by K. C. Archer
Dr. Sands’s question from earlier that day echoed in her head: How has your power influenced your relationships?
Her psychic ability always made her feel alone. Alone even in a crowd of people, at a party.
“Convince me to come back to your room,” she said.
Pyro lifted his right hand and slowly twisted his wrist, like a magician proving he had nothing up his sleeve. His fingers slowly grazed the hem of her T-shirt. Then he pressed his palm, fingers splayed open, against her stomach.
Heat.
She tilted back her head, closed her eyes, and parted her lips.
When she opened her eyes again, she found Pyro watching her, a smile on his face. A smile telling her that particular move worked every time. All right, so he was a player. She wasn’t looking for commitment. “How far is your room?”
Pyro took her hand and led her back along the path to the dormitories. His room was on the first floor, right off the front lobby. He swiped his ID card, opened the door, and pulled her inside with him.
“Where’s your roommate?” Teddy asked.
“Sent home this morning,” he murmured before he pressed his mouth to hers.
Her hands rested on his shoulders, pulling him closer. Pyro wrapped one arm around her waist, drawing her more tightly into his embrace.
He held her firmly against him, not the least bit rushed. Kissing her as though they had all the time in the world. Her knees went weak. Her balance lost, she stumbled backward, bringing him with her. “Just promise me you won’t make any jokes about crossing the finish line together,” she said.
Pyro caught her under the knees, lifting her to his bed. He pulled off his shirt and tossed it aside.
Teddy swallowed. His chest was lean and hard. And all of it beautifully, extravagantly inked. She hadn’t looked properly when she had seen him in the bathroom earlier. Swirling fire covered his torso, disappearing beneath the waistband of his jeans, which hung low around his hips. His chest was an inferno, and when he reached for her, his hands were hot.
But again, no pain. Only a delicious, welcoming heat. She wanted to feel those hands everywhere. She toed off her shoes and kicked them aside, wriggled out of her jeans, and slipped out of her shirt. She was vaguely aware that the sheets were growing hot beneath her back, and she smelled smoke, faint but distinctive. Startled, she sat up. “Pyro—”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got it.”
Leaning forward, he pressed his lips to her throat. He was right, Teddy decided, reveling in the sensation. Why worry?
Suddenly, Pyro tilted his face away from her, his expression alert. She heard shrill bells, accompanied by shouts and the thunder of running feet.
She sat up. “What?”
A hazy film of smoke floated near the ceiling. Teddy heard shouts in the hallway.
“I think we just set off the fire alarm,” Pyro said.
CHAPTER TEN
SHE WAS BACK AT THE yellow house. She wanted to go inside, walk upstairs, and look around. But the door wouldn’t budge. She twisted the knob. She jammed the doorbell. She threw her weight against the door once, twice. She woke up drenched in sweat, panic coursing through her.
She was supposed to take her psychic-ability exam this morning. Wasn’t she? Wait. Where was she? As her gaze flew about the room, the events of the previous night came rushing back. The party. The vodka. The smoke alarm. Pyro.
She scanned the bedside table. A small clock radio read 9:05 a.m. She was already five minutes late.
Teddy threw back the sheets and leaped out of bed. She staggered, pain slamming right between her eyes. The alcohol, which had provided such relief from her withdrawal symptoms the night before, now made her feel like her head was buried in concrete.
She gathered her clothes. The soft rattle of pills reminded her that she’d tucked her meds in her pocket as a precaution. She lifted the familiar bottle, chewing her lower lip as she studied it. Maybe going cold turkey had been a mistake. One or two pills might knock back the discomfort.
“Don’t do it,” Pyro said. “I’m sure the doctor told you those things mess with your brain.” He closed his eyes again and muttered something that might have been “good luck.” Or at least rhymed with “luck.”
“Thanks,” Teddy said.
“For last night?” he asked, sitting up in bed. As he did, the sheet dropped.
Damn.
“For the advice,” Teddy said. She bit her lip again. “About last night . . . just to be clear, I’m not really looking for anything serious. I don’t really do the girlfriend thing.”
