The Unwanted (A Novella of the FBI Psychics) (7 page)

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 her 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.

She’d been standing right where it had happened and when she’d lowered her shields? The rush of fear, lust, pain and the need to
hurt
had grabbed her, threatened to suck her under. It had gripped her for so long Caleb had ended up walking her near-zombified form off the campus after they’d started to attract attention.

That night, she’d had the first nosebleed but the connection had hovered just out of reach.

With each passing hour, that darkness moved in more and more, until it felt like it was going to choke her. And now…it was just moments away. It could hit in an instant. Of course, it could also take a week. She needed that one missing piece.

The echo was turning into a hum even now and every step she took made the awful music grow louder.

Caleb sensed it too. He was watching her with those dark eyes, watching and waiting for the time to step in. “Do we need to leave?” he asked quietly.

“No. It’s better if we stay.” She shook her head and continued to stare out over the campus.

One of the buildings loomed in front of her and her gaze landed on the doorway—logically, she shouldn’t know what it was. Logically.

But she did.

And…
click…

“It was here,” she said, her mouth going dry. The images slammed into her brain. Caleb was silent as everything played out in her head, her vision blurring as the girl’s vision superimposed with her own.
Right there—that was where he stopped me/her…

“I need to walk. I’ve finally got something,” she said, forcing her shields up enough so she could focus and talk to Caleb.