With relief he turned to Terk. “I want you to stay here too.”
“Oh, hell no,” Terk snapped. “Don’t give me that shit.”
“I’m only running with half senses,” Damon said. “You’re the only one who’s got your senses left and alive to function with. You find a way to get my damn senses back, and it’ll be different then. She’s right. There’s got to be one of us standing at the end. One of the two of us has to be left, and, since you’re protecting the team, you are it. And it’s got to be me as part of this sting.”
The two men glared at each other, but it was hard to argue with the common sense Damon had put forth. Nobody liked what was happening, but, until they got more team members back, this is just where it was at.
“You know I’m right,” Damon stated. “As much as I don’t like it, it’s what we have to work with.” He was already collecting the stuff he needed, and, as he walked over to the table, he snatched the truck keys, shot a look at both of them, and ordered, “Stay here.” And, with that, he returned his attention to getting ready.
She glared at Terk. “You can’t always protect me,” she murmured.
His lips twisted into a half rueful and half tender smile. “We almost lost so many,” he replied quietly. “You need to allow yourself to be protected.”
She fisted her hands on her hips and glared back. “I lost them too.” Tears choked the back of her throat. “You need to let me help.”
“Agreed.” Terk nodded. “So please do what you can—from here. Doing what you do. Tracking. We’ve got trackers on the truck. We’ve got trackers on Merk. Please follow them. Give me the satellite feed and let me know if anything’s there. At least then I can tell Merk if he’s walking into a problem.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Is that because of your normal senses or because you’re twins?”
“Both,” he noted. “Twins always have a special relationship, and my abilities just made it that much easier.”
“How is it that you have these special skills and he doesn’t?” she muttered.
Damon heard the bulk of their conversation as he geared up; then he bolted out to the truck. He left them to their discussion, and, as much as he wanted to be part of it, he needed to head out and to see if they could catch this asshole who was trailing Merk. As soon as Damon was out of the parking lot, he contacted Terk on his phone, propped it up on the dashboard, and asked, “So did you come up with the location?”
“I did. Sending you the address right now.”
As soon as he punched it in, he looked at the GPS map as he drove toward it. “It looks pretty protected,” he noted cautiously.
“It is, but it’s also deserted right now. The company is off on a trip for team building or some such thing,” he noted, disgust in his voice.
Damon barely held back his own grin. “You know that a lot of corporate places do that.”
“Right, so they shut down the entire company for it,” Terk snorted. “How on earth is that productive?”
“Who knows? Maybe they all needed a break?”
“Well, the corporate buildings are empty. The parking lot is empty, and a few company vehicles are parked in the lot, so you should find lots of space there.”
“A little hard to hide though.”
“Not so much,” he noted. “They have a vertical parking area you could get in, and they’ll have to go hunting to see where you are.”
“Got it,” he replied. “Where’s Merk?”
“On the second level already.”
“In hiding?”
“Waiting,” Terk clarified. “I’ve got him on the other phone, and, so far, he’s not seeing anything.”
“No, he won’t see it. You know they’ll come in without any warning. And you know as well as I do that, although they sent a hired assassin to take out Wilson and Mera, they used something much more powerful to take out our team. So Merk could be getting either of those coming at him.”
“I don’t think they’ll expect him to have any skills, but we’ve already considered that fact.”
“Can you protect him?”
“I’ll do my damnedest,” Terk said. “My brother has always been special in many ways. But he’s never really been able to handle this energy work.”
“No, but he has accepted it and you, and that’s worth everything.”
“It always is,” Terk replied quietly. “But we’ve never really discussed it in any detail, so I don’t think he understands what we do exactly.”
At that, Damon snorted. “Who the hell does? Sometimes I don’t understand it myself.”
A ghost of a smile was in Terk’s voice when he laughed. “True enough, and we’ve been getting stronger all the time.”
“Do you suppose that’s why they took us out?” he murmured. “Were they afraid of us? Of what we could do? If they could control us?”
“I think it’s a good possibility.”
“How did they know?”
“I don’t know.” Terk paused. “I hate to say it, but it keeps crossing my mind that we potentially had somebody leaking information.”
“Are you saying we had a mole?”
“I think that’s a strong word to use because I’m not sure this person knew they were being used.”
“That makes it even harder. Surely you don’t suspect Tasha?”
“No, I don’t, and she’s pretty bloody angry at whoever did this to all of us.”
“But then she would be, if she thought she had been used to hurt those she cares about.”
“It could also have been done under the guise of it being part of their job. So they wouldn’t realize they had done anything wrong.”
“It sure as hell better not be any of us,” Damon muttered, “but I can see that they might have tried that.”
“The other possibility is that we were bugged.”
“Did we ever really have those kinds of discussions in the office?”
“No, not really,” Terk said thoughtfully. “But I’m at a loss to explain how else.”
“Was anything else bugged?” he asked. “Like, I know it sounds foolish, but we’ve got trackers on us now. Did we have anything on us back then that might have given them audio?”
“I would hope not,” Terk replied, his voice turning distant. “And I’m not getting any sense of that.”
“Well, keep it in your thought process as we head into this mess right now because we’ll need to know just where that leak came from. And I don’t know if there’s any way for her to tell, but you might want to ask Tasha to look into it.”
“I will. You take care of yourself.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I’m already in the car park. Several vehicles are here, so I’m wondering if they all got picked up on a charter bus or something.”
“That’s exactly what they did. That’s another reason why it’s a good place to park because nobody knows what’s going on.”