Chapter Twenty-Nine

Grace stared at the illusion of JT, wishing it were nothing but a hallucination. She knew better. The mechanics of psychic phenomena still confused her, but she'd learned from firsthand experience that something unreal could exert very real forces and cause genuine damage.

As she tilted one hip to adjust her stance, a hard lump pressed into her belly. Her gun. She'd tucked it inside her waistband during their flight through the tunnel. Even if she managed to pull it out unnoticed, she had little confidence that she could cause enough damage to matter, at least not before several large and heavily armed men tackled her.

"Do you really think I'd bring the flash drive here?" she said. "I'm not that stupid."

Although she might not have been the smartest person on the planet, she'd at least had the brains to mail the flash drive to herself, at her Texas address. It was safe, relatively speaking, for the time being.

"Give me my flash drive," JT said, "or my guys will kill your guys. And they'll start with your boyfriend."

"Maybe you shouldn't have blown up your only other copy of your research."

"What makes you think it was my only other copy?"

"Because if you had another copy, you wouldn't be pestering me about the flash drive."

"Good point." The apparition of JT shrugged. "Might as well tell you. You won't live long enough to tell anyone else." He let out an annoyed sigh. "Edward didn't just make a copy of all the research, he also completely erased it from the facility's computers in the process. And he did such a good job we couldn't recover anything from the servers."

Well at least one part of the nightmare finally made sense. JT and his minions had gone to deadly lengths to obtain the flash drive because it contained the only copy of the facility's research. She doubted one little flash drive could hold the entirety of the facility's research, but it must contain the crucial bits needed to bring down JT, his cohorts, and possibly his whole empire. She'd had the key to his destruction in her pocket all this time.

Ideally, one of them needed to travel to wherever JT was hiding and stop this madness at the source. Unfortunately, that plan had two problems. First, David couldn't manifest without her help, and second, her strength had returned but not to the point where she felt capable of manifesting for any meaningful length of time. For those two reasons, she'd ruled out stopping the physical JT. She must stop the astral JT instead. Luckily, despite the drugs, he clearly lacked the ability to manifest.

JT apparently had no powers, or extremely weak powers, without the drugs. That might mean they had a chance. She needed no drugs to access her powers, and yet using them drained her quicker than slashing her wrists. From her past experiences with JT, she suspected his drug-induced powers drained him even faster. On top of that, he was dying. She knew what she had to do. She just wasn't sure how to do it.

Though David had gotten up off the ground after his spill, he lingered behind JT, twenty feet from Grace and Sean. She stared intently at David until he turned his eyes toward her.

As if he could read her thoughts, David mouthed, "No."

She didn't dare make any response. If JT decided she and David were conspiring against him, she couldn't predict the mad man's response.

"Give me the flash drive," JT said. His voice had taken on a petulant tone. "I'll count to ten and if you haven't given it to me by then, your boyfriend dies."

The commandos had spread out to form a circle around them. Because there were only six of them, that meant they stood widely spaced around the three prisoners and the apparition of JT. Two of the commandos held their weapons trained on David. One kept his eye on Sean, while a full three commandos had Grace in their sights.

In a different situation, attracting the attention of three brawny men might boost her ego. Right now it made her entire body tense.

She pulled her attention away from the three big weapons aimed at her and locked her gaze on the apparition of JT. He was, naturally, smirking at her.

"I bet I can find you," she said.

The smirk melted into a pinched expression.

She pointed toward the heavens. "You know, through the crossroads."

His eyes widened for an instant, but then the pinched look evaporated. "You wouldn't. Not with sweet David's life on the line."

He made the word sweet sound like a hideous insult. To him, it probably was.

She closed her eyes and let her mind float up, hovering a dozen feet above her body. As she looked down at her body, a feeling coursed through her, one she could only describe as a psychic shiver.

JT glared at her physical self as he clenched his hands into fists. "Come back or he dies. You have five seconds. Four, three … "

She hurled out a blast of energy that manifested as a hurricane-force wind. The gust spiraled out from her position, flipping the commandos off their feet one by one and flinging them backward through the air. By the time the spiraling gust hit David and Sean, they were flat on the ground, facedown in the sand. The commandos were slower to react — too slow. They sailed a good fifty feet and hit the ground hard enough to knock the sense out of them, if not render them unconscious. After circling their prey, the commandos had set down their lantern flashlights. Now, those lights sat on the ground unattended, forming a triangle around the three former prisoners and the mad man who wasn't there.

The apparition of JT roared with animalistic rage. "Waldron! Battaglia!"

A hundred feet away, just over the lip of the depression, a monster snarled.

No, not a monster. It was the mechanical snarling of a vehicle engine as it revved to scale an incline. A pair of headlights popped into view as the vehicle, still invisible in the darkness, hurtled over the summit and down the slope toward them.

She had her gun, but she couldn't shoot JT's apparition and shooting the approaching vehicle would do no good. She'd still have the men inside it to deal with.

She sank back into her body, opened her eyes, and shouted, "David, help me!"

As he sprang to his feet, David glanced at the vehicle and then at her. She nodded.

She felt him near her, though his body hadn't moved. His presence surrounded her and she opened herself up to him in a way she couldn't have imagined until last night. She let him into her mind. Their combined power surged through her, warm and sweet and crackling with energy. In unison, they switched their gazes to the onrushing vehicle.

The black SUV flipped into the air. It smacked into the ground upside down with a crunching thud. The windshield turned opaque as the safety glass cracked.

David's knees buckled but he didn't collapse. He hung there like a marionette, arms and legs limp, as if an unseen force clutched his neck. His face reddened as he struggled to breathe.

