“You’re that concerned about her safety?”
“She’s very visible, very public, and her lifestyle is not conducive to providing security easily. If you were some nut who wanted publicity, or who wanted to try and extort money from a very private family, she would make a good target. Or so someone who doesn’t know her might think.”
Amused, Margaret asked, “And exactly what does that mean?”
“She’s a royal pain in the ass, especially when she’s not happy about how things are going. They’d probably pay us to take her back,” Rebecca smiled fondly at Brenna, who was laughing. “She’s also a very accomplished black belt and can be quite dangerous with sharp objects or frying pans.”
“Frying pans?” Margaret laughed.
Soberly, Brenna told her, “Someone tried to kidnap me once. I didn’t take it seriously before that. You’d be surprised how effective a cast-iron frying pan can be in the hands of a high school softball player.”
Leaving the restaurant, Brenna asked Rebecca, “Can you see auras?”
“Auras? Like the touchy-feely crystal-gazing psychic aura thingies?”
Brenna laughed, “Yeah, I take it you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about.”
“No. I mean, I see, no not see, more feel, the energy signatures of people. Norms are different than telepaths, and good people are different than evil people. I think it’s part of my Empathy Gift.”
“Well, I feel that too, but I see a faint glow around people. Norms are a sort of beige-yellow and telepaths are white. But the past couple of months that’s been growing, and now I see very clear auras around people, mostly around their heads.”
“And what does my aura look like?”
“Some kind of weird mutant,” Brenna laughed. “It looks like a reflection of your soul, electric blue with white and gold lightnings. And for other people whose souls I’ve seen, like Cindy and Collin, their auras look like their souls. From that limited sample, I assume that’s true for other people.”
“Have you told Callie about this?”
“No.”
“I think you should.”
“Okay. But the reason I bring it up is that Margaret Townsend’s aura is white. I checked by entering her mind, and she’s not wearing a construct. But she has no knowledge of telepaths or awareness of any telepathic abilities. The other weird thing is she reads as though she has nine Gifts. I don’t think I’ve ever been wrong about that. Did you look at her throat? It’s awfully smooth for a fifty-five year old woman. She wears a lot of makeup, but I’m not sure she needs it.”
Rebecca froze. “What do you mean ‘she reads as though she has nine Gifts’? You can tell how many Gifts someone has?”
“Yeah, and what Gifts they are. Can’t you do that?”
“No, and I’ve never heard of anyone else who can. How long have you been able to do that?”
Brenna’s brow wrinkled. “Well, let me think. For quite a while. I think I started being able to read that when we were in Ireland last spring. That’s also when people’s auras started becoming more prominent.”
“I really think you should tell Callie,” Rebecca said. “Brenna, they told us that they couldn’t predict the way our Talents might manifest as we grow into our power. And with you, they don’t have a clue as to what might come out as you mature. I think we’re starting to see that.”
“What about you? You’re older than I am. Are you seeing more abilities than you used to have?”
“Yeah, mostly increases in range and power. My shields are much stronger than they used to be, but as a wilder, I don’t know how much of that is maturity and how much is practice. I’m much faster and cleaner with my constructs, but again I’m not sure how much of that is practice. In general, all of my Talents are growing stronger, and I have more control.”
Among Rebecca’s Talents was the Lindstrom Gift, which was used to create an artificial construct, much like a stage set, implanted in a telepath’s mind. It was often used to camouflage a spy or other operative. A telepath with a construct might appear as a non-telepath, a completely different person.
~~~
“So how did Jeremy and Margaret’s date go last night?” Brenna asked Rebecca Tuesday morning over breakfast.
“I don’t know,” Rebecca answered with a grin. “He didn’t come home last night.”
Jeremy straggled in around noon, looking like a person who had gotten lucky the night before and was wildly infatuated.
“So, how’d it go? I assume you hit it off. Either that or you got drunk and mugged and spent the night in an alley somewhere,” Rebecca asked, sniffing him. “You don’t smell like an alley. Smell more like lavender soap.”
He gave her a goofy grin, “God, what a wonderful woman. She’s just as sexy now as she was when I first met her.”
“And when was that?”
“About thirty-five years ago, in Portland. I was a graduate student and she was leading a student protest. I thought she was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. And you know something? I shouldn’t have waited so damn long. I was so shy back then, and so afraid of norms.”
“Jeremy, did you see her without her makeup?”
“Well, yeah, of course. Why?”
“Does she look like she’s fifty-five?”
“Well, I’m not sure, now that you mention it. She does wear a lot of it, and I don’t understand why. She washed her face before we went to bed, but the lights were off then. I know her body is great.”
“You didn’t shower together?”
“God, Rebecca, do you want a blow-by-blow? I’m not in the habit of talking about the women I sleep with, something you should appreciate.” He turned and walked out.
~~~
CHAPTER 9
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“Callie, do you have a few minutes?” Brenna had arrived in West Virginia that afternoon. After settling in and showing Collin for an hour or so how much she’d missed him, she went to find her aunt.
