Illicit Senses (Illicit Minds Book 1), Page 3

  Rhodes’ incredibly inaccurate description of exactly what happened to a person with his so-called talents when they got lost in the “other place” made Spencer want to roll his eyes.

  He’d had only a touch of the experience when Priscilla had died. She’d always been remarkably strong, and somehow with her last breaths, had managed to pull him out. For the rest of his life, he would always be grateful.

  And guilt-ridden.

  Could she have saved herself if she hadn’t been preoccupied with bringing him back?

  There was no point in dwelling on it, since there would never be anything he could do about it. People like him had no rights under the law, and even if he’d been able to convince a member of law enforcement to look into the matter, it wasn’t considered a crime to kill one of their kind if they were in some way threatening the person who killed them.

  You didn’t have to prove you’d been threatened. How could you, when the freaks could do things you simply couldn’t? That automatically made them threatening, at least under the law. Spencer sighed.

  “Regardless, if I do a surface reading, I can go deeper than anyone else.”

  Addison’s aunt finally spoke. “Then we want you.”

  For a second, it looked like Addison was going to argue, but she seemed to think better of it and stopped. “And your fee is?” She had the good sense to address that question to Will. Spencer had no idea what his fee was. He never saw any of the money.

  “Non-negotiable.” Will was always clear on that point. “Your check is made out to our facility and not to Spencer. As you know, since your family was pivotal in the writing of the law, he is not allowed to have money or own property.”

  He continued. “Also, as no one from Safe Dawn can be outside these walls unsupervised, for the duration of the process, Spencer will be living with you and you will be responsible for his welfare.”

  Addison made no remark to refuse Will’s condition, and Spencer was relieved to see she had known that. It was degrading to have to essentially be treated like her child during the time they were together. But those were the rules, and as Will liked to point out to them, until they could be changed, it was better to find ways around them than to beat your head against the wall.

  “When will Mr. Lewis be arriving?”

  “Later today—much later.”

  Since her impassioned speech, the rumored-to-be successor to her grandfather as the CEO of Wade Corporation had gone out of her way not to look at Spencer. He was going to have to do something about that. He shouldn’t have felt this way, but he missed the way her ice-blue eyes told him he was less than nothing to her until he made her mad.

  “I’ll send a car around dinner time, seven o’clock?”

  Will nodded. I think we’ll have concluded our preliminaries by then.”

  “Then we’ll take our leave.” Addison turned to the door.

  “Thank you for your time.”

  The two women walked almost soundlessly to the exit. After watching them cross the threshold into the hall, Spencer waited until the door closed tightly behind them, before turning toward Will.

  “Why would you assume I can’t do my damn job?”

  Will pounded his fist into the desk. “Why would you take unnecessary risks?”

  “I don’t see how it’s a risk. The kid’s been gone a month. We both know I’m going to be leading them to find his dead body, rather than running into some kind of trap.”

  “It’s not your physical well-being I’m concerned about, and you know it. You can handle yourself better than anyone in that kind of confrontation. You’ve never done a reading without Priscilla. Since you haven’t been able to successfully match up with anyone else since she died, you’re going into this one solo.”

  “Are you insinuating that I can’t do it by myself? We both know I can.”

  “I’m not saying anything of the kind.” Will took a deep breath. “I think you need to give yourself a little more time.”

  “I didn’t die. Sooner or later everyone is going to have to stop treating me like I did.” He’d finally said the words that had been itching to explode from his body since the moment he’d returned from the hospital. Apparently, they’d all been worried he might decide to follow Priscilla to the grave.

  “If everyone is treating you that way, it’s only because they care.”

  “I know that.” Which was why he hadn’t said anything earlier.

  “Fine.” Rhodes pointed a finger at him. “But if you can’t handle this, I expect you to say so and let someone else do it. Despite what you think, I know you didn’t die, but I refuse to bury you this year, too.”

  Will had practically raised both Priscilla and him. No one could have done better under the circumstances. The last thing he wanted was to make the old man worry about his welfare.

  Spencer needed to complete this job. It served the Wades right, after all they’d done to make his people miserable, that they’d had to turn to the “freaks” for help in finding their missing family member. Spencer loved irony, and the way it suddenly cropped up as if the universe were making a giant joke of everyone.

  Plus, he couldn’t deny that Addison Wade called to him sexually, and he didn’t normally find snobby girls attractive. She had gotten beneath his skin. She was clearly a woman with hidden depths. Her hand shaking had only been the beginning of his interest in what she was hiding. Her constant downward glances and the tapping of her foot were all physical manifestations of a mental war he wanted to be a part of. He would enjoy exposing her secrets until her soul was stripped bare in front of him.

  Then he might satisfy them both sexually for a few moments before he sent her back to her life. He was sure that entailed a lot of time figuring out how to destroy the existence of people less fortunate than she was.

  “Why did you push Addison Wade so hard?”

  Spencer shrugged. “She bothered me.”

