by Sara DeHaven
Leander gave her a crooked smile. “We must seem ridiculously like two strutting roosters, fighting for your attention.”
“Maybe a bit.” She was reeling from inadvertently revealing Daniel’s status, mind racing in anxious circles like a rabbit seeking its burrow when a hawk flies by. She had to find some way to judge how dangerous it was for him to know that information. It was particularly unnerving not to be able to call on her Reader talent. Fortunately, Leander went on, giving her time to think.
“You know, I actually tried to tell Daniel I wouldn’t go after you at that party. Being new in town, I didn’t want to screw up a potential new friend group. He told me not to refrain on his account, that you weren’t together and never had been. That’s when I read him. I wanted to be sure he was telling the truth, and not just speaking out of anger or hurt pride. Bree, surely you’ve read the dark energy in him. Are you sure he’s not Keltoi?”
Bree almost laughed at that, partly out of nerves, and partly at the absurdity of the idea. “He’s definitely not Keltoi, trust me. I’ll admit he’s a bit demon burned. There's a unique way demon contact seems to affect him. He’s more susceptible than most, although it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his character. He’s a good person, very morally rigorous, I’d say.”
“I’ve seen some pretty righteous characters succumb to Demon Master insanity. I’ve sometimes wondered if it isn’t a certain rigidity of character that’s part of the problem.”
Leander reached for a cookie and took a bite while Bree considered how to reply. Was Daniel rigid? He wasn’t self-righteous. He certainly wasn’t closed to new ideas. But she had to admit there was something rigid in the way he kept his Demon Master and Binder talents separated off, in the discipline it took to keep the Casting active that hid those talents, in how he kept the spell up pretty much full time. “I wouldn’t exactly call him rigid, not in the usual sense of the word,” she told Leander. “But I have to say I’m interested in how you know so much about Demon Masters,” she added with a searching look.
“Oh, I met a few when I was in the Keltoi,” he replied breezily, and with a definite light of mischief in his eye. He clearly wanted to shock her, and he’d succeeded. Leander was former Keltoi? What did that mean about what he might do with the information she’d given him so far?
Bree had felt out of her depth before, and now she was in serious trouble. She was clearly not cut out for espionage. The hell of it was, she shouldn’t be surprised, because Daniel had hinted at suspicion of Leander. She realized she had blown Daniel off about it out of anger.
“Don’t look so worried,” Leander chided, wiping at the sugar left by his cookie at the corner of his mouth. “I did say former Keltoi.”
Bree’s Reader sense reared up automatically as her stress grew, but as usual, she couldn’t come up with any pattern that made sense to her. “So when was this?” she asked. She nervously picked up her cup for a drink, then put it back down without taking a sip.
“Back when I was a teenager. I was raised in foster homes, and when I was thirteen, I was stupid enough to think I’d do better on the streets. I was in a pretty bad place when a Keltoi spotted me and recruited me. He was a Reader, and noticed that weird thing where I’m not readable. He wanted to use that. And for a while, I went along with the program. That’s where I learned the little bit of battle Casting I know, and where I first developed my Warder abilities. Since I was fostered with normals, I didn’t know what I was. So at first, I did find a home of sorts with the Keltoi.”
There was a studied unaffectedness in the way he summed up his early life that spoke to Bree of a deeper hurt. It sounded like a sad story. She was well aware that if Leander were still Keltoi, he could be playing all this up to get her sympathy, to soften her towards him. She hated having to think through all the possible layers of deception between them, so she found herself responding to the one part in what he’d told her that she could honestly relate to. “I grew up in normal family too. I was about the same age as you were when I finally found out what I was, although both my Reader and Demonsense talents came on far earlier.”
“My Demonsense came in kind of late, at around sixteen or so. My Reader sense came in a lot sooner. And I had some signs of Caster ability before I knew what it was. You know, sensing the energy of certain objects, things knocking over near me for no apparent cause.”
“Things knocking over?”
