A Gift of Thought (3 page)

‘
In the back,’ 
he conceded, so she led him that way, treading as quietly as possible. Her mind was racing, trying to decide what to say, what to ask. She had so many questions. At the back door, they paused and she turned to face him.

She might not see him again, so she had to ask the most important question first.

“How’s Dillon?” She tried to muster a smile. “He ought to be in college now, right? Did he follow you into the Ivy Leagues?”

“Beth . . .” he started and then stopped.

“Sylvie, now,” she said into the silence. Why couldn’t she read him? His emotions weren’t making sense to her, as if they were a scent she couldn’t identify, a taste she didn’t recognize.

“You went back to your own name?”

She nodded, as if it wasn’t important, as if reclaiming her name hadn’t caused her months of mixed emotions, a complex twist of anger, pain, relief, satisfaction, grief, happiness, even fear. She was still trying to understand what she was sensing from him. “Lucas, what aren’t you saying?”

“It’s complicated.” The words on the surface were meaningless. It was the words below that mattered. 
‘He’s dead.’

“He—what?” The words felt strange in her mouth, as if her face had suddenly gone numb and her lips couldn’t shape the letters.

“It’s complicated,” he said again.

‘
You were supposed to keep him safe!’
 Her thoughts were a scream. She brought her fist to her mouth, biting down so the sound couldn’t escape.

“Sylvie.” Lucas reached for her, putting his hands on her shoulders, but Sylvie brought her arms up, knocking his away. Stepping back, she glared at him.

“Get out.” She reinforced the words with mental fury, 
‘Get out or I will call the police.’

Chapter Two

At the sound of the woman’s name, fascination overcame Dillon’s anxiety. He let his father disappear into the darkness outside the house without a second thought.

Sylvie?

Really?

Holy crap.

She didn’t look anything like her picture. He’d only seen the one, taken shortly after he was born. In that image she was a pretty teenager, gazing down at the dark-haired bundle in her arms with an awed smile. Lucas, standing next to her, was looking at her face instead of the baby, his expression almost dazed.

But she’d had a cloud of red-gold hair, completely different from the brown hair that was tied up in some kind of fancy braid now. And she’d been . . . well, round. Curvy. Okay, he could admit it: she’d been chubby. Maybe it was because she’d just had a baby? But he’d thought it was what she was like.

When he’d imagined her, it was as an older version of the same girl, the mom version. Like Mrs. Weasley from the
Harry Potter
books.

Instead, she was Alice from
Resident Evil
. Except with a stupid-looking black dress with layers of puffy ruffles that Alice wouldn’t be caught dead in. But still, the way she pulled out that gun? That was seriously cool.

Dillon frowned as he thought about the conversation he’d overheard. His dad recognized her right away, but he’d called her Beth. And then she’d said something about Milan. What was that about? Dillon felt a stab of annoyance as he realized what it must mean: his dad had seen her since she’d disappeared.

She’d been standing motionless by the door, but when she finally moved and Dillon got a better look at her, his frown deepened. She was paler and she was moving slowly, without the grace and speed of her earlier actions, almost stumbling as she made her way through the house until she reached the foyer. At the base of the wide, sweeping staircase, she stopped, resting one hand on the carved wooden banister, swaying a little, eyes closed.

What did his dad do to her?

She’d asked about him, about college, and Lucas didn’t answer, not really. But then she’d snapped at him and kicked him out. Why?

Damn. Only one answer made sense. His mom read minds, too. Dillon wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or annoyed: here was further proof that he should have had a psychic gift of his own.

But that meant . . . oh.

Her weird behavior was because she knew he was dead.

Dillon felt guilty. Watching people be sad about his death wasn’t the worst part of being a ghost but it was close. But even as he had the thought, Sylvie pulled herself together. She shook her head, straightened her back, and took a deep breath before starting up the stairs.

Dillon trailed behind her, not sure how he felt about her quick recovery. Didn’t he deserve a little more than that? Like, really? Two minutes of sad and then she was over him? On the other hand, at least she wasn’t going to cry. He would not have liked watching her cry.

