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

by Deanna Chase

  The brown eyed one met his gaze directly when he began to speak.

  He listened to every word Revik spoke, unblinking.

  Even so, something flickered behind those eyes when Revik said the thing about one of them ending up dead. His expression did not move, however, not until after Revik finished speaking. Not until the silence had stretched a few seconds beyond that.

  Then the brown-eyed seer sighed, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Shaking his head, he looked up at the big seer with the Nazi scar, motioning towards Revik with one hand. When he spoke that time, Revik noticed the Eastern European accent.

  “He is telling the truth,” he pronounced, zero doubt in his voice. “He will kill some of us, if we pursue this.”

  “Dugra drahk!” the seer hissed. “He is fucking with us! Can’t you see that? You can’t believe anything out of the forked tongue of this evil prick…”

  The brown-eyed one shrugged, holding out calloused hands in a seer’s gesture of disagreement.

  “I do not think so,” he said only. “Not this time. Not about this.” He looked at Revik, his light eyes catching the reflection of the streetlamp at Revik’s back. “We will revisit this perhaps, yes? Some other day?”

  “No,” another voice interrupted. “You will not.”

  Revik looked up, flinching when he saw the trail of seers coming out the back door of Torek’s club. He felt his shoulders tense when he saw the size of a few of the seers standing there, and noted the weapons on most of them, including a woman with dark braids and red-colored eyes that had “hunter” written all over her light, obvious to Revik even with the dense shields standing between her and himself.

  He lowered his fists as he saw them approach.

  No way he could fight all of them. They’d pull him down like a wounded calf.

  Torek, who had been the one to speak, looked at him then, a smile playing at the edges of his dark, sculpted lips.

  “Fight you?” he said, audibly amused. “Brother, I came out here to help you. Which I should have realized you would not need. I apologize only for being somewhat late…and for not checking the alley more thoroughly before I recommended you come this way.”

  The humor leached from his eyes then, right before he turned, surveying the five seers standing on the floor of the alley. Revik noticed only then that Torek’s guards and that female with the dark braids all had their weapons trained on the five of them.

  “I will not have you back here,” Torek said, his voice forbidding. “Further, do not think of harming my brother, Dehgoies Revik, outside of my property, either. As an employee, he is a friend of mine…and of the brotherhood of the Rynak.”

  Revik felt the hair on the back of his neck rise a little at the last part.

  Truthfully, he wasn’t all that sure he wanted to be a “friend of the Rynak,” but he supposed now wasn’t the time to voice that concern aloud. When he glanced at Torek next, he saw humor touching his gold irises again, as well as the quirk in his mouth, and again it occurred to Revik that the other seer had heard him, shields or no.

  “Now get out of here,” Torek said, turning back to the blue-eyed seer. “You will be watched, brothers, so do not offend me again with this foolishness. Repent your own sins before you decide you will help another repent of his.”

  Torek’s voice rose then, shifting into the more rhythmic cadence of formal Prexci as he addressed all of them.

  “…For is it not the greatest sin of all, to harm one who has already taken the vow of penance? To harm his soul now, when he has committed himself to using his light in this world for the furthering of good. To help others to absolve their own sins? To harm one such as this, with the strength to bear the hatred of weaker souls…this is the work of those you claim to fight against, brothers. Is it not?”

  None of them answered, but Revik felt a flush of fury from the blue-eyed seer.

  When Revik glanced at him next, that same seer glared at him, his eyes full of hatred.

  Even so, the threat of the Rynak seemed to have reached him.

  It turned his mind back on, at least, through that alcohol-enhanced rage.

  Revik felt him backing down, even before the tall seer stepped back, opening up the passage between Torek and his guards and where Revik stood. Making it clear he intended to stand down for real, to let Revik leave the alleyway without fight.

  He hadn’t said his last words, though.

  “In another lifetime, then, perhaps,” the blue-eyed seer said.