“Sure, glad to have you home,” Callie stood and walked around her desk, hugging Brenna and giving her a quick kiss. “Are you enjoying the lobbying thing? Cindy and Karen say you’re doing very well.”
“That’s nice of them. At least I provide comic relief fairly regularly. It’s fun, but every time I get home from Capitol Hill I feel like I need a shower.”
Callie pursed her lips and said, “I couldn’t do it. Either I’d end up killing the lot of them or subjugating them and declaring myself queen. I guess I’m not subtle or patient enough for that sort of role.”
“It does have its benefits,” Brenna grinned. “You can get laid regularly by men with bad comb-overs and wearing cheap cologne.”
“Oh, well, in that case, I’m calling Karen and signing up immediately,” Callie laughed.
“Callie, what I wanted to talk about ... Well, Rebecca said I should come talk to you. I’m starting to manifest some Talents that she says are highly unusual. I thought they might be part of the normal maturation process, but she says they aren’t.”
“Such as?” Callie asked, going to her sideboard and pouring them each a whiskey. She didn’t know if Brenna wanted one, but experience had taught her that any discussion of Brenna’s Gifts would probably require some sort of tranquilizer. The girl was a Pandora’s box of Talents. Callie and her father were in a constant state of figuratively holding their breath, wondering what would emerge next.
“Well, she says that she can’t see people’s auras. When I look at you, I see a white glow around your head, streaked with silver and green. I assume that’s what your soul looks like, that the aura is a reflection of your soul. When I look at Seamus, I see white streaked with gold, silver and red. I’ve nev
er been in either of your minds on the ninth level, so I know it’s not projection on my part.”
Callie stared at her niece, sorting out what she had just heard. When she finally decided she had it straight, she took a drink of her whiskey, savoring the burn of it on her tongue and throat.
“Okay, anything else?”
“Well, that just started a couple of months ago. Before that, I could see sort of a soft glow around people, kind of a dirty yellow for norms and white for telepaths. Something else that I’ve been able to do for a while, but it’s gotten much stronger since the auras became so clear, is the ability to tell what people’s Gifts are.”
“You mean, you can look at someone and see that they have, oh, say Empathy, or Pyrokinesis?”
“Yes, I can tell how many Gifts they have and what they are. Like you right now, I can see that you have twelve Gifts, including two that you never told me you have. You’re as dangerous as Rebecca, aren’t you?”
Callie downed her drink, and looked at the one she had poured for Brenna. “Do you want that?” When Brenna shook her head, she picked up the second glass and downed it as well.
“I think I’m ready to ask this, now. What else?”
Brenna colored. “Well, I probably should have told you about it when it happened, but I’ve been trying to figure it out, understand how it works. I thought the auras and reading Gifts were just manifestations of Empathy, or Empathy and Telepathy combined. From your reaction, I guess they aren’t normal manifestations.”
Callie shook her head.
Brenna stood, rolled up her sleeve and pushed her hand into Callie’s desk. The hand just disappeared. The surface of the desk around Brenna’s forearm was smooth, as though she had just put her hand into a pool of water. Her aunt’s eyes bulged as she stared in horror. Brenna slowly pulled her arm out. The desk and her arm showed no evidence of what she had done.
Father, I need you, right now. Callie sent on a spear.
Seamus teleported into her office a second later, his shields set and mental weapons armed. He relaxed slightly when he detected no threat, but the expression on his daughter’s face worried him. He looked at Brenna, and the look of blushing chagrin on her face gave him a clue as to the problem.
“What did you do this time?” he asked.
“Show him,” Callie ordered.
Brenna pushed her arm back into the desk, then pulled it out. Seamus walked over to her. “Again,” he ordered. She pushed her arm back into the desk. Her grandfather reached out and felt the desk and her arm where they merged. “Pull it out slowly.” She did as he kept his hand right at the interface of the two objects. When her hand was completely back in the air, he turned to Callie’s sideboard and poured himself a large drink. A glance at the two empty but damp glasses in front of Callie told him that she probably didn’t need another. Sitting in a chair, he gestured for Brenna to sit also.
“Grandfather, it’s not dangerous,” Brenna said, anxiously wringing her hands. She couldn’t really get in trouble, but sometimes they got upset with her. “I can’t get hurt doing it, honest. If I don’t match the resonance of the object, then I can’t merge with it. I mean, matter is just an energy state. I modify my energy until it matches the solid object. And once I’m in resonance, I can’t change that until I’m not merged with it anymore. I tried with just a fingernail, and I can’t change it while I’m merged.”
“And how did you discover you can do this?” he asked quite calmly. Brenna did notice that he’d put a dent in the whiskey already.
“I dreamed it,” she answered weakly.
“You what?” her aunt and grandfather asked in concert, both sitting bolt upright.
“I had a dream that I was falling, and when I hit the ground, I just sank into it and came out the other side. And then I woke up, and I was lying on the floor under my bed. The bed’s rather low, and I can’t crawl under it. I mean, my breasts and nose were pressed against the frame. So I just lay there trying to figure out what had happened, and I could remember what I’d done in the dream, so I changed my resonance and used Telekinesis to push myself back through.”
