She rolled over, blinked. There was a naked man by the window standing in a shaft of morning sun. The light etched his muscles into relief. Her lips curled at the corners. “Morning,” she said.
Charlie turned around. “Hey.”
He walked over to the bed and sat down next to her, brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “You sleep okay?”
“Terrible,” she said. “Dreams.”
Charlie stifled a yawn, but not before Emily got a good view of the cords in his neck. “I had a really freaky dream, too,” he said.
Emily sat up, scooting her butt against the headboard. She tried to hold the sheet over her breasts like a bath towel but then just let it go. Emily caught Charlie’s glance and smiled. The skin around her nipples tightened. “What was it about?” she asked.
“You, actually.”
“We’ve slept together once and already I’ve taken over your subconscious.” Emily tented her fingers at the tips and whispered, “Excellent.”
Charlie chuckled. Oh man, she even liked The Simpsons. If she was into South Park too it was all over. Her eyes crinkled at the corners. Who was he kidding? It was already all over.
“Seriously,” Emily said. “You dreamed about me? Was I any good?”
Charlie leaned in and gave her three soft kisses, one on the mouth and one on each nipple. “Not as good as you were last night.”
Emily arched her back and sighed. “You better tell me about your dream fast, or I’m gonna’ have to interrupt you.” She looked at him. “You know, I dreamed about you, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, but tell me about yours first.”
“Okay, but I don’t want to hear any Freudian analysis afterward about how I’m really in love with my mother and worried that my penis is too small.”
“I make no promises.” She said. “Besides, I already know the second part’s bullshit.” She gave him a playful squeeze, but backed off before the blood drained from his head. “So make with the dream.”
“Okay, okay. You know how you can just know things in dreams?”
She nodded.
“For some reason I just knew I was on the outskirts of some small town in Wisconsin. I’ve never been to Wisconsin, right? I just knew that’s where I was.” Charlie’s eyes receded into memory. “I was walking along some street. It was cold. I don’t usually feel things in my dreams, but I remember feeling really cold.”
“Like it was going to snow?” Emily asked, watching his face. “That heavy, wet air cold?”
“Yeah, just like that. There’s a scene in that movie Harold and Maud where Maud had captured smells in old O2 bottles. One of the smells was a city street during a snow fall. It smelled a little like what I always imagined that would’ve smelled like, but without all the car exhaust.”
“What was the name of the town? You remember?”
Charlie squinted. “No, I just knew it was Wisconsin. I’m sure it’s because of the stuff you told me about where you grew up.” God, he thought, she has infiltrated my subconscious. “Anyway, I was beginning to wonder what the hell I was going to do when the snow started and then I saw your house.”
“My house? What it’d look like?”
“Just your usual two story brick box deal, with like a white wood siding add-on for the kitchen. I think I might have reasoned in my dream that I knew it was your house because you told me your father was a cop and there was a cruiser in the driveway.”
Emily’s fist bunched and griped the sheet. Charlie didn’t notice; he was rolling in the deep waters of recall.
“So, I just walked up to the house and went right in, like I lived there or something.” He shook his head. “Man, it was really something. I could actually smell the coffee and bacon in the kitchen. You ever hear some people say how they don’t dream in color?”
“Sure.”
“I never understood that. I’ve always dreamed in color, but I’ve never smelled something in a dream.”
“But you smelled coffee and bacon.”
“Yeah, so I just stuck my head into the kitchen and was like ‘Hi, everybody!’.”
“Everybody? Who was there?”
“You and your dad. You were at the kitchen table having breakfast and—.”
Emily’s eyes bloomed.
Charlie sat forward. “What is it?”
She swallowed, her throat clicked. “You stuck your head into the kitchen and said ‘Front door was open. Mind if I join you?’.”
Charlie sat back. “How’d you know that?” A smile formed and melted off his face in the same moment, like a cloud shadow passing over the sun. “I was talking in my sleep, is that how—”
“It was like my daddy knew you,” Emily said. “Like you were friends. He said ‘C’mon on in, buddy. Have some joe.”
Charlie pulled the sheet over his lap. “You, um… You’re scarin’ me a little.”
“I’m a little scared, too.”
He searched her face. The silence condensed around them. A car horn honked in the street and someone yelled something about next Wednesday. Charlie reached out and took her hand. “What else?” he asked.
In that simple gesture he diffused her greatest concern—a fear given to Emily the day her mother died. I will not leave you, it said. The corners of her eyes heated, blurred. After a moment she said, “You said you don’t feel things in your dreams, but you did in this one. What was the last thing you remember feeling?”
Charlie touched his chest. “An awful cold. It was like my heart had turned into a piece of ice.” He paused. “Then pain, really sharp. That’s what woke me up. When I was standing by the window, I was thinking that you had rolled over your in sleep and nailed me in the solar plexus with your elbow or something.”
“I don’t think that was it,” Emily said.
“Yeah, I’m kind of not buying that anymore either.”
“The dark man, the guy with the mirror eyes? Do you remember him?”