  He spoke it as Revik passed. Revik had been aiming his feet towards Torek’s guards and the back door of the club, since he intended to take up Torek’s offer of protection while he waited for the limousine Eddard sent up front. When the seer spoke, Revik turned in spite of himself, looking at him. The scarred face twisted in hatred, the voice and eyes reflecting the same.

  “We will meet again, brother,” the seer promised. “I swear it…in this world or the next. Count on that. For you still owe me…whatever you think you owe the gods.”

  Revik only nodded.

  There seemed little to say to such a thing.

  He wondered though, what lay behind all of that hate.

  He supposed the particulars didn’t matter. He was quite certain, whatever it was, he likely deserved it. He knew he deserved all of this and more, even if they had beaten his face into the cement and left him there in the alley to die bleeding.

  But he didn’t have time to think about that now, either.

  He had to get to Allie.

  Right then, it was the only thing he had room in his heart to care about at all.

  8

  BAND GIRL

  I woke up not knowing where I was.

  I knew I was sick, though…pretty much right off, and before I could even think straight, much less focus on the spackled ceiling above me. I felt horrible…sicker than I’d felt in a hell of a long time. That sick feeling coiled through me like a snake, twisting the nausea not only around my stomach and intestines but up into my throat and chest. I badly wanted to spit, but I was afraid to sit up.

  Realistically, I needed to throw up.

  I didn’t know where I was.

  I felt strongly that I needed to know that, first.

  The room was dark. I tried to wind back the tape of the last twenty-four hours. Fear slid through me, unnamed, unspecified, even as I did it. The fear was intense enough that I didn’t try too hard to remember everything, not at first. Logically, if I couldn’t remember anything, I had nothing to fear. But it didn’t really help. Not knowing anything made me more afraid, not less. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here…or really, where here was.

  More importantly, I couldn’t remember who I was with.

  The fact that I so quickly fell into panic mode didn’t reassure me. That felt like memory, too. Like an echo of fear, or those last moments of consciousness.

  Mickey.

  Fuck.

  My head started to pound for real. My unease turned to terror, to a jolt of adrenaline and darker fear. My throat went dry, just like you read about in books…but the blurriness behind my eyes clicked abruptly into full focus. Somehow, the tangibility of a real threat turned my brain right the fuck back on. If Mickey had me, I needed to know where I was.

  Now. Right the fuck now.

  Wincing in pain, I turned my head.

  A body lay naked under a sheet next to me. Too small to be Mickey’s, based on how he’d looked in that bar. White skin shone lighter than the dark sheets on the bed. I saw a muscular arm, tattoos, dark hair on the pillow, sticking up in spikes above an oval face with closed eyes. Fighting to focus, to blink the sleep out of my vision, I wrapped an arm around my chest, without looking away from that face.

  It was Jaden.

  Not Mickey. Jaden. As in the guy I’d gone to that club to see.

  I should have been relieved, but somehow, the feeling that came over me was closer to shock. I didn’t feel relieved at all. I felt sick.
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  That fear continued to pound behind my eyes, pulsing in my throat.

  Only now, it didn’t have a specific source. With the Mickey threat gone, the fear didn’t dissipate, but coiled around me in confusion.

  I definitely needed to get up.

  Moving my limbs and body brought a whole new slew of sensations, most of them not good. A lot of them definitely unpleasant. My ass hurt. My arms hurt...so did other parts of my body. I’d definitely had sex, and it felt like rough sex…a lot of it. Maybe too much of it.

  The fact that I couldn’t remember the sex definitely didn’t help.

  My jaw hurt, enough to make me wonder if someone hit me...then enough to make me wonder something else. As my mind whirled around the bits and pieces of information my body gave me, I found I didn’t want to examine any of that evidence too closely.

  I definitely didn’t want to tie the threads together into a coherent image.

