Psychic Storm: Ten Dangerously Sexy Tales of Psychic Witches, Vampires, Mediums, Empaths and Seers

by Deanna Chase

  "Yup. I've taken the month off and Luc and I plan on heading to the States. First to his home in New Orleans, then my hometown in Washington state. And I'm renting a bunch of DVD's to educate this boy." Angie patted Luc's leg.

  "What does he need to be educated in?" Claude asked with a grin.

  "He needs to learn to enjoy life. This guy hasn't watched an entire movie or seen a TV show in at least ten years. I'm going to see he makes up for that."

  Jon-Luc stared at Claude and rolled his eyes.

  "Hey, I saw that!" Angie elbowed him.

  Luc grabbed at his chest. "Ouch. Chere, watch the ribs."

  "Baby." Angie smiled and gave him a peck on the lips.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Morgan Hannah MacDonald writes Romantic Thrillers that are NOT for the faint of heart. She has held many positions , including a teller where her hands and feet were bound while armed robbers took over the bank. Then a few years later she learned she'd dated a serial killer. That's when she began writing, because strange things do happen to real people. She belongs to Romance Writers of America, the San Diego Chapter, as well as the Kiss of Death Chapter. She resides in San Diego, California where she is busy working on her next novel. She loves to hear from readers.

  Write to her at morganwrites@yahoo.com.

  Don't forget to LIKE her on Facebook for all upcoming announcements: http://www.facebook.com/#!/MorganHannahMacDonald.Author.

  She can also be found at www.morganhannahmacdonald.com.

  JUMP TO...

  NEW REVELATIONS by HEATHER TOPHAM WOOD

  ARMAND by APRIL AASHEIM

  TUESDAY’S CHILD by DALE MAYER

  JUST A LITTLE NUDGE by JESI LEA RYAN

  HAUNTED ON BOURBON STREET by DEANNA CHASE

  SPIRITS AMONG US by MORGAN HANNAH MACDONAND

  LONDON by JC ANDRIJESKI

  AMONG THE LIVING by JORDAN CASTILLO PRICE

  VAMPIRE VACATION by C.J. ELLISSON

  TOUCHED by HAZEL HUNTER

  LONDON

  Allie’s War Early Years

  ~ A Revik and Allie Prequel Novel ~

  BY JC ANDRIJESKI

  If there was ever a race-traitor job, this was definitely it.

  Revik arrives in London with a new job, a new home…and new people watching him, seemingly more than he has helping him watch the Bridge, a holy warrior hidden among humans to keep her safe from dark Seers called the Rooks. To hide his role as the Bridge’s protector, and the Bridge herself, Revik is told to use his real name to establish a public identity in London, to distract anyone watching him from his true purpose. The problem is, Revik's name is known already, either as defector and traitor, or as the evil ex-lieutenant in the Rooks’ dark army.

  Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Allie has no idea that she’s the Bridge…or even that she’s a Seer. She’s struggling with her own issues after she meets Jaden, a musician and tech savant who is drawn to her on first sight when they meet at a party. The problem is, no one in Allie’s life seems to like Jaden very much, including her brother, her mother, and even her best friend, Cass.

  Revik doesn’t like Jaden, either…or the relationship that begins to develop between them…well before Jaden gives him a really good reason.

  Heat Level: 4

  For Cindy B., who is still trying to convince herself she’ll be content with a normal life.

  Fly with the eagles, my beautiful friend.

  And yeah…fuck normal lives.

  1

  HALLOWEEN

  “That guy’s still staring at you,” Cass said, leaning close to my ear. She continued talking in an intensely not-stealthy way, I guess to be heard over the music. “He’s been staring. At you. Only at you, Al. For like...an hour!” she added, even louder.

  She was pretty drunk.

  Drunk enough to have forgotten that we’d barely been here, meaning at this particular party, for an hour, so I doubted the black-haired guy Cass was staring at currently had been staring at me all that long. Drunk enough to forget we were both in costume, and this guy probably had no idea what I even looked like. Drunk enough that between her talk-shouting in my ear and motioning towards the guy with her beer-clutching hand and grinning like a loon, my best friend, Cassie, was about as subtle as if she’d yelled from across the room and waved her arms for him to look over at both of us.

