Damon's Deal (Terkel's Team Book 1) Read online

  Books in This Series:

  Damon’s Deal, Book 1

  Wade’s War, Book 2

  Gage’s Goal, Book 3

  Calum’s Contact, Book 4

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  About This Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  About Wade’s War

  Excerpt from Magnus: Shadow Recon

  Author’s Note

  Complimentary Download

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  About This Book

  Welcome to a brand-new series from USA Today best-selling author Dale Mayer, where dark-ops SEALs have special senses and skills, needed to solve intrigue, betrayal, and … murder. A series with all the elements you’ve come to love, plus so much more, … including psychics!

  With the bulk of his team down, Terk tries to establish a new base, while struggling to heal the team through the special connection each has. Damon is concerned about finding Tasha, one of their admins, and keeping her safe. But, without any secure place to take her, Damon’s making do with the little they have—whether she’s happy about his plan or not.

  Tasha, barely surviving an assassination attempt, is not sure who to trust. When Damon comes to check on her, she can only hope her instincts and her heart are right about him. This man meant everything to her for the years they’d worked together, but he’d always kept her at arm’s reach. Now to learn that he and Terk are the only fully cognizant members of her old team, she wants to help but doesn’t want to risk her life … again.

  Still struggling with their new reality, both Tasha and Damon need to find out who did this to them. It’s the only way to get their lives back—and to have a future together …

  Sign up to be notified of all Dale’s releases here!

  Chapter 1

  Ice poured herself a coffee and sat down at the compound’s massive dining room table with the cup. When her phone rang, she smiled at the number displayed. “Hey, Terk. How’re you doing?” She put the call on Speakerphone.

  “I’m okay,” Terkel replied, his voice distracted and tight. “Barely.”

  “Terk?” Merk called from across the table. He got up and walked closer and sat across from Levi. “You don’t sound too good, brother. What’s up?”

  “I’m fine.” Terk paused. “Or I will be. Right now, things have blown to shit.”

  “As in literally?” Merk asked.

  “The entire group, … they’re all gone. I had a solid team—seven like me—and they’re all gone.”

  “Dead?” Ice’s jaw dropped in shock.

  Several others stood to join them, gathered around Ice’s phone. Levi stepped forward, his hand on Ice’s shoulder. “Terk? Are they all dead?”

  “No.” Terk took a deep breath. “I’m not making sense. I’m sorry.”

  “Take it easy.” Ice’s voice remained calm and reassuring. “What do you mean, they’re all gone?”

  “All their abilities are gone,” he stated. “Something’s happened to them. Somebody has deliberately removed whatever supersenses they could utilize—or what we have been utilizing for the last ten years for the government.” His tone was bitter. “When the US gov recently closed us down, they promised that our black ops department would never rise again, but I didn’t expect them to attack us personally.”

  “What are you talking about?” Merk asked in alarm, standing up now to stare at Ice’s phone. “Are you in danger?”

  “Maybe? I don’t know,” Terk replied. “I need to find out exactly what the hell’s going on.”

  “What can we do to help?” Ice asked.

  Terk gave a broken laugh. “That’s not why I’m calling. Well, it is, but it isn’t.”

  Ice looked at Merk, who frowned as he shook his head. Ice knew he and the others had heard Terk’s stressed-out tone and the completely confusing bits and pieces coming from his mouth. Ice spoke next. “Terk, you’re not making sense again. Take a breath and explain. Please. You’re scaring me.”

  Terk took a long slow deep breath. “Tell Stone to open the gate,” he said. “She’s out there.”

  “Who’s out there?” Levi asked, looked outside, and shrugged.

  “She’s coming up the road now. You have to let her in.”

  “Who? Why?” Ice asked.

  “Because … she’s harnessed with C-4.”

  “Jesus.” Levi bolted to display the camera feeds on the big screen in the dining room. “Is it live?”

  “It is, and she’s been sent to you.”

  “Well, that’s an interesting move,” Ice noted, her voice sharp, activating her comm to connect to Stone in the control room. “Who’s after us?”

  “I think it’s rebels within the Iranian government. But it could be our own government. I don’t know anymore,” Terk snapped. “I also don’t know how they got her so close to you. Or how they pinned your connection to me,” he added. “I’ve been very careful.”

  “We can look after ourselves,” Ice replied immediately. “But who is this woman to you?”

  “She’s pregnant,” he explained, “so that adds to the intensity here.”

  “Understood. So who is the father? Is he connected somehow?”

  There was silence on the other end.

  Merk said, “Terk, talk to us.”

  “She’s carrying my baby,” Terk replied, his voice heavy.

  Merk, his expression grim, looked at Ice, her face mirroring his shock. Merk asked, “How do you know her, Terk?”

  “Brother, you don’t understand,” Terk stated. “I’ve never met this woman before in my life.” And, with that, the phone went dead.

