“Tomorrow,” Ash said firmly. “How’s your head?”
With a jolt of surprise, Cooper realized that the dreaded back-lash headache had been pounding inside his skull. “It wasn’t just the people talking, then?”
“I imagine not. Even if you’re borrowing from the sword, or from Jared, it’s still a new skill. You’re using your own system to process it all,” Ash replied sensibly. “Come on, let’s get you some reishi and get you to bed.”
As the bitter astringency of the mushroom extract echoed on Cooper’s taste buds and the world fell away from him in the darkness of the bedroom, he relished the weight of Ash’s head on his shoulder. “I love you,” he whispered. Then he fell asleep.
CHAPTER 12
Russ woke up to the whooping racket of emergency vehicles. He sat up, panicked and confused.
This room was not his room. The paint on these walls... wasn’t the stark white of his rental apartment. Its greenness brought forth a memory of brined olives, and hangover, and fear.
Now the deep, familiar claxon of fire engines joined to the alarmed shrieking of an ambulance. He slapped his cheeks several times in a staccato that always woke him up. In the world of high voltage power lines, emergency vehicles spelled trouble.
His kind of trouble.
Russ rolled off the queen-size bed, only vaguely recalling that yes, last night he’d come over to meet Paul’s gang. He had ended up crashing at somebody’s house. He had slept in his briefs and a blue undershirt.
No time to hunt for socks.
Russ jumped into his jeans, slipped on his rubber-soled boots, and tore the bedroom door open.
A small hallway with another door opened up. The dim dusk of the late October early morning flooded the downstairs in darkness, as though he was looking into deep water.
Russ sat up on the smooth railing and slid down, jumping off before then newel post hit him. Few quick leaps to the front door – unlock, dammit! – and he was out on an unfamiliar little street with a few rowhouses on one side, and just a weedy construction site on the other.
The sun began to paint peach streaks in the sky to the east, above the 40th Street Bridge. It rose on its gray stone pillars, with its supporting arches like lacy, sky-blue steel topped off with a delicate, antiquated railing way up high.
The fire engine honked again, trying to make its way through unusually dense traffic. Russ knew this wasn’t just the rush-hour crawl across the river, no, this was... oh, an accident.
Just a crash, a kinetic collision of two strange vehicles, driven by two people who were not his students, and who had not made a fatal error in the lab, or on their first job.
He squinted.
A faint, purplish haze hovered over the cars, with an occasional neon pink spike marking an electric vehicle. The street lights were off at this hour, and the traffic light he could feel but could not see operated without mishap. He caught the scent of river mud and car exhaust instead of the reek of charred flesh, which he had been dreading.
“What’s wrong, Russ?” Paul’s sleepy voice, and his unmistakable bioelectric field, had him turn around. He did so slowly, sucking in air and willing the adrenaline spike to subside.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” Russ breathed in, then out, hoping the air would cleanse his stress away.
“You’re making fists,” Paul noted.
Russ looked down. Yep, there they were, tight and white around the knuckles. He drew another deep breath and exhaled, spreading his arms to the sides and forcing his fingers apart as far as they would go. “I didn’t know whose emergency that was,” he said, as though it explained everything. It didn’t, of course, but this wasn’t the time to go into the close calls he had seen, nor the few cases of electrical shock and critical burns. Those tragic cases his instruction had failed to prevent, where CPR didn’t help.
Nor was this the time to explain that when someone was in contact with a live wire, Russ was the only one who could touch them. Push them away. Or, even better, push the live wire away.
“Don’t worry,” Paul said with a reassuring smile. “This happens sometimes. We’re close to a hospital, so we get a good bit of ambulance traffic on the bridge. You’ll get used to it.” He ran his fingers through his mess of morning hair, making it sparkle in the dusky dawn like a cat’s before a storm. “Except this one wasn’t one of our accidents.”
The way he said that, Russ got the impression that yes, sometimes the “gang” had their own emergencies, their own accidents. Maybe they had to do with all that power stuff they were talking about the night before – unless he had imagined it.
