by Chloe Garner
“There’s just a lot to it. A psychic and a shaman can do pretty amazing things. There have been a few times in history where they bonded, well, where various people bonded through pledge, and it gives them certain, powers, certain advantages in their quest.”
“Quest,” he said.
“It doesn’t have to be something specific. The Templars were the most enthusiastic about it. They had a dozen bonded pairs running around the middle east at one point. Anyway. What it means is that I can feel where you are. Direction and proximity. And I can feel…” she closed her eyes, “hints of what you are feeling. If you need me, I will find you.”
“You really are crazy,” he said. She shrugged and walked to the open part of the room.
“Try it,” she said, closing her eyes and raising her arm to point at him. He stood and her arm raised slightly. She could have just heard him stand. He walked toward her.
“Closer, closer,” she said. He turned left, and her arm followed, straight and accurate. He stopped and her arm stopped. He faked right then squatted. She followed again.
“Okay, stop,” she said. “This is beyond weird. I don’t want to play any more.”
She went back to the bed and sat down. He followed, sitting down on Jason’s bed again.
“One thing we need to establish immediately. This isn’t permanent. You can send me away any time you like. You just have to cut the bond.”
“How do I do that?”
“Say the words. It’s not that special. We need to agree, now, on what you say when you want to cut the bond. I was thinking something like, ‘you’re free to go your own way’.”
He nodded.
“Sure. Wait. Go? You’ll leave?”
“Unless you break the bond now, yeah, probably. The literature isn’t perfectly clear, but they say that breaking a bond is worse than a divorce for how bad the two people hate each other after.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t ever be what you were again. They’re just a normal person, and I think that hurts a lot, once you get used to it.” She shrugged. “It’s a guess.”
“This is an experiment?”
“It’s a pledge. You are a psychic for a reason. I’m promising to do everything in my power to help you see through that purpose.”
“I need to think about this,” he said. “Can we not say anything to Jason?”
“Yeah. There’s just one more thing, though. We can’t be involved romantically.”
“We what?”
“I pledge to you my love, my loyalty, my life. The bond gives you a measure of authority over me. If you give me an order, and actually mean it, I will carry it out.”
“Do the chicken dance,” he said.
“No.”
He frowned.
“You have to actually mean it, and you don’t. But the thing is, a romantic relationship would be self-reinforcing to the point of toxic. It isn’t usually a problem, because the bonded pair are almost always both men, sometimes even married men,” she said, starting to talk faster, “but one of the bonded pairs in the eighteen hundreds decided that they were in love, too, a man and a woman, Alexandra, I don’t remember his name, and…” she stopped suddenly. Sam waited.
“And what?” he finally asked.
“They ate each other to death. In the end, they couldn’t stand to be apart for long enough to even feed themselves.”
Sam looked down at the handprint again.
“Left hand,” she said. “Right hand symbolizes power, consistency, strength, but also tyranny, control, suppression. Left hand symbolizes inconsistency and weakness, but also play, fun, joy. I am left handed; I chose my left hand.”
He reached a finger up to the print, then glanced at Samantha.
“It’s okay,” she said. He touched the dried blood.
“Why? Why did you decide to do this?”
“Honestly? Sometimes things just occur to me. Stuff I only read a reference to in a book once, or things I don’t even know. This was something I needed to do. You can reject it or not, but I had to do it without asking, because I knew you’d never go for it. Or you’d take a lot of convincing.” She paused. “It was important.”
He frowned at her, then nodded. It was the same spot, the same handprint, he had been able to feel for the past two days. Creep factor aside, it felt right.
“Go shower. Wash everything completely clean, then we’ll go let Jason know you’re alive.”
He stood, and she jumped up.
“One more thing. You want to try it out?” she asked.
“Try what?”
“The psychic thing. I should be able to trigger real visions, now. You’ll have them on your own, and those will probably hurt for a while, but the ones I trigger on purpose should be easier.”
“Uh,” he said. “Sure. Okay.”
She licked both thumbs and pointed them towards his eyes, pausing until he closed them. She rubbed her thumbs over his eyes, and he wrinkled his nose.
“I know, it’s gross,” she said. Suddenly his brain jerked like he was sitting at the top of a theme park drop tower, or like he was in an elevator whose cable had been cut.
The girl was sitting in the corner of a dark room, blond hair matted, white tank top torn and stained with age and abuse. She was crying. She looked up as a door, Sam turned his head, the disembodied feeling that resulted causing him to lose focus in a wave of nausea for a moment, then he could see a man standing in the doorway. The girl sobbed, her cries slowly turning to a cackling laugh. Sam pulled away, looking for some way of finding the place, the girl. In the hallway of the place he saw a book, a symbol, then his brain jerked as though pulled by a string.
Samantha was watching him carefully. Sam put the heels of his hands to his temples, wincing his eyes closed.
“Bad?” she asked. He shook his head.
“Weird. I feel sick.”
He ran into the bathroom and threw up. After a moment of the sweaty panic that came with throwing up, his head and his stomach cleared. Samantha had followed him to the doorway of the bathroom.
“Are you okay?”
