Zero Factor: A Cybershock Story

by Stacy Gail

  “She’s like you. She can see the past, present or future of whatever she touches.”

  “But there’s a secondary ability lurking beneath that. She’s kissed you, yes?”

  His body heated at the memory. “Yes.”

  “How was it?”

  “I saw my death.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked you,” Cedrine chided him, wagging a long finger. “The kiss, darling. How was it?”

  In a flash, Locke was transported back to that fractured moment, the shock of Via’s out-of-the-blue kiss that melted almost instantly into a sweet, intoxicating heat that splintered through his senses. The pleasure of it seemed to bounce from his mouth to hers and back again, filling him. Engulfing him. The wild heat of it shuddered and swelled, gaining a momentum that promised a never-ending shower of blissful euphoria until it was all he knew, all he ever wanted to know…

  “Wow. That good, huh?”

  Locke looked up at Cedrine, realized he’d lost his laser-locked attention to daydream about Via’s kiss, and had to bite his tongue to stop from telling Cedrine what she could do with her smartass smirk. “Do you have a point?”

  “There are psychometrics, and there are empaths, soldier-boy—separately, they’re pretty much a dime a dozen in the underground psionic world, you’d be surprised. But an empathic psychometric who has the ability to bounce or share the sensations feeding into them is about as rare as you can get, and I’ve only heard of one who can completely accomplish this sharing through intimate touch. Moi. I thought I was utterly unique, until I shook your hand all those years ago and saw my sister, Via. The only difference between us is control.”

  Again Locke glanced at Via. “Can you teach her?”

  “Darling, I’ve already given her every drop of knowledge I possess—knowledge accumulated through all the years of my countless, shall we say, experiments utilizing this unique ability. I’ve done my job. The rest…” Cedrine smiled a smile full of sin-filled relish, “…is up to you.”

  Chapter Six

  For Via, the conversation during the sumptuous feast Cedrine had provided slipped by like a dream. Same with the steaming-hot shower she took in an en suite bathroom that was as sybaritic as the rest of the ultramodern rooms Cedrine had given them to unwind in. Everything was a surrealistic blur, and all she wanted to do was fall into the nearest bed and sleep for a week.

  If only she could shut her brain down long enough to do it.

  After kissing Locke, Via had wondered if kisses were supposed to change lives. Now, after Cedrine’s kiss, she knew they did, if they were done right. Everything was different now. She was different. And for the first time, she was ashamed.

  In the twenty-three years she’d had on this planet, she hadn’t bothered to live. Never once had it occurred to her that she could. She’d always been so busy bemoaning her curse it never dawned on her that it didn’t have to be an obstacle. All she had to do was find the courage to face it head-on.

  Considering what she now knew about Cedrine, she felt like a spineless jellyfish.

  Originally born Cedric, Cedrine had had an unfortunate start in life, with a stepfather who had found the effeminate boy too tempting to resist, and a mother beside herself with jealousy. Because of the nature of his unique gifts, Cedric had learned early on how to turn it on and off so he would not be enslaved by the vagaries of being an empathic psychometric. Instead, with every intimate encounter he had—consensual or not—he made good use of the opportunity to learn how to become the one who did the enslaving.

  And cunning survivor that he was, Cedric got good at it.

  Turning off the psychic input from the physical world was something he’d learned to do out of necessity—it was either that, or go insane. Unlike Via, no parent was there for Cedric to wrap bandages over exposed skin and weave a web of lies about a skin condition. Cedric had had to learn to tune out the world’s psychic impressions, while Via had been hidden in an agridome bubble and buried in lettuce and fish.

  What a loser she was.

  On the upside, Via now had proof her curse could be controlled. Not just controlled, it could be used. If Via understood it correctly, tuning out the psychic noise around her was no big deal. All she had to do was expose herself to it and overlook it as easily as if she were tuning out a boring conversation. Focusing on the psychic noise was where she’d gone wrong. If she allowed herself to be distracted by it, she ran the risk of becoming lost in it.

  What was needed, of course, was practice.

