Grayson didn’t answer for a moment, standing in the middle of the office, framed by the window’s gray skies and mountain landscape. “Alex was the most dangerous corrupted empath I’ve ever met,” he finally said. “And the Dead Man always does what he has to do to save people. I wasn’t safe for my brother and I’ll never be safe for any empath, including you. You gotta remember that. Always.”
Reece stared at him.
He could read between those lines just fine, read the neon sign Grayson was unsubtly flashing for both him and Jamey.
He expected them to take his words to mean that Evan Grayson had caused Alex Grayson’s death.
And someone else, even Jamey, might actually believe it.
But Grayson might as well expect Reece to add one plus one and get three.
“Evan,” Reece said again, his voice a little lower. “What happened to you and your brother?”
Grayson’s gaze flicked over his face, like he was trying to confirm if Reece had swallowed the lie he’d just tried to tell.
“I’m not gonna give an empath details they shouldn’t be hearing, you know that,” he said. “I don’t have feelings about what happened, so it’s not worth dragging into the light. You want to help, keep an eye on the secretary so I can dig in Ms. Marist’s files and see if they’ve started making and mailing out extra-large empath gloves here, like the ones that turned up at the airsoft course. Then I might need to get back to Seattle and go looking for Officer Stensby—wherever the Dead Man is needed.”
Reece watched him walk over to the desk, bending his tall frame to open a drawer. His gaze went to the picture on the wall, of Stone and Marist, of Traynor and Nichols. These were the leaders in empathy defense. People who claimed to be protecting innocents from empaths, but when they had learned of the horror that happened to the Grayson brothers, they’d taken advantage, descended on Evan like vultures, treating him like he wasn’t a person anymore, just a weapon, until even Grayson believed it.
Reece slipped a hand into his jeans pocket and pulled out his phone. Keeping an eye on Grayson, he opened his messages—but not his texts with Jamey.
Instead, he opened the last message he’d gotten from Stensby, about a bakery in Everett, and sent a new text.
I’m not sure who has this phone now.
But I think I want to talk to you.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We can bandy around words like “singular” and “unique” but it will never make them true. Replication is key to any study: if it can be done, it can be duplicated.
Nothing—and no one—is an exception.
—COMMENT BY [REDACTED] ON [REDACTED] MANUAL
The freak whoruns this place is a sadist. I would know.
Cora’s words replayed in Aisha’s head as she stepped out of the fire stairs into Polaris’s top level, where the empath quarters were supposed to be. She’d been up to this level before, to check on the three other empaths who lived here. They knew her too, would call her name when she entered, because their empathy always picked it up when someone approached.
Today, however, all she heard was silence.
Her footsteps seemed unbearably loud as she walked down the hall. The heat had been turned off on this level, and her breath was a visible puff in front of her as she swiped her key card and stepped into the residential area. She approached the closest room, the walls made of glass like the medical rooms.
Her spine stiffened, her stomach plummeting.
It was empty of the furniture it was supposed to have. Instead, there were two steel tables under the skylight in the middle of the room, covered with sheets, the outline of a petite body under the first, a second, taller body under the other.
“No, no nono,” she whispered, hurrying forward. She hadn’t heard about any recent empath deaths. There shouldn’t beanybodies here.
Her hand was shaking as she unlocked the door and stumbled across the room. She reached the table and yanked the sheet back.
Marie Pelletier, unquestionably dead, her corpse at least a day old.
“Marie.” Aisha could feel the ache welling her throat, her chest. She grabbed the other sheet and pulled it back, already knowing what she’d see: another woman, younger than Marie but with the same curls and delicate features. They were unmistakably sisters, Marie and Simone Pelletier.
“Oh no,” Aisha whispered. “No, I’m so sorry, so sorry.”
She glanced up, seeing the telltale red dot of a security camera in the corner. She had minutes, maybe seconds now. She sprinted to the corner of the room, with its window, beneath its high skylight, and pulled the two-way radio Liam had given her out of her coat.
