The Protected

Psychic bloodhounds.

They’d tracked them down. Somehow. Gus didn’t know if it was because of something they’d done or what, but somehow they’d tracked them down. Maybe it was really as simple as she’d said and it was something Alex was unintentionally doing.

And it was something that did him no good to worry about now. They were hours away from where he’d left her and no telling where she was now. He had no way of finding her, which was exactly how he had thought he’d wanted it.

For now, he had to figure out the best way to take care of Alex.

Get those men off their tail.

“You think you can get in their heads?” Gus asked slowly, hating that he had to ask, but knowing he didn’t have much choice.

“You mean—”

“You know what I mean, boy,” Gus said quietly, staring straight ahead. “We need to be away from here. We need another car. We need to get you safe. But we have to make sure they can’t follow us, can’t try and take you from me. We need to make you safe.”

Alex swallowed, and the sound was terribly loud in the silence of the car. “If I do it out here, they’ll wreck. People will get hurt.”

Gus nodded. “Then we leave the highway.”

It would be better that way anyway. If they could find a quiet little road, someplace where they thought they might be safer to make a move, it would be easier for Alex to focus on them. Fewer people around to get hurt. Gus was willing to do whatever it took to protect his nephew, but if possible, he didn’t want to harm a bunch of innocent people.

He was already too close to becoming the monster he was trying to protect Alex from as it was.

They had to get off the highway, and fast. He checked the upcoming exit, mentally mapping things out. He’d spent long, long nights going over his exit strategies for the time when he and the boy had to leave. He wasn’t as familiar with this area as he’d like to be, but he knew the major interstates and the highways as well as he could hope to.

If he took the upcoming exit and headed east for a while, they’d get away from the traffic. There was a smaller county road that went north. There . . . they’d try to make it there.

“Okay, Alex,” he said, leaving the fast lane and watching as the car back there casually did the same thing. “This is what we’re going to do.”

* * *

VAUGHNNE woke up in more pain than anybody should have to feel without pharmaceutical intervention.

And when she opened her eyes a slit, she could see the highway speeding by. Not the bright lights of an ER, either. That was what she’d rather see. An emergency room. With a nice doctor . . . preferably a sexy one so she could have something to focus on while she waited for pain medicine, because damn, she hurt.

That wasn’t happening, though, she didn’t think.

She continued to sit there, breathing shallowly while she did a mental check. She had all of her body parts, and even though she hurt, she didn’t think she was in bad shape, considering she was pretty certain she’d been in an accident. Might have something to do with the fact that, even as scared as she’d been, she’d still been pretty limp and lax from whatever Gus had pumped into her system—

Gus . . . shit. Alex.

Fear flooded her, crowding up the back of her throat in a metallic, nasty rush, and she had to battle it back. Okay. Time to figure out what was going on—

“Calm down, Vaughnne,” a tired, familiar voice said. “It’s just me.”

She went to turn her head, and pain streaked through her, just from that. She winced, barely managing to keep the cry behind her teeth as she found herself staring at Tucker’s profile. “You.” Closing her eyes, she blew out a breath. “You heard me.”

“Yeah. Kind of hard not to. You wail like a banshee.”

She might have flipped him off if she could have moved without it hurting. Instead, she just sat there, letting her body adjust to being awake. Her body didn’t like it. Not at all.

“What happened?”

“I . . .” He paused and tapped a gloved fist against the steering wheel. “I might have forced the car you were in to wreck. Overloaded the system with a discharge.”

“A discharge?” She stared at him, trying to figure out what he was saying. The words sounded like English, but they weren’t, because he just wasn’t making sense. Or maybe it was the pain in her head.

“Yeah. It’s . . .” He blew out a breath. “I manipulate electricity, basically, and I store it inside me. Science says it isn’t possible, but then again, look at what most scientists would say about people like you.” He shot her a glance and shrugged.

“You . . . you store electricity.” Yep. It was official. He wasn’t speaking English. Okay. Whatever. “What are you talking about, discharging the car?”

“Think of a lightning strike. I took what I had in me, sent some of it into the car.”

“Then why weren’t we electrocuted?” Her brain was too muddled for this.

“The car.” He shrugged again. “I wanted to stop the car, and I did, but the car’s metal exterior protected the people inside . . . well, except for the guy driving. And the other guy. He got burned. Had his gun. He was touching metal.”

She narrowed her eyes down to slits, glaring at him. “I had a weapon on me, you ass. I dropped it like five seconds before you did . . . whatever . . .”

He grimaced. “Sorry. I was reacting on instinct, going with the best plan that seemed viable at the time. I knew you were there. And I . . . hell. Every one of us feels different, but those who don’t have a problem killing anything or anybody just have a different sort of vibe to their minds. I can’t read them—that’s not my thing—but you were in the car with a couple of people who would just as soon kill you as look at you. I didn’t figure you’d want to be dead so I took the chance.”

She closed her eyes. No. Dead wasn’t what she wanted. “They had information about the boy. Were tracking him. I needed to know who else was doing it—it would have been good to talk with them and figure out what in the hell was going on.”

“I can help you there.” He grabbed something from the backseat and dumped it in her lap. It was an iPad.

She turned it on and stared. “Now what?”

“Go to Safari. It’s the only page open. You’ll see.”

She blew out a breath and opened the browser, trying to think past the pain pounding in her head. Five seconds later, the pain was forgotten as a rush of adrenaline slammed into her.

Item.

Swallowing, she licked her lips.

“Please tell me this item isn’t what I’m thinking it is.”

“I’d be lying.”

She shot him a look, and this time, the jolt of pain that went screaming up her neck barely even slowed her. Absently, she reached up and rubbed her neck, although it didn’t do a damn thing to help the stiffness there. “It’s damn vague. It could be anything.”

“Scroll up to the top . . . read what the site is about. Who it’s for,” he said quietly. “Then decide if you think it’s nothing.”

She flicked her finger across the screen and found herself staring at the header. It was just an eye. The words were a jumbled mess. Shaking her head, she said, “I’m not getting it.”

“It’s a code.” His hands tightened on the wheel. “It’s called The Psychic Portal. An underground site for psychics . . . people like us. And they put up a want ad for the kid, Vaughnne. Anybody with the ability to pick up anything is going to know that isn’t an item being talked about. And