The Phoenix Agency: Blind Spot (Kindle Worlds Novella) (The Devlin Brothers Book 1)
Text copyright ©2017 by the Author.
This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Desiree Holt. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original The Phoenix Agency remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Desiree Holt, or their affiliates or licensors.
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BLIND SPOT
The Devlin Brothers Series
Casegy Hagen
Hagen Novels, LLC
KENNEBUNK, MAINE
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Table of Contents
Blurb
The Phoenix
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Blurb
Lily Ashmore finally built the life she’s longed for, in the home of her dreams, and under a cloak of anonymity, until one afternoon when her clairvoyant powers rear their head and show her the abduction of a young girl. Desperate to prevent the crime, she pleads with the child’s mother to believe her only to have her efforts thrown in her face. When her vision comes to fruition, Lily becomes a suspect instead of a good Samaritan. Her focus is to clear her name and bring the young girl home.
Mason Devlin, after years of guilt and torment form the abduction of his young sister motivating his cause, has created with his brothers, Alegra, a special division of The Phoenix Agency focused on finding abducted children and returning them home. Hired by the victim’s family to bring a young girl home, his path collides with a local clairvoyant who claims to have seen her abduction. History and disastrous experiences propel him to expose Lily for the fraud she is, despite the primal attraction flaring to life between them, as he fights the clock to find the victim.
Despite a deep-seeded distrust, Mason is forced to turn to Lily for help when time begins to run out and details run cold. Can he save his charge without losing his heart in the process?
The Phoenix
The Phoenix Agency
They served their country in every branch of the military – Army Delta Force, SEALs, Air Force, Marines. We are pilots, snipers, medics – whatever the job calls for. And now as private citizens they serve in other capacities, as private contractors training security for defense contractors, as black ops eradicating drug dealers, as trained operatives ferreting out traitors. With the women in their lives who each have a unique psychic ability, they are a force to be reckoned with. Risen from the ashes of war, they continue to fight for those in need. They are Phoenix.
Prologue
Lily pushed her flip flop against the weathered slats of her nana’s porch setting the white, wicker rocking chair rocking. Staring out at the lush green tobacco fields with their thick leaves dancing in the breeze, she let the visions play out before her eyes.
It was the boy, always the boy.
Her boy.
He stood out as the tallest amongst his friends, and lanky to boot. His white t-shirt bore a long, brick-red stain from wiping out on his dirt bike in the clay-rich dirt on his way to meet his buddies.
He dragged a navy, Jansport backpack off his shoulders, threadbare in places from his habit of half-hazardly discarding it into the most convenient spot, sometimes in the dirt of the sand mounds he hung out on, on the rocks by the quarry, or under his bed with no care.
A shimmering image danced before her eyes, almost as if looking through a thin waterfall like the one she’d seen in that fancy hotel her parents had taken her to last summer, of the boy dragging out four Mountain Dew bottles and a Swiss Army knife.
They popped the tops and joked, and oh how she longed to hear his laugh. Her boy.
He shoved his unruly, black locks off his forehead and snapped open the knife.
Her heartbeat kicked up, knocking against her ribs making it impossible to take a deep breath.
He took the knife and sliced open the center of his thumb, the skin splitting apart, and blood rising out to the surface. His friends followed suit.
With sly smiles as though they’d just pulled off the greatest ruse imaginable, they held their thumbs together.
She wanted to be just like her boy.
Just after he swiped his thumb on his jeans, the image collapsed.
Soon, Jasmine, Ivy, and Sage would arrive. She’d be ready. She’d pack sweet tea and a paring knife Nana used to slice apples for her famous apple pie, and in the thick of the tobacco leaves, she’d perform the same ritual bonding her best friends with her forever.
Chapter 1
Lily Ashmore clutched the black, wrought iron railing as she stepped outside and glanced up at the brooding, gray sky. She let her eyelids fall closed as she sucked in a cleansing breath from the narrow concrete stoop of her row home on North Patomic Street in Baltimore. She smiled at the absence of the fireball in the sky, preferring gloomier weather since it meant less people to encounter in Patterson Park.
So far sunshine, heat, and intermittent blasts of humidity had dominated the month of October, urging her to stay indoors more often than not. Today though, she intended to make up for it by treating herself to two hours in the park instead of her usual one. She’d walk the figure eight and then as a reward, she’d park her behind on the concrete steps of the pagoda facing the two thick maple trees that she just knew, by now, had transformed into a breathtaking crimson flash of color.
She’d sit with her Kindle, enjoying the beauty and the words until her butt froze from the cool temps hovering in the mid-fifties.
A brisk breeze carried fallen leaves across the cracked sidewalk during her two-block walk to the park. The crunching of them under her leather boots was music to her ears. God, she loved it here.
