Can’t you just imprint on her mind or something? I thought to Grace. Imprint on her that we are kind of all in this together now and that I’m going to help you two destroy the Rose-Lyle facility and help discover where other superpowered individuals may be. Notice I didn’t call you mutants, although that is in the title of the book I’m writing.
We may be able to work together, but I need to be stronger before I attempt to come out of the coma-like state she’s put me in.
How much longer will that take?
Distract her for two more hours? I’m afraid she’s going to feed on me when she wakes up, just to get a little more of my energy.
Does she actually need to eat food?
Yes and no. Like any human, she does gain sustenance from eating food, but she gains a lot more by draining a person’s life force. She prefers that, I believe.
She really is like a vampire, even the way she acts and …
Seduces. I’m aware. Distract her for two hours, and do not let her feed. Then, I will have leverage, and maybe we can come to some agreement about how we should go forward.
Got it.
“Hey, Veronique.” I touched her lightly on the shoulder. Her eyes popped open and she glared at me for a moment before her scowl softened at the edges.
“Are you ready to start writing?” she said, instead of good morning.
“Yeah, I am, but first I want to do something amazing.”
“Amazing?”
I gave her the most sincere shit-eating grin I could muster. “This hotel has the grandest, most beautiful breakfast buffet you could possibly imagine. We call it a continental breakfast, and it truly is continental.”
“Is it now?”
“Oh, yeah, it is a great breakfast, Grace and I had it yesterday. You just have to try it. You’ll be so impressed. I know it’s not maybe what you would normally eat, but I think you’ll love it, and I would love to be able to make you something.”
She sat up, her interest piqued. “Make me something?” She wore a training bra and nothing else beneath the blanket. Her demeanor was totally the opposite of what it had been in the shower; I no longer had the sense that I could reach out and touch her if I wanted.
Which was possibly a good thing.
I nodded, the grin still on my face. “That’s right, I want to make you an amazingly delicious extra sweet waffle. And while you’re eating that, I’ll make you a plate of bacon and sausage and potatoes and eggs and … Hell, I’ll probably be able to get you some yogurt, and some orange juice, and some coffee, and maybe even some fruit.”
She licked her lips. “That doesn’t sound too bad …”
I smiled at her. “It’s going to be phenomenal; the best breakfast you’ve ever had. It’s a continental breakfast – I mean, when was the last time you had a continental breakfast?”
“Never.”
“Exactly! Let’s go down there and have ourselves a badass breakfast, and then I’ll get back up here and start writing. No, you know what? Let’s have some breakfast, then go for a quick walk to get motivated – because that’s important – and then we’ll come back and I’ll get started.”
“I think that will be fine, yes.”
Thank you, Gideon, Grace’s voice said in my skull as I got out of bed. Are you sure you’re not a psychic?
No, I’ve just learned how to bullshit well, I responded as I put my pants on.
After Veronique slipped back into her tight, black mil-spec outfit, we headed down to the breakfast buffet. I wore a turtleneck sweater and a pair of jeans with holes at the knees. We were definitely mismatched, an odd couple, but no one at the buffet seemed to care.
To prolong our time at the buffet, I told Veronique it was customary for people to take items one at a time.
Of course, the hungry Americans all around me proved me wrong, but she didn’t seem to notice this. She had lightened up since the day before, and while she wasn’t smiling at me per se, there was a mischievous, yet friendly, look to her eyes.
We didn’t discuss what happened in the bathroom last night, and I was glad for that.
Mostly, we ate and drank, and I continued to try to make time pass, checking the clock on my phone every now and then. I suggested a walk, a look in the hotel’s gift shop, a tour of the guest amenities. She agreed to everything.
About two hours later, we took the elevator back to our suite.
Get ready, Grace’s voice said inside my head.
I tensed up, took a deep breath, and opened the door to our room.
Everything about the room was the same as it was before. Veronique, however, noticed that I was apprehensive.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes! I was just thinking about what I was going to write. I get tense like this sometimes before I write.”
“Okay,” she said, brushing past me.
I swallowed hard and moved over to my laptop, trying to stay as nonchalant as possible.
“Just going to do some writing,” I said.
Veronique stopped in front of the bed. Her eyes flashed and she hit the mattress, lying there as if she’d gone into a trance.
My heart skipped a beat as Grace stepped into the room. She looked calm and poised, her eyes white, her pupils tiny black dots.
“I don’t want you to hurt her,” I told Grace. “I know more about you two now, and I need both of you – we need both of you.”
“She can kill us.” Grace moved toward me, her shoulders swaying as she walked.
She was incredibly beautiful … her long blonde hair, her blue eyes, her voluptuous figure.
She wore an outfit similar to Veronique’s, a tight mil-spec number with a zipper on the front. Of course, she’d only zipped it up to about the meeting point of her breasts, almost as if it were a dominatrix bodysuit.
It was a fantasy outfit, that was for sure, likely something she pulled from my mind and juxtaposed with Veronique’s getup.
