Psychic Spiral (of Death)

by Amie Gibbons

  A hand wrapped around my hair, pulling me up to my knees, shifting the angle. Quil pressed forward to stay inside me, wrapping his arms around me and grabbing my breasts, squeezing them hard as his motions slowed. He had to be careful not to fall out at this angle.

  Carvi met my eyes and pressed up against me, helping keep me on Quil.

  Quil grunted and I couldn’t tell if it was in protest or arousal as the extra pressure helped him.

  He couldn’t move much in this position.

  But I could.

  I rose and went down in little motions on him, Carvi holding me up to help.

  My nub rubbed against Carvi and he pulled my head back by the hair, kissing me so hard another wave swept through me.

  Carvi put his hand between us, kissing me as deep as I could take as he played with my clit.

  I grabbed Quil’s arm and pulled away from Carvi’s lips.

  Arousal, pain, panic, happiness, sadness, anger, all these volatile emotions were high power.

  And in this state, I was pretty sure I could do whatever I could do when my life was in danger.

  I focused on Quil’s wrist and it split open in front of me.

  He gasped and I bit into it, sucking hard.

  Quil screamed, shoving up into me hard and as far as he could as he released.

  I let him go and he slid out of me.

  Well and truly done. At least for now.

  Carvi climbed off the bed and waved me to follow.

  I practically scrambled after him.

  He shoved me to my knees and I took him in my mouth eagerly.

  I held him hard, playing with his balls with my free hand as he pumped into my mouth. He grabbed my hair and moved my head over by pulling it.

  “Open me,” he said.

  I focused on him.

  On him going in and out of my mouth, the way the edge of his head caught on my lips as he pulled out.

  On the salty sweet taste of him as precum hit my tongue.

  And imagined that swollen vein I could see when he was hard and ready for me splitting open, just the barest bit.

  So I could suck him off both ways at once.

  Carvi gasped as the sweetness of vamp blood hit my tongue.

  He grunted, grabbing my head with both hands, holding it still as he mouth fucked me.

  I licked him and sucked as he moved, pumping his base and grabbing his balls hard the way he liked, pushing up and pulling them down.

  I stared up at him and he met my eyes.

  “I l-”

  I cut the thought off.

  Carvi didn’t appear to notice.

  Just stared into my eyes as he moved faster and faster, spilling more blood into my mouth.

  I sucked harder, drawing what I could of that power into me.

  Carvi screamed, head tossing back as he exploded in my mouth, still pumping as fast as he could, drawing out the orgasm.

  I pulled us into the astral plane.

  “Lea?” he gasped, shuddering as I pulled off him.

  “Have me in here.” I lay on my back, opening my legs. “While you come out there.”

  He landed on his knees between mine.

  He didn’t have to be asked twice.

  And shoved into me.

  I wrapped myself around him, holding on as he moved fast.

  I could feel myself sucking him off in the real world, the vamp blood powering me, turning me on, making me hot, but felt him inside me here.

  He moved vamp fast, a vibrator inside me, and I squeezed around him.

  We fell into the real world.

  Carvi finished and pulled out of my mouth and I didn’t even have to ask, just lowered myself to my back.

  He put his mouth back on me, working his tongue fast.

  He knew I was about to go.

  I came hard, the orgasm a short but a powerful seize.

  And I flopped to the floor.

  Vamp blood coursing through me.

  Holy crap.

  Quil appeared next to me, and lay on the ground, I rolled over, putting my head on his chest.

  Carvi nodded, pushed to his feet.

  And walked out.

  “I love you,” I thought.

  If he heard me, he didn’t answer.

  Probably a good thing.

  Because I’d just crossed one huge line.

  I didn’t need to cross another.

  Chapter eight

  “Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. “Ariana.”

  Carvi’s assassin friend took my hand, bending over it as he kissed the back of it.

  I smiled.

  Cheesy sometimes, but some guys could pull it off.

  “Ariana, this is Benjamin,” Carvi said.

  Was that the name he’d told me for his contact before?

  We’d finished just in time for the plane to land and had to get dressed and situated quickly so as not to waste any time.

  And it kept us all from having to talk.

  Because now that we were done and the pheromones had worn off…

  The only one of us okay with all this was Carvi.

  AB was looking tired but had enough energy to put off all kinds of sour, Quil was uncomfortable and jerked away any time Carvi got without an arm’s length of him.

  And I wasn’t doing much better.

  I’d had a three-way.

  Me!

  And I’d told Carvi I loved him. Didn’t know if he was listening in, but if he was, he hadn’t said anything back.

  And considering he always seemed to be listening in when we were around each other, that was telling.

  And none of us talked about it as we got our bags.

  “Are we going anywhere?” I asked as Benjamin dropped my hand.

  “Not if we don’t have to,” Carvi said. “Benjamin here is going to give you the phone he got the text on, we’re going to follow the information back upstream to where it came from in the astral plane, and we’ll go from there. Hopefully whoever it was wasn’t good enough to hide their trail, but considering who they hired…”

  Was it just me, or was Carvi babbling a bit more than usual?