Charlie shook his head slowly back and forth. “No, nothing like that. I remember the kitchen door booming open, but there was no one there. That’s when I woke up from the chest thing…
“Emily, what’s going on? How do you know,” he stammered. “Are you going to get all Scooby Doo and tell me that you had the same dream I did?”
Emily looked down at Charlie’s hand, hard and strong, but wrapped so gently around her own. I won’t leave you. Well, here goes the big test of that.
“I do think we had the same dream, or very near. But that’s not the weirdest part.” She took a breath and let it out. “I have to tell you something about me, something that’s going to be very hard for you to believe.”
Charlie raised his eyebrows.
~~~~~~~~
Chapter 12
DRUM STARED INTO the bathroom mirror. The trembling hand was cause for concern, but he could see no real outward sign of neural damage. Nothing immediate anyway. Both pupils were the same size, the irises were strange, overly reflective, but that was nothing new. Still, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that his new ability was screwing around with his wiring. The next time he reached into someone’s chest and stopped their heart, he could get stopped himself.
But cessation wasn’t an option at this point. Getting his fear fix usually required advanced planning and tremendous risk. Once the fear donor was identified, he or she had to be researched. Did they have family? Would anyone raise a fuss or ask questions when they disappeared? Could they be tied back to Drum? And then if the donor qualified, there was the abduction to work out and the subsequent probing for that one trigger that would send them over the edge into heart attack land. It was a grueling process that allowed for four, maybe five sessions a year. Just enough to keep Drum from going all the way over.
And now, because of that fairy Michael or Martie or whatever the little faggot called itself, Drum’s lair was compromised. That warehouse had taken months to find. If he stuck to the old way, he’d have to find a new place and start
all over again. That could mean he wouldn’t get another fix for at least six months. Maybe even longer. Drum stared at the man in the mirror. His skin was florid, his cheeks sunken, the corners of his mouth tugged down. This was not a man who could go for six months without another fix. If anything, the problem was getting worse, threatening to white him out with an acid bath of alien emotion.
But with this new addition—oh, why not name it?—this telekinesis, most of the risk was gone. He could walk down the street and suck up the death pathos of anyone he chose to reach out and touch. It was as simple as squeezing. And there was nothing to tie him to the murders. To hell with the risk of stroke, or whatever was happening to cause the hand tremors. They weren’t that bad anyway. He flexed his hand. Wrist hurt like a sonofabitch, though. If he was careful not to gorge as he had done on 5th avenue earlier that afternoon, he should be fine.
Just think of all the people in New York ripe for a heart attack. Anyone in a high-stress job, or with a few pounds to lose was a natural target. America was becoming more and more obese every day. Drum could fix at least twice a day and never worry about being caught again. What was one more fat-ass to worry about? Someone would sue the restaurant industry and he would keep feeding on his own fast food.
A giggle bubbled from Drum’s chest. It hitched onto itself and stretched into a howling roll of laughter. He gripped the sink and barked and shouted his glee at his reflection. His hair flew, his eyes flashed and his mouth gaped. I look like a monster, he thought and laughed even harder. A quiet snap sounded and the mirror cleaved a single line through Drum’s reflection. His left hand began to dance on the edge of the sink. Drum thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
* * *
IT TOOK TIME for Drum to calm down. A tiny bastion of sanity in the back of his mind whispered that if he didn’t stop laughing he would have a stroke for real. Either that or his new ability would tear the bathroom apart. Every time a fresh gale took him, another crack bolted through the mirror glass. By the time he got hold of himself, the sink was a cauldron of broken glass, his hand a vibrating blur.
He finally collapsed down onto the toilet and forced himself to breathe, slow and even, until his laughing jag cooled. With his head between his knees, he watched single tear drops tumble like sapphires and shatter on the tile at his feet. As the frequency between the drops stretched, so did his mind. Aside from being giddy with joy at this gift, he was equally curious about its origins.
He’d always assumed that his empathic prowess was an in-born trait, a side-effect of some chromosomal skew. During her pregnancy with him, Drum had long suspected his mother of dabbling in what Mr. Jager and the Stones had called “mother’s little helper”. Or, perhaps a positron spat from a solar flare had zipped through his father’s sweaty scrotum and into a lucky spermatozoum where it pushed a key peptide just enough to replace a C with a G. Either way, little Drum had ended up with striking but nearly useless eyes and a head full of other people’s feelings. Ah, yes, there was the madness too. He really did have to admit that one, being a shrink and all. Sociopath was probably the most accurate handle, but you say tomato…
Drum’s eyes flew open and flared orange from the sunset flowing through the bathroom window. That girl. That girl in the hospital lobby. It was something to do with her. He was sure of it; could feel it from the same part of his mind that smelled emotions and now broke hearts. When he’d felt her it had been like tasting the fear of a hundred people at once. And she had been aware of him, too. It had been all over her face. She had to have some sort of psy-enhancement as well. Could it be she too was an empath? That might explain why he seemed to feel so much intensity from her; she might have been filtering the collective emotions of multiple other people. At first, he’d been content to write her off, pressed for time as he had been due to the McCafferty problem, but things were different now.
