Touching Darkness
Authors: Jaime Rush
Touching Darkness
With love to my mom and dad,
Christine and Steve Ritter.
To all of the people who make
my North Carolina home special, including
John and Nanine; Mary Pat and Bill;
Herb and Gloria; Nancy and Bob;
Steve and Ann Marie;
Karen, Curtis, and family;
Mickey, Dina, Clare, and Grant;
Dave and Priscilla, Jayne and Mike;
Kay and Steve; Peg and Bill;
and Maureen and all my friends
in the workout class.
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Nicholas Braden was either about to learn a terrible truthâ¦
Nicholas returned to the Darkwell family estate in Potomac, Maryland,â¦
Heat and pain tore down Nicholas's throat as he triedâ¦
Olivia stood at the French doors in one of theâ¦
Nicholas headed downstairs for lunch but paused at the sightâ¦
Monday morning, Nicholas walked to the French doors that ledâ¦
That evening, Nicholas set a cheese sandwich in a butter-coatedâ¦
Late the next day, Nicholas stepped out of his roomâ¦
Olivia's official duties at the CIA took up much ofâ¦
Saturday morning, Nicholas woke with a start, roused from aâ¦
Nicholas's heart was banging in his chest as he sprintedâ¦
Olivia waited by the balcony in her father's office asâ¦
Nicholas ducked as a spotlight from the car played alongâ¦
Olivia waited for word in her father's office for whatâ¦
Gerard sat in front of the grand fireplace in theâ¦
Nicholas cooked everyone breakfast. Amy and Lucas had been inâ¦
Nicholas woke at three in the morning. He didn't letâ¦
Wednesday night, Jerryl finally made the connection with Petra. Triumph!â¦
In the dream, Petra found it harder to breathe. Theâ¦
Nicholas sat down to locate Olivia. He expected to seeâ¦
Lucas heard Amy's voice from what sounded like a longâ¦
While Amy, Petra, and Zoe were out getting supplies, Lucasâ¦
Like an animal senses an oncoming storm, Sayre picked upâ¦
Nicholas drove toward Woodbridge, his head a jumble of franticâ¦
Nicholas had been driving around Woodbridge all day, back andâ¦
The sound pulled Nicholas from the depths of darkness intoâ¦
Gerard Darkwell punched in the number from which Olivia hadâ¦
Eric paced the length of the room. “I don't likeâ¦
Olivia climbed from a terrifying nightmare to terrifying reality. Notâ¦
Once they were on the road, and Olivia could removeâ¦
The sleeping pill left Olivia groggy. Because of her low-qualityâ¦
Voices and people touching her pulled Olivia from her sleep.
Gerard Darkwell stepped out of the hotel where Nicholas Bradenâ¦
Sayre's phone rang. He was lounging on the couch watchingâ¦
Later that afternoon, Nicholas and Olivia reached Arcadia, the smallâ¦
Lucas spent the evening jumping down everyone's throats. He finallyâ¦
Amy woke the next morning in the guest suite, anxiousâ¦
Gerard was hunched over a map with three of hisâ¦
As soon as Nicholas walked into the tomb, he scannedâ¦
Olivia had been demanding to see her father for hours.
Olivia's voice was hoarse, her face wet with tears. Sheâ¦
Olivia and Nicholas walked into his bedroom at the tomb.
He walked among the smoldering ruins of Darkwell's estate. Somethingâ¦
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T
he man was straddling her, pinning her to the ground. Nicholas's heart boomed in his ears and felt like it would explode. In the shafts of moonlight, he saw something tied over Olivia's mouth.
A twig broke beneath his shoe. The man's head snapped up and he sprang to his feet and rushed toward him. Nicholas saw the flash of a knife. He pushed the man away and felt the knife slice his arm.
Get to Olivia, make sure she's all right.
The man came at him again. Nicholas grabbed his wrists. They were face-to-face, force against force. He couldn't lose. Olivia's life depended on it. She was still alive. Her quick, panting breaths were filled with fear.
The man tried to knee him, but Nicholas twisted out of the way. Blood trickled down his arm, and the pain seared down the line of the cut.
Push past it.