He grinned. “Good. Because I don’t really do the boyfriend thing.”
“Good. So thanks again.”
“That one was for last night, right?”
Teddy rolled her eyes and tried unsuccessfully to hold back a smile. “Yeah, that was for last night.” She grabbed her leather jacket and left.
Teddy kept her head down as she walked outside the building. Her stomach recoiled. In hindsight, attending the party probably hadn’t been such an amazing idea. She certainly wasn’t in the kind of physical or mental shape to face what might be one of the most important tests of her life.
* * *
When she stepped inside the classroom, she was officially fifteen minutes late. The stony expressions on Clint’s and Boyd’s faces told her she might as well walk right back outside. (Boyd? Really? Just her luck. She’d heard that everyone else had been tested by Clint and Dunn.)
“So you decided to join us after all,” Boyd said.
Teddy ran through Boyd’s list of acceptable responses: Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. I don’t deserve to exist, ma’am.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Clint looked her over and shook his head. Not quite disgusted but close. He looked like a weary beat cop who was tired of hearing the same old bullshit from the same old bullshitter. He folded his arms. “I heard there was a party last night. And certain first-year recruits were there to celebrate their admittance to Whitfield.”
So he knew about the party. Maybe that would make him just a little sympathetic to her current condition. After all, if everyone was there . . .
“Yes,” she said.
“Violated nearly every line of Whitfield’s Code of Ethics,” he continued.
Teddy felt like she was a teenager again, being grilled for breaking curfew.
“Well?” he asked. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Am I grounded?”
Clint didn’t smile. “Sit down,” he said, gesturing to a chair on the opposite side of the table where he and Boyd sat. “Let’s get this over with.”
Teddy’s old self threatened to make an appearance. She wanted to knock the chair over and tell Clint to go to hell. But Whitfield was her last move. She lowered herself into a chair.
“Whitfield policies mandate two instructors observe psychic-ability exams to document the events that transpire during these sessions,” Clint said. “Normally, Professor Dunn would be here, but he’s teaching a class this morning. Sergeant Boyd agreed to fill in.” He shuffled a stack of papers. “We’ll begin with a simple color wheel,” he said. “Are you familiar with how this works?”
She shook her head.
“Then let me start with the basics. Psychics—all psychics, no matter how their ability manifests—connect to the world differently than other people. Psychics are able to glean information or manipulate the energy of a person or an object in a way that others find impossible. In short, they sense the insensible and know the unknowable. To accomplish this, psychics rely on their extrasensory perception, or ESP.”
She must have made a face at the cliché, for Clint continued, “Don’t be put off by the phrase, Teddy. ESP simply means gaining information beyond the basic five physical senses. Are you with me so far?”
Teddy nodded, though her thoughts were still muddled.
Clint gestured to a color chart attached to a spinning wheel—the sort of wheel
employed by game-show hosts to award prizes. “This is our first test,” he said. “I want to see if you can pick up psychic impressions. At the poker table, you could tell when people were lying, but can you learn to ascertain what people are thinking? It’s quite simple. Out of your line of vision, I spin this wheel”—the wheel made a clicking sound as it spun, eventually stopping on yellow—“and when it lands, I will mentally project the color I’m seeing to you. All you have to do is say that color aloud.”
Teddy put her fingers to her temple “I’m getting yellow here . . .”
“You already know how I feel about comedy, Cannon,” Boyd said.
Clint set up a white partition screen to divide Teddy’s side of the table from his own. She could see their faces but nothing else. The wheel was hidden from her view.
Game on.
She imagined she was in Vegas, back at the poker table. It was as if she could feel the felt beneath her fingers. She listened for every click of the wheel like she listened for every shuffle of the cards. All she had to do was guess a color. It was just odds in the end, right? She lived on odds. She listened as the wheel spun, slowed, and stopped. She waited for a color to appear in her mind’s eye.
But there was nothing. No color at all.