He thought of her in the hospital lobby, pretty green eyes, good cheekbones. In the gathering dark his eyes shown like coals. Something had happened between them. He held up his spasming hand, slowing now like an engine cycling down.
“Looks like I’ve got a new pet project.”
~~~~~~~~
Chapter 13
“DON’T DO THAT again,” Charlie said. She was trying to hide it under the covers, but even from across the room he could see her right hand jangling like it was hooked up to some serious current.
The two of them had spent an hour talking about what made Emily Burton different from other little girls. At first Charlie wouldn’t believe her, couldn’t believe her. When she had poured it all out for him—her empathic power and now the telekinesis—it had been too much for him to get his head around. In truth, it had broken his heart. To fall in love with a woman in one night and then to learn that his heart’s desire was nuttier than Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…well, shit.
Emily had seen it on his face the second it was out of her mouth. She had focused out the white noise of the city and stretched, sensing his disbelief and accompanying pain. The emotional swell from him was as huge and complex as a weather front. Tears had sprung to her eyes and dull heat, male and stony, had thudded in her chest. But there had been no way to convince him that she was picking up on his feelings. No way to shatter his doubt. So Emily had said a little prayer that it would still work and shattered something else: the lamp.
It had been easy too. Second nature, really. Emily had imagined clapping her hands against the ceramic hips of the lamp on the bedside table and it had imploded. That had gotten Charlie’s attention. An hour later, most of the smaller objects in the room had been reduced to shards and Charlie was a complete convert.
Emily was like a kid with a new toy. The empathy had been driving her nuts, but the telekinesis was altogether a different story. She was like a superhero or something. She tried to think of a superhero with her power, but came up blank. Maybe one of the X-men? She’d always been more of a Superfriends girl. Hell, she had stopped a entire SUV from twenty feet away by sticking out her hand. Even Superman had to touch stuff.
She beamed at Charlie. “One more.”
Charlie got out of bed and stepped into his jeans. “No,” he said, scowling. “I don’t like this. I mean, it’s amazing. I can hardly believe any of it. I’ve got this light headed thing going on and I can’t seem to get my heart to slow down.”
Emily grinned and rolled over her on tummy. “You’re just falling in love.”
“Do you know that because you can—I don’t know—sense it from me or whatever?”
“At first, yes,” she said. “But I don’t like to do that. It makes me feel blurry, like I don’t know where I start and everyone else stops. It’s like I told you. That’s why it’s so much easier to be surrounded by so many people.”
“White noise.”
“Right.” She smiled and wagged her feet back and forth. “Besides I’m all light headed and giddy, too.”
Charlie put his hands on his hips. “Yeah, but with you it could just be some kind of neural melt-down.” God, he was beginning to remind himself of his mother. He took his hands off his hips and sat down on the bed. He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. Damn, her hair smelled amazing. He kissed her nose for good measure. “Listen, Emily.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, boy.”
“Shut up,” he said and stroked a lock of hair out of her face. “These things you can do worry the hell out of me and not just because this is like an episode of the freakin’ X Files.”
“I could do without the empathic stuff,” she said. “You don’t have to sell me on that one.” She winked and the button on the top of Charlie’s jeans popped open. “I like this new one, though.”
“Hey!” He tried to keep from smiling, and it wasn’t hard when her hand graduated from electric boogaloo to flopping around like a gut shot dog. “You may like it,” he said. “But it might be killing you. You’ve noticed your hand, right? I’m going to go out on a limb here a
nd guess that’s not a condition you’ve always had.”
“No, you’re right, but it’s just a little shaking. I get that from coffee.” She smiled. “Maybe it’s just nerves.”
“I think that could be just what it is, but when I say ‘nerves’ I think it might be the eventual degradation of your motor neurons, not just the jitters because you’ve had too many long nights at the fucking office.”
Emily darkened. After meeting Charlie, she was reinvested in the whole not dying thing. And she did feel pretty weak now that she thought about it. “You really think it could be something like that?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Well, what do you want me to do?”
“Don’t use it anymore. And don’t look at me like I just took away your water pistol. At the very least, until we know what’s going on with your tremors you’ve gotta keep a lid on it.”
Emily pushed out her lower lip. Charlie kissed it. “Listen, it just so happens that I work at a hospital. Let me get you an appointment to have an MRI done.”
“And if we find out that it’s harmless?”
“I’ll buy you another ice cream cone.”
She lay her head in his lap and stared up at him for a long time. She could see herself reflected in his eyes, skewed at the edges. “What if we find out that it’s not harmless?”
Charlie ran the back of his fingers along her cheekbone and traced the outline of her lips with his index finger. “Two scoops.”
She nipped his finger and then reached up to guide his hand down her neck and lower. Emily closed her eyes and sighed. The city sang outside the window, and the morning slid away from them.
* * *
“SHE’S GOT NICE toes, doesn’t she?” Charlie said, nodding toward the open end of the MRI where Emily’s feet stuck out. She waggled her big toe a him.
A knife blade of a man in a white lab coat and Day-Glo orange Chuck Taylor All Stars tennis shoes grumbled, “You know how much trouble I could get in for this, Charlie? Time on this machine’s expensive. Technically this is stealing.”
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