A Sinister Game

by Heather Killough-Walden

She was frustrated at the Game police for never being around when Black broke one of Game Control’s rules. She was astounded at how powerful the Gray leader had become. She was confused as to why he’d kept it secret this long and had chosen now, of all times, to come forward with this challenge. She was curious as to why he’d chosen her to help him attempt an overthrow of Game Control. She was definitely angry with herself for falling so easily into his trap.

  And most of all, she was afraid. She was afraid she wouldn’t find a place to hide in time. She was afraid that he would find her and overpower her and she would lose. She was afraid of what one night in Black’s bed would do to her, both physically and mentally…. And she was certain, absolutely certain, that going up against Game Control would mean True Death.

  So she ran as fast as she could. She needed to get back to the Red tower and pack a few things, just a few essential things.

  She accidentally bumped into another Gamer as he was leaving one of the transporters, and in the midst of muttering a quick apology, she glanced up to find herself once more staring into Maxwell Blood’s piercing blue eyes.

  “Victoria!” He reached out and steadied her with a strong hand, pulling her to a stop as her momentum tried to carry her right past him. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” he asked, taking in her disheveled appearance, the flush to her cheeks, and the stark worry in her golden eyes.

  She went still and stared up at him. Was it really him this time?

  She couldn’t concentrate enough to send out the mental energy it would require to verify his identity. But there were small things - the miniscule fleck of brown in one eye, the tiny scar beneath his left ear that he’d gotten before he’d become a Gamer, things like that. There was the warmth of his touch; as a dark leader with ice abilities, Black was almost always cold. There was the scent of mint that always laced Max’s words and made her want to kiss him just to find out if he tasted as good as he smelled. There were the little things.

  It was him.

  There was no way Black could have gotten all of those details right.

  She tried to feign nonchalance. “Nothing,” she assured him, but said it too quickly, and too loud. He was no fool.

  Max’s blue gaze narrowed. “Uh-huh.” He didn’t release her.

  “I’m just – I’m late for something,” she lied. It hurt lying to him. As far as she could recall, she’d never lied to Max. She swiftly tried to console her conscience by telling herself that it wasn’t exactly a lie. She was late, in a manner of speaking. She was late in finding a place to hide from Victor Black.

  But Max wasn’t buying it anyway.

  Without relinquishing the grip he had on her arm, he turned and pulled her back into the large metal cube of the transporter. There were others in there and they were watching Victoria and Max.

  “Out!” Max ordered, gesturing for the others to leave the transporter.

  Blood was a tall, well-built man who carried a lot of authority, and everyone knew his nickname, Bloody Max.

  Almost as one, the other Gamers filed out of the transporter cube.

  Victoria nervously watched them go. Her stomach was churning now. She knew what was coming, and she couldn’t make her mind think of a way out of it.

  Max closed the doors behind them, locking them in alone. Then he punched in some destination that Victoria wasn’t familiar with and the transporter blurred around them.

  Only then did he let her go. She straightened her jacket and looked at the floor, refusing to meet his blue gaze.

  “What the hell is going on, Victoria?” His height towered over her, making her feel small. “I know damn well that something is wrong, and I want you to tell me what it is.” He never called her “boss” as the others did. It was always Victoria.

  “It isn’t your concern,” she told him.

  “If it has some bearing on the team or its leader, it very much is my concern.” His tone was just soft enough that he wasn’t exactly yelling at her, but hard enough that it wasn’t conversational either.

  Victoria shoved her hands into the pockets of her uniform jacket. “It’s personal, Max. I promise. You really don’t need to be involved.” That much was true.

  She looked up at him. He gazed at her steadily as the blurred cube around them slowed, swirled, and then blurred in a different direction. It was all about interspace travel at right angles and speeds shy of light, but fast enough that they still boggled the mind.

  “I think I do.”

  Victoria took her hands out of her pockets and put them on her hips. “Excuse me?”

  “I think I do need to be involved. Because whatever it is that forced you to run down sixteen corridors in the TGB without slowing is the same thing that has been keeping you up at night. It’s affecting your health. And if you aren’t well, then our team will suffer,” he told her.

  She blinked. “You saw me run through the entire building?”

  He watched her for another tense moment and then sighed. He ran a hand through his thick, wavy hair and moved to lean back against the opposite wall, blurred as it was. The effect was strange enough to be disconcerting.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “There are no transporters in-between the library wing and the first corridor off section one. You didn’t hear me calling after you and, frankly, you’re too fast for me to keep up with. So I hopped into the section one cube and met you in the main room.”

  That was why he had run into her when she was stepping into the transporter. And that was also why he’d known something was wrong.

  Victoria studied him closely. He raised a brow – waiting for her to respond.

  She alternated her weight on her feet.

  Finally, she caved. “There is something keeping me up, Max, but I was telling you the truth when I swore it has nothing to do with you.”

  “What is it?” he asked. No pretense.

  “I would rather not share.”

