by Amie Gibbons
Well, crap.
“Do you ever do anything for just one reason?” I asked.
“Not usually.”
“How’s AB?”
“Feeling much better. Except her ass, which is very sore right now.”
I coughed, gagging on the image. “Ummmm, Carvi, you didn’t hurt her, right? We need her to do her science stuff.”
He chuckled. “She’s fine. She got a spanking for her little outburst. And she is feeling better. She needed to let out some of that anger.”
I shook my head.
It wasn’t any of my business, but… I’d had sake, I had an excuse to say things I shouldn’t.
That was my story and I was stickin’ to it.
“Carvi, does it ever occur to you not to sleep with someone?” I asked.
“If they're willing? No.”
“Uhhhh, will it after this?”
“Nah.”
“Carvi, you literally screwed Karma! You don't think she's going to screw you back?”
“She wasn't Karma when we screwed.”
“Which tells me whoever chose the next Karma had a beef with you too. You sleep with her too?”
“No clue.”
I sighed. “Carvi, you never know when someone you screwed is going to be in a position to screw you right back. Maybe just stop screwing people? And by that, I mean screwing them over when you actually screw them.
“You never know when you using people and runnin’ through them is gonna catch up and bite you in the butt.
“Even if it doesn't, these are real people with real feelings you're playing with. They aren't just players drifting in and out of Carvi's soap opera of life.
“Do you have any capacity for empathy for them? Do you feel anything for them?
“These are people. You can't just play with people, picking them up like new toys and putting them down when you get bored with them.
“They have feelings too. They matter too.
“What you do to them has consequences. For them. Don't you care at all when you wreck somebody?”
“You done?” Carvi asked after a moment.
I sighed. “Yes.”
“Good. I don’t wreck people, lea.”
“You-”
“No,” he said. “It’s your turn to listen.”
“I need to get back to work,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d help.”
“I can help,” he said. “That’s why I called, but you can’t attack me for sleeping with someone. You don’t get to do that. We understand each other?”
I growled under my breath. “Just please don’t hurt AB.”
“I only hurt her when she wants me to. Or when she needs a little lesson.”
I squinted at the phone. “I… Carvi, don’t hurt me either.”
He didn’t say anything. “Lea, I don’t want to hurt you. I may. But it won’t be on purpose.”
Something in me twinged and I was suddenly very glad I was drunk.
It dulled whatever that emotion would’ve been.
“We’re at the hospital,” I said. “I’m going into the astral plane to find the trail back to whatever started this. We called the security guys while we were getting some sake into me and feeding Quil, and asked them to go watch over the rally and my family, but they said they answer to you so they have to have your okay.
“Carvi, if these guys are so good, why didn’t they follow me when I left?”
Why hadn’t that occurred to me earlier?
“They did,” Carvi said. “It’s how I know where you are.”
“Oh.” I looked around. “Where are they? How did they follow without me noticing?”
“You’re not trained to notice, and they are that good,” Carvi said in a slow, patient voice. “Lea, you have a lot to learn.”
I stuck my tongue out at the phone. “Can you meet me in the astral plane? I want to figure this out fast.”
“I can, but I don’t think we’re going to get fast, no matter how much you want to. Karma herself said this wasn’t something she could solve quickly or easily, that says this is not going to be easy to track.”
Crap on a cracker, he had a point.
“Any idea how to track this once we’re in there?” I asked.
“I have ideas, yes,” he said.
I heard a voice in the background.
“What’d she say?” I asked as Carvi said something that sounded like a yes.
“She wants to know if I’m going into a vision,” he said.
She said something else.
“And she wants to know if she can come,” Carvi said after a moment, his tone making it clear exactly what he thought of that idea.
“Is that possible?” I asked.
He gritted his teeth so hard I could hear it on the other end.
Or maybe that was just my imagination.
“That’s a yes,” I said. “Oh, duh, I’ve done that. Of course you can.”
“Yes,” Carvi said. “That’s what she’s explaining to me right now. I was going to tell her it wasn’t possible to pull in non-magical people before she reminded me you did that before, and I even saw it.”
They got into something I couldn’t really hear and I grinned.
He was worried about her.
That was sweet.
And then I heard a smack.
“Carvi!” I yelped, “what was that?”
“AB getting a spanking,” he said. “She was getting mouthy.”
“Carvi, this is all consensual, right?”
“Yes, we have a deal that I get to spank her if she’s being bad, unless she uses the safe word.”
Why did I want to ask?
“Soooooo,” I said, “has she?”
“Oh, she’s tapped out a few times in the last few days,” Carvi said. “Knows her limits, and is pretty good about knowing when to push them. I’ve only had to choose to back off by myself before she called it once.”
“I take it that’s a good thing? Okay, see ya in the astral plane.”
And I hung up.
“Too much information, sweets?” Quil asked, grinning.
“Makes me think we could get some lessons from Carvi since I like the idea of having to tap out,” I said. “Am I too honest on alcohol?”
