by Dawn Jansen
“It’s complicated,” I say. “You know how it is with us, though. We’re basically ruled by our emotions.”
“But what would life be without emotions?” he says, coming out from behind the curtain. He’s stuffing his school shirt into his pants, which somehow with him even looks like a sexy thing to do.
“You’ve got a point,” I say. “Sometimes it’s scary though. Letting yourself get so close to somebody else...”
“You sure you wanna do this then?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“If you really want me to figure out what’s going on inside your head, we’re gonna have to get quite close.”
He’s been moving toward me this whole time. It’s kind of messing me up how completely different this is from what just happened with Paul. I was basically throwing myself on him and he wasn’t having any of it; whereas with Damion—yeah, granted he’s insanely hot, but I really don’t have any desire to get with him. And now he’s talking about the two of us getting close?
“I’ve done this before with Mr. Ward,” I tell him. “It’s intense, but I can handle it.”
“Is he a psychic?”
“Yeah.”
“Different thing,” he says casually, offering his hand out to take my backpack for me. I shrug it off my shoulders and give it to him, still processing what he just said.
“You’re not a psychic? What is it then? Everybody says you can learn things, know things about people...”
“And manipulate them too,” he adds nonchalantly, placing my backpack down on a nearby leather chair. “Don’t worry, though, I won’t do that to you. It’s not psychism, but I can’t explain exactly what it is either. All I know is if I touch you—skin-to-skin contact—I get flooded with images, feelings, sensations from your life... It was overwhelming at first, when I was a kid; I had no way of parsing the sensory bombardment that would happen any time I touched somebody. It tore my family apart...” he says, and then looks off into the distance, as though he’s remembering something. “But I ended up figuring it out on my own eventually. And not only that, I found I could manipulate people once I learned about them. They’d do anything I ask, thinking whatever suggestion I made was their own idea.”
“Okay, now I’m definitely getting cold feet about this,” I say, furrowing my brow. Damion just smiles in return. “No offense,” I add, “but how do I know you’re not gonna do that to me? Like hypnotize me or whatever?”
“I dunno,” he says with that cocky smirk still on his face. “You’ll just have to take my word for it. How important is this to you anyway? You said you had amnesia, right? Who knows if my powers will even work against amnesia? I never tried before.”
I take in everything he’s said for a moment. I knew this was going to be risky, but I thought he was just a normal psychic like Frankie or Mr. Ward. He wouldn’t do anything to me while we’re literally at the Academy, right?
Damion has gone and sat down on the edge of his big bed. The reddish purple of the fading summer light is coming in through the window as night starts to fall over Montauk, giving the whole room a dim glow.
I take a deep breath. “Alright,” I say. “Let’s do this.”
Damion moves over and pats the space next to him on the duvet, motioning for me to sit next to him. I do.
Not counting when we were sparring earlier today, this is the closest we’ve been yet. The air between us seems to be buzzing with electricity, though it’s probably just my overactive libido at work.
“It happened when I was eight,” I begin, but Damion raises a hand to stop me.
“I told you, I’m not a psychic. I’m not gonna be rummaging through your brain looking for clues. I’m just going to feel what you feel—what you felt...”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Damion moves closer.
“There’s no way to really prepare for this,” he says. “But I promise it won’t hurt at least. Just try to go with it as best you can.”
I nod. We’re only a few inches from each other now.
“Roll up your sleeves,” Damion says in a commanding whisper.
I do as he says, almost as though I’m in a trance. With my forearms exposed, Damion runs his palms and fingers over the back of my hands and up my forearms, keeping eye contact with me the whole time. My gaze keeps drifting back to his inviting lips.
I almost jumped when he first touched me, expecting him to shock me or something, but there are no unpleasant sensations as he runs his hands across my skin. His hands are surprisingly rough compared to his youthful good looks, hinting at the life of struggle he mentioned during sparring today, but I like the way they feel.