He stood up, head clear, feeling normal.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Throwing up fixed it, didn’t it?” she asked. He nodded.
“I can tell,” she said. “This is going to take some getting used to.”
She turned and pulled the door.
“Get cleaned up,” she said, leaning her head against the door as she stood outside. “Then I want to hear about your vision.”
<><><>
Samantha was dressed in her normal clothes again, baggy button-up over a tee shirt, baggy jeans, when Sam got out of the shower. The vertigo from his vision had faded and the part of his brain that defined what ‘normal’ was was ready to dismiss Samantha as a con and revert to his before-Samantha reality. She was sitting cross-legged on his bed with her well-worn boots on the floor in front of her and her hair up in its ponytail, watching him with a strange intensity that he was coming to realize was one kind of normal for her.
“So?” she asked.
“What?” he asked. “I feel fine.”
“Your vision,” she said. “I could tell you had one. You were here, then you were somewhere far away, then you were here again. That’s so weird.”
He sat on Jason’s bed, rubbing his hair dry with a towel.
“I saw a girl,” he said. She waited. “She was in a room, and she was crying.”
“What did you see in the room?” Samantha asked.
“Nothing. It was cement. The floor was cement, the walls were cement. There weren’t any windows, and there was nothing in the room with her.”
Samantha nodded, as if that were helpful.
“A basement.”
“Sure, maybe.”
“What else?” she asked.
“Someone opened a door, a man, and she started laughing. I saw part of the hallway, then… that was it.” He had gone through it several times in the
shower, and hadn’t recognized anything.
She nodded again.
“Good.”
“Good? Something terrible was happening to that girl, and I can’t help her,” he said. She sighed and nodded.
“It’s going to feel like that for a while. Your visions are going to center on demons for quite some time, them being the closest related things to the hell plane. But you shouldn’t have too many visions that stray very far from your own path, either. I think we’ll find her.”
She cocked her head to one side, eyes looking for something in his face.
“You’re going to have to accept that you can’t change everything that happens in your visions. Some of them, you won’t even be able to react to. There’s a certain amount of fate involved in what you see, but as you get stronger, there will be an awful lot more noise, too. You’re going to see bad things, ones that are real, and you’re not going to be able to do a thing about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because the world sucks.”
He couldn’t find anything to say to that.
“If it makes you feel any better, she may not even be there, yet. They might have just thrown her into that room, some time in the future, and we might walk in just a few minutes later. Or, that may be all you ever know about her entire life. But we’ll probably find her.”
Sam frowned.
“That sucks,” he said.
“Knowledge is two-edged, a lot of the time,” she said. “Should we go find Jason?”
Sam threw the towel onto his bed and stood.
“Let me find my shoes.”
She slid her feet over the side of the bed and pulled on her boots. A thought struck Sam as he was tying his shoes.
“Did you say that there is a census of demons?” he asked.
“We keep a list,” she said.
“Seriously?”
“Sure.”
“Huh.” He opened the door for her. “Why?”
She frowned.
“Why not?”
He turned his mouth. Hard to argue with that. They took the elevator down to the lobby, where Jason was pacing in front of the sliding entrance doors, which kept popping open as he went by.
“Are you okay?” Jason asked as he noticed Sam and Samantha.
“Yeah,” Sam said, opening his mouth to convince him, but Jason barely let him answer.
“They screwed with Gwen,” he said.
“Who?” Sam asked.
“The pit lord,” Samantha said. “Territorial. The SUV is how we got to his territory, so he targeted it. How bad is it?”
“I thought I remembered something weird, and when I got down here, I remembered. It wasn’t just blood on the ground at the restaurant. That prick cut my coolant lines.”
“How bad is it?” Samantha asked again.
“She drove all the way here with no coolant,” Jason said, looking back out the door.
“How bad, Jason?” Samantha asked.
“Who do we know around this part of the country with a junk yard or a mechanic’s shop?” Jason asked.
“That’s funny. How long?” Sam asked.
“Days. I’m going to have to swing the block,” Jason said. “Dammit, if I had just paid better attention at the restaurant.”
“The police would have known he was targeting us. We would suddenly be interesting,” Sam said. “I’ll call Heather.”
“Heather wouldn’t take my call,” Jason said. “Not after I slept with Elizabeth.”
“That’s why I said I’ll call,” Sam said. “She still likes me.”
“Heather?” Samantha asked.
“And say what? She knows you don’t know how to work a hydraulic lift if your life depended on it.”
“I’d just be nice,” Sam said. “It works for me more than you’d think.”
“Freaky voodoo mind control,” Jason muttered.
“Look, you just figure out how to tow the Cruiser across the state line. I’ll work things out with Heather.”
Jason muttered a few more unkind things, then pulled out his cell phone. He walked one way, and Sam walked the other, pulling up Heather’s phone number on his cell. He realized as it started ringing that they had probably left Samantha standing by herself in front of the sliding doors.
Heather loved Samantha because Samantha got on Jason’s nerves. Elizabeth got on Samantha’s nerves.
