Chapter 1
A lex Togan stayed at the back of the convenience store and watched as the three kids—quiet, almost to the point of too quiet—stood beside the tall, pale man, their supposed uncle, as he picked up a few things. The children didn’t ask for anything. They didn’t look at anything. They just stayed at his side. The man had to be at least six foot tall, maybe six-two, a little slim for his height, and was dressed in a worn T-shirt and jeans that were too big for him. He shot hard looks at the three kids, reminding them to behave. There was no air of happiness between them. On the contrary, an air of absolute terror was present instead. That’s what upset Alex.
Of course he’d seen it before, and unfortunately it was all too familiar. Hell, it’s why Alex was here in the first place. It broke his heart to see this behavior and the evident abuse—whether verbal, physical, psychological, sexual, or all of the above—but Alex wasn’t in a position to do anything about it yet. That would change very quickly at some point, but he didn’t have all the pieces in place yet.
Just as the man and the trio of kids stepped up to the cashier’s counter, another woman—whom Alex had already observed several times in the store—stepped up behind them as well.
Alex sent her a gentle energy, checking out her aura. When his energy was rebuffed, his eyebrows shot up. It took a lot for somebody to do that, particularly with his energy skills. He didn’t have a whole lot of the crazy talents that Terkel’s team had, but Alex certainly had enough to read good versus bad energy in people. As far as he was concerned, an energy scan could tell him everything.
Yet this rebuff was unusual. It was rare for someone to be strong enough to reject his intuitive feelers from their space the way this woman just ahead of him had just done. Of course it was her right. It was her space after all, but most people didn’t know when a gentle energy probe checked them out. Not her. This was a very deliberate act, which only meant one thing. She knew about energy.
What made it very interesting was the scenario he was in right now. He noted her smiling at the children, trying to engage with them. Something was going on here. He just didn’t know what.
As the woman waited in line, she asked the kids cheerfully, “How are you guys doing today?” The children turned and looked away. Her eyebrows shot up, as if a normal reaction.
However, Alex saw it more as a calculated response, as if she hadn’t expected anything else from them. That made him wonder too. He’d heard that somebody named Taryn had set up this op, so was this her? He had earlier studied the photo Terk provided, but it was several years old and hadn’t been updated in Terkel’s database.
Still, Alex got just a whiff of that same look, that same feel from the woman ahead of him. Chances were this was, indeed, the woman he was supposed to meet up with.
And that would, in many ways, explain her ability to rebuff his energy too. That she did some energy work didn’t exactly endear her to Alex though. He’d seen some pretty crazy energy workers in the past, and most were on the edge of not quite normal. Not quite normal didn’t necessarily mean a hard no in Alex’s world, but, if they were unstable, that was a different story. Of course his experience to date had been very different than Terkel’s, who had a vast amount of knowledge and years invested. As Terkel kept telling Alex, not every energy worker was the same.
Alex would give her a chance, just because of Terk.
Alex’s previous venue had been working with a lot of injured veterans, who’d come back from war, some with crazy PTSD shit that just wouldn’t go away. Some had been completely traumatized by what they’d been through. Alex would visit various VA centers, walking through a group of veterans, seeking anybody with gifts, who would need Alex’s particular brand of help.
Not that Alex could do a lot, unlike energy healer Terk and his team. However, Alex could certainly find out who was dealing with less of a physical and emotional trauma and more of a psychic trauma. Because, of course, that happened. Just not something that anybody ever freely talked about. Alex tried to help these guys who were otherwise all alone in dealing with the aftereffects of war. Yet Alex had reached a level of burnout.
With a sigh, Alex refocused on the present. Everything about this woman in the store seemed to be calculated, strong, and definitely not showing any weakness that he would have usually expected from a supposed newbie energy worker. However, if this was Taryn, all these observations would make sense.