  “Okay,” I said. “We do that, find the person who hired the assassins, and go from there. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “No harder than things were earlier,” AB said.

  I jerked, looking at her.

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  Ohhhhhh, crap. We’d crossed a line somewhere in there. AB was not okay with what’d happened in the bedroom.

  “Carvi,” I thought at him, “I thought you said she was okay with all that?”

  He sighed out loud and mentally said, “She was. Until she wasn’t.”

  “You’re in trouble.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  I rolled my eyes and looked around.

  The hanger was another small one built for tiny private planes. It was a big empty space with curved metal walls and not much in the way of decoration.

  “We can go into the office,” Benjamin said.

  “Already cleared?” Quil asked, sounding a bit stiff.

  “Of course,” Benjamin said.

  “My people know what they’re doing, Quil,” Carvi said, voice low and too intimate for business talk.

  Quil clenched his fists.

  “Carvi,” I thought to him, “tonight, we all crossed a line. And I don’t think the fallout is going to be good.”

  “You think too much.”

  “I don’t get accused of that much. Must be a blond thing, but come on, you know sex complicates things. Carvi, we’ve got a mess here.”

  “He’ll be fine. He’s just a little uncomfortable.”

  “And AB?”

  I swear Carvi flinched. “Her feelings are more… complicated. She lost her last crush, her ex, to a younger blond, at least in her head. And now she sees you as doing the same thing. It’s worse though, because you’re her friend. She likes you.”

  “And now she thinks I stabbed her in the back.
”

  Hadn’t I?

  You don’t do things with a friend’s ex, so you certainly don’t do things with a guy she’s currently seeing, even with everyone knowing what’s going on and supposedly okay with it.

  “I’ll figure it out,” Carvi said. “For now-”

  “Focus,” I said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know you only tell me to focus when you don’t want to talk about something, right?”

  “Noticed that, did you?”

  He smirked as Benjamin hit the door on the far side of the hanger and held it open for us.

  Quil paused so I could go ahead and me and AB walked in first.

  Ladies first.

  Because that’s the kinda guy he was.

  He was so sweet and understanding.

  And I’d just pushed him into something he’d made clear months ago he was uncomfortable with.

  There was no part of him that was the least bit bicurious, and he said he’d had three-ways, but it’d always been two girls or two guys who focused on one girl.

  This was the first time he’d been in any kind of intimate situation with another guy who was interested in him that way.

  And he wasn’t okay with it.

  I didn’t even need to be psychic to tell that.

  Not to mention AB.

  What kind of mess had we made?

  “Can’t fix it now, lea,” Carvi said in my head. “Stop obsessing. We’ll fix it when we have time. Or we won’t. Either way, we all have jobs to do here, especially you.”

  I nodded and looked around.

  The office wasn’t terribly small, but it sure was feeling cramped with all of us in there. It had a desk on one side that stretched almost the width of the office, a full eight feet at least.

  And a few papers piled up on it in a messy but organized chaos kinda way.

  There was a couch on the other side, right next to the door, and a cot pushed up against the wall.

  A place for the pilots to crash maybe?

  “I can get started on research while you guys do this,” AB said, voice clipped and harsh.

  I’d seen her deal with her ex. Why had I thought it’d be okay to fool around with the guy she was seeing now?

  Why had Carvi thought it was okay to fool around with me when he was playing therapist and had said he wouldn’t go near me because I was off limits?

  “Lea,” Carvi half shouted in my head, “seriously, cut it out! You can’t focus on that right now.”

  “I can’t help it,” I thought back. “We just-”

  “Got carried away and made a mistake. But not one we can’t undo. And for now, we really do have bigger issues. Remember that. We have to get into the astral plane, figure out how to follow that text back to the source, and after that, we still have to find the person in real life, then get back to Alabama to stop that spiral. Full plates.”

  “Right.”

  “Use the desk,” Carvi said out loud to AB, grabbing her arm and pulling her in close, kissing her hard as he had me earlier.

  And jealousy twinged in my heart.

  Yep, we were in a mess alright.

  And he was right, there wasn’t much we could do about it besides push on to solve the big, nasty world messes and leave the messy emotional ones for later.

  I could do that.

  I was pretty sure.

  “Ariana and Quil can have the cot,” Carvi said as he let AB go, and pointed to the side. “I’ll take the couch.”

  “Why?” Quil asked before I could.

  I knew he was asking why he’d be on the cot with me.

  “In case we have to go in deeper than the second or third layer,” Carvi said. “You will help anchor her here. She’ll be able to follow the trail back to you easier than anything else in this world besides maybe her family.”

  Or Carvi.

  But he didn’t say that.

  Why was I suddenly sure he’d heard what I’d thought to him in the bedroom earlier?

  We got situated and I snuggled into Quil’s arms, letting him spoon me.

  ###

  “Where are we?” I asked, looking around.

  I’d opened my eyes in what looked like a giant cave.

  And Carvi looked around, face almost showing confusion.

  “I haven’t the fuzziest fucking clue,” he said after a moment. “Lea, where did you send us?”

