Page 2 of Ace
Keller complied, not that closing the door prevented his psychic teammates from listening in.
Pursing his lips, Tucker assumed his position behind his desk, his ass in the chair, and his nose in the air. Lifting one hand, he scrubbed it over his big square chin, while Keller waited for USN words of wisdom he didn’t want to hear.
To be fair, the rugged, unpolished man did have a well-deserved rep. Built like a brick wall, Tucker Chasewasone of those tall, dark, and handsome hero types. Over and over again, hehadsaved countless American servicemen and women while he’d served. After he left the Navy, he’d joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There, he’d accomplished something no one else could have when he pulled the Bureau’s firstteam of psychics together, slapped a catchy handle on them, and made it work.
Keller just didn’t want to be part of Tucker’s Deuces Wild team. He didn’t want to be that kind of ‘special’. He wanted to be normal again, just one of the guys. Just not these guys.
“You’re an empath,” Isaiah Zaroyin said quietly from the corner opposite the door.
Keller’s head jerked up at the unexpected comment.Man, these psychic types are creepy. Just when you think you’re alone, you aren’t.“Didn’t know you were there.”
Isaiah shrugged. Dressed professionally as usual in his stereotypical Men in Black’s crisp black suit, white shirt, and black tie, the Tucker Chase look-alike seemed particularly gaunt this morning. Tired. Shadows rimmed his eyes and his cheeks were hollow. Gray.
That head of dark, curly hair and his blue eyes made Isaiah look younger than he was. But in fact, Isaiah Zaroyin was the old man of this team of mavericks. The only Level Ten psychic in the country, he was the real genius behind Deuces Wild. Eden, Ky, Tate Higgins, and Tucker Chase were just wannabes by comparison. Hell, so was Keller, only he’d never wanted the notoriety that came with this job, when people knew you were gifted. He worked best from the shadows, unknown, unseen, and unappreciated. That was who he was, just an average Joe doing his job, controlling the scene, and doing it right.
But Isaiah was the real deal. He actually could move mountains. Since he’d married Roxy Thurston, he’dchanged from a nervous genius to a genuinely scary adult male with crazy psychic abilities. Tucker said his powers were growing. Keller didn’t want to know what that meant.
“Unfortunately, it means I’m still scary,” Isaiah offered a sincere but faint smile, tapping one elegant brow with a long finger as he met Keller’s gaze.
“You heard?”Of course, he heard.
With a gentle nod, Isaiah closed his eyes and exhaled a controlled breath. He sank deeper into the chair, one arm cocked, one hand holding his forehead. Superman. That was who he looked and acted like. Make that Clark Kent. Mysterious but humble. Good-looking but capable of inflicting complete control on the psychically impaired—politically correct speak for normal folks.
Keller’s antagonistic opinions fled as an empathetic wave of heartbreak, so bleak that it dimmed the bright ceiling lights, washed up from the floor like a flood. Make that a tsunami, the waves cresting up the length of his body and ending high over his head. Turning in his seat, he angled his shoulders and zeroed in on the source of the pain, Isaiah. What the hell was going on?
Isaiah seemed barely in control. Keller got the weirdest sensation he doubted himself, that he was afraid. But mostly? Isaiah’s love for his wife battered Keller, nearly knocking him out of his chair to his knees. It wasn’t Isaiah’s sadness choking Keller, though. It wasn’t anger. It was the raw, frightening pain of leaving her behind. Like the air and the stars in the sky and night and…Isaiah didn’t want to leave this mortal life, especially Roxy! It clawed at him, and now it clawed at Keller, too.
“Where are you going?” Keller asked as evenly as he could. The rest of the room faded away as he focused on Isaiah, but damn. The bleakness radiating off the Level Ten filled Tucker’s office to overflowing. Suffocating and dark, it was as thick and stiff as tar, and Keller was Uncle Remus’s tar-baby. Stuck, his gift of empathy holding him fast.
