The cafeteria in the compound where we were created … born … trained …
I spun around, looking for my companions. They were gathered around Tel5 — around Bee — as they had been that day.
In a moment, the medical team would rush in.
Handler G15 would be replaced.
I never saw that cook again.
But I had tried the cinnamon on my oatmeal the next day. And loved it.
Bee had survived.
And Christopher had dubbed the telekinetic ‘Zans.’ A nickname we all knew she hated, but which we used because she’d almost killed Bee that day.
Over macaroni.
I knew. Because it was a memory.
I wasn’t four years old anymore.
I had survived my childhood, destroyed the compound.
I didn’t dwell in memories of the past. I refused to dwell, to obsess, to be overwhelmed by my impossible childhood.
I was being manipulated by the mystic.
I opened my eyes. The evening was dark. I was on my knees. Tendrils of magic held me, anchored me to a pentagram fueled by the blood of the Five. Binding me to the mystic’s will.
Her hands were on my face. Warm on my chilled skin.
She was pulling my magic from me.
Harvesting my power, feeding the pentagram with my amplification.
That shouldn’t have been possible.
She shouldn’t have been able to take my magic from me, nor should she have been able to use it to fuel a spell.
I could hear … something. Paisley … snarling.
I tried to move. Tried to shift my head.
The mystic locked her dark-eyed gaze to mine.
Magic pulsed through my mind — backed by the power of the Five, anchored to the blood tattoos and between my eyes.
I went under.
I got the blood off my hands.
It washed away in the freezing cold river easily enough.
But I couldn’t get it out from underneath my fingernails. So I stood there, naked, teeth chattering, staring down at the bloody crescent moons tipping each of my fingers and thumbs.
I had just turned seventeen. And I was already a mass murderer. We all were. We Five.
I started searching for a rock with a thin, sharp edge. But all the rocks at the bank of the river that curled through whatever jungle we’d been dropped into three days earlier were smooth.
I tried a sharp stick. But nothing was going to get the blood out from under my fingernails.
I forced myself to accept the idea and move on.
I forced myself to pick up the tactical armor I had stripped off in a fit of irrationality.
It was soaking wet. I had completely dunked myself in a deep pocket of the river before I’d realized that the blood had penetrated the armor, staining my skin as well.
I picked up the armor and retrieved my blades from where I’d dropped them, carrying them all over to a large sunlit rock. I laid the tactical gear out to dry, including my boots. It had been idiotic to get my boots wet. They’d be wet for days … for as many days as we remained posted in the jungle.
Still ankle deep in the river, the current tugging at me lightly, I dropped my head back, raising my arms and silently pleading with the sun to scour the blood from me as well.
Screams echoed in my mind … so many people … mind-controlled cannon fodder thrown at us by the sorcerers we’d hunted through the humid jungle as far as the small village. Maddened and driven to attack us by the sorcerers’ control. I hadn’t needed to touch anyone to choke on their fear, their utter terror.
The first sorcerer had fallen under my hand — he’d died screaming for mercy as I stripped his power from him, transferring it to Nul5 and Tek5 before we’d continued our rampage through the village.
I should have killed him slower. I should have avenged all the people he’d made me murder. But that wasn’t my job.
So I kept moving. Guided remotely by Cla5 and Tel5. Buffered by Nul5 from the magic the remaining two sorcerers threw at us. All while Tek5 tore through the village, amplified by me.
I slashed and hacked.
And eventually, the entire village was slaughtered, destroyed. We’d chased the sorcerers back into the jungle.
They hadn’t gotten far.
They’d also died too quickly. Their bodies were collected, tucked into an empty hut at the outskirts of the village, along with the first sorcerer’s. To be taken back to the Collective. Proof of our successful first solo mission.
The Five unleashed. With me in command.
Another in a long series of tests and trials.
And now we awaited the cleanup crew.
One of the covens in the Collective’s employ would destroy any evidence that the village ever existed. It would be wiped from the earth, along with the memories of their friends and family members in the neighboring villages. Tel5 would work with the witches to pull off that feat, her telepathy focused by the witches and boosted by me.
I should have been heading back.
I should have been checking on the team. I vaguely remembered Tek5 taking at least one bad hit when she’d compromised Nul5’s shielding with a wild burst of power-fueled arrogance, then had taken a sorcerer curse in return. And Cla5 — Knox — might need calming as well. It was always worse for him because he saw the slaughter twice. Once in his head, and then once as I — as we — wrought it.
Behind me, Nul5 moved silently through the jungle, pausing to watch me from the water’s edge. The magic that tied him to me had announced his presence moments before he appeared. Magic that had been tattooed in blood to my skin, burrowing deeply into nerve and bone, just over two years previously.
I kept my face lifted to the sun, my back to him. I wasn’t interested in trading words. I wasn’t interested in debriefing. I wasn’t interested in talking about adjusting our training based on the events of the incursion.
The sorcerers had stood against the Collective, stolen from them.
So they sent us. The Five.