Then Russ remembered the one, critical detail of what had transpired: he wasn’t crazy. Or, if he was, his flavor of crazy had nothing to do with seeing a purplish-pink hue surround live circuits, computers, appliances. No, he was only seeing their electromagnetic fields.
Only seeing. Only resisting.
After over a quarter of a century of hiding the “fun colors” he could see, and which had disturbed his parents so much, after all these years of thinking he was nuts and gone and mental, he was free.
And he wasn’t alone – there were others like him, other men and women who could see, and do, what most people could not. They didn’t flaunt their skills, or gifts, or their curses. They merely worked with them and around them to live their life as normally as possible, and unless last night’s snippets of conversation gave him the wrong impression, these people had learned to hone their skills and turn them to good use.
Like he had, in his awkward and rudimentary way. Saving a life or two definitely counted as putting his unusual resistance to electrical current to good use, although he had done little to fine-tune his control. If anything, he shut his inner eye (was there really such a thing as an inner eye?) and hoped the colors would go away.
He had thought his mind had been playing tricks on him, except he wasn’t imagining Paul’s electrical discharge right now because Paul brushed his hand against his own shirt just then, and a scent of burned cotton drifted to him on the soft morning air.
“Fuck,” Paul said, frustrated as he cocked his hip out and peered at his singed white shirt. “I better dump this charge before I cause an accident.”
This was a teaching moment for Paul, and just maybe, this might also be a learning moment for Russ. He extended his hand. “Do you want me to ground you?”
Paul hesitated. “Is it gonna be weird when I say I’d rather take a shower?” He bit his lip. “Really, I don’t want to hurt you. There’s always a lot in the morning.”
“Really,” Russ said, fascinated. He ached to ask whether a morning surge was akin to having morning wood. He wanted to know what it was like to let it go, whether the release of all that power was the same as having an orgasm – and these thoughts popped up only because this was Paul, the Paul with the kiss. He didn’t want to call the kiss “electrifying,” because that was just a dumb joke, and nobody could electrify Russ anyway.
It had felt good, though. Better than good – delicious. He could live on kisses like that. He could...
He halted his train of thought. All that would have to wait until they got to know each other better. Watching Paul struggle made him realize how badly he wanted to help him. The connection they had shared before had not been just another accident.
Power calls to power. He had read that in a book somewhere, a book about magic users and their magical horses, and he wondered whether it was true. He wondered whether the author had experienced something like that in her own life, or whether she had just made it up. Wasn’t there a kernel of truth in everything?
And if power called to power, he and Paul would have been drawn to one another even outside of his classroom. Somehow, eventually, they would run across each other, most likely with Russ cleaning up Paul’s mess or trying to solve the mystery of blown circuits around town.
Russ realized Paul was just standing there, not saying anything and not going inside, either. “What’s wrong?”
“I, uh. I have this morning routine, but that’s at our house. I can ground myself on the plumbing in the shower, but I seem to recall that not all the houses have their original copper pipes, and I think Hank’s bath tub is fiberglass, not cast iron.”
“You don’t want to melt Hank’s bathroom down,” Russ said, suddenly understanding. He looked up the street. “Your house, then?”
Paul shook his head. “I’d have to touch the house, and I’m too charged. I’d blow the circuits and all the clocks would have to get reset.” He groaned. “It wouldn’t be the first time, but still.” He peered across the construction site, where a backhoe and a bulldozer sat by their unfinished tasks. “The river.” He looked at Russ and through him, as though he was weighing his worth. “Want to come along?”
“Sure,” Russ said, and was surprised to see the relief in Paul’s eyes. “I don’t have to get in, do I? The water must be cold by now.”
“It’s not like we’re swimming across,” Paul waved his hand dismissively, sending a trail of sparks and a whiff of ozone in his direction. “Sorry,” he said, pulling his hand back and tucking it in his jeans’ pocket. “But anyway, Ash is the one who swims across.” In a lower voice, a whisper that Russ could barely catch, he said, “Ash said he can’t drown. But don’t tell people, they’ll think he’s weird.”