  I let out a low gasp as I brought myself up to a seated position on the mattress. My feet touched the shag carpeted floor, or my toes anyway. I sat there, rubbing my feet in that carpet for a few seconds more before I realized I needed a bathroom...now.

  As in, right now, before I threw up all over Jaden’s floor.

  I wanted my clothes, too. I couldn’t decide if I’d be able to manage both clothes and the bathroom, though.

  I decided I probably wouldn’t. Manage it, that is.

  Not in time.

  I needed to get out of this room. I needed to get away from the pale skin of the body curled up happily on the bed. I needed to get away from the contentment on his face as he slept.

  Clothes could wait.

  Lurching to my feet, I stumbled my way to the bathroom.

  Everything hurt more once I was upright, but I focused on movement, on getting from one side of the house to the other. I focused on staying on my feet, gripping bits of the walls and doorjambs with my hands on my way through Jaden’s cluttered room and into the dark hall beyond his bedroom door. I glimpsed things here and there that I recognized, but everything tilted in front of me. Band posters hung crookedly on the white painted walls. I saw dirty clothes, soda cans and bags of chips in front of a monitor and feed station, head sets, sheet music on the carpet, a hand-held game, what looked like a butterfly knife…

  Then I was out of his room altogether.

  Ahead of me, I saw a slice of his living room with its patterned carpet, his guitar sitting on a stand in the corner next to a small practice amp. I saw the purple-painted walls, the black frames of the windows, what looked like an empty beer bottle lying on its side.

  It never occurred to me that we weren’t alone.

  Well, not until I opened the bathroom door and saw Jaden’s drummer passed out on the floor. His body half-lay on a damp-looking bathroom rug. The other half of him sprawled on the white tile, his shirt hiked up to show a swell of beer belly.

  Letting out a surprised sound, I backed up, closing the door.

  For a few seconds I just stood there in the corridor, my heart pounding.

  Then that sickness surged another bare taste of bile in my throat.

  I had too much spit. I definitely needed to throw up...but some part of my mind remained analytical, assessing my options in the background. I considered just walking over the drummer, Corey, and throwing up in the toilet next to him. Then I considered the kitchen sink. I didn’t really want to walk through the rest of the house, though.

  I didn’t really want to know who else was here.

  I considered just throwing up on the carpet. Fuck it.

  In the end, I retreated back into Jaden’s room, looking for a garbage can.

  And my clothes.

  By then, I really wanted my clothes. I didn’t care about throwing up somewhere sanitary and bathroom-like, not any more. I wanted to get the fuck out of there.

  Images were still fighting to coalesce behind my eyes, but none of them were very clear. None felt reliable...or even like true memories. More than anything, I saw a blank wall from the night before, a kind of dead zone of no-time and no-feeling.

  I knew my mind was doing what minds did, and trying to make sense of that, to fill in the gaps. It was inventing timelines and scenarios out of bare bits of data, trying to string them together into coherence, in a way that looked and felt logical, true or not.

  None of those timelines felt good.

  Feelings wanted to come out of that...or maybe feelings about the lack of feeling.

  The longer I concentrated on that, on the fear and unease and the not wanting to think, the more I realized that at least some small part of me was in shock. Yeah, at least some of the sickness came from that, not from whatever was going on with my stomach. The feeling wasn’t shame, more like something gross had crawled up over me, touching me while I slept.

  Get the fuck out of there, Allie...

  Anger. A huge fucking swell of anger.

  It came out of nowhere, almost like it wasn’t mine at all.

  But it was mine. It had to be mine.

  Find your clothes and get out of there...I’ll deal with him...I fucking promise you that. Get out of there before he wakes up and starts to lie to you...

  I had to get the fuck out of there.

  The thought came at me strongly, without any doubt.

  Logic only fought to assert itself afterwards. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t do anything, not until I had more information. I couldn’t trust anything Jaden told me about the night before, not now, not without any memory of my own.

  I needed to get out of here.

  But I didn’t. I just stood there.