  Drunk enough to embarrass the hell out of me, in other words.

  But Cass had started her drinking well before we left the house.

  Her and her jerky boyfriend, Jack––her on-again, off-again boyfriend of more years than I could count––got in another big fight earlier that day.

  Which I guess meant they were probably off-again at the moment.

  I hadn’t been able to get much that was coherent from Cass on the subject, though. She knew I didn’t like Jack, so she tended to keep her comments on him short and cryptic, since both she and I knew Cass would probably be back together with him again in a day or so.

  Also, yeah, she started drinking a few hours before I even got off work.

  Cass was my roommate at the moment.

  That happened the way a lot of things happened with my best friend, Cassandra Jainkul. Meaning, I told her she could crash with me at my crappy apartment on Fillmore Street for a while if she needed to. I said she could stay as long as she needed, even for a few months, if it took that long, while she got her shit together and figured out what came next for her.

  That was two years ago.

  My brother, Jon, warned me back at the beginning that Cass would never leave, barring some unforeseen Act of God.

  Since neither of us could think of what that might be, apart from her winning the monthly state raffle or one of the city prizes, it was the same thing I guess.

  Jon also warned me that my drama quotient would go way up if Cass moved into my place, even apart from the drinking and Jack and her lack of money and whatever else. Knowing Jon, he was probably worried about my grades, since I’d just gone back to art school and Cass was freewheeling it without that whole higher education nonsense. And yeah, I knew Jon was right, even then, but what could I do? She was Cass. She was my best friend. And while Jon was right about the drama, she was also a lot of fun. We could drink wine and paint and laugh about stupid shit on the feeds and she would drag me out of my cave once in awhile.

  Even I knew that was good for me.

  Without Cass living with me, I knew I’d be home alone a lot more, not depressed or anything, but definitely more broody and artisty and that wasn’t great for me, either.

  So a little drama came with that? Seemed like a fair trade to me.

  Anyway, I wasn’t going to let her end up on the street, even if she had terrible taste in men and got fired more often than anyone I knew. At that point I would have done just about anything to keep her away from her crazy family...or from moving in with Jack, who I suspected had a lot bigger issues than Cass’s tendency to over-drink, whatever b.s. she fed me.

  Since Cass was now staring at the guy with the black hair and the light blue eyes hard enough for both of us, I didn’t let myself look over at him, not even when she did the shout-whisper thing in my ear. Instead I stared at the far wall, like there was some other guy staring at me from that part of the room.

  Or like I wasn’t all that interested, maybe.

  I tried to keep my face blank, too, but I doubt it was all that convincing.

  It was easy to forget I wore full-on face paint, given my Space Girl costume...a character from an obscure comic book Cass and I fell in love with a few years earlier, and the reason I got more puzzled stares than recognition when people saw my get-up.

  The silver metallic foundation, black, raccoon eyes and black lipstick made me pretty difficult to recognize.

  It also made the subtler expressions hard to pull off.

  Given that I also wore a skin-tight, rubber shirt with a big, neon “S” on the front, a black micro-mini, fishnets and thigh-high vinyl boots, it was to t
he guy’s credit that he looked at my face at all. Or that he wasn’t leering at Cass, really, given that she’d opted for some kind of weird clown-nurse-slut costume that had her looking both mildly frightening and full-on sex kitten all at once. I knew hers was from some B-horror flick Cass thought was funny. As I hadn’t seen that particular gem yet, I had to admit, the get-up looked schizophrenic, even for her.

  In addition to Cass’s normal, dyed, neon-green hair, she wore a crazy-short white nurse’s dress open almost to her navel in front. The latter showed off a lace white bra and most of her cleavage, which was about four sizes bigger than mine and usually got her attention even in regular clothing. To complement the white maybe, Cass also wore spiked, white, fuck-me shoes, a nurse’s hat, a stethoscope...and full-on clown make-up with a neon-pink frowny face over most of her cheeks and chin.

