Calum’s Contact Page 6
He smiled. “Because it is right, never doubt that.”
And, with that, she laughed. “Maybe,” and then she froze. “Uh-oh. I bet you’ve got another heat signature. Cal’s hearing voices.”
“We have two more approaching the house,” Tasha confirmed, “but he shouldn’t hear those voices.”
Mariana frowned. “Well, he is. I’m not exactly sure if that’s new or just different, but he is definitely hearing voices.”
“Okay, people, on alert right now,” Terk said. “We need faces. We need recognition. We need IDs. And we need to know who the hell is after Calum. And why they chose to kidnap Mariana.”
“Well, the more she talks, the more we learn about how unique she is,” Tasha noted. “Chances are she was targeted to draw him out, sure, but maybe also because of her own skills.”
“It’s possible,” Terk agreed, “but somebody would have to know about them first.” He looked at Mariana, who shrugged and shook her head.
“Nope, I can’t see that happening. My family were carnival nuts, and they ran a fortune-telling booth for a long time,” she shared, “but I never ever worked it. It went against everything that I wanted in this world.”
“So that is highly doubtful then. The trouble is, if anybody finds out now,” Terk warned, “you will be targeted.”
She stared at him in surprise and then slowly realized what he meant. “Fine, my lips are sealed.”
Terk nodded. “Not for too long, I hope. We need to know if you see anything else.”
“Definitely something is there,” she said. “I just don’t know whether it’s of any value or not.” And, with that, closing her eyes, she turned her attention to Calum. “He’s hidden now.” And then a weird slam came in her head. She opened her eyes, stared at everyone around her, in shock. “I think he just shut a door on me.” She spun to look at Terk.
“Yeah, he would.” He nodded. “That makes total sense, especially under times of stress like that. He can’t afford to not be 100 percent focused. Any distraction right now could kill him.”
“Got it.” She frowned. “In that case I’ll just deal with Little Calum and try to forget what Cal’s doing.”
“That would be good,” Terk agreed. “But first, tell me this. When you told me that you used to do this as a kid, what exactly did you mean?”
“I used to kind of—I don’t know—jump into people’s thoughts, get what they were thinking somehow. Different than when you were sending me information after Cal got hurt because that deliberately came from you to me. It’s more like overhearing what was happening with Merk. Then I forgot about it because it was just a childhood game, until I met Cal. We had some sort of a connection, part of that whole ‘meant to be together’ thing that couples experience, but, like I said, ever since he got injured, it’s been so much clearer and stronger between us.”
“Do you think he knows?” Terk asked her.
“I don’t know.” She frowned. “If he doesn’t know, it’s because he’s not looking at it.”
“Maybe he’s hearing voices or thoughts and doesn’t know where they’re coming from.”
“Exactly, when, in actual fact, it’s me.”
“Okay.” Terk nodded. “That’s something else we must clarify when we get to it.” And, with that, he turned his attention back to the computer.
*
Cal slipped through to the back of the house. He’d heard something off, something registering in his peripheral vision, but he wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Or maybe peripheral hearing was a better phrase, but he didn’t know what to make of it. Ever since he’d woken up from the coma, things were different.
It’s like he heard more noise going on in there, more of everything converging in his mind, but he hadn’t mentioned anything to Terk. Cal made a mental note to talk to him about it, and he needed to do it soon. There really just hadn’t been time. Terk was the man to talk to if you had problems with powers though. Terk’s connection to the ether was stronger than all of them, sometimes to the point of making the team feel like a bit of a fool.
However, Calum should have come out of that coma feeling better, not worse. But some things were just not working out the way they were supposed to. As long as he kept fighting it, he also knew he was fighting himself, and that wouldn’t help any of them. He needed help.
Fighting on that level affected him—though in fairness, he couldn’t remember everything, like specific things Terk had taught him. Those lessons had been very hard to grasp, but, once learned, they were not exactly something you would ever forget, but he had, and everything was coming to him in bits and pieces. He’d been coming in contact with the raw side of his powers, which wasn’t something he had done before.
And even now he felt like he could do more, so much more to be honest. It was a matter of having the time to sort it out, not when they were under the gun with whatever asshole was after them right now. First things first, and that was keeping his family out of danger. Then he would figure out what was going on with his skills.
He almost heard a whisper in the back of his mind, but he shut it down, since it didn’t pertain to what he was doing right now. It was more important that he keep everything flowing and moving in the direction it needed to move, instead of getting caught up in his head—which just led to the craziness of trying to figure out what was going on, when maybe it was nothing.
That kind of confusion was deadly. He slipped forward another few feet, wondering what he heard here, when suddenly a horrific noise sounded off in his ears. He clapped his hands over his head, wondering if some dog whistle or a high-pitched computer sound were intentionally going off.
He dropped to his knees, and almost instantly Terk slammed into his brain. He had wrapped something around Cal’s mind and was telling him to shut down.
Shut down right now!
Cal immediately broke all connections to everything, but with that came a horribly weird sense of disorientation.
