by H. R. Moore
Helena squeezed Anita’s arm warmly as she got up and jogged away, calling, ‘I’ll see you in a couple of days,’ back over her shoulder.
Anita couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. She’d had lessons with Helena every day for years and she’d never mentioned anything about any of this. Helena hadn’t even tried that hard to recruit her to be an academic, and now this? Anita was astute enough to know that Helena hadn’t really been warning her off Marcus, nor had she accidently bumped into Anita at the river. Helena had obviously known about the direction Anita’s relationship with Marcus was going, so saw the opportunity and went for it. But that didn’t really help Anita decide what she should do next.
She was also a little worried by the brass cylinder in her head and the notion that it could be something hostile that was waiting to kill her. She didn’t think that Amber had had an opportunity to plant something, but then Anita didn’t know what to look for and she had no idea how long it had been there, so it could’ve been anybody, for any reason over the course of her life. It could have been Helena for all she really knew.
*****
The following day, Anita was still pondering what she should do as she ran to the castle for her first Mind lesson. She arrived and almost ran headlong into Austin and Amber descending the steps and was instantly on guard.
‘What are you doing here?’ Austin sniped, shooting a questioning sideways glance at Amber, while Amber ignored him and stared intently at Anita. Anita stood her ground, wondering again if the cylinder in her head was hostile and had been put there by her.
‘I’m here to see Marcus,’ she replied cheerily, pretending she hadn’t noticed their hostility.
‘I see. What for?’ he fired back in crisp rounds, not happy about the prospect of Anita spending more time with his precious son.
Luckily, as Anita was contemplating her answer, Marcus came striding out of the entrance towards them. ‘Anita, hi,’ he called openly.
‘Hi,’ she said, visibly relieved, the tension going out of her.
As Marcus reached her, he put an arm around her shoulders in a plutonic, brotherly way and shepherded her into the castle. ‘See you later dad,’ he called back calmly over his shoulder. Marcus didn’t say a thing until they were safely up the stairs and in his suite. He closed the door firmly behind them and took a deep breath, ‘that was almost very interesting,’ he said frivolously. He took a cavalier step towards her and she casually moved away. The energy changed, charged at the realisation they were now alone in Marcus’ suite, no prying eyes and Marcus changed too, his movements becoming calculated, reminding Anita of a big cat stalking its prey. ‘Nothing like a dangerous encounter to liven up a morning,’ he purred, his predator’s eyes fixed on her.
‘Something like that,’ she countered defensively, moving cautiously away from him, over to one of the enormous light grey sofas and sitting down informally, legs tucked underneath her, pulling a large patterned cushion protectively in front of her, trying to ignore the delicious reaction she was having to Marcus’ honed form stalking her every move. ‘So, tell me, what am I learning today?’ she said as strongly as she could, averting her gaze. She wanted to keep him focused on the matter in hand, something it was difficult enough to keep her own mind on, let alone his.
Marcus smiled as he sat down lithely next to her, a knowing, victorious smile, casting aside her weak attempts to divert him. She felt his energy lift as he leant in towards her and despite herself she felt hers respond, her skin prickling as the heady smell of vanilla invading her lungs, eroding her resolve. Impulsively, she moved towards him, meeting his lips with hers. They kissed with urgency, Anita feeling tingles shoot all over her body as Marcus put his hands on her waist and pulled her astride him. She grabbed handfuls of his hair and kissed him more deeply while his fingers explored her, finding the chink between the back of her running tights and her vest, pushing their way under to caress her back. But Anita stiffened as he did it, pulled her lips away, placed her hands either side of his face and rested her forehead on his, closing her eyes. Marcus removed his hands alarmed, pushing her backwards so he could see her face. She dropped her hands from him and in one supple movement removed herself from his lap, curling herself up against the arm of the sofa.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, reaching for her hand, a look of concern on his face, but she didn’t let him take it.
