Lover Beware

me, Anna? Promise?”
    She left the bed, wandered to the bathroom, and splashed her face with cool water. She made herself some chamomile tea from the hot pot the hotel provided. Sitting back on the bed, Anna held the warm cup in her palms.
    Where the hell had her head been to have returned to New Orleans? She should have planted her butt in BSU where the agency profilers normally worked on their cases. Then again, she didn’t work her cases like most of the agency profilers. Because she wasn’t like the other profilers.
    She was quite certain she hadn’t been born with the gift—if one could be so ignorant as to call it that. It had begun after the tragic accident that had taken her mother’s life and left Anna near death—a head-on collision. A semi truck driven by a man who had fallen asleep behind the wheel. She had been twelve at the time, and the sudden flashes that would come at her with no warning throughout her adolescence had been shrugged off by physicians and psychologists as PTS, post-traumatic stress syndrome.
    By the time she was eighteen, they had tapered off. Or perhaps she had learned how to block them. They had come winging at her again for a short while after her father had been killed in the line of duty. Carl Travelli, detective for the New Orleans PD Homicide Division, had walked into an ambush that had taken him down in a hail of bullets.
    Perhaps she hadn’t even realized herself just how the gift had come to affect her life until she been a field agent for the FBI for a year. Her ability to process the crime scene and investigation had brought her to the attention of her superiors. Rising in the ranks had been an easy punt.
    She had never spoken of her sight to anyone on the force. Wouldn’t dare. Then the call had come from the BSU and she had found herself transferred to the Behavioral Science Unit despite her protests. She wasn’t a fact cruncher. No sitting behind a desk for hour upon hour poring over stat printouts and case files. She lived for the streets, the adrenaline punch of the search and confrontation with the perp, just like her father.
    But she had learned soon enough that the agency’s plans for her were not the norm. Far from it. She had found herself buried into a division that was classified even from the existing BSU.
    For six months before joining the Behavioral Science team she had worked with the classified division to better develop her psychic capabilities—but only with the understanding that she would be allowed to work her cases like any other field agent. Up close and personal. She really had no choice. The flashes of images that would come to her were not premonitions of upcoming helter-skelter, but the shocking visions of the crime as it happened—but to accomplish that it was necessary for her to place herself at the crime scene.
    She was still pretty damn green. Often questioned the images that would come blazing at her from nowhere—not just images, but energy. Fear. Anger. Confusion. Yet, little by little, she was becoming more confident with each case. Trusting her judgment. Capable of discerning the difference between the gut instincts and training of a top-notch agent and those insights that were born from her special talents.
    But what might have become a blessing to the agency had become an increasing burden to her. Too often that meant reliving the victim’s horrible death. More emotionally debilitating, and frightening, were the too frequent forays into the killer’s psyche. Often she experienced the crime through the killer’s eyes while at the crime scene or with the victim…if the victim survived, which wasn’t often.
    Emotional and physical burnout was tapping her on the shoulder. Why else would she continue to lie here in her lumpy hotel bed after getting Jerry’s call? The sooner she could get onto the crime scene the more quickly she could utilize her so-called gift to tap into the negative energy that remained following such an act of violence.
    God, she was kidding herself. It wasn’t exhaustion that kept her sheltered in her hotel room at the St. Louis. It was facing Jerry again. Her confrontation with him that afternoon had been far more unnerving than she had anticipated. Looking into his eyes again had slammed her like a fist.
    Six years and he still had a grip on her heart, and it hurt like hell. All the weeks, months, even years of second-guessing her decision to walk away had rushed over her like an avalanche the