Lunatic Fringe

by TL Schaefer

  “Are you getting a feeling, or did you have a vision?” Heath asked, the urgency on his face unmistakably clear, and as stark as Kavenaugh’s.

  “A vision. I can see a brunette woman running, and then she’s on her back and there’s a gun pointed at her. And then it breaks up and all I can see are over-the-counter earplugs. I don’t get it.” Dobbs sounded bewildered, like what he was describing had never happened before. “I’m not sure if she’s supposed to die or not, I just know she cannot get into that building or the aftermath is going to be horrific. It’s the worst I’ve felt about a vision in years.”

  Chill bumps erupted on my arms. Spooky Dobbs was certainly living up to his name.

  Heath was looking at me, more specifically at my hair, and Roney caught the focus of his attention and ran with it before I’d even formed a thought. I was a brunette, and in the thick of this.

  “Do you remember Sergeant Monica Morgan, from back in the day?” Roney’s tone was oh-so-careful, not giving anything away.

  “M&M? From Afghanistan?” Dobbs gave a little laugh, the kind one gives to a fond memory. “She was no bigger than her battle rattle, but could kick your ass. Why?”

  “Is there any way possible the woman you’re seeing in your vision is Monica?”

  “No way,” Asa’s voice was absolute. “I’d know her right away. I’ve never seen this woman before. She was taller, super thin, older than Sergeant Morgan would be now. Wearing pressed jeans and a white blouse. Kinda fancy but not over the top. Reasonably unremarkable. I got a Colorado vibe from the foliage around her and how thin the air felt, but I couldn’t say exactly where.”

  “Thanks Asa,” Heath said, and the relief in his voice was barely discernible, but it was there. “Call me if you see anything else.”

  Kavenaugh broke in, impatient that he’d been forced to wait while we talked to Dobbs. “We got a tip. Suspicious activity at the house where we found you two. We’ve got agents en route. Farrell, are any of your people there? Maybe sniffing around where they shouldn’t be?”

  Heath shook his head. “No. All of my people are with Jonah, Arin and Sara and the kids.”

  “All right then, we’re rolling. Roney, you’re with me.” Kavenaugh was already heading out the door.

  When Heath started to jump in, I could tell he wanted the two of us to tag along. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I wanted to be there when Grace was caught, but I wanted to talk to Trang just as much. He’d laid hands on my daughter, threatened to hurt her. As a mother, I couldn’t let that stand.

  Plus, I was pretty sure that Spooky Dobbs had been describing Grace. Everything he’d said rang true to the picture in my head of Heath’s half-sister, especially if she was trying to be low profile. But Asa hadn’t seen a true background, so all we were really left with were the clothes she was wearing and his vision of earplugs. Which was totally weird, but everything about the last year had been nuts.

  “You two are staying,” Kavenaugh said, his tone firm. “Brian is a badged law enforcement officer. You are not. If we need to make an arrest, I can’t have either of you there, especially under the current circumstances.”

  Heath deflated, then nodded. “We’ll talk to Trang. Nothing he says to us is admissible, but he’s probably going to be charged with so many crimes whatever he tells us won’t add much.”

  I nodded without comment and stepped into Tori’s room to say goodbye privately.

  Her expression was troubled, like she’d finally begun to come to grips with what had happened. And when she spoke, her words twisted my heart, tore at my soul.

  “Is there something wrong with me?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said gently. “You and I, we’re different than a lot of people. But different isn’t wrong.”

  “I don’t want to be different,” she said, tears on the edge of her voice before it hardened and became angry. “I don’t want to end up like you, screaming in the middle of the night like you’re being murdered. I don’t want to go crazy like you.”

  The breath left my lungs like I’d been sucker punched. And I had. But Jesus, how to explain it to her?

  I sat on the edge of the bed, cringing inside as she moved away an inch. Moved away from me. Her mother.

  “I’m not crazy,” I told her. “My special talent was trying to come out and couldn’t. You didn’t hear me scream last night, did you?” And as the words left my mouth, I realized I hadn’t had a nightmare since Health held me what felt like eons ago. Relief flooded me.