Isaiah nodded that he now knew Keller was on board, that Keller sensed the real reason for his discomfort. He closed his eyes, and the stifling sensation evaporated. “Sorry. I can’t always control it. Now you know what I’m up against.” He cleared his throat, the muscles in his neck rigid. “At the moment, I’m going nowhere fast. Just like you, I’m stuck. I can’t do the job I love, and I’ve become a danger to everyone around me.”
“Including your wife and unborn child.” Keller understood perfectly. That was the only good part of this extraordinarygifthe’d been blessed with. Psychic empathy filled in the blanks when words failed.
Isaiah cupped his chin, his elbow still on the armrest as if his neck wasn’t strong enough to hold his head. “But that’s not the real problem. Most people’s bodies fuel their brains and minds, but mine works in reverse. I think it pulls energy from the universe. I can’t control it. It’s an automatic reflex, like blinking, breathing, and heartbeats. Because of that, my brain never shuts off, and by default, my mind can’t. What I can’t deal with is the negative energy mygenuinely scary adultmindproduces. That’s what you just felt. I can’t sleep, and most times, I don’t eat. I can’t. It’ll take over if I do.”
“You’re over-energized?” Keller murmured.Whoever heard of that?“Um, sorry. Didn’t mean to—”
Isaiah tilted backward, bumping his head against the wall behind him. “Tell him, Tuck.”
“Tell me what?”
The narrow empathetic tunnel between Keller and Isaiah expanded outward to include Tucker Chase.
Tucker huffed, blinking like he had something in his eyes all of a sudden. “There’s a woman in Louisiana near New Orleans. You’re going to visit her. She’s a hundred and three, but word on the psychic street is she’s got the same condition and power as Isaiah. She’s a Level Ten, only she knows how to handle it.”
Keller’s hand lifted automatically to the back of his neck where a migraine had just mushroomed like an A-bomb over the Pacific. Empaths worked that way. They suffered the same physical, emotional, or spiritual pain the person transmitting did, oftentimes more acutely than the transmitter. Mother Nature had a knack for enhancing the most peculiar traits in her prodigy. While Isaiah was transmitting one helluva mental cocktail, Tucker’s pain was worse. He wasn’t just angry at himself. He was pissed at not being able to fix Isaiah’s problem, for being as helpless as Isaiah.
Keller bowed his head to shake the powerful sensations lapping at him from his boss and friend. If empathy was a gift, he didn’t want it.
“I get why you’re angry all the time, Keller,” Isaiah said quietly, his voice softer than Keller had ever heard. “I know you don’t want to be here. You don’t like us. I understand. I do. One day you were a normal guy doing a bang-up job for the Bureau, and you had the world by the tail. Then lightning struck, and the next thing you know, you’re tagging along with us like a newbie instead of leading the way. You’re learning there’s an entirely different, invisible world out there, one you still don’t believe you belong in. Yet you never fit into that other world, did you? Not even when you were active duty and hiding what and who you were.”
Wasn’t that the truth? Keller stared at Isaiah instead of answering. But yeah. He’d had no idea how powerful his reaction to his first Army kill would be until the repercussion—his damned empathy for the bastard aiming a fifty-caliber rifle straight at him—slammed over him that day in Afghanistan. Self-defense hadn’t made shooting that enemy sniper—a kid, for the love of God—any easier. And puking his guts up afterward had only made Keller look weak in front of his men.
But that day, he’d felt every barb of the twisted hate emanating from that teenage killer. Stupid kid was clutching a fully loaded, beat-to-death Kalashnikov in his sweaty hands. But deep inside, the hatred he’d been taught mingled with liquid yellow fear that ran down the kid’s legs beneath those dirty pajama-like trousers. Only thirteen, he’d been promised he’d see Allah if he followed through with his divine, holy mission. There was nothing on earth worse than an overzealous, homegrown martyr, peeing himself and crying because he knew he was going to die.
His name was Ahmed...
Keller swallowed hard, remembering. Ahmed had been told to kill American soldiers. That was his mission. He’d meant to be brave and courageous. He’d meant to die a martyr’s death to honor his parents. But he’d hesitated…
