Born to Darkness (22 page)

There was no way he wasn’t going to follow her. But just to be safe, as she left the establishment she nodded at Diaz, who was lurking near the Dumpster. And when he nodded back, she knew he’d used his power to jam shut the restaurant’s front door, so that no one could enter or leave any way but through the back.

Mac climbed into the driver’s seat of the car that Diaz had
traded for his bike when she’d called him after guessing—correctly—that Littleton had taken at least part of his payment for Nika’s capture in product.

When she’d hit Chestnut Hill, she’d picked up on his emotional grid almost immediately.

She was glad to be right, because she hadn’t picked up an empathic reading on Nika at the abduction site—the stretch of sidewalk where the little girl had been grabbed.

Sometimes, after trauma, the remnants of a person’s emotional grid were so loud that Mac could search for that person and pick them out of a proverbial crowd, even though she’d never laid eyes on them before.

But it was hard to do that if the event had occurred outside versus indoors, and as she’d stood on the spot where Nika had been attacked, she’d felt almost nothing. A mere glimmer of fear.

She’d found Nika’s phone, broken, in the street, but that hadn’t told them anything they didn’t already know, and she’d picked up nothing from touching the plastic.

Mac now rolled down the heavily tinted window and pulled the car up so that she was idling near the restaurant’s back door.

And here came Rickie Littleton, his hood up and his hands in his pockets. He spotted Mac right away and she smiled at the dirt-wipe and he didn’t look away.

Because he didn’t look away, he didn’t see Diaz coming up behind him.

One hand on Littleton’s shoulder was all it took for Diaz to zap the dealer into full submission.

Mac was already out of the car. She opened the back door and helped catch the unconscious scumbag and throw him neatly into the backseat. Part of her was pissed off that, despite all of her various skills and tricks and talents, it was the simple fact that she had a vagina that had most expedited Littleton’s capture.

It bothered her that she still struggled to control her powerful telekinetic skills, even after years of training. While Bach and Diaz could use their minds to pop open a window or door lock, she was limited to larger, less precise movements. She could blow a hole in
a building just by thinking about it, sure. She could toss an adversary across a city street. She could turn up a thermostat so that the heat would kick on in a room.

But she couldn’t set the thing precisely at seventy-two degrees, the way Bach or Diaz could. She’d invariably turn it up as high as it could go, and then have to make the adjustment in person, by hand.

And if she tried to hold a man’s arms behind his back, creating a force-field version of handcuffs in order to subdue him? More than likely, she would dislocate both of his shoulders in the process.

Her telekinetic fine motor skills were for shit. She still spent hours working on her control. Her current project was a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, done entirely by moving the tiny pieces with her mind. She’d been working on it for three weeks now, and had accidentally sent the damn thing flying around the room—destroying the part that she’d already pieced together—five separate times. What a pain in her ass.

Bach had commented that this was also an exercise that provided a workout for her patience.

No shit, Sherlock.

Here and now, Mac had already used one of the plastic restraints she always carried to cuff Littleton’s hands behind his back. She stepped away after closing the door behind the scumbag and said, “See you back there.”

Diaz nodded as he climbed behind the wheel. He was already out of the parking lot as Mac took one last look around, checking to make sure no one had witnessed their little kidnapping.

There were people coming into and out of the drugstore next door, and others pulling into the parking lot, but no one was anxious or upset—at least not about anything having to do with Rickie Littleton.

There
was
a woman who was frantic about her four-year-old’s devastating illness, and a despondent elderly man with terrible arthritis whose wife had died last month, and who was now unable to get his run-down car to start. Neither of them had eaten in several
days. Their problems were so much more severe than Mac’s, and she kept her emotional shields down longer than she usually would have, just to remind herself of that.

The fact that she’d met some random guy with a nice smile, a guy she had to stop sleeping with because they were both going to work in a place that not only frowned on fraternizing, but encouraged across-the-board sexual abstinence …? And yeah, okay, that was just a handy excuse for Mac not seeing Shane again. In truth it was more complicated—more about her not wanting to use him like he was just another toy for her amusement.

But whatever the reason was, the bottom line was that she and Shane were history.

And boo-freaking-hoo. She was going to have to sacrifice a little immediate gratification and a whole lot of hot sex.

And
that
was a great big nothing on a cosmic scale that included starvation, pain, dead spouses, and dying children.

Life would go on.

She’d deal.

She always did.

Besides, even if she’d gone ahead and met Shane next week for dinner and a massage—and more of that awesome sex, let’s be honest—it wouldn’t have been long before the guilt kicked in, big-time. Shane Laughlin was no Justin. And even if she could have pretended, since the man was blacklisted and couldn’t find a job, that letting him live in her apartment was an act of generosity and kindness on her part, she would have eventually done the right thing and let him go.

This was just the accelerated version of that very same path.

So Mac took a deep breath and grew her hair long and lush, and made her lips pouty and full. She gave herself boobs that would’ve made Shane weep with joy. And that really was enough to disguise her. A woman’s body was still too often the only thing most people bothered to notice.

Mac took her boobs and went inside the drugstore, to the ATM, but the damn thing had a limit to how much she could withdraw from her account in the course of a single day. Even though she’d
never done anything like it before, she managed to short the fucker out so that it burped wads of cash at her—close to sixteen thousand in the new five-hundred-dollar bills—nearly her entire savings. She left the store with it, dividing it into two piles—one of which she handed to the distraught mother, walking away without a single word.