  “We’ll explore yours, if you even have one. That’s why you’re going with your Dad while we figure out what happened here and try to stop it from ever happening again. And when it’s said and done, you and I can delve into this together, okay?”

  Her chin had done that stubborn Joe thing, and I knew she wasn’t going to take my explanation. “I want to stay with Daddy. This is all your fault.” She stood up from the side of the bed, grabbed her backpack and walked out of the room without another word.

  I sat on the bed for long moments, then stood at the window and watched my husband and daughter drive away.

  Five minutes later the law enforcement arm of our team headed in the opposite direction. Potentially toward our enemy. Leaving Heath and I alone. Alone to find out just what Lloyd Trang knew.

  I could guarantee he wasn’t ready for me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  WHAT CAME BEFORE...

  I stood outside the hospital room door, unable to take that last step. Memories of Papa’s unexpected cancer diagnosis and all-too-quick death crowded my memory, making my stomach churn, my pulse spike with anxiety.

  Then a nurse stepped out of the room and forced my hand.

  I walked inside, the smell of antiseptic and despair hanging heavy in the air.

  Mama looked like a tiny china doll on the bed, her face shadowed by fading bruises, her thin arms pierced by needles, her leg in a cast.

  When they’d called me home saying she was in the hospital, the doc said she’d make it through, but her tumble down the stairs had broken her leg, and they’d worried about a punctured lung.

  That was twenty-six hours ago. I’d flown from Kuwait to Dover Air Force Base, Delaware in the jump seat of a C-17 cargo plane, then grabbed a commercial flight from Baltimore to Dallas. Then two hours in a shitty rental that was all I could afford.

  And now I stood at the foot of her bed, thankful she was going to be fine, and wondering how in the hell she’d fallen down a flight of stairs when we lived in a one-story trailer home.

  Now... Denver

  Whatever they’d given Trang for the pain must have been a doozy, because he almost seemed happy to see us. There was still an armed FBI agent outside his door, just in case Grace tried to tie up loose ends, but we were waved in with little fanfare. Apparently Kavenaugh had paved the way for us.

  We’d met his doctor before we headed down the hall, and there was no indication that Trang had been drugged with long-acting Simple Simon. Everything he’d done had been of his own volition. The man was an amazing actor.

  He believed he’d been caught in a house fire of some kind, rather than what had actually happened, and since the hospital staff and his guard didn’t know any differently, they’d gone with the story we’d spun. It was amazing the lengths the human mind went to to deny the paranormal.

  Beside me Heath was stiff as a board, tension flowing from him in choppy, furious waves. But on the surface, he seemed like the same old icy-cold ex NSA analyst. I wondered if the empathy that’d been shuttered away had always felt Heath this deeply or if it was just simply how the two of us seemed to read each other now. I had a sneaking suspicion it was the second, and that we’d both rebelled against our instinct because neither of us were one to do something we didn’t choose to.

  That was all well and good, but finding Grace took precedence over anything between Heath and me.

  Asa Dobbs’ words had rattled me more than I’d like to admit.

>   Was the woman on the ground Grace, as I suspected? Or was it someone else entirely, maybe not even attached to what we were battling? My head, which had never really stopped hurting after healing Trang, seemed to throb even more.

  Thank God Dobbs hadn’t described a child, or I’d be halfway to wherever the CASI kids were being hidden right now, using my body as a shield, even if Tori wasn’t talking to me. Knowing she was safe, that neither Dobbs nor Sara had seen anything dealing with Tori or the Talented children, was the only reason I was sitting in this sterile little hospital room, looking at a man I’d gone from being uncomfortable around to one I downright hated.

  Trang was swaddled in bandages, almost from head to toe. His once quiet eyes now crackled with something that approached crazy. But not quite. More like a psychotic awareness that had been carefully hidden. Hidden and curated by Grace Pearce.

