“I have what was there,” she noted, “yes.”

  “Good,” Terk replied. “We’re trying to find a physical location for wherever this person is who is after us.”

  “He is close,” she said.

  Terk frowned. “Okay, we didn’t even know that much. Can you tell me more?”

  “I say that because I didn’t have to use much energy to communicate. They’re looking for a response from me right now. I would say that they’re probably here in town.”

  “You can tell whether the energy is local or not?”

  “Sometimes,” she admitted. “In this case, because it’s obviously not injured energy, it’s a much stronger signature. They’re close by. I’m sure of it.”

  “Good to know,” Terk said. “They are probably preparing for an attack then.”

  “That would be my take,” she murmured.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a job with us?” Terk repeated.

  “I don’t think so,” she replied, with a smile. “You guys won’t need as much healing as I normally offer.”

  “Did you always want to just heal?” Terk asked.

  “It’s what I do,” she stated simply.

  “And I get that,” he murmured. “Do you have to physically be with the patient?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, “but it was always much more convenient to just move from one patient to the next, rather than trying to always deal from a second apartment and people who didn’t understand.”

  “Right, so you did it knowing that people would ask less questions if you went to their site.”

  She nodded. “For the same reason, I always insist on complete anonymity and nobody can be around me while I’m working.”

  “And do people really let you do that?” Gage asked her.

  “It’s a condition of my work,” she murmured. “If they aren’t prepared for that much, they sure as heck aren’t prepared for the rest.”

  He smiled at that. “That is a good point,” he murmured. “I still think you should join the team.”

  “And again,” she repeated, “you don’t have enough work for me.”

  “I don’t know. We keep getting injured,” Gage replied, with a smirk.

  She laughed. “You know what? From that point of view, maybe so, but it’s really not where my preferred work would be.”

  “Got it,” Gage agreed, “but we’ll still work on you to get you to change your mind.”

  She smiled. There was definitely a growing sense of acceptance with these people, and that was huge. She didn’t even know what she wanted to do with her life right now because everything just felt so off. It was her own fault, but she was trying to disconnect from Rick, but, every time she tried, she ran into this damn resistance. She knew where it was coming from, but Rick had to make up his own mind. Still didn’t answer the issue of her own future.

  Just then a chiming sound came from one of the computers.

  “He’s here. He’s here in Manchester,” Tasha called out. “His email seems to have originated in London, but he’s not there.”

  “So this is a setup then, by someone who’s after me?” she asked, stepping closer to the computers.

  A picture flashed up on the wall.

  She stared at it. “Well, that’s the one who contacted me, though that doesn’t mean he’s the one after you guys.”

  “And yet,” Terk said, at her side, “what other connection would there be?”

  “You guys have no doubt made more than a few enemies in your time”—she smiled—“so maybe that’s for you to answer.”

  “I hear you.” Terk gave a clipped nod. “Still, I’m pretty sure that this is one of the guys we were looking for.”

  Sophia agreed. “Yes, it is. I found some phone numbers in common and a couple emails.” She held up one finger. “Oh, hold on just a second.” Her fingers flew over her keyboard. “Ha,” she said a moment later. “I have an address.”

  With that, everybody spun to look at her.

  “It’s only about ten minutes from here,” she murmured.

  “Yes.” Rick pumped his fist.

  “I presume that means you want in on this one?” Terk asked Rick.

  “Oh, hell yeah,” he replied, his hand on his heart. Yet he felt a stillness beside him. Recognizing something odd going on, he spun to see Cara staring at him. “It’ll be fine,” he told her.

  She shook her head. “No, it won’t be.”

  Stunned, he asked, “What is it you’re sensing?”

  She looked at Terk. “Surely you’re sensing it too.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I am.” He looked at Rick. “And I presume there’s no way we can convince you to stay back?”

  “Hell no, not in this lifetime.”

  His wording brought an audible gasp from Cara.

  His gaze locked on her. “Are you saying I’m in danger?”

  She nodded immediately. “Yes, you are. They know about you. I’m not sure they know about the rest of the team, but it’s you they are after.”

  “That’s fine,” he replied. “Then I’ll take them out.” He looked back at the others. “I’m assuming, as always, that the team will have my back?”

  “We will,” Damon agreed, “but are you sure about this?”

  “I’m sure. I can’t sit it out and let this fear do me in. And I get it. I understand that our best information suggests the possibility, or even the likelihood, of something very unpleasant heading my way,” he murmured, “but, if you guys were in my shoes, I’m pretty sure you’d make the same choice.”

  Wade nodded, as did Cal and Gage.

  “That’s fine,” Damon said, “but no Lone Ranger stuff. You’ve got to keep your cool.”

  Rick gave him a flat stare. “Who? Me?”

  “Yeah, you,” he drawled in exaggerated frustration. “We see it with you more than anybody else.”

  He shrugged. “No way, I’m a new man.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Damon argued, “but you’re definitely different.”

  With that comment still rattling around in his brain, and unsure what he should do with it, Rick turned to look at Tasha and Sophia at the computers. “Have you got the location up on the satellite?”