It took her a bit longer to find the old man and once she did, she had to tap on the window of his car to get him to roll down the glass. He was crying, and the wave of loss and pain that hit her was so much like the emotion she’d felt last night from Bach, that she just stood there staring at him like an idiot.

Was it possible that the seemingly unmovable Joseph Bach had lost someone that he’d loved as much as this man had loved his deceased wife …?

And the real irony—the real stop-her-in-her-tracks, slap-in-the-face truth about
that
was that she was freaking jealous of them both. She wanted what they’d both once had. Yes, they’d lost it, but you can’t lose something that you’ve never experienced. And Mac thought of Shane, and of what he’d never mean to her—of what he could never have meant to her, even if she said to hell with her conscience and spent the next two years with him in her bed, every night.

The old man wiped his face as he peered up at her with watery blue eyes that were magnified by his old-style glasses. He spoke in a quavering voice, “May I help you, dear?”

He wanted to help her—this man who had less than nothing.

He lived in his car. Mac could see that the backseat was packed with his belongings—including a teapot with roses painted on the side, and a pink cardigan that was probably new back in the 1980s—and she realized that even if she gave him
twenty
thousand dollars it wouldn’t be enough to truly help him.

Still, she held the money out for him. “Get your car fixed.”

His eyes widened as he looked at it, but then he looked up at her again, and shook his head. “I can’t take that,” he told her. “You’ll make better use of it than I will. I’ve already called … some friends. They’ll be here to pick me up in about an hour.”

But Mac could see the brochure for Johnston, Lively, and Grace Drug Testing Labs on the passenger seat next to him, and she knew he was lying. He had no real friends—at least not at JLG.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “Go to JLG? They’ll treat you like a lab rat. When they say
lockdown
they mean it.” She tossed the money across him, onto the seat beside him, atop that brochure. “This way, you still have some options.”

It was then, as she was turning to walk away, that he said, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Not for me. But
you
still have time to make the right choice.”

Mac turned back to look at him, and he was holding out her money.

“Love,” he said, as if he were answering a question that she’d asked him. “The only real right choice is
love
. It’s worth any risk. And it’s well worth the pain. I had her for sixty-three years. Over twenty-three thousand days. Can you even imagine …?”

She looked into the old man’s eyes and shook her head, thinking about the single night she’d spent with Shane—a night that, by comparison, didn’t even count, because love wasn’t involved.

And she found herself thinking, then, about her father, about her little brother Billy, about Tim …

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Mac said, and turned and walked, and then ran to her bike, and got the hell out of there.

Elliot was still in the examination room finishing up a set of prelim-tests on Shane Laughlin when he got the message that Mac and Diaz were on their way back in, and that Diaz had Rickie Littleton in his possession.

Bach also sent a quick text: “Already here, escorting Ms. Taylor back to her room, on my way,” which was good since Elliot needed a visual aid. All of the former SEAL lieutenant’s test results were coming out remarkably unremarkable, and Elliot was pretty certain that the man had erected a very large block of disbelief that was inhibiting or counteracting any natural talent that he may have had.

The brain worked in mysterious ways.

So Elliot popped out into the hall, hoping to catch Joseph Bach before the pair of Fifties arrived and they all vanished behind a locked door with their suspect.

He just needed the maestro for a brief show-and-tell—maybe pick Shane up and move him over to the other side of the little room, along with a quick demonstration of what Elliot, who’d clearly spent too many hours watching his father’s DVDs of
Star Trek
, still thought of as a
mind meld
. It
was
mind-blowing—extremely fantastic and a little scary—to experience the sensation of Bach tiptoeing through one’s head. It wouldn’t take more than a few seconds of that to take Shane’s nonbeliever status and give it a quick one-eighty.

Thinking about that kind of mental power brought Elliot back to the wall of images he’d experienced a few hours earlier, when he’d tried to help Stephen Diaz up from the floor. He was still fairly positive that Diaz had had no idea he was broadcasting those thoughts. Although, to be honest, it was hard for Elliot to believe that Diaz was
having
those thoughts in the first place. And it wasn’t the fact that he was gay that was so hard to swallow. Neither was the idea that he was attracted to Elliot a problem. Okay, maybe that
was
a little mind-bending—a little
holy crap
. Okay, it was a truckload of
holy crap
.

But still, really, it was the idea that Diaz might be thinking about something other than a serene rose petal suspended mid-air, or the powerful ripple caused by a single raindrop moving across the Atlantic Ocean that was shocking.

As Elliot opened the door and stepped out into the hall, Stephen Diaz was right there, mid-stride, outside the exam room. And even though Elliot had tested himself again and again and again, and was completely convinced of his status as a lowly fraction, it was almost as if he had conjured Diaz up, just by thinking of him.

“Oh, hey,” Elliot greeted him. “I thought you were only just on your way back in.” He checked his phone for the status of the message Diaz had sent and … “Oops, there’s that dang time delay
again. It took … twenty minutes this time, for your message to come in. You nearly beat it back here.”

Diaz had stopped walking, although he glanced almost longingly down the hall in the direction he’d been going. “Infrastructure decay,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “It’s getting worse. I’ve noticed it, too.” He cleared his throat. “We’re going to have to work on getting ourselves a dedicated satellite.” He couldn’t quite hold Elliot’s gaze and he looked down the hall again and even pointed a little. “Long night. I was getting … something … to eat?”

“And … we don’t have people who’ll do that for you?” Elliot asked.