The Protected tfp-4

by Shiloh Walker

  “How about we focus on the job?” he suggested softly as he whipped the car around.

  “You are just no fun, Tucker. How can you be so cool and controlled when I’m sitting here squirming and thinking about you and me and bare skin?”

  He disconnected the call. She’d call back in a second; he knew it. So he took the brief moment to drag a hand over his face and force his recalcitrant body under control. The leather of his glove slid over his face, smooth and worn from years of use. He’d had the gloves specially designed. He pulled them on first thing in the morning, and pulled them off right before he went to bed. He stripped them off for certain things, of course, but for the most part, those gloves were as much a part of him as breathing.

  They protected everybody in the world from the wild charge that lived inside him. It seemed his body was one big, giant conductor of electricity half the time, although it wasn’t that simple. He pulled the energy from somewhere, he knew, and he could channel it out when he was focused. When he wasn’t focused, when he was pissed, he also affected the ebb and flow of electricity around him.

  Once, he’d unintentionally stopped a person’s heart because of it.

  Bare skin on bare skin. Terror pulsing out of him.

  Yeah. Control was pretty vital to him.

  And Nalini managed to shatter it.

  When the phone rang a few seconds later, he was as much in control as he could expect to be. After a ring or two, he answered with a curt, “Yeah?”

  “Wow. I must really be getting under your skin. Okay, we’ll focus on the job,” Nalini said, her voice heavy with amusement.

  The woman was bizarre. Most women get hung up on and they are irritated. He does it to her? She laughs.

  “Why don’t you just give me a better idea of what I’m looking for and then we can be done with the chatter?” Tucker said.

  “I already explained I’m not sure what you’re looking for,” she said, her voice low and soft. There was a long pause and he thought he heard a rapid series of taps. Like somebody firing away on a keyboard. “I . . . I just think there’s a kid involved. I’m almost positive the item is a child. I hear one . . . in my head, if you get my drift. He’s screaming. I think it’s him. And I think they are looking for him because he’s . . . well . . . unique.”

  “Drop the codespeak, Nalini.” He slowed at a stop sign and then turned left, taking the highway that would lead him into Orlando. He didn’t live in town. That just wasn’t smart for a guy like him. But his place was only a few miles out and already traffic was closing up around him. “You mean psychic.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I mean psychic.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what this site is for. It’s where people go to find others, it’s where they go to connect . . . and I think others go to recruit. It’s bad news, though, because sometimes people disappear.”

  “Disappear.” He stared at the license plate of the car in front of him and tried to blank his mind. Wild, chaotic energy crackled inside him and he had no place to put it, no place to direct it. All he could do was focus and ride it out until it eased off. “And you think a kid’s the next mark?”

  “Yes . . . but this is different. Usually, they recruit here. This isn’t recruiting. It’s . . . hunting,” she said, her voice grim.

  Hunting—

  Just thinking about that had his hands tightening on the steering wheel and he wanted to hit something. Pound it bloody and then do it all over again.

  Seconds ticked away, and then softly, Nalini asked, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m just fine, darlin’.” Everything built to a screaming roar in his brain and he shunted it off, splicing that part of himself off until it was like two people rode inside his mind. Tucker who was in control, pressing on the gas as the cars around him started to move. Tucker who was ready to fry the next thing he touched. He could control it. He’d spent the past twenty years of his life learning how to do just that, and control it was exactly what he’d do.

  “How certain are you that your boss isn’t behind any of those disappearances?” he asked dispassionately. He knew more than a few federal types who’d tried to make people like him disappear. One had tried to make him disappear. Permanently. Not long after—

  The car shuddered around him and he cut that line of thought off. Couldn’t go there. Not right now.

  “I couldn’t be more positive if I had to. Jones and his unit are clean. I know you don’t have any reason to trust me, but they aren’t dirty. They aren’t behind any of this.”

  Nalini continued to talk, her voice soft and low, and even though he barely heard her words, he let himself focus on the low, soothing sound of her voice until some of that rage banked, until the energy surging inside him ebbed down.

  “So. You got any idea how to help me out here?”

  Tucker spotted a familiar sign up ahead and hit his turn signal. “Yeah. If the kid I’m looking for is psychic, I just go trolling. The human mind is an electrical construct, basically. And the mind of a psychic feels different. I’ll just keep circling and hoping I’ll find something.”

  “That . . . could take a long time.”

  He grunted. “Yeah. But there’s already been something around here moving. I’ve been ignoring it. Guess it’s time to check it out.” He got in line at the drive-thru. “Is that all?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  He didn’t say anything as he went to disconnect.

  “Hey, wait . . . you can really sense things just by the way our minds feel?”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his brow.

  “And you can sense the minds of all the people around you, too. All the time?”

  “If I let myself.” He’d already lowered his shields a little and he knew, within a fifty-foot range, there were one hundred and fifty-two people. One of them had a pacemaker. He felt that as well.

  “Doesn’t that drive you crazy?”

  He pulled forward in the line. Softly, he said, “Yes.”

