by Cat Gilbert
Bryan had pushed away from the table, ready to go after him, but I motioned him back down to his seat as Brown turned to look out the window. He wasn’t going anywhere and now that he was talking, I didn’t want to do anything to encourage him to stop.
“I simply told him what he already knew. It didn’t seem worth the risk not to. But that’s all I told him. Nothing else. Not the rest of it. Hughes isn’t stupid.” He turned back around, his emotions in check, and leaned against the counter. “He figured Sean was with you and you'd head to the Agency for help. That’s pretty much SOP. Once he knew you were in the area, he planned on using me as bait to lure you in. He didn’t know and I didn’t care to enlighten him to the fact that you were a couple of steps ahead of him.”
By that I had to assume he meant he hadn’t told Hughes we were coming. It was the second time he claimed he hadn’t done that. I wondered who he was trying to convince, because I wasn’t buying it.
“Not far enough, it seems.” I said, holding out my cup for a refill as Mama D came around with a fresh pot. “They were on us pretty fast.”
“You were far enough ahead to catch them off guard and get me out. Problem is, they had already implanted the tracking device, so it didn’t take them long to find you.”
I looked over at Mac, not sure I’d heard Brown correctly. He nodded at me, confirming what Brown had said.
So that was something new. I had already figured out they were still tracking him after we tossed his clothing, but thought it was mentally. Apparently I’d given them too much credit, but I guess that was better than under estimating them. However, the fact that they’d implanted a tracker meant they knew what we were up to. Hughes might have guessed that we’d come to the Agency, but there was no way he would have guessed we’d come for Brown or that we would blunder onto him. Brown had told him everything or maybe I had it all wrong and Brown was the one calling the shots. This was getting more complicated by the minute and I could feel the pressure build in my head. I needed help, but I couldn’t trust this guy. He needed to go. Now. My decision must have shown on my face or he was reading my mind, because he jumped right back in with both feet before I could tell Mac to take him back to wherever they’d had him stashed.
“Look, Taylor. You’re absolutely right to doubt me. I knew they’d done it, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really relish the idea of being tossed out onto the road or being left there at Hughes mercy. I wanted a way out and I took it. I’m not proud of what I did, but I’d do it again if it meant getting away from Hughes.”
“Why you?” I came back at him, angry at being played. “Why would he take you? How could he even know we were still alive? I seem to recall a pretty bad fire back in Little Rock. One where we all died.”
The buzzing from him suddenly surged in my head, and I could practically taste his terror. He shook his head, and looked down at the floor, avoiding my gaze, without answering. I leaned back in my chair, coffee in hand, determined to wait him out as long as my head didn’t explode.
“You are not the only Client,” he said, finally breaking the silence. “There was a girl, named Abby. She had the amazing ability to find lost things. He used her to find you. I was her Handler. He needed me.”
I sat stunned as his words sunk into my mind. He wasn’t lying about this, although I wish he had been. There had been a girl... she’d had an amazing ability... Brown’s terror, the horror he felt? Suddenly the pieces all fell into place and I knew.
She was gone. They had used her to find me and then, if Brown’s terror was to be believed, Hughes had killed her. Killed a child to get to me. Brown knew it had happened, maybe he’d even seen it. I knew the horror that he’d felt because I’d felt it too. I could feel it in him now, simmering on the edges of his mind. But he hadn’t stopped it. Whether he was in on it or not, he’d let it happen. The rage came fast and hot, flaring out and flowing through me. That I would find Hughes and make him pay, was the last thought I had as blinding pain arched through my head, bringing me to my knees, screaming in agony.
“This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you.” Brown’s words were the last thing I heard as the darkness overwhelmed me.
I CAME TO on the sofa in the living room, disoriented and totally disgusted with myself. The pain behind my eyes was intense, substantially less than earlier in the kitchen, but it was definitely there. The sadness, however, the feeling of guilt and loss was nearly overwhelming. A girl named Abby was gone and I was to blame. Hughes may have killed her and Brown may have let him do it but I was the reason she’d been in danger to begin with. I was the one responsible.
