That was not good. That never happened during practice.
Without thinking, I flicked my wrist, and the word “sorrow” echoed through my mind. Masters of the Mental Arts form psionic weapons from thoughts and emotions. Unfortunately, I am not a Master. I didn’t mean to draw the emotion that triggered the Psi Fighter’s most powerful Psi Weapon, but Andy and I had just practiced the technique in training, and I couldn’t think of anything else. A ghostlike whip of psychogenic mist exploded from my Amplifier and solidified around the stalker’s arm. I yanked and held tight. His gun spiraled through the air, and he fell to the grass, shaking violently. My Memory Lash slithered up his arm, coiling around him like a misty python.
Please! The stalker’s terrified thoughts filled my brain before his voice reached my ears. He sobbed like a little girl, thrashing as the Memory Lash tightened. His memories flooded my mind like a blast of putrid wind, siphoned by the Lash…tiny faces in a wire cage, little girls crying for their mothers. A hideous skull surfaced and disappeared. A little blond face flashed into my head, dirty and crying, screaming that she would tell his mommy. Horror gripped him, fear that his mother would find out—
His terror filled me in a way I had never experienced in practice. I became him, horrified of my mother, paralyzed by what she’d done to me in the past. Her enormous face came at me from all directions. The little girl wouldn’t stop screaming. I ripped open the cage door, picked up a claw hammer, and hurled it with all my strength. The claw lodged in the wooden frame beside her head. Terror filled the girl’s eyes, and she clamped her hands over her screaming mouth. An overwhelming sense of glee flooded into my mind, and I slammed the cage door shut.
That twisted feeling jolted me like high voltage electricity, and I fought to become me again. I threw my Amplifier to the ground, trying to escape the horrible images, but I couldn’t push the stalker’s memories out of my head. My legs shook, the world spun, and I dropped to my knees, trying not to vomit in my mask.
“Get up!” Andy’s irritated voice snapped me from the trance. His mask, a bright angelic face with laughing eyes, peered down at me, cocked at a furious angle.
I knew without looking that the smelly creeper was gone.
“Andy, I’m sorry.”
He jerked me to my feet. “You ignored my orders. Why?”
“But my radio—”
“I told you to check the charge,” he spat, towering over me. “Why would you use a Memory Lash? You know you can’t handle it!”
“It was all I could think of.” My whole body quivered. “He had a gun. I’m sorry, Andy, I…”
Andy sighed. His big body relaxed, and he rested his gauntleted fist on my shoulder. “It’s okay. Did the Lash change him?”
“No sorrow, no remorse,” I said. “He enjoys terrorizing. I think he likes being afraid. Andy, I saw his face.”
“I know.” Andy picked up the dropped Elmo mask. “That thing smells awful. Who is this Jim Henson reject?”
“Didn’t recognize him. But Elmo isn’t his only disguise.”
“Yeah, I know. Clowns, purple dinosaurs.”
“I saw a skull mask in one of his memories. Like a pirate’s Jolly Roger. Probably wears it to frighten the children.”
Andy’s body went rigid. “A death’s head? Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. Now that I was released from the effects of my backfired attack, I tried to remember what I had seen. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it. Children were caged, and I had just let their kidnapper escape. “Idiot!” I said under my breath. “Andy, he’s holding little girls captive. If they die, it’s my fault.” I picked my broken Amplifier out of the grass and pulled at it with my mind, hoping that some memory fragments remained.
How could I have let him get away? How could I have been so stupid? That poor child, the way her eyes bulged when the hammer nearly killed her, the sickening joy the stalker felt, the horror of his mother…suddenly, a gateway opened and the terrible things I had seen in the stalker’s mind flooded out. My legs buckled, my hands shook… Instantly, the memories became too vivid—the hammer felt deadly in my hand—I was there again, enjoying it, and it terrified me—and I struggled to separate myself from him. “Andy, the little girls—please stop it! I can’t keep him out—Andy, help me! Andy—”
Andy was on me in an instant, arms around me, masked forehead pressed against my own, whispering into my mind, “Every mission has its own horror. Don’t dwell there. You know how to push it away. Now push. Like we practiced.”
