Power Mage 2

by Hondo Jinx

  He slipped effortlessly into the dark cavern at the center of his mind, where his inner self stood once more before the strands. Five remained gray and lifeless as the arms of a dead cactus, but the red and yellow strands burned more brightly than ever before.

  He concentrated for a moment, wondering about their power, and his new psi score came effortlessly into his mind.

  172.

  Killing Junior and Marco had boosted him three points. Was that from a predetermined point-and-a-half boost for each kill, or had he received a percentage of their power?

  Ultimately, he supposed it didn’t much matter. He’d just keep on killing assholes and figure out the finer details as he went along.

  When he examined his stats more closely, he noticed that the yellow strand registered two points less than the red. That was curious. He guessed he was probably always burning a little Seeker energy just keeping his senses on high alert.

  He reached out and touched the red strand and pulled gently, drawing the energy slightly forward. Then he released it and did the same with the yellow strand, pulling and releasing a modest portion.

  The separate energies hummed side by side like parallel power lines. There was no arcing, no attraction or repulsion, no sense of conflict between the powers.

  Good.

  He needed the girls to teach him specific actions from their disciplines. Until then, he would concentrate on doing something Sage had mentioned.

  Splicing.

  In the past, the strongest power mages had magnified their power by splicing strands, borrowing energy from one to replenish another. Some had even managed to supercharge actions with the married force of two full-strength strands.

  Which to a degree explained the Culling. People had feared power mages so much that the Order had orchestrated a swift and merciless mass execution around the globe.

  Again, he wondered about his parents, who they had been and why they had given him up and why they had disguised and suppressed his psionic power so thoroughly that he would still be a fuggle if it weren’t for Aftershock snapping his neck and that little cat at Mallory Square forcing him to push beyond his natural limits.

  He cleared these thoughts and focused once more on the task at hand.

  Splicing was dangerous, even when mating a fresh strand to a depleted one, and the more power one tried to harness, the more danger he invited. Most power mages failed to splice at all; some spliced two strands with varying degrees of success; a few outliers supposedly managed a triple splice, though the veracity of those tales remained very much in question. Attempting anything beyond a three-strand splice was madness, pure and simple.

  If a power mage went too fast or overloaded a strand, he could kill a strand, fry his psionic wiring, or boiling his brains, leaving him catatonic, insane, or flat-out dead. These failures were legendary, passed down through the generations like mythology, the culture’s warning against hubris echoing down through the ages in stories of once-great skulls cracked wide open and leaking brains that steamed like a shrimp boil.

  But if there was one thing Brawley wanted to avoid, it was running out of ammo, and a depleted strand was the same as an empty magazine, rendering his psi mage abilities as pointless as the trigger of an unloaded gun.

  He reached out again and took loose hold of the red strand. As usual, he could feel the warmth and vibration of his telekinetic potential. He considered pressing the red strand into the yellow but thought better of it and instead concentrated on his inner self for a second and reached out with its free hand and touched the yellow strand with his fingertips.

  More energy there, not so warm as the red energy but buzzing harder and faster. Yellow force flowed into his fingers and through his hand and started up his arm. He let go only to realize the same thing had been happening with the other strand. His inner self released the red strand and stood there, one arm yellow as lightning to one elbow, the other arm red as hell’s hinges all the way to the shoulder.

  He didn’t know what he was doing. Didn’t know what this meant. So he drew back out of his mind and stood there on the medicine ball for half a minute, breathing the night air and feeling a faint echo of the buzzing in both arms, neither of which, he was happy to note, glowed here in the real world.

  But the energy was in there. No doubt about that. But what did that mean? Was it like having a round in the chamber? He didn’t know. Couldn’t know. Not without asking the girls.

  What he could do was experiment.

  The road was dead quiet. Across the street, the clerk from the drugstore stood beneath the glowing sign, smoking a cigarette and staring into the upper darkness as if the night sky might hold answers to notions long pondered.

  Brawley waited for her to go back inside. He checked the highway again and then focused on his left arm, which tingled from fingertips to clavicle.

  A light breeze sighed across the road, east to west. The pale disc of a plastic coffee cup lid hopped and skittered across the empty road. Down around the curve, the traffic light thunked, once more washing the night blood red.

  He raised his left arm and flicked his index finger, and the windblown lid froze in midair as if gripped in an invisible hand. Up and down his arm the buzzing increased, growing warmer and more insistent, and he had the sudden urge to crush the lid and hurl it away.

  Instead, he imagined what he wanted to do, and the lid floated slowly and evenly back across the road, spinning like a miniature frisbee thrown in slow motion and disappeared into the trash can to one side of the drugstore door.

  Not bad.

  The buzzing still felt strong in his arm. Both arms, he realized.

  He concentrated, wondering about his psi score, and had his answer an instant later.

  Force mage energy: 145 points.

  Truth mage energy: 151 points.

  So he’d spent twenty-seven red points and nineteen yellow since last checking, which suggested that the energy buzzing in both arms had already counted against his totals.

  This invited more questions. How many of the twenty-seven points he’d drawn into his arm now remained? How many had the lid trick burned? How long could he hold this energy at the ready? Was it stable? Or would unused energy, once drawn, begin to bleed away?

  He would ask the girls later. Maybe they would know, maybe they wouldn’t. He figured they would probably have to just kind of feel their way through much of this.

  Speaking of which…

  He brought his fingertips gingerly together.

  Nothing happened.

  Maybe to splice he needed to release some juice. Best to try one at a time.

  He braced himself and counted to three, imagining a slow, steady release of yellow energy and felt a buzzing force tingle from his fingertips.

  But the energy did not pass into his other hand, and there was no splicing. He just sort of turned it loose.