While the man paid for his purchases, the children with him remained silent, just these silent little ghosts, not a chirp out of them, either good or bad. No request for candy or toys, nothing, making them seem all the stranger. They all trooped outside without one word. Alex grabbed something else before checking out, as he watched the woman approach the cashier now, quickly made her purchase, and slipped out the front door. Alex tossed his own selection and money on the counter, waved off the need for a receipt, and exited too.
The man and the children were getting into a truck. Alex casually walked around the back of it and got a look at the tag number. It was the same as what Alex had followed into this parking lot. He knew it would be, but you can never check these things too often. It seemed as if the more he learned about the criminal world, the more the criminal world had to show him, seemingly one step ahead of the authorities. A pretty sad turn of events really.
Alex didn’t give a crap about the man, except that he was an abuser and worse, an abuser of children. Any energy reader would find that to be true. So Alex’s only concern was for those children. Taryn had sent out the alarm that these three were in danger. From what Alex just witnessed, he agreed. They were in danger, but he wasn’t sure what the hell was going on exactly. How much danger were they in?
Alex had received Terkel’s initial case brief, but, as always, it was very incomplete. That was just another part of this energy work that Alex did, at least when he did it. The information was often hard to come by. People were shady, dealing with the underworld, trying hard to do whatever the hell they were trying to get away with. Thus, they weren’t too open about sharing information. Alex had to rely on cues, actions, and energy to get a better handle on them.
Regardless of his findings, or Terk’s, or Taryn’s, any authorities would want more concrete evidence. Alex shook his head.
As the truck drove off with the man and the children inside, Alex walked toward the car the woman was getting into. Just as she went to close the door, he stepped in the way. “Maybe we should travel together.”
She froze, her gaze narrowing. “And I would want that, why?”
“I could follow behind you,” he suggested, plain and simple, “but, with two of us following the same truck, it’ll look mighty suspicious.” Her breath sucked in on a gasp, and he nodded. “I’m Alex.” She frowned at him, her gaze assessing, sending a strong probe his way. “Hey, if you repelled my probe, don’t expect me to allow yours.”
Her eyebrows shot up, and she studied him for a moment. “What about your vehicle?” she asked, turning to look at the car beside her.
“We can come back for it later.”
“It probably won’t be here later,” she shared, with a laugh. “Or, if it is, it won’t have tires or maybe even an undercarriage at that point in time.”
He shrugged. “I’ll have the rental company pick it up then.” She seemed to consider letting him in her vehicle. He added, “They’re getting away from us.”
She glared at him. “Get in then.”
And, with that, he raced around to the passenger side and quickly took his seat. As he did so, he sent a text to the rental company, asking them to come pick up his rental.
“You won’t have wheels after this,” she repeated.
“I’ll just get another rental.”
“If they give you one. They don’t usually like it when you abandon their vehicles in the middle of nowhere, especially in a neighborhood like this.”
“I don’t know about that,” he countered, keeping his gaze on the road. “I do it quite often.”
She frowned, gave him a quick headshake, then tore down the road after the kids.
*
Taryn struggled to drive and to keep up without being too obvious that she was following the truck in front of her. She blamed it on the distraction caused by the very magnetic man at her side. She was shocked to feel this again, since the loss of her partner. Yet it highlighted a void in her life that she thought she had been handling well so far. With a shake of her head, she sighed and shared, “He told me that he was sending a couple people, but he didn’t tell me who.”
“That sounds like Terk,” Alex stated, with a clipped nod. “He tends to keep information close.”
She nodded. “Are you expecting some backup?”
“I can get help, if needed. Since Levi is based here in Texas, even if he can’t spare a man with boots on the ground for us, Levi can run his satellite for facial recognition, while his team does background checks and online surveillance. Plus, he’s got local contacts with the authorities and such, for whatever else we may need. So we may not see his man. As for Terk, he has people all over. He mentioned Riff was somewhere in the US, so maybe he’ll show up later.”
“Wow,” Taryn muttered. “How do you run an op like that? Sounds a little too fly by the seat of your pants for me.”
Alex laughed. “Maybe because most of us on Terk’s team aren’t the most obedient types anyway,” he admitted.
