“I was gonna bring him with me,” Grayson said.
“With you. And you think my empath brother should spend the day with an empath hunter becausewhy, exactly?”
Grayson’s gaze darted back to Reece, the slow rise and fall of his chest, the sleep flush across his cheeks. “Because protecting your brother is how I protect Seattle.”
“Mmm,” St. James said, disbelief clear in the sound. “Fine. But Agent Grayson?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re from Texas, aren’t you? Don’t you tell a story down south, of dads on their front porches with shotguns, protecting their innocent daughters from the unfeeling assholes who’d break their hearts just to get laid?”
Grayson hesitated. “We might?”
“Just remember: I’m a hell of a lot scarier than that.”
She hung up on him.
He lay back against the pillow. That could have gone worse. Maybe.
He pulled up the coffee shop’s social media account on his phone and scrolled back to see the pictures and tags from Friday afternoon, when Reece had been moving in. Outside the studio’s big windows, the morning was dawning in a palette of silvers and whites: steel-colored sky and mercury rain, milky clouds and pale flecks of sleet.
His dreams had none of the depth or dimension of a Seattle winter morning. He only ever dreamed of a flat, unchanging gray. The doctors theorized it was the same sort of thing as the phantom sensations sometimes experienced by people who lost limbs. Grayson’s emotions were gone, and his mind had conjured a phantom gray to fill the empty space where his dreams used to be.
Over his scrolling, a new text message alert appeared at the top of the phone screen.
Director Traynor: Didn’t get your update yesterday. What’s the latest in Burlington?
The Empath Initiative and Stone Solutions would expect to be told that the murdered woman in Vermont wasn’t an empath. They’d expect to be told that the Dead Man had left.
Grayson raised his eyes from his phone to Reece, still peacefully sleeping on a bed that was very much in Washington, not Vermont.
The next thing I knew, he was just as scared as I was. So I ran.
The Empath Initiative and Stone Solutions also would have expected the Dead Man to do something about an empath who’d projected his emotions onto others—they’d expect the Dead Man to bring the empath up to the Polaris empath prison, to make sure innocent people weren’t at risk. Even if the empath was still a pacifist and had been in the most danger of all.
Grayson’s gaze lingered on Reece.
The Empath Initiative and Stone Solutions might’ve expected Grayson to hand Reece over to be locked up, but how was that the right thing to do? When Reece had only lost control because he’d been held at gunpoint, and had still run away on his own to protect everyone else? When Reece had been put in this dangerous, complicated liminal state by the Stone Solutions CEO in the first place?
Was Grayson really supposed to trust any of them with Reece right now?
He sent a response to Traynor.
Grayson: Burlington’s cold.
Grayson: Nothing else to report.
He went back to the coffee shop’s social media account, and then paused. There was a picture of three people, holding up their Christmas-themed coffee cups, and behind them a figure in camouflage was lounging against the wall of the building.
Grayson zoomed in on the background. This had to be the man. His face was hidden by the balaclava and he was holding a phone to his ear with a thick glove, the kind with hard knuckle reinforcement.
He took a screenshot and then got up and dressed, and was moving silently through the kitchen when Reece stirred. Grayson tipped some kind of crunchy frosted cereal into a bowl as he watched those big brown eyes flutter open.
“Morning,” he said, to orient Reece and remind him he was here. Reece had been pretty deeply asleep, and it wouldn’t be very nice for an empath to be surprised by the Dead Man in their kitchen.
Reece, though, didn’t startle. He just turned his face in Grayson’s direction. “Hey.”
Grayson grabbed the cashew milk. “Took you up on that offer. I’m helping myself to everything I want in this apartment.”
