by Hondo Jinx
A heavily tattooed brunette holding a Corona stepped into view, wearing black leather pants and a tight black tank top. She looked Brawley up and down and gave him a cocky smile.
Nina leaned into Brawley, frowning.
Remi simmered with confidence. She was undeniably, jaw-droppingly hot but also looked incredibly dangerous.
Her A+ rack strained against the thin fabric of her tight, black tank top, and her impressive muscles rippled, bringing to life the countless tattoos covering her body. There was something feral about her bright white teeth, dark irises, and the powerful grace with which she moved, and yet her face was strikingly beautiful in the classic sense, the type of beauty you see only once or twice in your life.
She was a study in contrasts, a bad girl with breeding, like a top model with royal blood who had given it all up to win a world title in MMA while shooting gonzo porn in her free time.
Remi sat down, putting an arm around Nina’s shoulders and pushing halfway onto her stool. “That wasn’t a trick,” she said, grinning at Brawley. “This is a trick.”
Remi slid the bottle of corona down the front of her shirt and pulled her hands away. Her full, round breasts trapped the bottle between them.
Brawley couldn’t help but stare as drops of condensation rolled off the bottle and trickled down Remi’s firm boobs like beads of sweat.
“Incredible, aren’t they?” Remi said, and gave her tits a squeeze. “But they’re not my trick. This is.”
Nina groaned.
Brawley slipped a comforting arm around her tiny waist but couldn’t look away as Remi squeezed her boobs, flexing and relaxing, flexing and relaxing. Each repetition worked the bottle up and up until its tip reached her bright red lips, which slid over the bottle and sucked.
Lowering her head, Remi deep-throated the longneck. Then she tilted her head back, and the bottle popped free of her mesmerizing breasts.
The bottle sunk deeper until only a few inches jutted from her mouth. The rest bulged in her pretty throat. Her lips gripped the bottle’s girth as she swallowed greedily, chugging beer. Foam drained from the corners of her mouth and ran down her throat and over her breasts, wetting the tight black fabric.
Still eyeing Brawley seductively, Remi gulped down the beer. Then she pulled the bottle from her mouth, wiped one muscular, heavily inked forearm across her wet, sexy mouth, burped, and threw back her head with rich laughter.
“Wow,” Brawley said. “That was quite a show.”
“I’m not done yet, handsome,” Remi said.
“Don’t, Remi,” Nina said. “Seriously.”
Remi shoved the bottle back into her mouth and—crunch—bit the longneck clean off. Then she started chewing.
Brawley couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d seen a guy once in a honky-tonk chew a piece of glass about the size of your thumbnail. But Remi had bitten off the entire longneck, and he could hear the shards snapping as her jaws worked. “What the hell are you doing, girl?”
Remi laughed again, and Brawley glimpsed a mouthful of glass and blood.
He grabbed Remi’s arm. It was smooth and hard with muscle, like a python. “Spit that shit out,” he said. “You’re cutting yourself.”
Remi pulled her arm free then took Nina’s drink, flicked the umbrella over one shoulder, and threw back the sweet-but-strong concoction. She swished the liquid for a few seconds and gulped it down.
Brawley winced. “That is not good for you.”
Remi laughed and stuck out her tongue.
Brawley was no stranger to trauma, but he winced at the sight. Remi’s tongue was all cut to hell and bleeding like crazy.
Only then it wasn’t…
Remi was watching him intently. Watching him watching her.
And he couldn’t stop staring. At her tongue, specifically. Because as he watched, the bleeding slowed and stopped. The terrible gashes shrunk and closed.
“You want to kiss it and make it better, lover boy?” Remi asked.
Brawley stared for a moment, second-guessing his eyes. “It’s already better.”
Remi swept his beer off the bar and chugged the rest. “You want to kiss it anyway?”
Nina slid off her stool and tugged Brawley’s hand. “Let’s go.”
“All right,” he said, pulling out his billfold.
“Pie and a burger,” the bartender said, coming toward them with his meal and the biggest damn piece of pie he’d ever seen. The meringue alone was tall as a ten-gallon hat.