  SEVEN

  VAUGHNNE didn’t run because she liked it.

  She didn’t hate it, but she sure as hell didn’t love it, and in her expert, professional opinion, all of those who talked about a runner’s high were just deluding themselves. The only time she got high off exerting herself was after a bout of particularly good sex.

  Which she hadn’t had in so long, she could be delusional.

  No, she ran because she knew it was necessary.

  Keeping her body in top physical form was just part of the job.

  It was the same reason she lifted weights and the same reason she trained in a variety of fighting styles, ranging in everything from standard tae kwon do to kickboxing to muay thai. Even though she’d spent so much time on the streets, she couldn’t rely on street fighting to get her everywhere, and she didn’t. There was always room for improvement, so improvement was what she pushed for.

  After the shit way she’d felt ever since the last job in Orlando, she’d been knocked down to where she could barely manage three miles on average, and the first few times she’d run, she’d been hard-pressed to make two.

  She was back up to five now, and today, she planned on going for six. It was annoying as hell, having to do it in this neighborhood. Pounding it out on the busted-up pavement wasn’t much better than running on a treadmill in the gym. She preferred the park back home, but she wasn’t leaving this area unless she had to, and she definitely wasn’t leaving it to run.

  Right now, it was just after six; Gus and Alex weren’t home. According to the tracker, they were at the grocery store, just a mile away, and although she didn’t feel right not being there, hiding just out of sight, she hadn’t followed them that day.

  She couldn’t explain why, but she’d felt the need to stay here. Instinct, she knew. Still, her gut was a wild, tangled mess, and she wished there was a way she could have planted a tracker on the damn kid.

  She felt almost glued to this place, though. Thanks to the wonde
rs of technology, she had the video feed coming to her live on her iPhone and she kept checking it every few minutes as she ran. At their house, everything was calm, everything was quiet.

  For now. But it wouldn’t last.

  Something was going to go down. The knot in her belly, the tension crawling through her. All of it added up to something, but the question was what. Yet again, she found herself checking the video feed . . . nothing.

  Nothing unusual had activated the alarm sensors that fed into the program she’d set up, either.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.

  She was less than half a mile away at the most and could be over there in no time.

  Stop it, she told herself. She was working herself up—

  The camera feed caught the image of a car. It cut between the cameras she’d set up at her place and the house directly across from hers, rolling down the street slowly. Slowly, but not too slow.

  Everything about it set her hair on end.

  The camera feed on her phone wasn’t good enough for her to be able to make out anything about the driver, but everything inside her was already screaming. Long and loud.

  It wasn’t screaming danger, danger, danger.

  But the warning alert was bad enough.

  Wheeling around in her steps, she laid on the speed and hauled ass back.

  Son of a bitch.

  She’d expected things to make a shift soon. Just not this soon.

  The question was . . . is this for the better . . . or the worse.

  * * *

  TUCKER eyed the house.

  Somebody who lived in that house was a problem. Whoever it was, they weren’t home now and all Tucker could pick up was a weird little buzz, kind of like an echo.

  One hell of a strong echo.

  If it was this strong and the person wasn’t even here, then how strong was he?

  A kid. Assuming Nalini was right, and it was a kid involved. She seemed to think so, though, and he wasn’t inclined to dispute her gut feelings. People like them, they lived and died by those feelings.

  Sighing, he cut around the corner and headed north, trying to decide what to do. He’d told Nalini he’d take a look around, see if he could find this item. He’d be willing to bet this kid was the item—and if so, that kid was a walking, talking hazard. If anybody in the entire town could possibly be drawing the absolute wrong kind of interest, it was the person living in that house.

  Absolutely no idea how to control what he had in his head, very little control period, and more power inside him than Tucker had ever sensed in his damn life.

  Swearing, he arrowed the car over to the curb, and under the pretense of making a call, he pulled out his phone and punched in the phone number for his house. He didn’t have an answering machine and Lucia was there only a few days a week, so all it was going to do was ring. And ring. It would buy him a few minutes so he could think. That was all he needed to do. Take a minute and think.

  Sighing, he held the phone to his ear and stared straight ahead, focusing on the vibrant energy still riding in the air as he tried to think up a plan.

  He would have been better off checking behind him. Then he might have seen her coming.

  As it was, he didn’t see her until she already had her gun pulled.

  “Well, well, well . . .”

  * * *

  VAUGHNNE didn’t know whether to cuss or heave out a sigh of relief.

  The tattoos spiraling up his arms weren’t what had clued her into whom she was dealing with.

  It was the fiery red hair spilling down into his eyes and down over his collar. Tucker couldn’t have tried any less hard to attract attention, she figured. Muscle car. Brilliant red hair . . . not carroty red, but that deep, rich fiery red that a bunch of women would probably sell their soul for, and tattoos that twisted and twined around a rather nice pair of arms. She had to admit that. He had a great set of arms.

  Even as she saw them tensing, his hands tightening on the steering wheel. She pressed the gun a little harder against the area behind his ear and moved in, using her body to hide it as best as she could. He’d parked in a damned conspicuous area, so this was going to be hard.