  “Obviously. She bothered me, too.” Will crossed behind his desk and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels. He put two shot glasses down in front of them and poured them each a portion. He handed one to Spencer as he raised his own. “To Priscilla.”

  Spencer waited for the sadness that always hit him when discussing Priscilla, but felt only the slightest tug on his heart. He’d loved the woman… like a sister. Sure, there had been a time, when they’d been only slightly older than teenagers, where they’d gotten naked. It had been years since they’d done that. Even though right before her death she’d made overtures to try again, he could say without much hesitation that neither of them had been particularly satisfied with the other in the sack.

  Priscilla wanted romance from her lovers. She liked kind words and heartfelt sentiment. Spencer didn’t have those kinds of emotions. Not when it came to his bedmates. All in all, he preferred a really intense couple of hours rolling around in the sheets—the wilder the better—followed by an evening spent away from the person he’d rolled around with.

  Both of them had preferred being friends. She had been his partner, his guide, and his most trusted ally. He would always miss the intimacy of her mind touching his, as she kept him from staying in the dark places only she could share with him.

  “To Priscilla. Why are we drinking in the middle of the day?”

  Rhodes smiled. “There was another reason I thought it might be better for someone else to handle this.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Patience.” Will’s eyes gleamed, and Spencer groaned. His mentor had formulated a plan. For thirty years he’d watched the man work, and he knew there would be no putting him off of his track now. No matter what happened.

  “This, my friend, is an opportunity.”

  “To find the child?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Will rubbed his hands together. “But also, to earn the everlasting gratitude of the Wades, and to show them that we can be trusted. Maybe then, they will support the legi
slation going in front of the board later this month.”

  “I don’t think my turning up the remains of their dead nephew is going to earn any kind of thanks.” Priscilla’s death had proved how dangerous it could be to tell people what they didn’t want to hear, truth notwithstanding.

  “But you can show them how human you are, how you deserve to be treated with respect.” Will narrowed his gaze, and Spencer felt twelve years old again.

  “You can do that, can’t you, Spence?” His tone spoke of skepticism and doubt.

  “I can try.” He could. He hoped.

  “Good. Then go and get ready. And try not to antagonize Addison Wade too much. Keep your head down, get the job done, make yourself approachable and not at all scary, and then you can come home and regale us all with stories of just how awful Addison is to be around.”

  Spencer shrugged. “Maybe she’s not that awful.”

  “Don’t be fooled. I’ve dealt with the Wades my entire career. They’re as awful as you think, and then some.”

  “Now you sound like a Wade.”

  “Out.”

  Spencer smiled as he headed toward the door, his mind already turning to packing.

  He stopped in his tracks. “But seriously, Will, look into that juvenile who’s projecting like that. It’s awful and dangerous. It would just take one bad mind to push through those shields, and then you’ve got a brain-dead psychic on your hands.”

  “What were you hearing?”

  “One of those obnoxious children’s rhymes.”

  “Which one?”

  “One of those where you fill in the letters.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “It’s like, S, my name is Spencer, my brother’s name is Shawn, we come from Sarasota, and we eat sundaes. T, my name is Trevor, my brother’s name is Travis, we come from Trenton, and we eat turnips.”

  “Over and over again?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll look into that. Too much time spent with that as a shield would make a person crazy.”

  Three

  Oliver turned off the power on his cell phone so he wouldn’t be disturbed. His granddaughter, Addison, hadn’t answered when he’d called. It was unusual, but not enough to get worked up over. After all, in this modern day and age, women had the same rights as men—and that included the right to disappear if they wanted to. Besides, he had a council meeting to get through. All his attention needed to be focused on that task, and not on why his granddaughter had temporarily disappeared.

  At least he hoped it was temporary. His family had an unusual habit of going missing and winding up dead.

  He stared out the noise-blocking windows that lined the outside of the room.

  Wade Corporation held the patent on the design, and they worked like a charm. Inside the room you couldn’t hear a thing that went on outside. They could have been anywhere in the world, for all you could tell from inside. But they weren’t; they were in his favorite place on Earth, two blocks north of the Natural History Museum in New York City, on Central Park West.

  It had always seemed the perfect place from which to run the world—a merging of the historical with the modern—and so beautiful, no one noticed anything amiss as the scenery overwhelmed them.

  The committee had met in the same room for thirty-four years. Every time Oliver entered its familiar surroundings, he mused remotely over how odd it was that life-changing decisions could be made in such humble surroundings. Plain black conference table, hard-backed red chairs, a screen on the wall to allow for the rare videoconferences. He supposed it could have been a board meeting anywhere.

  It wasn’t the space that made the place one of a kind; the people who arrived in New York City once every three months to conduct their meetings created the uniqueness of this environment.

  He shifted in his leather chair and looked out the window. The meteorologists called for rain, but it looked bright and cheery over Central Park. Someone coughed, and he turned his chair to regard the room again.

