Psychic Storm: Ten Dangerously Sexy Tales of Psychic Witches, Vampires, Mediums, Empaths and Seers

by Deanna Chase

  If anything, the confusion and anger around that would make their hatred worse. A few of those angry seers wanted to see him come now…either with the woman or with whoever else Torek intended to use on him, now that’d he’d softened his light.

  Even the blue-eyed seer with the Nazi scar wanted that now.

  The fact was, he’d raised the hostility of the crowd significantly, even in just those few seconds of silence where he stood by Torek on one end of the stage.

  Revik stared out at that crowd, momentarily paralyzed, confused by the darkness from where he stood under the bright lights of the stage. Then, blinking, he felt his mind click back on, for real that time. As it did, another jolt of fear shot through his body…along with a rush of adrenaline that clouded his mind all over again.

  “Let me go,” he growled, jerking his arm away. “Deal’s off.”

  “I’ve paid you, brother,” Torek reminded him.

  “You’ll get your money back,” Revik snapped. “Every fucking pence. Now let go of me, before I hurt you in return, brother...”

  That time, Torek barely hesitated before he released Revik’s arm.

  “What is it?” he said, his voice subdued. “What’s wrong?”

  Revik finished buckling his belt, fighting to control his light.

  “Do you have a place I can jump?” he said.

  Torek hesitated again.

  Confusion flitted across his face. Revik felt pain there, too, like the other seer was still recovering from what they’d been doing, maybe even more so than Revik himself. Revik fought the urge to hit the other male, or maybe just shake him, but Torek recovered suddenly.

  The instant those gold eyes cleared, he nodded.

  Once. Decisive.

  Torek’s light shifted in the same set of seconds, turning harder, more infiltrator-like.

  “Yes. I will take you.” He jerked his head sideways. “Follow me, brother.”

  He must have sent something to the female via his light, too, because Revik glanced over as she climbed off the table, still naked, then held up her hands and began to address the crowd, which had started to murmur and mutter their disapproval of the show’s interruption.

  Revik didn’t hang around to listen.

  He followed Torek off the stage, not even bothering to grab his shirt off the chair before he left.

  Torek took him to one of the back rooms.

  He indicated towards a high bed, but Revik was already heading for it, checking out the construct in the room even as he lay down his body. He stretched out, shirtless, realizing only then that he’d left his headset in the pocket of his shirt on that stage, too. But that didn’t matter, either. He’d use his light to imprint whatever happened...he wasn’t supposed to use tech to record his jumps with Alyson, anyway.

  “Is the construct secure in here?” Revik said.

  “Yes,” Torek affirmed, again nodding once, seer-fashion. “We have government officials in here, brother. Diplomats. We cannot afford to not be secure in every way.”

  “Do your people monitor it?” Revik said, turning his head.

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?” Revik demanded. “I can’t have any recordings of this...”

  “I’m absolutely sure, brother. Do not worry.” Torek hesitated. “Do you need a pair?”

  Revik looked up, truly noticing only then that the seer had remained in the room, lingering by the door. He barely hesitated.

  “No,” he said. “Get the fuck out of here.” Hesitating, he added. “Please...and thank you. I’ll give you your money back as soon as I come out. And more for the use of the room.”

  Torek waved that off, though, an intensity rising to his gold eyes. “You’ll work it off,” he told him. “I don’t want the cash, brother.”

  A flicker of pain reached Revik’s light from Torek’s, enough to startle him.

  But he didn’t pause on that, either. By then, he’d already checked through the basics of the construct, noted the lack of recording devices...at least that he could feel...and pinpointed her location in the physical.

  He didn’t wait.

  He jumped.

  Pain lives there for him...the instant he is in that other place.

  He splits his consciousness even as he makes the first jump, looking for her brother, Jon, with some lesser but equally focused part of his light. He scarcely gives this his attention in his conscious mind, however, before he renews his focus on finding her.

  He feels her.

  He always feels her...no matter where he is now, as soon as he reaches for her...but it is difficult this time to get any information that is concrete. When he can’t get much usable information off her mind, he uses her light to find her body in the physical. It is what he had started to do, even before he dismissed Torek from the small construct of the sex room.

  Even before he jumped, he was looking for her...and now he finds her.

  She is where he saw her when he’d been on that stage.

  People are holding her now, dragging her out of the bar. He sees a face he recognizes there, feels the light of a human male he’d been forced to deal with before. The human worm is older now, fatter, his light is sicker than Revik remembers, and it was not good then. The human’s anger has twisted down into itself since he left school, turning him even more petty and bitter and broken. Revik gets snapshots from the human’s life, none of them pretty.

  He focuses back on Alyson, on her light...and he sees an opening.

  Revik wraps into the male’s light, first.

  He considers knocking the human out cold, fights with whether he should do it now or wait for him to be out of the public eye, away from surveillance, alone with her. He could take him out in the parking lot, but that would leave her vulnerable, too…and possibly in a position where he’d have to knock out numerous humans, enough for his actions to be noticed.

  There might be surveillance in the parking lot, too.