She gave a startled laugh. “Not exactly sure what that means.”
“Oh, I suspect you do,” he argued. “We have a tendency to be independent, and we’ve seen a lot of the world that isn’t that great and don’t just accept what we’re fed. We do this work voluntarily, not for free, but by choice,” he explained. “We do it for ourselves because few of us have the abilities and the support to do that, but we certainly don’t do it because we have to. It’s a calling,” he murmured. “Terk knows all that. So, other than providing what we need to get started and to address any immediate safety concerns, he opts not to spend time and resources on things we’ll largely disregard and go figure out for ourselves anyway.”
She shrugged. “Do you know the family in question?”
“No, I don’t.” He turned to her. “Do you?”
At that, she gave him a hard look but still answered the question. “Yes, I know Bruce, the maternal uncle to those children. He’s recuperating in England at Terk’s castle, after being rescued with his cellmate from a shitty Russian prison. I also knew Mary, Bruce’s sister, when we were all young. She’s the mother of the three children, but she died recently.”
Alex went quiet for a moment and then nodded. “That fits too. I’d heard that Terkel’s team had some guys the Russians had imprisoned but didn’t realize there was a connection to these children.”
“After their mother passed away not all that long ago, I heard that Jeff, the paternal uncle, considered the kids more of a commodity than anything else.” Alex stiffened. “Exactly,” she murmured.
“Terk filled me in,” Alex replied, “but it sounds even worse when you put it that way.”
“It sounds awful because it is awful,” she declared bitterly. “I just can’t understand the mindset of somebody who could do such a thing.”
Alex sighed. “The issue is not so much the mindset but the fact that no emotions are involved, no humanity. Abusers are totally selfish and don’t care one way or another about anybody else. Plus, I understand that the children’s father is out of the picture. So, in this stateside uncle’s eyes, these children have become a liability for Jeff, so he’s trying to get as much as he can for them.”
“Who does that?” Taryn cried out softly, even as she kept the truck in view up ahead.
“People who have no soul, people who just don’t care,” he muttered. “I’m sure all kinds of psychological reasons have helped make Jeff who he is today, but the bottom line is, if he cared at all, he would never consider such a thing.”
“Did you see him in that store?” she asked, shaking her head. “Cold, really cold, and the children were these quiet little…” She was bereft of words.
“Ghosts,” Alex suggested. “Little ghosts, scared of the future and terrified of the present, with absolutely no idea how to change it.”
Taryn bit her bottom lip. “How pathetic is that?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“Do we have any idea if Jeff had anything to do with his sister-in-law’s death?”
“I don’t know. Of course it crossed my mind, but I have no proof either way. What’s worse is that Bruce doesn’t even know yet that his sister is dead.”
“If Jeff killed his own sister-in-law, it would be a nice way to get those children away from her,” Alex murmured.
Taryn agreed. “True. I don’t know what this guy’s timeline looks like or how he’ll even go about it. How do you sell a kid anyway?”
“What I’m also wondering about is,” Alex added, “did Jeff have a hand in the disappearance of the children’s father too?”
“Wow,” Taryn muttered. “I didn’t even consider that. However, being blood brothers, maybe Jeff and the biological father to those children are more alike than I want to believe. From what I know, they were both unemployed and not actively looking for a job. Mary, the kids’ mother, was working two jobs and was the only breadwinner in that household of three adults and three children.” Taryn shook her head.
“Yep, those brothers are not exactly pillars of the community,” Alex agreed.
“If you get a hit on the missing father, let me know. We sure don’t want either of these brothers granted legal possession of these kids, much less illegal possession. Right now, though, I’m more focused on the sale of those children. I don’t have any dark-web experience I can call on to hunt that down, so I’m really hoping that Terkel can handle that part.”
“I’m sure he will, but what exactly is Jeff trying to sell the kids for ? And I don’t mean the money angle.” Alex hesitated. “Depending on the particular crime involved here, Terk would have multitudes of agencies all over the globe with dark-web resources that can be brought in to help.”