Calmness flowed through me, but I knew it wasn’t of my own doing. I concentrated, filling myself with thoughts of home, the Academy, my family, until I regained control. My storm of emotions calmed. I forced the memories out, and I was me again.
“Thank you,” I muttered. “The Kilodan was right. I wasn’t ready. Why is he always right?”
“Benefits of being our glorious leader,” Andy said. “You were lucky this time. Rinnie, you don’t realize how powerful you are. You have got to stay in control. You could hurt somebody.”
I smiled, knowing Andy couldn’t see it under my mask. “I’m okay now. I guess I never took that part of the training seriously.”
“I know. You never had a reason. Now you do.” He lifted my chin with his finger. “You know, the Kilodan is also right about your school. You could stop it all. Make the high school safe.”
“Smooth change of subject.”
Andy folded his hands. “It’s what I do.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, not interested. I’ve got a stalker to pummel. It’s personal now.”
“And being bullied every day isn’t?”
I thought about a typical day at school. Name-calling, humiliation, the joy of being a total outcast. Algebra. “Life can’t always be a box of chocolates. Anyway, that’s different. Out here, I’m masked.”
Andy laughed. “Our masks are just tools.”
“This tool”—I jabbed a finger at my mask—“is the only thing that hides my identity. In case you’re forgetting, I don’t dress like this at school.”
“There are ways to stay hidden without wearing a mask. Underdog didn’t wear a mask. Nobody knew his identity.”
“Underdog had it easy. He had a telephone booth to duck into. I have a cell phone. It’s a little tight.”
“Duck into your locker,” Andy said.
I did a finger wag at him. “Somebody would notice a blond girl going in and a masked vigilante coming out. I’d be captured and interrogated by the Knights until I told them your name. They would hunt you down, torture you for days, and finally kill you and hang your rotting corpse in the streets as a reminder to us all. Worse yet, I’d get detention. You know we aren’t allowed to fight in school.”
Walpurgis Knights, our fiercest enemy. Their leader is very likely the deadliest human alive. They call him Nicolaitan. Like us, the Knights also create weapons from thoughts and emotions, but they prefer jealousy, hatred, and guile, the darkest of emotions. They are especially sensitive to the use of Psi Weapons, which is why the Psi Fighters never use them while unmasked.
“Your concern for my safety overwhelms me,” Andy said. “As does your cluelessness about your school.”
“I know enough to keep my mask on. The Kilodan is never unmasked. I’ve known him for ten years, and I’ve never seen his face. Or heard his real voice. He knows how to keep his identity hidden. I’m just following his example.”
“The rest of your classmates would love to fight back,” Andy said. “They just need a leader.”
“The rest of my classmates aren’t in danger of being murdered in their sleep.”
“I thought ‘Danger’ was your middle name.”
“Not according to the jerks at school.”
“So you’ll take the assignment?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
Chapter Two
A Day in the Life
I’m sixteen, but sometimes I
feel a lot older. I like Elvis Presley and the Three Stooges. I like old superhero comic books. But I do not like spiders of any age. Unfortunately, my life is infested with them. Some of the spiders attend my school. One of them goes by the name of Mason Draudimon. He’s my year, and has picked on me for as long as I can remember. I used to come home and cry on my bed, but I never let anybody see. Especially Dad. Well, I’m adopted, so he’s not my birth father, but I still call him “Dad.” If he knew Mason picked on me, he would pay the boy a little visit, and that would not be pretty. He is so overprotective. But in a really sweet way.
If Andy and the Kilodan had their way, Dad would never need to visit Mason. They pulled me from the stalker case. They were cool about it. Unfortunately, they wanted me to permanently stop Mason instead. Yuck. Oh, yeah, and they wanted me to master the Memory Lash. Double yuck.
I knew I’d never win the Memory Lash argument, so I didn’t even try. I’d have to learn to deal with the anguish of that thing regardless. Came with being a Psi Fighter. Mason, however, was another matter. I really didn’t want that assignment, so I told the Kilodan that being targeted by Mason didn’t bother me. He reminded me that I’m not the only one Mason picks on. Touché. He hit a soft spot, and he knew it. To tell the truth, I would have saved the rest of the kids from him and his goons long ago, but here’s the thing—I was completely comfortable kicking bad guy butt while wearing the mask and armor of a Psi Fighter. I could have polished the floors with Mason’s forehead and never broken a sweat if I was in uniform. But I wore jeans and frilly tops to school. If I fought crime dressed like that, everyone would know my secret, right? Happened once. Won’t happen again.
