Spook Squad (36 page)

“Let me know if there’s any other way I can be of help.”

While I couldn’t stand that guy for what he’d done to Lisa, my current situation with Chance was pretty dire. Any ally was a welcome ally. Even Bert Chekotah. I thanked him one more time and then moused around, searching for the button that would end the chat session, while he reached up and took off his headset. And then I saw it.

A wedding band.

Jacob put his hand over mine, guided the cursor to the signoff point, and clicked my finger into the button. Chekotah’s image was gone now, but the image of the wedding band was firmly branded into my brain. That creep had
married
someone just a few months after the astral debacle? Not only was I enraged for Lisa, and for every other decent woman at PsyTrain, but for his current wife, too. Because if he hadn’t cheated on her yet, I’d lay bets that he’d be sleeping around by New Year’s.

“I’m gonna hit the bathroom,” Bly said, fleeing the room before anyone could tell him where it was. Apparently my bitterness was so pronounced I could use it to deflect empaths.

I glared at the icon Bert Chekotah had chosen for himself, some Native American stylized feather. The way he hid behind his “I’m so spiritual” crap turned my stomach. “I’m sure he’ll make an
awesome
husband…and it had better not be Faun Windsong who married him. Because she should know better.”

“No, she’s still in Santa Barbara. I don’t think we’ve met the lucky girl.”

“Good. But whoever it is, he doesn’t deserve her.”

“Yeah, I know, I give it less than a year.”

I was sorely tempted to seize on my indignation and call the guy back before I cooled off. Once I had some time to think about it, I’d probably decide it wasn’t worth getting a few digs in, and Chekotah would still be going around oblivious to what an ass he was. Jacob, standing behind me, settled his hands on my shoulders and dug his thumbs into the muscle on either side of my spine. I hadn’t even realized I’d been gathering tension there. Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between pulling down white light and painful clenching. I rolled my neck a few times and sighed. “Of everyone at the FPMP with a big SUV, you had to bring an empath into our house?”

“So that’s what’s really eating you.”

“If he could see into all your nooks and crannies, I’ll bet it would be eating you too.” I spun the office chair to face him. “It pisses me off. If it weren’t for him strong-arming Richie when I specifically told him not to, Chance would still be in there. We’d know where she was, and we wouldn’t need to go on a ghost hunt right now.”

Jacob planted his hands on the armrests, leaned in, and spoke whisper-soft. “I had my eye on him.”

“I thought he wasn’t your type.”

“I’m serious. Yeah, he’s shifty, and I had my reservations before, but I’ve made my peace with them. If Bly hadn’t read Chance’s intentions and stepped in, she might’ve managed to zap you out of your own body so she could take over. You’re armed. How would you feel if she used your weapon—your hand—to take the rest of us out?”

I tried to swivel away, but Jacob’s hold on the chair didn’t budge. The small struggle, though, made me suddenly aware of the way he was straddling my outstretched legs and leaning over my body like he owned it. When we roleplayed at being bossy, it was all an act for me. For him, though? He really was that butch. In fact, he was probably holding back so he didn’t dislocate my shoulders when he forced my hands over my head and pushed my wrists into the mattress. That was fine in bed—he’d had plenty of practice over the years at being just forceful enough without taking things too far. In terms of Psych, though, he was flying blind.

“Here’s the thing about working as a team,” I said. “I need to be sure everyone’s got my back.”

“We do.”

Maybe. But that didn’t mean they knew what they were doing. “Bly thought I was oblivious that something was seriously wrong with Richie and he pushed too hard.” And Jacob swung a light in my eyes…but the last thing I wanted to do was undermine that enviable self-confidence of his. “You and I need to get on the same page with our Psych talk.”

“Okay.”

The words I used to describe my subjective experience of Psych were painfully dumb, but it wouldn’t do us any good to reinvent the vocabulary at this stage of the game. “There’s energy all around us. Once, when we were all hopped up, you said it felt like vibration. For me, it looks like white light.” Jacob nodded. This wasn’t news to him. But I don’t think he really understood its importance. “You handle this energy, whether you know it or not—Chance couldn’t slip out of Richie until you let go of his arm. If my subtle bodies are rattling around loose inside my shell, I’ll bet yours are fused in so tight it’d take a psychic earthquake to dislodge them. It wouldn’t surprise me if you were actually better at handling the light than I am…but the problem is, you can’t see what you’re doing. I can.”

