The Missing

pretty country church with a white picket fence, flowers, and stained glass windows.

    But the house—

    “Shit.” Taige swallowed the bile churning up through her belly. The house was new. Over the past ten years, the church had grown, more and more members joining, and five years ago, those members had built the rectory. Five years old. Most houses that new didn’t have much psychic energy inside them, especially not a house where only one person lived.

    But this house was screaming with it. Chilled to the bone, she crossed her arms over her chest and started toward the neat little brick house. She could sense Leon’s energy, an echo of his personality. All people left it behind, almost like a scent. When she’d lived with her uncle, she had kept her shields up so that she couldn’t pick up anything random from him. It had been an effort to avoid feeling his hatred of her and maybe, because she had always blocked him off, she’d missed the clues.

    He’d been killing for a long time.

    Those little memory flashes she’d picked up earlier from the paramedic told the story in vivid detail. She saw dozens and dozens of faces, all of them differing in physical appearance and age. There were hairstyles that had to date back to the seventies, girls wearing the big hair and stirrup pants of the eighties, blue eye shadow almost up to the eyebrow. A boy no more than ten wearing the red fake leather jacket made popular by Michael Jackson.

    So many of them—rage churned inside her like bile, boiling up her throat, threatening to spill out onto everything around her, hot, potent, and deadly. She swallowed against it, struggled to breathe past the nausea. It wasn’t time yet. She couldn’t break down yet, couldn’t get sick, couldn’t scream in denial or let herself wallow in the storm of guilt that waited.

    Not yet.

    Because there was another child. When Leon had seen the paramedic earlier, he hadn’t just thought of the man’s sister, he’d also thought of another child. Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, her body just beginning to show signs of womanhood. A demon child with a demon gift, and the time to purify the child was drawing near.

    “Please, God.” Taige closed her eyes and prayed. “Don’t let me be too late.”

    On the heels of that soft prayer came a rush of energy. Adrenaline-induced, she knew, and once it faded, she was going to crash, and crash hard. But for now, it gave her the strength she needed to pull the Glock 9 mm from the holster at her side and hold it steady as she crossed to the house.

    “I thought you said he wasn’t here,” Cullen said, his voice neutral. Neutral, but it couldn’t hide the rage blistering through him.

    “He’s not,” she said quietly. But she’d been wrong before.

    Terribly wrong. Bitter, futile rage burned inside her as she thought back to how many times she’d told Rose that Leon wasn’t dangerous to anybody other than Taige. She couldn’t have imagined him hurting somebody other than her, not in a thousand years. And she had been so very wrong.

    Walking to the house, Cullen at her side, she took a few seconds to bolster her shields. Bad, bad things had happened inside that house, and it had left a nasty, stinking cloud of death hovering, all but coloring the air. If she walked into that unprepared, she’d never emerge with her sanity intact.

    “So, if you know he’s not here, you got a plan for getting inside? Or are we even going inside?” Cullen asked. His voice was calm, almost level, but it didn’t quite mask the fury she sensed inside him.

    “Oh, we’re going inside.” The adrenaline crashing through her still had her shaking minutely. “You feel like trying to break a door down? I’ve got some lock picks in the car, but I’m too shaky to use them.” She held up her hand and stared at it, watching the fine tremors.

    “You can’t hocus-pocus it open?”

    Taige shook her head. “No. Any telekinetic gift I have is limited to living things. I can’t do jack with something inanimate.” A door lock was about as inanimate as it got.

    “In that case, I’d love to break the door down.” He had a mean smile on his lips, and she suspected he’d like to break all sorts of things, a door being fairly far down on the list. But considering the real target of his rage wasn’t handy, he’d make do with the door. For now.

    A shiver raced through her on the tail end of that thought.

    Cullen was going to kill Leon.

    She understood