Ten feet away from David, the apparition of JT held up one arm with his fingers curled in a strangulation gesture. JT shook his hand and David jerked in response.

Grace resisted the urge to lunge forward, to help David, because the she moved all her muscles might give out completely. Ice-cold exhaustion flooded through her. The ground looked so inviting that it took all her strength to stay upright rather than dropping to the sand, curling up in a ball, and letting herself fall into the abyss of sleep.

JT shook David again. The choked sound that David grunted out snapped her out of her half sleep. She sucked in a couple deep breaths, swallowing enough oxygen to rouse her brain and body.

"The flash drive," JT said. "Or I snap his neck."

"It's not here, but I can tell you where to find it."

"Nice try." JT squeezed his astral hand and David gurgled from the increased pressure. "Like mother, like daughter. I'm not falling for that one again."

Pounding noises erupted from the upside-down SUV. Grace darted her eyes to look at the vehicle. Someone had kicked out the gummy, crackled sheet that had once been the windshield. A pair of legs hung out the opening.

Waldron slid out onto the sand. He looked disheveled, his face streaked with what might've been blood, and he also looked very, very angry.

Grace focused on JT again. "Don't you want my power? Isn't that what you really came for?"

A wild look came over his features. His grip on David loosened a little. She could tell because David's chest rose and fell as he drew in as much air as he could.

"You think you're stronger than me, right?" She spread her palms in an invitation. "So come and get it. Come and take my power."

Without letting go of David, JT turned the remainder of his psychic energy on her. She experienced it like a rip current dragging her mind down and down into a swirling emptiness. Gathering every iota of energy she had left, she clawed her way out of the invisible vortex. It hurt like hell. She gritted her teeth, clenched her hands, and gasped from the effort. Still she held on. Couldn't say how. Didn't know if she could keep it up for long.

David crumpled to the ground. Panting and wheezing, he pushed onto all fours.

JT had lost his grip.

The sucking sensation lessened, and she pulled her mind free of it.

The JT apparition bellowed. She squinted at him. He looked less solid now, though not quite transparent.

Over at the SUV, Battaglia had crawled out of the space where the windshield had been. He straightened and tried to walk, but staggered a few steps instead. His face was not merely streaked with blood, but virtually coated with it. As he stumbled away from the vehicle, falling to his knees in the sand, another figure rolled through the punched-out windshield.

It was JT. The real one.

The lantern flashlights cast a pallid glow on everyone, but JT looked so pale he could've doubled for Casper the ghost. He crawled away from the vehicle, and Waldron had to help him stand because Battaglia was having mobility problems of his own. Saddled with propping up his boss, Waldron could do little more than glare at Grace. JT was muttering to Waldron, and based on the look on the other man's face, she guessed JT was issuing orders that the bigger, stronger man did not want to follow. The duo trudged away from the SUV toward Grace, David, and Sean. The boy still lay unconscious on the ground.

The JT apparition stood motionless and dead.

His physical body went slack in Waldron's arms, forcing the other man to support the dead weight by hugging JT to him as he continued slogging through the sand.

The JT apparition came to life. He fixed a hateful scowl on Grace. Both of his faces, the real and the projected, shared the same deathly pallor.

"Why haven't you taken my power?" she asked with a scornful tone. "That's right, you're about as strong as a Pekingese that thinks it's a Great Dane."

He struck out at her psychically. She felt the hit like a blow to the gut — though not as strong a blow as she'd expected. Wincing, she shook her head.

"Is that all you got?" she said. "You're just a week little twerp with delusions of omnipotence."

He lashed out again, in a different way, falling back on the same trick he'd used in the tunnel. She saw herself pulling the gun out of her waistband, raising it in front of her to take aim at David, and finally pulling the trigger. Unlike the first time JT had tried this trick, the effect was like a ghost image rather than a vivid hallucination. While she watched the semitransparent vision of her hand perform the actions, she also saw her very solid and real hand remain at her side. Meanwhile, JT completely lost his grip on David, who'd sat back on his heels gasping. JT was getting weaker.

Waldron seemed to recognize what was happening. He halted, and his entire demeanor changed from annoyed and strained to something darker and far more determined. He let go of JT's limp, vacant body. JT crumpled to the ground.

Reaching inside his jacket, Waldron brought out his gun. He swung it up toward Grace.

David launched himself across the space between him and Waldron, at first running, then flinging his body through the air to tackle Waldron. Limbs flailed and grunts echoed.

Grace yanked the gun out of her waistband and took two steps toward the battling men.

Something smacked her in the chest with the force of a boot kick. It felt real, and it sent her staggering backward a few steps. Yet she knew the force that had struck her was psychic, not physical. JT's last gasp, in telekinetic terms. She kicked back at him with a force exponentially greater than what he'd lobbed at her. His apparition shattered and vanished.

His limp body, no longer vacant, stirred.

She had bigger problems.

Waldron had flipped David onto his stomach. Jamming one knee into David's spine, pinning him to the sand, Waldron settled the muzzle of his gun on the back of David's skull.

Grace curled her finger around the trigger of her own gun as she took aim at Waldron's back.

Arms clamped around her from behind, pinning her arms to her body and squeezing so hard she couldn't breathe. The gun tumbled from her grasp. The arms that restrained her lifted her up until only her tiptoes touched the ground. She gasped for air, flailing her legs at her assailant, but her ears began to ring and darkness began to close in around her.

"Quit fighting," Battaglia snarled into her ear, "and I'll let you breathe."

She really couldn't match his strength anyway. So she stopped fighting.

He loosened his grip enough to let her breathe. The ringing quieted and the darkness receded, giving her a clear view of David and Waldron.

"Now," Battaglia said, "you get to watch your boyfriend die."