THE ALLEGHENY RIVER sprawled before them in all his glory. His, because Ash always insisted that he was the Old Man River, and considering water was Ash’s element, Paul trusted him to know best. The ancient, weathered concrete of the loading dock slipped under Paul’s bare feet with familiar smooth pebbles of its exposed aggregate, and the rough, gray connecting pieces of what Cooper called the “matrix.” He couldn’t easily ground his morning surge into the slab itself, not even with the conductive steel mesh that was embedded within its bulk.
He needed the water itself, fluid and conductive and so vast, nothing or no one could get hurt from his release.
“I’ll go down the side and slip in, okay?” He pointed to the upstream end of the dock, where a staircase of rough stones and discarded railroad ties made the passage to the river bank possible. “You can come along, if you want, but don’t get in until I tell you I’m done.”
To his surprise, Russ had a curious expression raise his eyebrows way up, although he didn’t look in the least concerned. “You’ll be like a human electric eel,” he said.
Was that a joke?
As Paul looked up and down the bank, making sure he had enough privacy to strip naked, he wondered at Russ and his nonchalant acceptance of his uncontrollable electric surges. He was joking about it now. Nobody had ever joked about Paul's problem before, and Paul wasn’t entirely sure how he should feel about it.
He turned his back to Russ, who wasn’t exactly staring, but who wasn’t not looking either, and dropped his jeans and leg-briefs and the T-shirt he had slept in. The clothing was piled on top of his rubber-soled shoes, only Russ was here, and the cool water of the Allegheny spread before him, offering solace.
Paul stepped in, navigating the algae-slick stones. As soon as his feet got wet, the electric charge began to slowly drain. If he could only get waist-deep and submerge, he could dump his power all at once - but once the water hit his thighs, his feet began sinking in deep and squishy mud. “Oh, it’s a bit muddy here!” he called out for Russ’s benefit, and flopped down on the water.
The excess charge drained from him so fast, he gasped with shock. He had never, in fact, tried this. Now that he knew he could, he would add the river into his power-dumping repertoire of available techniques.
“Are you okay?” Russ’s yell was all panic and upset. As Paul floated peacefully on his back and enjoyed seeping his bioelectric field into the water around him, the tranquility of the moment was just about destroyed by splashing and swearing from the bank.
Paul flipped over to look.
Russ was naked, just as he was, doing his best to wade in and not be tripped by the treacherous mud.
DAMN THE SILT. There was just so much, and... Russ pulled his foot and calf out of the sucky sediment, and flopped in face-first, just like Paul had done. Cold water drove the air out of his lungs, but once he took a few steps away from the bank, where he could stand without sinking in, he found his breathing calmed down and the water came across as merely cool, and not dangerously glacial.
Whatever had possessed him to undress in public? Even though they were alone, despite the privacy screen offered by the tall trees on one end and the empty river on the other, they were in public. They were skinny-dipping within Pittsburgh’s city limits, and Russ hoped that none of the police up on the bridge would climb over the concrete barrier that divided the road from the narrow sidewalk and look over the railing before the accident was contained, and the vehicular traffic could resume its crawl.
The point remained that Russ had acted quite out of character. He didn’t know whether it was the driving need of Paul to not hurt others that did it, or the flashes of loneliness in his light brown eyes, or whether the sight of Paul’s broad shoulders and round, creamy buttocks had entirely deprived him of sound judgment.
Yet here he was, naked in the river and hoping that the water was murky enough to disguise his state of undress.
The sound of Paul’s laughter eased his mind.
Paul was alright. He didn’t hurt himself by dumping all that charge too fast.
Even now, fifteen feet from Paul, the water had a curious tingle to it. “Did you let go of all your charge, Paul?” Russ called out, sputtering as he let his head surface. “There’s got to be a better place here somewhere. Or is the river all mud?”
“Don’t know,” Paul called out. “But there’s a creek flowing in next to the bridge. Let’s check it out!”
