It was immediately clear that nothing had been resolved when Chase burst back into the house. There was no one left in the living room except Trent, who was nursing a cup of coffee.
“What’s wrong?” Trent asked, immediately standing at attention. “Did something happen?”
“I think he saw something,” Nate said.
Chase didn’t explain the horror of his vision. Describing to his brother how he’d seen Trent being shot in the fucking head was the worst possible thing he could imagine. If the memory of that intelligent gaze going blank was horrible for Chase, he didn’t know what it would do to Nate.
“Where’s Jessica?”
Trent shrugged, spreading his hands, and Chase turned away. There was no one in the kitchen, and the only people in the backyard were Holden and Elijah. They were standing in the cold, Holden’s arm wrapped around Elijah’s shoulders as they spoke in hushed tones.
Swallowing a bitter bill of resentment, Chase jerked his chin at them. “Where’s the Ex-Comm people?”
Holden yanked his arm away from Elijah as if his skin had suddenly burst into flames. He looked awkward, but Chase pretended not to notice. Especially because Elijah was gracing him with that guarded glare.
“They’re in Jessica’s room. Including Six,” Holden said. “What—”
Chase headed back into the house without explanation. He knew they’d follow, and the idea of retelling the hideous story over and over again was enough to make him sick. If he focused on it for too long, he could feel the pressure consuming him again—the indication that he was close to flying apart and taking everything in the vicinity with him.
“We need to talk.” His voice was a clap of thunder in the room where Six, Jessica, Lia, and the Ex-Comm brothers had holed up. It wasn’t very large or decorated very well, and the tension between the people in the room was thick enough to slice with a knife. If he felt that way, he wondered how it was affecting Nate, who was notoriously bad at shielding himself against impressions.
Chase shot a quick glance over his shoulder, unsurprised to see the others filing in behind him. Nate was cringing, and Trent was standing close to him, astute as always and analyzing the scene.
“Sorry to cut the debate short,” Chase said. “But—”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.” Lia separated herself from the cluster and stood in the middle of the room with her arms over her chest. “It wasn’t going anywhere.”
For as little as she’d said, her posture and tone spoke volumes. There was a clear divide between them. Odd that it was Chase’s existence causing people to draw lines in the sand when he’d been a captive of the Community long before anyone else in the goddamn house.
“To be honest, that shit is the least of our worries,” he said. “They’re coming for us.”
Jessica shot up from her seat. She asked, “When?” just as Damon said, “You suddenly have this information fifteen minutes after rushing in here?”
Chase’s lip lifted. It was only Nate’s voice muttering in his head that it was entirely the type of skeptical question Chase had asked Nate when he’d first rocked up to Evo, that kept him from saying some out-of-the-way shit.
“I had a vision,” Chase said flatly. “It wasn’t good. They were here, and so were all of you.” His voice went wobbly on the last part, and he hazarded a quick glance back at Elijah. “I don’t know how much you fuckers understand about how me and Elijah got here, but us escaping required me taking out the team Richard had sent to track you all down. And one of them survived.”
“Who?” Elijah demanded. “Was it Will?”
There was no point asking how he’d known. Judging from his hunted expression, and the way he shrunk in on himself, Chase could guess Elijah had been having his own visions. Maybe in his sleep, and he’d tried to write them off as nightmares.
“Yes,” Chase said. “He was here, and he . . . had you.” Horror transformed Elijah’s features further. Chase had to look away before protectiveness took hold of him and wreaked havoc all over the room. “It was bad.”
“How bad?” Xander demanded. “Who did they come for?”
Chase wet his lips and swallowed hard, his voice suddenly dry. How did you tell someone that you’d seen them die? There was no way to go about that in a good way. Or maybe there was, and he needed to take a Psychic Bad News seminar.
“They wanted Elijah, Nate, and Jessica. The rest of you were expendable.”
Jessica was the only person who didn’t react. Maybe she’d already seen what was coming, or maybe she trusted him for some reason after all this time.
“When are they coming?”
“I don’t know for sure, but the snow was melting. So, my guess is the first string of warm days this area gets.”
Trent cleared his throat. “Supposed to have a warm blast next week. Like fifty degrees for a couple of days.”