A punishment. A lesson to anyone else who dared to stand against them.
Our first kill mission.
I had celebrated my seventeenth birthday just two days before. Zans had created a distraction that ended with a broken nose and a sprained wrist for two of our trainers, while Knox stole an entire chocolate cake from the cafeteria. Bee had found a candle. A regular one, not the colorful birthday candles we’d all seen in the couple of movies we’d been allowed to watch.
The slide of a zipper drew my awareness back to Nul5 at my back. I opened my eyes but refused to look at him. I didn’t want to engage. If I ignored him, he’d go away. That was my way. That was how it always was between us.
He stepped into the river at the edge of my peripheral vision, stripped to the waist. He crouched to splash water on his face, then chest. His shoulders just got broader and broader every time I took a moment to truly look at him.
He stood. He’d left his boots and weapons on shore, but he pinned a dark-eyed gaze to me as he methodically stripped off the rest of his tactical gear.
He tossed everything back to dry land, then stood as naked as I was, fists clenched at his sides, shoulders tight.
I’d never stood back and looked at him before. Not fully naked, not without him being aroused. Sunlight caught in the wet droplets sprinkled across the smooth skin of his chest. He rivaled me for height now, standing slightly taller.
If I touched him. If I wrapped my hands around his neck or shoulders. I would feel his anger, picked up with my empathy.
That rage would match mine.
Then I would slip my hands farther down, take the length of him in hand, and that anger — his and mine — would be extinguished, smothered in need.
Dampened.
Just for the moment.
He moved toward me without invitation. The first time he’d done so since I’d begun visiting him in the dark of his room. I stepped back, keeping my feet in the cool water, pressin
g back against the smooth boulder that held my wet armor.
He swiftly closed the distance to press up against me. Face buried in my neck, hands clenching my upper arms. He held me, crushed between him and the rock, breathing. A tangle of emotions filtered through my empathy — anger, frustration, and terror … residual terror.
I broke his hold on my arms, wrapping one hand around the back of his neck, setting the tips of my fingers over the tattoo that bound my magic to him. That tattoo was the only reason I could reach my power through his nullification magic. I reached between us with my free hand, between his legs, calling forth an erection with a few strokes.
Then I shifted up on the rock, wrapping my legs around him. He entered me without further invitation, without all the words I knew he wanted to speak, and the emotions he wanted to vent.
I never spoke to him in those moments. Never allowed him to speak. Words did nothing to soothe me. Words recalled me to the present. And the only reason I sought out Fish was to feel something more than … more than the terror I commanded with a brush of my fingers.
My back pressed harshly against the smooth rock. And Fish let go, thrusting into me. Finally. His magic welled up, chilling me everywhere we touched. Every patch of skin. I gathered it around me, allowing it to numb me.
His breath became ragged. His mouth pressed against my neck, my shoulder, behind my ear as he buried himself in me, over and over again.
I gazed up at the sunlight dappling the broad leaves of the trees.
I had no idea where in the world we even were.
I had no real idea why I’d just killed all those people.
I just wanted to be numb.
I wrapped my other hand around Fish’s neck, shifting my hips to meet him, trying to find some pleasure in his increasingly unsteady thrusts. It was there, faint. But if I focused on what I wanted, what I needed, I could coax it forward.
I turned my head to initiate a kiss, but then my gaze fell on my hands curled around Fish’s neck, on my fingers.
On the crescent moons of blood under my fingernails.
I closed my eyes, pressing my face to Fish’s, pushing him back slightly so I could kiss him.
He thrust his tongue in my mouth, groaning quietly. And I reached for his magic, pulling it forth. His magic would settle into my bones, it would numb the rage, it would smother the sadness.
I just wanted to be numb …
…
…
…
I didn’t want to be numb.
I hadn’t wanted to be numb for a long while.
And … I wasn’t with Nul5. I wasn’t still using him to keep myself in check. I wasn’t using him to feel something other than fear and terror from those I touched, those I killed on command.
Nul5 was Daniel now.
I was Emma, not Amp5.
My soul might still have been drenched in blood, but I wasn’t seventeen anymore. I wasn’t lost in a jungle somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t trying to smother my feelings.
I acknowledged the destruction I was capable of.
I owned it.
Because no one told me what to do or who to kill anymore.
I was in command. Of myself. My life. My choices.
The mystic still had me in her grasp.
I took a long lick of my ice cream cone, catching the drips of creamy vanilla before they reached my fingers. Christopher brushed his shoulder against mine, already halfway through his double scoop of strawberry and chocolate.
We walked toward the water, enjoying the warm evening. Paisley prowled alongside us.
We’d been in San Francisco for three months without incident. Christopher had been steady, focused. I was starting to think about trying to stay.
I steered our path, turning left instead of right. Christopher followed without comment. I had viewed an apartment two blocks south that morning, though being forced to have an actual conversation with a real estate agent had been uncomfortable.
The penthouse view had been incredible. The price was massive. I would need to take at least two more contract jobs to pay for it outright.