At the top of the stairs, she took a left and headed down a corridor. Dillon followed, looking around curiously. He’d never been in a house this big or this ridiculously grand. The white walls were decorated with fancy trim, both along the ceiling and breaking up each chunk of wall. Lights tucked unobtrusively into the ceiling shone on paintings, mostly pastel landscapes in gold frames, spaced every few feet. The hardwood floors were smooth and shiny, with an ornate carpet running down the middle of the hallway.

Sylvie knocked on a door and waited.

Dillon wished he knew what was going on. What was his mom doing? And why had his dad come to this house? What was he looking for, if not his mom? He hadn’t been able to talk to Lucas during the flight, but after they’d picked up a rental car and headed out onto the highway, he’d tried to ask Lucas what he was doing. If he had a voice, he would have said something like, “Why are you pretending to be some guy named Murray? What are you doing?” But he’d abbreviated his texted question to,
Why Murray?

Big mistake.

His dad had answered with annoying brevity. “It’s a clean identity and I don’t want to leave a paper trail.” Oh, like that was helpful. His dad wasn’t an undercover agent. Why was he worried about leaving a trail?

Dillon had still been formulating his next question when his dad said, “Sorry, Dill, but I’ve got to turn the cell phone off. Can’t risk it buzzing while I’m working.”

Working? Was that what he called it? Dillon had tagged along, wondering the whole while. It didn’t look like work to him; it looked like an impressively efficient burglary. Except for the part where he got caught before he managed to get anything, anyway.

Sylvie knocked again, a little harder this time. “Rachel?”

Dillon looked at her, looked at the door, then shrugged and pushed himself through it. Not waiting around for people to open doors was one of the few advantages of being a ghost. In the back of his mind, he imagined his grandmother scolding him for his lack of manners. But ghosts can’t knock, he protested silently to the voice of his conscience, shutting it up for the moment.

Inside the room, a girl in cotton pajamas, dark hair twisted in wet tangles down her back, hurriedly slid a book onto a shelf. Dillon frowned. Something about her hurry was furtive, as if she was trying to hide the book. He drifted closer.

The spine was black with a red ribbon on it.
Eclipse
, he read. Was that one of those weird vampire books?

“Rachel!” The knock was harder, the voice a demand.

“Coming.” The girl glanced back at the shelf, touching the book one last time, then crossed to the door. Dillon took a look at the other books on the crowded shelves. He didn’t recognize most of them, but she had a couple by Terry Pratchett. That was a good sign.

As the girl opened the door, Dillon wondered who she was. But he supposed if he was going to be haunting her house, he’d find out soon enough.

*****

Dillon was dead.

Had been dead for a while, judging by the flavor of Lucas’s emotions.

Sylvie knew that if she let it, the pain would overwhelm her. Every morning when she woke up and thought of Dillon, wondered what he was doing, where he was, every morning he’d already been gone. Every night before she fell asleep, when she’d wished him a silent good night and God bless, he’d already been gone.

Was this what drowning felt like? This choking sensation closing off her throat?

But she had a job to do.

Rachel.

She needed to check on Rachel, make sure she was okay, then test the security system, find out how Lucas had gotten in, get the cameras back online . . . yes, she needed to work. To make her charge safe.

She stuffed the pain down, burying it deep inside her. Later, she promised herself. Later.

Rachel was fine. A little forlorn-looking still, but going straight to bed and to sleep. Twenty minutes ago Sylvie might have insisted she eat something or at the very least rehydrate, preferably using a drink with electrolytes. Instead, Sylvie just nodded and walked away, heading straight to the security room on the lowest level of the house.

She and Rachel had come in that way, through the garage, and up the back stairs to the third level where the bedrooms and Chesney’s private office were located. Lucas, though, exited on the mid-level, through the French doors that opened from the large family room onto the back terrace. But how did he bypass the security system?

The room that the security team used as their base of operations was tucked between the caterer’s kitchen and a staff work room. A wide-screen monitor displayed multiple camera feeds. Lucas had said that the ones in back were down, but they all appeared to be running. Sylvie ran a quick system check. Managing the technology wasn’t her job, and apart from turning the system off and on, the system check was all she knew how to do. But the lights were green and it seemed to be working the way it was supposed to.