“I have a small talent for telekinetic spells, and that’s how it first started to manifest. It kind of explains those stories of poltergeists in the house of teenagers, don’t you think? Not to mention the fact that birds had started to follow me around by then. I have to say I kind of freaked out the last couple of foster parents I had.”
“I find telekinetic spells seriously difficult,” Bree replied, hoping to keep him off the subject of Daniel. And even though Leander might well be lying to her, it was also possible that in getting him to talk about himself, she was getting a chance to know him, to begin to get more of a sense of whether she should trust him.
“Note I said a small talent,” Leander replied ruefully. At Bree’s doubtful look, he said, “Here, let me show you what I mean.” He pulled the tea bag out of the mug and put it on his cookie plate. Then he lifted his right hand over the mug and began slowly gesturing in a small circle with the tips of his first two fingers. Bree leaned forward in interest, and saw that the tea had begun to move in a little whirlpool. As she watched, it went faster and began to rise out of the cup, a tiny tornado of tea hovering in the air over the mug. It was a small thing, but somehow delightful. She glanced up at Leander’s face and saw no sign of strain. In fact, he had a gentle smile on his face as he regarded his handiwork. He gradually slowed the gesture, and the tea spun back down in the cup until it settled into a slow swirl.
“That’s a cool trick. It looks to me like it takes a very fine sort of control,” Bree told Leander as she settled back into her chair.
“Well, that’s more my style, power-wise. In that sense, I was something of a disappointment in the Keltoi. They tend to give preference to high power types with heavy duty Casting abilities, or to those who can sustain and survive possessions, neither of which I was good at. Still, I do have the Keltoi to thank for most of the powered schooling I got. And I’ll admit, as a teenaged boy, I was pretty fascinated by the tough image the Keltoi represented. As you can imagine, as a foster kid, growing up in poor families for the most part, I was feeling pretty disenfranchised, not really a part of mainstream society.”
Bree put her elbow on the table, chin on her hand. She was still uneasy about learning of Leander’s Keltoi ties, but she couldn’t help but be fascinated by his story. She’d never personally known someone who’d left the Keltoi. “Why did you leave?"
Leander had seemed quite casual throughout his recitation, but a shadow came over his face as he responded to her question. “Because I couldn’t stomach the violence, not really. The longer I was in, the worse things I saw. And frankly, I didn’t like the structure either. There’s a definite hierarchy in the Keltoi, a lot of rules, if you can believe it. I guess that’s how you keep a bunch of sociopathic powered in line. I got out at eighteen, once I thought I could succeed in disappearing for awhile and take care of myself without having to go back out on the streets.”
“And are you still on the run from them, so to speak?”
Leander shook his head. “No, I went back to Marton after about five years, made a truce. By that time, I’d proven I’d not revealed any of the information I learned in the Keltoi to the Keepers, and besides, by then, most of what I knew was out of date. Marton always had kind of a soft spot for me, so he let me go.”
Bree’s ears had pricked up at the name. “Marton? Marton, oh what’s his name, maybe Vargas? Varga?”
“Yeah, how could you possibly know Marton?” Now it was Leander’s turn to regard her uneasily.
“I don’t,” Bree assured him. “But I heard that he was the le
ader of the L.A. Keltoi. He’s also some kind of distant cousin to Daniel.”
“Is he really? I suppose I see the resemblance, now that you mention it, in level of power anyway. Marton is high power in just about everything, like Daniel.” Leander’s expression transformed into a look of great glee. “Man, wouldn’t it be interesting to see those two face off?”
Bree reached out and slapped him on the arm. “You are bad!” she exclaimed. “No, it would not be interesting. Someone would end up dead.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Leander sighed with theatrical regret.
“Please, at least attempt to be serious for just a few more minutes,” Bree admonished. “I want you to be honest with me, Leander. Do you still have ties to the Keltoi?” Bree could only hope that such a direct question would trigger some kind of response that she could read. But Leander’s expression, his body language, gave nothing away.