  Her brain was still swimmy when she stepped out of the bathroom and into the luxurious bedroom complete with a California King bed situated on a black marble platform. In contrast, the sheets were a squint-worthy white, the wealth of pillows black satin, and there was a veil of fine chain mail like a crown overhead. Pacing in front of a matte steel see-through fireplace that opened onto a private patio placed beyond more chain-mail sheers and a privacy-glass-darkened door, Locke looked up at her entrance, his expression turbulent.

  “Are you injured?” he asked without preamble. “I swear, I never expected that. I mean…shyte, she kissed you without warning—”

  “I don’t think a warning would have prepared me any better.” Her voice sounded foreign to her ears—high-pitched, a little ethereal, as if she weren’t all there. Which was pretty much how she felt. “Some things just have to be dived into headfirst. Didn’t I leave my clothes on the bed?” She was wearing nothing but a massive bath towel—new, touched only by Cedrine, bless her.

  Locke’s scarred face hardened until it resembled granite. “She…”

  “Yes?”

  “Cedrine came in while you were showering and took them. Even the gloves.”

  Via sighed. “Of course she did.”

  “I tried to stop her. I even threatened to throw her across the room, but then she mentioned she has a house full of Lifers who would come to investigate—”

  “It’s all good, Locke.” Crossing to the bed, where now only a luxurious swathe of China red silk glimmered like a dream, Via reached out a pale hand toward it. She hesitated for just a moment before she plucked it up and tried to overlook the many times Cedrine had enjoyed slipping on the magnificent robe. “How nice of her to let me borrow her things.”

  “This was a bad idea,” Locke announced as if he’d been waiting to say those words. “I don’t know what I was thinking, bringing a psychometric to a bordello. We need to stay laser-locked on the problem at hand, and that’s Colonel Fynn, and not on…whatever it was that happened downstairs.”

  “I think I can help with the Colonel Fynn problem,” Via said in that same not-normal voice, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she began practicing, the sooner the better. “This wasn’t a mistake, Locke. Coming here might be the answer to everything.”

  “She kissed you,” he burst out as if that were the bottom line. “I don’t know what the hell that was all about, but she kissed you—”

  “It was necessary.” Turning her back on him in automatic modesty, Via slipped the robe on, then let the towel drop at her feet. Images of Cedrine seducing whomever she deemed important enough to enslave tried to seep into her mind’s eye, and for a moment Via wavered. “Locke, is there a sat-radio or vid-screen in the room? I need something, an anchor, to focus on.”

  “An anchor?” He looked around distractedly, then moved to the control panel set discreetly into a black marble bedside table. As soft as a murmur in the dark, the sultry moan of a saxophone sighed through the room’s surround sound. “Will this do?”

  “It’s perfect. I just need something to hold me to the reality of the moment. That’s the key to controlling this…this gift,” she explained, while the unwanted images faded as she focused on the sensual music murmuring through the room. When the images faded completely, she raised a wondering smile to Locke. “I’m so glad you brought me here, Locke. I’ll never be able to repay you for all you’ve done for me.”

  “Right. Kidnapping you out of yo
ur safe little bubble was a pure-win move.”

  “Maybe it was.” Tossing her discarded towel over the back of a nearby chair, Via sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. “Locke?”

  “Via?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  He looked as though she had asked him if he believed in unicorns. “I’m a Lifer. Trust is a zero factor in my world.”

  “Your world is changing, in case you haven’t noticed,” she drawled. “I’d like to see if I can pick up anything about Fynn and whatever he’s up to, but I need your permission to…well, to touch you.” There was no way to make that sound less awkward, so she didn’t even try.

  In an instant he sat beside her and offered his hand. “Whatever you need.”

  “You understand I’m going to look into your life?”

  “I understand you’ve already been bombarded by it since we’ve been in constant contact with each other from the moment we met,” came the unconcerned reply. “I have nothing to hide.”

  “Because you’re a good man, Lieutenant C. Locke.” Taking a deep breath, she held her hand just over his. “What does the C stand for anyway?”

