Protector Unmatched, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Book Description
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About the Author
Copyright
Protector Unmatched
Stealth Guardians #6
Tina Folsom
Book Description
When a psychic vision warns Pearce that he’ll die at the hands of the human woman Daphne, he goes after her to try to change his future.
After a career as a hacker and several brushes with the law, Daphne is trying to go straight as a cybersecurity analyst. But when her brother gets in trouble with a loan shark, she’s forced to draw on her skills to wipe out his debt—an action that puts her in the path of the Stealth Guardians and their archenemies, the Demons of Fear.
What starts out as a mission to prevent Daphne from killing Pearce turns into a race against time to stop the demons from obtaining the key to certain annihilation of the Stealth Guardians and mankind.
* * * * *
Protector Unmatched (Stealth Guardians #6)
Copyright © 2019 by Tina Folsom
* * * * *
1
“You’ll be murdered!”
At the words, Pearce spun around, hair dripping wet, feet bare, and nearly dropped the towel he’d been about to remove from where it covered his naked skin from waist to knees. He held the damp towel in place and stared at the intruder.
It was an unwritten rule at the compound that nobody entered a warrior’s private quarters without invitation. In the many years that he’d lived in Baltimore, nobody had ever intruded his privacy. Even though there were locks on the doors, nobody ever used them. What would have been the point? A Stealth Guardian could walk through walls and doors as if walking through air, thus rendering locks useless. However, the human wives of his compound comrades were another matter—they didn’t possess the abilities of their preternatural husbands. Same went for the female psychic in their midst. Although she had supernatural skills, walking through walls wasn’t one of them. Hence she’d simply opened the door—without invitation and, apparently, without knocking first.
“What the fuck, Winter?” he growled at her.
Brushing away the reprimand as if she didn’t care, Winter approached. “Didn’t you hear me, Pearce? You’re going to get stabbed!”
“Yeah, I believe it. Just as soon as Logan finds you in my quarters!”
Winter’s mate, his fellow Stealth Guardian Logan, was a fiercely possessive man and skilled with his deathly dagger. If he found Winter in Pearce’s rooms, wearing a bathrobe over her flimsy nightgown, with Pearce half-naked to top it all off, there’d be hell to pay. At best, Logan would beat the crap out of him; at worst, he’d use his dagger, a weapon that could kill even an immortal, to inflict real damage.
“Are you out of your fucking mind, coming here? What if Logan finds you in my rooms?”
She made a dismissive hand movement. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. He’s in the shower.”
“Yeah, so was I,” Pearce said dryly, making a corresponding motion with his free hand, the one not currently clutching the towel. “And now, I’d like to get dressed.” He pointed to the door. “Without an audience.”
“You don’t understand,” Winter continued, her voice laden with frustration. “It’s not Logan who’s gonna kill you, but Daphne.”
Water dripped into Pearce’s eyes, and he wiped his hand over his face and brushed his wet hair, which was in need of a trim, back. “Who the fuck is Daphne?”
“The woman who killed you in my vision.”
“You had a vision about me?”
She let herself fall onto the couch and sighed. “Finally, you’re getting it. If you’re that slow on the uptake, no wonder you’re gonna get killed.”
Pearce rolled his eyes. “You could have led with this.”
“With what?”
“The fact that you had a vision. And with knocking first.”
“Well, sorry for being concerned, but my visions are never wrong.” She rose with a huff. “But if you’d rather run into danger without being prepared, be my guest.” She headed for the door.
“I’m sorry, Winter. Don’t go.”
At the door, she hesitated, then turned slowly. “So, you believe me now?”
“I never said I didn’t believe you. I just wasn’t pleased about your mode of delivery. It’s not every day that a man finds out he’s gonna be murdered.”
“Stabbed by a Stealth Guardian dagger, to be exact,” she said. “By a woman!”
“A female demon,” Pearce corrected her.
Winter shook her head, though the motion was hesitant. “I don’t think so. I can’t say for sure, but I think she was human.”
“What makes you think that?”
“She had an injured arm. The wound was bleeding. Red.”
“No green blood? You sure about that?” There were two ways of recognizing a demon. One was their green blood. “And her eyes? Were they green?”
“I couldn’t tell the color, but they didn’t glow poison-green like I’ve seen in other demons.”
And Winter had encountered demons, more than she’d ever wanted to. Luckily, she’d survived the ordeal. If any non-Stealth Guardian could recognize a demon’s green eyes, then it was Winter.
Pearce contemplated Winter’s words for a moment. “She could have worn colored contact lenses.”
“Could have, but that still leaves the bleeding arm.”
“Hmm.” The risk to be eventually killed by a demon came with the territory of being a Stealth Guardian warrior. But being killed by a human? “How do you know her name?”