  Tasha pointed at the screen. “While you guys were all busy, talking and chest-bumping,” she teased, “we were working.”

  Just enough sarcasm filled her tone that everybody chuckled, as they came over and took a better look.

  “It’s not very far from that other house, where we found the dead guys,” Damon noted.

  “No, it isn’t,” Rick murmured, “and that’s a good thing. The bad guys are probably keeping everybody close.”

  “Keeping them close is one thing.” Terk studied the layout. “But how close is a completely different story.”

  They nodded but immediately started discussing plans.

  Rick deliberately corralled the insecurities bouncing around inside him. This was not the time to get a case of nerves. As much as he wanted it to be a sure thing, there was no such thing in life, as the team all well knew. And this mission wouldn’t be any different. When they finally had an agreed-upon plan in place, with Damon staying behind to manage communication central, and Terk on security watch, Rick, Cal, and Wade would go in. Gage would stay back since he’d been covering the latest security watch and needed some sleep so he could be of use soon.

  Satisfied with that, Rick said, “Everybody be back in five, prepped and ready to go.”

  “We’ll get the armory opened up,” Terk stated.

  Rick looked at him. “It’s still hard to believe that this is where we’re at now.”

  “Hey, I’m kind of liking it,” Damon admitted. “I’d go for this long-term, as well.”

  At that, Terk looked at his team. “You’ve all said that several times now. We’ll have to talk when we get back.”

  “Let’s wait until we have the whole team,” Damon suggested, “and that includes Brody. According to Cara, Scott could surface first and, with any luck, soon.” With that, he turned his gaze toward Cara, and then Damon disappeared.

  “Well, that was directed at me,” she murmured.

  “If you can keep an eye on our two members in the ethers while we’re gone,” Terk noted, “I could disconnect.”

  “Right,” she agreed. “You’ll need all your energy. Please keep Rick—all of them—safe.”

  “I will.” He nodded. “At least I’ll do my best. We might need your services, so please don’t disappear.”

  She frowned. “You know I can’t just be at your beck and call all the time, right?”

  Terk smiled. “I get it. I really do. But, in this instance, I know that you’ll be there. You and Rick haven’t managed to get things sorted out yet,” he murmured. “And you won’t go far before you do.”

  “Yet I’d like to,” she muttered.

  “Yeah, you might,” Terk noted, “but I also know that you can’t.”

  She glared at him. “It’s not nice to make fun of somebody who’s struggling.”

  “You are the last person to be struggling with that.” Terk gave her a wry look. “I know your heart is pure. Rick is just a little bit more of a slowpoke on these things.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “I saw some of his history.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t tell him that you know anything about that,” he murmured. “At least not yet.”

  She nodded. “If he doesn’t keep me in his life, I’ll never tell him.”

  Terk smiled. “Give him some time. He’s already there. He just needs to figure it out.”

  “Like hell he is there,” she said, with feeling. “He’s nowhere near ready.”

  At that, Terk laughed and headed away with the rest of the guys, as they each took care of their assigned duties.

  Cara watched them go, with huge misgivings. She came up behind Tasha and Sophia at the computers. “Do you mind if I watch?”

  “Not at all,” they said together.

  “We’ll be keeping track of all their vitals on satellite,” Tasha murmured.

  Cara took her spot slightly behind them. “Is it always like this when they go?”

  “When you’re new, it probably feels like a lot of commotion,” Tasha noted quietly. “Once you get accustomed to it, you realize they don’t take unnecessary risks.”

  “But they’re all angry right now, so how does that not interfere with their decision-making processes?” Cara murmured. “They’re all upset.”

  “Of course they are upset. Wouldn’t you be, if somebody you cared about was being targeted?” Sophia asked Cara.

  Cara sighed, understanding fully how much caring for people carried real risks with it.

  “Terk has been dealing with this since the attack that took them all out,” Tasha explained. “By himself for a time, all while trying to keep every one of the guys alive, until they woke up. So, if you ever get any information on that initial bloody attack on the team, let us know.” She added, “It took down more than just a few of us, and some went down for good.”

  Cara’s eyes widened at that. “I get it, and I’ll do what I can—but no guarantees that I find anything about the attack. That’s so not my wheelhouse.”

  “That’s the thing about life,” Lorelei said, coming up behind her. “There are no guarantees in life, and still we do the best we can.”

  Cara knew for sure that she could do one thing, and that was to help Scott and potentially Brody, but she might need more help with Brody. With that decision made, she got up and went back to her room, where she focused her mind on reading energies. However, it was not just the two unconscious team members she wanted to keep an eye on. It was Rick. She knew that Rick was close to deciding on his future relationship with her, but he was still a long way from where she needed him to be.

  She hadn’t made the decision to help him lightly, and she was really hoping it wasn’t a mistake, but it was coming down to crunch time. Even more so now that he was back out in the field, doing missions. If he could keep his focus and could keep his energy up, he would take the brunt of this mission, but she could do something to help minimize that, and, with that thought in mind, she proceeded to get some energy work done.