  But she wasn’t about to let Tucker, whoever in the hell he was, disappear without finding out why he was here. Because she knew better than to believe this was a coincidence. “You don’t want to go grabbing for my gun, sugar,” she said, smiling at him. “And don’t go trying any of that electrical shit I know you can do. Remember what I can do . . . I’ll shriek inside your skull until you’re ready to gouge out your own brainstem just to shut me up.”

  He angled his head around just enough to look at her.

  Brave guy. He apparently didn’t seem to think she was going to pull the trigger.

  She probably wouldn’t, but still.

  “I won’t go pulling any of my shit if you don’t make me,” he said levelly. “How about you lower the gun and we can talk . . . Vaughnne, right?”

  “We can maybe talk. But we aren’t doing it here.” Arching a brow, she held out a hand. “Gimme your keys and your phone. I’m getting in and then you can have them back.”

  “I can hot-wire the damn car quicker than you can get around to the other side.”

  “Probably.” She smiled a little. “But you’re here for a reason . . . I bet it’s got something to do with why I am here.”

  His brown eyes bored into hers, a scowl darkening his face. Finally, he jerked his head in a nod and tugged out the keys. “I’m doing it to make you feel better, darlin’. You know it’s a waste of time.”

  “I’m all about feeling better . . .” She smiled at him. “Darlin’.”

  He tossed her the keys. She barely had time to pocket them before the phone came flying at her. It was an iPhone, and she went into its settings, putting it in airplane mode and shutting down any of the apps that might use the GPS. It wasn’t a surefire thing, but it was all she had without destroying the phone. She didn’t think she had to take that step with him. She’d hold it in reserve, though. As she turned the phone off and slid it into her pocket, she headed around to the other side of the car, fully aware of the weight of his gaze, boring into her.

  Broody bastard.

  She wondered if Jones had tried to recruit him yet. He’d fit in really well.

  Sliding into the passenger seat, she kept her gun in her lap, a firm grip on it, but aimed it away. “See? It’s aimed elsewhere. Better?”

  Tugging out the keys, she tossed them at him and nodded behind them. “I’m living across from the house you were probably checking out. Let’s see if you know where it is. Go park in the alley behind my place.”

  “See, that’s the problem with you federal types. Got to be all subterfuge, all the time. You can’t just give me the damn address,” he muttered, checking the road before he pulled out.

  She shrugged. “Well, I could. I just want to see if my hunch is right.”

  He slanted a narrow look at her. “The kid I’m looking for has a brain that glows like neon. He doesn’t know how to shut down. Anybody who knows how to look for people like us can see it.”

  Damn. She didn’t let her reaction show, but her heart sank as she caught a glimpse of the look in his eyes. “So why are you looking for him?”

  “I had a . . . request,” he said, turning into the alley just behind her street. She wasn’t surprised when he pulled into the narrow little space behind her house. “So did I pass the test?”

  She just grunted as she climbed out. “Come on. Let’s get inside.” She used the cover of the car to hide it as she tucked her gun back out of sight and started toward the house.

  He waited until the door was shut before he came for her.

  She barely managed to duck out of the way, and the only reason she managed it at all was a weird tension in the air. It was like the air went all tight and crazy right before a bad thunderstorm. He was fast. He was quiet. And she thanked God and Taylor Jones for all that brutal, a
wful training he’d thrown her way before he’d agreed to let her in the unit.

  It was the only damn thing that kept her out of Tucker’s reach as she spun and drew her weapon—why in the hell had she put it up, anyway? “Do we really have to do this?”

  “Put that down before I decide to get pissed off,” he suggested.

  “And what are you going to do if you get pissed off?” She curled her lip at him. “Call down the lightning on me or something?”

  Something flashed through his eyes. “You think it’s a joke.”

  “No. I got a good idea of what you can do and it’s pretty damned amazing. I’m impressed. But I’m not looking at a killer. You’re not going to hurt me, so shove the empty threats up your very nice ass, Tucker.”

  Lights flickered. “I don’t have to kill you to get you the hell out of my way. Give me my phone. Get out of my way and let me do my job. Do that and we can call a truce before anything gets out of hand.” A strange smile curved his face and damned if it was a little bit unsettling. “Before you get hurt.”

  “You can have your phone . . . after we talk and I’m certain you’re not a threat to the kid I’m supposed to be protecting.” Jerking her head to the table, she said, “Why don’t we sit? Talk . . . and you can have your phone back. Heaven forbid you miss an important call or something.”

  The lights flickered . . . and went off.

  She clenched her jaw and braced herself for an attack.

  But it didn’t come from him directly.

  Darkness swarmed in on her mind. And she knew her mind well enough to know one thing . . . it wasn’t natural. It was like something was pressing in, pressing down—

  She sucked in a breath and felt her muscles weaken, felt her weapon hand lower.

  Instinctively, she sensed him moving and she threw herself backward.

  Knowing she only had a few seconds, she did the one thing she knew would work.

  She screamed. But she didn’t scream with her mouth.