“You say you resonate with an object and then you can merge with it?” Seamus asked.
She nodded.
“A bed would have a lot of different materials. I would think they’d require different resonances.”
Forgetting her anxiety, she became animated, excitement showing in her face. “It does. It can get really complicated, because passing from one material to another you have to change your resonance, and for surfaces that aren’t even, you might have different molecules in your body resonating at different speeds. A wall, for example. There is wallpaper, then paint, plaster, brick and mortar. Then on the other side, there’s the opposite. And since I’m a bit thicker than the wall, I can have parts of me resonating at a bunch of different frequencies all at once. You really have to concentrate.”
“And if you don’t concentrate, if you stop in the middle?” he asked in what he thought was a calm voice.
“Nothing happens. I just stay there until I get it straightened out. I’m already in resonance with whatever I’ve merged with. It does feel really weird, but not really any weirder than if I keep moving. I just have to finish it.”
“So you can walk through walls, and doors, and possibly a boulder or a mountain.”
“I don’t know about anything that thick. I have to breathe. A door is easier than a wall because it’s just a single material.”
“Can you show me?” he gestured toward Callie’s office door.
Brenna blushed, then looking at the door to the bathroom, said, “Yeah, sure.” She walked over and closed the door, then pulled her sweater off and started taking off the rest of her clothes.
“You can’t do it with your clothes on?” Callie asked.
She straightened, wearing only her panties.
“Oh no. I can’t change the resonance of matter, only of me.” Looking at Seamus, she said, “Remember, you told me that we can’t change the laws of physics, just bend them a little.”
“It’s nice to know that someone listens to some things I say,” he growled.
“Hey, you never told me not to do this. You never even told me it’s possible.” She looked at Callie, “It’s not on that list of Gifts you gave me. I don’t even know where it fits.”
Her relatives both shook their heads. “That’s because we didn’t know it was possible,” Callie told her. “It’s never even mentioned in the archives.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Really,” Seamus said dryly. He motioned for her to proceed.
She took off her panties, then stepped through the door. It completely unnerved her audience to see half of her sticking out of the door. It only took a couple of seconds for her to disappear. The door opened, and Brenna stepped out.
“Can you take another person with you?” Seamus asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried. Do you want me to?”
“I am curious.”
“Okay.” She sent a spear to Rebecca, Are you busy? Can you come to Callie’s office?
Sure, I can be there in a few minutes.
Brenna teleported Rebecca into the office.
“Shit. I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Rebecca said with a shudder. ”I could have walked. It makes my stomach all flip-floppy.”
“Seamus and Callie want me to demonstrate something for them,” Brenna said, ignoring her protests.
A puzzled frown crossed Rebecca’s face as she took a good look at Brenna’s state of dress, “If you’re putting on some kind of kinky sex show you should call Irina. You know I’m not into women.”
Callie snickered and Seamus looked slightly shocked.
Brenna quickly explained the ability she had discovered, pushing her arm through the door to demonstrate. “Seamus wants to know if I can take someone with me. Get undressed.”
Rebecca turned and walked to a chair. She sat down and started pulling off her boots.
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“Just like that?” Seamus asked. “She tells you to get undressed so she can merge you with a solid wood door and you just do it?”
Rebecca didn’t pause, placing her boots beside the chair and unbuttoning her blouse. “Either she can do it or she can’t. The only way it can fuck up is if she lets go of me while I’m in the middle. She can’t kill me, Seamus. I die after she does.”
He felt faint, “I’m almost afraid to ask how you know that.”
She smiled. “The Goddess doesn’t grant all her Gifts at birth. Certainty is truly wonderful. It relieves so much anxiety.”
Callie remembered her vision on Samhain, standing in Kallen’s arms as the lightning took them both, and understood. “Shadow,” she whispered.
Rebecca nodded, standing to shimmy her jeans over her hips. “I don’t have to know her purpose. It’s irrelevant as far as what I need to do in my life.”
Folding her clothes and placing her bra and panties on top of the pile on the chair, Rebecca walked across the room to where Brenna awaited her. Taking her hand and lacing their fingers together, Brenna stepped through the door. When she was inside the bathroom with only her right hand still on the other side of the door, she pulled, and was delighted to find Rebecca’s hand still clasped with hers when it emerged from the wood of the door. The rest of her friend followed, crowding her in the small bathroom.
She pulled Rebecca into her arms, looking up at her friend, her sister. “Are you okay? Did it feel really weird?”
Rebecca pressed her body against Brenna’s, shivering. “Yeah, pretty weird. It was quick though. Different than teleportation. Kind of a buzzy feeling, like a really mild electric shock, but no pain.”
Brenna nodded, “Yeah, that’s how it feels to me. It’s really weird when there are multiple materials, and I have to change resonances several times and have several different resonances going on at once.”
“You didn’t tell me you can do this. You have no fucking idea how pissed I am at you.” Rebecca’s calm voice was totally at odds with the look in her eyes. “Don’t do this again. Do you understand me? It’s not fair, Brenna. Not fair at all.”
Succubus Rising, An Urban Fantasy (The Telepathic Clans Saga) Page 9