“Then you’re in charge.” Jacob pressed his forehead into mine, and though Bly was lurking around the cannery somewhere, I felt some of the knots inside me untangle as I focused on Jacob’s nearness, the immensity of his presence. It was big, like everything about him is big. Yet somehow, that huge presence didn’t drown out my essential me-ness, but rather, amplified it.

He glanced at my lips as if considering whether or not we could afford to squander a precious moment for a kiss, and I leaned forward and made that decision for both of us. His lips parted. Our teeth grazed together. I swept my tongue in, bold, and his breath caught. Mine too, sharing this inhalation between us, dwelling for one shining moment in our trust, fortifying ourselves with the single, fleeting kiss, shoring me up before we embarked on an exorcism in which I absolutely could not allow myself to fail.

I relaxed into the familiarity of his mouth…and then I felt it. The gentle tug. Startled, I pulled back. “Did you feel that?”

The moment was ripe for a wisecrack, but Jacob must have sensed I was dead serious. “I’m not sure. I mean…” he broke eye contact and glanced away, somewhere in the vicinity of my ear. “It’s always intense.”

“I’m not talking about—”

“I know. Neither am I. Not entirely.”

I squirmed my hands up between us, grabbed him by the face, and squared up his eyes with mine. “Listen. I’ve been gorging on white light all day. I’ve seen Jennifer Chance puppeteering Richie’s body and I’m spooked as hell. That can’t be me on the end of her strings, get it? That can’t ever be me.”

“I get it.”

“So you can’t grab my light. Heat of the moment, things get crazy…you’ve gotta keep your head on straight.”

“Wait a minute. You’re saying that when I kissed you, I—?” We stared at each other for a long moment, and when I didn’t back down, he said, “Can I try it again, just to see if I can feel it? If it’s safe, I mean, if you don’t think I’ll siphon out all the—”

Since I still had him by the face, it was up to me to pull him into the kiss. I doubted he’d steal the whole shebang. Last time he did that it was a different situation entirely, with sky-high adrenaline and a very disturbed ghost in the room. Besides, even if he did nab some juice, it couldn’t hurt to rev him up before we charged into battle. I’d have time to replenish on the way back to FPMP headquarters. His mouth was hot and wet against mine, but his tongue was shy. Now he was really holding back. I could feel a tremor in the arms of the chair where he gripped them so tightly his hands shook. I moved slowly. We didn’t have the time to be leisurely, but I wanted to forge the connection right. My tongue skimmed the edges of his teeth, but no telltale tug followed. Even when I tuned in to the great glut of light I’d been hoarding, it was all still there, roiling around inside whichever subtle body contained it.

I tongued him deeper, encouraging him to try and take it from me, but I could tell that light wasn’t budging. Whatever he’d been doing before when I felt that tug, it wasn’t happening now. Anxious to get going, I gave a little push…and then the floodgates parted.

My world went as bright as a sunrise over a fresh snowfall, but without the accompanying squint-inducing pain of overtaxed pupils struggling to adjust. I felt the light rushing into him through this connection in the physical, this kiss. It could have been any kind of touch, though, from a pinch to a caress. I don’t think that detail really mattered. What escalated the luminous flow was our intent.

I ended the kiss gently. The transfer had been substantial, but I still had a sizable stockpile remaining. Jacob’s eyes fluttered open. His cheeks were flushed. “You felt it,” I said. I didn’t need to ask. His awed expression said it all. “So that’s the mojo at the heart of it all. If you grab it from me, you might as well tie me up before I shoot anybody, and then fly that asshole Chekotah out here to evict Jennifer Chance. If I can see the white light, it’s likely she sees it too, and she’ll slip in the second she spots an opening.

Jacob’s eyebrows twisted up earnestly. “Wait a minute, who says this has to be a liability? If I can drain your white light, shouldn’t I be able to top it off too?”

I typically cede to Jacob’s greater intelligence, experience, and overall competence on all matters. Psych, however, was my thing, the only arena in which I had an advantage. I didn’t want to burst his bubble, but given the stakes in this game, I couldn’t afford to coddle him for the sake of—

He crushed his mouth to mine and jammed his tongue in, hard. His hand slid into my overcoat and grazed my holster while his fingertips dug into my ribs. His breath came in ragged huffs—and my physical body was starting to think this exchange was more about getting its rocks off than gathering light.