Even in his coma, Cal had sensed something. Someone being there with him, someone he could connect with. Most of the time that had been Terk himself, and, if he were the one telling him to shut down, there wasn’t a whole lot Calum could do about it except shut down.
He quickly slipped into a closet and huddled on the floor, waiting for the pain in his head to stop pounding. With his senses shut down, everything was distorted, disconnected. He knew from experience that it would last a few minutes, and that it would be harder to hear until he could adapt. But his shuffling from one to the other wasn’t as good as it could be.
He felt somebody out there, somebody concerned and somebody with an eye on him. He figured it was Terk, but, having already delivered the message, Terk should know that Cal would be fine. But then, from Terk’s point of view, Calum had just come out of a long period of recovery and probably wasn’t thinking he was fine at all. It was a weird thing to consider that, to most of the team, he was operating at less than full capacity. Not exactly the way he wanted to go through life, and yet it’s just what it was. The team knew better than to label it good or bad in a case like this; they knew this would just be their reality for now.
Taking a slow deep breath, Calum released it, letting the energy flow through him and out. And, sure enough, as soon as he completed that deep breath, everything started to realign. He took several more calming breaths, waiting for the present surroundings to return to his senses. And finally he could stand up and look around.
Don’t know what that was, he muttered in his head, but maybe it did what it was supposed to do. Cal got no answer. He slowly took another look around. He’d stepped into an office. He’d found the body on the floor, with a single gunshot to the head. Even as he stood here, studying the layout, Cal sensed Damon crying out for him. Cal immediately took a few steps back and walked over to where he found Damon, with intense pain reflected on his friend’s face. Cal held out a hand and pulled him to his feet. “Just close off that door,” Cal relayed to Damon, telling him the same message Cal got from Terk.
“I did,” Damon said, “but it still feels like something’s in there.”
“That’s not good. Try it again, then give it a few minutes,” Cal replied, then waited as his friend worked at it.
Finally Damon nodded. “Wow, I forgot what those boomers felt like.”
“Let’s hope we never get the opportunity to figure it out again,” Calum stated quietly.
“We’ve already had some people using these things on us,” Damon noted, “but honestly, I wasn’t expecting it today. Guess I should have been.”
Cal nodded. “We’re not perfect, and, right now, we’re less than even optimal, in fact, so let’s not start laying blame or BS like that.”
Damon gave him a sheepish grin. “I hear you. It just seems like, once again, everybody is operating in such a way that we don’t have a clue what’s happening, but the bad guys all do. It’s always that way, until we get ahead of the curve,” he muttered.
“All we’re looking for is whoever the hell attacked us. After that, we can figure out who the rest of these assholes are. Unfortunately, all we’ve been given are bits and pieces, leading us to more assholes. That’s because they keep throwing up smoke screens to keep us off track,” Cal added succinctly. “I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of done with that whole tactic.”
Immediately Damon nodded. “It’s good to have you back, bud.”
“I hear you,” Cal replied. “It was pretty rough in that coma. I could hear all kinds of things and yet couldn’t respond to any of them.”
Damon looked at him in surprise. “Were you aware?”
“To a certain extent, yes. Don’t ask me what I was aware of.”
Damon nodded in understanding. “That’s one of the harder things, isn’t it? We are all just trying to sort out all those crazy impressions, and figuring out what everybody is trying to say and to do is almost impossible. Yet there’s no real option, so it is what it is.”
“Exactly.” They slowly moved through the house. “How are we handling all the bodies we’re finding?” he asked Damon.
“We’ve been dumping them on Merk and Jonas.”
“Well, that’s handy,” Cal said.
“Honest to God, it has been. Very handy. I’m sure the locals think that Merk is leaving a swath of pain everywhere he goes right now, but honestly, it’s us. Or not even us so much as these guys cleaning up behind themselves and killing their own people to prevent us from getting to them.”
“Is that it?” Cal asked.
Damon nodded. “As far as we can tell, yes, … the assholes.”
“Yeah, that was my thought too.” Calum laughed. “But the bottom line is, we need to get as much intel as we can off this guy.”
“Yeah, that’s been our standard process,” Damon agreed. “We’ll take his photo and get shots of any ID on him. Then we’ll send on all the information. He’s just one more piece of the puzzle and was likely taken out because it was easier to kill him than keep him on and have to deal with anybody else opening their mouth.”
“And we don’t have anybody left who has opened their mouth, correct?”
“Correct,” Damon replied quietly. “Took them out right in front of us a couple times.”
“These guys are so busy killing everyone off. It’s an interesting tactic and not the most common,” he murmured, “though we’ve seen it before to some degree.”
“Bodies still talk.”
“I’ve always thought that too,” Cal noted, “but you know? These guys don’t seem to believe that same theory. Which is also odd, so who the hell is running that side of things that finds life of so little value? They can kill off somebody without a thought, and they don’t mind hiring new people. New people take training, and, once the word gets out that nobody’s left alive, how will they keep bringing in new hires?”