It seems so natural for me to turn my palms upward, and when I do his hands meet mine and they clasp together. I was nervous at first, but now I realize I’m totally relaxed, and as Damion moves in to kiss me, I’m eager to meet his lips.
Even though we’re just holding hands kissing, the sensations are almost overwhelming. I feel like my erogenous zone has spread throughout my whole body, and even Damion’s soft lips on mine is enough to make me feel like an orgasm is threatening.
Without even thinking, I start taking my top off so Damion can caress me with his magic touch in more places. When he places one of his strong hands on my chest right below my neckline, I shudder as a chill runs through the front of my body in mini-orgasmic waves. This is amazing; we haven’t even gotten our pants off, and he’s manipulating me like silly putty in his hands, making me writhe and quiver as he pleases.
As I surrender myself to the euphoric melting sensation spreading through me, I fall deeper into Damion’s embrace. There isn’t any part of me that thinks about how sudden this all is—Damion’s kiss and electric touch override any logical thought I might be capable of at the moment. All I know is I want more.
The erotic sounds of both of our moans fill the room. My power is fully unleashed now, drawing greedily from the energy transference that Damion is providing as though his kiss is an oasis, the only thing that can keep me alive. Along with this surge of power, a veritable film reel of mental images starts flipping through my mind’s eye at incredible speed—scenes of my life, scattered and random. I realize this must be Damion’s power at work calling up my memories to the surface. This is nothing like the mental invasion I experienced with Mr. Ward. Instead of being penetrated, I feel that Damion and I are soaring together through the velvet texture of my memories and experiencing them together.
Though I’m only half aware of the physical world at this point, my bra has now come off and Damion induces another semi-orgasmic wave of pleasure by titillating my nipples, which in turn enhances the experiential quality of the memories we’re traveling through. While they started off random, they soon begin to fall in to order. There’s me entering the shadow realm with Tristan; crushing the officer’s hands with his cuffs on the night I got arrested; riding my Interceptor for the first time in the snow; running away from my foster dad when I was fourteen...
Eventually—I’ve lost all sense of time at this point—we’ve returned to the hospital where I first came to when I was eight, and it’s here that the darkness inside me rears its ugly head. It growls, producing a painful shock that serves as a stark contrast to the pleasure Damion is giving me. Damion grunts in pain. Is he feeling the same things I am?
As scenes from my time at the hospital play back, that evil core inside me grows stronger in power, spreading its black tendrils from my belly up into my heart and lungs. It’s only now that I realize we’re lying down on Damion’s bed. He moans in pain again as his hands grip into my waist, but the memories keep coming.
That’s when, for the first time in my life, I see—or rather feel—a glimpse of my life before the amnesia.
I’m around the same age that I was in the hospital, maybe a year or two younger, and I’m in a small metal room crying. All I have on is a gown that looks like hospital clothing, but this doesn’t look like a hospital. I’m barefoot, cold, hungry,
alone, scared.
The darkness inside me is raging now. It doesn’t want me to see this, and to be honest, neither do I. I want to turn back. This is an experience filled with so much agony that I just want it to end.
But it doesn’t end. The memory only comes in clearer, in fact. Now I see an observation window nearby, and there are stone-faced men in lab coats on the other side watching me, scribbling notes on clipboards. Above the window is a dim red light. It’s a lab. I’m in some sort of test lab. I’m not alone in the room, either. Now I see a grown man shackled to some sort of platform nearby. He’s wearing what looks like dirty prisoner’s clothes and there’s a black bag covering his head. He’s shaking. Suddenly, the red light turns green and my stomach drops, knowing I have to do something terrible, something I hate.
Damion’s scream rips me from the memory, and I am forcefully jolted back to reality. I open my eyes and see that Damion has been knocked off the bed and onto the floor. He’s doubled over in pain, clutching his face.
