Chapter 2
The bus wove through the packed lanes, brakes stuttering, engines idling too long between stops.
Three cars back, the sedan hadn’t moved.
His aura still pressed on her senses. It was focused and impossible to confuse with the usual mental scatter.
Audrey had always seen auras as fields of color and pressure surrounding minds, each one shaped by emotion or will.
Most people gave off messy trains of thought and feelings, a constant background hum she could tune out.
But every so often, someone’s presence sharpened into something purposeful, cutting through the noise like a signal through static.
What she felt now was power organized and directed, impossible to ignore. If he was after her, every second she stayed visible narrowed her options. The sense of being hunted settled in her chest, making her all too aware that danger was already closing in around her.
Audrey swayed, nausea twisting in her gut. The city’s minds layered until it seemed everyone faced her. Her mother’s stern, familiar voice rose in her head.
First, build a wall. Brick by brick. Around your mind.
She squeezed her eyes shut, picturing bricks locking in place.
In prison, drugs had built a wall, dulling the noise and others’ minds.
Pills had blurred everything into manageable gray, leaving nothing but silence and slow hours.
She remembered the hiss of fluorescent lights above her bunk, counting stains on the cinderblock ceiling when the world got too loud in her own head.
But here, outside the penitentiary, her defenses collapsed at a touch. Thoughts poured through the cracks like floodwater. She pressed her fingers to her nose, focusing on breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.
The bus jolted forward a few feet, then stopped again. Feeling trapped, Audrey pushed her senses outward and felt for him. Behind them, the sedan was there, still following. When she focused on the driver, his head was muted—unnaturally so. He didn’t honk or shift lanes. Instead, he just waited.
Up ahead, brake lights flared in a red chain.
Audrey leaned just enough to see past the aisle.
Two city cruisers blocked the intersection.
No sirens, no urgency. The officers stood outside their cars, peering into windows and talking to drivers.
It looked routine, unless you looked closer.
Beneath the calm, their minds flurried with anxiety.
She hit her fist against her seat. This mess was because of her. Everyone wanted to see the monster. Other passengers lifted their phones and turned their screens at careful angles. Audrey hunched deeper into her sister’s jacket.
If the police boarded the bus, if a reporter saw her, if someone shouted her name, it would become another spectacle. Another story about her instability.
You always did draw attention, the killer murmured, as if summoned by her worried train of thought. I’ve been counting on that.
Get out of my head.
Let’s see what you can do while we’re waiting.
Across the aisle, the woman who had pulled the shank earlier lifted her head. This time, her eyes were entirely devoid of any rage. In fact, they were nearly vacant.
Audrey felt the intent before the woman moved. She lunged, but not for Audrey’s money; this time, she went for the throat.
With a single focused thought, Audrey plunged into the woman’s mind. She dove harder, deeper—almost violently—forcing her presence in with a decisive mental thrust. Psychic pressure pulsed between them, more intense than ever before.
Stop.
The woman froze mid-lunge, her body stiff, hand inches from Audrey’s throat. Audrey’s eyes darted from the hand to the frozen woman. Breathing hard, she struggled to undo it as panic spiked.
Move. Please move.
After several seconds, the woman blinked, swayed, and dropped her arm. A shaky breath escaped Audrey.
“She did something,” a former inmate whispered. Throwing a look over her shoulder, Audrey saw another passenger recording her with a phone. Audrey grabbed the device and crushed it beneath her boot.
“You want this to be your face next time?” she snarled. The woman flinched and leaned back, arms crossed and eyes down.
Good.
Shifting in her seat, she decided to look out the window another time. But before she could, a distinct sensation rose through the chaos.
The aura was cold and singular, sharp as glass. That strange lilting language slithered beneath the noise. It wasn’t words she understood, but something older, structured, forceful.
Damn it. He was still here.
Then she felt it—a psychic connection snapping into place. It wasn’t a stray emotion, and not a surface thought. It resonated deep and physical, as if an invisible line had been drawn between their minds.
Their auras caught, locked together in a way she had never experienced before.
Invisible threads twisted between them, binding them further.
The only thing she’d ever felt like it had been with Cary.
But her sister’s telepathic powers had been softer and safer.
This was heavier and more intrusive. Audrey even felt his pulse pounding within her.
Fear spiked, but the psychic grip only pressed closer, making her breathing thin with panic.
In this strange moment on a crowded, overfull bus, she acknowledged a truth she’d ignored up until now.
The killer wasn’t just strong; he was familiar. Beneath the suffocating intimacy came the worst realization of all: he felt like her—the same kind of power, just shaped differently. Audrey recoiled inside herself, terrified not just of what he could do, but of what that familiarity might mean.
He killed your family, she thought, appalled.
But there was no time to dwell on such disturbing thoughts.
His aura pressed further. It probed at her consciousness.
He tested for a way in, tried to go deeper into the parts she kept buried.
He crawled through the unseen corridors of her mind, exposing every secret, weighing her with an intimacy that felt like suffocation rather than comfort.
Questions clawed at her: what did he want, what could he see, could he change her in some way?
Her muscles seized, every nerve rigid under an icy psychic grip.
Only Cary had managed such an invasion, and with her, it was always a delicate whisper.
