by Koby E Hill
Their lips collided softly this time, opening and closing at a sensual pace. Alice could feel herself becoming immensely aroused—inhumanly, even. Just as Angela began to moan, she caught her lower lip between her teeth and bit down. The force of the bite was incongruent to the mood of the moment, but Alice felt as if she had to push through the sensation of comfort and stimulation. Like passing a sword through fog, except the fog felt like jagged nails pushing through your skin. She pierced the soft lip, and held on for a moment for effect.
The effect was achieved. Alice observed Angela’s eyes open wide, and squeal out a pang of surprise and anguish. Alice let go after a couple of seconds, and Angela leaned back, clasping a hand over her mouth. Now it was her turn to curve her body away from a woman who had expressed a sudden forceful change of emotion. Alice stared and licked Angela’s blood off of her lips. She had thrown a large piece of dice in air here, but she knew that she had to act against Angela’s heavy influence over her. Whether or not it landed on snake eyes, she didn’t care. She truly meant it when she told Angela that it would be a huge favor to her to kill her. The only reason she had for living had to do with the strangers she was targeting, and even that was beginning to not look like that profound of a motivator after all. She was leaning forward, trying to exert her own power as much as she could in the presence of something in possession of much, much more of it.
Angela’s eyes remained wide as she stroked her own lip. She looked at the blood incredulously, being in genuine shock. She may have never felt that feeling before in her life. She had expected to easily make Alice swoon once more, leading them to have epic sex, and re-diverting the attention Alice kept bringing to the dead lawyers. Instead, she had sliced her teeth through her delicate lips, and held on for extra domination.
A wash of relief rushed over Alice when Angela smiled. She licked the finger that was covered in blood, and continued wiping away the stream that didn’t want to halt. Angela’s heart was palpitating—she was excited, offended, and beyond intrigued. She settled herself back onto Alice’s lap, and spoke in between her fingers. “Oh Alice. I like you. I think I really like you.”
Chapter 11
Craig stood over Ella’s hospital bed in a fresh t-shirt he’d taken from his quarters. He was still sweating, but hygiene was last on the list of what needed tending to. Ella was still unconscious, but stable. Emmett was having his burn wrapped up and was put on morphine, which Craig felt he may be overusing. Tobias was good enough to be standing with Craig over Ella, but was still assessed by Crowden’s specialized paramedics and doctors. He’d hit his head, but didn’t have a concussion. A large bandage was placed on his forehead. Craig had also hit his head, and could possibly be experiencing the effects of a concussion. He was recommended to rest, but not to sleep anytime soon.
“There won’t be time for sleep in the near future, so don’t worry about that.” He’d informed the doctor, much to the doctor’s dismay.
Tobias asked Craig what he meant by his remark out by the road. He looked at the young man, and felt an urge to place a hand on his shoulder and reveal some fatherly wisdom. He didn’t, though, but spoke earnestly instead. “There’s a lot more to this than we were willing to share with everyone. Alice and I felt it was too sensitive, and your minds were too… Open. We felt it best you be unaware for the time being.”
“So all that work in the QR, Ella not sleeping for three weeks, nearly getting blown up by some broad in a mask, all that was for nothing?”
Craig shook his head. He decided to put hand on Ella’s forehead. “It wasn’t for nothing. All facets of information gathered are always helpful in an investigation as important as this.”
“But what about you? You’re not even a psy. Wouldn’t your mind be the most open, out of all of us?”
Craig sighed. “I could tell you the story now, or save it for everyone later, so I don’t have to repeat myself.”
Tobias shrugged, hands in his pockets, his young-adult status showing vividly. “Who knows when Ella is going to wake up? And I think you owe us to repeat it.”
Craig laughed, secretly impressed with Tobias’ abrupt assertiveness. “You have a good point there. Come sit with me.”
Craig led Tobias down the hall of the infirmary, to a bench that lined the hallway. It looked like any other bench you may find in any common hospital. It was white, hard, and plastic. Craig felt his age when he sat down on it, and grimaced out loud. Perhaps he had injured himself more than he’d known in the explosion.
“Alice placed a block around me. She’d been practicing doing it for years. That’s why she left in the first place. She had to find a place where she was on her own enough to master it, so she could place it around me—as you said—a non-psy.”
Tobias shuffled in his seat. He stared down at his shoes—Converse shoes—that had been sprinkled in ash from the incident on the road.