  Oliver Wade knew more private details about the lives of the other six members of the council than they could possibly imagine. He’d made it his business to know. None of his colleagues—if you could call them that—could legitimately make that claim about him. For eighty years, he’d kept his own counsel and played his cards close to his chest. He’d grown up the son of a coal miner, with a mother who’d been drunk more often than not. Those days had taught him that the only reliable person in the world was himself.

  That wasn’t to say he didn’t consider himself a family man. He’d built his empire for his family. He just needed to keep them all alive long enough to let one of them inherit. That had, over the years, proved to be more difficult than he could ever have imagined.

  As the last member of their group arrived with muttered apologies, it occurred to him that none of the attendees had any idea that his great-grandson was missing. He would commit murder to keep anyone from knowing. Weakness in the family structure affected stock prices.

  He looked around the room and smiled as he considered them carefully. He knew, because he always knew these things—that was why he was Oliver Wade—that one of the people in his presence was responsible for Jeremy’s disappearance. Which one?

  That question plagued him.

  To his left, staring at her laptop as she always did, sat Grace Ann Charters. Forty years old, the mother of six children and heiress to a liquor dynasty started by her great-great-great-grandfather, she’d also inherited her father’s place on the Committee for the Protection of Free Society. She was five feet five inches tall, and her hair fell straight, dyed black, and looked as though it had been plastered to her scalp with hairspray. Her eyes matched her hair in color. A slew of freckles covered her face and she did nothing to hide them, as so many women did.

  For fifteen years, she had been married to her second husband, Paul, and they had three children together. Her first marriage, which no one discussed, had lasted two years. For the most part, it was like it hadn’t happened. Except that Oliver knew about it, like he knew about the small incident in college involving a hit-and-run and three ounces of cocaine.

  Was she the one who’d arranged for Jeremy’s kidnapping?

  Her views on the council were remarkably consistent with what her father’s had been. As far as the woman was concerned, they shouldn’t have locked up the people who showed symptoms of the Condition—they should have killed them. Oliver had personally talked her father out of a plan that would have included the torching down of buildings, and possibly the implementation of killing squads.

  Was she out for revenge because he’d halted her family’s plans?

  Evidently, neither the man nor his daughter was a follower of history. They didn’t know how that plan would have eventually blown up in their faces. No, Oliver had known the only way to keep people safe was to put the Conditioned safely away, where they couldn’t harm the general population. It was better that Ma and Pa Everyman had no idea how close the bogeyman of their nightmares lived to their colonial farmhouse.

  It was better that only Oliver and the other council members ever knew just how dangerous things truly were. It was better that he alone knew how close they had all come to destruction. As long as he lived, he would keep the world secure.

  As if feeling his gaze, Grace Ann shut the computer with a click and looked around the room. She held the role of group moderator. They rotated the position, the idea being that none of them would ever become more powerful than the rest. That was, of course, bullshit. He’d been in charge since day one, and everyone knew it.

  “Now that we’re all here”—Grace Ann eyed the latecomer, George Rainier, with a brutal glance to match her tone—“we can begin. I think our first order of business should be to figure out what we’re going to do about this ridiculous request sent over by William Rhodes, the director of Safe Dawn.”

  “Why is it ridiculous?” George took a drag on his hand rolled cigarette. His fingers
were always dyed slightly orange from the tobacco he regularly handled. George had been the first person Oliver had considered as a potential suspect in Jeremy’s kidnapping. His ruthlessness almost matched Oliver’s, and that made him a serious threat.

  The completely bald, sixty-five-year-old man had been raised in South Carolina and, other than to attend these meetings in New York City, Oliver didn’t think the short, stout force of nature left the Palmetto State.

  It was unusual that George had been so late to the meeting, and Oliver made a mental note to find out what he’d been doing. If something important had made the other man late, Oliver would know what it was by the end of the day.

  Grace Ann sneered. “Because there is no way we can start arbitrarily handing out travel passes to people who, for good reason, have been sent to live away from society.”

  Oliver cleared his throat. “I don’t think he’s asking for that.” Whether they liked it or not, he would achieve his agenda by the end of this meeting. The trick would be convincing the six others in the room that he didn’t have an agenda.

  The woman Oliver considered least likely to have taken Jeremy finally spoke.

  “We locked them away for a reason. I have no interest in letting them out and about unsupervised.” Karen Monroe, daughter of the late Turner Monroe—the well-known industrialist who’d been responsible, before his passing, for one of the most notorious sex scandals of his generation—slammed her fist on the table to add emphasis to what she’d said.

  He often speculated whether she ever wondered how her father had been caught that day in the orgy that would destroy his reputation. Oliver could have told her; after all, he’d been the one to send the photographers to capture the scene.

  George interrupted. “It’s not all of them, and it’s not a total lack of supervision. They wouldn’t just be wandering around. But a few of them—those who are deemed worthy because of their helpful behavior and abilities—should be given passes out into the public. It will silence the critics who say we’ve locked them up, kept them prisoner, and abused them.”