“Yes, but I like it. I won’t play with him myself, but we can ask him for tips,” Quil said. “I don’t trust him, and I don’t swing that way, but I have said I’m okay with you two if you want to.”
“I don’t trust him not to break my heart,” I said. “I’d fall for him, and I don’t think he has the capacity to love back. I also think that’d hurt us, no matter what you say. Wow! I really do just say whatever when I’m drunk, huh?”
Quil kneeled in front of me and kissed me lightly. “You are always honest. I think alcohol just makes you say things you normally would consider inappropriate. You okay to go in there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely. I can do this. I can do anything in there, given enough instruction.”
I’m pretty confident on alcohol too.
I laid down and Quil grinned as he stood up.
I felt the cold linoleum under my sweater and took a deep breath of that hospital smell.
Antiseptic covering the stench of sickness, and maybe a hint of urine.
Hospital by Calvin Klein, yuuuuuumy.
I opened my eyes on the astral plane.
I don’t know how I knew it was the astral plane right away. Most of the time I figured out I was in it when I sat up and saw my body under me.
This time I knew, without anything looking any different.
I could feel it… or smell it maybe.
I sat up outta my body and pushed up to my feet, even though on this plane I could’ve done the vamp thing where I just rose without any support.
The man lay on the bed next to me, dead as dead could be, his spirit long gone.
That was some small blessing at least. He wasn’t hanging around with unfinished business.
>
Ghosts were almost always a tragedy. Poor souls who couldn’t grasp they were dead or couldn’t let go, and got stuck. Forever watching over a world they could barely touch, barely affect, and couldn’t even understand half the time.
I’d only heard of one instance from Carvi where a witch had put a spell on herself to keep her tied to this world and coherent after she died, so she could lure and kill pedophiles.
If there was ever a good reason to hang around forever in the in-between, that was it.
But she’d also known how to make it so she was coherent and could touch the world as easily as a corporeal person, so she wasn’t a normal specter anyway.
Did that make a difference after a few hundred years of being stuck? I honestly didn’t know. Maybe she’d made some kinda escape hatch so she could leave once she’d gotten her fill of taking out bad guys.
Maybe not.
Carvi appeared in front of me and I snorted.
He was naked, but his member was obviously sated and down.
I couldn’t remember the last time he’d been naked, in real life or on the astral plane, and he wasn’t flying the flag and ready to go.
“What are you looking at, lea?” he asked, giant smile telling me he knew exactly what I was looking at.
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“No, thanks,” he said. “As you can see, I got plenty of that in the past hour. That woman can suck. I mean it, mouth like a vacuum cleaner, and she-”
“Carvi!” I tossed up my hands. “Too much information.”
Though I’d been told the same thing.
And I know he enjoyed my blow jobs.
“Holy crap!” I said. “You’re tryin’ to make me jealous, aren’t you?”
He just smiled. “Focus, lea, we have work to do.”
I growled at him.
Freaking hypocrite.
“I heard that,” he said, turning to the dead man. “Focus on him, on forces around him, as opposed to what actually happened. We know what happened in the real world. We need to see what happened in the metaphysical one.”
I took a deep breath and walked to the bed, taking the man’s hand.
It was cold, even in here.
“Show me,” I said out loud, knowing I didn’t really need to.
The purple grid came up again, the gold lines doodling around us, showing connections to others through the walls.
And two giant threads in this one.
The one between me and Carvi, and the thread and webbing between me and Quil.
Quil and I had a webbing, but the thread between me and Carvi was thicker.
My blood ran cold.
I did not like that.
Why didn’t I like that?
Because it meant I was more attached to Carvi than Quil? No way. The webbing countered that. But it did mean something.
That one connection was strong, and the little threads coming out of it were longer now.
If we went on doing stuff together much longer, we’d make a web too.
And we both knew if I got attached, if I fell in love, Carvi would hurt me.
“Lea,” Carvi said, resting his hand on my shoulder, “you need to focus. Don’t worry about this now.”
“Carvi, the tie to you is thicker than the one to my boyfriend. I’m worried.”
“That could mean something completely different. You don’t know. What we do know is you need to focus. Show us what happened to him.”
The world was a grid, too light to see specific parts if I tried to focus on it, but I could tell it was there.
What did that mean?
“Show me what you are,” I said out loud to it.
It glowed.
“And that means what?” I asked it, the sake making me huffier than I probably should’ve been.
It glowed, pulsating at me.
It wanted me to touch it.
How did I know that?
I kneeled down and focused on the square around me.
It formed walls, lifting up outta the floor, making a box with an open top around me.
What the?
“Carvi!” I called.
“Right here, lea,” he said, sounding like he was right next to me.
So at least the walls weren’t affecting that.
“What’s going on?”
“Why? What do you see?”
“Walls around me, the purple lines grew and made a box around me. I’m not claustrophobic, but it’s a little close in here.”