  “You’ll never find her in time, you know,” he said, his voice a croak now, no longer the smooth, unemotional bodyguard. “She outsmarted you for decades and she’ll continue to.”

  “What is her end goal, Lloyd? I think I deserve to know that much.” Heath’s voice was quiet, and yet still it almost echoed in the room, a command on the undercurrent. Nothing talented, just his personality shining through.

  “To destroy you, of course.” There was a definite sneer in Trang’s words. “Her work on The Board is groundbreaking. Simple Simon was created for her use.” Fervor, emotional, devotional fervor rode the man now. “But you held the cards with the children. How could she test her theories when the Talented were all under your thumb?”

  “Ah, so that’s what they call themselves. O’Donnell wasn’t that forthcoming,” Heath said, nodding his head, stroking his chin. “You know they’ve turned on her, right? They’ll hunt her down, are doing it even as we speak.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Trang said, though his zeal seemed to dampen a bit at the mention of O’Donnell. Because how would we have known otherwise?

  “Why didn’t she just start up her own version of CASI?” I asked, drawing Trang’s attention. “It’s not as if you or she couldn’t find other Talented children. When CASI first stood up, parents delivered their children there. Why couldn’t you use the same method?” I had my cold, cop voice on now, was using it as a protective shell for words that should never have left my mouth. Not when my child was potentially one of the targets. But we needed to know why Grace hadn’t simply gone hunting on her own. Why she’d only started recently. With Tori and Health and I.

  “Like calls to like,” Trang said, now almost dreamily, as if he’d gone someplace deep in his own mind. I had to wonder if the painkillers were kicking in even more heavily now. “Most of the CASI kids eleven years ago were from broken families, from parents who didn’t want their problem children anymore. Now it’s different. With Summers, there’s interviews and demonstrations. Parents and children come to him willingly. They were never like that with Grace. Kids don’t like her and parents listen to their kids nowadays. But she tried, and failed long before you two with Green. You were her second chance.”

  Well that made a ton of sense, even if it was totally fucking nuts. All of the pieces were coming together.

  If Tori told me someone creeped her out, I’d keep her as far away from them as possible. But how heartbreaking that the first incarnation of CASI had been fringe kids who didn’t have another choice. We’d known it, of course, with Sara and Burke, but to hear it so clearly stated was sad.

  “What did she want with CASI?” I asked as Heath mulled Trang’s words. I could almost hear his brain working, tossing and tumbling Trang’s statements to find a hidden truth.

  “What everyone wants. Power, absolute power. And she’ll have it yet. Nothing you do can stop her. She’ll own all of you.” He lasered his attention to me. “Especially your pretty daughter. We’ve never encountered one of her. Grace calls her Teflon, because nothing sticks. Think of the children she could have with a Null like me. Children impervious to compulsion, to any kind of Talent. They’d be unstoppable.” He sighed, almost longingly. “Once we realized what she was, Grace promised her to me. But only after we’d eliminated Farrell. The No-Talent who refused to share the building blocks to an empire.”

  Inside me, rage flared, sudden and sharp. I leaned forward, inches away from his mangled face. I vaguely felt Heath tugging at my arm to hold me back. “You fucking stay away from her, you bastard.” Then I was laying my free hand on him, intent on doing damage, any damage. It didn’t matter that I’d healed him less than a day ago. Right now, I wanted him dead. Painfully, agonizingly dead.

  My hand settled over his throat, clenched, choking a startled scream out of him.

  Heath yanked on me, then my hand was being removed by the FBI agent who’d been stationed at the door.

  The mist over my eyes cleared as exquisite pain crashed over me. I stood straight against the tsunami of pain battering me. “Touch her and there won’t be a thing in the world that can stop me, Trang. Know that, know it as a surety.”

  Then I allowed Heath and the agent to escort me out of the room. Once we cleared the doorjamb, I curled in on myself, succumbing to the agony. I had no idea what had just happened to me, what was still happening. But I did know one thing. Lloyd Trang was terrified of me. And he had every reason to be.