“Black,” she guessed.
Clint made a mark on a form and spun the wheel again. She shut out everything else, the wheezy sound of Boyd’s breathing, the smell of Clint’s aftershave, the hum of the air conditioner, everything except the click of the wheel.
“Blue?” she said.
Clint spun again and again. Teddy could tell from Boyd’s face that she wasn’t getting any of the answers right. After the last spin, Teddy asked for some water, and Clint pointed to a pitcher on a counter across the room. Teddy poured herself a glass and gulped it down. With her back to Clint and Boyd, she closed her eyes, desperate to regain her composure.
“You all right?” Clint asked.
She faked a smile. “Absolutely. I’m having a great time.”
“Let’s move on,” Clint said. He put away the color wheel and showed her a deck of flash cards. “These are called Zener cards,” he said. “Named after a pioneer in the field of psychic research. Each card features a geometric shape on the reverse. I’ll put up the partition and shuffle the cards. Sergeant Boyd will flip over a card one at a time. You name the geometric shape I’m seeing. Got it?”
Teddy took a fortifying breath. She didn’t think it was possible to concentrate any harder. Her head was pounding, her mouth dry. Still, she guessed card after card.
Boyd stood abruptly, giving the hem of her boxy jacket a tug. “I think that’s all we need to see, recruit.”
“Very impressive,” Clint said.
Boyd spun around. “Excuse me? We’ve seen nothing to indicate—”
“Exactly. She got every single question wrong. Fantastically so. That’s actually difficult to do. I’ve never seen anyone get everything wrong.”
“Does that mean anything?” Teddy asked.
Clint leaned back in his seat. “You tell me.”
“I’m sorry, Corbett, but Ms. Cannon shows absolutely no sign of any psychic ability whatsoever. I think we can safely say she failed the exam.”
“She didn’t fail. Well, technically, she failed,” Clint said. “But that doesn’t mean she failed.”
Boyd sighed and folded her arms.
Clint ignored her. “Teddy,” he said, “what were you focusing on during the tests?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, where was your mind during the first two tests?”
Teddy bit her tongue. “On the wheel. And the deck.”
“That’s what I thought.” He smiled.
“I don’t know why you’re smiling when you just said you’ve never seen a recruit perform so badly on an exam,” Boyd said.
“Teddy,” Clint said. “Why do you play poker and not slot machines?”
It took Teddy a second to put it together. And then she felt like an idiot. She took a sip of water from the glass next to her.
“Do you want to tell the sergeant or should I?” Clint asked.
“I read people,” Teddy said. “Not wheels or cards.”
“Exactly,” Clint said. “She shut me out so completely by focusing on the testing devices that she effectively blocked any psychic communication between us. Meaning she failed. But spectacularly.”
“I don’t see where you’re going here, Corbett,” Boyd said.
“Where I’m going, Rosemary, is now I’m going to give Teddy a chance to focus on me.”
“You think she’s a telepath?” Boyd said.
Clint nodded.
A telepath? She could tell if certain people were lying, sure, but her life would have been a hell of a lot easier if she’d known what people were thinking all the time. She could read players, evaluate their behavior, and even guess their actions. But know their thoughts? You’ve got to be kidding me. Teddy stifled a laugh.
“You seem to be the only one finding this amusing, recruit,” Boyd said, tapping her clipboard.
“I’m not kidding, Teddy. Just do what you did in Vegas.” Clint met her eyes.
“But we’re not playing poker. What am I supposed to look for?”
Clint smiled. “Something . . . interesting.”
It wasn’t a decision to reach out to Clint’s mind—it had been a habit since before she could remember—but the force of meeting his consciousness was like nothing she had encountered before. Was it because she was off her meds?
She’d glimpsed one image of Molly, but now she seemed to be turning the pages of a flip-book. She was bombarded with what felt like thousands upon thousands of . . . She wanted to say they were memories. Clint featured prominently in a lot of them. There was a younger Clint in a football uniform, then a military uniform, then a police uniform. Walking through a barren desert. Talking to the same Rosemary Boyd in front of her. Watching Teddy at the casino in Vegas. As soon as she felt had purchase on one image, another would appear. Teddy felt dizzy. If only she could slow them down.