I was trying hard not to lose the omelet I’d just eaten when Brown leaned over the back of the sofa, looking at me with an ‘I told you so’ expression on his face, which was pretty much the last thing I wanted to see.
“You’re going to have to learn to have at least a modicum of control.”
If he’d known how badly I wanted to throw up right then, he’d have been very impressed with my control. He had a point though. This passing out thing just had to stop.
“Go away,” I gritted out, not wanting to see him. He moved back, but didn’t leave, instead turning to talk to Mac like I wasn’t there.
“Just how out of control is she? Can’t you handle her any better than that?” he snapped at him.
“I don’t handle Taylor. She’s perfectly capable of handling herself,” Mac shot back. “Frankly, I think she’s holding it together pretty well, all things considered.”
“Well, you think wrong. If this is how she holds it together, I’d hate to be around when it falls apart.”
I spotted a book lying on the coffee table next to me and had a sudden impulse to throw it at Brown’s head. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind, than the book was flying through the air, disappearing out of view behind the sofa.
“Good shot,” Candice mumbled, as I heard cursing and a thud as the book hit the floor. I leaned up on one elbow and wiggled around to see her sitting next to me on a chair. Bryan was parked on the fireplace hearth across the coffee table from me, grinning.
“Do that again, and I’m out of here.” Brown leaned over the back of the sofa, glaring at me.
I glared right back and reached out for another book, only to have Bryan snag it mid-air.
“Well, now. Barely even had to think about it that time, did you?” His tone changed completely and he walked around the sofa, past Mac who’d been standing by my feet, to go and sit on the hearth near Bryan.
Feeling at a distinct disadvantage, I sat up, propping myself in the corner of the sofa, and tucked my legs around me. Mama D appeared and handed me a cup of coffee, heavily laced with cream. I raised my brows in question and took a cautious sip. She’d put something in there besides cream and it was really good. Really good. She just smiled as I looked up in appreciation and settled in on the other end of the sofa.
“I’d watch myself, if I were you, Dr. Brown.” Candice had her lawyer voice on, deep, deliberate and threatening. “The jury’s still out and you’re not doing so well. Perhaps instead of creating problems, you might try to resolve a few instead.”
Amen to that. I couldn’t have agreed more. Brown looked as though he might argue for half a beat, but the open hostility in the room reinforced both her words and his precarious footing and he wisely chose to keep quiet. She waited long enough for him to become uncomfortable before she went on.
“Now that the crisis is over, I’d like you to explain what happened in there. Is there something wrong with Taylor?”
“There’s so much wrong with her, I don’t even know where to start.” Bryan slapped his thighs and started to pull himself up from the hearth, his intention to thrash Brown obvious to everyone in the room, including Brown himself. “Look, don’t get mad at me for telling the truth. It should be pretty obvious there’s a problem. She’s been thrown in at the deep end of the pool and she’s been flailing around, trying desperately to stay afloat. Probl
em is, all that flailing around? It’s going to kill her.”
“What do you mean it’s going to kill her?” Candice was all over him. “I want to know exactly what is going on and I don’t want anymore analogies, Mr. Deep End of the Pool. We may not be genius like yourself, but neither are we heaped in a pile at the other end of the intelligence scale. So explain yourself. What, exactly, is going to kill her?”
Candice was in rare form, spitting the words out like a machine gun. She’d watched me hit the floor in the kitchen and she was stepping up to the plate, taking the lead. I was perfectly content to let her run with it. If anyone could ferret the truth out of Brown it was Candice. If she had any problems, Bryan was standing right there, more than ready to beat the truth out of him and Mac looked more than ready to lend a helping hand. Brown was in big trouble and genius or not, I wasn’t sure he was smart enough to know it.