  “I don’t know! Weren’t we supposed to follow Benjamin’s trail or something? Weren’t you driving this show?”

  He closed his eyes, holding his fists tight by his side.

  “Counting to three?” I asked, not able to keep the snark outta my voice.

  Now that we’d crossed that line, was I being mean to push him away?

  Probably.

  I had a history.

  “Ten,” he snapped, opening his eyes and staring me down. “You need to cut this shit out. I can feel the attitude from here, and it’s not amusing. We all screwed up on that plane. You don’t have to keep reminding me of it.”

  My mouth worked. “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were. You feel bad. You think we did something wrong. And now, you want to punish me, and yourself. Stop it. For one, we don’t have time. For another, I don’t have the patience for it. I already have AB shooting daggers at me and I’m worried I’ve hurt her. You’re not hurt, you’re just embarrassed, so table it.”

  “I am hurt,” I said under my breath.

  “Lea,” he said, shaking his head.

  “You heard me,” I said. “On the plane. I know you heard me.”

  He gave me a look and shook his head. “Whatever. Can you focus on Benjamin? On his phone? See it. Hold out your hand.”

  I did, imagining his phone appearing there. The one he got work calls and texts on.

  Texts of death.

  I giggled.

  Carvi looked at me and I shook my head. “Don’t ask. I’m a little punchy.”

  “That’d be the vamp blood,” he said.

  “At least I’m not tired anymore.”

  “True. But your mind is bouncing all over the place when it needs to stay in one.”

  “Yeah, it does that.”

  “It’s annoying. Lea, focus. Don’t make me get mean.”

  I almost told him to bring it.

  And bit my tongue.

  I’d forgotten how sassy his blood could make me.

  I really had missed him those three and a half months we hadn’t talked.

  I was missing a lot of people lately.

  No, that was me being dramatic. Two, I’d been missing two of them.

  Two men I loved who didn’t love me back.

  “Lea!” he snapped. “Ariana Kay Ryder, focus!”

  My name pulled my consciousness like a magnet and I held out my hand.

  A tiny old-fashioned flip phone appeared in my hand.

  “I’m going to remember that works,” he said. “Close your hand around it. Feel it. Feel the information flowing through the world. We need to see the trail it left.”

  I stared down at the phone and lines of blue thread, glowing with an otherworldly light spiraling out of it, making a spiderweb around us.

  Information.

  Every single text, call, email, social media post, all of it, boiled down to information.

  And it flew through the air just like the strings of fate.

  “There we are.” Carvi grinned, big and beautiful. “You are amazing when you want to be.”

  “I’m amazing when I don’t want to be and you’re making me,” I said. “You really have a way of cuttin’ through my crap.”

  “What can I say, you came with a manual.” He winked and I stuck my tongue out at him.

  There was the Carvi I knew and lo-

  Er, nope, wasn’t even going to let myself think it.

  It was too much.

  “How do we know which line was the text from the person who hired him?” I asked.

  “Open the phone and scroll through the texts,” Carvi said lik
e it was obvious.

  Yeah, okay, it probably was obvious.

  I flipped it open, snorting.

  Who still had a flip phone these days?

  Soooooo not important right now.

  My brain really did ping all over the place on vamp blood, huh?

  I scrolled down through the texts until I found one that stated simply, “Ariana Ryder, psychic, FBI agent, twenty-three. One hundred dead. Two hundred alive. Bring to meeting point to be set when send proof of capture or kill.” And it had a picture of me under it.

  I looked at Carvi, mouth hanging open. “One hundred?” I finally asked.

  “Thousand,” he said. “And two hundred K for you alive. It has to be a vampire. Who else would think you’d be any good to them alive? If she wasn’t in a coma, I’d say Jade.”

  “Me too,” I said, waving the phone. “How do I pull out the string for this text?”

  “How do you do anything with magic? Focus.”

  I rolled my eyes, and grumbled under my breath, but focused on the words.

  They were so cold, so clinical and short. Just the facts, ma’am. Like they weren’t talking about killing or capturing me.

  Because to these people, I wasn’t a person. I was just a commodity.

  “It has to be someone who wouldn’t mind me dead, too,” I said. “So someone who wants a psychic, but doesn’t mind losing one. Most of y’all want me alive.”

  “Again, I’m thinking Jade,” he said.

  “Any way she could do this from the coma? Like contact someone psychically? Like you do?”

  He pursed his lips. “She could contact her people from the astral plane. But I have her pretty well trapped in there. She might have gotten through a crack, but then why wouldn’t she get help breaking her out, instead of going after you?”

  “Good point. You sure she hasn’t called for help to get her out and it just hasn’t been successful yet?”

  “Nope.”

  The line for this text lifted away from the others and I grabbed it.

  It lifted my feet off the floor and yanked me.

  And I zoomed down the dark cave, faster than even a vamp could go, deeper into the cave, still able to see somehow.

  Where was the light coming from?

  Where was Carvi?

  The walls blurred past me and I glanced behind me.

  I had the end of the string and Carvi was nowhere in sight.

  That couldn’t be good.

  I’d never been deep into the astral plane without Carvi.