  It was pretty terrifying, honestly.

  Also, as per usual with the two of us, Cass’s get-up pretty much guaranteed that every guy in the room would blow past me with hardly a glance in favor of staring at my best friend.

  And yeah, while I was used to that, tonight it stung a little.

  Maybe because, for me, my own costume was definitely on the sexy scale.

  Trying, anyway.

  Next to Cass’s, though––and, more to the point, Cass’s body––I knew I might as well have come dressed in garbage bags, or maybe as a farmer in ratty overalls and straw in my dark brown hair. Every guy within visual range paused to check Cass out––girlfriended or not, straight or gay, alone or in a group––and it wasn’t because of the dummy meat cleaver covered in fake blood that she gripped in her free hand, either.

  This guy was staring at me for some reason, though. Not Cass.

  And Cass was punishing me by making me look like an asshole in front of him.

  Not on purpose, of course.

  Well, my mind muttered cynically in the background. Probably not on purpose.

  I decided to ignore that voice, though.

  Truthfully, more than anything I wanted Jon to get here and save me from trying to wrestle drunk clown nurse hooker alone, in the event she decided to get either or both of us in trouble. I knew the Jack thing genuinely bothered her, which made her unpredictable at best.

  But Jon just pinged me via my headset to let me know he’d be another hour.

  Luckily, it was pretty danged loud in there.

  The other costumes in the room were easier to identify than me and Cass’s, for the most part.

  Dressing up as a seer was all the rage this year, just like it had been the year before, and the year before that. It seemed like every other person I saw wore funky contact lenses, a fake sight-restraint collar, leather clothes of one kind or another, or military gear, if they were going for some kind of historical version. I’d seen a few seer Nazis, and one guy with the big sword and sun sign on his chest, who I’m pretty sure was supposed to be Syrimne, the telekinetic seer who fought with the Germans in WWI.

  Since a lot of seers worked as sex workers downtown––the ones that weren’t owned by corporations or rich douche bags, that is––dressing up as a seer was one of those cool, “alternative” costumes that gave people an excuse to show some serious skin.

  I thought it was pretty tacky, honestly.

  Moreover, I’d love to see one of these bozos wear something like that anywhere near the real deal. Meaning an actual, real-live seer, like at one of the ritzier clubs on Broadway or whatever.

  Even as I thought it, I found myself rubbing the “H” tattoo on my arm.

  A nervous tic, I suppose. Now that more seers lived full time in the United States, we all had to wear those as part of the Human Protection Act, in addition to the barcodes...at least once we turned eighteen. Before that, we had to wear implants, which were worse.

  Implants didn’t just verify race-cat; they could be used to track your every movement. Worse, your parents could access that information if they wanted. We all learned to jack them and distort the signal even in grammar school, but still, yeah, I’d been grounded more times than I could count because I’d failed to jack my implant correctly back in high school.

  So yeah, the dual tats weren’t awesome, but they were an improvement.

  I’d had nightmares where someone had burned both tats off me and threw me in a cage with a bunch of human-hating seers.

  My mom said it was because I was a worrier.

  I hated the seer thing, though...I really did.

  I don’t mean seers themselves. I mean, I didn’t know any actual seers, did I?

  I hated the system, and how we were all supposed to pretend it was normal. I didn’t care what anyone else said. It wasn’t normal. I didn’t care how the government spun it, or what they said in those public service ads on television, either. It was screwed up and it was wrong, and it was pretty much slavery, whether they were human or not.

  Jon 100% agreed with me on that, by the way.

  He also agreed with me that the government was full of shit when they droned on about how “safe” it was, integrating seers into human society.

  Cass agreed with me and Jon, too, but I honestly got the sense she more didn’t care all that much. Cass thought seers were sexy. The slavery aspect of that maybe struck her as sexy, too, knowing her, although I hadn’t wanted to ask her outright.