She tapped her fingers on the desk, debating, and then, with a twist of her mouth, she picked up a phone and called Ty.

“Clear?” He didn’t bother with hello when he answered, jumping straight to the information he wanted.

“Not exactly,” Sylvie answered reluctantly. She glanced at the monitors again. Everything looked as if it was running properly, but it couldn’t be.

“Not exactly? You’re on the house phone.”

“Confirmed. The house is currently clear.” Sylvie put a little extra emphasis on the second to last word.

“Currently?” Sylvie could hear the shock in Ty’s voice.

“Confirmed.” She waited. In the background, she heard the noise of the party; the faint formal music, the dull clamor of conversations, the clinking of silverware against fine china. Rachel’s ‘friends’ had made an early start to the evening, but the diners must be on dessert by now. Or maybe that was wishful thinking; she wanted Ty back at the house sooner, not later.

Finally the noise quieted, and Ty’s voice came back, “Report.”

Sylvie paused. She didn’t know how to explain what had happened. At least not where she couldn’t be sure who could overhear. “We had a visitor,” she finally said. “I don’t know how he got inside. The security system is up and running but he was in Chesney’s office.”

“What? What the hell were you—”

“It was fine.” Sylvie interrupted Ty. She knew he was questioning her decision to enter the house, especially with Rachel in tow. If she hadn’t recognized Lucas, it would have been a terrible decision. Maybe it had been anyway. “But I don’t know how he got past the system. It’s still online and it looks like it’s working the way it’s supposed to. Can you send a tech?”

“Fine?” There was a sarcastic edge to Ty’s voice.

Sylvie pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to hold back a hasty retort. She couldn’t do this, not right now.

She wanted to get home. She needed to get home, to the safety of her small apartment, the comfort of her solitude. She wanted to close the door behind her and shut the world out. “Ty, do you really want to have this conversation while you’re on duty at a party? Or do you want to send me a damn tech?”

This time the silence was on his end. “Was anything stolen?”

“No.” And then Sylvie added, “Not that I’m aware of.” Could Lucas have stuffed something in a pocket before she’d gotten there? Damn, it hadn’t even occurred to her to check.

“All right, I’ll tell—”

“No.”

“No?”

“Chesney, right?”

“Mr. Chesney,” Ty corrected her dryly.

Sylvie tried to restrain her sigh. “Yeah, whatever. Don’t tell him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Is this . . . .” Ty paused. They didn’t often speak about her sixth sense. Ty knew about it, had for years. But for both of them, not talking about it had become habit.

After Sylvie ran away from Tassamara, she’d joined the Marines. Her first duty station was Somalia. Peace-keeping forces, that’s what they called them.

Right.

Peace-keeping.

Sure.

In a world dominated by strong men, Sylvie kept her head down, but on a terrible October day Ty listened when she told him what she could do. For the next decade, they’d stayed close. And when the detailed background checks required for intelligence jobs killed their chances of career advancement, they’d joined forces.

In Sylvie’s case, she’d gotten out of the Marines barely ahead of her dishonorable discharge. It turned out that stealing the identity of a dead girl to join the service was frowned upon. Sylvie would have loved to protest—she’d been seventeen, too young to join. She hadn’t had a high school diploma and they would have rejected her. Hadn’t her decade of service proved her worth? But there wasn’t any arguing with the system.

And in Ty’s case, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ hadn’t been enough. He hadn’t told, but he hadn’t been as careful as he needed to be either. He’d never get the position as intelligence specialist that he’d been up for, and now that the service knew . . . well, his military career was dead.

Sylvie had been bitter, too bitter to move forward, but Ty had been more practical. Fortunately for her, he’d dragged her along. As he built his own security business, her skill as a bodyguard and a reader of people had been a cornerstone of his success. Enough so that he paused now, willing to listen to her reservations.

“I don’t know,” she said. Everything was churning inside of her. She couldn’t make sense of the way she felt. But she knew she didn’t want to tell Chesney that Lucas had been in his office. Not now, not yet.