by Hondo Jinx
“Warn me… or worse. These guys play for keeps.”
Brawley felt a twinge of cold rage in his heart. He’d blow the son of a bitch’s psionic brains out the back of his skull. “Where is the bastard?”
“Don’t even think about it,” Nina said. “Junior might look like a douche bag—hell, he is a douche bag—but he’s a powerful telekinetic. And really mean.”
Brawley let his fingers brush across the pistol hidden in his waistband. “I won’t take him lightly.”
“This still might blow over,” Nina said. “What just happened with Gordo? Junior won’t want that getting out. But if we hit Junior, his father will find out and will get involved, and then we would be good and truly fucked. The psi mob has Seekers and technopaths and can call in a Bender if need be. We wouldn’t stand a chance. The best thing to do is lay low and hope Junior forgets all about us.”
They turned onto Fleming, strolled past a book store and a strip club, and entered a quieter, residential block.
“In the meantime, I’ll ask Sage to cloak us,” Nina said, slipping her hand into his. “Thanks for pulling my ass out of the fire back there.”
Brawley gave her a quick kiss. “Anybody lays a hand on you, darlin, he’s going to wish he hadn’t.”
When they reached the library, Nina started for the steps. “Come on. This is where Sage works.”
“Not yet. I still have to check out.”
They walked a few more blocks, and he recognized the long porch of Eden House. As they were crossing Fleming, an incredibly loud engine roared to life.
“Oh shit,” Nina said, dropping into a crouch beside an airport shuttle idling at the curb. She yanked on Brawley’s hand, and he squatted down beside her.
A second later, a black Harley pulled out of the side lot and roared away down the street—but not before Brawley glimpsed the bike’s gorgeous, heavily tattooed rider.
“Ugh,” Nina said. “Fucking Remi. Texas is sounding better every minute.”
“Now you’re talking my language, little lady,” Brawley said, and they went inside.
“Mr. Hayes,” the bearded guy behind the desk said. “A woman was just here looking for you.”
“Is that right?” Brawley said. “What did you tell her?”
“Nothing, of course.”
“Nothing?”
The man blushed. “Well, almost nothing. She was very… charming. I did tell her that you were staying here, but—”
“She asked for me by name?”
“No,” the man said. “She had your picture.”
That was curious. “Did you give her my name?”
“No, sir. Of course not.”
Brawley and Nina went upstairs. As soon as they entered his room, Brawley smelled a faint twinge of perfume and motor oil.
“Remi was in here,” Nina said.
He nodded. “You smell her, too?”
Nina shook her head and pointed to the bed, where a small, white rectangle lay atop his suitcase.
He crossed the room and picked up the business card.
Between dollar signs and handcuffs, the card read, Badass Bail Bonds. When you absolutely, positively have to get out of jail tonight. Remington Dupree.
He flipped the card and saw Remi’s personalized message to him: the imprint of her lips in bright red lipstick.
8
Brawley tossed the card and gathered his things. He didn’t know whether the guy at the desk had given Remi a key or she’d broken in here. Didn’t matter much, one way or the other.
Question was, what the hell did Remi want?
“I’m no Seeker,” Nina said, “but I can sense a storm brewing. A shitstorm of epic proportions. You still feeling all lovey dovey toward me, cowboy?”
“I told you,” Brawley said. “My feelings won’t change. And it’s not lovey dovey. It’s love. Deal with it.”
She smiled, bit her lip, and said, “Let’s get out of town before everything blows up.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said, shouldering his ruck. “My badass RV awaits.”
“We have to see my friend Sage first,” Nina said. “I’m dying to hear what she says.”
“Let’s go, then,” he said. Opening the door, he scanned the walkway in both directions before stepping from the room. Out in the courtyard, the party was already gearing up, a dozen people boozing it up poolside, another dozen partying in the pool, Buffet playing softly on the speakers.
“I’ll have to grab some stuff from my place,” she said, then frowned. “And were you serious about me just quitting my job?”