“Not anymore. Bree, I’m not out to hurt you, or Daniel. Like I told you before, I’m asking some questions because I’m trying to do the right thing for a change. To be honest, I still feel guilty that I didn’t go to the Keepers when I left the Keltoi. I know that’s what a lot of Keltoi do to get out, they trade information for asylum. But at that age, I didn’t trust them anymore than I trusted the Keltoi. And in some ways, the choice I made did work well for me. This way, I don’t have to hide from the Keltoi, or be perpetually distrusted by the Keepers. I get to go my own way. That’s always been important to me.”
Somehow, that last statement had a particular ring of truth to Bree. Leander did seem like the type of person who avoided being tied down to anyone’s expectations. Just look at how much he had loved shocking her with his announcement that he’d been Keltoi. He positively enjoyed being different, took pleasure in causing a stir. In a way, it was hard to feature him as some kind of Keltoi spy. He didn’t seem serious enough for that. Leander’s eyes were fixed on her face, and she got the impression he’d brought his Reader sense up. She met his eyes, searching for the truth, and challenging him a bit over the read. It was a strange moment, with each trying so obviously to see into the other. “You know, I haven’t given up on the idea that you might be able to read me,” Leander told her softly.
“I haven’t give up on it either,” Bree admitted. This time, she consciously brought her Reader sense to the forefront of her awareness, keeping her gaze locked with Leander’s. She could tell she was still not up to full strength, but was in far better shape than she had been the last time she’d tried, at his place.
She felt a shift in the energy between them as she slowly pushed back her chair and moved to stand over Leander. Her power was filling her as she invited it in. If she succeeded this time, she would know for certain if she could trust him. She would stop feeling like some kind of naive idiot, fumbling her way through a dense thicket of fatal hazards with only a pocket knife to hand. She wanted her power back, both literally and figuratively. There was an edge of anger in her, at Leander for intruding and asking his questions, at herself for not trusting Daniel’s assessment of Leander.
Leander continued to regard her steadily, with a look of mixed trepidation and controlled excitement.
“Unbutton your shirt,” she told him. He did as she said, glancing down at his hands as he undid several, opening his shirt halfway. He looked back up at her, waiting for her next instruction. Without thinking it through in the slightest, Bree stepped forward and arranged herself sideways on Leander’s lap. His eyebrows raised at that, but he shifted his legs to more comfortably accommodate her. Bree wanted to be close this time, as close as she could be. She wanted every possible advantage for the read. She knew that men opened to intimacy through sexuality more than through any other route. If some physical desire could be generated through physical closeness, she knew it would help the read. It wasn’t something she would normally use, though she was sure it had helped in her reads of Daniel.
The whole scene was, on the surface, much as it had been that night in Leander’s bathroom. Internally, to Bree it felt much different. This read was more deliberate on both their parts. She still wanted to read Leander out of a desire to ensure her and Daniel’s safety, and for the challenge of it, but this time, she really did want to see more deeply into Leander himself. Bree put her arm around the back of Leander’s shoulders and rested the palm of her right hand on his neck. Her left she raised and settled on the center of Leander’s chest. His arm went around her waist to steady her, and he put his other hand on her knee. “Are you sure?” Bree asked him quietly, though she thought she already knew the answer.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Leander replied. His muscles were tensing under her hands, and his voice was a little rough with some emotion, but Bree took him at his word.
She started the read with simply looking at him, letting the edgy anger she’d been feeling drift away as she closely regarded the arch of his red brows, the shape and color of his eyes, the tiny scar by his hairline on the left side of his forehead, the elegant plane of his almost too pretty cheekbones. She felt the temperature of his skin under her hands, the rise and fall of his breath. She let herself sink into Reader empathy, wanting to know him, to feel whatever it was that he felt. She let go of suspicion. When she thought she was ready to go in, she closed her eyes.
This time, she went slow as honey dripping from a jar, letting her Reader sense ease out of her and toward Leander. She quickly encountered the kaleidoscopic tangle of his energy, and she slowed down even further, just letting herself be with the whirl of impressions. She could feel herself start looking for the patterns, and she relaxed that part of her Reader function, much like relaxing the eyes to let one’s vision blur.