It almost reminded me of something one of the X-Men would wear, which, as I moved further into my adult life, became more and more ridiculous. I mean, all superheroes, no matter which publisher, wore pretty ridiculous outfits. But then again, if they didn’t wear those crazy outfits, would we like them as much?
“Quiet, Writer Gideon,” Grace said as she glowered at Veronique. “Your internal banter is distracting me.”
“No, I’m serious here,” I said, standing my ground. “We’ve got enough problems, and I don’t want to add you two fighting each other to our list. For example, we need to check out by eleven a.m., or go downstairs and trick them again using your abilities. My point is: both of you are a key to this puzzle, and both of you have powers that we need to use together, to stop them.”
“He’s right,” Veronique gasped. Her eyes flashed back to their normal color and then turned white again.
“Grace, let her go. And Veronique, don’t do anything crazy when she does. Someone needs to take charge here, and, um, that person is going to have to be me.”
Surprisingly, the tone of my voice seemed to completely change Grace’s demeanor. There was still anger in her eyes but also a strange sense of obedience. Which there shouldn’t have been, because she could have fileted my mind if she had wanted.
Grace’s shoulders relaxed, and Veronique slipped off the bed and stood in one fluid motion, her stance that of a person ready to kill.
“Okay everyone,” I said, holding my hands out wide, palms facing the two women. “Let’s just bring this down a notch. I need to finish my book, first off. And you two need to give me as much information as you can without fighting or killing each other.”
“Nice to see you, Grace,” Veronique said. While her normally harsh tone wasn’t evident, there was still something there, something slightly aggressive in her voice.
Grace glared at her. “It wasn’t nice what you did to me.”
“You would have done the same to me.”
“But now we’re one big happy family, and I need you two to behave
,” I said. “Now, Veronique, you need to get some new clothes. Grace, you have the ability to help her get new clothes.”
“I could find one of the hotel maids,” Grace said.
“Yes, you could. In fact …” Something occurred to me. “I know you were trying to make a suggestion that you would get Veronique some maid clothing, which is not what we need. But it does give me an idea. We can’t go around wearing private security uniforms. We’ve done that twice now,” I said to Veronique. “It’ll raise suspicion. I’ll call room service and send a maid up. Grace, have them buy clothing for Veronique.”
“Okay.”
“I need to get like eight thousand more words written,” I told them. “And to do that, I’m going to need some concentration time, so what I want to happen here is for you, Veronique, to stay in this room and just relax while the maid is out buying you new clothes. Grace, I need you to come in the other room with me so I can ask you some questions.”
“Fine.”
I shook my head at her. “And I know you’ve been either modifying the truth or lying to me some. So that ends now. The truth from now on. I checked your drive while you were out. Give me the truth, got it?”
Veronique grinned at her counterpart. “I let him access you.”
“And one more thing, Veronique, no more deadline. This book will be finished today, but that’s because I want to publish it as a serial. So can it with the threats. We’ll get the book out today, we’ll make some plans for tomorrow, and we’ll go from there.”
I was surprised that it was Grace who spoke up next, especially after what she said. “We will destroy the facility.”
It’d been less than a day without the psychic and I’d already forgotten just how powerful she was.
“Exactly, we’ll destroy the facility and we’ll uncover the truth, even if it kills us. Hopefully, we’ll find more of them,” I said, my voice increasing in volume. “And we’ll go for them too. We’ll destroy them all.”
“Yes,” Veronique said, “we will.”
“Your skills will come in handy for gathering info, Grace, but we also need to rely on the collective readership of America, because there are a lot of people in places that we have no access to. People may know more about these experiments and the people who are being experimented on. So let’s get started.”
Veronique moved back to the bed and sat, then turned on the TV.
“Good, that’s the spirit,” I said, my voice faltering.
After you’re done asking me questions, can I watch daytime television too? Grace’s voice echoed in my head.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Definitely. But I want to experiment some more with adjusting your stats first. I think it may come in handy in the future. And I want to know why my picture was on your hard drive. How is that even possible?”
Grace shrugged. “We’ll just have to find out.”
Chapter Seventeen: Memories Revisited
Grace and I went downstairs to extend our stay another day, which was a piece of cake. The next thing to do was get some clothing. We found a maid stepping out of one of the rooms on the floor below us.
“Tell her to get some nice clothes, a lot of nice clothes.”
“She doesn’t have any money on her,” Grace explained as she read her mind. “She doesn’t have a lot in her bank either.”
“Crap, I didn’t consider that. You know what? Let’s just deal with clothing later. Veronique’s military black will work for now. Disregard what I said earlier about it making her stand out. I mean, it’s America, people wear crazy things all the time.”
“Is my outfit crazy?” she asked. The maid stood before us, still in a trance. Grace was now in a coat, my pants, and a sweater with a cherry blossom stitched on it.
This got me wondering just how Grace chose clothing. For people, she had to have seen them once before. Was it the same for clothing? Or could she think anything up and it worked?