“Darlin,” he said, draping an arm over her shoulders, “do me a favor and start taking me at my word. I say what I mean and mean what I say.”
Nina smiled. “You’d better. You have no idea how hard it is to find a job in this town—especially when you’re an ex-con.”
“Speaking of which, just how much trouble am I taking on here? At exactly which point am I aiding and abetting a criminal, when we cross county lines or just when we leave the state?”
“State. But we don’t even have to break county lines. Monroe County stretches all the way up the Keys. I know some people in Marathon and some others in Key Largo. I just have to be back in two weeks to meet with my parole officer. That should give things time to blow over here.” Her mismatched eyes flicked back and forth as if she were checking her math. “We have to hang around until afternoon so I can stop by the community center and say goodbye to my little brother, David. He would worry if I didn’t.”
“Sounds good.”
She frowned. “And I have to tell my dad.”
“All right. Why the frown?”
“Nothing,” she said. “My dad’s just a pain in the ass sometimes.”
“I haven’t met a pretty girl yet whose dad wasn’t a pain in the ass. He live around here?”
“Precisely. He lives around here. My dad is a professional couch surfer. He likes to keep moving. But I know where to find him once the sun starts to set.”
They checked out and started for the library. Brawley kept his eyes peeled. As they walked, Nina explained Sage’s order, the Seekers.
Also known as the Order of the Curious, the Seekers were truth mages who dedicated their lives to seeking knowledge. They believed in the Latticework of Truth, an ethereal, four-dimensional network that supposedly connected everything that ever was or would be. Their psionic energy allowed them varying degrees of access to this latticework.
Seekers were walking polygraphs and had the intuition of Gypsy grandmothers. They could read psionic auras, gauge psionic strength in numerical terms, and were experts at unraveling mysteries, solving puzzles, and gathering information. Nina said that some of them were remote viewers.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“ESP espionage. They use an inner eye to see stuff happening someplace else.”
“So they’re like psychic Peeping Toms?”
Nina laughed. “And psychic peeping tomgirls. But most Seekers are harmless. A little batty, maybe. Sometimes, they get obsessed with chasing truth, they just drift away in search of knowledge. It’s like they simultaneously have superhuman focus and the worst case of ADD you’ve ever seen.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Nina grinned. “Neither do Seekers, most of the time. As they get more experienced, they break into two basic groups: the insane and the insanely powerful. The powerhouses can manipulate people’s memories, turn invisible, predict the future, all types of crazy shit.”
“And the insane ones?”
“They’re like chess masters who lose their shit and shun the world to study the game. They become drifters or hole up and go full hermit mode. Quit showering. Nothing matters but information. They get so focused on truth that they lose touch with reality.”
“So which type is Sage, crazy or crazy powerful?”
“Neither, yet. She’s only twenty-one. But if I had to guess, I’d bet on her getting crazy powerful. Don�
��t get the wrong idea. Sage is awesome. She might seem a little bit out there, but don’t be fooled. She’s the smartest girl I know. Here we go.”
They had reached the library.
Brawley glanced to either side of the steps, half-expecting old Weird Beard to pop out of the foliage, but there was no sign of prophet of destruction.
The Chaotic, he reminded himself.
They entered the library. The main desk was just inside the doors. A friendly looking librarian with dark hair and a goatee greeted them warmly, calling Nina by name.
“Hey, Michael,” Nina said. “Is Sage in her cave?”
Michael nodded. “She’s ensconced in her realm of dust.”
Nina thanked him and led Brawley across the room and rapped on a door that read Special Collection. “Sage is the library’s historian.”
There was no answer.
Nina knocked again, a little harder this time.
The door swung open, and Brawley did his best to keep his mouth from falling open.
The girl who opened the door stood nearly as tall as Brawley. She had the slender physique, long limbs, and elegant neck of a runway model—and a face to match.