Craig took his silence for an understanding, and continued. “Alice had sensed something out there that was like her, possibly more powerful than her, years before Crowden asked you guys to start investigating it. She initially kept it to herself, but eventually felt it was best to confide in someone of whom it would least effect. She consulted with me over beginning contact, and I accepted it, so we began conducting a plan to lure her in. That meant creating a block on me, with whom she was sharing all this information, for obvious reasons. It took her longer than she anticipated to learn it. She had to research it, meet up with older psies—trial and error. That’s why she took so long to come back. She was trying to prevent this psy from reading my mind and figuring out thatwe were trying to fool her.”
Tobias moved his hands out of his pockets, and crossed his arms. “If this psy is so powerful, then why can’t she read Alice’s mind?”
Craig rubbed the back of his head, feeling slightly nauseous and sore. This wasn’t a story he wanted to share multiple times, but he felt Tobias was right—he did owe them.
“Alice figured that she could. She didn’t hide the fact that she was attempting to contact her, once she was finally able to put a block around me. But the other thing that she did that really took it out of her, was to create a block on herself, but only on a certain portion of her mind.”
Tobias frowned venomously. “That’s not possible. Even placing a block around yourself is one thing—exasperating—but dividing up the mind into slices? That’s another. No, not possible.”
Craig was nodding behind him. “But it is possible. She managed to block the portion of herself that was tricking her, that was using the contact as a cloak of truth to make her feel like she was successfully reading all of her thoughts. Getting you all involved was intentional, and we wanted her to see that. Appeal to her narcissism. And trust me, this one is narcissistic.”
Tobias maintained a look of indifference. Craig thought that he would do well at a poker table, both with his look and his unthreatening mind-penetrating skills.
“So we were able to lead her into believing that we were chasing her based on mere coincidence. Not based on the fact that Alice had found her almost three years before, and had been chasing her before the psy even knew she existed. Where we last left it was that we would go into Trendor, and see if she detected us. There was always a risk of a confrontation, but Alice believed that it would be merely towards her, out of sheer annoyance. She, of course, was wrong.”
“Very wrong.” Tobias scratched the area of the bandage. “But I really can’t blame her.”
Craig continued. “Lately, before we went to pick her up, Alice had seemed preoccupied with the other psy, in a way that went beyond professionalism. It was an obsession that concerned me—that concerned me for her mental health. I know that isn’t something of a new concept, but Alice has never let anyone get to know her, much less a person capable of vast environmental, mental, and physical manipulation.”
“I feel like there’s more you’re trying to tell me. It’s time to do it.”
“You’re as per
ceptive as you are a mind-reader, Tobias. The matter of urgency is this—” Craig leaned into Tobias, looking around to see if any of the doctors or nurses were passing by. “Alice thinks that this psy is capable of mass destruction. You saw how easily the van exploded? Alice thinks she’s planning something the size of genocide. Alice is frankly, the most afraid I’ve ever seen her. But she’s also greatly taken with her.”
It was Tobias’ turn to sigh. He leaned forward and placed his head in his hands. “I definitely should have just stayed in mathematics.”
“Craig!” He turned in the direction of the yeller and watched Emmett roll down the hallway in a wheelchair. His leg had been bandaged, and morphine was still running through his veins. He was agitated, and expressed himself clearly. “It’s time for us all to have a little chat! I’m not going back to that bed until you give us some details.”
“He’s told me everything, Em, calm down.” Tobias motioned at Craig. Emmett did not appreciate this.
“Don’t give me that father-son horseshit, I want answers, and I want them now!”
“You’ll get them, only if you calm the fuck down.” Tobias had stood up from the bench, and moved between Craig and Emmett.
“Don’t you want to know why the fuck we were thrown into the air by some random bitch?! Don’t you care about what happened to Ella?”
“I do care, you old idiot! Just shut up for a second and let him tell you what he told me!”
Emmett’s face had turned apple-red, when a small person emerged from the doorway. It was Ella, and she was walking with the help of a cane. “I got something, guys”, her small voice whispered into the hallway.
“What?!” Emmett bellowed.
“When I was unconscious—I think it was Alice. She seemed to be in the middle of something, but I couldn’t tell what. She was trying to tell me where she was, and something else.”
“Do you wanna sit down first?” Craig offered her the bench. Ella shook her head.
“This seems important. She wanted us to know that she was okay. And that she’s with the psy. The psy is keeping her abilities limited.”
Craig stood up, and placed his hands on Ella’s shoulders. “What else did you hear?”
“There was another male voice. I couldn’t make it out completely. It wanted me to know something too, though, that the psy doesn’t want us to know.”
Everyone crowded around Ella, and watched her pour reluctant words from her lips. “It’s Alice’s father. The psy has her father.”
fin
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