“Jason!” the tiny dark-haired girl yelled, running across the yard to hug him when they pulled into the driveway. He swept her up off her feet and twirled her, kissing her on the mouth as he put her back down.
“How old is she?” Samantha asked Sam with alarm.
“Twenty-two, at last tally,” he said. “She called Jason and asked if he was around to help her come celebrate.”
“She’s sixteen,” Samantha hissed. Sam snorted, tilting his head as he watched the enthusiastic greeting from the car.
“Heather counts pretty well,” he said, “and if she had a better reason to keep them apart, believe me, she would.”
The tow truck driver grunted.
“I’d keep my daughter away from that one.”
Samantha ‘mmm-hmm’ed an agreement with him, and she and Sam got out of the tow truck as Elizabeth put her arm around Jason’s waist and the pair started walking toward the house.
“Jason,” a deep, melodious voice said from the front door. Samantha could have sworn he teleported six inches to the left, suddenly no longer in direct physical contact with Elizabeth. Samantha looked up at the short, elegant Kiowa woman with admiration. “You are here as a courtesy to Sam. I will not tolerate you abusing it.”
“Mom,” Elizabeth complained.
“I have spoken.”
The woman’s dark eyes moved over to Samantha appraisingly. Sam had explained to Samantha on the way down that Heather had been a Ranger - a great one, he said - until she had gotten pregnant with Elizabeth and retired. Now, her home functioned as a way station for other Rangers, and her small mechanic’s shop had gained some local notability.
“You are unexpected,” the woman said. Samantha lowered her head and looked up at the woman.
“I’m traveling with Sam and Jason for the time being,” she said. “I’m sorry to intrude on your hospitality.”
The woman’s mouth curled up slightly, then a bit more when Jason snorted.
“Do you curtsy, too?” he asked.
“This is Sam,” Sam said, walking the rest of the way across the yard to hug Heather. “It’s good to see you.”
Heather motioned with her chin at Samantha.
“Who is she?” she asked. Her voice was not unkind, nor was it warm.
“Serendipity,” Sam said and smiled. “She’s my friend.”
Heather nodded slowly, then held out her arms to Samantha.
“Let me look at you,” she said. Samantha glanced at Sam who raised his head to be out of Heather’s line of sight and nodded.
Heather gathered up Samantha’s hands as she got within reach and held them up, looking at the backs, then the palms. The dark head turned up to look into Samantha’s face, and Samantha slid one hand free to take off her sunglasses, passing them to Sam. The woman squinted, the wrinkles around her eyes spreading across her temples and her cheekbones.
“Your eyes betray age that isn’t on your skin,” the woman said. Samantha glanced at Sam.
“Are all of your friends going to do this?” she asked. He put a hand on Heather’s back.
“The important ones, probably,” he said. Samantha looked back down at Heather.
“Your people have deep, old connections with the natural magics of the earth. My eyes have many years of wisdom, but that which you have from your people is much older.”
The woman smiled.
“You have things to hide,” she observed.
“Yes,” Samantha said. Heather looked at Sam, lifting Samantha’s hands up and together.
“She is good. Keep her close.”
She looked
from Samantha to Sam, dropping one of Samantha’s hands and reaching for Sam’s.
“There’s something else…” she said. Samantha slid her hand back away.
“Will you leave me my secrets?” Samantha asked. The woman nodded.
“Yes. Forgive my curiosity,” she said. She looked back at Jason.
“You may as well let me take a look at you,” she said.
“No, thank you,” Jason said. “I just want to get Gwen up on a lift.”
The woman sighed, then waved at the tow truck driver and stepped down from the porch to walk the truck over to the garage. Jason stole a quick kiss with Elizabeth, who giggled and ran up the steps and into the house as he followed the tow truck as well. Sam and Samantha watched Elizabeth as she ran by.
“She’s the kind of girl who makes me insecure,” Samantha said after the door closed.
“Why?” Sam asked.
“Are you kidding? She’s perfect.”
Sam raised an eyebrow, then shrugged.
“If you say so.”
“You just can’t see her clearly from up there,” Samantha said, then turned her head. “Abby, just leave it alone.”
“You want to go get settled in?” Sam asked. Samantha shook her head.
“I think I’d like to see how the engine looks,” she said.
“That truck is his real girlfriend,” Sam said. “Be careful what you say about her.”
Samantha laughed.
“Got it.”
Sam let himself into the house and Samantha walked across the yard to the oversized workshop on the other side of the driveway. Jason was shaking hands with the tow truck driver as Heather lifted the hood on the Cruiser. Samantha went over and leaned against the front fender as Jason started disassembling parts.
“I know, baby,” he said, patting the engine as he worked. “We’re going to get you all fixed up.”
“Swapped the engine out for a Chevy, huh?” she asked. Jason came and stood over the radiator.
“That’s cute,” he said. “Are you going to tell me that it has eight cylinders, too?”
“Well, that and that you’ve installed an aftermarket manifold, here, and the fuel rail and injectors over there. Probably got a different cam in there, too, if you have any idea what you’re doing.” She turned to lean back against the car, crossing her arms. “I was going to let you show me where the spark plugs go and pretend to be impressed, though.”
