by Hondo Jinx
He drove his consciousness forward through the void, and the strands grew warmer and brighter and stronger. More distinct.
There were two clumps of wavering strands, one red, one yellow, swaying back and forth among several grayish hummocks, out of which stretched a thicket of ash-colored strands as stiff and motionless as petrified trees. These gray clumps—he counted five—gave off no heat.
Seven orders. Seven strands.
The gray strands must be his five untapped power sources.
Brawley’s curiosity spiked. He pushed forward for a closer look.
The red and yellow strands brightened, growing warmer, and he felt a new sensation, something like urgency emanating from the colors.
But he focused on the lifeless, gray strands. Choosing one clump at random, he reached out, trying to coax it toward him.
There was no response.
One by one, he tested the gray tangles, and one by one, they remained lifeless. No heat, no motion. Nothing.
So be it.
He reached out, beckoning to the luminescent fibers, and his mind exploded in a blinding, burning rush of heat and light.
Brawley recoiled instinctively and came to on the couch. The mind-space and strands were gone.
Nina stirred, mumbling softly.
He stroked her head gently, his fingertips whisking over her stubbled temple and combing through the long, purple tresses.
Nina settled back into her slumber.
What, exactly, had happened in there?
He’d coaxed the strands, and they’d both pounced on him like dogs welcoming their master. Trouble was, these dogs weighed a ton each and burned at about four hundred degrees.
All right, then. He’d need to fit a valve onto his coaxing. Gain a little precision here. And he couldn’t have both of them hitting him at once.
According to Nina, the idea with psionics was locate the power, draw it together, shape it, and use it. You could learn different actions over time, some more intuitive than others. Each of these had a certain cost attached.
But he was getting ahead of himself.
He went back in. A second later, he was right back where he’d been. The colorful strands had retracted back into their clumps. They pulsed brightly, throbbing with eagerness. He couldn’t help but think of whining hounds aching to come off the lead.
He concentrated on his will, shaping it once more into a grasping appendage, and reached out toward the clump of red strands.
Strands of both colors rushed toward him like striking snakes.
Easy, Brawley thought. Easy there.
He held out the hand of his consciousness, allowing the strands to bump against it.
That’s it. Easy now. You’re okay. He kept his thoughts as calm and soothing as the voice he used to gentle a half-broken mare.
He took his time, experimenting with different tones, opening and closing his mind’s hand, and permitting just a whisper of invitation.
Finally, he managed to separate one of the red strands from the tangled red-and-yellow mass. Once more, he was reminded of having latched onto an overloaded power cable. Only this time, the heat and vibration were even stronger.
Again and again, he attempted to haul back on the strand. Again and again, he met with failure.
Then, remembering Nina saying that he couldn’t force it, he concentrated on the single strand and rather than trying to pull it toward him, called to it softly in a mental whisper.
It worked.
The strand pushed toward him. All of the strands did, but mostly the red one he held in his mind’s hand.
He hauled back experimentally, and the strand came to him, dragging behind it more power. It was heavy, like drawing a full bucket out of a deep well.
With each pull, the red power he’d already gathered coiled in an ever-increasing pile that grew warmer and vibrated more powerfully. Slowly, the red fibers untangled themselves from the yellow and drifted forward, and he was able to gather them as well.
Soon, he was able to grasp all of them at once. He tugged, and a wave of power rose from the blackness within his mind.
A short time later, his consciousness—which increasingly felt like not just a hand but an entire figure, a thing approaching some shadowy representation of his corporeal self—reeled, surrounded by a swirling mass of hot, red energy that coiled thickly around him, spinning up and up and up into the dark reaches of his mind.
It was awesome. Power beyond power.
And at the moment, totally useless.
He needed to draw it in more tightly if he was going to stand a chance at shaping the stuff. With his mind’s hands, he started scooping away sections of the luminescence and cramming it down at his feet. And yes, his consciousness had feet now, or something like feet, anyway, and they stood upon a dark pediment of sorts. Soon he was using the feet of his consciousness to tamp the bright red stuff down like so much dirt and gravel.
Haul, tamp. Haul, tamp. He fell into a rhythm. Gathering more and more of the stuff with each pull and packing it down into a mass that fairly sizzled with heat and pent-up force.
Finally, he figured enough was enough.
Most of the red stuff was still pillaring up around him like a tornado of lava, but he decided to draw no more.
The tamped mass upon which his inner self now stood was already seething and humming with power, and honestly, he didn’t know whether he was standing on a firecracker or fourteen tons of C-4.
He had no clue what to do next. In fact, he really didn’t know what he’d managed to do beyond the fact that he had managed to do something.
Had all of that amounted to simply gathering energy? Or had his mental tamping been the shaping that Nina had mentioned?
If so, had he shaped it correctly?
Hell, he didn’t know. But he sure was curious.
Not curious enough, however, to go off half-cocked and blow his damn fool head off.
For a second, he paused there, examining the scene and looking for a way to separate the tamped energy from the swirling storm of force. But he could see no way to do that, no way to parcel up one bundle from the main mass.