  “Charles. Lame-ass name, yeah?”

  “No. It’s solid. Like you.” With one last fortifying breath, Via cupped both her hands around his. And saw.

  By degrees, Via’s fingers tightened on Locke’s hand. Immune to any fleeting pain, he looked down at her hands—as pale as milk and as soft as a baby’s. Which wasn’t surprising. She’d kept them hidden her entire life, and the enormity of that task struck him anew. How crazy hard all this must be for her now, he thought, his brows drawing together. Though worry over how delicate Via was out in the real world should be nothing more than a zero factor for him, it was gnawing away at him from the inside out. Bottom-lining it, he was responsible for slamming into her sheltered life with all the force of a deep-space meteor. The weight of guilt sinking through him like a rock through murky water was all but suffocating him. If anything happened to her now—

  “Don’t.”

  Locke looked up, only to find her eyes closed, her lips parted. “What?”

  “I don’t need or want your guilt, and getting me out of the bubble was the best thing you could have done for me. Now help me focus and think of Fynn.”

  Locke swallowed a curse, but did as she asked. And here he was stressing over how delicate she was. When push came to shove, it was Via who was the better soldier, while he was little more than a fumble-fisted noob.

  Gotta love the irony.

  “A baby?” A frown shadowed Via’s brow, and her tongue came out to moisten her lips. In a hungry fascination he couldn’t help, Locke watched the action, all but tasting the crushed-silk texture of her made-for-sin lips. “Dayum, Cedrine makes this target-viewing seem so easy, but it’s… I just don’t get it.”

  Distracted by the defined indentation of her upper lip, he wondered what Via would do if he traced it with his tongue. “Get what?”

  “Why I keep seeing a baby getting born almost at your feet.” She opened her eyes to search his face. “Are you thinking about that?”

  He nearly swore again when he realized his mind was nowhere near that scene or anywhere else that would be helpful. “No.”

  “Does the birth of that baby have anything to do with Colonel Fynn?”

  “Not that I know of. We were on an ordinary mission, I even mentioned it to you earlier—transporting people to a medical facility, remember? Colonel Fynn’s in charge of all our missions, but that’s the only tie-in I can think of to that particular instance.”

  “Maybe there’s something there and I’m just not seeing it. Or maybe I have no idea how to look for specific events like Cedrine can,” she said, letting his hand go with a preoccupied sigh. “I think it’s entirely possible I suck at this.”

  “What exactly did you see?”

  “It’d be easier just to show you what I saw. Maybe you can figure out if there’s any significance to it.” And with that, she leaned over and captured his mouth with her own.

  Locke went statue-still while his mind flooded with the memory of a woman in labor, of gripping her hand as she screamed at the peak of it, of Colonel Fynn looking at the new scrap of life with his usual expression of irritation and muttering about bad timing, of the happy tears shed by the new mother as she held her baby for the first time.

  That was what he saw. But what he felt…

  A luxurious sort of sinking drifted through him, a blissed-out drugging of every nerve in his body. A sudden surge of molten need in his loins tightened his sensitive flesh in a kind of exquisite near-pain, his arousal springing to life so fast it made his head swim. His pulse throbbed out an urgent rhythm in his lengthening manhood, a pleasurable pulse that nearly doubled him over.

  By dayum, she turned him inside out.

  The heady pleasure grew, doubling and trebling between them, and he yearned to settle himself into the silken cradle of her thighs and bury himself in her hot depths up to his hilt, lift himself almost completely free of her, only to plunge like a free-falling madman back into her—

  A fractured moan gasped from her mouth and into his, and shock sliced through him when her hand cupped the white-hot bulge straining against his zipper and squeezed. Blinding pleasure erupted in his every cell, and his incoherent cry mingled with hers as the pleasure flowed like an ever-tightening whirlpool between them, threatening to pull them under into an airless world of shattering insanity.

  And that was when reality hit him.

  His pleasure had become hers.