And then I felt it, like pins and needles, like a whack on the funny bone or a deep huff of aerosol propellant, an edgy, squirmy, frighteningly exuberant sensation that morphed from tactile to visual as it passed from Jacob’s body into mine…from his spirit into mine. Sparkling, buoyant light. The same stuff as mine, but with a slightly effervescent cast imparted by the act of forcing itself through both our filters. My breath caught, and my groin throbbed. My physical body wanted to do something completely different than ghost hunting with this heady potency coursing through my veins.

Power is power, and I knew better than to squander it in my pants. I pulled away with a wet gasp before Jacob could ram all his light down my throat. If Bly was listening in, it probably sounded like we were banging each other. And if he was eavesdropping with his psychic empathy…well, it probably felt pretty much the same. Jacob’s lips slid to my ear. He was breathing hard. “You felt that,” he gasped urgently, like he’d just discovered my G-spot. “I know you felt it.”

I felt it, all right.

Big time.

Chapter 31

Once Jacob and I confirmed that yes, the light flowed both ways, and once we adjusted our manhandled clothing and half-hard dicks, we headed downstairs to find Bly sitting on the big leather couch, leafing through the latest issue of Inner Eye. I’d rolled up the magazine and squeezed it in a sweaty fist so many times it read more like a scroll. The empath looked totally innocent, like he hadn’t been catching massive waves of gay emanating from the upstairs office. Other people’s lust must get old after a while. Or maybe he’d simply learned how to tune that type of stuff out.

We all headed down to the basement. I might not be entirely sold on Bly’s presence in my home, but I was glad enough to take advantage of the extra pair of hands and strong back. I tested the set first to make sure it was working. Red and veiny?
Check
. Completely flayed?
Check
. Tracer fingers?
Check
. Then we unplugged the behemoth, eased it into its padded clamshell case, and set to hauling it up the stairs. I’d assisted with the encasement, but there wasn’t room for all three of us in the stairwell. I darted up ahead and slid furniture and throw rugs out of the way to prevent anyone from tripping and getting crushed by the last remaining GhosTV.

I toed three pairs of shoes out of the way—why do women need so many shoes?—and scooted a wastebasket up against the wall as Bly backed out of the stairwell, carefully maneuvering his side of the massive crate. Scouting ahead, I discovered the typical scattering of mail on the vestibule floor. I gathered it up and was about to toss it on the blowjob bench when I saw that one of the envelopes didn’t have a stamp or a return address on it. Only my name, in Bob Zigler’s precise handwriting.

“Front door,” Jacob called out, breathless. I crammed Zig’s letter into my coat pocket and yanked open the front door just in time for the guys’ momentum to carry both them and the TV crate through it. As Bly backed over the threshold, a vision of Washington goons flooding in to relieve us of the technology came to mind. Or worse, gunning us down in the process. I was relieved that at least Bly would be the first one to take a bullet…and then I felt guilty for thinking it. I was also relieved that he wasn’t a telepath, and the worst thing he’d read off me was a confusing jumble of anxiety. Which was probably pretty typical of my headspace anyway.

Bly’s gargantuan SUV did come in handy after all. The back row not only folded, but also split down the middle and swung to either side. Meanwhile the middle row had the capacity to fold down individually, just in case even more cargo room was required. We could’ve fit a keg in there alongside the GhosTV, as well as a new 70-inch flatscreen for Richie. The dashboard was pretty impressive too—satellite radio, MP3 dock, onboard navigation—though the main thing I cared about was that it could charge my phone, since I’d gone through the trouble of remembering my car charger.

Maybe Bly was part of my new Spook Squad, but I still didn’t want to sit next to him where he could stare at me in his peripheral vision. I climbed in back, figuring I’d leave that honor for Jacob, since Bly could stare at Jacob all he wanted without reading a thing.

I opened my faucet to the infinite supply of white light and started loading up for the big showdown with my ex-doctor, and as I did, the image of the lightning-struck tower floated up through my consciousness.
Something you believe to be true is revealed as false.
I’d thought Dreyfuss was the worst guy in the world Lisa could have hooked up with, but one look at Chekotah was enough to convince me that I’d been wrong. I saw Dreysuss’ face when he looked at Lisa—the guy was hopelessly besotted. If I could find room in my heart to relax my suspicions on Chekotah and Bly enough to accept their help with this exorcism, I could probably find a way to go a little easier on Dreyfuss for dating my best friend. Behind my back. And doing
yoga
and
manicures
together, for crying out loud.