Was this normal?
How could he—
Oh, to hell with it, he thought, and then he was back in himself, back in his real-world, walking, talking body, laughing now because the whole thing was cool and crazy and totally fucking absurd, and because here he was, some kind of mental magician stockpiling power, still struggling against his natural tendency to keep fighting, keep pushing, to keep climbing back on the damn bull no matter how much it hurt or the likelihood of getting stomped or gored or maybe even killed.
Yes, he wanted to go back in. Yes, he wanted to try to use his powers. But all his years of training and riding had also taught him that sometimes, climbing back onto the bull was a damned fool idea. And right now, lighting the fuse of the red bomb pulsing in his mind would probably turn out to be the damned foolest of all damned fool ideas.
He sat there grinning for a while, thinking, wishing Nina would wake up but knowing she needed her rest.
He didn’t know what to do with himself.
Finally, he decided to keep it simple. He got up and went to the pantry and pulled his medicine ball from the lower cubby then grabbed one of the dozen boxes of Fruit Loops he kept on board.
Five minutes later, he was standing on the medicine ball, working his balance while he ate a bowl of cereal and watched the latest news report. The police chief, a rugged looking guy in his forties, stood at a podium surrounded by microphones, doing damage control.
“This is an unprecedented event in Key West,” the chief told reporters. “We will, of course, continue to investigate, but this really appears to be an open and shut case. None of the men involved were Key West residents, and we have no reason to believe that the organizations they represented are not otherwise active in our city. Judging on forensic evidence, eyewitness accounts, and security camera footage, we do not at this time belie
ve any additional persons were involved in this event.”
Strange, Brawley thought. A strange thing to think, even, let alone report.
The police chief paused, and a wave of jumbled questions washed over him.
“The main thing I want to get across,” the police chief said, “is that Key West remains the safe, friendly town it always has been. This was an unfortunate but isolated event, and it is behind us now. Residents and tourists alike are encouraged go on about business as usual. Relax and have your fun. There is no threat, and as always, the Key West Police Department will be out there helping to keep you safe.”
13
Later, Brawley left Nina a note and headed out to pick up some stuff. He had a couple of hours to kill before meeting Sage and figured he might as well grab things while Nina rested.
Besides, he was dying of hunger. Man could not live on Fruit Loops alone.
This part of town felt less like Key West and more like Anytown, Florida. Other than Publix, he saw a pawn shop, a liquor store, a Subway, a consignment shop, and a movie theater that was either shut down or in bad need of a facelift.
Colorful graffiti decorated the large dumpster and row of garbage trucks parked in front of the dilapidated theater. One patch of straightforward green ink read Keep Key West Weird. As Brawley read the words, they blurred, revealing psi graffiti underneath the paint: We’re trying, asshole.
Further down the line, he saw more restaurants, more shops, and a few big department stores.
He kept a pretty good roll of cash onboard the RV, but with everything that was going on, he hit the ATM and pulled out an additional three hundred bucks.
It was still strange, even after all these months, having money. You grow up poor, you never quite believe that you’re flush with cash no matter what your bank statements say.
At Subway, he wolfed down a foot-long cold cut combo. Then he went into the consignment shop next door, where he picked up a turquoise hoodie and yellow sweatpants for Nina, along with a ball cap the color of a bluebonnet in April.
He would have grabbed her some shoes, too, but he had no idea what size she wore. Besides, if there was one area in his experience where women were extremely particular it was in the realm of footwear.
Girls and their shoes. Coming between them was like doing the jitterbug between a mama bear and her cubs. Ill-advised, men of the world, ill-advised.
Much safer to hand Nina the disguise and some cash, point the way to Champs and TJ Maxx, and tell her to have at it.
At the liquor store, he grabbed three cases of Bud and enough liquor to kill a bull, blowing through a good portion of the money he’d pulled from the ATM. The rest of the cart he filled with chips, pretzels, and cheese curls because most of the hot women he’d known lived primarily on junk food.
Nina was still sleeping.
Brawley stowed the stuff and left again. In Publix, he stocked up on the essentials: SpaghettiOs, beef jerky, milk for his Fruit Loops, and a few rolls of Copenhagen.
He hadn’t slept in a long time, and he’d sure been through the ringer, but he felt good. Great, in fact. His old injuries still pained him, but what the hell? He’d been carrying those pains around for so long he’d almost miss them if they left now.
Well, not really. But their absence would certainly be peculiar.
Meanwhile, he felt energized and strong. And if he concentrated, he could feel the energy he’d drawn up sitting in his mind, humming away like a whole-house generator waiting for a storm.
His curiosity remained cranked to the max, too. His thoughts shifted now to the questions Sage’s friend Hazel might answer.
What was Brawley’s real name, his true name?
Who had his birth parents been? Why had they given him up for adoption? And why had they cloaked his aura?
What did it mean, being a power mage? He understood that it meant having the potential to tap all seven strands, but what else? The girls had been awed by the idea, both amazed and frightened.
Just how powerful could he become, anyway? And what would that mean? He had a general sense of what psi mages could do, but that was it.