“You called her Daphne, before she stabbed you in the chest. You knew her.”
Pearce shook his head. “That’s impossible. I don’t know anybody named Daphne.”
“You did in my vision.”
He searched his memory, but he was certain that he knew no woman named Daphne. “What else? Where will it happen?”
Winter looked as if she was about to shrug, but then thought better of it and raised her head as if suddenly remembering something. “Actually, it was weird. It looked like a backstage area of a theater or a movie stage—you know, where they film TV shows. It looked like a set for some sort of medieval show or play.”
“A film studio?”
“Yes, or a theater.”
“Tell me more about the woman,” Pearce demanded.
“Not sure what to tell you about her.”
“Age, hair color, size, ugly or pretty, thin or fat, you know.”
Winter looked into the distance as if to recall the image. “She was maybe in her thirties, but then, I find it hard to guess women’s ages. Let’s just say she was over twenty-five and probably under forty. Nice looking, not skinny, but muscular.”
“Butch?”
Winter rolled her eyes. “Men! No, not butch; she just looked like she took care of herself, like she works out and eats right. She was pretty, too. Long black hair. Kinda cute.”
“Oh great!” Pearce said with a good dose of sarcasm. “Not only will I be killed by a human woman, but by a cute one. That’ll make it all right. Wouldn’t wanna go to my death staring at the face of an ugly woman.” He sighed. “Sorry, go on. What else do you remember?”
“She wore strange clothes.”
“What?”
“Actually, more like a costume. You know, like a female superhero.”
“That makes no sense.”
Winter shrugged. “You weren’t dressed any less strange. You wore some sort of medieval uniform. You know, as if you were both dressing up for a Halloween party.”
Pearce shook his head. “I don’t go to Halloween parties. Anything else you noticed?”
“One thing was really weird.” She hesitated.
“What?”
“You didn’t fight back.”
“Excuse me?”
“When she stabbed you, you just stared at her as if you wanted her to do it.” Winter let out a nervous chuckle. “Maybe I just imagined that. But your expression, the way you looked at her… It was odd. You didn’t look like you were angry at her or saw her as an enemy. Almost as if you trusted her.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Maybe it does,” Winter said. “She could be some sort of Mata Hari who’s putting the moves on you, seduces you, and then betrays you.”
“Oh, please! As if I’m stupid enough not to recognize when a woman tries to use me. I’d never fall for that. Besides, I don’t even know anybody named Daphne.”
“Which is a good thing, because it means you can still change the future.”
He nodded. “You’re right. I have to eliminate the threat.”
Winter swallowed hard. “Eliminate? That’s not why I told you about the vision. I don’t mean for anybody to get hurt.”
“Winter, you should have learned by now that somebody is always gonna get hurt.” And a threat had to be eliminated before it was too late. “Better my would-be killer than me.”
“So what are you gonna do?”
“I need to figure out who she is.” And he had an idea how to accomplish that task. “Would you recognize her if you saw a photo of her?”
Winter furrowed her forehead. “But you just said you don’t know anybody named Daphne. And now you have photos?”
“I don’t, but the DMV does.”
“There must be thousands of Daphnes in all the DMV databases in the U.S.”
“We’ll start with Maryland. There can’t be that many. It’s not a very popular name. And we have parameters to limit the search: a female with black hair aged between twenty-five and forty.”
“I wouldn’t limit the search to black hair only. What if she dyed her hair?”
“Good point. Still, there can’t be that many women named Daphne. Meet me in the command center once Logan has left for his assignment. I’ll run the search in the meantime, and then we’ll go through the photos.”
Winter nodded. “Fine.”
As she turned to the door, Pearce said, “And Winter…”
She looked over her shoulder. “Yes?”
“Not a word to the others about your vision. Not even to Logan. I don’t want anybody to know before I can figure out what we’re dealing with here. Agreed?”
“For now, fine. But once we know who she is and why she wants to kill you, we need to talk to the others.”
“One step at a time,” he said, and watched Winter leave his quarters.
Once he knew who this woman was, he’d do what needed to be done.
2
It was midmorning when Winter finally entered the command center, where Pearce sat in front of a bank of computers.
“What took you so long?” He didn’t want to sound accusatory, but he was impatient. It didn’t happen every day that he found out he was going to get murdered. He looked over his shoulder.
“Sorry,” Winter said, lowering her lashes as she approached.
Pearce stared at the golden shimmer that covered her face. In fact, even her neck and every part of skin that was exposed exhibited the same sheen. In disbelief, he shook his head. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Winter sat down in the chair next to him, but didn’t look at him directly. “What?”
“Oh, please.”
Finally, she met his gaze. “What was I supposed to do? Logan got a call that his meeting was delayed a couple of hours. So, he was free.”
