GENRE: Gay Fantasy Spicy Romance
LENGTH: 53,866 words
RATING:

Telepathic private investigator Quentin Q. Quasar and his partner Nate Braddock are back. They accidentally stumble on a series of kidnapping/murders, and begin to investigate. Eventually, the kidnappers snatch a young man from an Interstate rest area, and Quentin and Nate hear his telepathic cry for help. Armed with that information, they contact their friend George Martin at the sheriff’s office, and manage to catch the kidnappers before they’ve killed the victim. The intended victim was on his way to Orlando to join his boyfriend -- also a telepath -- who’d recently moved there to take a job.

Meanwhile, Nate’s grandparents fly into Jacksonville from Chattanooga, so Quentin and Nate can drive them to a hospital in Ocala. Nate’s mother has been in a state prison for women located near Ocala, and has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. At the end of a series of hospital visits they encounter and capture the leader of the cult that Nate’s mother and stepfather belonged to. The cult leader and his wife, both of whom had jumped bail before their trials, had just administered poison to Nate’s mother, to keep her from making any sort of deathbed confession about the cult and its activities.

EXCERPT:
Note: may contain sexually explicit scenes of a homoerotic nature.

Quentin directed Nate to a long stretch of road. “Pull off the road, park under that tree, and kill the motor for a minute.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, please.”

“Okay.”

Nate followed Quentin’s instructions, and when the motor was silent, said, “Now what?”

“Now, we go into rapport and have a mental look around.”

“Why?”

“I want to see if there’s anybody about who isn’t asleep, and I’m particularly interested in the police. This area is known for occasional drag racing, and it’s not unheard of for the cops to be lurking about.”

{Oh!}

They slipped into rapport.

{What now, Q?}

{Now we look for signs of life in every direction. There’ll be too much background noise to the east of us, but let’s try that direction first, then work our way around the compass, clockwise. Okay?}

{You’re the expert in surveillance.}

{That’s what my clients pay me for: expert surveillance—among other things.}

With their minds linked, they reached out mentally toward the city, and immediately encountered so much mental static that it was impossible to distinguish any individual thoughts.

{This is like static on a radio, isn’t it, Quentin?}

{Yeah. That’s a good description. Let’s probe slowly around in a circle now.}

{Clockwise, right?}

{Yeah.}

They sat quietly in the car and probed to the south, immediately running into a band of static.

{What’s that, Quentin?}

{Orange Park, I suspect. Let’s keep moving.}

{Okay.}

The static grew less as their search neared the Middleburg area, and they even picked up bits of late night conversations here and there. Then, when they were mentally searching an area due west of where they sat in the car, they picked up a pair of mental voices that were so strong that they had to be nearby.

{Why’d you have to kill the other guy, Marv? We only needed one body tonight for the ritual.}

{What did you want me to do, Harv? Let the little fucker get away? That’s all we need right now.}

{What are we gonna do with an extra body then, Marv?}

{Dig the grave a little deeper and bury them together, Harv.}”

{She won’t like that, Marv. Not one little bit.}

{She don’t have to know about it, Harv.}

{She says that the wrong kind of body can mess up the ritual, Marv. She says the body has to be in a certain age range, and killed right here, in the grave, and nowhere else. If that can mess the ritual up, who knows what two bodies will do?}

{Fuck her, and fuck the ritual, Harv. I don’t believe in all that mumbo jumbo, I’m just in it for the money.}

{In that case, shut the fuck up, Marv, and start digging this grave a little deeper.}

They withdrew from rapport, and Nate said, “What the fuck have we stumbled on?”

“I don’t know, babe, but I think we need to get out of here. As soon as I mark our location in the GPS gizmo, I want you to start the car and ease carefully back onto the road… and whatever you do, don’t rev the engine.”

“You got it.”

Nate watched as Quentin dealt with the GPS device, then started the car as instructed, eased out onto the road, and didn’t turn on the headlights until they were some distance away.

“Be careful, babe. It’s kind of dark out here,” Quentin said.

“Yeah, but there’s just enough moonlight for me to see the centerline of the road, and we both know that there’s nobody on the road ahead.”