She briefly met his worried eyes. ‘Marcus,’ she paused, trying to work out what to say next. ‘Why did you invite me to the ball?’
He looked confused, his eyes wide as he considered the question, ‘I was intrigued by you. You’re different. I find you exciting.’
‘And so far this has all been a game,’ she said cryptically.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, although Anita could tell in his eyes he knew what she meant.
‘Yes you do. I didn’t react to you like the other girls normally would, so your instincts were aroused and you chased me. And because I knew that, I pushed you away, which made you chase me more. But now we’re here, in your bedroom, and we’re in too dangerous a position to play games.’
‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,’ he said sceptically.
‘It’s the only way of looking at it,’ she snapped. ‘You know Austin doesn’t approve of me and we live in an increasingly dangerous world. I need to know you’re not playing a game now.’
‘Anita, I’m not. I like you. I genuinely like you, you’re confident and clever, and ballsy and you don’t cower at the sight of my father and you’re reckless and sexy and most importantly, I can talk to you. I’ve never spoken about my mother to anyone, but with you it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.’ His voice had taken on a pleading edge, worried he was about to lose her.
Anita tempered, her defences falling away. She wasn’t totally sure he was telling the truth, but she found herself wanting to believe him. She took his hand and kissed it gently, signalling that she believed him for the moment, before saying softly, ‘what am I learning today?’
He smiled, leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on her lips, before leading her by the hand into his bedroom, ‘today you’re going to learn the arts of suggestion and persuasion,’ he said brightly as they went.
‘You mean manipulation,’ she said bluntly.
‘Call them what you will, they’re very powerful skills.’
They spent the next two hours playing chess, with Marcus teaching Anita about the nuances of suggestion and idea planting to influence the thoughts and actions of others. The idea was that she would distract him with the chess, then casually plant an idea into the conversation that he was supposed to pick up and think was his, but by the end, she hadn’t really got very far. Marcus assured her that one of the problems was that he knew what she was trying to do, so he told her she should practice on other people. He explained that it was best to start with people who trusted her implicitly, or who were naturally inclined to believe her and after a brief internal moral debate, she decided Bas was the best person for the job. She just had to work out what she wanted to plant.
Anita left the castle frustrated. She didn’t like it when she couldn’t do things and she was cross about Marcus’ comment before he had kissed her goodbye, ‘be careful with Alexander’. She would do what she damn well wanted and judging by what everyone kept telling her, it wasn’t Alexander she needed to be careful with.
*****
Anita had just about managed to throw off her bad mood by the time she arrived at the Temple of the Spirit to meet Alexander, but she suspected that may have had something to do with the prospect of spending an evening meditating with him. Her stomach flipped as she thought about his piercing blue eyes, and she fought to get her energy back under control as she climbed the steps into the Temple. As she entered on the dot of seven, she saw Alexander striding towards her, his cloak billowing out behind him and his hair looking wild, as though he had run his hands through it in despair many a time today
. Even slightly worn as he looked now, he was exceptionally attractive. She felt her energy respond mischievously to her thoughts and Alexander looked up when he felt it, no hint of a smile on his face.
‘We’ll start here at the back, where you were meditating yesterday,’ he snapped.
Anita’s energy deflated at the curt greeting. Obviously he wasn’t as pleased to see her as she was to see him, unless of course it was just that he was hiding his energy; I need to learn to do that, she thought.
‘How do you hide your energy?’ Anita asked again.
Alexander, whose back was facing her, paused, a flash of surprise showing on his face before he turned to look at her. He glared at her, slightly more fiercely than he’d intended, but it was taking every fibre of his control to keep his energy in check at such close proximity. ‘I think maybe we should master the basics first. Seeing as you seem to have particular trouble keeping your energy under control, that may never be something you manage to grasp,’ the words were quiet and menacing. Anita looked hurt, she was embarrassed and confused and Alexander felt a tug on his heartstrings. He didn’t want to be nasty to her, but he had to keep his distance, she was in enough danger as it was.