She’d been born and raised in North Carolina, but something about the north called to her. The raw beauty of nature humbled her as it withstood the passing of the seasons: the rebirth each spring, the flourish of summer, the waning of autumn, and the dormancy of winter from which life would spring up new again. She loved the cycle; felt the changes to her core, as though she changed with the seasons, too.
And here, in her quaint section of Baltimore, in her brick row home, she’d scrimped for years to buy, no one knew what she was.
No one shot her scathing looks. No one moved away from her when she sat down. No one knew that from her hometown in the south, they’d condemned her as though she’d gained her gift by pawning her soul to the devil himself.
So she saw things. It’s not like she saw everything. Or at least, she tried like the devil, no pun intended, to not see everything. Hence, why she went out in times of gloom. Less people meant less visions. Less visions meant she’d have an easier time mustering up the willpower to keep her trap shut.
It’s also why she had gone into radio. She had the smoky voice suited to the airwaves, and as a hopeless romantic, she encouraged her late-night fans to call in and share their love stories with her and her thousands of
Love After Dark listeners. She didn’t have to see them or touch them. Instead, she let the sound of their voice and their stories guide her with the right song choice or the right piece of advice or encouragement. And maybe she tapped into her abilities a bit, too, but that was okay, it’s what made her good at her job.
Clairvoyant, they called it. She called it darn inconvenience of the highest order. Her own specialty—funny way of describing it, felt more like a curse to her—precognition and retrocognition. Of course, she excelled at the precognition aspect. But at one time, it was like being eight-years-old, and fifty pounds, trying to control a full-powered firehose.
Lily spent much of her childhood slapping her hand over her mouth, wishing she could ball up the visions, stuff them back down her throat, and drown them under a few healthy gulps of sweet tea. Especially when they cropped up so fast she had little more time than to get the words out before the vision came to fruition right before her eyes.
The phone is going to ring.
The water is going to spill.
Muffy is going to get hit by a car.
Mrs. Bigsby didn’t appreciate that one. Of course, in that instance, she hadn’t been pissed about Lily’s gift, just about the fact that she’d only said it in enough time for Mrs. Bigsby to see Muffy’s demise with her own two eyes.
Like it was Lily’s fault. That’s what leash laws were for.
And it’s not like Lily enjoyed witnessing Muffy’s death, no matter how many times the little bark-box nipped at Lily’s heels on the way to school.
She crossed South Linwood Avenue and into the park. Heading for the dog park area first, she smiled as she watched a black lab and border collie frolic behind the green, chain-link fence as their owners chatted on wooden benches.
Unable to make the commitment to a furry companion of her own, she lived vicariously through park goers instead.
Maybe someday.
She always told herself that, but the idea of seeing impending doom for a pet she committed to protect? No.
At least, not yet.
She picked up her pace to warm her muscles. Minutes later she found her stride and before she knew it, she passed the now-empty dog park again, her cue to hoof it to the pagoda because she had a date with a hard piece of concrete.
She opened her kindle to the latest thriller she’d been dying to read, Friend Request, and within minutes became engrossed in a whole other world.
Laura Marshall hooked her by page three. She’d made the outside world slide into oblivion by page fifteen. Around page forty, with her butt almost numb, the whine of a young girl tugging on her mother’s sleeve broke through the bubble Lily surrounded herself with.
Glancing up, she raised a brow at the way the eight, maybe nine-year-old, redhead whined. Her mother smiled, but didn’t given in, and instead gently reminded her daughter of the rules. Before Lily could finish hearing what she said, it was as if the frame froze, then rewound and the flashes played out.
Her retrocognition worked like an old VCR playing a worn-out tape. Lily sighed and went with it. After all, what more could she do?
Visions of the mother crying in her husband’s arms as she clutched an ultrasound picture danced before Lily’s eyes making her throat grow thick with sorrow.
She’d miscarried. Again.
The same woman jumping into her husband’s arms, wrapping her legs around his waist celebrating making it past the twentieth week with their twins.
Then the appointment where they were told one of the twins died and needed to be removed.
So much anguish for this woman. No wonder she had a world of patience for a whine that had Lily ready to hit the Pinot Grigio.
Lily glanced back down at her Kindle as the images faded away. Two sentences in, her kindle screen shimmered and there it was, the young girl, her thumb roaming over her cell phone, with no regard for the dark-haired man watching her from next to the oak tree across the street.
A mean smile split his lips as he exhaled the thick smoke from his cigarette. He flicked the butt onto the yard closet to him, licked his lips, and bolted across the street toward the girl as soon as the black Lincoln turned the corner heading right for them.
Lily’s heart raced as she choked on her breath.