Apparently he was smarter than I thought, because he stood up and moved away from the hearth, keeping an eye on Bryan as he answered Candice’s question.
“She doesn’t know how to use what she’s got. She’s forcing it and when she does, it damages her.” He moved over to the sofa and sat down on the opposite end, redirecting his focus to me. “Think about it Taylor. Did your head hurt worse when you threw the book at me?”
He paused waiting for an answer. He was going to wait a long time, because I had no intention of supplying one. He was here to supply answers and he either had them or he didn’t. I had no intention of helping him out. I just stared at him and waited. Eventually he got the drift.
“Fine. I’ll answer for you. No. It didn’t hurt. Why? I’ll answer again. Because you used it properly, without even thinking about it. Thinking about it is what gets you in trouble because you’re forcing it. That and not controlling your emotions. They’re tied together, Taylor. If you can’t control one, you can’t control the other and it will destroy you. The brain can only take so much and you’re fast approaching its limits.”
“Can you teach her?” Bryan asked finally, breaking the silence that had fallen over the room and lowering the hostility level immensely.
“If she’ll let me.” Brown leaned back into the cushions, never taking his eyes off me. I met his stare dead on, knowing I would never trust this man. “But it’s not going to be easy and it will take a long time.”
“How much time?” Candice asked.
“Months. Years maybe.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” I said, uncurling from sofa and managing to get to my feet while retaining some amount of dignity. “Because you have one week. Then we’re going after Hughes.”
I had decided to let him stay. Better here where we could watch him than out there where he could run amok and tell everyone where we were. The prospect of finding another place and starting the process over again was not something I wanted to contemplate. So, I’d give him a week. Maybe he could teach me something. Heaven knew, I needed help. It just rankled that he might be the one to do it.
I wound my way past them and left the silent room, wondering if I had just lost what little of my mind I had left.
THIRTY-THREE
“YOU’RE NOT CONCENTRATING, Taylor. You’re doing it wrong. Still.”
I looked at the feather sitting on the kitchen table and hated it with every ounce of my being. The past four mornings at 6 a.m., Brown had set it down on the table and then picked it up 2 hours later from exactly the same place, only to put it back down and start all over again immediately after breakfast. This morning looked to be no different. My goal was simple. All I had to do was to push it off the table, without using my hands. So far, I hadn’t even been able to make it move. The deadline was fast approaching and my frustration was mounting with each passing second.
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe you’re teaching it wrong?” I shot back, shoving myself back from the table to glare at him.
“No,” he answered back, completely unruffled. “The action is an extension of the thought and it rides on the emotion. You want it. You reach for it. You take it. Not by force, but by simply doing it.” He stood and picked up the feather, giving me a raised eye-brow look that clearly said I was the problem, and left the room, passing Candice and Mama D on their way in to make breakfast.
I blew out a long breath of frustration, closed my eyes and counted to ten under my breath.
“What’s wrong?” Candice asked, slapping down a placemat in front of me.
“I hate that feather,” I answered her, “and I’m not real fond of Brown.”
“Well, there’s a surprise.” She fairly dripped in sarcasm. “So I take it there’s no progress, huh?”
I shook my head and took another deep breath. The smell of coffee in the air had my head swimming. I looked over to see Mama D pulling eggs and bacon from the refrigerator, the frying pans already on the stove, ready and waiting.
Brown had been preaching at me from six in the morning until midnight for the past four days and all I had to show for it was an even more intense dislike of the man. It looked like I was in for another day of the same and I wasn’t looking forward to it all. In fact, I had to keep from shuddering when he followed Bryan and Mac back into the kitchen.
“So what have we learned today, Dorothy?” Mac quipped as he pulled out a chair. I stared at him. For a guy who picked up on my emotions, he had to know he was playing with fire. He just chuckled and sat down.
“From the look she’s giving you, my guess is she still hasn’t moved that feather.” Bryan pulled back his own chair. “I wish you would just hurry up and figure it out. Maybe we could eat sooner. I’m starving.”
