Free Darkness of the Soul by Kaine Andrews Page B

bond he was trying to tap into with Parker and Drakanis when Brokov tapped him on the shoulder and waved her other hand in front of his face.
    “Hellloooo? Anybody home?”
    Damien started and blinked a few times, trying to get his eyes to focus on her—the farsight always raised hell with his normal vision, even when it wouldn’t work. He smiled at her, reading the expression on her face—part irritation, part boredom—and jabbed a small mental needle in her direction to keep her sedate. Calm.
    No sooner thought than done, and the lines smoothed out in her face and the tapping on his shoulder turned to a caress.
    “Where were you, hmm? Not in your head, obviously,” she said with a mischievous smirk.
    “Sorry. Was woolgathering. Hard to think in here, too goddamn gloomy.”
    Though others had noted the same more than once as the afternoon dragged on and the guests came and went, he doubted anyone else was feeling it the way he did. Drakanis might be, but he was too unfocused to understand it. The rest of them were just plain blind. There was something there, some force, and it was deadening everything, making what was already a morbid affair into something with the atmosphere of a midnight mass. Damien still couldn’t put a finger on where it was coming from.
    Probably exactly why he’s doing it. This was true enough, he was sure. The killer was putting out this dead static over the psychic airwaves, knowing someone or something would be picking it up—another thing that drove Damien up the wall. Cops might not remember him, and the man on the street might not even know he existed, but whoever was doing all this shit knew there was something to be hiding from at least, and that was one step closer to finding him than Damien liked anyone to get.
    “You want to get out of here? It is pretty gloomy, and much as I liked the captain, I think I’ve said good-bye enough times.”
    Damien paused only for a moment; he’d prefer to stay there and see if he could pinpoint where that mental static was coming from, but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to tell until it was gone, and then it’d be useless anyway. Outside, at least, he might be able to get a better mark on Parker, and if things turned sour, he’d have a cover story.
    “Sounds like a plan.” He paused for a moment, pursing his lips and searching for the proper etiquette. In all his masks and years of deception, it sometimes became difficult to remember the basic niceties.
    “Hey, all these years, I never asked your first name. What is it?”
    Walking alongside him with her arm companionably pushed through his, she glanced up, smirking and arching a brow. “Hang out with a lady all night and don’t even know her name? Tsk-tsk. It’s Sheila, sweetie.”
    That name made him feel as though he’d been kicked in the crotch. He must have paled, or at least stalled his steps for a moment, because he could hear her asking if there was something wrong with that.
    Sheila. Of course, it would be.
    For a moment, Damien felt all of it trembling, all the work of the past years and all the possibilities he’d tried to lay out, each and every one of them quaking in their foundations, about to be toppled by one single mistake, one accidental overlap. He pushed it away, devoting all of his considerable will into pushing things back onto the right track and forcing himself to start moving.
    “No. It’s a beautiful name.” His voice sounded stilted and false to his own ears, but again, he stroked her mind with his, a brief nudge to knock her suspicion down a notch. She just nodded, grinning a little and almost leading him out.
    “Of course it is. It’s mine, isn’t it?”
    Today it is. But what was it last time, and what will it be next time? He wasn’t sure—not 100 percent—but all his mental alarms were ringing, and some of the old paranoid fantasies were creeping back in. No matter how many times he told himself to watch out for that sudden blow from around