by Amie Gibbons
Cuz I never thought I could just say stuff to my dad.
“What happened after that?” I asked, staring him in the eyes.
Something flashed across his face. “The man fell, we got him an aspirin, Carla called an ambulance, and they took him to the hospital. They were working on him last someone checked on him.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“About four hours ago,” Mama said.
I nodded. “I can look into it. Where was it? I can at least see what was going on there.”
“Baby, I don’t want you getting into this,” Daddy said.
I shrugged. “If someone’s after this guy, or after you by messin’ with your campaign, I’m looking into it. You can’t talk me outta it.”
He stared at me.
I don’t think I’d ever told Daddy how things were going to be either.
Huh.
“I think he’s impressed,” Carvi said in my head. “He’s hard to read. Really hard. But sounds like he’s proud you’re growing up.”
I shrugged. “I am?”
“You just offered to take on a case on your own, without your team, and without Grant. When have you ever done that?”
I looked at him. “Well, I went down to Miami with you.”
“With Grant. You have me and Quil here to help investigate, but you are the only agent here, and you just took on this responsibility. You could have listened to your dad and let it go. He was giving you an out. And you didn’t take it. That’s a good thing.”
“Any idea what’s going on here? Do you sense any magic?”
He shook his head. “Nothing obvious.”
“What’s going on here?” Mama asked, squinting at Carvi. “Are you… who are you? You look familiar.”
“Really?” I asked, grinning.
Mama had been writing vampire romances since Anne Rice was on the rise. Maybe she’d run into Carvi in the past, and he’d inspired some of her writing.
Oh, wait, no, that was creepy.
Sooooooo creepy.
I needed brain bleach now.
Carvi grinned. “We think there might be magic about, if a twenty-two-year-old had a heart attack, and we’d like to check for magic, after Ariana gets her visions off of his desk. May we go in?”
Mama stared harder. “Seriously, do I know you, sugar? You look familiar.”
He shrugged. “I meet a lot of people.”
“I just bet you do. And I’m also bettin’ you look mighty good for your age,” Mama said, pouring on the sweetness.
Ohhhhhh, Carvi was bugging her. Or at least, her not being able to place him was.
“Wait, do you know her?” I asked him mentally.
“No idea,” he said. “I really do meet a ton of people. She could have been to one of my hotels, or seen me at a club. And if it was years ago? I wouldn’t remember.”
“And you make fun of my memory.”
“Thirty-five hundred years, lea,” he said. “Let’s see how many people you remember after that long. If it was years ago, yeah, not going to remember some random woman.”
It was my turn to squint at him.
“You’re cute when you’re trying to be intimidating,” he said.
“Are you two talking?” AB asked.
“What?” Mama asked.
Carvi turned his stare on AB and she shrank back, chewing her lip.
I guess he didn’t want my parents to know he could do that.
Whoops.
“Telepathy?” Mama asked.
I shrugged. “Kinda, but he can talk in your head easier than he can read your mind.”
“That knowledge does not leave this group,” Carvi said, taking AB’s elbow.
He whispered something in her ear and she squeaked, cheeks turning pink.
“I just told her she’s getting spanked for revealing such delicate information,” Carvi said. “And she’ll enjoy it. Same goes for you, lea, if you talk about anything you know about me.”
“It’s like selling nuclear secrets to Iran, yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said.
We walked toward the building, the guards spreading to make a square around us. I could almost see the lines of magic stretching between them, making a shield around our little group.
“What’s that?” Mama asked in a stage whisper.
She’d never really gotten the whisper concept down.
Then again, most people said I didn’t have it down either, so that’s probably where I got it from.
“What?” I asked.
She smiled at me. “I may not be psychic, baby, but I can tell they’re doing something.”
So Mama was a sensitive?
She’d dabbled in magic, but was there some natural gift there too? Maybe that’s where my powers came from.
“It’s a shield, Mama,” I said.
She sighed. “The whole assassin thing is real, isn’t it?”
“Afraid so,” I said. “We don’t even know who sent them after me, or why.”
“That… I…” Mama growled. “You sure you don’t want to be a singer?”
I laughed, and Carvi was only a beat behind me.
“It’s entertaining to see where you came from,” Carvi said, taking AB’s hand. “I can see where you get the sauciness from.”
“And the stubbornness,” Daddy said, pulling the door open.
“I’m not stubborn,” I said.
Daddy gave me a look as I walked past, and Mama swatted his arm, pausing to kiss him on the cheek.
I grinned.
My parents had been married almost forty years, had five kids, one of whom had run out on the family, not to mention the drama I’d had as a teenager, basically putting them both through hell, and they were still obviously in love.
They’d tackled everything life threw at them together.
And almost never fought because they talked most everything out.
Whenever I heard the Lee Brice song, ‘Love Like Crazy,’ I thought of my parents.