“Sure he was,” Pearce said dryly. Free to make love to his wife the Stealth Guardian way, pouring his virta, his life force, into her to heighten her arousal, giving her an orgasm every time he touched her. And as long as his virta coursed through her veins, she would shimmer golden. With four of the warriors at his compound now bonded, Pearce thought he’d gotten used to seeing their women walk around with the telltale golden shimmer every so often. But for some reason, it still jolted him. After leaving his parents’ home and moving into a compound, surrounded by single men and one Stealth Guardian female, he didn’t have to deal much with that particular sight.
“If I’d said no, Logan would have known that something was up.”
Pearce rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure, that was the reason you let him drag you back to bed.” He sighed. “That man of yours is insatiable.”
Winter smiled. “He is.”
Clearly, his admonishment went right over her head. Lost cause!
“Well, you’re here now.” He pulled up a window he’d been working on earlier and directed Winter’s gaze to it. “I’ve already narrowed the search down.”
“Wait. What did you do?”
“I went into the census. Since 1880, more than thirty thousand girls were named Daphne in the United States. The name was most popular in 1962.” He glanced at Winter. “There were over eleven hundred babies named Daphne that year. But any Daphne born back then would be too old now. You said she was maybe in her late twenties, early thirties?”
“Yes, but I’m horrible at guessing another woman’s age, so you’d better do a wider search. Maybe from twenty to forty, just to be safe.”
“Okay, no problem.” He switched to another window that showed the Department of Motor Vehicle database for Maryland. He’d hacked into it earlier and left himself a back door to easily get back in. He started typing in his search criteria. “Let’s see: female, age twenty to forty, first name Daphne.” He hit the enter button and watched a little wheel spinning.
“There shouldn’t be too many, right?” Winter asked. “Even if there were a thousand Daphnes born each year for twenty years across the U.S., they can’t all live in Maryland. I mean, it’s a small state.”
“True. But we can’t be certain that she’s from Maryland, or that she has a driver’s license here. If there are no viable hits here, we’ll have to go through the neighboring states’ DMV databases. But let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.” There was no need worrying about something that might not be an issue.
Ding!
The computer chime indicated that the search was done.
“Fifty-four records,” Pearce read. “You said she had black hair. We could narrow the search further.” He was about to type something when Winter stopped him.
“I wouldn’t do that. It could be dyed, and her DMV record could show a different color.”
“Good point. Then let’s go through the records.” He turned the screen a little so that Winter had a better view of it. “Can you see?”
“Yes. Let’s do it.”
Slowly, Pearce pulled up the driver’s licenses of the women in the search results. The first woman was black.
“Eliminate all black women,” Winter said immediately. “She was definitely white.”
“Okay.”
The next photo showed a white woman. Winter leaned in closer. “No, she was way prettier. And her face wasn’t round. Next.”
With every photo, she made other comments that eliminated woman after woman. The possibilities dwindled fast.
“Wait,” Winter suddenly said, and pointed to a photo. “This one looks a little like her, but her hair is all wrong. Can you save that one and we look at her again?”
Pearce nodded and pasted the woman’s record into a separate folder. “Done.”
Five records further and Winter stopped him again. “She looks familiar. But the hair is too short. It makes her face look so different. But if her hair were longer, it could be her.”
“Okay, I’ll put her in the saved pile.”
They had only ten more records to go through. Several of those belonged to African American women, one to an Asian woman, and one to a woman who had a kiwi-sized birthmark on one cheek.
“Nope,” Winter said.
The rest looked nothing like the woman Winter had seen in her vision.
“Okay, back to the two we saved,” Pearce suggested, and opened the file, then placed the two driver’s licenses side by side.
“Hmm.” Winter tilted her head. “Both have some of the same features as the woman in my vision. Shape of the face, nose, chin—all of it looks very familiar. Of course, they both look a little younger, too. And the hair is tripping me up. Neither one has the same hair as the Daphne I saw. And it’s so hard to imagine what they would look like with long black hair. It could be either one of them. Sorry.”
Pearce nodded. “No worries. The photos were probably taken about ten years ago. We’ll just have to go and visit them both to see what they look like now.” He checked the driver’s licenses again. “Let me run a couple of additional searches on these two to see where they work and whether they still live at the address on the license. Then we’ll head out.”
“We?”
He turned his head to meet Winter’s surprised look. “Of course we. You’re the only one who’s seen the woman. You’re the only one who can identify her.”
“Can’t you just go and take a picture of the two and then come back and show me?”
“It’ll be easier to identify the woman if you see her up close. A picture can distort things. It’s not as reliable. And we need to be sure.” Because if this woman really wanted to kill him, then he might have to take drastic steps and eliminate her before she could do him any harm.
“But Logan doesn’t like it when I leave the compound,” she said.