“I’ve been trying to figure that out myself,” Damon admitted. “I came up blank because, seriously, who will sign onto a team that has no regard for life? The thing is, the ones we have been able to talk to—before they were also taken out—they had no idea that they too were expendable. I wonder if this guy had a clue.”
They both moved into the office. “This is not Sean Calvert,” Calum said. “This is his brother David.”
“Well, shit,” Damon replied. “Do you think Sean would have killed his brother?”
Cal frowned at that. “I don’t know,” Cal replied finally. “You know what? My first thought would be no, but I also don’t understand a lot of what’s going on right now. So, if I say no, I’d say it with that caveat in mind.”
“How about we just keep it as is, as a no, until we can find out something further. But let’s also look at a scenario where this guy is potentially capable of killing his brother, perhaps to keep him in line or even to make it look like you did it.”
Calum winced at that. “That would be even more of a reason for Sean to kill David.”
“Who is this Sean Calvert guy? Or, more important, why does he hate you so much? So much that he hates the rest of us too. And why would he want anyone to believe that you killed his brother?”
“It could be anything, Damon.” Cal was not being unhelpful; he truly had no idea. “I’ve always worked instinctively, and anything could have pissed off Calvert,” he explained in a short tone, with a bite to his voice. “The guy has hated me since we were in training together.”
“Oh, crap, don’t tell me that he was a US Navy SEAL?” Damon asked in shock. “A UK citizen?”
“Dual citizenship. And no he washed out,” Cal told him. “That just added to the hate. He went on to become a mercenary, while I ended up doing what I set out to do. So, maybe from Sean’s perspective, that was a triumph for me and a failure for him.”
“Something that he really couldn’t forgive you for.”
“Well, I wondered about that, as soon as we realized that Calvert was involved. But I mean, is that enough reason to hate him now? He may be a victim in all of this himself.”
“I don’t know. If it was advertised that you killed his brother, and he just found out about it, would that be enough to turn him on you? He already had a grudge against you.”
“Yes, that would probably do it,” he agreed.
“Do we know how long this guy has been dead?”
Cal studied the body; it wasn’t necessarily fresh. There was no rigor, and the body was past cold. There was definitely an odd look to it, but, as far as decomp, he studied the room. “The house is cold.”
“What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you look at the body?” Damon asked Cal.
“I think—my take on this would be that he’s been dead for at least a couple days now. And maybe that’s what pushed Calvert into kidnapping Mariana, for revenge, you know? Thinking that I’d killed his brother.”
“But wouldn’t revenge just mean killing Mariana outright? And why wouldn’t he have buried his brother? Intentionally leaving his brother here to be found like this, … that just doesn’t sit right.”
“I agree, unless Sean hoped to call the cops and let them find us here with the DB.” Calum studied the scene. “I don’t find any other energies descending upon us. Plus, let’s get real. This guy wasn’t killed here. There’s no blood. Nothing says that he was killed on this property at all.”
“So, you’re thinking these guys killed him somewhere else? Then they showed Sean the body, just enough to get him stirred up and ready to take you out. Then came and delivered the body here for us to find.”
“Jesus, that sounds a little on the implausible side, but I don’t have a better theory.” Calum was unsure, but, at the same time, nothing else made sense either.
“It is ludicrous,” Damon agreed. “But I don’t know what else to say, so let’s just keep on working our way through this.” He took several photos of David’s body, then sent them off to Terk. Now they searched the rest of the house.
“We need something that says more about this guy. Do we even know for sure whose house this is?”
“It’s listed as Calvert’s father’s originally,” Damon noted, “but it could easily have been the family home.”
“Which would make some sense that this guy was left here.”
“It would,” Damon agreed slowly. “But you know what? As we go over this, none of it really makes sense. Does Calvert have that short a fuse where you’re concerned?”
Calum stared at his friend and then slowly nodded. “Yes, you could say that.”
“So, something else is going on?”
“I dated his sister for a while. She only dated me to get back at Sean, and I dated her because I thought she was cute,” he added, with a wry smile. “It backfired on both of us. Calvert lost it big time when he found out, and she immediately took it out on me, I think to defuse her brother’s anger, or maybe just to get back at me. I don’t know. We broke up shortly thereafter, and we both agreed on that. However, she had an awful lot to say that wasn’t terribly nice or true.”
“And that probably set off Sean even more.”
“Not that he needed a reason, but yes,” Cal confirmed. “That set him off even more.”
“Interesting. Somehow, when we get these oddball enemies, they fill our life with craziness, right?”
“What a pain in the ass,” he stated bluntly. “I never did anything to him, but he’s been hating on me for a very long time.”
“And when you hate someone for that long …” Damon added, “that’s why we’ve got so many problems right now.”
After a few moments of silence, Cal shook his head. “I just don’t think he would have been behind all this.”
Damon looked up in surprise. “So what are you thinking?”
“I just can’t see it, and I don’t think it’s even possible. Sure, he may hate me, but this is his brother, and he just left him here?”
“I can’t say I disagree,” Damon replied, “and, Jesus, nothing here is really making sense anyway.”
“No, I hear you. It’s just one more of those puzzles that we have to get to the bottom of.”