I tried to get this answer out of her as we went back to our room, but she didn’t give me much detail about it.
“Sorry, no clothes for now, Veronique,” I told the deadly woman relaxing in front of the TV. She was glued to the screen, watching a rerun of some Big Bang Theory spinoff.
Once we got into the second bedroom, Grace lay on the bed and I used my phone to plug into the port on her neck. Her head was propped up by a single pillow, her blue eyes gazing steadily at me.
“You don’t have to watch me,” I told her, feeling just a hint of nervousness.
“I’ve had my eye on you for a few days now,” she said with a chuckle.
“I believe that.”
The first thing I did was bring up her psychic stats. They were presented to me the way they had been the second time, with dials that I could adjust.
Omnikinesis: 1
Second Sight: 1
Psychometry: 5
Telepathy: 8
Clairsentience: 7
Psychokinesis: 1
Hypnosis: 6
It was time for me to research a little more about what these things were. With my laptop open, I researched each skill individually, figuring it would fill out my manuscript.
A few of them, such as Second Sight, were self-explanatory. I knew what telepathy was and I was familiar with psychokinesis and hypnosis.
Psychometry was interesting; it allowed her to touch an object or a person and understand that person’s emotional state or the history behind the object. Like, she could touch Hunter S. Thompson’s typewriter, and learn more about his years of drug abuse.
Clairsentience was the ability to figure out past, present, and future emotional states of people. This would come in handy in the future – a future in which I hoped to use her powers to their utmost ability.
It became clear as I read more about omnikinesis that I had finally stumbled upon a min-max situation. Omnikinesis was all of the psychic abilities combined and increasing it increased the other powers as well.
This became evident as I turned all the other ones down and adjusted Omnikinesis up to ten.
The results brought a smile to my face.
As soon as omnikinesis hit ten, all the other skills jumped to either five or six, so that her dials looked like this:
Omnikinesis: 10
Second Sight: 5
Psychometry: 5
Telepathy: 6
Clairsentience: 5
Psychokinesis: 7
Hypnosis: 5
Psychokinesis, which had been at one before, had surprisingly jumped up to seven. So this wasn’t a min-max situation at all; it was a situation in which someone had turned down her best ability to prevent the other abilities from being higher.
There was a ton of other stuff I wanted to do while plugged into her, but I couldn’t resist testing her psychokinesis ability.
“Grace, I want you to use your mind to lift that TV.”
“Use my mind to lift the TV?” She looked from me to the flat screen television on the nightstand.
“Yes. I’ve been messing with your psychic abilities a bit, and I think this is something you may be able to do now. Focus on it, and, um, pick it up with your mind.”
Talk about becoming a Jedi master – I had just made the leap from Padawan to Yoda in a matter of seconds.
Grace’s brow furrowed, and her eyes flashed white as she looked at the television. The television wobbled, lifted, fell back to the nightstand, and lifted again, this time floating a good two feet into the air.
“That’s awesome!”
She gently set the television down. “Really?”
“Really.” A few thoughts raced through my mind and I settled on the most logical. “Okay, I want you to try a heavier object. Fuck, try me. That’s it – lift me! Lift me up with your abilities, but not too high because I’m afraid of heights. Kidding, but seriously, try.”
I stood with my hands at my side, ready to see how powerful she truly was.
I felt a tingling sensation in my stomach as my feet li
fted off the ground. “Keep going,” I told her, a smile on my face. She continued lifting me until I was a few feet from the ceiling. I reached my hand up and touched it for stability.
“This is so sweet,” I breathed. “But as much as I’d like to float around the room like Peter Pan, I have more work to do. You can lower me now, we need to continue.”
Using the smartphone, I began going through some of the subfolders in search of data that could possibly help us. I also wanted to ask her questions that would help expand my manuscript and expose more of what was going on at the secret Rose-Lyle facility.
“You’re wasting your time,” she told me.
“By going through your data? What about the fact that I found my pictures in there? I just have so many questions about this.”
“Maybe it would be better if I showed you.”
“You mean transfer …” I made a gesture that meant mind to mind. “Sure, it would kick ass if you could show me something that helped me better understand what you experienced. But we need a safe word because if you show me too much and I feel like I’m trapped, it could be a traumatizing experience.”
“It was a traumatizing experience.”
I considered that for a moment. “Yeah, you’re right; you should just show me,” I said bravely.
“Come lay down next to me.”
Grace didn’t have to ask me twice. I unplugged my phone, wrapped the cable around it, and got on the bed next to her.
I swallowed hard as she placed her hand on mine. “Close your eyes.”
My lids shut tight and a myriad of moving images came to me.
It was not at all like watching a video, or a flashback.
It was like waking up in the middle of the night and thinking of everything at once – your past, your future, something that occurred recently, something that occurred months ago, and something that could potentially happen. A literal wall of memory slammed into me.
I understood Grace’s life now, at least the life that she wanted to share with me.
Because of her psychic ability, she was kept in solitary confinement from the age of three or four to her current age of twenty-one.
Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set Page 12