  HEATH BUNDLED ME INTO an empty room, laid me down on the exam table, then pulled a chair up and twined his fingers through mine. “Pull on me, Monica, heal yourself.” His voice was low, soothing, rumbled through me, slowly tamping down the pain, smoothing the rough, nerve-filled edges. Warmth spread through me, not the warmth of a healing, but that of a warm blanket, a slow-burning fire.

  “You’ve got this, Monica. Come back to me now.” I soaked in his voice, his words, before they registered on me.

  My eyes shot open. Heath’s face was inches from mine, his free hand stroking the bangs back from my forehead. His murmured words stroking me like a lover’s caress.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his voice still low and silky.

  I nodded and felt a dull ache spread through my head. I stifled a groan and answered him. “What happened?”

  His features tightened in anger. “Trang was a complete fucker, that’s what happened, and you went after him. He deserved every bit of your wrath. We pulled you off when you went ghost white. Then when we got you in the hallway you collapsed.”

  “How long?” I croaked, my voice cracked and hoarse.

  “Just a few minutes, though you really scared me.”

  I’d never imagined those words leaving Heath’s mouth. Ever.

  He leaned forward, brushed his lips over my forehead. “Hang tight, I’ll get you some water.”

  He walked out of the room with a purpose, seeming to suck all the air right along with him. I flopped back on my back. What the hell had just happened? Not with Heath, I’d dissect that later.

  No, what had happened with Trang? I’d wanted to kill him for even thinking about Tori. Remembered laying my free hand on him, but after that it was all blinding pain. Had he done something to me? I couldn’t imagine him doing anything to me in the state he was in, especially since he was a Null, had no power whatsoever.

  Heath returned with two bottles of water. Unscrewed the cap on one and handed it over.

  I sat and gulped it down, the coolness soothing my throat one swallow at a time.

  When I’d guzzled the whole thing, I ran the still-cool empty bottle over my forehead, then raised my gaze to Heath. He watched me patiently.

  “Better?”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  He waited a long moment, then asked. “What the hell happened, Monica? I mean, I totally understand trying to strangle Trang, but as soon as you laid your hand on him, you looked ready to keel over. He’s a Null, he shouldn’t have been able to pull energy from you.”

  I mulled what he’d said, reaching back, trying to analyze if I’d ever felt something similar. I hadn’t. But then again, before t
his week, I hadn’t been a healer either. And that might just be the gist of it.

  “I wasn’t a healer before, it was all repressed, right?” My throat still felt raw. “But all those doors were blown off. Before, when I had to use force on the job, it felt vaguely wrong, but I always thought it was a morality thing. It was nothing like this. Never anything like this.”

  He sat back, a considering look on his chiseled face. “Do you think this might have been back blow of some kind? That you can’t use force anymore without it harming you, in return.”

  I hadn’t thought of it in exactly those terms, but that sounded right. Really right. “Maybe,” I hedged, not willing to go there quite yet, not in my own head, and not with Heath. I swung my legs over the side of the exam table. The screaming in my skull had subsided to a thumping worthy of a brass band, but it was tolerable.

  It was time to shift the focus from me to what we’d learned from Trang.

  “What did he tell us that we didn’t already know, really?” I intentionally left Tori’s part in the breeding program out. I couldn’t go there without wanting to walk over and throat punch him all over again, even if it killed me.

  Heath understood, veered away from that piece. “Primarily that everyone thinks I’m powerless. Trang didn’t even seem to remember me turning him into a briquette. Only our group knows.”

  “And that’s a pretty select group of people,” I finished. “How do we use that when we find Grace?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, exhaustion souring his tone.

  Afternoon sunlight filtered through the hospital windows, the yellow fresh and clean like the cool spring day outside. I needed to feel that air, needed to bring it deep into my lungs, cleanse Trang’s taint from my blood.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, and pushed off the bed. There wasn’t anything more for us to do here besides be frustrated, and potentially homicidal. Given how much hurting Trang had disabled me, the further away from him I was the happier I’d be. And Heath needed to get away as well.