Mind Games

by Christine Amsden

  We drove in silence until he pulled into the driveway of my rented house, behind Kaitlin’s car. I reached for the handle, but before opening the door, I turned back to Evan, hating him for making me ask when he should have been the one to offer. “Just one more thing before I walk out of your life forever.”

  He winced. “What?”

  “Will you give it back?”

  There was a long moment of charged tension between us while we stared into each other’s eyes. I’m not sure what he saw in mine, but in his I saw a great deal of fear and uncertainty. Whether he feared the pain of transference or the loss of power, I had no idea. When he finally answered, it was with a firm, decisive. “No.”

  18

  KAITLIN AND MADISON SAT IN THE living room among the haphazardly rearranged bedroom furniture when I returned home. I can’t even imagine what I looked like to them, soaked to the bone in filthy clothes, hair hanging in limp tendrils about my face. The horrified looks they gave me outshone even the ones they’d given me when I’d turned up half burned from an accidental fire.

  “What happened?” Kaitlin demanded.

  I stared over my shoulder, out the partially open front door, watching Evan’s car. It hadn’t moved. Giving him one last evil glare, which I hoped he could see despite the dark and the rain, I slammed the door shut.

  “Cassie?” Kaitlin’s voice rose. “What’s wrong? Is it Evan?”

  “Why would you assume it was Evan?” I asked.

  Kaitlin and Madison looked at one another as if sharing their thoughts, but Kaitlin answered. “You’re still hung up on him.”

  I laughed and shook my head. It was perhaps the one good thing to come out of the day’s revelations, but I felt, firmly and forever, that I no longer loved Evan Blackwood. Sometimes love fades away, but other times it just dies. Hard.

  Ignoring my roommates’ protests, I grabbed fresh clothes from the dresser in the middle of the living room and headed for the shower. Fifteen minutes later I emerged to find Madison and Kaitlin still waiting expectantly, but as much as I appreciated their friendship, they weren’t the people I needed.

  The person I needed, the only one I could even think to seek out for comfort, answered his front door in jogging shorts and an old t-shirt. Somewhere in the distance, the TV blasted a rerun of Law & Order, but Matthew’s attention was focused squarely on me.

  My mind went blank as I looked at him and saw the concern radiating from his green-gray eyes. Powerful, well-muscled arms reached forward to draw me to him, out of the rain.

  For the first time, I appreciated the usefulness of dating a telepath. There were no awkward questions, no halting attempts to explain, only warm arms and the lingering scent of his aftershave surrounding me as tears began to slide down my face.

  “That’s right,” Matthew said in a hushed voice. “Let it out.”

  He ran his hand up and down my arm, warming and soothing my body, but he didn’t put an end to the tears. He could have ended the sadness with magic, but he didn’t.

  “You need to cry,” Matthew said. “There’s nothing I could do to spare you from this pain short of making you forget, and you don’t want to forget.”

  Didn’t I? For twenty-one years I’d gone around thinking of myself as nothing more than a disappointing failure or a weak link, to use my father’s own words. Now I knew it hadn’t been my fault, but I felt more helpless than ever. My world had changed, but whether for better or worse, I had no idea.

  Somehow, we ended up on the sofa, the TV turned to a soft rock music channel. Matthew still had his arms around me and my head rested perfectly against his shoulder, as if it belonged there.

  “Did you know?” I asked suddenly. My parents had known and hadn’t been able to tell me. Who else, though? Who had known and who had guessed? Matthew could read minds, so perhaps…

  “No,” Matthew said. “I can’t read Evan’s mind. Or your parents’, for that matter. Even Nicolas has almost figured out the trick to shielding me. It took him some effort, but he nearly had me blocked at the picnic last week.”

  “I feel like I should have known or guessed, somehow,” I said. “It wasn’t just that we were in a relationship. He was my friend, you know? My best friend for so long. My father told me I didn’t know everything about him, but I just never guessed.”

  “Stop blaming yourself.” Matthew brushed his lips across the top of my head. “Nothing about this is your fault.”

