by R. A. Rock
Then I recognized the dark hair of the woman and the tall guy. Their arms were wrapped around each other and he had her leg hiked up around his hip. He held her there with his large hands on her ass, pinning her to him.
I froze, unable to believe what my eyes were seeing.
Well, she had said she wanted us to try out other people. And I had been having impure thoughts about Natasha, that was for sure. But I didn’t count on having to witness Yumi’s transgressions with my own eyes.
I stepped back out of the alcove and shut the curtain.
I didn’t know what to do. I felt sick. And angry. And confused. And I didn’t like feeling this way.
But I knew what would make me forget it all.
A good fuck.
At that moment, Natasha walked up and took my arm.
“There you are, Chad,” she purred, leaning into me so that her breasts brushed my arm. “I wanted to show you something in the North End. Are you busy?”
And the expression on her face said that she would show me a lot more than just the North End, if I let her.
“No,” I said, putting on a smile and avoiding looking at the alcove. “Not at all. I was just about to leave. Please, lead on.”
As we walked across the ballroom, I saw Shiv and Grace in conversation with some guy with glasses and… Wait, was he wearing a lab coat at the party? I caught Grace’s eye and waved. She lifted an eyebrow and waved back but I didn’t care to explain to my sister what I was doing. That’s why I didn’t contact her telepathically.
I turned my thoughts instead to the guy in the lab coat. Maybe Shiv was making contacts with the scientists in the community. That was good. It would give him an in to get the tools he needed to fix the bracelets. At the door, we paused to let another couple come back in and I looked around the room.
A rumpled Yumi stepped out of the alcove with Jeff by her side at that instant. He seemed mighty satisfied. She glanced around and then spotted me. I met her eyes for a moment and smiled triumphantly. Her forehead wrinkled in a frown.
Good. I wanted her to see me leaving with another woman. Maybe she would feel what I had when I caught her kissing that guy.
For a moment, I savoured an extremely satisfying feeling of revenge, then I let Natasha pull me out of the room.
11 Knockout from C's POV
Chad
I sat on my bed, feeling depressed.
Natasha and I had made out after the ball and it had been crazy hot. I had had my hands on those soft breasts and they had felt amazing. My fingers tingled at the memory. I had wanted nothing more than to bury myself in her heat.
But… I hadn’t been able to go through with it. I pressed my lips together. I was a fucking failure at being some sort of player. Or whatever I had been trying to be.
So I had come back here and somehow I didn’t feel like sleeping. I felt too despondent to go to bed. Instead I stared at the ugly carpet with leafy swirls all over it, playing with the rough lace frills on the pillow beside me. I listened to the ticking of the clock on the mantle. Then the little clock struck eleven. I wondered what Yumi was doing with Jeff, the tall, dark and handsome guard.
And that thought made me so angry that I punched the pillow as hard as I could. If Yumi was fucking him, I didn’t know what I would do. Especially since it seemed that I couldn’t have a fling that meant nothing. In the movies it always seemed so liberating to have a mindless screw. But being with Natasha hadn’t felt freeing at all. It had felt…
Wrong.
Punching the pillow wasn’t satisfying, though. I stood up and walked to the door, driving my fist into the wooden frame as hard as I could. It fucking hurt. But at least it took my mind off the emotional pain in my chest.
I slammed both fists into the board a couple more times until one of my knuckles bled. That seemed to crush my anger and I sat back down on the bed, sucking on my hand, the rusty taste of blood filling my mouth.
Finally, though, I remembered that Yumi and I were supposed to sneak out to get the adamantium Shiv needed and I should rest before we went. Feeling reluctant, I lay down on the bed, fully dressed. And eventually, against my will, I fell asleep.
***
Chad
I woke up some time later, feeling disoriented.
I knew it was the middle of the night after the ball.
But everything else seemed hazy.
What had woken me?
Something felt off.
“God fucking damn it!” Yumi’s mental voice blasted me.
“Yumi?” I sent, immediately alert. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay. I’m being chased by your pretty Natasha and some goon and they’re about to…”
I stopped her, needing to get the important information.
“Where are you?”
She was silent a moment.
“I’m in the warehouse area. Just follow my mental voice. And be quick because they’re going to…”
She cut off and my sense of her mental presence disappeared as if she was…
But no. Of course not.
She couldn’t be dead.
No.
Unconscious maybe?
I tuned in to see if I could sense her through the soul bond. And with relief I felt her Yumi-ness. So, she wasn’t dead.
But something bad was happening.
“Grace, Shiv,” I sent. “Yumi’s in trouble. We need to find her.”
“Of course she is,” came Shiv’s annoyed mental voice.
Before he could finish his thought, they were both in my room. Grace’s hair was messy, her cheeks bright pink and Shiv looked annoyed, as if I had interrupted them about to… I stopped the thought. I didn’t want to know what my sister and best friend had been about to do. That definitely was too much information.
“No really,” I said. “I thought for a second she was dead but then I realized that she was just unconscious.”
“Unconscious,” Grace frowned. “Why?”
