the case by myself. At least the part of the case that involved me going after Nico Diaz. The CIA wasn’t keen on using taxpayer resources to settle personal vendettas.

  Wearing a conservative gray suit, striped tie and sunglasses, I stepped through the revolving door of the high-rise office building in the heart of Austin. I crossed the busy marble-floored lobby and made my way to the long bank of elevators where I flashed an ID badge to a security guard. He nodded. When the bell dinged, I stepped into the waiting car.

  “Hold up, Moreno,” called voice from the lobby.

  I glanced to see one of the new recon agents on loan from the FBI for some joint task force. He was tall and blond and had a certain fake look about him. I could never remember his name. In my head, I referred to him as Special Agent Hunk Johnson.

  Hunk flashed his ID badge at the guard and stepped into the elevator car.

  “How’s it hanging?” He chuckled.

  I was not a chuckler, and I didn’t trust any dude who made comic innuendos referring to current status of another man’s penis position. I gave him a curt nod of greeting.

  When the door closed, I opened a panel in the wall and typed in a code. The lights flickered. Hunk and I stood straight, holding our arms slightly extended from our sides as a laser beam scanned us from head to toe, cataloging all the metal on our bodies down to our dental fillings. I had no sympathy for travelers bitching about invasive scanners at airports. I had a stranger examining what was under my clothes on a daily basis.

  “Late night, homie? Looking rough.”

  Homie? 1994 just called. They want their slang back. And I didn’t think I looked that bad. “Nope. Just didn’t have time to shave this morning.”

  The scan finished just as the car drew up to the fourteenth floor. The doors opened to a normal looking reception area, staffed by a pretty, but forgettable, receptionist. A bronze plaque over her head read, Remington Investments. The company was as fake as the philodendrons decorating the lobby, and beneath that desk, there was an AK47 trained on our dicks.

  “Good morning, gentlemen. Won’t you please scan in?” She said it like we had a choice, as if a swat team of armed guards wouldn’t descend on us if we refused.

  Hunk and I each stepped forward and submitted our hands for the print scanner perched on the desk. It beeped an “all clear” signal. Beside the desk stood a large set of gleaming glass doors which led to a couple of mundane and completely unused offices, staged to look like hardworking stock brokers just left to get a coffee and would be back any minute. Hunk and I ignored these obvious doors and walked to a small janitor’s closet on the left. Of course, it wasn’t really a closet, despite all the brooms and cleaning detergent. Once we were inside with the door closed, we crossed to the back wall. There we took turns entering our employee codes and leaning in for our retinal scan.

  As we waited the sixty seconds or so for the guards monitoring us with tiny cameras to confirm that we did in fact belong there, Hunk decided to fill the silence with vapid conversation.

  “Yeah, working this task force has been amazing. I love being part of missions so important to national security. My boss back in Quantico said you boys can keep me as long as I’m needed.”

  “It’s a wonder he can spare you.”

  My sarcasm must have been lost on him because Hunk puffed his chest out and beamed.

  Thankfully, the hidden door in the wall slid open before I had to engage in any more small talk. We walked down a long white hallway until we reached two doors across from each other. Hunk scanned in first, and when his door opened, said, “Well, it was nice seeing you, Moreno. Time to go save the world!”

  I mumbled a goodbye and scanned into the opposite door. It opened to a sea of beige cubicles. Hunk the idiot got to shoot and dodge bullets. I had to sit at my desk and try to suppress the urge to eat one.

  With a sigh, I made my way to my cube. Ringing the outer perimeter of the work space were offices with huge glass windows and conference rooms. Around me, people talked on phones and tapped on their keyboards, not paying me any attention. It really did look like an investment house. But it wasn’t. This was the Texas branch of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  I’d been working undercover inside El Caos for three years when my cover was blown. Since then, the CIA’d had me riding a desk as a consultant. Don’t ask me what that meant, because I didn’t think even my bosses could’ve given my job description. Basically, I knew too much about the cartel to be transferred to another task force, but the giant price on my head meant the agency couldn’t take the chance of sending me out in the field.