  “I thought I loved him.”

  “You probably did.”

  “Isn’t love supposed to last forever?” I asked.

  “Only if it has help. You have to work at it.”

  For a long time we sat like that, him supporting me while I cried into his shoulder, mourning once and for all the loss of the magic that I had never even had. Its absence had been a critical part of my life, but at least now I understood it. At least now, I could find some closure.

  After a long time, my tears subsided, but I didn’t move. I clung to Matthew as if he were my lifeline.

  “Cassie,” Matthew said after a while. “I hate to bring this up when you’re so upset, but who knows about this?”

  The question surprised me. “I-don’t know. My parents, but they aren’t allowed to say. Evan. His parents. I’m not sure who they would have told. Why?”

  His arms tightened around me. “If the wrong person finds out, you’ll be in danger. Drained women fetch a high price, and it’s rare to find one as strong as you must have been.”

  A chill ran down my spine at his words. It seemed to me that I’d had a similar conversation before, though I couldn’t begin to place it now. I knew it, intellectually, since my mother had been sold after she’d been drained, but somehow I hadn’t quite accepted the emotional truth.

  Evan had been insisting upon protecting me. Was this why? Did he feel some guilt or responsibility? Or was there, perhaps, something more sinister? I remembered the diamond and sapphire engagement ring I’d found in his den, wondering why it was still there after two months. He didn’t think he could somehow get me back, did he? Is that why he was so determined to free me from Matthew, so he could have every part of me?

  “It’s okay,” Matthew said. “I won’t let him near you.”

  Of course he wouldn’t. Evan wouldn’t be easily cowed, but he was powerful, not invincible. Between Matthew and my parents, he would have to leave me alone and stop messing with my mind by kissing me and trying to protect me.

  “Let me protect you,” Matthew said. “That’s why you came to me tonight, isn’t it?”

  I’d come to him because he was the only person who would understand and be able to help me. Because I felt safe with him. I was even beginning to love him.

  He groaned, softly, and turned me to face him, lifting my chin so he could capture my mouth in a fierce, possessive kiss. My mind blanked as my body responded, willingly giving over control to his demanding kiss. He knew exactly how to draw out my responses, exactly how I liked to be kissed, and exactly where I liked to be touched.

  Of course he did. He could read my mind. Anytime he tried something that might have made me surface from the sensual haze, he immediately shifted his tactic to something else. Something that heightened my awareness of him. And my desire.

  He trailed kisses along my cheek and jawbone to my ear, where he paused to whisper, “I love you.”

  The echoing words fell from my lips with barely any conscious thought. “I love you, too.”

  “Then marry me,” he said.

  I did begin to surface from the sensual haze then, to stare in wide-eyed surprise at his taut, perfectly serious face. He took my hand in his and when I looked down, he held a gorgeous diamond solitaire in his outstretched fingers.

  “Matthew,” I began, too surprised to think. “I-we’ve only known each other for a week.”

  “I feel like I’ve known you forever,” Matthew whispered.

  “That’s because you can look into my mind,” I said. “I can’t do the
same.”

  “You can. If you want to.”

  I stared at him, at his beseeching eyes fixed on mine.

  “I know a spell that can do it,” Matthew said. “It’s very temporary, lasts only minutes, an hour at the outside, but you’ll know my thoughts the way I know yours.”

  “You would do that?” I couldn’t believe it. “What if I found out some secrets?”

  “I’ll try not to actively think about those,” Matthew said. “But it won’t matter, if you marry me. I’ll teach you all my secrets then.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I sat there in dumbfounded silence as Matthew began laying out the candles and preparing a casting circle that encompassed the two of us. When he finished, he began chanting the words of the spell that would open his mind to me.

  I expected it to be something like the time I had joined minds with my mother as she lay comatose in a hospital bed, but it wasn’t much like that experience at all. Then, I had been inside her mind, joined to her, walking through her subconscious and her memories. This time, I simply heard his thoughts. Not heard, precisely, because no sound was involved, but heard in the way I hear thoughts inside my own head. Like a ghost of my own thoughts.