  I wanted to remember so fucking badly. It felt important to remember before I left, before time passed and I brushed this away somehow, let either myself or others rewrite it into something else, something that didn’t happen.

  But I couldn’t remember. I didn’t remember how I’d gotten here. I didn’t remember drinking, so I had no idea how I’d gotten so fucked up. I remembered one beer…one, if that. I remembered seeing Mickey. I remember the recognition on his face, the surprise.

  After that, I remembered...

  Nothing.

  Pretty much nothing after that.

  Someone must have brought me here. I knew that someone had to be Jaden. I also knew Jaden and I weren’t here alone, and I was pretty sure I’d had a lot of sex the night before. Maybe more sex than I could have had with just one person…

  Allie, get out of there. Get the fuck out of there. Now.

  I shook my head, fighting to clear it.

  Please, honey. Please...let me handle it.

  My mind continued pulling threads together...a little too fast now.

  Fast enough to make that sick feeling in my gut a lot worse.

  Don’t get arrested for this piece of shit…please…he's not fucking worth it…

  Fast enough for the anger to feel a lot more connected to me now.

  A lot less like it belonged to someone else.

  Allie, don’t hurt him. You can’t afford to have law enforcement looking at you...you can’t...even if they let you off in the end. Please...trust me on this, please. Let me do it. I promise you, I’ll handle it. I fucking promise…

  Fear continued to darken in my mind, to turn into a hotter and denser anger. Fast enough to wake me up out of the stupor of whatever poison still coursed its way through my body, making my limbs and mind sluggish, pulling at my insides.

  Allie! Don’t hurt him! Please don’t, goddamn it!

  Somewhere in that, I realized I’d reentered Jaden’s room.

  I stared at the pale-skinned body lying on the bed.

  I thought about what would happen if I did something to him. Maybe with that butterfly knife over by his feed station on the floor. I thought about how it would look from the outside, given everything. I thought about Mom, about what everyone thought of me back in high school, even when I hadn’t done anything. I thought about the weird things in my past. The things I
couldn’t explain. The things that made me stand out, pretty much since I was a kid, no matter how normal I tried to be. I knew that nagging feeling in the back of my head was right.

  They’d put me away. Even if I was right about what happened to me the night before, I would be the one who ended up in jail.

  What I couldn’t decide was, if I really cared.

  Goddamn it, Allie…if you don’t back off, I’m going to have to knock you out. You’ll have to stay there, maybe until I get there, and I’m still a few hours out. Please. Please don’t make me do that. Please, baby…let me handle it…

  The sickness in my belly worsened. Indecision pulled at me.

  Maybe to buy myself time, I turned, looking for my clothes.

  A minute or so later, I found my dress in a heap on the floor, halfway crammed under Jaden’s desk. I crawled under it to pull the fabric out. When I crawled back out, gripping the black, stretchy fabric in one hand, I glanced at the bed, but Jaden hadn’t moved.

  I was dressed less than a minute after that.

  Well, except for my underwear. And my shoes.

  I shoved the underwear from my mind.

  But I needed the shoes.

  I couldn’t see them anywhere, though...at least not anywhere in Jaden’s room. My headset was missing, too, which bothered me more. Not like I would have called anyone right then, but yeah, I needed the damned thing. Worse, it would force me to see Jaden again, if I couldn’t find it. That, or I’d have to report it stolen and go stand in line for another re-coding to my implant, which would be a serious pain in the ass.

  They also might insist on using the locator to track the damned thing down, and then I’d have to see Jaden anyway.

  Allie...

  I felt that anger worsen, and shook my head.

  I had to go. Now. I could feel the urgency there.

  I agreed with it, too.

  Well. Mostly.

  I tried to remember if I was supposed to work that day. I decided I had the day off, whatever the schedule said. Even if it meant getting fired.

  Call Jon. Get him to pick you up, Allie...

  Some part of me thought about calling Jon, about walking to his house, even.