  The desire to give Via her own pleasure made his hands burn for the feel of her. Feverish and fumbling, Locke pushed away the sides of the borrowed robe to unveil Via’s pale, lean body, the dizzying scents of soap and sex wafting to him like a sensual enchantment he had no hope of resisting. Her breasts were exquisitely shaped, the pouting undersides made for the worshipping palms of his hands, while the mauve-tipped nipples begged for the devouring caress of his mouth.

  He bent his head, giving into their irresistible allure by rolling his tongue around the rock-hard tip before pulling the nipple into his mouth and suckling until she cried out. The other breast was teased by the merciless abrading of his thumb, and a ferocious thrill of need moved like wildfire through his veins when she arched and fell back against the mattress, only to gasp out loud.

  “This bed…this bed…” With speech apparently beyond her, she dragged him back to the pleasure chamber that was her mouth.

  In an instant, shattering pleasure swam through him, echoes of orgasmic heights left in the mattress on which they lay, and for a suspended second the madness of ecstasy was all he knew. Then the greater reality of the present absorbed the intoxicating sensation, and with the urgency of a man who needed to be inside the woman he craved, Locke divested himself of his clothing in record time. And as he did so, he glanced back to Via, and what he saw there was a vision he believed he would remember for the rest of his days, however the hell many they might be.

  She was gloriously naked, her dark, corkscrew hair wild and tousled across the bed. The brilliant splash of the red silk robe pooled about her, wide open and caught on her elbows, her vivid green eyes half-lidded and lost in a psychic-pleasure-filled fog that brought arousing little purrs from her and lifted her hips in a rhythm as old as time.

  “So hot,” she whispered, her helpless gasps making her breasts heave in a way that made him nearly burst where he was. “Oh God, I don’t know… I need—”

  “I know what you need.” And it was a need they shared. His muscles were quivering with the force of it, when he could never remember shaking in his battle-scarred, godforsaken life. Cupping a hand under her knee, he drew his tongue along the silk-soft flesh of her inner thigh, coming to support his weight on the bed with his knees while his fingers delved into the small triangle of downy curls between her thighs.

  A helpless cry broke from her at his first touch, and when he found her to be more than ready for
him, he felt only a shuddering relief that he didn’t have to wait. Pulling her other knee up beside him, he then cupped her bottom in his palms and brought her up hard to meet the surging thrust of his manhood.

  She was so tight, so hot, that the slick flesh gloving him nearly made him come right then. Sheer strength of will held him statue still, until he had a modicum of control. Until he was in charge. Until he knew he could make this unbearable heaven last.

  Then she moved her hips, and in a heartbeat the insanity of excruciating pleasure swamped him, engulfed him. Every sense he possessed exploded in the mindless ecstasy that fractured him all the way to his soul.

  Chapter Seven

  Soft strains of something bluesy hummed through Via’s splintered consciousness, luring her inch by inch back to the world around her.

  So. That was sex. No wonder it was so popular.

  The psychic reverberations from the bed on which she lay had quieted, whether instinctively shut out by her overwhelmed psyche or drowned out by the enormity of the pleasure she’d experienced, she didn’t know. Nor did she care. At that moment, all she knew was that she had never felt better in her life.

  How was it possible to go back to ordinary day-to-day living after such an experience? It felt as though her bones had melted and her cells had been turned inside out. Voluntary movement at this juncture was in serious doubt, but that was nothing compared to the complete chaos of her emotions. In less than a two-day time frame, she had gone from being resigned to living out life alone and isolated from every human on the face of the planet, to awakening sensual appetites with a man who shouldn’t suit her at all, yet somehow fit her to perfection.

  How well he fit her, indeed.

  Via shivered as the embers of desire, banked but still glowing with need, flared once more. Never before had she understood what it was to want someone. Oh, she had heard the term countless times, certainly. She had even assumed she understood the concept. But logical comprehension and experiencing the gnawing, empty ache that needed to be filled by that one special man were definitely two different things. She craved Locke, and with that craving came the breathless anticipation of shared pleasure, the closeness of giving herself over to another in whom she had absolute trust, and the piercing joy of knowing he felt it too.