The guy spun around, nearly snapping Nicholas's arm until he had to let go. Nicholas spun out of the way of the knife, but the assailant wasn't aiming at him. He plunged the knife straight down toward Olivia.
“Noooo!”
The word tore from Nicholas's throatâ¦
To My Readers:
Â
If you've read my previous books, welcome back to the Offspring series! If you're picking up one of my books for the first time, this is the third book in the pulse-pounding series that started with
A Perfect Darkness
and continued with
Out of the Darkness.
Fear not! You'll get caught right up with what's going on, like jumping on a moving train. And I predict that you'll want to go back and read the first two books so you can experience all the excitement you've missed.
Â
Cheers,
Jaime Rush
N
icholas Braden was either about to learn a terrible truth or be killed. He rode on the back of a motorcycle through an area of Baltimore the likes of which he'd seen on
Cops
. The only certainty was that he had made a mondo mistake. He'd soon find out if that was trusting the man driving the bike and his comrades, known to him as the Rogues.
They didn't trust him.
Nicholas was the baton in a relay. He had gone to the designated place and met a gang-banger-type guy named Taze, who took him on a beat-up motorcycle to another guy on a bike. After a decoy handoff, the second guy delivered him to Rand Brandenburg.
Nicholas braced himself on the back of Rand's motorcycle seat as they drove to a dead area, with abandoned buildings and roads pocked with potholes, that gave him the creeps. They approached a building begging for demolition. Windows had been smashed out, leaving wicked shards of glass to catch the sunlight.
Nicholas got off the bike the moment Rand pulled behind a crumbling, concrete square that had once held garbage containers. He scrubbed his fingers through his thick, dark hair after removing the helmet and tapped his cross pendant twice, something he did whenever he embarked on a risky adventure.
Rand kicked down the stand while he kept an eye on Nicholas. Rand was solidly built, with dark blond hair and a silver bar through his eyebrow. Nicholas was pretty sure the lump under the back of his shirt was a gun, and that gave him a hell of a lot more than the creeps.
A car pulled up nearby, and a tall, lean, redhead got out and walked over. He knew her, too: Zoe Stoker. He'd been told these people were his enemies. Maybe they were, but his gut told him they weren't.
Rand nodded toward the entrance of the building. Nicholas's chest tightened the way it did when he was about to sink into the depths of a dark underwater cave with only a rope and an air line to link him with the world. No one knew he was here, though. There would be no one to send help if he signaled.
He followed Rand into the first apartment, Zoe behind him. The place was trashed, a dinged-up dining table the only piece of whole furniture left. The smell of mildew and urine permeated the debris on the floor.
Nicholas took only a few steps in before turning to face them. “Is all this really necessary?”
“Afraid so.” Rand stepped closer. “The last time we tried to contact you, we nearly got our heads blown off. Call us a little paranoid, but it keeps us alive.”
Nicholas's brows furrowed. “The shootout at my house. That was the second thing that got me thinking. Made me suspicious. Darkwell, Director for Science and Technology at the CIA, is my temporary boss. He told me to tell the police I had no idea why someone used my house, which is true. He said you guysâthe Rogues, he calls youâwere going to kill me. But he never gave me a good reason why.”
“Because he wants you to fear us. And he sure as hell doesn't want us to tell you what's really going on or get you suspicious.”
The shootout had happened a week and a half ago, and Nicholas still couldn't physically check his house to see
what kind of damage it had sustained. Darkwell told him it was too dangerous; the Rogues could be watching. He promised to restore anything that had been damaged, but Nicholas had a lot of salvage items that couldn't be replaced. He had other ways to see his place, though, and it looked as though it had been cleaned up.
“What's really going on?” Nicholas asked.
Rand said, “You wanted to meet with us. Tell us what you know.”
They had him there. He wanted answers; he would have to give some first. “A month ago, I was contracted by Darkwell to use my skills in a classified program called DARK MATTER. I've got an uncanny ability to find things.”
Zoe tilted her head. “And you found out that your
skill
is actually a psychic ability.”
“Yeah.” That had blown his mind. “And that I inherited it from my father.” Robert Braden, a man he had no memory of. Nicholas tested the strength of the table and leaned against it. “Darkwell promised to teach me to develop my skills so I could help locate hostages. I liked that idea.”
