by Dima Zales
Reluctant Psychic
Sasha Urban Series: Book 3
Dima Zales
♠ Mozaika Publications ♠
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2018 Dima Zales and Anna Zaires
www.dimazales.com
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All rights reserved.
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Except for use in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
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Published by Mozaika Publications, an imprint of Mozaika LLC.
www.mozaikallc.com
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Cover by Orina Kafe
www.orinakafe-art.com
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e-ISBN: 978-1-63142-358-1
Print ISBN: 978-1-63142-359-8
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Excerpt from Transcendence
About the Author
Chapter One
A hellish clamor rips me from the welcome arms of slumber.
Heart hammering, I jolt up to a sitting position.
It takes me a moment to pinpoint the source of the offending noise.
It’s my phone.
Grabbing the evil device roughly, I stare at the caller ID.
Instead of a number, it says, “Private.”
“Nope,” I say to the unknown telemarketer—or whoever the nuisance is. “I don’t pick up when I don’t know who’s calling.”
The phone keeps ringing insistently, so I tap the screen to reject the call and wait to see if they leave a voicemail.
They don’t.
Then I see the time of day, and it makes me so angry I nearly throw the phone at the wall. It’s my usual get-up-for-work time, but I don’t need to go to work today—one of the few pros of quitting a high-paying job.
Making matters worse is my extreme grogginess. I clearly still owe myself sleep from that all-nighter for Nero.
The manipulative bastard.
My stomach rumbles.
If I’m up, I might as well grab a quick bite to eat.
Getting to my feet, I put on some sweatpants and a comfy T-shirt to celebrate my unemployment, and tromp into the bathroom to take care of business.
The orc bruise on my shoulder looks purplish yellow in the bathroom mirror, but it doesn’t hurt much—courtesy of the frozen pea compresses, no doubt.
Yummy smells waft from the kitchen, and my nose drags me there to investigate.
“It’s not just stuff,” Felix says to Fluffster, whose tiny tea saucer with oats is sitting next to Felix’s pancakes. “I nearly got killed.”
“Morning.” I beeline for the counter, grab myself a plate, and put some pancakes on it. “How are things going?”
“Felix is moping,” Fluffster mentally replies, and the expression on the face of my chinchilla/domovoi is as close as a rodent could ever come to a smirk. “First, he complained about sleeping on the living room couch, then he said that he’ll never get a female, and now he’s upset that—”
“That was a private conversation.” Felix threateningly points his fork at Fluffster’s furry body.
I look at the fork incredulously. Did Felix forget last night, when Fluffster turned a hopped-up-on-sex succubus into a bloody smoothie?
“Sasha knows what happened,” Fluffster replies as though no fork is near him. “So how is this private?”
“And I think you are going to get a female, Felix,” I say, sitting down with my pancakes. “At some point,” I add with a wink, spearing the carb-laden goodness with my fork. “Especially if we define the words ‘get’ and ‘female’ loosely.”
The front door bangs open, cutting off Felix’s rebuttal. He looks at his phone, likely checking the security footage, and informs us, “It’s Ariel.”
“Finally,” Fluffster says in my head, and I experience a pang of jealousy that he can be so eloquent with his mouth full of oats. “She never came home last night.”
“We’re in the kitchen,” I yell out to make sure Ariel doesn’t think she can slink into her bedroom and pretend all is well. “There are pancakes.”
I finally put a piece of pancake into my mouth, and the explosion of flavor makes me moan in appreciation.
“Made of potatoes,” Felix explains gruffly, his mopey expression easing. “It’s a traditional Russian dish.” More somberly, he adds, “After nearly getting killed, I felt like eating something my mom would make for me when I was little.”
“Hi, all,” Ariel says with the enthusiasm of a hyperactive kid hopped up on chocolate and amphetamines. “Good to see Fluffster is doing so well. How are the rest of you doing?”
She’s wearing last night’s clothes, but she must’ve done something with her makeup, because she seems to be glowing from the inside.
“It’s a long story,” Felix says and exchanges a confused glance with me.
If he’s thinking what I’m thinking, he has the right to be confused. This is the strangest “walk of shame” behavior we’ve ever seen.
Could Ariel and Gaius be in love? After all, movies say that when you’re in that state of being, you act kind of crazy.
Alternatively, maybe she’s doing something new to self-medicate for her PTSD?
