San Antonio, Texas
Morning
“What were you thinking, Mia?” Dan Romeo paced their living room like a hamster on a wheel. “After you had a dark vision, you jumped on a train, not knowing where you were headed? Do you know how dangerous that was?”
Mia’s husband painted a stark reality to what she’d done.
“I put you in charge of our new Psi division. I need to know I can trust your judgment.” He stepped toward her and cupped her face in his hands. “I’m upset because I love you, Mia. If anything happened to you, I could never forgive myself.”
He kissed her and when he pulled from her arms, she thought of the terrible guilt Braxton Valentine must be feeling. She knew Dan loved her. He’d give his life for her. Seeing him upset brought back the ordeal she’d witnessed and the sadness overwhelmed her.
Being psychic made her feel things deeper and the raw emotions lasted longer. With every new skill she learned and practiced, the more vulnerable she became. Her gift cut both ways. It made her stronger yet more susceptible to her feelings. She wondered if anyone else had experienced the same struggle.
Had her encounter with Valentine on the train made her vulnerable to him? Just because she hadn’t linked to him, didn’t mean he hadn’t planted something in her that she couldn’t detect. The magnitude of his mind made her realize all she didn’t know about mental telepathy.
Once she opened her psyche to reach out to someone powerful like Valentine, had she exposed a weakness that put her at risk with him? Without her realizing it, the damage could already be done.
That thought frightened her, but she didn’t want to admit her fears to anyone. If they saw her as weak, she might not get the chance to prove them wrong.
“I understand and I promise you. I will set up protocols for my team. I promise. It was not a safe thing to do, but honey.”
“Oh, boy. There’s a ‘but honey’ coming.”
“I need you to hear me.”
After he stood still and fixed his gaze on her, she struggled to find the right words.
“What we do at the Phoenix Agency is dangerous but very necessary work. I worry every time you and your men take on an assignment. If you want me to head up our new division of psychics, I promise you I will focus on team safety, but you might have to get used to a little worry. If we’re in this endeavor together, we have to be equal in all ways.”
Dan clenched his jaw, but he didn’t argue.
“What did you find out about Braxton Valentine?” she asked.
“Andy ran a background check on him,” he said. “Let me show you.”
Dan went to his home office and Mia followed him to his computer. He pulled up a digital file and ran his cursor over areas he wanted her to see.
Andy Moreil ran a super computer he called the ‘Dragon’ for the Phoenix Agency. Andy called himself the dragon slayer. He’d become the master of all things digital. Whenever the team needed the impossible at their fingertips, Andy was their ‘go to’ guy.
“Mike put out feelers through his old contacts. He confirmed that the CIA recruited him, but his file has the highest security clearance. We won’t get anything about his work, especially his past missions.”
“The CIA?”
“The one and only. Other than we confirmed he boarded the train in San Antonio, we have no idea where he lives. If we had this kind of trouble, the cartel would have, too. My guess is that they found out about his fiancée somehow. All they had to do was stick with her and wait for him to show up.”
“That’s a frightening thought,” Mia said. “In his world, it’s true what they say. Love makes you vulnerable.”
“Love gives you something to protect…to fight for.” Dan reached for her hand and kissed it. “After we came up with zilch on his day job, we searched his past and found interesting material on his childhood.”
Mia narrowed her eyes and gazed over his shoulder as he clicked on an investigative report, but before he opened the file, Mia made a guess.
“He’s psychic, isn’t he? I couldn’t break through his mind. He has some mad skills. You don’t develop a gift like that on the fly.”
“So you sensed it in him?” Dan asked.
“Yeah, I guess I did, but I know what it’s like to be targeted by people’s cruelty. If they think you’re different, they can’t let it go. They demonize you until even you think there’s something wrong with you. This guy has been alone for a very long time.”
Ideas flooded Mia’s mind that were mixed with a deluge of memories from the train. Braxton Valentine had drawn out the cartel for a reason. She had to find out why.
“Do you mind if I look through what Andy dug up?” she asked. “I’d like to go over the highlights with Faith.”
“Yeah, sure. What do you have in mind? You sound like you’re not done with this guy.”
