Reece Davies, location unknown, said the caption.
Gretel stared at Reece’s picture, Marist’s words coming back to her.
The empaths are more complicated than the public has been led to believe.I’m not at liberty to say more than that. Just know your sympathy for the empaths, and Reece Davies in particular, is misplaced, and our funding is more necessary than most could even imagine.
Gretel clicked on the second red dot and found herself looking at a picture of Cora.
Cora Falcon, location unknown.
Gretel furrowed her brow. She looked back at the map and pressed on the third red dot. And suddenly she was staring at a younger version of the man she’d had brunch with, who’d texted to say he was sorry about her parents.
Alex Grayson, said the caption.Location unknown.
Reece scrolled through search results on his phone as he waited for the gas pump—because maybe Grayson could drive Reece’s Smart car for ages on a single tank, but Reece had to fill up—and frowned. The only connection to EI that was turning upin the area was the old unfinished facility outside Port A. Why the hell would Evan be headingthere?
The pump finally stopped, and Reece got back on the road as quickly as he could.
But the minutes ticked by with no sign of Traynor’s Tahoe.
“Where the fuck are you?” he muttered as he finally pulled onto the shoulder and idled the truck. The wipers swished away the falling snow as he opened his GPS. It only took a moment to pull up the tracker they’d put on Traynor’s Tahoe: He was actuallybehindReece, a little ways down some tiny side road that didn’t even have a name.
“What. The. Hell.” Reece put the truck back in gear. He had the advantage of a vehicle capable of handling a snowy road, so he cut straight across the two lanes and the median to head back east. A few minutes later, he made a right turn at a gas station, heading south on a road that turned empty almost instantly.
Reece didn’t like this at all.
A couple of miles down the road, he caught sight of a black Tahoe on the shoulder, looking abandoned at the base of green pine trees.
“Son of a bitch.” Reece slammed on the brakes, pulling over onto the opposite shoulder. He hopped down from the truck and approached the vehicle.
The snow was sticking to the ground now, beginning to pile, but not quite high enough yet to hide the evidence of a recent struggle: mud churned up, footprints everywhere, the Tahoe’s driver’s door smashed on the ground.
Red streaks all over the snow.
Reece crouched down by a particularly bloody patch of snow next to the Tahoe’s smashed door, cold snowflakes dotting the back of his neck. There was no sign of Traynor himself. Was this his blood?
Traynor was following Evan, the little voice in Reece’s head pointed out.
His fingers curled into a fist. If one single drop of this blood was Grayson’s—
He shot to his feet and followed the red trail into the tree line. Then he stilled.
At the base of a pine lay Holt Traynor, eyes open and glassy, blood smeared across his face from his eyes, his nose and the single bullet wound in the center of his forehead.
Reece felt himself tense.
The bullet would have torn through skin, burning flesh and bone in its wake—
He brushed angrily at his own forehead before an echo could bloom on his skin. He wasn’t that goddamn pacifist anymore, and he would not feel grief or phantom pain over fucking Traynor.
He forced himself to stare at the corpse, to try to piece the scene together. Had Traynor been too far from Alex, burning out, bleeding from the eyes, maybe losing all control? And someone else had been here with Traynor, someone armed and with good enough aim to take him out with one bullet, giving Traynor a more merciful death than the inevitable thrall burnout?
Reece could take a pretty good guess who’d fired the shot.
He backtracked to the Tahoe and then headed several paces down the road, already suspecting what he’d find. And sure enough, in the mud beyond the Tahoe was a different set of tire tracks; these were small and narrow, the perfect size to have been left by a Smart car.
He went back to the truck, starting the engine right up and doing a tight U-turn to head back to the highway, this time with more speed.
If this was Grayson’s work—as it almost certainly was—hewould have made arrangements for the body’s removal, which meant Reece needed to be out of there immediately.
