The truck’s engine came to life with a roar. He threw it into reverse and punched the gas, and the tires screeched as the truck spun in a tight one-eighty just as fast as he could have hoped.
“Atta girl,” he said aloud. “Now show me how you behave for a boy who can drive.”
He switched terrain modes for a more responsive throttle map and longer rev range, applied throttle until he’d built up the revs, then released the brake and took off.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Empath Initiative just restricted empath research to approved facilities ONLY. There are THREE approved facilities in the ENTIRE country.
National security, they say. Such bullshit. I’ve spent the last two years studying empaths’ siblings. I was on the cusp of a breakthrough, and now I have to throw it all away.
—twenty-year-old note from the medical school at Rainier University
A shot rang over her head as Jamey dove through the open VIP room door. She grabbed the legs of a barstool and swung it just as one of the security guards rushed her, sending him flying into the brick wall.
She leaped to her feet, eyes on Taylor as he raised the Magnum. She launched the barstool at him, buying herself a second as he dodged.
The second guard got arms around her neck with an inhuman growl, but she reached back and grabbed his shoulders, flipping him over and across the bar into the shelves. Dozens of stacked glasses and liquor bottles shattered.
Taylor aimed the gun again and she went for his legs. The two of them hit the floor, and she rolled them. She grabbed for the gun in his hand, but his grip was too strong, and his knee connected with her stomach hard enough to wind her.
She barely had time to gasp as a barstool was coming down at her head. She rolled, away from Taylor, away from the first security guard, smacking into the base of the bar. The guard slammed the barstool down, not at her but over her, and then he held it, pinning her to the ground like a butterfly in a net.
Jamey shoved at the barstool, but the guard was as unnaturally strong as Taylor had been. “Josh,stop.”
But Taylor was getting up, Magnum in hand, the other guards at his side. All three of them oblivious to their injuries, to the blood now running freely from their eyes down their cheeks.
Taylor raised the gun and Jamey had nowhere to go—
Three rapid gunshots split the air. Two for the security guards, who dropped lifeless to the floor—and one in the center of Taylor’s forehead.
Jamey drew as sharp breath as Taylor fell back against the wooden floor, eyes wide open, body still as stone. She looked up to see Grayson, who didn’t holster the gun as he said, “I heard glass break. That was the bar?”
“You justshotthree people.” Taylor was on the floor and the grief was already coming. “You shotJosh.”
“He was about to shoot you.” Grayson was moving through the room, tensed. His gaze flicked to the broken bodies on the floor. “Your officer was enthralled by an empath. He didn’t know who he was anymore. If he had, do you think he would’ve wanted us to let him keep slaughtering folks in this club?”
She took a breath through her nose. “We could have—”
“There’s no help. There’s no coming back.” Grayson dropped a cursory glance behind the couch. “You saw them bleeding. Their bodies were destroying themselves. They probably had minutes left, but they would have killed you and as many as they could before they died their own agonizing death. And there was nothing we could have done to stop it.”
Jamey shoved the barstool off her, and it clattered to the floor. “They deserved better.”
“They did.” Grayson was looking over the bar, examining broken glass. He nodded toward the other bodies, the girl in bunny ears, the man with the loosened tie. “So did their victims. This is the world of the Dead Man, Detective. There’s a reason I never bring anyone into it.”
Jamey got to her feet, staring at Taylor’s unmoving body, the burn in her chest searing her throat, her eyes. She crouched at his side and took the Magnum back, but adjusted him to a more peaceful position. Closed his eyelids before she stood.
“I’m not a detective anymore,” she said, and pushed past Grayson back into the main club.
He followed at her heels without comment.
She kept the Magnum up as she scanned the now-empty room, littered with broken tables, broken glasses, the DJ tables abandoned. “They were too fast. Too strong.”Too much like me, she didn’t say. “Is this what Cora does? Creates devotion, then jacks up the hormones that fuel emotions to make thralls with super-strength? Is that how a tiny sixty-five-year-old senator killed two men your size?”
Grayson nodded. “But they’ve got a time limit, because all that rage will kill them, if nothing else does first.” He was walking toward the bar. “And it’s not the only thing she can do. She can twist emotions all sorts of ways, or send people into catatonia, like you saw with the witness at the marina.”
She hadn’t gotten any news about the witness since that morning. “What’s Braker’s condition now?”
Grayson picked his way over the shattered glass. “He didn’t make it.”
