Page 6 of Soul Sucker

Feehan appeared beside her again. “We need you to read her before it’s too late. I’m going to get them to clear out and give you some space, okay?”

She nodded. She hated this part of her job. Her kind spent a huge amount of time and energy building shields to protect themselves from the psychic shit they accumulated. Probing another empath’s mind, even that of a dead empath, was like trying to pry open a spoiled clam and usually gave her the empath equivalent of food poisoning.

When the noise died down, she picked her way through the debris and knelt beside the brown leather couch. She took her time studying the dead woman’s face, carefully opening her senses to anything that still hung around polluting the atmosphere. The victim definitely was an empath.Shit. Whatever had killed her had a very distinctive signature, which was both good and bad. It made the murderer easier to track, but indicated a level of power that didn’t care about shielding itself. Ella took hold of the victim’s cold hand and centered herself on the rapidly disappearing internal psychic signature. Whoever this female was, she hadn’t bothered keeping her shields up to the high standards demanded by the SBLE. Despite feeling like she was crawling through barbed wire, Ella was able to get into her mind rather easily.

Rather too easily. There was nothing there, nothing but a confused mass of fear and joy, and—what was that—relief? Was that the only overriding emotion left? And did that mean the empath had been glad to die by the end?

Shaking her head, she sat back on her heels and tried again. She concentrated harder this time, opening herself wider, but now all she sensed were her own signals bouncing back at her like radar.

“Did you get anything?” Feehan crouched down beside her.

Ella released the dead woman’s hand and turned to stare at her perspiring boss. “Not really.”

His shoulders slumped. “No last image of the killer, no sense that the victim could identify the murderer?”

“It’s way worse than that. It’s as though all her memories and abilities were sucked out of her head.”

Feehan went still. “Seriously?”

Ella rose and glanced at the police officers filling the doorway. “Can we talk about it back at the office? I don’t want these guys hearing anything they shouldn’t. They already think I’m one of those nutty TV psychics who makes shit up, and they barely tolerate me being here.”

“Sure. As long as there’s nothing else you need to see.”

She kept moving. “They’ll send everything over to us, right? We can gather the team together and talk about it then.”

Didn’t he know that she needed to get out of there? Sometimes she wondered who thought it a good idea to have empaths answering to government employees who didn’t understand the immense pressure such encounters put on their staff. When it came down to it, empaths scared the crap out of humans. She saw it every time Feehan looked at her.

Without another word, she pushed through the group of cops and headed for the elevators. The thought of being trapped with Feehan or any other normal human even for two minutes in a tin box made her veer toward the emergency stairs.

“I’ll see you by the car,” she shouted, opening the heavy fire door and then starting down the brightly lit but barren concrete staircase. Her flip-flops smacked against the steps and echoed in the stairwell. About halfway down, she came to a stop. The murderer had used the stairs. She could smell him, and his triumph. So he hadn’t magically shifted in or out of the apartment, which meant it was unlikely he was Fae.

She deliberately opened her senses to his distinctive signature, and shuddered as she met his meticulously constructed mental barriers. He wanted her to see his pleasure at the murder, but nothing more. And the killer was male. She was now sure of that. After checking her own mental shields, she continued down the stairs and out through the lobby into the parking lot.

Feehan waited for her by the car, his expression anxious. The roar of traffic from the Bay Bridge above almost drowned out the police sirens, but not quite. Dirt shimmered and danced on the metal roofs of the vehicles making everything seem out of focus.

“I think the murderer is an Otherworld male and he entered and exited the building using the stairs,” she said quietly. “I sensed him there.” She scanned the parking lot. “So it’s possible he either drove himself here, or used an Otherworld portal.”

Feehan nodded. “I’ll go tell the police to check out the vehicles in the parking lot, and that we’re pretty sure we’re looking for a male killer.” He hesitated. “They’re not convinced it was a murder, by the way.”

“Um, what woman commits suicidenaked? When I go, I’m wearing my best fancy underwear and full makeup.”

Feehan stuttered something incoherent.

“They just don’t want to be bothered because they hate the paperwork as much as we do.” Ella fished out her cell phone. “I’ll check the Otherworld app for current portal locations.”

Like most things that belonged to that screwed up place, the entrance and exits to Otherworld moved around seemingly on a whim. It had taken years to persuade the Otherworld government to share the latest locations with their human counterparts, and even longer for the Fae nerds to come up with an application that worked with human technology.

She clicked on the app and waited for her phone to recognize where she was. Two red circles flashed on the map, one close to the Bay Bridge and the other by the ballpark at the end of Embarcadero. If the murderer had come from Otherworld, he’d had an easy journey back. And if he was a baseball fan and had chosen the portal farther away, the crowds streaming out of the park would have provided a perfect screen for his murderous activities.

Feehan had left the engine running, so she got in the air-conditioned car and briefly closed her eyes. She’d kill for a soda or something smothered in chocolate. Lately, it seemed to take longer and longer for her to recover from an encounter with Otherworld. But she was about to turn twenty-seven, and everyone knew that was about the limit of an empath’s ability to remain sane and do their job properly. It was also probably why Feehan was handling her with kid gloves.

A rush of movement outside the car caught her attention, and she watched as the body was brought out and loaded into the ambulance. They’d eventually take it to the morgue under the SBLE offices, and get as much information as possible to help the team detect the killer. Ella tried to think about the woman and whether she’d seen her before, but she couldn’t recall a single memory. Perhaps her mind was so full of psychic shit that her real memories were being erased… She opened her eyes. That wasnotgoing to happen. She was going to get through this without going nuts or following stupid government procedure.

“You ready to head back, Ella?”

“Sure, boss.”

Feehan got into the car beside her. He waited for the ambulance to pull out ahead of them, and then followed along behind, acknowledging the offhand waves of the police officers still gathered around the entrance to the building. She didn’t bother. If Feehan thought the way to get promoted was through developing a good relationship with the San Francisco police department, he’d soon learn the error of his ways.

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