“Someone was chasing her in the industrial sector.”
“Oh, I know where that is,” Shiv said, excitement radiating from him. “I was there tonight with Dr. Berners-Lee. I went to see his lab.”
“Really?” I said. “I’m assuming by how excited you are, that he’s a big deal?
“Chad, he’s only the guy who invented the Grid.”
“Wow.”
“Yes,” he said, putting his arm around Grace. “And then my stealthy Kinetic girlfriend borrowed a few materials and tools from it. As soon as we save Yumi… again, I’ll get right to work on fixing them properly this time.”
“That’s great, Shiv.”
He gave a proud half-smile, that turned into a frown.
“Well, you can tell me it’s great once I fix them properly and we get back home.”
“Alright,” Grace said, getting things back on track. “Let’s go get Yumi. I’ve had a bad feeling about this place since we got here.”
“How are we going to track her if she’s unconscious. We can only follow her mental voice if she’s conscious,” Shiv pointed out.
“Soul bond,” Grace said, immediately. “Like on Lood.”
“This is nothing like on Lood,” I said, clipping my words. Why would she bring up that fiasco right now?
“Oh, give me a break, man,” Shiv said, irritated with me. “This is exactly like on Lood. Yumi’s gone off on her own and got into trouble and we have to get her out. Do you not see a pattern in her behaviour by now?”
I thought hard about that.
Was he right?
She did have a habit of getting into trouble, but so did we all. Since we had been tagged as Wild Minds two years ago, we had been in trouble most of the time. I wasn’t sure Shiv could say that Yumi got in more trouble than the rest of us. Okay, yeah, he could. But not that much more trouble.
“Are you defending her in your head?” Shiv said, incredulous. “Because if I had to guess…”
I put a hand up.
“Yes,” I said, feeling sour. “You know me too fucking well. Okay Shiv?”
“Yeah, and what the hell anyways,” Grace said, looking as though she wasn’t impressed with me. “Weren’t you guys fighting again? And didn’t you leave the party with that bitch Natasha?”
“I did,” I ground out. “And we didn’t do anything. Or… not much anyway.”
Grace got an expression on her face that was both shocked and appalled, which I ignored.
“And it doesn’t matter whether we’re fighting or not. Obviously, I don’t want her dead or hurt. Now, stop being a know it all and a nosy gossip,” I said, glaring at the two of them. “And let’s find Yumi. Who knows what these people want to do with her?”
That made both their faces cloud over.
“Track her, then,” Shiv ordered. “These bastards aren’t allowed to mess with my friend. Even if I am pissed with her.”
12 FInding Her
Chad
If I had known exactly where she was, then Gracie could have teleported us directly to her, saving a lot of time. But I had to follow the soul bond.
It was kind of like following a smell. I closed my eyes and Grace and Shiv linked arms with me so I wouldn’t fall. And I shuffled along paying close attention to the soul bond, following the hint of her essence that I could sense through the link between us. Sometimes I walked into a wall and we would have to go around the long way to stay moving in more or less a straight line.
It was tedious and took us over an hour until we were close enough for me to pinpoint her actual location in a lab in the warehouse district. The same area that Natasha had told us we weren’t supposed to enter due to construction. Apparently they were doing more than some harmless renovations out here.
Grace listened in on the minds that were with Yumi and relayed what she was mentally hearing to Shiv and I.
“They’re doing tests on her,” she said, aghast. “The next one is a brain scan. We need to get her out of there. Right. Now.”
I could smell a scent of sulphur and in the darkness I wondered if I had landed in Hell. It certainly felt like it, with Yumi in there with a bunch of scientists about to do tests on her without permission. This district was hell and the scientists were demons about to torture her in this scenario. Unfortunately, the comparison was a little too apt.
“Why don’t you just teleport her?” I said, feeling indignant that they dared kidnap Yumi and apprehensive that they might actually hurt her. I didn’t like them messing with her. It wasn’t right.
“She can’t just teleport her,” Shiv said, always the voice of reason. “They’ll know for sure that we’re not like them. Obviously Natasha suspects that we’re not who we say we are. And she’s determined to find out exactly what we are. If her test subject suddenly disappears, she’s going to be even more suspicious. No. We have to think of something else.”
“Break in there and hit them on the heads?”
I spread my hands as the other two stared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really worried about her. I can’t think straight. That’s all I’ve got.”
Shiv sighed.
“Do I always have to do all the thinking?”
“Yes, Shiv,” Grace said, exasperated. “That’s why you were given an enormously powerful brain.”
“Okay,” he said, and Grace and I came in closer to listen. “Here’s what we do. Grace, you disorient them a little so they don’t do the brain scan on her. We definitely don’t want them finding a brain structure that shouldn’t exist.”
“Okay.”
“I will manifest a gas that could be released from something in the lab. That won’t require precision, so it won’t matter that I don’t have complete control over my powers.”
I remembered the flood of the century and hoped he was right.
“The gas will knock them out. That way, if they investigate, they’ll explain it away, saying that it was a gas leak.”