  *

  Rick felt good to have a weapon in his hand again. Nobody had even mentioned retesting to see if Rick was fit to carry one, and he appreciated that trust, since feeling like he was less than for the last few days had been rough. Now, with Wade and Cal beside him, they approached cautiously on foot.

  Darkness was just falling, which gave them a perfect presentation of how best to approach this house. It looked completely innocuous, nothing different than any of the many other houses around them. Rick looked over at his two partners. “Are we really believing this is the address?”

  “I would think so,” Cal murmured.

  “We certainly won’t take a chance and not check it out. No reason not to trust Sophia’s work,” Wade added.

  Rick agreed with that wholeheartedly, but it was a little hard to determine if this simple brownstone in the middle of a large piece of land had anything to do with the mess that they were working on. But he also knew that his team, these guys, every one of them, had come up against house after house, finding nothing but dead bodies.

  Rick had been at the latest one, where they’d also come upon a curious neighbor, who was even now under protection, apparently something that Terk would have to pay for. Rick sympathized with everybody involved. MI6 was more than furious at the littering of bodies all around their country, but it wasn’t Terk’s team’s fault, though nobody gave a crap about that.

  Blame wouldn’t be laid in a scenario like this, without other people feeling like something was going on that shouldn’t be. Rick and his team were doing the best they could, but certain scenarios couldn’t always be helped.

  Having that weapon just made Rick feel like he was ready and more prepared than he had been up until now. Rick searched the surroundings. “I’m not sensing anything.”

  “Neither am I,” Wade confirmed.

  Cal added, “Keep your energy low, just in case.”

  “Just in case of what though?” Rick asked.

  “We haven’t figured out what they did originally to take us out,” Cal murmured, “and, until we actually know what was going on, we can’t take a chance of them attacking us like they did before, since we don’t have anything in place to protect us.”

  Smiling broadly, Wade added, “Well, maybe you do, Rick, with Cara. Yet the rest of us? Not so much.”

  Rick shrugged. “I’m not sure what the deal is with Cara.”

  “Yes, you are,” Cal argued. “You’re just slow to acknowledge it.”

  Rick winced at that. “I gather everybody has an opinion.”

  “Everybody always has an opinion.” Wade’s soft laughter filled his voice. “What you don’t realize is that we’ve all gone through this to a certain extent, one way or another, before you. You’re just coming on board a little later than the rest of us.”

  “Right,” Rick agreed, “and it feels like I’m behind.”

  “That’s your insecurity talking,” Cal noted. “We didn’t all wake up at once and come back at full strength by any means. We came back one by one, each with different issues, all weaker than hell and all feeling the same way you are. Some handled it better than others.”

  Wade nodded. “So, you may be behind some of us, Rick, but you’re not farther behind than Scott or Brody. When they surface, they will have a lot more to catch up on. Will you consider either of them late or less than?”

  “Hell no. Okay, I get it,” Rick said. “The sooner we’re all back up and fully functioning, the better.”

  “But it takes as long as it takes,” Wade noted. “Recovering from this can’t be rushed. The stakes are too high.”

  “I was hoping that Cara would help Brody,” Rick shared. “Scott sounds like he’s doing much better, of the two of them.”

  “Well, I suspect she is,” Wade said. “She probably doesn’t want to make any promises that she can’t keep.”

  “Plus,” Cal reminded Rick, “while it appears she can do a lot, much of it still depends on Scott and Brody.”

  Rick nodded. “It must be hard to have those kinds of skills, knowing that, in the right circumstances, you can really help someone. But the other times? Realizing that some things just can’t be fixed has got to be gut-wrenching.”

  “The other thing is,” Wade added, “people are out there with a heavy need for somebody like her, and, once they discover her and her special skills, she becomes a target herself.”

  “Is that what you think is happening now?” Rick asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Wade admitted. “It is something that I had to question because, in that scenario, she’s in danger.”

  “I know,” Rick agreed. “Terk was wondering if she was really the target, not me, back at the apartment we shared to heal me. It’s possible certain people could be thinking that everybody on our team was alive because of her. And, if that were the case, she would become a huge target, and we don’t want that to happen,” Rick explained.

  “No, of course not, and none of this is easy on any of us,” Wade murmured. “None of us are back on our feet to the point that we can take on the whole world again. We do okay, but our stamina isn’t what it should be by any means. And our abilities are all over the map compared to what they were. Some different, some stronger. We’re having to retest and reassess everything.”

  Cal looked over at Rick. “I don’t suppose she can do anything for us, can she?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that. How close are you to being back to full function?”

  “Because of Terk, I’m doing as well as I am,” Cal noted, “but I’ll need weeks.”

  “Cara might be able to help,” Rick replied. “I don’t know what she might do versus what she’s willing to do,” he admitted, “and I really don’t understand the part about how much it takes out of her.”

  “Strange to even think of any of that, isn’t it?” Wade murmured.

  “More than you can even believe,” Rick shared. “It’s sure not what I expected to wake up with, straight out of a coma.”