  He could wait until he has Jon looking for her, implanting her location in his thoughts as subtly as he can without slowing the human down…

  But he can’t wait that long. This fucker is dangerous. Revik decides he will take the human out now, while he’s still in the bar.

  Then, something changes.

  Jaden, the new boyfriend is there.

  The band stops playing. He is arguing with the human male, Mickey, Revik remembers as his name. Hesitating where he’d been about to pull the trigger on the other’s light, Revik holds back, watches.

  Even as he does it, his light wraps obsessively into Allie’s.

  He can’t seem to keep his own light out of hers, despite Vash’s warnings, despite the anger that courses through his light when he remembers the things Kali has said. Despite the fact that he resents her, too, resents this fucking job, resents that she screwed up his life, that she’s basically made it impossible for him to move on and create a new one.

  Seeing her there, on the floor, unconscious in a dress that gives him an instant hard on, doesn’t help. He doesn’t want to fuck her like this, but something wraps into his light, amplifying the natural protectiveness around his job, making his cock hurt and making his light hurt, which probably isn’t aided by the memory of the female seer’s cunt or the hotter pain of his back. He’d let himself go there again. Even with Vash’s warning, he’d been there again, fantasizing. He’d been trying to fuck her light…

  Gods damn it. He didn’t want this. He never fucking asked for this…

  He’s confused. Confused. Scared. But focused, too, back on the job.

  Back on the job.

  He wants...

  Jaden hits Mickey, right in the face.

  Mickey finally set Allie down on the tile floor, backing down like the coward he is. The crowd is larger now, which is part of it. Mickey doesn’t leave entirely, though, or even leave her side. Instead, he continues to grip her limp arm in one hand after he lays her body on the floor, a sharp coil of possessive stubbornness sliding around
his fogged, human light.

  Revik sees the two of them face off, arguing.

  He sees Mickey‘s friends converge around them in the seconds that follow, standing around and looking as confused as most of the rest of the onlookers who have gathered to see the passed-out, half-dressed woman. Mickey’s friends are like he is. Sick-looking. Feeding on the stories Mickey tells them, stories of anger and revenge and being wronged. They cluster together like snarling, wounded animals, looking for brighter things they might break or harm.

  Revik sees Jaden pointing at Allie with one hand, even as more people gather, as the bartender walks over, pale, worried he might be held liable for whatever just occurred.

  Too many people now.

  Revik’s options narrow.

  He can’t knock Mickey out, not now...not with this many witnesses...but he also feels himself relax marginally as he realizes he may not have to. For the first time, he feels a rush of gratitude towards Jaden...for paying attention, for looking out for Allie, for not letting that sociopathic monster take her out of there while she’s unconscious.

  Even so, Revik feels his light react to the possessiveness he feels on Jaden, too...strongly enough that he struggles to control a rising anger that wants to suffocate his light. Jaden sees her as his. Even now, when they barely know one another. They are barely more than fucking, yet he claims her as his.

  The idea infuriates Revik beyond any kind of logic or rationality.

  He continues to pull on Jon, almost obsessively now. He wants Jon there.

  He trusts Jon.

  But Jon isn’t at home. He’s currently making out with a guy he met through the kung fu circuit, and too focused on getting off to feel much about Revik’s attempts to get his attention. If he were seer, he would feel it, sure...but he is not seer, he is human, and Revik isn’t allowed to impinge on Jon’s free will in any significant way, either. All he can do is worm a vague anxiety into Jon’s brain as he continues to massage the dick of the guy he’s sitting in a car with, hoping to bring back to his apartment.

  Revik eventually gives up, focusing even more of his attention back on the bar, on Allie, on Jaden and that fucker, Mickey, and the bartender standing just outside of that circle.

  The scene in front of him begins to lose charge.

  Enough that Revik finds himself flipping into investigation mode, scrolling back through the loop of time, using yet another split off portion of his light to ascertain the exact sequence of events that just occurred. He looks for when it started, who drugged her, how they managed to get it in her...for it had to be a drug of some kind. She didn’t feel drunk, her light didn’t have the drunk stamp at all, more like she’d been shot with a tranquilizer dart.

  It crossed his mind that a seer could have done this to her.

  Then he sees her drink the beer, in the minutes before she catches sight of Mickey. He feels her wanting to leave, her decision to leave. He watches her stop off the barstool…

  She falls like a stone, barely maintains consciousness after she reaches the floor. He watches as she struggles to stay upright, convinced again that it wasn’t alcohol, and now also convinced it hadn’t been a seer that did this to her. A seer’s knock-out would have been clean, no gap between the cut strings and total blackout.

  Revik scrolls back further.

  From what he can tell, she hasn’t had anything to eat or drink since she left the restaurant where she works. That was hours earlier, which again points back to that beer. He doesn’t feel sickness on her, either, or anything like a fever, food poisoning, hormonal problems, anything that could cause light-headedness...

  He finds it.

  Revik understands then, the bartender’s fear.

  The bartender is in on this. He drugged the beer. That hadn’t been an abstract fear of liability Revik felt, but something a hell of a lot more specific.

  Revik splits his light yet again.