“Mateo De La Cruz is one cagey bastard, but he sent a hit squad after Valentine and was prepared to make a message of him. That train hit would’ve been a bloody massacre if both those men had cut loose with machine pistols.”
“Are you thinking of using Valentine…as bait to draw the cartel boss out?”
She scrunched her face and hesitated.
“It sounds…cold to put it that way, but yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. We could have his back if he gets in trouble, but the cartel really wants him. We should use that. They could make a mistake if they underestimate him…or us.”
“You may be onto something, but if we do this, our full team has to be in on the mission. It could be our first true joint op with Psi. It would be dicey and it’ll take all of us to pull it off, but the De La Cruz cartel is worth the risk. Stick with it, Mia.”
After Dan left the room, Mia settled behind his desk and got to work, delving into the background of Braxton Valentine.
Faith? Can you meet me in an hour? My house. I have something important to share with you.
I thought you’d never ask. Faith’s quick response was borderline creepy.
Mia smiled and kept reading.
***
Evening
Mia had arranged for the team to meet at Faith and Mark Halloran’s house in the hill country, north of San Antonio. The view from the back deck at dusk was spectacular. Mia knew these men, but tonight would be different.
Her nerves would be put to the test.
Five impressive partners had started the Phoenix Agency—Dan Romeo, Mark Halloran, Mike D’Antoni, Troy Arsenault, and Rick Latrobe. Whether by good fortune or fate, many of the partners had married or become engaged to women with extrasensory skills. That’s why Dan had asked Mia to build a Psi division.
No pressure.
Since Mia and Faith were proposing a Psi strategy for hunting Mateo De La Cruz—and asking for the agency’s resources to do it—the Phoenix Agency would have their first joint op, using the psychic gifts of the fledgling Psi division. Mia had a lot riding on this gathering, after Dan had trusted her to initiate the use of extrasensory gifts into their service offerings.
After a light dinner, the Phoenix Agency got to work.
“We don’t have concrete proof of Braxton Valentine’s missions with the CIA on foreign soil,” Faith said. “But if Mateo De La Cruz sent a hit squad to kill him—and annihilate any witnesses on that train—we think it’s fair to say his path crossed with the cartel boss in a big way.”
Faith elaborated.
“The cartel came across the border to set up an assassination that would’ve made national headlines if their attack hadn’t been thwarted by the very man they came to kill. With Valentine still alive, Mateo De La Cruz will be furious. He’ll double down on his efforts to take him out. His obsession with Valentine could force him to take risks we could capitalize on. We’re proposing using Valentine as bait to draw out el jefe. We may not get a better shot.”
“Bait?” Faith’s husband, Mark Halloran asked. “Are you saying that he won’t know we’re tracking him? If he’s had covert operative training, that won’t be an easy thing to pull off. He’ll see us coming…unless you think your psychic team can give us an edge.”
“That’s the wrinkle in this,” Mia said. “We think Valentine is psychic, too. It’s unclear what skills he may have or how he uses them, but he’s got a powerful enough mind barrier to block out anything I threw at him. Only the strongest telepaths can do it…and make it appear effortless. To maintain a mind barrier is exhausting.”
“Do you think he’s aware he’s doing it?” Kat Culhane asked. “This could be something he does naturally.”
Mia glanced at Faith before she answered.
“That’s a good question. We can’t be sure. Neither of us has ever encountered anyone who does this naturally, but it’s possible.”
“I can’t imagine him not knowing,” Faith argued. “Picture what it would take to harness power like that. Bottom line, he won’t be easy to track or trick. We’ll have to use different tactics and be on our ‘A’ game to avoid detection by him. He’s got skills from the CIA and whatever mental abilities we think he acquired from his mother.”
“His mother?” Kat asked. “You have information from his childhood?”
Mia ran through the investigative reports on Valentine’s childhood. Some reports needed interpretation—opinions from Mia and Faith on what it might’ve been like for Valentine to grow up as a psychic child. Both women knew firsthand what the challenges must’ve been.