  “I know,” he acknowledged with a single nod. “But I can’t help you if you won’t let me in.”

  Let me in…. He wanted her to let him in? In what way?

  “You can’t help me anyway, Max. And it isn’t your job to help me.” She was his leader. He wasn’t supposed to help her; she was supposed to help him! She wasn’t supposed to show this kind of weakness in front of her team members. It was humiliating and frustrating. It was also pointless.

  Time was speeding by almost as quickly as the transporter was shooting them through space. She was wasting it here with Max.

  She’d never felt the urge to run as strongly as she did in that moment.

  “My job?” Max asked incredulously. “It isn’t my job?” With that he slammed his hand against the stop control on the transporter console. The blurring slowed and ceased, and the transporter cube went still, solidifying around them. The doors remained shut.

  “Where are we?” She instinctively asked. Dangling somewhere above a precipice? Underwater?

  It gave her a chill.

  “Don’t change the subject, Victoria.” He left the wall and faced her again. “You just broke our relationship down into the basest components imaginable, and that’s insulting. You know damn well that I care about you as more than my leader.”

  She gazed up at him, her heart suddenly beating a little bit faster than it had been a moment before.

  He went on. “Whether your problems – whatever they are – affect your abilities as leader is indeed my problem and, hence as you put it, it’s my job to help you overcome them. It’s also April’s job and Ty’s job and Simon’s job.” His tone was still hard, and his voice was rising in volume. He motioned to the nothingness around him as he spoke. “But that isn’t why we’re here right now Victoria, in this transporter, in the middle of nowhere. We’re here because something is eating you up inside and I’ve never seen you this scared before – not in ten years.” He visibly tried to calm himself before he added, finally, “And I don’t want you to suffer. Is that so hard for you to und
erstand?”

  It was a while before Victoria could respond. She considered telling him everything. For a second, she really did.

  But then she remembered Victor’s warning about True Death – and Max. She thought of Black’s immense, powerful reach. Even her intermediate contact for dealing with Game Control had been switched.

  No. There was no way she could involve her captain. Not in this.

  When she did finally speak, her voice was no more than a whisper. “I’m sorry, Max. I can’t let you get involved.” She hoped her expression reflected even a fraction of the helplessness she felt at that moment.

  Max gazed down at her for what felt like an eternity. She was about to apologize again, just to break the uncomfortable silence, when he at last straightened and turned away from her to face the console. She stared at his broad back as, he pressed a series of numbers into the transporter keypad, and the cube began to blur once more.

  A few seconds later, they came to another stop and the doors slid open. They were in the Red tower.

  Victoria didn’t wait. She stepped through the open doors and into the main meeting room of the Red Team’s home base. When she turned to look back, it was to find Max watching her once more.

  The doors slid shut, blocking him from sight.

  * * * *

  “There’s a possibility she told her captain about the Game.”

  Victor turned away from the tall windows he’d been staring out of and faced his captain. “What makes you suggest this?” he asked.

  John Storm shrugged. “Can’t know for sure; they got into a transporter together and let’s just say he didn’t look like he was gonna accept much from her but the truth. Shooed everyone else off of the cube, apparently.” Storm sat down on a couch and waited for his leader to mull over the information.

  Black considered the news. In truth, he hadn’t expected Victoria to try to get through this alone. They’d never really set the rules, as he had expected they would. He’d lost patience with her and forced her hand.

  As a result, they had both jumped the gun and, other than the basic tenets of fair play, there were no rules. Not really.

  “What’d you finally say that made her agree?” Storm asked.

  “Nothing of consequence,” Victor replied.

  “Threatened to kill Max, then?”

  At Victor’s sharp look, Storm laughed. “Aye, that’d do it, I wager. You’re lucky she thinks you’d actually go through with it.”

  Victor considered that. “Am I?” he asked softly. His gaze wandered to the windows again. Did he want the Red leader to fear him as much as she obviously did? On the one hand, it forced her compliance. On the other… fear wasn’t exactly the emotion he most wanted to elicit in her. Something about her distrust of him was disquieting.

  “If she’s getting her team to help, then you might as well have us on your side,” Storm suggested.

  Victor looked back up at him. He mulled this over, too. “This isn’t your Game.”

  Besides, there was a chance that she’d told Max to mind his own business. And if she had, then five against one was hardly fair.

  Victor turned away from him and paced back to the windows. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Approximately five hours until sundown. He would very much like to know what she was doing at that moment, and it wouldn’t have been difficult to determine. But he had to give her this time to herself.

  Immediately after sealing the deal with Victoria in the library, Black had left the TGB and gone to the nearest communications console. There, he had pulled all of his men – his eyes and ears across the Field – and told them to back off of the Red leader for the remainder of the day. He did not under any circumstances want to give Victoria just grounds on which to call the entire Game off.

  He needed her. In so many ways….

  It was safe to say that he had been much more than impressed with her display of power in the training room that morning. Truth be told, he had been stunned speechless for several minutes.