‘Sit down,’ he said pointing to the place on the mat where she had been sitting yesterday. Anita sat down and said nothing. Her energy had plummeted; she was now empty and deflated. She wasn’t angry, her usual reaction, she just felt drained.
Alexander sat down in front of her, the knees of his crossed legs so close to hers that she swore she could feel a tension in the air between their skin. Alexander looked Anita in the eye and it was all she could do to hold his gaze, searching his lovely blue eyes while he struggled to keep them from showing any warmth.
‘Close your eyes, clear your mind and breathe deeply,’ he softly commanded and she did as he said. She relinquished control, following his instructions to the letter, feeling strangely tired. As she closed her eyes, Anita was almost instantly transported to the sky above the clearing with the yurt, then felt herself falling and landed in front of the door. Again, Anita pushed the curtain aside and entered the unexpectedly light space inside; it was exactly as it had been last time, apart from the brass cylinder which had disappeared. She looked over to the bed to see Alexander exactly where he had been last time too, still topless and dishevelled and she made her way towards him. As she neared him, she felt a warm nudge at the edge of her energy, similar to the nudge she had felt at dinner at the ball and she smiled.
‘So that was you,’ she said, encouraged, although weirdly her lips didn’t seem to move as she spoke.
‘You can feel that?’ Alexander shot back, the surprise clear on his face.
‘Of course,’ she said, sitting down next to him and bringing her legs up so she could sit cross-legged on the bed.
Alexander was amazed. He had never met anyone who could feel nudges apart from himself, it was a rare skill. He was tempted to touch her to see if she felt tingles in her fingers, as he had when they had danced, but to test that would require touching her outside of the meditation and it wouldn’t surprise him if Marcus was watching, to make sure Alexander wasn’t trying anything untoward. He knew there would be another opportunity.
‘So how did it feel when you got rid of that brass cylinder?’ he asked instead.
‘I don’t know, as I didn’t manage to get rid of it.’
‘What?’ Alexander replied alarmed, ‘where is it then?’
‘It hit the floor and rolled out of the door, but it wasn’t in the clearing outside when I came in a second ago.’
‘Great.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means you have a brass cylinder roaming around in your head somewhere and we have no idea where. Have you ever meditated to anywhere else?’
‘Ha,’ Anita laughed. ‘Not really. I didn’t even believe this was possible until a couple of months ago, when Cleo and I meditated to a boat on the sea, only I didn’t actually see her there, so I only had conclusive proof it’s not total rubbish when I meditated here yesterday and saw you.’
‘Gods, they really do teach you nothing.’
‘It’s looking more and more that way,’ she replied sardonically, clearly conveying this was not a helpful comment. ‘So where are we now?’
Alexander looked at her as though she had just landed from another planet. ‘You’re kidding?’ Anita shook her head and frowned impatiently. ‘You have no idea where you are?’
‘Nope, none whatsoever,’ she said irritably.
‘Anita, this is your Centre,’ he said gently.
‘My what?’
‘You’re Centre. The place that comes together when you’re thirty, remember?’
‘Well yes obviously I’ve heard of my Centre, but I’ve always thought it was just some rubbish made up to keep people in lessons after school. You’re telling me this is the place that will ‘come together’ when I’m thirty? What does that mean anyway?’
‘It means that this place reflects your most prominent skills, the ones you are most comfortable with and that come most easily to you. So for you it’s a mixture of Body and Spirit with very little Mind at all, but there are also other places inside your head that represent different combinations of skills and any one of those places can be developed. When your Centre comes together, all the different places in your mind merge or ‘come together’ into one new Centre that you will have for the rest of your life. Why that happens at thirty no one knows, but from the time when your Centre comes together it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to truly develop new skills. The reason you are feeling so tired now,’ she gave him a questioning look, ‘and I know because I can read your energy remember?’ she nodded yieldingly. Of course he could, ‘is because this morning you had a session with Marcus to try and develop your Mind skills. That doesn’t come easily to you, so it takes a great deal of effort to build up your abilities. Just like when someone practices Body skills and they feel tired and stiff while their muscles recover, your mind is currently doing the same thing and you’ll feel empty and drained until it has time to recover. Hopefully, as you already have a lot of Spirit in you, you won’t find these sessions take too much of a toll. You may feel a bit tired afterwards, but that should wear off after a couple of sessions. The Mind sessions on the other hand you are likely to find very draining, so you’re going to need to be careful that Austin or Amber don’t try to take advantage of you in the next few weeks, as you will be especially vulnerable to attack.’