Chase tried not to react, but he felt himself flinch at the words. A fucking week? That was nothing. They could barely decide on whether Chase was part of their squad, let alone work out a real plan on how to get the hell away from Poughkeepsie. Not that evading Will and his crew was his, or Ex-Comm’s, ultimate goal.
“Again,” Damon said, cutting through the tense silence that had fallen over them. “How do we know we can trust him?”
A flash of impatience swept over Jessica. She glared at Damon for a beat, then two beats, before focusing on Chase. “Can you still transmit your memories to others?” After his nod, she pointed at Damon. “Can you transmit the vision to him?”
“He can,” Elijah piped up. “But why should he? Why should we have to continuously prove ourselves to someone who clearly can’t see past their dumbass single-minded purpose to completely destroy the Community?”
Damon looked at Elijah the way someone would look at an annoying pet. “We lost our sister to the Community you spent years profiting from—”
“‘Profiting,’” Elijah said incredulously. “You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about, hon.”
Damon bristled. “They gave you a job, didn’t they? You had a livelihood, friends, connection. Holden was wealthy. Chase—”
“Don’t even try it,” Chase said. “You don’t know me, bud. You wouldn’t like what you saw if I let you in even a little bit. You wouldn’t like having walked a few miles in Elijah’s shoes either. If I judge by this house, and your attitudes, you came from some privilege. So don’t try to talk shit about me or Elijah. We stayed with the Comm ’cause we had nowhere else to go. You wouldn’t have handled even a fucking fragment of the shit Elijah went through to get to New York.”
Xander glanced at Elijah, but his brother’s cheek clenched. Damon didn’t disagree, maybe because he couldn’t without knowing real facts, but he crossed his arms over his chest in outward defiance.
Jessica closed the space between them and put a hand on Chase’s arm. “Show him the vision, please.”
Her touch startled him, and he looked down at her hand, then her face. She looked so tired that he wondered how much of their past interactions she remembered. Her polite distance and him acting out, so desperate for her attention, and then hating everyone around him because nobody had ever treated him the same as Holden.
Had it been obvious to an adult that he’d craved affection? A kind word? To be treated like a real child and not a little freak? He fucking hoped not. That would make the lack of it even worse.
“It’s okay, Chase,” she murmured when he only stared at her. “You belong here with us.”
He shrugged off her hand and swung his gaze over to Damon. “Whatever.”
It took little effort to call forth the vision he’d just seen, and he blasted it through the connection he opened with Damon. Let the little fuck hear every anguished scream, every impact of fists hitting flesh, gunshots, the sound of boots trudging across the ground as an army of Community murderers returned to their vehicles and went back to the Farm.
When it was done, and all the horror had been traded, Damon was completely unaffected. His expression unchanged, no tension in his shoulders, and judging by the narrow way Holden was gazing at him, he wasn’t emoting anything either. The dude was either a rock, or he had experienced something that made the vision look like a Sunday picnic.
Chase held that stare, lifting his chin, and finally Damon cracked. He glanced at his brother, the smallest flicker of his eyes, but one that let Chase know he was human.
Chase turned to Jessica, knowing the others were there but putting his attention solely on her. The legend of Ex-Comm, the one who’d also been there since the early days of the Community, and the person who had to see this from all the angles since she’d been around from the start.
“That vision shows mostly everyone in this room dead except Nate, Elijah, and you.”
“And you,” Jessica said. “Because you weren’t there.”
Chase set his jaw and nodded.
“Which is exactly why we’re not sending you away.” The protests swelled in Damon’s and Xander’s throats, but she silenced them again with a single look. “First, there’s a chance that Chase staying will change the course of the vision. Second, out of all of us, Chase is the only one with the psychic capability to defend everyone in this room.” She gave the brothers another meaningful stare down. “And third, he’s spent his life being used when convenient and discarded when he wasn’t. We’re not doing it to him after he came here seeking refuge.”
He was a few seconds away from saying he wasn’t deluded enough to think this was a refuge, but why fuck up a good speech? Probably be even worse to add on that his powers would only activate if he thought Elijah was in danger.
Chase shot Elijah another look to find him continuously glaring at Damon like he was trying to freeze his soul. Which really did it for Chase. Nothing like a pissy look to get his motor going.
“Then what’s the plan?” Xander asked when nobody else spoke. “We go to them before they come to us?”
“They have dozens of trained armed guards as well as scores of meat shields on the property,” Six said scornfully. “There’s a reason why we went guerilla warfare last time instead of some kind of brain-dead assault.”