  He fights fury, a near-murderous rage that makes it hard not to cut the cord of the bartender right then and there. Instead, he flips even further into infiltration mode, reading the bartender at depth this time, to hell with his personal privacy, or even his dignity. He looks for any information around this incident that he can find.

  The rest of Revik’s attention remains on Jaden and Mickey while he searches, making sure the scene continues to unfold such that Jaden keeps pulling Allie away from that piece of human excrement. Making sure that Allie gets home in one piece.

  That still has to be the immediate, right now, thing.

  He feels himself fighting to calm his light, even as he continues to assess the timeline in reverse. He doesn’t fully panic until he reads the bartender to the beginning...meaning to when he gets the drug, versus when he pours it into Allie’s chilled beer after he cracks off the cap.

  It wasn’t Mickey who paid the bartender to dose Allie.

  It was Jaden.

  Panic slices back through Revik’s light, clouding his mind.

  He feels the bartender panicking too, which doesn’t help––the two things amplify one another, making Revik’s light spike higher, in more exaggerated arcs, even as he tries to decide what to do. He can’t take Jaden out, not with Mickey there. SCARB would have all of this on the internal cameras, and it will definitely arouse suspicion if he takes out both of them. They will look for seer involvement, look at Allie more closely than any of them can afford.

  Even if he finds a way to disable the cameras, using infiltrator contacts who work the public surveillance feeds, it is too risky. One of them could be undercover SCARB, too, and Revik knows others could be watching from the Barrier that night, even just in a random spot check, or attracted to the chaos around Allie after she fell.

  Fuck.

  He wants to be on the ground so badly he can taste it.

  He pulls harder on Jon, trying to get him there, trying to reach him, but it’s no use.

  He looks for other seers he’s used before, but none of them are close enough.

  As the realization sinks deeper into his light, the panic in Revik’s light worsens, even as it becomes amplified with rage.

  Fuck it. Should he just drop them both? Risk it?

  No... a voice intervenes, soft. No, you cannot.

  Revik recognizes that voice, as well as the pulse of light that comes with it, but he shoves both aside, so angry he can scarcely breathe. He knows they watch him, but their silence right then nearly unhinges him.

  Forcing his light back to a level, he closes to the immediate Barrier space where he is. He blocks them, even as he knows it probably will do him little good.

  He focuses all of his light back on the scene in the bar.

  Jaden is winning the argument with the crowd about Allie. About who she belongs to inside this horror pit of predators and rapists. Revik hates all of them right then. He wants them dead. He hates them more than he can even feel, but the heat of that hatred nearly blinds him, making him forget about everything he learned in those monastery caves, everything he’s tried to do with Vash, to be the kind of person he’s fought to be for the last several decades.

  He feels Jaden’s words with his light and that hatred deepens.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” Jaden says, yelling around at the onlookers as much as at Mickey. “She’s my fucking girlfriend, man...who are you? What are you doing with her?”

  He is pissing on her, in his human way.

  Claiming her.

  Jaden’s band mates back him up.

  The bartender does, too, although his light still looks and feels nervous. Like all humans, he feels safest hiding behind a mob, behind the bodies of other humans.

  But yes, he is nervous and he should be, Revik thinks. More than nervous. He looks scared out of his mind. Revik sees an accomplice rap behind the bartender’s eyes. Accomplice to what, the human doesn’t yet know, but the guy has already done time for dealing and is terrified of going back inside. He already details and refines his defense in the recesses of his light,
what he will tell the cops if they tried to pin this on him.

  Wasn’t supposed to knock her out like that, his mind muttered. Revik could hear the words, nearly on the surface. Thought it was just supposed to be a bit of fun. Just get her fucked up and horny...make her pliable, open-minded. Damned seer drugs, you never know what they’re going to do. What the hell is Jay pulling? And who is this skank he’s fucking, anyway? She doesn’t look that slutty…he made it sound like she was a quasi-prostitute. Thought she was kind of cute, and nice when she asked for that beer…

  More fear seethes through his light as he looks around at the crowd, at Jaden, at Mickey.

  Who is this crazy fuck with the shaved hair who looks like a junkie...? he thinks next. Does Jay actually know that guy? Fuck...is he an undercover cop?

  The bartender starts to back away.

  He slinks away from the scene with Allie, even as he thinks that last thing, staring at Mickey warily, like he’s worried the overweight and pimple-faced rapist-wannabe might pull a gun.

  When Jaden bends down, getting ready to pick Allie up, Revik winds deeper into Jaden’s light. He fights to discern his motives, what he intends from this...even as a part of him realizes he already knows pretty much exactly what Jaden intends.

  Revik wants it confirmed, though.

  Maybe he even needs it confirmed, before he does what he intends to do.

  However he ends up handling this...or more to the point, however he ends up rationalizing what he does in the next few minutes...Revik knows, even now, in some dimmer corner of his mind, that he wants there to be absolutely zero question as to why he did what he did. He wants that information to be clear, beyond refutable, before he pulls the trigger.

  Even so, Revik feels entirely at peace with the progression of his thoughts, and for once, he finds his emotional reactions exactly align with how he perceives his role as Alyson’s guardian.