When I was six, the Walpurgis Knights kidnapped me. One of them saw me practicing…figured out that I was a Psi Fighter in training. Stupid move on my part, even for a six-year-old. I’ve grown considerably more careful since then. The Knights are like the bad guys plus, like the comic book super villains on a steady diet of prune juice and fiber. They are just miserable people. The Psi Fighters rescued me, but two died trying. My real parents. I miss them. I thought the Kilodan would back off the Mason assignment when I reminded him. No such luck.
The Psi Fighters are nothing like comic book superheroes. We’re more like awesome vigilantes. We practice the Mental Arts, which are like martial arts with extra caffeine and awesome sauce. We punch and kick and do that ninja art-of-invisibility stuff, but we also make weapons just by thinking. Andy invented this gizmo he calls “the Amplifier.” It channels our thoughts and emotions into weapons. Some weapons are harder to control than others—I especially have trouble with the Memory Lash. The problem is, when I use it, it shows me my opponent’s most horrifying memories. The stalker’s memories were just too real. Who knows what I’d see if I used it on Mason? That boy had issues. And Kathryn, my best friend in the entire universe, loved to point them out every time we saw him.
“Okay, Rin.” Kathryn stood next to me in the hallowed halls of Greensburg High School during our break before morning assembly. “Let’s say you’re the first person on earth. God gave you the job of naming all creatures that slink or slither. What do you call that slathering beast?” She pointed to the large figure lumbering our way, elbowing through the crowd like a coupon-toting shopaholic at a fifty-percent-off sale.
“Let’s see,” I said. “Long hairy arms, stubby hind legs, unibrow…Mason is a wombat.”
We burst out laughing. Kathryn Hollisburg has been my best friend since forever. We know everything about each other. I know her secret shopping hot spots. She knows my secret identity. She is beyond beautiful, built like a supermodel, and über popular, although she totally misses that fact. Kathryn is as genuinely unsnobbish as a person can be.
Then there’s me. Born Lynn Morgan, my last name became Noelle when I was adopted after my parents’ murder, and my first name became Rinnie when my adorable new little sister Susie couldn’t say Lynn. I am, in my professional opinion, a tad underdeveloped for sixteen, and on the line between popular and unpopular, I fall somewhere in the vicinity of despised. But only by the Excessively Cool, who are jealous of my friendship with Kathryn.
Mason Draudimon is another story. We have a deep, ongoing love-hate relationship—he loves to abuse me, and I hate his guts. Totally. Of course, I’m in the minority. The cool girls think he’s a hottie. They babble about his gorgeous sapphire eyes, the way his hair swoops away from his face like an eagle’s wings, how he’s built so strong and sleek and pantherish…all of which is true, but when you’ve been picked on by someone since the fifth grade, your view becomes slightly skewed. To me, he’ll always be a smelly, grub-eating marsupial of the genus Vomitus Wombaticus.
The thing is, he’s not just mean, he’s privileged. As the untouchable son of the mayor, Mason could find a cub scout helping a little old lady cross the street, mug the old lady, take the scout’s lunch money, and three quarters of the city officials would swear he was at the soup kitchen feeding the poor when the crime occurred. Everyone is afraid of his father. Even the teachers are helpless against him, which Mason totally takes advantage of. He has no respect for anyone in authority. With two exceptions—Mason worships Captious the math teacher and Miliron the science teacher. They have doctorates. Mason loves people with brilliant minds. He has made it clear to the world that he’ll earn a PhD and cure mental illness. Academic achievement is Mason’s top priority. He’s a man on a mission.
Unfortunately, part of that mission includes inventing new and exciting ways to abuse people. Rumor has it Mason was emotionally scarred by his cruel mother, who, rumor also has it, resides in Old Torrents, the mental hospital outside of town. So he takes his anger out on the kids at school. It’s his mean streak that makes him ugly. I should probably feel sorry for him, but I don’t. I wish a meteor would hit him.