“Fine,” I said. “And what do I do?”
“Once they’re out, we go in, using our Kinetic lock pick,” he gestured to Gracie, who smiled. “You get her out of the restraints and Grace and I will make sure that the scene looks right. Then Grace will teleport us back to Yumi’s room where we’ll make a Circle and heal her if she needs it.”
“I don’t have much to do,” I said, feeling left out for probably one of the first times ever. I suddenly realized how Yumi had felt most of her life and it shocked me. No wonder she was grumpy. I would be too if I felt like this all the time.
“Chad, you can’t help it that you can’t use your power,” Shiv said. “Don’t be an ass. And let’s just get Yumi the fuck out of there.”
“Fine. Let’s do it.”
The plan went off without a hitch and I unstrapped Yumi while the others made sure that the scenario would make them think that they’d been knocked out by an accidental gas leak.
“Chad,” Grace said, suddenly. “Natasha’s coming.”
“Shit,” I said. “We have to get out of here.”
I picked up Yumi, who was completely unconscious.
“I’m leaving. Teleport me when you’re done. I won’t take the chance that Natasha might get ahold of her again.”
“Okay,” Shiv said, turning back to what he was doing.
I left, walking as quickly as I could down the empty corridors. My heart pounded from carrying Yumi and from fear. It didn’t matter how angry I was at her, I wasn’t going to let them do tests on her without her permission.
I heard the sounds of someone walking and ducked into a dark room. I slid down the wall with Yumi on my lap and waited, my pulse pounding in my ears. I stared down at her pale face in the light that came in from the window in the door. How could she be so infuriating one day? And so precious to me the next?
God, I was so tired of this roller coaster of a relationship.
I kissed her forehead, then rested my head against the wall, waiting. The footsteps went past and I stood up again, my quads straining.
I peeked out the door.
No one.
I continued down until I made it out of the warehouse district. Without warning, I was suddenly in Yumi’s bedroom as Grace teleported us all there. I set her down on the bed, my arms aching. I was strong and she was light. But Yumi was still a full grown woman and I had carried her pretty far. I rubbed my sore biceps.
“It was a good thing that you left with Yumi,” Shiv said. “Natasha walked in on us just as we finished. She had Jeff with her. We had to fight them and then run. There’s no way you could have kept up.”
“Oh no,” I said, at the same time feeling relieved that I had left when I did.
“It was okay, though,” he said. “Once we had lost them, Grace erased and changed their memories, as well as those of the scientists, so that they would think that they had completed the testing on Yumi and she had been returned to her room. She also planted the idea in their heads that we were completely normal.”
We don’t usually do this sort of mental manipulation unless it’s absolutely necessary. And in this case, it was.
The three of us kicked off our shoes and I locked the door. Then we climbed up and sat in a circle on the bed around Yumi’s unconscious form.
We clasped hands. I had Yumi’s cold hand and Grace’s warm one. We closed our eyes, making a Circle. When we do this our minds link and we are more powerful together. The four of us can heal each other this way and often have. We didn’t know exactly what they had done to her, so we thought it prudent to do a healing just in case.
“Okay, I’m going to go check on her mind,” Grace sent. “Be right back.”
Shiv and I maintained the Circle and sent her energy to do what she needed to do.
“There’s some really unusual brain activity, though the actual brain matter looks fine. It’s like she’s in a deep sleep and is dreaming.”
“Is there any point in staying linked?” I sent, thinking that if she was in deep sleep, there was
n’t any reason to.
“I think there is,” Grace sent. “I can’t explain it but I feel like we need to support her in whatever is going on in her mind right now.”
“Okay,” Shiv sent. “We stay linked, then.”
“We should use a meditative state to maintain the Circle and feed her energy, with a gradual healing,” Grace pronounced.
“For as long as it takes for her to come out of this unusual brain state,” I added.
“Not as long as it takes,” Shiv’s mental voice had a frown to it. “Remember, we don’t want to create a soul bond by staying connected too long. But we should stay linked as long as is safe for all of us.”
“Fine.”
There were three mental nods and then I went into a deep trance and lost track of time until Yumi’s waking state pulled us all out and we unlinked our minds.
“We should go,” Grace whispered. “She’s back in a normal sleep state. Let’s let her rest.”
Shiv and I nodded as we all crept out of the room, to find our own beds. The night had been particularly long and exhausting. All I wanted to do was sleep.
And now I could, knowing that Yumi was safe.
13 Yumi's change
Chad
Shiv and I were silently playing cards in the common room in the afternoon on Boxing Day. And I was thinking about all that had happened since we had rescued Yumi from Natasha’s slightly evil clutches.
Time had seemed to pass by in a blur and the only thing that stood out was how different Yumi was acting than the way she had been behaving for the past… well, her whole life, really.
She had been eager to apologize to me and the others. She had even said she was sorry to Natasha for being rude. Then she had made a vow to each of us that she would be a better friend.
And when she and I had walked back to her room on Christmas, she had roped me into helping her contact Matt and Nessa, so that she could apologize for her behaviour before we left.