They had what everyone I knew was lookin’ for.
A partnership.
The office Daddy rented as his headquarters looked like something outta Scandal. Just a lot of desks and chairs, tons of people on phones, and Daddy’s posters all around.
He was running technically as a Republican, but made it clear in all his ads that he was a constitutional conservative focused on cutting down government spending and the bloated bureaucracy.
He was positive he wasn’t gonna win.
“I’m too honest to be elected,” was what he’d been saying for the past year now.
I wasn’t so sure.
Weren’t people sick of established politicians who did nothing their whole lives besides be politicians and lie to people?
Mama was sure Daddy was gonna win. She always said the only difference between a politician and a con man was how many people they could trick at once. And she was just as sure as me that the people wanted something different.
“What time does the rally start?” I asked.
“Eight,” Daddy said.
I nodded.
It was already six, so if we were gonna do this, we had to do it fast.
“Who was the intern?” I asked.
Mama led me over to a desk in the first row.
I did a double take as we passed a scorched spot on the wall.
“What happened here?”
“Oh man.” Mama rolled her eyes. “Baby, it was something outta a Three Stooges Movie. Sam was getting her coffee this morning and she tripped and spilled it all down her top and fell right into Natalie, who was heading out to smoke. She had her lighter out, not even on, and somehow fell against the wall and flicked it on when she fell. It lit the painting that was here on fire.”
I looked at Carvi.
“What are we looking at here?” I asked mentally. “Bad luck spell to affect the campaign?”
“Maybe,” he said. “You get a vision. I’ll text Quil to ask him to look for that.”
I nodd
ed and walked to the desk.
Why did I think this was a good idea again?
Oh yeah…
Cuz I knew something was going on here.
And I couldn’t let it lie.
I touched the desk, focusing on what Mama had said. There was a twenty-two-year-old college senior working here. He was probably planning on going to law school, like I had been, or maybe going into business, and volunteering because he believed in Daddy’s cause.
Or maybe-
Flash.
The world snapped on like I was really there, not fuzzy like most of my visions. More like when I walked the layers of the astral plane with Carvi.
Was I doing that now all on my own?
I’d done it before, but again, it was during a big battle. This was without that extra stress and pressure to make me perform.
Maybe I really was learning.
The place buzzed with afternoon, last-leg-of-the-race frenzy. So most of the people had probably left earlier than six, or they’d left after what happened to the intern.
His name was Carlton Nash.
Pretty good-looking guy. At least as tall as Daddy, but thin as a rail, looked like a runner based on strong legs under his shorts and the way he flitted around the office, grabbing papers and running them to others.
He moved with almost a dancer’s grace, and I knew without seeing it that he was on the track team and also a college cheerleader.
He had a lean face with just the barest bit of stubble suggesting he was a man and not a boy of maybe sixteen, and giant brown eyes behind slim glasses. Puppy eyes. He had a wide mouth and was smiling all over the place as he whipped around.
I couldn’t even tell what he was doing besides running stuff between desks. I mean, what was the point of all that, anyway?
Not that it mattered.
He paused by his desk and grabbed a folder laying on a stack of them, flipping it open, eyes flying over the words so fast you could tell he was a speed reader.
I didn’t have to think it more than a second before it came to me that he was planning on going to law school. He’d recently gotten his LSAT scores back and scored in the ninety-eighth percentile. It beat mine. And I’d been no slouch in the ninety-fifth.
He coughed and shivered, dropping the folder, jerking straight a second later and grabbing his left arm.
“Carlton!” a girl with a stain on her shirt said.
Ohhhh, that had to be the one Mama said had spilled her coffee.
Carlton looked at her, big eyes even wider as they searched her face.
I focused on him, on making the world stop so I could take a closer look at this moment.
And the vision paused.
It worked!
Even without Carvi here, I could pause a vision!
Okay, not the time to celebrate.
I took a deep breath and focused on the young man, on the air around him, on anything magical around here showing up.
Faint lines of purple and gold showed up overlaying the room, almost like a grid. Lines ran around things, but an overall structure held.
It took me a minute to realize I was seeing two separate things.
One was a field of purple. The grid, imperfect and mismatched sized rectangles as far as I could tell.
What the quack was that?
The other was a field of gold. It held to the grid, lining up over the purple… mostly.
Little lines like escaped threads wove around the room.
And one ran right past Carlton.
Coincidence?
Maybe.
Cuz lines of the golden threads ran off everywhere. Some were short and just kinda hung out. Others ran out through the walls and door.
What was I seeing?
“Carvi?” I said. “I think I need you in here.”
He popped up next to me. “Yes, lea?”
“What am I seeing?” I waved a hand around the office.
He grabbed my shoulder and narrowed his eyes, staring around.
“Oh!” he said a moment later, letting me go. “I am not entirely sure what this is. A grid? That’s… interesting. I don’t know what it means though.”