  Chapter 2

  Damon Wilcox stared as Terkel slowly lowered his phone, his attention still on the screen in front of him. That was a hard conversation. Damon could only imagine the reaction on the other end of that phone right now. “What do you think they’ll do?”

  “I think”—Terkel raised his gaze to look at Damon—“No, I know that they’ll let her in.”

  “It’s a risk for all of them,” he reminded his old friend.

  Terkel nodded. “Yes, it is, but I have faith in who they are as people. That woman didn’t deserve what those assholes did to her.”

  “We don’t even have a name, do we?”

  “Celia,” he noted quietly. “That’s all I know.”

  Damon nodded slowly. “And while they are looking after her”—he watched as Terk started texting on his phone again—“where do you want us to start?”

  Terk looked at him, the briefest of smiles on his face. “You need to focus on regaining your abilities. Of everybody, you’re the one who appears to have most of them. Or at least didn’t lose them all.”

  “No.” Damon frowned at that and stared off in the distance. “I can feel something.” He paused. “I don’t know what it is—maybe a block, maybe a burn or a scar through my sight or something. I don’t know. But I can sense something foreign.”

  “Foreign? As in something inside you?” Terk asked sharply.

  Damon sighed. “I can’t explain it.” He looked at his friend curiously. “And you don’t have any disruption in your talents?”

  “No, but I was off-line, doing some … maintenance,” he noted, for lack of a better word. “That’s when I noticed you guys were all slowly going down.”

  “Yet we weren’t even all in the same place when this happened,” Damon reminded Terk. “We were spread out all over town, like always when we’re busy.”

  “I know,” Terk agreed. “That’s why I’ve always kept you guys on my radar, on a mental map of sorts.”

  Damon nodded. “I get it. I know all about that system. We’ve used a similar one to keep track of people, while they are out on jobs.”

  “Exactly, and it’s a mental system, so, therefore, when I sense something happening,” he explained, “I shut down my own senses.”

  At that, Damon’s gaze widened.

  Terk nodded. “I know. Don’t think I didn’t feel like I was betraying you. Believe me when I say, it wasn’t an easy decision, but I knew I had no choice.”

  Damon immediately shook his head. “Hell no,” he argued. “Self-preservation is always at the top of all our priority lists. What I was reacting to was the fact that you could sense it happening. That was huge.”

  “Only if I could have sensed it enough ahead of time to do something useful. And I really think it was due to the disconnection that I noticed.”

  Damon got up and paced the small room, empty except for the table and the electronics. It was a warehouse storage compound. In their warehouse, they had one fully concrete room to themselves. Nobody else in this area knew who they were or what they were doing. But the concrete had been important for their own abilities, a place where they might actually relax. It should be steel, six inches of thick steel and concrete. But they didn’t have that resource available to them anymore.

  They used to be part of a special black ops team, working for the US government. The program was being disbanded, and, on the last day,
a lovely coincidence was that everyone, not Terk, but the seven other men on the team started to experience agonizing pain and a complete wipe of their senses. Or at least Damon assumed it was complete. From what Terk had said, it sounded like it was, as Damon knew two of the men were in comas, two of the men were coming back out of a similar state, and two were … presumed lost on the ethers. Terk, as the boss himself, was in the best shape of all. Wade was, in a way, fighting hard to heal and to regain some consciousness, like Damon had been not too long ago. “I’m not sure why I didn’t get hit as hard as the others,” Damon murmured. “My instinctive thought was because I wasn’t as much of a danger.”

  Terk snorted. “You guys are all dangerous to anybody who knows what we can do.”

  “And yet we aren’t terribly powerful.”

  “We’re more powerful as a team,” Terk acknowledged quietly. “But still individually, you each have specific talents.”

  “But individually, we all have the ability to connect or see or feel or sense various things at a very long distance. And most of our work has been done on government jobs.” Damon shook his head. “I still can’t believe our government disbanded our group.”

  Terk stiffened, turned, looked at his friend. “I have to suspect that, due to the timing, they’re the ones behind this.”

  Damon slowly nodded. “I wondered if you would come to the same conclusion as I did.”

  “Absolutely,” Terk snapped. “But it’s only guesswork at the moment. A gut feeling. We need to investigate. Plus, the department wouldn’t have done this themselves. They’d have contracted the job out. But who and how?”

  “Whatever they did, it’s continuing to affect the team.” Damon studied his friend, then decided to ask the question in the back of his mind. “So you have an ability to filter into each and every one of the team’s psyches?”

  “Sometimes to transmit messages, sometimes just to check up on their health,” Terk admitted. “I can do a bit more, but it’s limited.”

  “I’ve always known that to some degree,” Damon admitted. “We’ve discussed it slightly but never in detail.”

  “And that was partly on purpose,” Terk stated, “because it seemed like I was pushing the line by getting into their heads at all.”