He tugged Nina’s hand. “Your pie.”
“I’m not hungry anymore.”
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Remi said, pulling the pie toward her. “I’ll eat it all up for you.”
4
“That sucks,” Nina said as they left Blue Heaven. “I really wanted pie.”
“We’ll get you some,” Brawley said. “There are signs for it everywhere.”
Nina shook her head. “I lost my appetite. Let’s go back to my place and talk.”
“Sounds good. I got about a million questions.”
“Go figure,” Nina groaned. “Remi parked right next to me.”
Nina’s moped looked small and silly beside the huge, black Harley.
“What happened back there?” Brawley asked.
“Remi’s a pain in the ass, that’s what happened. We have history. She fucks with me every time I see her.”
“I’m talking about the bottle. Her tongue was all cut to hell, then…”
Nina straddled the moped. “She’s a Carnal.”
Brawley got on behind her and wrapped his hands around her tiny waist. Once again, her hair brushed the underside of his chin and the good smell of her filled his nostrils. “The Carnals. Sounds like a biker gang.”
Nina laughed. “Nope. Though Remi actually was raised by bikers.”
“I believe it. She seems like a tough chick.”
“The toughest,” Nina said, pulling away from the curb. “Where do I start? There’s so much to explain. I’ve never met a clueless twenty-three-year-old virgin.”
“Just give it to me fast and hard, down and dirty, and we’ll figure out the finer points as we go along.”
“You’re my kind of man, cowboy,” Nina said. “Okay, so there are seven orders of psi mages, each built around a specific strand of psionic power. You and I are telekinetic, so we’re force mages. That means we’re in the Order of the Unbound. Well, I am. You’ll have to register.”
Brawley didn’t like the sound of that. In his experience, most people were okay, one-on-one, but groups brought out the worst in them. And that went double for groups that required registration.
“Force mages include telekinetics, pyrokinetics, cryokinetics, electrokinetics, the list goes on and on. Bottom line, we reject the laws of physics and rewrite the rules. Hence ‘The Unbound.’”
“All right,” he said, and felt another little hiccup of reflexive incredulity, which he immediately booted. Second-guessing things at this point, after what he’d seen and experienced, would be stupid. Now was the time to learn the lay of this strange, new land. “What about the Carnals?”
“Carnals are flesh mages. They’re biokinetics. They manipulate organic structures all the way down to the cellular level. So they’re all super hot and strong and fast and a bunch of other stuff. They also tend to be a huge pain in the ass, as you probably noticed. Did I mention that I love pie?”
“Flesh mages,” Brawley said thoughtfully. “So, Remi healed her tongue just like that?”
“Just like that,” Nina said. “Carnals regenerate. Must be nice, huh?”
You’re not kidding, Brawley thought. Over the years, he’d been thrown, stomped, butted, hooked, plowed over, and tossed. Before breaking his neck, he’d broken both hands, both collarbones, his nose, half his ribs, several teeth, and his sternum. He’d racked up more concussions than an NFL team, dislocated his shoulders no fewer than twenty times, and torn both knees badly enough to require half a dozen surgeries. He’d punctured h
is lung, lacerated his liver, and taken a hoof to the sack that swelled his nuts to the size of grapefruit.
“Can I learn that to fix myself up like that?” he asked.
“I wish,” Nina said. “But no. Like I said, we’re Unbound. No Carnal tricks for us.”
“What if I joined them?”
“No can do. Technically, every psi mage has all seven energy strands, but we can tap one and only one. The others remain inert. So poor Brawley is stuck with only being able to rewrite the laws of physics.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining. I just like to know what’s possible. All right. So there’s the Carnals and us. Who are the other five orders?”
“Well, you have mind mages or ‘Benders.’ They’re telepaths and empaths.”
She swerved to avoid hitting a chicken strutting across the street. “Then there are truth mages. We call them Seekers. Some of them can see the future.”
Brawley nodded. He wasn’t sure he’d want that ability, not unless he could change the things he saw.