Normally Anita would have said Alexander was being ridiculous and that of course no one would attack her, but she was beginning to believe that maybe he and Helena might be right, especially after the way Austin and Amber had looked at her this morning.
‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘it wouldn’t surprise me if Marcus is watching us right now, and he probably will for the first few sessions, until he trusts that I’ll behave myself.’ Anita remembered the look on Marcus’ face when he had said goodbye earlier and she knew he was right. It was quite likely he was currently watching them from the outside, but she wasn’t totally convinced she wanted Alexander to behave himself.
‘Well at least he can’t tell what’s going on in here,’ she said.
‘No, he can’t exactly, but there are a few tells on the outside that give clues to what is going on inside the meditation, so we need to be careful not to give anything away about that cylinder of yours. But we do need to find it.’
‘Or it might explode in my head and kill me?!’ Anita laughed.
Alexander gave her another stern look. ‘Yes, and you can find that funny if you want to, but if you die while I’m in here, I could very well die too, so I’d rather we take this seriously if you don’t mind.’
Anita went pale, ‘you think someone may actually have put it in my head to try and kill me?’
‘Who knows, but what I do know is that it’s best to find it and get rid of it before we get a chance to find out.’
&
nbsp; ‘But what if it contains something really important from a friend?’
‘Do you have any friends who need to pass important messages to you through cylinders in your mind?’
‘Not that I know of, but you never know.’
‘And what if it’s been put there by Austin or Amber to try and kill you?’
‘I know they don’t like me seeing Marcus, but really, you think they would resort to trying to kill me? You said yourself they wouldn’t try that if I was close to Marcus, if they would even try it at all.’
‘Believe me, they would try it if it suited them, and they can use it at any time they like, which means they could have planted it just in case you and Marcus don’t work out, so they have a convenient way to kill you.’
‘I still find it hard to believe that Austin wants to kill me just because I have strong energy.’
‘He’s killed for much less. He thinks he can do whatever he wants and get away with it, and to be honest, there aren’t many people queuing up to try and stop him.’
‘Are you trying to stop him?’
Alexander ignored the question. ‘So we need to find and get rid of the cylinder in your head. I need to teach you how to hide your energy, along with all the meditation poses, and then we may get on to visiting the Centre of others and extraction, depending on how quickly you learn.’
‘Hopefully I’ll pick up this a lot quicker than I seem to be doing with the Mind skills. I’m abysmal at those,’ she said, considering Alexander’s comment about visiting the Centre of others. Would she get to visit his Centre? Just the very prospect sent shivers up and down her spine. ‘So, where do we start?’
Alexander and Anita spent the next hour trying to locate other places in Anita’s mind where the cylinder may have hidden itself. Alexander didn’t tell Anita this, but he was surprised the cylinder had run away. It meant that someone very powerful, more powerful than Austin or Amber and with a mix of Mind and Spirit had planted it and it would be difficult to get rid of, but they could cross that bridge if and when they got there. They located two other places in Anita’s mind, one by the river in Empire and another on top of a beautiful cliff looking out over the sea. Alexander knew this place well, the cliffs overlooking Kingdom, but neither showed signs of the cylinder. Both places were steeped in Spirit and Body, hence why they were the first and easiest places to find. Alexander found himself wondering what Anita’s Centre would look like when it came together; it would be an interesting one, of that he was sure.