Though I’m topless—my shirt and bra are strewn about Damion’s bed—I immediately jump off the bed and crouch down by Damion. The room is dark now, with just a dim crepuscular glow highlighting our features. I reach toward Damion, moving his hands away from his face to see if he’s okay. Holding his hands away, I see something that shocks and confuses me; there is a long, black scar running down the side of Damion’s face that definitely wasn’t there before. I instinctively go to touch it, still in a daze at this point and almost thinking it’s just soot that I can rub off, but Damion flinches back.
“Don’t,” he says through his teeth. “It hurts...”
I notice now that my cheeks are stained with tears. Aside from the big black scar, though, Damion seems okay. He sits up against the wall, his breathing still heavy but calming down.
I’m in a weird state, having just been brought to the peaks of erotic pleasure with a new man and then forced to see a terrible part of my past that had been hidden from me for over a decade.
“What happened to your face?” I ask, my voice trembling. “Has that ever happened before?”
“No,” Damion says, his voice weak and raspy. “It must be from your power. I felt it trying to push me away the deeper we went into your memory. At some point it just snapped at me.”
I did that? It almost looks like Damion got struck in the face by concentrated lightning; it’s a jagged stroke of burnt blackness from his sideburns to his lower jaw.
“You saw everything?” I ask him, thinking back to the memories that were revealed.
“Yeah,” Damion says, nodding seriously. “I didn’t just see it; I felt it.”
“That’s the first time I’ve been able to remember back that far,” I say. “Where was that?”
“It looked like a lab,” Damion says.
“But where? It didn’t look like any place I’ve ever seen...” I say to myself as much as Damion, but right after the words leave my mouth, it suddenly comes to me. “Epsilon,” I say defiantly.
“What? What’s that?” Damion asks.
“Epsilon,” I say again, surer now that that’s where I was. “It’s the government facility underneath the Academy,” I tell Damion, realizing that I’m really not the new girl anymore. “It’s where they do experiments on EMPs that refuse to join the Academy and EMPs that get in trouble here... Who knows what else they do there? That has to be it!”
New tears are forming in my eyes now as I realize that I have just been a government test subject this whole time. No wonder my power levels are so high. Is it even safe that I’m telling Damion this? I’m probably not even supposed to remember this.
“Let’s go,” Damion suddenly says, his voice much steadier now.
“Go where?”
“To Epsilon. You said it’s under the Academy, right? Let’s go and see if that’s really where you were for all those years.”
“And if it is?” I ask.
“We’ll figure that out later. But don’t you want to know for sure? That could change a lot of things for you.”
Damion seems different than before, and not just because of the scar. I feel like he really cares about me.
“Okay,” I say, trying to steady my voice too. “But I have to go alone. Look at your face, I’ve already caused you too much trouble.”
“This is nothing. I always wanted a cool scar,” Damion says with a chuckle. “Besides, I want to go with you. I wanna know the truth behind this place too.”
Damion and I stare at each other for a moment, and then suddenly we both start laughing at the same time—I think it might be a combination of stress, the ridiculousness of the situation, and also a kind of exhilaration at what we both just experienced and what we’re planning to do next.
“How do we get in, though?” Damion asks. “Sounds like it might be guarded pretty heavily.
“I think I know two guys who might be able to help us with that.”
Chapter 14
Mazzy
Fortunately, it didn’t take a lot of convincing to get Tristan and Gate to help me and Damion into Epsilon.
We’ve worked out a basic plan and are going to break into Epsilon at midnight—Tristan and I are going to go in through the shadow realm, and Gate will open a portal for him and Damion to get in through.
We know that Epsilon is underneath the Academy, but besides that we’re pretty much flying blind. None of us know anybody who’s been to Epsilon for punishment, and if we start asking around it might arouse suspicion, so we’re just going to have to wing it once we get in.
It’s about fifteen minutes to midnight. Tristan and I are in his room preparing ourselves mentally for what we’re about to do.