She looked at him. “Really?”
He nodded and then added, “You won’t like which one is most likely to be brought in though.”
She stared at him, feeling her stomach clench. “Child sex crimes?”
“That’ll be the big overarching one, yes. Also child slavery, child prostitution, child trafficking, and God-only-knows what else is in that sick bastard’s mind,” Alex replied. “And that’s why we’re here,… to confirm that doesn’t happen and that those kids end up somewhere safe.”
“I want Bruce to get his niece and nephews back.”
Alex nodded to that. “Is Bruce the guy who’s still sliding in and out of a coma at Terk’s castle?”
“Yes, though, according to Terkel’s healers, Bruce is doing much better.” When Alex didn’t reply, she just glared at him. “I have to believe that Bruce will come out of this okay,” she murmured.
“He’s a good friend of yours?”
“He is. I don’t really know too much about his sister in recent history, or even the children really, outside of the fact that they exist,” she admitted, with a shrug. “I went off the grid for a while, and now I feel bad about that. I was fostered by Bruce’s family. Bruce and I were best friends when we were kids, and I still consider him my best friend today. However, as we got older and went off and had lives of our own, we lost touch. I didn’t even know what had happened to Bruce until his girlfriend reached out to me,” she murmured. “And that’s another story in itself.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, somebody besides me desperately hopes Bruce survives this and comes back to her.”
“Bruce has a partner?”
“Not exactly. At one point he and Amara were partners, but, as it happens so many times in long-distance relationships, they drifted apart.” Taryn sighed. “Eventually it got to be too much, and they ended up separating, maybe over his going on that last mission to Russia. I’m not exactly sure of the details. That was a while ago because then he was captured by the Russian government and held as a prisoner under horrible circumstances. Amara didn’t know anything about it until recently, and neither did I. Now that Bruce has been rescued, Amara wants to see him, but he’s not quite capable of handling a visit just yet.”
“No, of course not,” Alex replied, “if ever. One of the hardest things to do is go off to war—or, in Bruce’s case, a potentially dangerous mission—knowing there’s no reason to come back.”
Startled, Taryn stared at him, before yanking her gaze back to the road. The truck up ahead just thudded along as if that asshole didn’t have a care in the world. Jeff was all about himself and what he could get out of those kids. “I’m not sure what you mean by no reason to come back . Bruce had his sister and his niece and nephews and his friends. Besides, Bruce and Amara made a mutual decision to split up.”
“Maybe, but I can tell you that the guys who have partners to come back to, the guys who have a reason to come home,… they do much better on military deployments, particularly in war zones, than those who are out there without that anchor, that sense of grounding as to the reason why they are doing this. It’s the same for military and post-military private work. A supportive partner makes a huge difference.”
That made a lot of common sense to her, and Taryn could understand it, even given the little understanding she had about the human condition. “I’m hoping Bruce will snap out of this. I don’t know what shape Amara is in, now finding out more about Bruce and his situation. Still, she’s a lovely lady.”
“And she didn’t want Bruce to go on this Russian op?”
“No, and,… I’m just guessing, I think she probably got a premonition of what would happen to him.”
“Ah, that’s a different story then,” Alex noted, with a nod. “Especially when you have someone who’s determined to go anyway, even when the partner has a strong reason for them not to.”
“And yet it shouldn’t be a deal-breaker,” Taryn noted. “There should be a certain amount of trust shared by the couple.”
“It depends on whether their relationship had matured to that point or not,” Alex pointed out. “You have to understand that most don’t ever reach that level of trust. People either don’t know how or choose not to go through the difficult work of building their relationship and knowing how their various skills play into it. So, they don’t trust their partner—or maybe don’t trust the partnership itself—and, if they don’t trust it themselves, well,… it’s hard to convince somebody with trust issues to have faith outside of themselves.”