As though to highlight my musings, Ariel whirls through the kitchen like a tornado—no doubt using her Cognizant powers to move so fast. Before I can spell motion sickness, she’s already sitting at the table with a plate full of pancakes, a fork, a knife, and an eager expression on her perfect face.
“Tell me what happened,” she says excitedly and stuffs a potato pancake into her mouth. Even her chewing seems to be on fast forward.
I clear my throat. “So, remember Harper—the thing that used sex to nearly kill me at Earth Club? Well, he—or as it turned out, she—was here last night.”
Ariel gapes at me and audibly swallows her third pancake. “I knew she was a she. But what was she doing here?”
“You knew she was a she, and you didn’t tell me?” I forcefully halve a potato pancake with my fork.
“I didn’t know that you didn’t know.” Ariel shrugs. “It was obvious to me what she was.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Felix readjusts his plate. “The important bit is that she tried to kill us last night. Nearly succeeded, too, but Fluffster saved the day.
”
Fluffster proudly puffs up his tail and sits up straighter—which makes him look like a fluffy meerkat instead of giving him the gravitas he was probably after.
Ariel drops her fork and stares at me and Felix with varying levels of accusation. “You guys left the house after I dropped you off? But then how did Fluffster—”
“No,” I say. “She was here, at the apartment, right after you dropped me off.”
Ariel pales. “How could a succubus get invited—” She looks at Felix and smacks her forehead. “That was your date?” Her voice rises. “You invited a succubus into our home?”
“I didn’t even know she was a Cognizant of any kind,” Felix says. “There was no aura. How was I supposed to know?”
“The smell,” Ariel and I say in unison.
“What smell?” Felix sniffs the air as though Harper’s scent might still linger. “Are you talking about her perfume? It was exceptionally nice-smelling, but—”
“Forget it,” Ariel says, her shoulders sagging so much I expect them to drop to her ankles. “You don’t go to clubs, so you’ve never met one of their kind. This is all my fault. I should’ve been here.” She covers her face with her hands. “I’m so sorry.”
“Look,” I say consolingly, uneasy with her sudden mood shift. “We’re fine. With Fluffster around, nothing bad can happen to us. Not inside this apartment.”
Fluffster’s tail puffs up so much it’s now bigger than the rest of his body.
“Tell me exactly what happened.” Ariel lowers her hands, but her face is still uncharacteristically pale. “Every little detail.”
Felix and I take turns explaining. He starts with how he met Harper, became smitten, and invited her over for Netflix and chill, “as per Ariel’s own suggestion.” I then tell her how I entered the apartment, smelled the enemy, and tried to fight her—and how Fluffster sealed the deal.
“I’m so sorry,” Ariel says again when we’re done. “I should’ve been here. It’s not excusable. If this had gone any other way, I—”
She stops talking, and an actual tear streaks down her cheek.
Felix and I exchange extremely concerned glances. Felix, like me, had probably thought Ariel’s tear ducts went out of business long ago.
“Could she be bipolar or something?” Fluffster asks—presumably only in my head. The little guy is clearly on the same wavelength. “I saw something about that condition on YouTube.”
I give the chinchilla a shrug.
“I’m sorry,” Ariel mutters again, then stuffs her mouth with a pancake.
“I actually have a question,” I say to make sure she doesn’t start apologizing again. “Can we get in trouble with the Council because of Harper’s demise?”
Ariel swallows her food. “You were acting in self-defense. More importantly, she didn’t have an aura, so she wasn’t under the protection of the Mandate.” Her voice steadies a bit. “In fact, if human authorities were to come snooping around, we could call upon the Council to make the cops look the other way.”
“Oh?” I raise my eyebrow.
“Imagine if a long-lived Cognizant gets a life sentence,” Felix chimes in gleefully. “Their slow aging might get noticed after a while—not to mention what happens when the prison sentence runs an unnatural number of years.”
“But don’t let that be an excuse to break human laws.” Ariel’s brows furrow. “For example, if you hack the database of an important bank”—she looks pointedly at Felix—“the Council could well decide to let you rot in prison for a while, especially if you don’t have flashy powers that—”
“What is it with everyone breaking confidences today?” Felix grumbles. “I share with you that one time—”
“You always brag about your hacking,” I say in Ariel’s defense. “You told me you got into the DMV just the other day.”
Felix gives me an annoyed look and also stuffs his mouth with a pancake.