This was a brute force intrusion, a violation that lit every instinct on fire.
Audrey shoved back with everything she had, psychic energy flaring, her aura expanding and colliding with his as she resisted.
A growl reverberated through her skull, foreign and feral and threaded with surprise. He hadn’t expected her to push back, and violence radiated from him.
Then—impact.
He threw her out—abruptly, ruthlessly. The psychic connection severed with a yank, so fierce it felt like a hot wire snapping free inside her head. Pain erupted behind her eyes, then her skull hit the seat in front of her. Numb and dazed, she slumped backward.
With the connection gone, the noise returned in a rush. It was loud, merciless, and she couldn’t escape. Her breath tore from her throat.
Every minute in this steel-moving cage was a liability.
They finally slowed near a vast downtown station of gleaming metal and glass. Skyscrapers blotted out the gray sky. People swarmed below while trains roared. Audrey stood on shaking legs. She needed off the bus—not because of the police or the cameras, but because she was being maneuvered.
Moving with the line of passengers toward the exit, sweat dampened the back of her neck. Her shield was ragged, but she kept working at it, forcing the noise down, layer by layer.
The bus was almost empty by the time she stumbled off.
Brisk air slapped her face. Noise—announcements, footsteps, engines, squeaks—assaulted her. Tense, Audrey reached out, searching for that impossible frequency.
But she found nothing. Just ordinary people living ordinary lives.
He was gone.
Frustration scorched through her limbs.
The bus freeze replayed in her mind. The woman had stopped because Audrey had told her to. If she could do it on purpose again, then maybe she wasn’t losing her sanity.
She studied the crowd for someone normal, someone safe.
A man near the ticket kiosk argued with a clerk, irritation buzzing off him in bright, harmless bursts. His mind hung open in the careless way most people’s did. Audrey knew right away that he was late for work and was blaming everyone else.
Narrowing her focus, she pushed, intentionally repeating what she’d just done on the bus.
Stop.
The man froze mid-sentence, mouth parted, fingers suspended in the air. Power slid into place inside her. It felt subtle and nothing like the chaotic noise she usually fought. Fear slithered inside her, too, because this wasn’t just listening to a mind anymore.
It was controlling a mind.
His thoughts fluttered in mounting confusion beneath her grip. With awful clarity, Audrey understood how easy it would be to redirect them. She could make him apologize, leave, or even kneel.
The realization opened inside her like a dark flower.
He is mine.
There was a sinister appeal to bending the world rather than bowing to it. She liked it and held the man there a few seconds longer than she should have. The power felt natural, which frightened her more than the killer had.
What am I doing?
Audrey released him at once, and the connection snapped.
The man jolted and finished his sentence weakly, blinking as if he’d lost his place in his own mind. Then he kept arguing, unaware that several seconds of his life had belonged to someone else.
No one had noticed.
Audrey stepped back against a steel column, pulse hammering.
If she could hold someone for five seconds, could she do it for longer?
The thought made her uneasy enough to lock it away at once. She took a deep breath. She hadn’t lost control. She’d chosen to stop.
The distinction unsettled her more than anything.
None of it changed what mattered most: Alex was still missing, and the killer was still steering her toward a direction of his choosing.
Forcing her aura inward, she sealed the cracks of this madness before temptation widened them.
She would not become a monster.
And yet, as she stepped back into the moving crowd, the truth followed her.
The freeze on the bus had been survival, while this?
It had been a rehearsal. Deep down, this feeling had been growing for a while.
Today, it was just louder, as if the monster inside her had stopped pretending it was human.
People stared at her now, their phones rising.
Someone snapped a picture, then another, while whispers spread as the crowd slowed around her.
Audrey’s heart kicked into a nervous rhythm.
All she wanted was to disappear, to blend back into obscurity before anyone could attach her face to a headline or a file.
She needed to escape, to reclaim the anonymity that felt more vital than air.
A flash of red and blue outside caught her eye.
Two officers climbed from a patrol car. One pointed toward the station while the other lifted a radio.
A hand closed around her wrist. Before she could fight, a second, stronger arm pulled her out of the crowd by the shoulder and into a dark alley.
“You need to stay out of sight,” a man whispered, dragging her deeper into the shadows.
He stood at least a head taller than her with a black hoodie obscuring most of his bearded face.
His posture was controlled and his movements purposeful.
But she caught the color of his eyes—a brutal, startling cerulean.
They lingered on hers, searching, then he hesitated, jaw flexing as if weighing a decision.
There was something urgent and uncanny in the way he kept glancing over his shoulder, his focus split between the crowd and Audrey, as if her being here had changed something.
Audrey pulled up her own hood and followed him, mostly because she didn’t have a better option.
He was a stranger, but the police behind her and the killer in her head made him the least dangerous option.
She needed to get out of here. He led her to a quieter side street and pointed toward North Seventh Avenue, only a few paces away.
“Go,” he said.
She didn’t need to be told twice.
Behind her, a distant siren wailed through the city grid, and out of the alley’s shadow came the prickling certainty that someone else was already watching—someone more dangerous than the police or the man in the hoodie.
Audrey sank deeper into her hood and slipped into the streaming crowd, wondering who would find her first.