“And yet Amara is certain that Bruce has skills. Of course, she does too, so wouldn’t that make navigating a relationship easier for those two, rather than for two regular people in life? Regardless, if she’s got energy-working skills, she’s got walls up. Since she’s my friend, I don’t pry. If she’s gifted, she’ll tell me when she’s ready.… Back when we were young, Bruce and I used to laugh about having superhuman gifts all the time, and I was pretty sure he did have energy-working skills. Of course I didn’t know what to call it back then. Yet he laughed about being superhuman and brushed it off as just a strongly developed sense of intuition.”
“What did his aura tell you?” Alex asked.
She frowned. “I don’t have abilities.”
Alex shook his head, smirking.
“No, really. I don’t have abilities.”
“Yet you can detect gifted children from afar?” Alex asked, raising one eyebrow.
She laughed. “It’s my one and only gift. You can imagine how confused I was as a child to have these images pop up in my brain, especially in the orphanage, not knowing what to make of them.”
Alex stared at her but nodded. “These gifts are forever changing and evolving. Even Terk gets surprised by someone with particular gifts that he’s never seen before.”
Taryn shrugged.
“Back to Bruce,” Alex began. “If Bruce has a strongly developed intuition, I wouldn’t knock it. I know a lot of guys who go by their gut feelings, and that’s kept them alive and safe many times over. The problem is when you’re forced by bosses or circumstances to go against that gut feeling. That’s when you end up in trouble because of it. That happens with energy-working gifts too. Ignoring them is not in anybody’s best interests.”
Taryn remained silent on the subject, still in denial. Just then the truck up ahead turned down a dirt road. She drove past, studying the driveway. “That’s not the address I have on file for the kids.”
“But that would have been when they lived with their parents, presumably.”
Taryn nodded. “That’s exactly when it was. I just assumed that Jeff had stayed in their house after his sister-in-law and his brother were gone.”
“Maybe it held memories that Jeff didn’t want to deal with. Or maybe it was easier to throw off any shackles of honor he may have had and a sense of what he shouldn’t be doing by cutting the ties to an absent brother and a dead sister-in-law that Jeff’s probably feeling ambivalent about. Living in a different place just allows Jeff to be more of an asshole now.”
Startled, Taryn frowned at Alex. “Do people do that?”
“Sure, it happens both ways, good and bad. Whenever an attachment to a house is holding you back, sometimes it’s important to let it go. However, you also must understand that, when you let it go, some people let go of that sense of righteousness, honor, and their ethics because that was also tied to the prior relationships within the home. If they were better with that person around, and acted with love and respect, then they are worse without them. Letting go of those bonds that kept them tied allows them to go back to the part of their personality that they used beforehand to get their own way, and they become those people again.”
“ Great ,” she muttered. “I can see Jeff doing that for sure. Still, how did unemployed Jeff buy or even rent another house? Surely he couldn’t sell the family home? Not legally anyway.”
“Terk’s looking into all that. However, knowing Jeff, he’s probably just squatting in an otherwise empty house.” Taryn’s mouth gaped open. Alex nodded and continued. “If that’s true, we could contact the true owner and have them evict Jeff and the kids, but we don’t want to do that to those children, which would only pressure Jeff to sell them faster and to any old Joe Blow off the street.”
Taryn had one hand to her heart at this point, stunned by fear into silence.
Alex added, “However, if no furniture is in the place, and they are sleeping on the floor—or the plumbing doesn’t work and no running water is in that house—that would not look good to the local social workers. If given notice of that, they would immediately step in and at least get the kids away from Jeff, which is good, but that lands all three youngsters in a children’s home, which I know you will veto. However, you can’t take them, as you are not related and don’t have temporary custody, not legally yet. And the local authorities, once activated, would immediately search for the biological father, which is not a good option either.”
“I don’t want those kids further traumatized, and I don’t like any of those choices,” Taryn exclaimed. “The missing father has already proven himself to be negligent and irresponsible, and I went that orphanage route myself, and I sure hate to do that to those kids.”
“I understand,” Alex replied. “Plus, Levi and Ice are working with national authorities, alongside some local ones, all watching movement on that ad.”