“I guess I got away lucky,” Tristan says. “We nearly had sex and I didn’t get any scars.”
I know he’s joking, but at the same time it scares me. Just what is this power inside me that can lash out so violently like that?
“Look, if anything happens down there, don’t do anything stupid to save me,” I tell Tristan. “I’m the one roping you guys into all of this—”
“Shh,” Tristan says, putting a finger to my lips gently. “Nothing is going to happen to you. I promise.”
I’ve never had a guy care for me like this before, but it’s a feeling I can definitely get used to. I wrap my arms around his waist and look up at him.
“The memory is so clear to me now,” I say. “If Epsilon is really where I was, I’ll know as soon as I see it.”
After a moment, Tristan asks, “What do you think the person in the room with you was there for?” I’ve told him all about the memory by now.
“I don’t know for sure,” I say, looking away from Tristan’s gaze. “But... I know they wanted me to hurt him. I think they made me do it before.”
Tristan sees the tears forming in my eyes and pulls me closer.
“Those bastards,” he says, stroking my hair.
Being tucked into Tristan’s embrace causes my power to flicker inside me. It normally wouldn’t become aroused by something as simple as a hug, but gaining that pre-amnesiac memory seems to have—once again—empowered me.
“We better get going,” Tristan says after a while. “It’s almost midnight.”
“Are you sure Gate will be able to get them in?” I ask.
“I told you, he’ll be fine... and so will Damion,” Tristan says, and for a moment I wonder how much he’s guessed about what happened between Damion and me. “Gate’s used his power to get out of the Academy to go see movies and he’s never been caught; portaling into the basement won’t be a problem for him. Besides, you know him; he’s a huge nerd. He’s dying to see what kind of conspiracy sci-fi stuff they have down there, and now he finally has an excuse to sneak in.”
“Okay. Let’s do it then,” I say, taking a deep breath. “Should we just go from here?”
“Yeah,” Tristan says, holding out his hands. “I haven’t tried going there yet, but I’ll get us there in a jiffy.”
&nb
sp; I grab on to Tristan’s hands and get ready to enter the shadow realm again. Tristan and I have gone into the shadow realm together a few times since the night by the lake, but I’m still not used to it. I haven’t adjusted to the shadow realm much at all since the first time either; I still can’t see shit and I’m about as mobile as a cow trying to swim in there. It’s already cool enough that I can even enter in the first place, though, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. Tristan, on the other hand, has improved impressively in his ability to navigate the shadow realm; he says it’s a result of having bonded with me, even though we’re still not able to fully “seal the deal,” as he puts it.
After counting to three, I’m once again plunged into that world of darkness, holding on tightly to Tristan as we fall through one of the many shadows in his room.
I trust Tristan’s ability to find a shadow that will lead us to Epsilon, and sure enough, after zooming around for what seems like a minute or so, Tristan stops in front of one of those tears that correspond to a shadow in the real world.
“This is it,” he says.
He moves us closer to the rift. Unlike Tristan, who can see through these tears with great clarity, they always look extremely blurry to me. Even still, I can make out two figures on the other side.
“It’s Gate and Damion,” Tristan says. “They already made it. Let’s go.”
Tristan pulls me close to him and then goes through the tear.
To Gate and Damion, who have been waiting for us in the real world, what this looks like is Tristan and I appearing from out of one of the shadows near them. Gate has seen this plenty of times before, but this is Damion’s first time seeing Tristan’s power. Still, if he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it.
“I think this is the main elevator,” Gate whispers. We’re all crouched by a big door in a metallic hallway. It’s completely silent all around us, so we’re trying to be as quiet as possible.
“Did you see any guards from the shadow realm?” Gate then asks.
“No,” Tristan says. “It’s like we thought. The security is so tight all around the outside of the Academy, they probably don’t waste manpower guarding someplace so deep inside the mansion. Let’s try this elevator.”