Greensburg had this marvelous (according to the School Board) campus that squished the elementary school, middle school and the high school next to each other. Consequently, the younger kids enjoyed the agony of sharing the halls with the older kids. That beautiful arrangement allowed Mason and his thugs to mistreat all ages, as they saw fit. And they saw fit a lot.
As he stalked toward us, Mason broke into a nasty smile that grew bigger and bigger, like the Grinch when he had his wonderful, awful idea. The Grinch had his dog Max, and Mason had his dog, Bobby. Bobby Blys was a small, mouse-haired boy with a lightbulb-shaped head and abundant ears. He was a brain, and I think Mason admired him for it. But he was also a little geeky—actually, a lot geeky—and a favorite target of Mason and his goons. His buzz cut and Mr. Magoo glasses didn’t help. They just made his ears more noticeable. Not that they needed help…he could hang glide in a weak breeze.
Bobby knelt facing an open locker down the hall from us. Mason stopped beside him and whispered something I couldn’t hear. Bobby looked up at him and shook his head. Mason smiled, reached out and slammed the door on Bobby’s face just after a teacher disappeared into his classroom. Besides being helpless, the teachers are completely buffaloed when it comes to Mason. His public displays of nastiness are legendary, and so is his timing. He never gets caught.
“The jerk,” Kathryn fumed. “Why can’t he leave Bobby alone? He thinks he’s so tough.”
“Mason’s a coward,” I said, glaring at him. “He never picks on anybody who can fight back.”
“Time to put a stop to it.” Kathryn whipped an umbrella from her book bag.
“What are you gonna do with that, open it and give him bad luck?”
“Hey, these things are deadly in the right hands. You stomp him, then. I mean, you are a major butt-kicking machine, aren’t you? I’ll cover your back.”
“You know I can’t.” Not that I wouldn’t have liked to. Stuffing Mason’s head up his nether regions would bring me unbridled joy. It was times like these that made me wish I didn’t have a secret identity to guard.
“If I practiced every night to kick major butt, I’d definitely kick butts that needed
major kicking,” Kathryn said. “Whatever happened to ‘With great power comes great responsibility’?”
“That’s for people who have issues with radioactive spiders.”
“You have issues with any kind of spider.”
“Okay.” I took Kathryn by the umbrella and pulled her toward Bobby and Mason. “Maybe if we give Mason dirty looks, he’ll go away.”
Bobby closed his locker door and got up to leave, rubbing the egg-sized knot on his head. Without a word, Mason pushed him up against the lockers. Bobby’s lip quivered. He stared up at Mason with wide, watery eyes.
“You should reconsider,” Mason said, his face suddenly grim. “This project means a lot to the community. You know how civic-minded I am.”
“You don’t know what you’re making.” Bobby’s knees shook. “It’s illegal, Mason. I heard Tammy Angel bragging. She said—”
“Angel is a perfectly law-abiding citizen, just like me.” Mason pinched Bobby’s trembling cheeks in his huge hands and stretched his mouth into a grin. “We’re one big happy family.”
“Let him alone, Draudimon!” Kathryn screamed.
Mason turned and beamed. He released Bobby’s cheeks and whacked him on the side of his head. “Gotta talk to your girlfriend, Roberto. I think she likes me.”
“Your dog doesn’t even like you,” I snapped, as Mason stepped toward us. Kathryn stared at me in disbelief and proceeded to walk backward until she disappeared around the corner. So much for covering my back.
“Smile when you say that, Peroxide,” Mason said, reaching for me. “My dog’s dead. Hey, I wonder if you’d look like Mrs. Bagley if I put your hair up in a bun. Let’s find out. Did you know that one day I aspire to be a hairdresser?”
I backed against the wall. Peroxide. That was hardly fair. It wasn’t my fault I had super white blond hair. It just grew that way. Beautiful visions of kicking Mason right in his nomenclature danced in my head. Retribution for giving me that nasty name. Of course, properly kicking said anatomy might expose my secret. Clark Kent had it so much easier. As long as he kept his glasses on, there was no way he’d be mistaken for Superman.
Psi Another Day (Psi Fighter Academy) Page 2