But the city was filled with Adepts willing to pay well for the services of a skilled amplifier. No one ever needed to know the depth of my power, or about my other abilities.
Christopher brushed against me again, pulling my focus back to the present. The ocean sat on our far right, beyond Fisherman’s Wharf. Most of the businesses on either side of the street were closed for the evening.
A small group of Adepts stood in the shadows on the corner. Sorcerers by the tenor of their magic.
Paisley grumbled quietly, glancing up at me.
Christopher tugged sunglasses out of his pocket, slipping them on to shade his eyes. A moment after the glasses were in place, his power shifted, fanning across my shoulders and running down my bare arms.
I should have been more aware of our surroundings.
But … why exactly?
Nothing had happened with the sorcerers, other than the spike of Christopher’s power.
We had turned the corner, finished our ice cream, and I’d decided to not mention the possibility of buying the penthouse. Three days later, I’d found the clairvoyant in the closet of my bedroom, besieged by glimpses of the future. I’d never found out what had triggered him that time, though I thought it might have had something to do with him trying to date someone. He had spoken casually about a sorcerer who worked at the restaurant with him. But being intimate with another Adept came with consequences for the clairvoyant, especially if that person’s immediate future was erratic or complicated in any way.
It had been a lovely evening walk.
I’d been thinking I could stay … build a place for myself in the city …
It was a memory.
I could feel the sidewalk under my feet. Taste the ice cream. Smell the warm, salty air.
The mystic was still mucking around in my mind.
Why?
To what end?
Why bring me back to San Francisco?
“You can’t hold me here,” I whispered, somehow still strolling along the wharfs with the clairvoyant and Paisley at my side.
Christopher tilted his head, frowning. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t belong here,” I said, firming my tone. “This is not my place.”
Christopher grinned. “You could stay here with me. We could be happy.”
“No.” I stopped walking. The action physically hurt, as if I were pulling against myself, against the forward momentum of the scene around me.
Except it was all in my head.
The street and Christopher and Paisley went blurry.
Then dark.
A cascade of warm water slid down my back, followed by strong fingers tracing my spine, sliding over my hip, slipping between my legs.
I arched forward, pressing eagerly into the silky, soapy touch, moaning quietly.
Teeth raked my neck as the nimble fingers increased their speed and pressure. I gasped, opening my eyes to meet Aiden’s searing blue-eyed gaze.
Pleasure lapped up over my stomach, tightening, building.
“I could stay here forever,” I whispered.
Aiden smiled — a possessive, heated, and sharp baring of his teeth. I wrapped my arms around him, sliding my hands over wet, slick, hard muscles, shoulders and back, to cup his head and tug him forward into a hard kiss.
I thrust my tongue into his mouth and he met me with equal intensity as I sank into the pleasure, as I allowed it to have me, to own me.
If only for that moment.
The pleasure would crest. Then it would fall away. As it always did. As it should, because we couldn’t actually stay in the shower forever.
For one thing, we would run out of hot water. And —
I couldn’t feel what Aiden was feeling.
I couldn’t feel his emotions.
I tilted my head away from the ravaging kiss. I settled my hands fully and firmly o
n his shoulders. We were skin to skin. Hell, if he slipped his fingers slightly lower, he’d actually be inside me.
And I still couldn’t feel what he was feeling — not his pleasure. Not his own desire. Not that sense of satisfaction that flooded through him when he made me moan, made me writhe under his ministrations …
“What’s wrong?” he whispered, nipping at my lower lip.
“We aren’t actually here,” I said. “This isn’t really happening.”
Anger flooded through me.
It wasn’t my own emotion. Or Aiden’s.
The mystic was pissed.
She couldn’t hold me.
Not for much longer.
Snow crunched under my feet as I turned and laid eyes on the young girl sitting on the bench by the icy river.
The dread that had been clogging my chest all morning, constricting my breathing, eased.
Opal.
Finally.
I’d thought I’d lost her.
I stepped forward, closing the space between us and wanting nothing else but to wrap her in my arms and keep her safe from the world.
I could give her a home.
Comfort.
Education.
Love.
With me, she would grow strong.
Formidable.
I stopped walking, leaving my gaze on the back of her dark-curl-haloed head as my mind caught up to the situation. My rational mind, suffocating under the conflicting emotions I always felt around Opal.
I had sent the young witch away.
For her safety.
So she wouldn’t have been, shouldn’t have been in the park by the river in the center of town.
I scanned the snow-covered area — the scene that had been plucked from my memory. Except it was blurry around the edges. When I took a slow, deep breath, the air wasn’t as chilly as it should have been. The deep, constantly flowing river was far too quiet.
I laughed, low and dark, banishing the dread — the fear of losing Opal and the trepidation of being a terrible influence. A terrible parent.
“Bee is better than you,” I said, shifting my feet.
I wasn’t actually standing in the snow.
Mystics and Mental Blocks (Amplifier 3) Page 22