Xander scowled. “We don’t have to go in guns blazing. If we kill Richard—”
Chase looked at Holden, who dropped his gaze.
“You won’t get close enough to my husband to kill him,” Jessica said, this time with a scoff. “The only people he would ever allow to get that close to him are one of his sons, so he can berate them for betraying him. Then he’ll humiliate them one—” she glanced at Chase, then where Holden and Six stood side by side “—by one.”
“Richard needs to go down,” Damon insisted. “Regardless of who he’s related to. He’s a monster—”
“My husband kept me drugged and held in a room for years while he experimented on multis to figure out how to breed and engineer them,” she interrupted. “I understand he’s a monster. As do Nate and Chase, since he’s also held their mother captive for over a decade.”
Nobody argued with that.
“Then what do you suggest?” Damon asked instead. “We sit here and wait for them to come to us before letting this unstable fuckboy blow everyone to pieces?”
Elijah strode forward, but Holden jerked him back. Just the sight of his hand gripping Elijah’s wrist was enough to set Chase’s teeth on edge. He told himself to focus, but he couldn’t look away.
Jessica sat down again, her hands folded in front of her. “I’m not in the position to suggest anything. The organizations I created, both of them, have become something else. The Community has been contaminated by what’s going on at the Farm, and Ex-Comm has become a gathering of crusaders who see the Community on the whole as the enemy.”
“And you’re saying it’s not?” Xander’s voice raised for the first time since they’d all gathered. “You were the one trying to save people from—”
“From being programmed against their will and used as pawns, but that doesn’t mean that’s all there is. But as I said, I’m not in the position to make that call anymore.” She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes before exhaling. “We need to remove Richard, Jasper, and anyone else complicit with the operations at the Farm from power, and then we can make a decision about all the rest. And if Ex-Community members don’t like the way I feel about it, they’re welcome to stop using me as their folk hero.”
Six cringed at the statement, the first animated expression Chase had ever seen from the man. “You’re the reason I’m part of Ex-Comm,” he rumbled. “The person who opened my eyes.”
Jessica’s face softened marginally before closing up again. “My role was always to make sure people have a choice, but my aims and the aims of what Ex-Comm has become have diverged.”
Damon had started nodding before she finished the sentence. Not for the first time, Chase had no idea what the fuck was going on, but it was Elijah who spoke up.
“What are the aims of Ex-Comm now? I get you want to take down the Community brick by brick, but, like, how? It’s not that easy. There are thousands of people involved in it, who believe in it and support it.”
“The only way to dismantle it is to expose it,” Damon said. “Expose the existence of psychics and the savages who—”
“That’s insane,” Nate blurted out. “Do you know how dangerous that would be for all of us if people knew we existed?”
“I’m aware of that, but like your friend just said: there is no other way.”
Chase looked around at the others in the room, wondering if anyone had any brilliant suggestions about how to expose Richard and Jasper without exposing the entire organization, but they were blank. Blank and looking to Jessica, which was a fuck-ton of pressure for someone who’d been out of the loop for nearly a decade. All her Ex-Comm contacts were people she’d recruited on her own in the Farm, like Shelby and Six.
The way the Community had been run for the past several years was probably a mystery to her.
“There’s another option,” Chase said. “We could go to the board.” The silence he got in response to the statement was so irritating that he pressed on. “While I was on the Farm, Richard made a big deal over wanting me to be the new Holden-slash-Six. He was prepping me to take over for him on the Farm so he could take over the Comm in the city, and he had me sit in on a phone call with Kyger and Hale. They were a hundred percent not about him or his plans, and Hale in particular treated him like he was fucking raving.”
“But that doesn’t mean they’d side with Ex-Comm over him,” Lia said. “Unless you could show them that he’s also a threat to them.”
“He is,” Chase said, warming to the idea. “As soon as they hung up, he made it sound like he had no probs taking them out of the picture so he could do things his way.”
“Sounds like Richard,” Jessica said quietly. “He’s made similar statements in the past. He found them . . . stifling.”
“Which means it’s possible they don’t know about what goes on at the Farm,” Lia suggested. “Not entirely anyway.”
Chase wasn’t so sure, but if it came down to working with the lesser of two evils over exposing the entire psychic world to the general public—he’d take it.