The Protected (Fbi Psychics) by Shiloh Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

it might look like they were talking. Gus had the backpack slung over his left shoulder, a jacket draped over his right hand. Weapon hand, she thought. Something skittered along her senses and she knew, as sure as she was standing there, they were not talking.
    Alex stood there, while Gus looked down at him. And the boy looked up at the house. Just watching, kind of like she was watching him.
    Then, the next thing he did had her rubbing her temple as the headache flared.
    Psychic energy flared, crackled. And it wasn’t until the mad energy faded that the tension she sensed in both man and boy eased. Once it passed, the two of them headed into the house.
    “What kind of trouble are you two in?” she muttered.
    Then she glanced over at the plate of cookies she’d put together. She needed to reach out to them, try to get some sort of relationship with the kid going, but everything in her screamed
caution, caution, caution
—
    It was just a plate of cookies.
    They could take the cookies or not, invite her inside or not.
    It might take more than one or two visits to get in the door, and she was more than aware of that fact. She knew she’d have to take her time getting closer to the boy and
that
was the easier part of the job.
    The scary part . . .
    Her heart jumped into her throat as she thought about the other thing she needed to do. She slid a hand into her pocket, touched the microscopic little camera, and sighed. She really did need to get eyes on the inside and
not
just because it would be nice to be able to do more than catnap at night. Her instincts were good, damn good, and they’d kept her alive, sane, and healthy for a long, long time—part of the reason she made a good
babysitter
, she figured, but part of a
babysitting
job . . . or bodyguard job? Knowing where in the hell the body was. Watching the damn body. Hard to do if she was catching up on sleep. No matter how badly she needed it.
    The lack of solid sleep wasn’t going to help her get back to fighting form any quicker, that was certain.
    She went to pick up the cookies and then she stopped. Although Vaughnne absolutely wanted to kick herself in the ass, she headed to the bathroom. She wasn’t vain. Back when she would have been learning all that shit about hair and makeup, she’d been struggling just to scrape by after her parents had kicked her out on her ass.
    Once she’d managed to haul herself out of the hole where she’d found herself, she’d then been busy busting her ass to get up to speed, because she’d figured out just what she
wanted
to do. What she
needed
to do. It had been right about the time she read about a psychic in the newspaper.
    Taige Branch. Taige Morgan now. But Vaughnne had figured out then and there, she wasn’t alone. So she’d hitchhiked and walked and made her way down to Alabama, determined to talk to the woman who had been helping others out. She hadn’t ever gotten to talk to Taige that day, but she had talked to somebody else.
    Taylor Jones, who had been playing guard dog at the hospital where Taige was hospitalized. Apparently that happened a lot with her. Taylor had taken one look at her and told her she wasn’t ready.
    He was right. She hadn’t been. Getting her GED, college, all of that shit had eaten up more of her time. But for the past six years, she’d been a part of his unit. She finally had a place where she belonged, and she’d worked damn hard to get here. Not much time to worry about some of the vanities that came with being a girl, not much time to worry about hair, makeup, any of that shit.
    But she knew when a guy was interested and she’d seen the look in Gus’s eyes more than once the other day. Flipping the light, she stared at her reflection for a long moment. A black woman with a hell of a lot of hair, a hell of a lot of attitude, and grim eyes stared back at her.
    “You are
not
going to be charming anybody’s pants off with that look on your face, honey.” Blowing out a breath,