He'd never found a live person before, only weathered remains for Bone Finders, an organization of volunteers who pooled their varied skills to give closure to families of missing persons.
The satisfaction he'd gotten from participating in those searches had instilled a desire to find live missing people, like abducted children. The possibility filled him with a deep sense of purpose. The one time he'd tried, though, he had nearly fallen into an abyss that kept him from doing the find.
The more emotions tied to the missing article, the more of a toll it took on him. Finding lost ships or equipment was simple. Finding a child's bones sucked out his energy for a week, though it was worth it. At the promise of learning to overcome that, Nicholas had signed on with Darkwell,
getting a bonus for residing at the old psychiatric hospital where the program was being conducted.
“Plus he offered me a wad of money to do it, enough so when I'm done with my contract, I can start my own business. He taught me how to psychically see distant placesâremote-viewâexplaining that it was an extension of my location skill. But before I can find any hostages, I'm ordered to find these bad-ass Roguesâall of you.”
They were definitely badasses.
“You're supposed to be terrorists, but you seem like ordinary Americans like me.” In the surveillance and driver's license pictures he'd seen of them, they looked like normal twentysomethings. “He told me he wanted to question you. Then you guys break into the hospital and”âhe rubbed his hand over his faceâ” that was some hairy shit, but what bothered me as much as anything
you
did was seeing one of
our
guards holding two women at gunpoint. I knew he would have killed them.”
It was more than hairy shit. It was everything he'd imagined his father going through in the final moments of his life.
“When it was over, Darkwell told me it was an unprovoked attack, but I overheard him talking about a prisoner being rescued. I had no idea there
were
prisoners. Darkwell denied it when I asked him. I knew he was lying. That was the first thing that had me suspicious. I haven't been comfortable since, but I've got another month on my contract.” Nicholas hated lies. Black lies, white lies, it didn't matter; a lie was a lie. He also hated breaking obligations.
Rand stood rigid. “Two of us were being held at the asylum. Darkwell was using us as guinea pigs, shooting us up with drugs to see if they would boost our abilities.”
A chill trickled down his spine. A nurse had taken his blood when he'd started, ostensibly to check his health. Taken, though. Nicholas had watched the blood going into the syringe; nothing had gone into his body.
What Rand said seemed too horrific to be true, but
Nicholas wasn't about to discount it. “Earlier this week, I was told to find the women again.” One of those women was Eric Aruda's sister, Petra. By focusing on her, he could not only find her, but remote-view her. She usually sensed him and kicked him out. This time she'd talked to him:
“Whoever you are, you're on the wrong side! Darkwell is lying to you. You lost your mom or dad when you were young. Twenty years ago he or she was working for the government or part of some program that no one can tell you anything about. Your parent died because of that program, and now you're working for the man behind it. He only wants to use you. All we want is the truth. Don't you want to know why you have the psychic abilities you do? Don't you want to be on the right side?”
Being on the right side was important to him.
“When Petra told me I was on the wrong side, it jibed with my suspicions. Then this guy, Cheveyo, gets into my head, and even as freaky as some of this stuff is, that was mind blowing.” Wicked wild. Like thoughts in his head, but not
his
thoughts.
In a psychic conversation, Cheveyo confirmed what Petra had told him: Darkwell was trouble. Cheveyo's father had worked with Nicholas's father and was also dead. Cheveyo explained he was not part of the Rogues but was acting as a go-between because he had the ability to communicate psychically. “Petra said something about the classified program my dad worked in twenty years ago. That he died because of it.”
Zoe nodded. “Darkwell created a program that put people with psychic abilities to work finding hostages and terrorists.”
“Darkwell mentioned the program but never said he'd created it.”
Rand said, “It was his baby. He gave the subjectsâour parentsâsomething called the Booster, which enhanced their abilitiesâ¦but messed up their heads. Ask your mother about it. Your dad probably started acting erratic,
maybe got really, uh, let's just say he got pretty randy. Their mental states deteriorated, and one of the participants went on a shooting spree at the facility.”