She wore stiletto heels, a tight black miniskirt that showed off her shapely legs, and a short-sleeved white blouse complete with a name tag that read Sage. Her long blond hair was twisted into a pile atop her head, skewered haphazardly in place by three or four pencils, and still cascaded down her back in a honey-colored waterfall all the way to her ass.
Sage’s big, blue eyes regarded Brawley from behind a pair of black-framed glasses that screamed sexy librarian.
“Hey, Sage,” Nina said. “This is Brawley.”
Sage lifted one golden eyebrow. “That is an unusual name.”
Brawley shrugged. “I didn’t pick it.”
Sage blinked, then wiggled her pixie nose, scrunching her glasses higher up the bridge. “Brawley was not always your name.”
“That’s news to me,” he said. “But I was adopted, so—” He trailed off with a shrug.
Truth be told, the thought kind of rocked him.
Since an early age, he’d known that he was adopted, but it never really mattered to him. Mom and Dad were Mom and Dad. He understood that his birth parents had given him up the same way one might understand that he or she was born at 5:35 in the morning. These were merely interesting tidbits of ancient history signifying nothing.
Somehow, it had never occurred to him that he had been given another name at birth. A strange and oddly powerful notion. Even though it shouldn’t really matter, the idea seized onto his thoughts and he couldn’t buck it off.
What was his true name?
“Did you wish to see the artifacts?” Sage asked. “We have library cards, letters, and manuscripts from Jimmy Buffet, Shell Silverstein, Ernest Hemingway—”
“Some other time, maybe,” Nina interrupted. “We have psi mage questions.”
“Nina, I can’t talk now,” Sage said, turning her back on them and walking into the large room full of bookshelves and filing cabinets.
Brawley couldn’t help but notice how tight her ass looked in the black miniskirt.
“I discovered a discrepancy in a shrimper’s log from 1947,” Sage explained. “The date and day of the week do not match. The shrimper probably just made an error, but I must be certain, so goodbye. Please close the door behind you.”
And with no further adieux, the leggy blond librarian disappeared around a tall bookshelf packed not with books but with bundled stacks of paper.
Nina gave Brawley’s hand a squeeze, pulled him inside, and closed the door.
“When she said to close the door behind us, I think she meant leave,” he said. “As in don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”
“Like I said, Sage can get lost in her work. As her best friend, it’s my job to pull her out now and then. Come on.”
On the other side of the shelf, Sage knelt atop a chair with her legs folded under her. She leaned over a rough-looking leather-bound journal, peering through a large magnifying glass. Her glasses were shoved up into her blond hair, loose tresses of which corkscrewed down onto the table. As she leaned forward, her tight-looking ass strained against the fabric of her short skirt, which had hiked all the way to the top of her thighs.
“Sage, we really need to talk to you.”
Sage flinched, obviously startled, then turned slowly until one blue eye regarded Nina impatiently. She gritted a pencil in her teeth like a pirate biting down on a knife blade. Withdrawing the pencil, Sage said, “As I already explained, Nina, this is not a convenient time. This journal is—”
Grinning like a madwoman, Nina reached out and touched the librarian’s shoulder. “That shit can wait, girlfriend. This is big. Seriously. It’s going to blow your mind.”
“You have ten seconds to convince me.”
Nina launched into a stumbling, breathless explanation. “Last night, I fucked Brawley and opened his strand, and this big loop of energy connected us, and now I feel super powerful, and he located his strand on the first try, and he already started drawing power, and I think I’m going crazy because I feel like I’m in love with him, and I need you to look at his aura, because something crazy is going on, and we’re leaving town today because the psi mafia wants to kill us, so you have to help us now not later, please.”
The golden eyebrow arched again. Sage laid the magnifying glass on the open journal and put her glasses on again. Then she twitched her nose, apparently adjusting their position.
She unfolded her long legs, got down from the chair, and approached Brawley. She stared at him for a second. Then, for several seconds, she seemed to stare through him, her eyes losing focus.
When her eyes returned, she blinked at him, tilting her head like a quizzical dog.