Nina said, “Tech mages—we call them Gearheads—can control machines. On the other side of the spectrum, you have the Beasties or beast mages.”
“They control animals?” he guessed.
Her hair brushed his chin as she nodded. “Control them—or become them.”
“That’s different,” he said. All of this was strange, but the idea of changing into an animal somehow seemed most far-fetched of all.
“It is different,” she agreed. “I have a friend, Vixie, who lives in a Beastie compound out in the woods. She’s a real fox. And I mean that in more than one way.”
Nina turned down a quieter, more residential street. “But if you think that’s weird, wait till you meet the arcane mages. We call them the Cosmics. See, psionics are like magic, right? But the energy we use comes from within, not without. Cosmics are different. They use their psionic power to draw on external energy sources, like mana, and to do crazy shit like open gates to other universes.”
“That sounds like a bad idea,” Brawley said.
“It is,” Nina said. “And it’s illegal now, thanks to the Order.”
“The Order?”
“Yeah, they’re kind of like our government, I guess, but maybe more like a police force. They take the best from each order, kind of like a psionic Delta Force, and solve big problems, like conflicts between orders or rogue psi mages.”
Brawley nodded, taking it all in. He believed her, believed every word, but it was still hard to accept all this hocus-pocus bullshit. “How many people are psi mages?”
He felt her shoulders shrug against his chest. “Lots,” she said. “More than you’d guess. A million in the US, maybe more.”
Brawley whistled. “That’s an awful lot. How come I’ve never heard of them?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard stories of weird things happening and people with strange abilities. Those stories are largely bullshit, but some are true—much to the chagrin of the Order. They make sure we keep a low profile. If the fuggles found out about us—”
“Fuggles?”
“Fucking Muggles,” she laughed. “Normals. Norms. Normans and Normas. If they ever knew about us, they’d try to wipe us out. And that wouldn’t be good for anybody. So the Order is really strict. No fucking with the fuggles. Ha—that sounds like a TV Show, doesn’t it? ‘Tonight on Fucking with the Fuggles, Gearhead prankster Fred hacks his fuggle boss’s computer, and hilarity ensues.’”
Now it was Brawley’s turn to laugh. What a surreal situation.
“But seriously,” Nina said. “We’re not supposed to use our powers around the fuggles. Let alone on them. If you do, they send someone like Remi after you.”
“Not sure I’d mind her coming for me.”
“Very funny, wiseass. Trust me, you don’t want her on your trail.”
Remi didn’t strike him as a cop. “What is she, a bounty hunter?”
“I prefer to think of her as a professional pain in the ass, but yeah, she tracks people down for a living. Us and Fuggles. She has a bail bonds place on the other side of the island. And if I never see that place again, it’ll be too soon.”
“What did you do?”
“Tact, cowboy. You’re not on the farm anymore. You don’t just go asking impolite questions to a civilized lady like me.”
He laughed. “You don’t seem too delicate.”
“I’m not,” she said, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not talk about Remi or our history.”
Nina pulled into a narrow driveway between two stubby bungalows half hidden in tropical foliage and parked alongside a wooden fence overgrown with flowering vines. They went through a gate into a tiny backyard dominated by a small swimming pool.
Moonlight rippled off the surface of the pool. Otherwise, it was surprisingly dark and private in the little backyard.
“Home sweet home,” she said, and led him through a slider into the bungalow.
Nina flicked on the lights, revealing the tiny cottage’s bright interior. The high-vaulted main room had a loveseat, a short shelf crammed with books, and a freestanding record player overtop a cubby packed with vinyl.
To the left, a small table and two chairs dominated a claustrophobic kitchenette. Further along the wall was a bathroom.
Against the far wall, a ladder led to a small, A-shaped loft. He could see the edge of a queen-sized mattress that fairly filled the sleeping nook.
Everything was bright and clean and surprisingly understated.
“Three hundred and fourteen square feet of heaven,” Nina said. “Good things come in small packages. Want a beer?”