  I did know there was an all-seer band out of Seattle, End of Times, owned by one record label or another, that Cass had been obsessed with for like five years. In particular, Cass crushed on their lead singer, Darvon, an Asian-looking seer with light purple eyes splattered with bright gold flecks. She wasn’t alone in her crush, either. A lot of girls I knew lusted after that guy, even though I read on some feed station fan site that he was something like two hundred years old, which, to be fair, is supposedly like thirty in human years.

  They had up-close images recs of his eyes, though, on that same station.

  And yeah, he was pretty damned beautiful.

  He also had a body to die for, whatever age he might be.

  Because he was seer, they could show his real face and body on the feeds, too, meaning without distorting his appearance or voice via an avatar. Since seers don’t fall under the image ban protocols of the Human Protection Act, they showed a lot of their real faces and bodies on the feed stations...unless there was some security reason not to, I guess.

  Cass wanted me to go with her to the next End of Times show at the Fillmore in two weeks, so she could see Darvon up close. I knew the place would be mobbed, but I was curious, sure. Since the Fillmore was a pretty small venue, we could probably get right up next to the stage, depending on what they had in the way of security.

  And yeah, Darvon was pretty hot.

  Even so, it struck me as pretty weird to want some guy owned by a corporation.

  I mean, he wasn’t even human.

  Brushing the thought out of my mind, I took a longer drink of beer and looked around the room, that time trying to get a sense of the crowd as a whole. A lot of college students and recent grads were there, like me, but I also saw a fair few people in their late twenties and early thirties.

  More Jon’s crowd, in a lot of ways.

  A lot of them looked straight, though.

  The first band cranked up the sound from about a dozen yards from where we stood, sliding into the chorus of a song that sounded vaguely familiar from the local college station. I looked towards the make-shift stage and saw the lead singer sing-shout-spitting through the mike, his face bright red from the exertion between that and strumming his dual-necked guitar.

  They played a metal-rockabilly-punk-new wave type of thing, one of those mish-mashes of the old, new and ridiculous that seemed unique to the San Francisco underground music culture.

  And yeah, I’m from here, so I’m generally open to weird, but these guys were seriously giving me a headache.

  Maybe I needed to do like Cass and drink faster.

  “What do you think?” Cass said, beaming at me. �
��Pretty cute, right?”

  Before I could stop myself, I gave the guy a casual look, and indeed, caught him staring at me again. When he saw me looking him over in return, he met my gaze, a smile teasing the edges of his lips. Before I could look away, he raised his beer to me, too, a mock-toast.

  I returned his smile, caught off-guard as much as anything.

  As I did, I had a sudden flash of how creepy that grin must look on my silver face.

  “So?” Cass said. “What do you think?”

  I’d already averted my gaze, so I only shrugged.

  “I think you’re really loud,” I muttered, taking a sip of my own beer. The black lipstick left a dark stain around the lip of the bottle.

  Cass laughed, somehow hearing me over the chaos.

  A big guy wearing a leather jacket covered in spikes slammed into me just then, drifting out past the circle of the dance-mosh-whatever pit just in front of the stage. Cursing as I tried to surf my beer bottle to safety, I felt my face grow hot under the silver make up after I glanced up and caught the black-haired guy grinning in my direction.

  “Okay,” I said to Cass as I shook out my wet, beer-covered hand. “He’s cute.”

  “You need to go talk to him,” she announced, looking me up and down. “You look awesome in that dress, by the way...no wonder he’s gawking.”

  “He’s not gawking,” I said. “He’s just...looking.”

  “He’s confident,” Cass said, looking over at him. Her gaze grew more shrewdly appraising. “...Cocky, maybe. That could be a good thing,” she added, tilting her head as she continued to look him over. Glancing back at me, she smiled. “...Or he could be an arrogant asshole.”

  “Awesome,” I said, grunting a laugh. “Thanks for that.” Watching her look at him again, I rolled my eyes, irritated in spite of myself. “Why don’t you go for it, Cass? You clearly think he’s hot. Why not give Jack something real to worry about for a change?”