“Why wasn’t Harper under the Mandate?” I ask. “She didn’t seem too young for it. Is her kind also persona non grata—like the necromancers?”
“No,” Ariel says. “Very few types of Cognizant are that.”
Felix clears his throat. “It’s likely they both came here from the Otherlands. When you told me about the vision conversation between Chester and Beatrice, he said something about ‘here’ and ‘liberal attitudes’—which makes me wonder if our villains hail from a pre-Mandate world. Those places sometimes have negative attitudes about pairings between different types of Cognizant—and sometimes, like in more conservative societies here, about same-sex relationships.”
I feel a pang of pity for Beatrice and Harper. If Felix is right, all they wanted was to live together in peace, but Chester took advantage of that, setting Beatrice on her deadly path.
Then again, being a victim of prejudice on some distant world is no reason to agree to kill me. That choice, whatever her reasons, is why Beatrice is dead. Ditto for Harper—though I have to admit, her actions are even easier to relate to.
If someone had killed a person I love, wouldn’t I want vengeance?
Felix also looks somber as he continues. “Alternatively, if they were from here, then Harper might not have gone through with the Mandate because her girlfriend, being a necro, wasn’t allowed under it.”
Ariel looks thoughtful. “That makes sense.”
“It does?” I ask.
“Imagine having a lover, but being unable to speak to them about what’s most important in your life,” Felix says.
I nod, recalling Ariel bleeding from her nose, eyes, and ears when I asked her pointed questions about the Cognizant world prior to me being under the Mandate.
Ariel’s phone chirps, breaking the momentary silence.
She glances at it, then looks up with a guilty look. “I have to run.”
“Is it work?” I ask as casually as possible. “Or—”
“See you guys later,” she says as though she didn’t hear. She then repeats her Tasmanian Devil impersonation, cleaning up after herself and vacating the kitchen fast enough to break some highway speed limits.
Felix and I eat in silence until we hear the door in Ariel’s room slam—which hopefully means she just changed her clothing. Then the front door bangs shut, followed by the sound of keys locking the door.
I look at Felix. “Is it just me, or are Ariel’s comings and goings a bit odd? She didn’t even shower.”
“She does usually go to the hospital at this time, so it might be that,” he says unconvincingly.
“I’m concerned,” Fluffster mentally says, summing up my feelings perfectly.
“Let’s keep an eye on her.” Felix finishes the last of his food and says, “I also have to run now. In my case, definitely to work.”
“I’ll clean up then.” My appetite ruined, I mindlessly spear my last pancake. “Thank you for making breakfast.”
“Fluffster told me about Nero,” Felix says, getting up. “I’m sure you can get another Mentor—and a job.”
I nod, but when Felix leaves the room, I say, “I didn’t realize you were such a gossip, Fluffster.”
“I was just concerned about the finances,” the chinchilla replies, nonplussed. “You told me and Ariel, so I figured Felix can know too.”
“I’m just messing with you.” I scratch him behind the ear. “I was obviously going to tell Felix.”
I then finish my food and begin tidying.
Just as I’m almost done in the kitchen, I feel a strange sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and a wave of fear rolls over my body. It reminds me of how I felt when Nero’s orcs staged those accidents for me the other day—except I know that I should be safe here, in Fluffster’s presence.
The phone rings in my room.
Could that be the source of my malaise?
Getting up carefully to avoid tripping over something and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, I hurry to my room and take a look at the caller ID.
It’s a private number.
Just like this morning.
Chapter Two
Grabbing the phone, I contemplate answering the call.
The anxiety symptoms worsen.
Is this a nightmare? Am I in The Ring?
I did watch a video tape recently…
I let the call go to voicemail again, and the fear abates.
Clearly, my intuition doesn’t want me to talk to whoever is calling.
I do want to know what’s going on, though, so I need to figure out who the caller is.
I run for the door and intercept Felix just as he’s about to leave.
“Is there a way to figure out who’s calling on a private number?” I ask, waving my phone around.
“Sure. There are a bunch of apps for that. Some block private calls, and a few try to unmask the number for you. Why?”
“Someone woke me up with a private call today, then called again just now,” I explain. “I got a weird feeling about it both times.”
“Probably a telemarketer,” Felix says. “Try a few apps, and if that doesn’t work, let me know.”
He leaves, and I spend a few minutes playing with my phone, installing a bunch of apps that promise to unmask private numbers, as well as block them if I wish.