His dadâ¦His dad and three others had died that day. The blood drained from Nicholas's face. He had spent his whole life imagining what his dad had gone through.
Rand continued. “The program got shut down. Within a year, all the participants were dead. We're the offspring of those participants. In fact, that's what they call us: Offspring. We inherited our parents' psychic abilities and the Booster. That's what made us so powerful. And that's why Darkwell wants us. What we want is the truth. About the program and the Booster.”
Rand crossed his arms in front of his chest. “How many of you are working in the DARK MATTER program? We met with Jerryl Evrard, who pretended to be interested in what we had to say, then nearly took out Zoe.”
Hell.
“What did he do?”
Instead of looking more vulnerable at the memory, she straightened her shoulders in a defiant gesture. “Grabbed me, put a gun to my head, then jumped into the water with me.”
“Jerryl.” Nicholas shook his head. “He's a Marine. All he ever talks about is serving his country and killing people, like both are a privilege and pleasure. There are three of us. Fonda's the third, and she's tight with Jerryl. Little thing, but fierce.”
Zoe leaned against the wall so she could face Nicholas. “What is Jerryl's psychic ability?”
“He remote-views, but I think he can do more than that. He and Darkwell spend a lot more time together than they do with me. They're coconspirators, both with that killer gleam in their eyes.”
“Jerryl can mind-control.”
Nicholas's eyebrows furrowed. “As in, getting into someone's head and making them do something against their will?”
Rand's expression hardened. “Exactly.”
“And I thought this Cheveyo guy getting into my head was freaky enough.”
Zoe narrowed her eyes. “Were you the one who found me in Key West?”
“That was me.”
“Darkwell sent an assassin after me. And he's come after Rand and me twice.”
“In an apartment in Baltimore. The two of you were, uh⦔ Nicholas's cheeks warmed. He'd been ordered to find Rand and had caught them in flagrante.
“Yeah,” Rand said. “Talk about killing the afterglow.”
Nicholas rubbed his mouth. “I'm sorry. I didn't know.”
Zoe checked her watch. “And the thing at your house, that was a setup. Darkwell knew we were going to contact youâcontact, not killâand he put one of his thugs in there to pose as you. The goal was to take all of us out, no questions first.”
Nicholas massaged his temples and closed his eyes for a second. It sounded crazy and paranoid and so government-conspiracies-and-spies and stuff. Yet he sensed the truth in it. “This confirms the bad feeling I've had about this for a while now.” He looked at them. “Thisâ¦Booster stuff in us⦔
Rand said, “We don't know what it is. Our parents were told it was some kind of nutritional cocktail, but it was obviously more than that. And it's a good bet it could make
us
crazy, too.”
Crazy? Like having nightmares about being burned to death? Like feeling outrageous fear at the sight of a fireplace or a candle? “Why is Darkwell out to kill you?”
Rand stuffed the tips of his fingers into his front jeans pockets. “He would have approached us the same way he did you, but we got suspicious and started digging. No way would we work for the dude who caused our parents to die. He can't take the chance that we'll expose him.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
A shadow crossed Zoe's face. “We want to shut him down. He's hurt a lot of people, and he's going to keep on hurting them. Some will be terrorists. Others will just be people in his way. Like us.”
Terrorists. That's what Darkwell said he'd be helping to find. Nicholas knew some of it wasn't pretty, some of it was classified, but he liked helping his country. Finally, after seeing all those news reports about bombings, 9/11, he could do something. So far he'd been mostly working on his ability to find living people. He'd been using that ability to find the Rogues.
Rand asked, “Where did Darkwell move the operation?”
Nicholas met their gazes. “Not until I understand more about what's going on. You're not going to storm the place, are you? Innocent people work there. How do I know you
are
the good guys?”
Zoe pushed away from the wall. “Find out for yourself. Ask about your dad, what he was doing before he died. Talk to Jerryl and find out what he's up to. Ask questions about what's really going on there. You already know Darkwell's not being straight with you. You decide who the good guys are. But be careful. Darkwell kills curious cats.”
Rand handed him a cell phone. “We'll be in touch. It's set to vibrate. We'll call once, disconnect, then call back in thirty minutes. That'll give you time to get someplace where you can talk.”