“Hmm,” Sage said. “Your aura is strange.”
Brawley spread his hands. “Like Nina said, twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t know shit about psionics.”
Sage shook her head. “That is inconsequential. Even as infants, psi mages radiate perceptibly. And once the strand opens, your full aura is visible to Seekers. But I needed several seconds of intense focus to detect your aura. Initially, I had the distinct impression that you were not psionic gifted. But then, when your power shone through…”
Sage turned to Nina. “I see what you mean about his power. I have never seen a psi score this high. 166.”
Nina’s jaw dropped.
To Brawley, Sage said, “You throb with power. Once you learn to harness your energy, you will be truly formidable.”
“You’re a rock star,” Nina said, giving him a playful shove. Then she turned to Sage. “But what’s so weird about his aura?”
“Despite its potency, his aura is incomplete,” Sage said. She looked at Brawley and frowned. “Nina’s aura is a sphere of red light since she’s an Unbound. My own aura is a yellow sphere since I’m a Seeker. Yours is red and spherical, as it should be, but most of the sphere’s surface is missing. There’s a swath of red here,” she said, swiping her finger through the air. Then she slashed her finger at a downward angle. “A stripe here.” She drew a circle in the air. “A swirl there. It’s like your sphere is invisible, and only a small portion of it—say fifteen percent—is showing through.”
Brawley didn’t know what to think of that. “Is this a problem?”
Sage crossed her thin arms over her chest, screwed up her face with concentration, and exhaled, stirring an errant lock of blond hair that had fallen across her beautiful face. “No. I mean, you’re already super powerful. But… why does your aura look like a mesh ball? Do you mind if I check something?”
He shrugged. “Go for it.”
Sage reached out and laid her hand on his chest. Her fingers were long and slender. She wore no fingernail polish, and the nails were chewed to the quick. But even the telltale ravages of anxiety couldn’t deter from the beautiful perfection of those fingers, just as her lack of makeup made her face n
o less beautiful.
As she touched him, her eyelids fluttered.
Nina sat on the table top, watching with intense curiosity.
Sage’s eyes opened wide. “That is extremely interesting. Someone cloaked you a long time ago.”
“What’s that mean?”
“A cloak creates a screen,” Sage said.
“Psi camo,” Nina chimed in.
“Yes,” Sage agreed. “Which explains the initial difficulty I encountered when attempting to perceive your aura, despite focused effort. A vicinity scan or even a standard aura check would detect nothing.”
“Who would’ve cloaked me?” Brawley said. “And why?”
“Unfortunately, I am not powerful enough to determine those answers.” She frowned, narrowing her eyes thoughtfully. “I really want to know. The cloak is unusually strong. Someone went to extreme lengths to protect you from discovery.”
“You said it’s been in place for a long time,” Nina said. “I’ll bet his birth mother did it. Or father, I guess. Maybe one of his parents was a psi mage, the other wasn’t, and the psionic parent didn’t want to live their life hiding the truth from the other, so they put a cloak on Brawley to protect him from detection and gave him up for adoption to some norms.”
“That is pure conjecture,” Sage said, “and highly unlikely. Brawley is Unbound, after all, and only a powerful Seeker could have created this cloak.”
“So his mom was Unbound and his dad was a Seeker,” Nina said with a so-what shrug. “My dad’s a telepath, and my mom was obviously Unbound, though the only trick she ever showed me was how to disappear.”
Brawley let her know he didn’t understand.
“My mom walked out on me when I was a newborn,” Nina said, and held up a hand. “But do me a favor and don’t say you’re sorry, because I hate sympathy with a passion.”
Brawley just gave her a nod. He could understand that. He’d never had much use for sympathy himself. It didn’t do any damn good, and most of the time, it was really about the sympathizer, not the one suffering.
“So his parents were both psi mages,” Nina said, “but they gave him up for one reason or another and didn’t want the psi community in his business. The question is, why?”