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t think anybody hated you for it, and I did speak with a couple of them because they could sense when you put in the messages that you were also taking a look around. And your telepathic abilities have always been phenomenal.”

  “That was a two-second mental check, like, ‘Hey, on a scale of one to ten, how is this guy doing?’ And then getting a response and getting out.” Terk smiled.

  “Even in mine?” Damon asked, a sharp look at his friend.

  “Even yours,” Terk agreed with a nod. “We are part of a team, and keeping the team safe, healthy, and functioning is always my goal.”

  “And, because we understood that, it was fine,” he agreed. “Can you communicate with any of them now?”

  “Wade, yes, but he is not capable of responding, yet I sense brain activity. As for the others, I know they’re there, but I’m not getting even that.”

  “Are you getting any response?”

  “Like a life-support system,” Terk noted. “Other than that, not a whole lot.”

  “Well, that’s a start. We have to make sure that we keep them safe.” Damon frowned. “But that kind of security may need to be physical,” Damon said. “Keeping them safe on the energy level is a different matter, not to mention we don’t know what happened in the first place. We have to stop a second attack.”

  “And that’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Terk confirmed quietly. “I know it’s like closing the barn door after the fox got in,” he admitted, “but I’ve got a psychic guard around each of the team members. Less around you because you are recovering.”

  “And Wade?”

  “On a scale of one to ten, I’d say his health is at a five, so 50 percent. If I can even get that inched up to 52 to 53 percent, he’s heading in the right direction. The problem is, I can’t maintain this level of energy around everybody alone.”

  “And I can’t help you and be on the hunt,” Damon replied.

  “I know, so somehow we have to sort our priorities.”

  “No.” Damon shook his head. “Somehow we have to get help.”

  At that, Terk raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know who you’re expecting to come help us. We don’t have any government-sanctioned assistance anymore, and very few can help at this level.”

  “I know, and that just sucks too because we need resources.”

  “Money is not an issue,” he reminded him. “We have plenty of that.”

  “And that’s a damn good thing,” Damon noted, “because we need it all. Particularly with this kind of a security issue.”

  “No, I hear you,” he agreed. “I’m just not exactly sure where to turn.”

  Damon hesitated for a moment. “What about your brother?”

  Terk looked at Damon sharply, then frowned. “If I asked, he would come,” but his reluctance was very telling.

  “You don’t want to put him in danger, do you?”

  “Of course not,” he admitted. “My brother and I have always been close, but, more than that, not many people out there understand or even accept me for who and what I am, like my brother does.”

  “But you’re twins too, right?”

  “We are.” He nodded. “With one very important difference.”

  “He has no abilities?”

  “None. We didn’t even realize I did, until I hit about nine or ten.”

  “Huh. What if he has abilities now?” Damon asked. “And, if he does, and they’re latent, that’s an entirely different issue.”

  “Very latent. He’s never been tested and has never shown any interest in being tested.”

  “Yet, as long as he’s been supportive of you, maybe we can utilize that.”

  “And again, it would not be my choice. Anybody who even has any inkling of what we’re doing still doesn’t understand the kind of predators that we’re dealing with. How could anyone? Although my brother would more than most.”

  “Do you think somebody else can do what we do?” Damon asked instantly.

  “We took care of that—right? In Iran? But, if there was one group, maybe there are others.”

  “I’m not sure.” Damon slowly reached up to rub his temples.

  “And because my energy is split, trying to individually funnel a guard around our team, I don’t have the power I need to defend you and me properly.”

  “And that is not acceptable,” Damon snapped. “I get we have to save everybody, but you are the strongest of us all. We must have you at the forefront of every investigation in order to make it all work.”

  “Well, that’s the theory,” Terk agreed, “but each and every one of us will have to pull a little bit more, if we can.”

  “You know we might need to bring in Wade, regardless of whether he’s fully healed or not.”

  “And that could kill him,” Terk replied instantly.

  “It might.” Damon hesitated. “Look. I know. I don’t want to do it either, but, if he can do anything, even if just run basic comms for us, so that we can get out and start hunting, then he needs to.” He could see that Terk was torn. “Maybe think about it from his perspective. Right now you’re saying he’s completely useless, even though so many other people out there would say that, even without his extra abilities, he is a hell of a better man than most.”

  “He absolutely is,” Terk noted quietly. “But I also know that the more he drains his energy, the less he’ll utilize to help us, and, with his energy drained, it will stop his healing. Not to mention he’s slowly waking, but he’s not conscious. And yanking him out of that state could kill him.”

  “Dammit,” Damon muttered because Terk was correct. But when did this stop and start being something that they could utilize in a different way? “We have to do something,” he replied. “We’re sitting ducks right now.”

  “We’ve already been taken down,” he stated. “What we have to do is keep anybody from finding out that we may not recover from this.” And then he stopped and whispered, “Not all of us, but maybe a few of us.”

  “Do you really think not everybody will recover?”