“And yet we don’t know anything yet, right?”
“Nope. We just wait until we hear more.” He then asked her, “How did you find the ad to begin with?” She hesitated to answer, and he had a crazy feeling. He raised one eyebrow and stated, “Please tell me that it’s more than psychic information.”
She flushed. “With Bruce in trouble, I searched for his sister, finding her dead. That sent me down this pathway in the first place,” she clarified. “Then I hired somebody to look into this further, confirming the kids and Mary’s husband were okay. Of course the PI confirmed the kids’ father was long gone, and the kids are with Uncle Jeff. My PI also found the actual posting of the upcoming auction. I have a copy of it on my phone. Then my investigator died from a bad accident ,” she muttered, “and I realized I couldn’t get other people involved, not people who weren’t pros, who wouldn’t understand the danger.”
“When we get a chance,” Alex suggested, “you need to show me that posting.”
She immediately pulled onto the shoulder of the road and grabbed her phone, brought up the screenshot she’d taken, and handed her cell to him.
He read the ad and whistled. “Wow, Jeff really is an asshole, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, my PI somehow knew this was Jeff’s ad, but I questioned it. Then someone posted pictures of the kids.” She showed Alex three other screenshots of the same three children they had just seen at the convenience store.
“Crap. In the ad, the price point is blurred, but the message is clear. Open usage ,” he repeated in anger.
Taryn asked, “What the hell does that even mean?”
“It means,… Jeff doesn’t give a crap,” Alex stated, his tone harsh. “Whether they’re sold as black-market adoptions or for human trafficking, the sex trade, pornography, whatever , Jeff is okay with all that. Terk’s people are already tracing that ad back to the person who placed it, which I would bet will be asshole Jeff.”
She shook her head, scrunching up her face to hold back the tears. “To think of it happening at all is absolutely brutal,” she muttered, “but to know that it’s happening to Bruce’s niece and nephews while he’s not here to do anything about it, or to even be told about it, is crucifying me.”
She was startled when Alex gently squeezed her arm. “You and I both know that negative energy will cripple you, if you don’t keep it in check.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah, you’re right about that, but you and I both know what can happen when these kids disappear. They get lost out there in the big wide underbelly of the world,” she noted, waving her hand around. “It will be almost impossible to find them.”
“So, who did you contact, and what have you done about this so far?”
She sighed. “I contacted Terkel.”
He frowned at her. “Just Terk? Why not the police?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t call the police yet,… and I can’t really explain why.” He stared at her, and she felt the heat of her face flushing. “Look. I don’t have anything against the police, other than their disdain for any woo-woo stuff,” she added. “I did go to another couple I know, and I talked to them. Through them,… they contacted Terkel for me.”
“Levi and Ice,” Alex stated.
Taryn smiled and nodded. “Yes, and I’m hoping they were the right people.”
Alex stared out in the distance and nodded slowly. “They are definitely the right people. Not only do they take on cases like this all the time, but they have a lot of connections to law enforcement, the good ones. So that’s probably the best thing you could have done. Plus, Levi and Ice know which cops are honest and which are dirty.” He settled back and smiled. “Okay, so all that should at least ease your mind,” he said, trying to make her comfortable. “Did they come up with a plan yet?”
“No, they’re still gathering info, working on tracking down Jeff’s history and connections, plus bank accounts, looking to see if there’s been any recent movement or transactions. They’ve got watches on airports, but I think their immediate concern is that Jeff might take the kids across the border into Mexico, and they would just disappear.”
“Being in Texas, with the border not far away, I suppose that’s possible too,” Alex agreed thoughtfully. “Although unfortunately enough abuse is certainly going on in the USA— and right here in Texas alone—that Jeff doesn’t have to drive to another country.”
“I know.” She winced, getting back on the road. “I just want to keep an eye on Jeff and these precious children, until I know what the next step is. We must save those kids. So, if we don’t get that plan going soon, I’ll go in and snatch the kids myself.”