  To rip apart a room telekinetically was one thing, but to do so without the help of a Game band? Bewildering. To melt metal was even more impressive; it required immense control of atmospheric temperature and an innate, molecular understanding of the differences in object states.

  But to put it all back together…. That was something else entirely.

  Victoria had destroyed everything around her, in probably every way imaginable. Black had barely managed to shield himself from her power while maintaining his invisibility.

  But when she had closed her eyes and set it all right again, he’d been perpetually blown away. Reattaching jagged plastic pieces into seamless perfection? Solidifying fifty-pound metal discs into their original shapes?

  The air had even been cleared of dust motes. It was impossible, what she’d done. It was… god like.

  He’d waited four hundred years for someone of her caliber to come along. Individually, the members of Game Control could not defeat Victor in a battle of magic and might. However, collectively, they were a force to be reckoned with.

  Black couldn’t beat them alone. But he could absolutely win with Victoria on his side. In the training room that morning, she had more than made that clear. It wasn’t until everything had been put perfectly back into its place and Victoria had opened her eyes and smiled that Victor at last managed to find his voice and hide his shock. He’d put on quite an act. And when she’d shoved him into the wall, it had given him an impressive headache.

  A part of him had wanted to congratulate her. Another part had wanted to retaliate by shoving her up against the wall, and then pinning her there beneath him as he ran his hands through her honey-scented hair and grazed his teeth along her throat and the smooth, taut skin over her collarbone….

  Now Victor pressed his hands to the glass of the tall windows and laid his forehead against its smooth, cool surface. He closed his eyes and forced the need in him to back down.

  He had to admit that he felt a measure of trepidation about this Game. He wanted Victoria alive. What if she fought so hard that in order to win, he would have to use too much force? She was like a thorny rose, so dangerous and so delicate at the same time.

  In the end, he knew that he could never truly harm her. If she struggled that much, he would have to let her go, and then they would probably both be either rehabilitated or killed by Game Control for breaking the rules.

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  He’d pulled them both into a dangerous Game indeed. He would have to be very careful with her. The next three days would see seven rounds, each possessing a ten-hour time span. Victoria Red would do everything and anything within her power to keep from being captured for those seven rounds.

  She was an incredibly bright and determined young woman. Victor had a feeling that this Game was fated to see most, if not all, of those seven rounds come to difficult and trying fruition.

  * * * *

  “It’s crazy,” she muttered to herself. “You’ll be caught. You’ll be killed.” She shook her head and continued to pace frantically back and forth across the floor of her master suite. “This is nuts.”

  But it was the only way.

  She knew that, deep down inside. The only way to make certain Victor Black could not find and capture her was to make certain that she was not there to be found and caught in the first place.

  She had to leave the Field. She had to breach the wall.

  But was that even possible? Had it ever even been done? Attempted?

  Surely, Game police would be all over the wall. How would she even get close to it?

  Victoria ran a furious hand through her long golden hair and then stormed to her chest of drawers, yanked the top drawer out, and moved all of her undergarments aside until she found the small velvet pouch she was looking for.

  She picked up the pouch, pulled the straps loose, and shook its contents into the palm of her hand.

  A small gold pendant winked up at
her in the soft overhead lights of her bedroom.

  The necklace consisted of a thin gold chain and attached to it, a small, square smoky quartz crystal.

  Victoria did not remember where she had gotten the necklace. She only knew that after she’d been brought onto the Field and trained, she’d been escorted to her room for the first time – and this necklace had been waiting for her beneath her pillow.

  It was a beautiful piece of jewelry, and the only one she owned. She never wore it. She wasn’t sure why, but for some reason she felt it was necessary to hide the ornament. She didn’t want anyone to know she possessed it.

  She especially didn’t want anyone to know about its secret. It was a unique crystal. Though it looked whole and seamless, all it required was a touch of Victoria’s mental energy and the smoky quartz would smoothly split all along its side so that it could be opened. When opened as one would open a book, it revealed two images, one on each side. The images were laid out in three-dimensional and full-color detail, and portrayed a little girl on the left, and a compass on the right.

  The little girl had long, golden hair that fell in ringlets around her shoulders. Her eyes reminded Victoria of her own. She was smiling, but it was a strange smile, a touch sad. Maybe scared? It was a hard smile to pin down. Victoria had been trying for ten years.

  The compass on the other side was as different and special as was the locket itself. Unlike other compasses, it was not flat and did not point to four different directions. Rather, it was spherical and possessed five bearings: North, East, West, South – and either Up or Down, depending on its mood. At least that was what Victoria attributed its fluxes to. It seemed to have a personality of its own.

  In the end, Victoria had no idea what either of these images meant. She only knew that when she needed comfort, she sequestered herself in private, reached for this necklace, and put it on. Wearing it brought her a sense of peace. It seemed to help clear her mind of clutter and distractions.

  It helped her think.

  She wanted it with her before setting out to hide for the first round of her Game with Victor Black. If there was a chance she would never again see the inside of this room, she wanted the pendant with her.