“Sure,” he said, following her into the kitchen, where she handed him a Coors Light and grabbed a wine cooler for herself.
He thanked her, and they went back into the main room and sat on the loveseat. She folded her legs underneath her and let her leg flop against his thigh again.
“This is a nice place,” Brawley said. “Not what I expected, but…”
Nina laughed. “And what did you expect? Some super secret psychic training lab?”
He took a pull off the beer. “I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. You don’t look like someone who’d live here. I don’t picture a girl with purple hair and combat boots living on page 39 of the Pottery Barn catalog.”
“What?” Nina’s mouth dropped wide open. She tried to look offended, but her smile ruined the effect. “Did you think I lived in a mosh pit?”
He shrugged. “Something like that.”
“Don’t judge a book by its cover. Or by its name… Brawley.” She drew out his name, teasing him. “What if I heard your name and saw your cowboy boots and just assumed you lived on a ranch?”
“Then you would assume correctly, darlin,” he said.
“Hmm,” she said, and lifted her wine cooler to her grin. “So you’re all predictable and boring, huh?”
“Boring’s my middle name,” Brawley said.
“Yeah right,” she said. “So on this ranch of yours, do you ride horses and do cowboy shit?”
“I do.”
“Do you throw lassos?”
“Yup.”
“Do you… what’s that phrase? Punch doggies?”
He laughed. “I do.”
“What’s that mean, anyway, punching doggies?”
“Tact, punk rocker. You don’t just go asking a man about punching doggies.”
Nina threw back her head and laughed. It was a pretty sound, wild and girlish and genuine. “I think maybe I like you, cowboy.”
He held out his beer. “Well, I’ll drink to that because I think maybe I like you, too, punk rocker.”
They clinked their bottles. For a second, they just sat there, smiling, neither one of them saying a thing. Then Nina looked at his shirt and frowned.
Following her gaze, Brawley saw that blood had soaked through his white t-shirt, striping his chest in crimson. “That’s where the damned cat scratched me. You’d think s
he would’ve been grateful after I pulled her out of the ocean.”
Nina’s mismatched eyes lifted from his chest to his face, and a severely cute grin lit her face. “Never underestimate the dangers of a wet pussy.”
Brawley laughed again. It felt good. He hadn’t laughed this much since getting out of the hospital, that was for sure.
Nina finished her wine cooler, stood, and bent to place the empty on the little coffee table, giving Brawley a perfect view of her peach-shaped ass and toned hamstrings.
Then she straightened up, turned to face him, and gestured for Brawley to stand. He would’ve missed the view if she hadn’t looked so delicious from the front, too.
He dragged his boots off the table, set his beer when they’d been propped, and stood looking down at this gorgeous girl, who was grinning playfully up at him.
He reached out to touch her, but his hand hit an invisible wall an inch from her shoulder.
“No shit,” he said. “You’re doing that?”
“I am,” she said. “You cracked your power strand tonight,” she said, “but you haven’t opened it all the way yet. There’s a lot to learn, and I’ll be happy to teach you.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I’ll teach you to recognize and draw the energy within you, how to shape it, how to reach out and grab the world by the balls.”
As she said this, an invisible hand goosed his crotch.
“You know the best way to open your power strand wide open, cowboy? Find a nice telekinetic girl and fuck her cross-eyed, that’s how.”
5
Brawley reached for her again. This time, her invisible gate opened for him.
He flattened one hand against Nina’s back and drew her toward him. The fingers of his other hand slid up the back of her neck and plunged into the purple locks.
Their mouths met, kissing softly at first then faster, harder, their tongues playing as their hands moved over each other, exploring.
Nina peeled the bloody t-shirt over his head, he untied her bikini top, and just like that, they had stripped to the waist.
Taking Nina by the shoulders, Brawley stepped back, held her at arm’s length, and marveled at her naked perfection. Her perky breasts were large for her petite body but alluringly harmonious with her peach-perfect ass, which flared out lushly from her minuscule waist. “You are a beautiful woman,” he said, meaning it.