  Open. Mind into mind. Thought into thought.

  I was hearing the echo of the words of the spell, translated into English instead of the gibberish he used. And it was gibberish. He’d completely made up his own words to mask the intent of the spell.

  Done. Working. Echo…

  He smiled at me and I realized there was a bit of an echo effect arising from our shared ability to hear one another’s thoughts.

  The thoughts didn’t always come as clearly as English words. Sometimes they were more like concepts or images. He thought about me and how he felt. He loved me, or thought he did, which might amount to the same thing.

  I love you. The words were clear, firm, and a direct challenge to my unvoiced concerns. He thought I was beautiful. There was an image of me in his mind that didn’t look much like the one I held of myself. I seemed bigger somehow, though not in a bad way. More important. Radiant. Desirable.

  He wanted me. It was all he could do to keep his hands off of me when he knew I needed his comfort rather than his lust. Evan had hurt me so badly. Maybe it had been too soon to propose, but he’d needed so badly to offer his protection and his name.

  I drew back mentally, reeling at the influx of information. I still hadn’t seen why he wanted me so badly, when he’d only known me for a week.

  He answered without words. Strong. Brave. Intelligent. Beautiful. Desirable.

  Again, I felt that sense of longing, but this time, it didn’t originate from him. Or at least, not only from him. I gazed at his slightly parted lips hungrily, willing them to kiss me, to taste me. When they did, it was with a primitive sense of claiming that echoed forcefully through his mind. Mine.

  I didn’t argue, I only responded. His touch set me on fire and though I touched him tentatively in return, I sensed that this time, this first time, he wanted to learn all the secrets of my body and to hear me react in voice and in truth. I turned and arched to meet his kisses, anticipating each one, reveling in our shared joy of the experience.

  He longed to see me topless, so with a smooth, fluid motion, I tossed my shirt behind the sofa. The move bespoke a confidence I would not normally have had, but his unspoken desires and responses filled me with a sense of pride. He liked what he saw. Through him, I liked it too.

  Then I unlatched my bra and exposed myself to his view, to his frank admiration. He liked what he saw, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted to touch, to taste, and to share those sensations with me.

  His hand went to the waistband of my shorts, though he hesitated, uncertain if it was too soon. If I might still need more time.

  If I’d had any doubts, that hesitation convinced me. I didn’t need more time. I was ready. Moving his hand aside, I started to unfasten the button, but couldn’t budge it.

  Frowning, the magic of the moment shaken but not destroyed, I tried again, but the button simply refused to move. So I reached for the zipper, but it, too, remained stubbornly in place.

  Matthew tried to help, but his fingers found only resistance. Finally, in a moment of sheer frustration, he tried to work a spell that should have torn the garment to shreds, but to no avail.

  Evan.

  I’m not sure who thought the name first, but we both seemed to know at about the same time that something wasn’t right here, and that it had been his doing.

  “Give me a minute.” Matthew stood and stormed away.

  The instant he left the casting circle his thoughts disappeared from my mind. Though I had only known them for a few minutes, I felt their loss as keenly as if we’d been connected all our lives. Perhaps it was the abruptness of the severed bond. I don’t know.

  Matthew didn’t stop for explanations or apologies. He stormed out of the room and down a dark hallway. When he returned, some five minutes later, he held a massive tome, but I still couldn’t hear his thoughts.

  “Sorry, Cassie,” Matthew said. “The spell is only good inside the casting circle.”

  He had the book open to a page in the middle and began muttering some kind of incantation. I stayed perfectly still, suddenly aware of my own nudity in a way that I hadn’t been before.

  “The nerve! A chastity block. He set a chastity ward on you.”

  My face went red. I scrambled to the other side of the couch to grab my discarded clothing, trying to digest the new information. “When would he have done it?”