The young girl never knew what hit her when he grabbed her ponytail, yanked her to him, and held a knife to her throat. The cell phone slipped from her slim, fair fingers before landing with a crack on the sidewalk.
Lily’s ears buzzed drowning out the pounding of her heart. She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
It took only a handful of seconds and he had the girl stuffed into the car and disappeared.
The vision danced away again leaving her sucking in a panicked breath. Goosebumps rose on her flesh, the hairs tingled along the nape of her neck.
The vision of the abduction reminded her of the partial glimpses she’d gotten of another abduction, one from so many years ago, one she had remained silent about. They’d never found that raven-haired girl and Lily couldn’t help but blame herself for remaining silent.
She choked down the sob that rose up in her throat and pushed off the concrete step and wandered in the same direction as mother and daughter, driven by a ball of regret.
She’d follow along and if the daughter disengaged from her mother long enough for Lily to speak to the mother, she would tell her what she had seen.
If the girl didn’t, maybe it was a sign to keep her mouth shut.
Either way, Lily drew the line at saying anything in front of the child.
She hated this, but had no options since she lived with a gift designed to torment her just as much as elate her.
She pulled her scarf tighter about her neck when the wind kicked up, sending a chill right through her despite the gray wool coat she’d chosen. She followed them for at least twenty minutes, until they headed out of the park, through a break in the trees to a green Volvo parked along the edge of South Patterson Park Avenue.
Just when Lily thought she wouldn’t get a chance, the girl ran back to the park edge to take a selfie in front of a copse of trees.
It was now or never.
She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans and jogged over to the car, turning back to make sure the girl was still occupied. “Hi. Look, I don’t have much time, I don’t want to upset your daughter, but I need to warn you about something.”
The woman narrowed her eyes, pinched her lips together, and looked Lily up and down as if she was a junkie that had just run out of the bushes at her. “Excuse me? I don’t know what you’re up to—”
Lily caught the woman’s daughter sliding the phone in her pocket out of the corner of her eye. She was running out of time. She curled her fingers into the jean material of the woman’s jacket. “I’m not up to anything. Listen, don’t let your daughter go out alone. I can’t tell you when, just don’t. She’s in danger.”
The woman wrenched her arm away and backed away with a wariness in her eyes. “You’re insane.”
“No, I’m…look, I had a vision. I saw it. I can’t pinpoint when, but it’ll be soon.”
The woman ran around the passenger side of the car along the edge of the park and pulled open the back door as she reached for her daughter’s sleeve. “Mara, get in the car. Now.”
“Mommy, why are you mad?”
Her mother hustled her into the backseat. “It’s okay, baby, you didn’t do anything wrong. Put your seatbelt on. Hurry now.” She slammed the car door and pointed a finger at Lily. “You stay the hell away from us!”
“Please, the guy has dark hair, he smokes, the car that picks them up is a black Lincoln.”
“You’re insane.” She yanked open her door and jerkily dropped into the driver’s seat.
Lily shot a hand out to catch the door before the woman could close it. She should have just let it go, but once she reached out, she had to see it through. She had to do whatever possible to stop this. “What does it cost you to trust me, ju
st in case?”
The woman paused for the briefest moment giving Lily a glimmer of hope that maybe she had gotten through and not made a complete fool of herself. The thing was, the minute the words came tumbling out, a sense of desperation swept through her. She needed to make this woman believe her. She needed to prevent that little red-headed girl from having her innocence shattered by the soulless man reeking of burnt tobacco.
She had no way of knowing what would happen once that little girl disappeared, but from the curl of his lip, he’d gotten far too much pleasure out of his work.
“Let go of my door or I’m calling the police.”
“Please—”
“No, damn you!” The woman screamed yanking her door shut narrowly missing Lily’s fingers. She started her car and peeled away from her space.
Lily swiped a hot tear away from her cold cheek and headed for home with images of Mara, no, she couldn’t use her name, it made it too real, with images of that girl flashing through her mind.
***
A week later it happened. She’d been avoiding the TV since her encounter, but when she’d gone in for her shift at K105.5, there with the play logs sat a stack of announcements and news stories broadcast throughout the day.
On the top, a special bulletin. Nine-year-old Mara Wilkins had been kidnapped from the sidewalk in front of her house earlier in the day.
An Amber Alert had been issued.
Police were following any leads they had gathered and encouraged the public to report anything suspicious, no detail was too insignificant. They were racing to find her in that first twenty-four-hour window.
She had failed. Lily had opened her mouth, and for what? None of it mattered. She gave a small smile to Nate, the night manager, as he passed by the door on his way to his office. Shutting the door to the booth, she took a seat in her chair and set up the main control board to cue in her opening score. She’d done this job for five years now, her fingers moved even as her brain disconnected from where she was and what she was doing, instead remaining locked in a loop of helplessness.