“Talk to Brown. He’s the one that insists we do this before breakfast. Or coffee.” I glanced over at Brown, who shrugged and plopped down next to Bryan, just as Mama D sat a steaming mug in front of me.
“You’re an addict.” Brown’s voice was dry and accusing.
“And you’re a pain in the keister!” I shot back, causing Candice to gasp and Mama D to burst out laughing.
Brown lifted a glass of orange juice in a mocking salute, as I glared at him over the rim of my coffee cup.
We sat quietly after that little exchange, listening to the sound of bacon sizzling. All I could think about was all the time I had wasted with Brown when I could have been focusing on a plan to get to Hughes. I had given Brown a week. Four days were already gone and we had accomplished nothing. To top the whole thing off, I didn’t think I could stand one more hour with Brown, much less 3 more days. Not at this rate. I wasn’t sure whether it was that I still didn’t trust him, that I just didn’t like him, or the sneaking suspicion that he was right, and I was the whole problem, but I was pretty certain I’d had about as much of him as I could take.
By the time Mama D and Candice sat hot plates loaded with eggs and bacon down in front of us, I’d finished my coffee and was in a better state of mind. Bryan went over and got the coffee pot and refilled my cup before setting it down on the table.
“So,” Mac broke the silence, “if you don’t mind me asking, what seems to be the problem?”
“She’s not listening. That’s the problem. She thinks she knows it all.” Brown dove right in before I even had a chance to open my mouth. My better state of mind was gone in an instant. “I knew she was ignorant, but I didn’t think she was stupid.”
I didn’t mind being ignorant. That much was true. I didn’t have the knowledge I needed and that’s what he was there for, so I could let that one pass. It was the stupid part that pushed me over the edge. So far as I was concerned, the stupidest thing I’d done was waste four whole days trying to move a feather. I gave his plate a mental shove and watched in surprise as it slid off the table into his lap.
“Good girl.” Brown ignored the plateful of food in his lap. Instead he whipped his hand up and almost magically the feather appeared on the table. “Now the feather.”
I gave it a push and watched as it sat there where his plate had been moments before.
> “Taylor,” Brown called quietly, drawing my attention. “Did you feel the difference?”
Yeah, I felt the difference. I enjoyed dumping the plate into his lap. Couldn’t wait to do it. Could feel my hands on the plate. Could feel the plate start to slide, feel the slick edge of the plate move past my fingers as it disappeared over the edge of the table. I couldn’t care less about the feather, but coating him with steaming eggs and greasy bacon? That was great.
I was about to tell him that very thing, when it hit me, freezing me in my tracks. That’s not what he meant. The difference wasn’t in how I felt. It was in how I directed what I felt. I had wanted to move that feather with every once of my being, just so we would move on and I wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. I wanted it as much if not more than I wanted to dump that plate of eggs into Brown’s lap. The difference was I tried to force the feather. With the plate I just reached out and did it.
I felt my muscles clench up, my breath coming rapidly. Could it really be that simple? I looked over at the feather and gave it flick, watching in amazement as it floated up in the air, a smile of satisfaction spreading across my face as it slowed wafted down to settle back on the table and cheers erupted from my supporters.
“By Jove, I think she’s got it. Finally. ” Brown’s mocking whisper wiped the smiles off everyone’s faces, including my own. He stood up, tossing the plate back onto the table and scattering bits of scrambled eggs around in the process. “I would appreciate it, however, if you would desist from throwing things, although, it does seem to be your forte.”
He gave his pants a shake, trying to dislodge a few particularly clingy pieces of egg and looked down in disgust at the dark spots left behind by the grease and butter. He threw me one last steely look before he huffed out of the kitchen.
“Gee, what a killjoy,” Candice blurted out as soon as Brown was out of the room. I was pretty sure he could hear her. She’d said it loud enough. “He really doesn’t like you, does he?”