  My desk was located in the center of the office next to the 3-in-1 copy machine, as far from anything resembling natural light as possible. As I waited for my computer to boot up, I spotted a post-it note stuck to my keyboard. It read, “It would be nice if you would re-fill the printer when it runs out of paper. Thanks! :)”

  The note wasn’t signed, but the passive aggressive tone could only be my boss’s tightly-permed assistant. The flimsy walls of my cubicle loomed over me. I tugged at the knot of my tie.

  “Hey, JC. How’s it going?”

  I glanced up to see Tom Miller. Tom was one of those guys who took to office life well. A little soft, a little quiet. The last person you’d suspect worked for the CIA, even as a data analyst. Tom was the closest thing I had to a friend. Pathetic really, since I never saw him outside of these walls. Being undercover for so long wasn’t conducive to cultivating personal relationships, and I was out of practice.

  “Did you get that info for me?” I asked, careful to keep my voice low.

  He nodded. “Just emailed you the file.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Nada. The DNA was a bust. The only interesting thing that came up involved the girl’s father. Eddie Sexton... he was a con man and petty criminal. Has arrest records in four states around the south. Was found dead in a motel room outside Vegas about fifteen years ago.”

  “El Caos?” The cartel didn’t usually venture that far north of the boarder, but Vegas might be an exception.

  “No. I didn’t find any cartel connection. Looked like a mob hit. Cops figured he tried to rip off the wrong person.”

  A con man. Was this who Marley got her nudging from?

  “Any indication father and daughter were close?”

  Miller shook his head. “Looks like he didn’t have much to do with her beyond conception. Took off when the mother was pregnant, and they divorced soon after.”

  “Okay, well, thanks for looking into it for me.”

  “You gonna tell me who this girl is?”

  “I’m not sure yet myself.”

  “All right, man. If you need anything else, just let me know.”

  Miller retreated to his desk across the aisle.

  I combed through the file he sent, looking for anything he may have missed. Nothing. The girl might be clean. Then again, she might not be. Feeling the tension rise in my shoulders, I set thoughts of the telepathic stripper aside a
nd turned my attention to my files on Nico Diaz. Shit, without Gomez, I needed another way to get to him. I wouldn’t get any help from the higher-ups. As far as the agency was concerned, Diaz was a small fish in El Caos, just one among hundreds of cogs in the organization.

  I had been one of those cogs once. Most boys where I came from ended up working for the gang at some point. Especially troubled boys like me. But what people from the block didn’t know was that I joined the gang on the direction of the CIA.

  It all started when I saw my first ghost at age thirteen. I was at a neighbor’s funeral, and while it scared the shit out of me, it wasn’t entirely unexpected either. Psychic abilities ran in my family, one or two people in every generation. My grandfather was the local Brujo, sort of like a shaman, in the Mexican border town where I grew up. I hoped that if I turned psychic, I’d develop a way to see through girls’ dresses. That’s what I was doing during the funeral mass, concentrating really hard on my friend’s sixteen-year-old sister’s floral-covered ass. The appearance of the bloodless body floating up the aisle killed my budding hard-on and had me tearing out of the church like el diablo was on my heels.

  It pissed me off the way all those pansy-ass ghost hunters ran around with their little magnets and EMF detectors and shit. They wouldn’t be so tough if they had to see the shit I do. And I didn’t think it made me a pussy that at the age of thirteen, I had to sleep with the light on to keep visions of bloated corpses out of my head. Soon the lack of sleep from paranoia and fear gave me a temper. Didn’t help that the other kids thought I’d turned nuts. I got into a lot of fights, picked up the wrong kinds of friends. I think my family understood why I was acting out, but my poor parents couldn’t find a way to control me. When I was expelled from school for knocking the front teeth out of a boy, my grandfather urged my parents to send me to live with relatives in Chicago, where I could be kept well away from the local gangbangers. Before my fourteenth birthday, my ass was on a train headed north.

  It was ten years before I saw my hometown again. Didn’t have much need since most of my family had immigrated to the States years earlier. But a job’s a job. I was a trained psy agent for the CIA, and my mission was to infiltrate El Caos. I took a job at a gas station just outside Monterrey and waited for my old friends to get in touch. It didn’t take long. I’d been briefed on which of those friends were members of El Caos, and I made sure to make nice. Within only a few months, I’d been recruited.