She saw an image of a young Clint, maybe age eight or nine, on a lawn, a black and white dog at his side. In the next, she saw Clint hook the leash on the dog’s collar in the yard. In the next, she saw him go into the house. She saw what he did not: that the dog pulled on his leash. That he jumped the fence to chase a red car down the street, into traffic.
In her mind, Teddy yelled: Stop!
The image began to fade. Clint’s mind grew darker and colder. She wanted to dive back into his consciousness—to see more, learn more—but when she tried to reach out again, she felt as if she had slammed into a metal wall. She opened her eyes, breaking the connection. When she looked up, Clint was standing above her. “Are you okay?”
Teddy looked up at him, confused.
“You cried out for us to stop.”
“What did you see, Cannon?” Boyd said.
Teddy turned to Clint. “When you were young, your dog was hit by a car. You felt like it was your fault. It wasn’t. You didn’t notice that the leash broke.”
Clint looked at her, then sat back down. “It seems like a trivial thing to worry about a dog all these years later.”
Teddy swallowed. “What just happened in there, Clint? It was like I could see everything you’ve ever thought in your entire life.”
“Huh,” Clint said. He leaned forward, studying Teddy for a moment. “I thought you might be a telepath because you could tell when people were lying.” He cleared his throat. “I also practice telepathy, Teddy, but it’s aural. I can hear thoughts. I can hear what you’re thinking at this exact moment, but I don’t have access to anything beyond that.” He leaned forward. “What you just demonstrated—what we’ve never even seen here at Whitfield—was something called astral telepathy. You have access to thoughts not only on the physical plane but on the astral one as well. And it seems like you can see them. You can see not only everything I’m thinking at thi
s moment but everything I’ve ever thought, and one day, maybe, even everything I’ll ever think. Astral telepathy provides access to all thoughts, conscious and unconscious, deliberately transmitted or not.”
You’ve really got to be kidding me.
Boyd cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Corbett, but the rules are clear. Protocol states that a new recruit must pass two of three psychic tests. You asked me to stand in and witness the exam. Procedure must be followed. It’s only fair.”
Clint sighed. “Sergeant, I’m sure we can make an exception here.”
Red splotches appeared on Boyd’s cheeks. “I wonder if other students were afforded the same treatment as Ms. Cannon.” Teddy wondered if the sergeant was remembering her poor performance on the course. Did Boyd think she wasn’t up to rigors of Whitfield?
“With all due respect, Sergeant, this is not your area of expertise. Once Professor Dunn hears what happened today, he’ll agree with my recommendation.”
Boyd nodded. “I see my services are no longer needed.” She turned and exited the room, closing the door not loudly enough to be an intentional slam but strongly enough to send a message.
Clint waited a moment. “Congratulations,” he said to Teddy. “You passed. But don’t get too excited. What just happened here was the easy part. What comes next is harder. It takes discipline. Dedication. Commitment.”
She wasn’t exactly excited; what she felt was more like relief. “I can do that.”
“Which part of showing up fifteen minutes late after dragging yourself out of bed with a hangover is supposed to convince me of that?”
“It’s the meds—”
“Excuses won’t work anymore. Bottom line, Teddy, and you’ll excuse the poker terms, but I need to know that you’re all in.”
“I am.”
Clint stood. “If you decide to stay, you won’t catch any more breaks. Boyd was right: being a Whitfield student means playing by the rules. And you’ll have to study hard to pass your midyear exam in December. If you don’t, you’re out. Got it?”
“Loud and clear,” Teddy said.
* * *
Teddy needed some time to think. She’d heard once that fresh air could help a hangover, though she’d never bothered to try it before (her preferred cure being hair of the dog). She flashed her ID and slipped through the campus’s checkpoint station, following the rocky coastal path away from the dock.