Just how hard was it going to be to hide this shit from the Order? Although Brawley missed riding bulls, he had also been looking forward to a quiet life on the ranch far from the packed stadiums, booming speakers, and blasting pyrotechnics of the PBR events. The last thing he wanted now was a life on the run.
No sooner had he considered this thought than an icy wave of dread washed over him.
Had that frigid pang been some Seeker shit, a bad omen dropping a mystical ice cube down the back of his shirt?
Nothing he could do about it now, one way or the other.
When he got back to the RV, Nina was up. She was bright-eyed and ready to roll.
Brawley popped a can of SpaghettiOs with meatballs and asked her if she wanted any. She said no, so he stood there eating them out of the can like a true Winnebago warrior.
Nina came over and asked for a bite. He handed her the spoon, and five minutes later, his SpaghettiOs were gone.
“Thanks,” she laughed. “Guess I was hungrier than I thought.”
Curious creatures, women.
Brawley filled her in about the news reports, but he still didn’t want her running around town, so they agreed to split up. He would pick up Sage at five then go with her to meet Hazel. Nina would put on the hat and sweats, hit the department stores, and take it easy in the RV.
“I stand corrected,” Nina said, scanning the vehicle. “I had no idea that RVs were so cool.”
He gave her the grand tour. She asked about his hat, which sat gathering dust on the top shelf of the pantry, but he realized that he didn’t feel like explaining his reasons for leaving it in there.
Someday, he’d climb up on a bull again. Then and only then would he put that hat back on his head. And that was nobody’s business but his.
“You need any cash, this is where I keep it,” he said, pulling out the can of dehydrated potatoes. He tilted the can, shifting the flakes to reveal a stash of plastic baggies filled with tens and twenties, several thousand dollars in all.
Nina’s eyes got huge. “How do you know I won’t drive off with everything?”
“Never happen,” he said. “You’re crazy about me.”
They laughed and kissed, and that turned into more. After they made love, they showered together, which proved to be pleasantly awkward in the little stall. So much so, in fact, that they ended up doing it again.
One thing was for sure. Becoming a power mage had strapped a jet pack to his stamina.
Brawley left Nina the keys, the cash, and the machine pistol, happy to see that she knew her way around firearms. Then he kissed her goodbye and went to see his other woman.
Sage was waiting for him on the steps of the library.
For just a second, Brawley thought their reunion might be awkward. At least with Nina, they’d had time to talk and grab drinks before getting freaky. With Sage, on the other hand…
But the beautiful librarian came straight into his arms and kissed him deeply. Sage was different than Nina. Taller and less curvy. Her kissing wasn’t feverish and desperate like Nina’s, but her kisses were soft and deliberate, full of subtle passion and joy.
When they stepped apart, Sage’s eyes were gleaming. “I enjoy being intimate with you, my power mage.” She sounded almost sultry, and he detected half a grin, which he found disproportionately endearing.
“I enjoy being intimate with you, too,” he said. “Which way to your friend’s place?”
She nodded down the street, and they started walking. “Tell me what happened at Nina’s.”
“You sensed that?”
“Not initially,” Sage said. “Everyone at work was buzzing about it. Then yes, I did spend a good deal of time checking in on you today.”
“How could you? I thought we were cloaked.”
“You are,” she said, “but I put a psi sensor on your belt buckle
and Nina’s nose ring.”
“You LoJacked my belt buckle?”
“Essentially. But a psi sensor allows me to occasionally observe the sensor’s surroundings, so it would be more appropriate to say I bugged your buckle.”
“That’s creepy.”
“Not at all,” Sage said. “We are bound and thus have no secrets between us. Besides, I am happy that I did. It allowed me to check on you after the news story broke. And…” She broke off, and her pale cheeks pinkened.
“What?”
“I tuned in while the two of you were being intimate.”
Brawley laughed. “Like I said, creepy.”
“I could hear you and see you and even smell the sex. I became so aroused that I masturbated through multiple orgasms.”
Brawley had to grin at her weird phrasing, but imagining this beautiful blonde swept into a rapture of voyeuristic masturbation in the back room of the library, he felt himself going hard again.
“It’s really quite interesting,” Sage said.
“You can say that again.”
“These urges and emotions are very much out of character for me,” Sage explained, slipping her hand into his, “but ever since we bound our energies, I can’t stop thinking about you and Nina. I have never been in love before. Or lust. And now I find myself immersed in both conditions.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I am concerned, actually, that our passions might distract me from my work.”
“Well, darlin, there are worse fates than fucking too much. After we get back from seeing your mentor, we can scratch that itch for you.”
She gave his hand a squeeze. “I would like that very much, Master.”
“Master?” Brawley laughed.
“You are a power mage,” Sage explained. “My power mage. You bound me. When a power mage binds a psi mage, his energy both empowers and dominates hers. You strengthened me, and I’m very curious to see what all of this power can do.
“But you also broke me. I am yours. Completely yours. It is the natural relationship of a devotee to her power mage. Nina and I only wish to serve and please you… Master.”