“Huh,” he said. “I can see you perfectly fine. You look a little freaked out.”
“What do I do?”
“Touch it.”
“Touch it?”
“Yeah. See what happens.”
“What if something bad happens?”
He sighed. “Then we’ll deal with it. Standing there isn’t doing anything, so touch the damn wall and see what happens. If something bad happens, then at least we’ll know more. More likely, you’ll see more. But you standing there doing nothing isn’t going to get shit done.”
“You sound… maybe not annoyed, but like I’m pushing it.”
“You are. But I just got some, so it makes me less testy with you.”
“Carvi?” I asked. “This just occurred to me. Do you get pissy with me sometimes because you want to have sex with me and can’t?”
He took a deep breath and I could almost see him thinking. “Sometimes. It’s more the desire to get some, and I do want you, but, possibly. Why?”
“Because I just figured out earlier that’s why I’m mad at Grant. I want him and can’t have him. It’s not even anything that’s really his fault. If he doesn’t want me, he doesn’t. But I’m so mad at him for it.”
“That’s not quite true. He would sleep with you if he weren’t such a good guy. He never touched you because he knows it’d mean more to you than it would to him, and he didn’t want to do that to you.”
My heart twinged and I sniffed. “He is a good guy, isn’t he?”
“Lea, we can, and will, talk about this later, but for now, can you focus?”
“Yeah.” I shook my head. “Sorry, I’m… I’ve had alcohol. It’s making me think. I don’t like thinking like this.”
“Lea…” Carvi’s voice rang with pity and he paused. “You will get over him. I swear you will. But you have to want to. Right now, you’re like AB. You don’t want to get over him, because you are, if not in love, then fixated on him, and that makes you want to maintain that tie to him. When you want to let it go, when you are ready and able, you will.”
I sighed and reached out to the wall. “Okay, show me what ya know.”
I pressed my hand flat against the wall.
Purple light flashed around me and I yelped as stars danced across my vision.
I blinked the brightness away and the world slowly came into focus.
The landscape was a brilliant field of purple flowers, every one with golden pollen bellies and sparkling gold dust around them.
“I…” I didn’t even know what to say. “Ummm, Carvi?”
He didn’t answer.
“Crap on a cracker,” I whispered. “Okay. What am I seeing?”
The flower in front of me lifted its face up towards me, showing eyes in the pollen heart.
They looked like my eyes, the same green, the same shape, the same little fleck of brown in the left.
“So this is me?” I asked the field.
The flower blinked at me.
I’d take that as a yes.
The sparkles grew brighter, showing a denser cloud than I’d first thought.
“These are the gold strings I saw, right?” I asked out loud.
The gold glowed brighter.
“Okay, this is my mind,” I said. “That means this is my interpretation of whatever is playing out in the grand scheme of things. Soooooo, the flowers are people? The gold dust… is it little particles or lines? Come on, pick one.”
The field didn’t do anything.
“That is not helpful.”
I looked around. The flowers went on around me as far as I could see.
But clear in the distance, a mountain rose outta the field, far enough the atmosphere made it nothing more than a shape in the distance I barely recognized as a mountain, but it was.
I focused on it, picturing myself landing near it, seeing what was at the base.
I opened my eyes on a rocky slope, the flowers spread out beneath me.
“Well, that was easy,” I said.
“You are psychic,” a voice answered.
“Ah!” I jumped, sliding down the slight slope onto a packed dirt path. “Who’s there?”
“That depends, now doesn’t it,” the voice said.
“On what?” I whirled around.
The trail changed, becoming more defined, trees suddenly around it.
The flowers blocked.
“I can’t see the flowers anymore,” I said.
“Yes, that is the problem,” the voice answered.
It was definitely male, a little accented, maybe a touch of English, or something close?
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I know. You’re missing a piece of the puzzle.”
“Can you help? I got some kind of karma spiral going on over here, and the real Karma left it to me to figure out.”
“Oh that. No, that’s not what you can’t see. You can figure that out. What you can’t see is what you don’t want to see.”
I growled. “And what would that be?”
He appeared on the trail in front of me.
And my mouth fell open.
He was short for a guy, all muscles and pretty dancing eyes, strong features, though not nearly as hard as his brother’s, and a giant smile.
It was Milo!
“Milo!” I launched forward, wrapping my arms around him.
And went straight through him.
“I’m not actually Milo,” he said as I turned around. “This is how you see me, because he was the first person you met who could teach you how to use your powers, so your brain interprets me as him.”
He was right. He didn’t sound like Milo.
“I’ve seen this movie,” I snapped. “Who are you?”
Why was I snapping?
Because I’d thought for just a second that I’d gotten Milo back.
And I wanted him back.
My heart ached and I looked down as the fake Milo smiled.
“Why do I feel like this?” I asked him. “I’d barely known Milo a few hours when he died. Why do I miss him like this? Why did I bond with him? Because he was the first other psychic I’d ever met?”