  “Monday night?” Matthew suggested. “If he did the prep work at home, he would only have needed about fifteen minutes while you weren’t paying attention. How long does that kiss of his last?”

  More than fifteen minutes, most of the time. Usually not more than an hour. “How long will it last?” I asked.

  “A week or two, unless he can renew it. That only takes a few seconds, though, so you’ll need to avoid contact with him.”

  I thought back to earlier in the evening, when he had skimmed his fingers down my arm, exactly as if he had the right. “He still thinks he owns me!”

  “Exactly.” Matthew’s jaw clenched.

  We fell into a tense silence for a minute or so, until I spotted the diamond solitaire sitting on the end table. Striding purposefully forward, I picked it up and turned to Matthew, who arched an eyebrow at me.

  “I accept.”

  19

  BY THE TIME I RETURNED HOME, Kaitlin and Madison had gone to bed, but they had moved my furniture back into my bedroom before doing so. I made a mental note to thank them before heading for bed, fully clothed, and falling into an exhausted sleep without the help of the potion.

  The next morning brought with it the sense that a new chapter was truly about to begin in my life. It wasn’t just the diamond engagement ring sparkling in the light of the morning sun, though it certainly portended a change. It was a strange sense of freedom.

  Three years ago, thinking they could not be overheard, my parents had suggested that I might be a weak link in the magical protections they had designed for the family – namely, the power of seven. At that point, or at least after a few weeks’ renewed and desperate attempt to discover a source of magic that had always eluded me, I gave in to my normalcy. I stopped pretending to be a sorcerer and distanced myself from magic.

  I no longer wanted that distance.

  It wasn’t that I had any illusions about somehow regaining the power that should have been mine. It was more a sense of connectedness that I’d never felt before. I no longer questioned whether I belonged to the normal world or the magical world.

  Now I knew my parents had been utterly mistaken in more ways than one. Drained or not, the power of seven protected me and my siblings. Even if I couldn’t feel the magic, I could feel a connection to them that would not be denied. It was the reason I hadn’t left Eagle Rock, even if it would have made more sense to do so in search of a truly nor
mal environment. It was why I worked so hard to patch up my relationship with my parents, despite the anger I still felt in my heart.

  I’d denied the connection in the past, rejecting it as soon as it had formed – the day Christina was born. The day I rejected all magic. There it pulsed, however; strong and steady, a subtle presence in the back of my mind. It wasn’t like empathy, though I thought I’d know in an instant if any of them were hurt. It was just there, a bond that had sickened us all when my parents had tried to break it. We had all recovered but for a while, Juliana and Adam’s gifts had turned against them, Elena had retreated so far into the spirit world that she had not eaten, and Isaac had turned to theft to purchase a magical gift for himself.

  Strange, but I had almost forgotten about Isaac’s recent crimes. He had used a simple and only partially effective invisibility spell to rob a bank and several stores before I caught him and turned him over to the police. The only reason he hadn’t been sent to a juvenile detention facility was because the Blairs had made everyone involved forget. Apparently, even me. My parents hadn’t had a favor to call in at the time…

  The phone rang, jarring me from my thoughts. When I answered, I heard Matthew’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “Good morning,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine.” I looked down at the ring and managed a smile. “Very good, actually.”

  “Since Friday night didn’t work out, I was hoping I could take you out to dinner tonight. We need to celebrate our engagement.”

  “Tonight? I have dinner plans with my family tonight.” Then, on the spur of the moment, I added, “You should come.”

  “I will,” Matthew said. “What time?”

  “Six.”

  “See you then. I love you.”

  “Love you, too.” I hung up.

  Sitting up in bed, I stared for a long time at the black walls of my room, trying to remember what I’d been thinking about when he’d called.

  The walls needed another coat of paint, I thought idly. Then I wondered if Matthew would let me paint the bedroom walls black when we got married. Probably not, but then again, I didn’t think I wanted them black. My fortress of solitude was not a place that I wanted others to be able to invade. I would need my own place, one that no one could enter save me. A place where I could think, relax, escape, and plan.