Patient Darkness: Brooding City Series Book 2 Read Free Page B

find Detective Bishop, right? You couldn’t have solved it without me!”
    That was exactly the problem. While Bishop had been grateful for the rescue attempt, just exactly how Brennan had learned of her location was still suspect. He had reported it as an anonymous tip, but he knew Sam suspected something, his outward nature notwithstanding. It seemed everyone was playing it close to the vest these days.
    “So you were thinking…what? You’d get the visions again if you relapsed into patches?”
    “Relapsed,” Greg scoffed. “You make it sound like I did it for the fix.”
    “Didn’t you?” Brennan asked. He gingerly lifted a bit more of the patch, exposing more afflicted skin in the process. His nephew inhaled sharply. “I wouldn’t blame you if that’s the case, but I need to know.”
    “No, Uncle Arty.” To his credit, Greg looked him straight in the eye as he answered. “I only wanted to be special again, to have visions like I did before. Without that, I don’t want the patches.”
    Truth .
    Brennan grunted. “Here, hold this up,” he said, passing the lifted side of the patch to Greg. He went to the kitchen and soaked a washcloth under warm water, then returned to the couch. “You said ‘patches,’ plural. Where did you apply the others?” he asked, pinching the raised patch between his fingers again.
    Greg reached to the hem of his shirt. “Mostly on my chest and—” He cut off in a howl of pain as Brennan ripped the remainder of the patch from his arm and quickly pressed the damp cloth against the open wound. Greg swore a steady stream of expletives as Brennan went to toss the toxic patch in the trash.
    “Just like ripping off a Band-Aid,” he said, cleaning his hands thoroughly in the sink. His fingertips just barely started to tingle where they’d brushed the patch. “I want to get you in to see a doctor tomorrow, too, and have him look at that arm.”
    “Whatever.”
    He shut off the tap and dried his hands. “Greg, listen to me. Maybe the patches were responsible for what you saw, but maybe they weren’t.”
    “You think people are just born special?”
    Brennan couldn’t reveal his own power. Not yet, at any rate. He had already told Greg about his past experience as a Sleeper, and his nephew had taken it surprisingly well. He could count the number of confidants privy to that secret on a single hand, and those others had all been Sleepers themselves. But the gap between being a Sleeper and being…well, something else, was still too big to bridge. Sleepers were generally accepted as boogeymen in Odols, walking the fine line between covert operatives and figures from folklore. He had been one of them, too, a long time ago. As far as Brennan knew, he was the only person who possessed a talent above and beyond a Sleeper’s standard set of skills.
    Until Greg, that is.
    “I think you might have a gift,” he said. He carefully kept excitement from creeping into his voice. “It’s not unheard of, after all. They have all those shows now about superhuman strength, endurance, telepathy—”
    “Yeah, but all of those people are fakes. It’s scripted, everyone knows that.”
    “Really? The psychic boy wonder is now arguing against the existence of psychics?”
    That got a grudging smile out of his nephew. “I’m not—No, I’m not saying that they don’t exist, necessarily. But what are the odds, really, that I’m one of them?”
    If it’s genetic, the chances are far greater than you think. “Anything’s possible,” Brennan said with a shrug. “How is your arm looking?”
    Greg peeked under the washcloth; his face paled a few shades. “It’s, uh, not pretty.”
    “Do you feel anything from the patch?”
    “Nothing good. Next to Chamalla, this stuff is shit.”
    “Eloquent,” Brennan said dryly. “Watch that mouth of yours.”
    “But you curse all the time!”
    “Yes. Yes I do. I also hunt down killers and spend more nights awake than not.” I also used to