As they swam against the lazy current, Russ generated just enough heat to counter the cool water. “This is nice,” he said with surprise.
“Yeah. No wonder Ash loves it so much.” Paul stroked ahead, treaded water for a short while, then stood. “We’re downstream of that little creek that flows in, and there are rocks to stand on!”
Russ swam closer to Paul, extended his arms to his sides for balance, and let his left foot reach down gingerly. The mud was still there, albeit in a layer thin enough to tolerate. Under it, he felt the irregular, round shapes of mid-sized boulders.
He stood up and breathed in relief. “This is better. That mud was wicked!”
“Yeah.” Paul gave him a lopsided grin. “I can’t believe you’re skinny-dipping with me, Dr. Yantar!”
“I’m here just to make sure you don’t get in trouble,” Russ said, shooting for an aloof and impersonal tone. It came out as fake as when he had tried to act back in high school.
Paul snorted. “You better come save me, then. I think I might be sinking!”
Their eyes met, and when Russ searched the humor in Paul’s warm gaze for any clue as to his intent, he saw only enthusiastic desire.
Slowly, carefully, Russ bounced in the water toward Paul, feeling like an astronaut on a Moon walk. The water tingled some more, and when Russ squinted, he saw a hint of purple haze around Paul’s head and shoulders, an effect which dissipated in the river current as though it was carnival cotton candy.
“You’re melting,” he commented. “Your charge is getting washed off and it’s almost gone.”
“It’s never quite gone,” Paul said with a level of gravitas appropriate for an executive meeting, or a doctor’s office, or... or anywhere other than a naked swim too close to a populated bridge. “I can feel it, and if you come closer, you’ll feel it, too.”
Their hands touched. A pleasurable shiver passed through Russ as that frisson of energy passed through him, a lot weaker than ever before but still there. Paul pulled him closer, too fast for Russ to keep his footing, and Russ stumbled into Paul’s embrace.
“Hey,” Paul whispered.
“Hey,” Russ whispered back, suddenly all hot and needy, as though the river
was just a pleasant bubble bath.
They leaned closer, touching their lips. Soft. Paul’s mouth was made for kissing, for pleasure, for carefree smiles, and Russ yielded to him and sank into the sensation of being held, and kissed, and electrified all at once.
CHAPTER 13
Ash spun, weightless in the dim current of the Allegheny River, and laughed. A few bubbles escaped his mouth, bubbles he did not need while his skin still had that pearlescent sheen. He stretched his long body in the cool water, knowing he could thoroughly relish his early water swim for at least twenty minutes more.
So what if he ran out of air? Who cared whether his skin reverted to that of an ordinary person and stopped extracting oxygen from the water that flowed past him? Five smooth kicks, and he would reach the surface again, and breathe. His stamina was good enough to swim across the river and back half a dozen times. He had never thought to test it. To Ash Ravenna, swimming was as natural as walking, and staying under this long was a special skill he had learned as a baby in his mother’s arms.
He had sneaked out of Cooper’s sleepy embrace and out of their house before the sun kissed the sky farther upstream. So much has happened in such a short time that Ash kept waking up. Afraid that his turning and would wake Cooper, he decided he might as well wash off the night’s murky sediment and clear his mind of anxious dreams. He wasn’t going to fall asleep again, not for any useful length of time, and to Ash, river-walking was a form of meditation.
A way to sort new information.
A means to reconcile Cooper’s newfound ability to see power currents – as well as the apparent presence of Cooper’s cousin’s spirit inside the old, half-ruined sword he had given to Cooper only a few weeks ago.
River-walking was Ash’s time-tested method of adapting to rapid change, such as the discovery of another talented person who could do and see something quite unexpected, and who was in dire need of training. Although, at least in case of Russ, he didn’t seem to be as destructive as Paul, or Cooper, or even as Ash himself. Russ was a power-sink, much like Hank and his Void, and Russ assumed that his ability applied only to electric charges. Whether this assertion held any water would soon be tested by Cooper’s uncle Owen.
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