A few half-formed images and feelings flickered in and out of her awareness, a tinge of fear, a flash of Warder energy, the white and grey flutter of bird’s wings. She let them flow by like water. She was trying to find a way to attune at this more surface level, which was not the usual procedure. Usually, attunement was only attempted on deep reads. A good Reader didn’t need much attunement to read basic talents, energy levels, and whatever hits of emotion were closest to the surface.
But she tried it anyway. She imagined herself as a leaf on the surface of Leander’s energies, going wherever the little eddies and waves took her. It was a dizzying sensation, and she distantly registered Leander’s arm tightening around her as her body swayed in unconscious reaction. There was a paradoxical tension between the effort it took to keep concentrating and the necessary letting go that allowed her to be receptive and unfocused. Bree’s brow furrowed as she periodically lost the trick of that paradox, but she kept trying, kept keying back in to the flow. And she got better at it, until she felt a hint of a rhythm in the movements of Leander’s energy. Her body dipped and swayed in subtle little motions as she rode the waves of his psyche. She continued to get brief impressions, but she ignored them, knowing somehow that they were blocks in the road, not the eventual destination.
As she found the crazy, syncopated, be-bop tune of his energy, she sunk into it further, riding it deeper in wild little jerks and spins. It was like being on an amusement park ride, and now, she could feel Leander starting to move with her. Wondering what his experience of this whole process might be nearly broke Bree’s concentration, but she held on. And the first thing that started to form up out of the non-patterned pattern was the emotion of unease, followed by a soupçon of wonder, then tension again.
Then she started to get images, first one of a looming, angry man raising a hand to strike, from a child’s eye view. Then one of a dark eyed woman scowling, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. Another woman, this one surrounded in a sort of soft glow and a feeling of being held.
Then came a quick succession of physical sensations: Of being dragged, kicked and penetrated. That last one made Bree flinch, but now she was caught in the attunement, and the shock wasn’t enough to blow her out of it. More images: a school classroom, of sitting outside a principal’s office, acc
ompanied by a feeling of defiance. Then a tall woman shaking a finger, followed by a feeling of dead emptiness. She saw huddling with a teenaged boy on the beach in the rain, both trying to fit under a single coat. Felt the thrill of kissing a teenaged girl, and horribly, gagging on an older man’s penis. She saw a man with dark hair and green eyes, shaking her shoulders, face distorted with fury, and that same man laughing and holding out a piece of pizza.
Bree realized she was so attuned now, she was feeling Leander’s feelings, his memories, as her own. She’d somehow completely skipped all the intermediate levels and gone straight into a very deep read. She felt Leander’s body rocking underneath her, felt a startle in her gut as they almost tipped over in the chair, but she gritted her teeth and kept with it. The memories and emotions felt chronological to her, and if she could just hold on, maybe she’d get something that would tell her about Leander’s time in the Keltoi, how he truly felt about it, and whether he was still involved.
She got a brief flash of sex with a gorgeous African-American woman, but again, with that awful emptiness. She saw the dark haired man again, this time holding a gun to her head, then throwing the gun away and striking her in the face. And then, she felt Leander pitch backwards in the chair, and as her body jerked in primal reaction to the sensation of falling, her connection with Leander was broken. Leander grunted in pain as she landed on top of him.
At first, Bree was too stunned and dizzy to move. Then, when she tried to move, she realized how weak she felt. She must have been pouring out the power to stay with the read there in the end. She was lying half on top of Leander, and with a little wriggling, managed to get her knees on the floor. She had to push off a little against his stomach to get upright on her knees. She looked down at him anxiously, afraid he’d been hurt in the fall.
He was looking at the ceiling, and, amazingly, laughing, with tears leaking out the corners of his eyes. It was pained, choking laughter, and as she watched in concern, he put his hands over his face.