“Does the line going by Carlton mean anything?”
“I can’t say. There are lines everywhere and no one else dropped from a heart attack.”
“What would I be seeing as a grid? What does that fit, that you know of?”
He shook his head. “Lea, this is your brain. What you interpret as a grid could be something I interpret as something completely different. It’s like you seeing the war room as a chess board. That’s your personal interpretation. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to figure this one out for yourself. I can tell you see a grid, and that it has something to do with the supernatural, but that’s it.”
I sighed.
I was afraid he’d say something like that.
I hit play on the vision and it went forward.
Carlton dropped, people rushed over.
And the lines of gold moved with them. Almost like they were sometimes connected to people.
I focused harder.
Or maybe they were tying people to that grid?
I looked down and a solid gold thread went between me and Carvi at our stomachs.
“What the?” I asked.
Carvi pressed his lips together. “I can not say for sure, but I believe we are seeing something far more widespread than a simple spell at play.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, there’s one of these threads between us. Look at the others. What do you see?”
I paused the vision again.
The world froze, the people in mid-movement.
“See?” Carvi said, pointing to the group of people gathered around the fallen student.
Little gold threads licked outta every one of them, but only one went between two.
And the guy was hugging the girl.
“What?” I asked.
Carvi shook his head. “Figure it out. Walk through it. What could that mean? You and I have a line between us. Those two do. Who else in here?”
I walked around the group and over to the office in the back.
Mama and Daddy were talking in the office.
They had a web of the gold lines between them.
Some of the threads were thicker than others, but they were tied together so tightly, I was surprised they were ever able to leave each other’s side.
“Tied together?” I said. “Are those lines showing connections between people?”
“I believe so,” Carvi said. “They aren’t showing lines between these people and others not in the room. But those who are connected and here are showing up. We’re seeing the web between your parents. We see the line between us.”
I looked at it again.
It was only one, but it had little threads coming outta it all floating towards one or the other.
Like a web barely being built off that one thing.
“I’m scared to ask,” I said.
“We are bound, lea,” Carvi said, frowning.
“What’s with the sour puss?” I asked.
It wasn’t like we didn’t know we had a connection.
He shook his head. “I’m not sure yet, but it shouldn’t be that thick. That suggests… something else.”
I raised my eyebrows at him. “I’m lost.”
“I know,” he said. “We know we’re seeing the ties between people. What does that make that grid?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t look at me. I can’t say for sure, but you are the one seeing things this way, so it’s something in your head making it show up that way.”
“And you can’t tell me what that’s about, or what it is at all, or whatever?”
“No.”
I shook my head.
Why was I feeling fuzzy?
“Carvi? I don’t feel well,” I said.
He frowned, looking around. “Shit! Get out! Now!”
&nb
sp; I opened my eyes in the real world and slumped to the ground as nausea swept through me.
“Carvi?” I asked.
He fell to his knees next to me. “Someone trying to break in. The sickness is a natural extension of that.”
I looked up at him.
“It’s like psychic pain,” he said. “It was someone trying to get into your head through the astral plane and you feel this pain because of that damage.”
“Can they get in now that I’m out?”
“No, at least, not easily.”
“You do.”
“My power allows it. Most people don’t have that.”
“Who was it?” Daddy asked.
I would’ve jerked if I weren’t curled up, shoving down vomit.
I’d kinda forgotten there were other people here.
Even my parents.
That couldn’t be good.
Like maybe I was losing my purchase on reality?
Or maybe I was just being dramatic.
I took deep breaths, leaning down so I was laying on my side, and pulled my body into the tightest ball I could.
The nausea burned through my belly like a horrible hangover, where you knew you’d feel better if you could throw up, but you couldn’t quite get your body there.
“I… Mama?” I said after a moment of activity around me and people yammering at my parents, asking what was wrong with me.
“Sprite right here, baby,” she said.
I cracked my eyes open as a cold can was pressed into my hand. It was already open.
“Thanks,” I whispered, leaning my head up a bit and sipping off the top of the can, sucking in a bit of the soda.
It’s what I always wanted when I was sick to my stomach. Sprite and saltines.
“I know my baby,” Mama said, sitting next to me and stroking my hair.
Carvi sat in front of me, studying me.
“Yeah?” I asked him mentally.
“We have you protected from such mental attacks,” he said out loud after a moment. “No one should’ve been able to find you, let alone try to break in. How is that possible?”
“I was gonna ask you that. Can you call Quil? See what he’s seen?”
Carvi nodded and got up, pulling out his phone.
“Ariana, what’s going on?” Mama asked.
“What Carvi said,” I said. “Someone tried to break into my brain. But we’re worried since they shouldn’t have been able to find me. And really shouldn’t have been able to get in enough to hurt me.”