“We have police reports of documented visits to his childhood home and record of his mother’s child abuse from Social Services,” Faith said. “Reading between the lines of his life and what we’ve learned of his mother, we believe she had the gift and passed whatever she had to him. She was labeled as mentally unstable. You can imagine the ridicule he endured with that kind of stigma put on his mother. These reports are only a fraction of what could be a very misleading picture.”
“She kept him uprooted,” Mia added. “She moved him from place to place. They were reported as homeless for a period of time.”
Mia understood what it meant to be an outcast and a social pariah to people who didn’t understand her gift. Children were cruel enough, but adults with authority could have made Valentine’s life a living hell.
He could’ve developed a mind barrier because of his mother, to keep her out of his head. After she died when he was fifteen, he’d learned to live alone and must’ve kept his gift secret—hard lessons realized from a mother persecuted for her peculiarities.
Mia had a great deal of respect for the man he’d grown into, a man willing to sacrifice his life for innocent strangers.
“It’s amazing he turned out anywhere near the vicinity of normal,” Dan said. “I can see what a CIA recruiter would’ve seen in him.”
“We’ll send each of you our assessment with highlights of what we presented here,” Mia said. “We’re proposing to use him to draw out a very wary cartel boss.”
“If Valentine will be hard to track, where is he now? How do you propose to do surveillance on a skilled operative?” Mark asked.
“We don’t have to know where he is now, but we do know where he’ll be,” Faith added. “He’s escorting his fiancée’s body to Los Angeles for her funeral. We’ve learned he’ll be staying with Raine Garrett’s parents. We’ll be there, too.”
“If we know where he’ll be, you can bet the cartel does, too,” Mia said. “We can count on not being alone in tracking him.”
Members of the Phoenix team glanced at each other and Mia could almost hear the groan at what they were proposing. It sounded cruel to stake out a funeral, but she justified their decision because she intended to have Valentine’s back. He’d spent his life as a loner and she understood what that meant. That didn’t mean he couldn’t use discreet help when his life was on the line.
Next stop—Los Angeles.
***
Los Angeles
Three days later
Charles Garrett had made funeral arrangements for his daughter and coordinated with Valentine’s flight itinerary. If Brax could’ve flown beside Raine’s coffin in the belly of the plane, he would’ve done it. He hated being with strangers when he only wanted to be with her. After the aircraft touched down, he watched from an observation window as her casket transferred to a hearse on the tarmac.
Raine would be buried on Saturday, her birthday.
Long after the hearse drove away, Brax sat staring out the window. Still in the fog, he found himself sitting in the back of a taxi from LAX. Raine’s parents had offered to pick him up, but he chose to postpone facing them. He’d spent much of his life cocooned in the shelter of his head. His mother had taught him how to find comfort in silence, but nothing had worked since Raine died.
He couldn’t stop remembering and didn’t want to.
After he pulled up to the curb outside the Garrett home, he paid off the cabbie and retrieved his bag from the trunk. As the cab drove away, he gazed down the street at the upper-middle class neighborhood of Angelino Heights, a historic district of Victorian homes off the Hollywood Freeway, not far from Echo Park.
Most of the houses on the block were behind short stone walls with wrought-iron fences, true to the period, while others were tucked in close to each other, reminding him of two-story versions of the shotgun-style houses in Louisiana, long narrow homes with welcoming front stoops.
Brax pushed through the gate of the Garrett home and walked the steps up to the front door of a well cared for Victorian. Hanging baskets of cascading flowers hung from the eaves. The manicured lawn had been freshly mowed for Raine’s arrival.
He stared at the home where Raine had grown up and learned how to love from parents she adored. She made memories here. He sensed her presence all around him. Brax shut his eyes and breathed her in, fighting the gut wrenching misery of losing her.
Your fault. Those men were there because of you.
He still felt her limp body in his arms. Because of his guilt, in his mind her death had eclipsed her life. He didn’t deserve a reprieve from his dark feelings, but that didn’t stop him from wanting Raine back in his life anyway he could have her, even if it meant only in the memories they’d made together—and the shattered hopes of a future that would never be.
As he raised his hand to ring the bell, the front door opened. Valentine recognized the face of Raine’s father, Charles Garrett. Something passed between them that Brax couldn’t put a word to.