Taylor had narrowed her gifts down to precognition, psychometry, and telepathy.
He only hoped that was all she had inside that brain of hers. But she’d gotten stronger over the years, and it was entirely possible new gifts had emerged as she’d gotten older.
Many of his psychics hadn’t even developed any of their gifts until puberty. By the time Jillian had hit that age, she’d already hit a level of control that made some of his people look like rank amateurs.
Now the teenager was living another nightmare . . . somebody else’s nightmare. He knew that didn’t always make it any easier. Trapped inside somebody else’s misery, somebody else’s pain. And when she wasn’t able to do much more than watch from the sidelines . . .
Except Jillian hadn’t watched. There were missing kids. Missing women.
Some of them, Jillian had said, were already gone. The missing . . . For Jillian, that meant they’d been killed. And she had decided she’d stop it.
Frustration chewed at him; he’d told Taige this would happen. He’d seen it, even when Jillian had just been a child, just like he’d seen in Taige. His people were his for a reason . . . they were warriors. Jillian was already walking down that road.
He hated it. Taige, Cullen, they had no idea how much he hated it.
He’d never track her down, but in the end, it wouldn’t matter, because she’d come to him.
His phone started to ring, cutting through the dark, heavy cloud of his thoughts.
He wasn’t the least bit amused, or surprised, when Evanescence’s “Haunted” came blaring from it. Dez had programmed the ring. He didn’t do ringtones—exactly what he needed, to have a ringtone like that go off in the middle of a meeting. But his wife wasn’t part of his unit . . . not anymore . . . and she had a sense of humor that was, at best, strange.
It was the ringtone she’d programmed for Taige. Thankfully, he could count on his hands the number of times Taige had called him.
Sighing, he accepted the call, already bracing himself. Jilly, kid, what have you done now . . .
“What is your damned room number?”
SIX
"ELLA . . . I’d like you to meet Patrick Whitmore.”
Finally. Dru had damn near had to bend over backward just to get a damned invite to the party, and then she’d spent most of the night working the crowd just to get this close to Whitmore.
Just as she’d done three other times, all unsuccessfully.
Whitmore wasn’t exactly the easiest man to get up close and personal with, something she’d discovered the hard way. She’d used the time to learn everything she could about him. The type of woman who seemed to catch his eye, their style, their looks . . . she’d made them her own and it was finally paying off.
As Whitmore gave her a casual glance, then a longer second look, Dru smiled, pretending to be just a little nervous as she held out a hand.
Mentally, she braced herself. It wasn’t always pleasant, that first touch of bared skin on bared skin, leaving an impression for her to study, for her to learn and understand . . . her ability might be labeled as psychometry. She didn’t know. It worked best on people rather than things and it didn’t work on everybody. But sometimes when she touched a person, she took in chunks of memory—good things, bad things, she never knew which it would be.
The second Whitmore’s fingers closed over her hand, she wanted to jerk away.
Flash, flash, flash.
Screams, terror, pain . . . and it made him smile. She pushed it all down inside and locked it down tight.
As his hand tightened, ever so intimately, on hers, she gave him a demure smile.
As he leaned in closer to her, she resisted the urge to pull away.
“Ella . . . a lovely name.” He lifted her hand to his lips.
She wanted to back away and put as much distance between her and the monster as she could—that wasn’t an option, so she would have been happy to grab something big and heavy—like a sledgehammer—and pound him across the head with it.
In reality, she did none of that.
She pretended to be pleased with his attention, letting her hand linger in his . . . even as the screams continued to rage.
Nobody else heard it, of course. It was just in his mind, buried in his memories. But that was where she excelled . . . peering into those