  A second later, information rocked his mind with a shotgun blast of facts concerning the patch of rutted earth at his feet. He could feel the topography of the ground, the ridges and hollows of the ruts, the crenulated impressions of tire tracks like the moldering ruins of some ancient civilization fading into the past. Then his mind latched of its own accord onto a coin half-buried in the sandy soil, a disc of dull copper that hung in his mind like a blood moon in a dark sky.

  It was a 1929 wheat penny that had been pitched from the window of a passing car by a seven-year-old boy in an act of casual impulsivity. Done and over and forgotten. The boy was a fool named Theodore Driscoll, Teddy to his friends, who weren’t really friends.

  Teddy was a large boy, large and mean and quiet by nature at the point when he’d flicked the penny from the window. As a toddler, he had been mocked as fat and clumsy. But the mockery ended when Teddy got his height in first grade, after which point he initiated friendships with the sole purpose of winning over weaker boys so in order to later betray them, bit by bit, in an unceasing experiment meant to test the limits of trust and friendship and
forgiveness.

  Later, long after the pitching away of the forgotten penny, he joined the Navy and lost his gut and put on a lot of muscle. But inside, he was still Teddy, so he took a weak submariner named Darryl under his wing. Darryl looked up to Teddy, almost worshipping his big muscles and booming voice.

  During shore leave, Teddy would take Darryl out on roaring benders, pushing drinks on the smaller man. Then Teddy would throw a beefy arm around Darryl’s narrow shoulders and lead the blind-drunk sailor to a motel, where he would lay him on one of the beds and wait for him to start snoring.

  Next Teddy would stand beside the cot and urinate on the unconscious sailor. Finished, he would zip up and wake the drunk and say, his voice blending pity and saintly patience, “Oh man, Darryl. You got so drunk, you pissed yourself again.”

  Teddy would help Darryl out of the urine-soaked uniform and into the shower. He would get the smaller man toweled off and into clean clothes, cooing the whole time about how Darryl had to get his act together. Darryl was distraught with embarrassment and guilt.

  Next, Teddy would tell Darryl to sit down, and Teddy would strip the bed and put on clean sheets. Finally, Teddy would tuck the smaller man in like a loving mother, softly chastising Darryl’s embarrassing behavior and promising, to Darryl’s inestimable gratitude, to carry the small man’s humiliating secret to the grave.

  And Teddy was good to his word. He told no one, not about Darryl or any of the strange scenarios he had engineered in the lives of several other “friends,” hoarding these carefully manufactured secrets like a serial killer might collect the jewelry, hair bows, or fingernails of his victims.

  Later, Teddy and Darryl parted ways, shipping off to separate fleets. The submarine upon which Teddy was serving crept into the shallow waters west of Luzon and torpedoed a Nosaki-class food ship. Before the submarine could escape, Japanese destroyers hammered it with depth charges, splitting the hull, and sinking the sub to the ocean floor.

  In his last seconds, as sea water rushed into the sub, Teddy recognized the futility of his fellows’ scrambling efforts, swung his wrench, and caved in the skull of Machinists’ Mate Garrett Blaine Phipps, Jr., a left-handed nineteen-year-old farm boy from Iowa who had enlisted primarily to impress a busty classmate with the prettiest eyes he had ever—

  “What the hell?” Brawley said, snapping out of it as he hit the ground. He’d fallen off the medicine ball. And thank the good Lord for that.

  He lay for a second, blinking up at the indistinct stars high above in the hazy tropical sky, feeling half-sick from the disturbing information that had grabbed hold of his mind.

  1931. That was the year Teddy had pitched the penny from the window. May 10th, 1931, to be precise, the very same day that 1270 miles away in Burlington, New Jersey, golf ball-sized hail fell in Burlington, smashing auto tops and windshields, causing an estimated $300,000 in damage, and—

  Brawley shook his head and snapped off this line of thought before it could suck him into another rushing river of unwanted information.

  The yellow energy he had released—and by the buzzing that still filled his forearm halfway to the elbow, he reckoned he hadn’t released all that much—had rushed out into the world without a target or a driving question. It had fired randomly into the ground at his feet and ricocheted back into his mind with a shocking depth of information.

  He wanted no more of it.

  At the same time, curiosity crawled over his brain like a carpet of fire ants, urging him to unearth the penny.

  Pick it up and take another ride, his curiosity whispered seductively. Maybe plunge back into the life of good ol’ Teddy or take a peek into the life of the cashier who’d handed Teddy the change when he bought a Baby Ruth bar back in Boca Raton. Or toss the cashier aside like a penny and leap instead into the life story of Virginia Estancia Helms.

  Virginia was the elderly woman with whom, years later, the cashier, while under treatment for a deep vein thrombosis, had shared a hospital room. Virginia had been born in Alabama in 1864, the daughter of—

  Brawley snapped off the flow. Again. Holy shit.

  Out on the highway, a nondescript sedan passed slowly, trailing a tinny jangle of country music.

  When Nina had first broken down the seven orders, the truth mages had sounded a little lackluster in comparison with folks who could turn into animals or open gates to other universes or light things on fire with their minds.

  But this Seeker shit was powerful. And dangerous.

  He remembered Nina saying truth mages sometimes went mad, becoming hermits or worse. He thought of the chip of petrified gingko on Sage’s bracelet and recalled the madman with bugs in his beard who’d shouted at Brawley on his first night in Key West.

  Seek the past to know the future, the crazy bastard had hollered. Beware the albino tiger!

  Which sounded like the raving of a madman. But the man also said, Seven minds, seven wives, seven strands.

  At the time, Brawley had known nothing about strands or psionic orders, and he certainly couldn’t have guessed that now, a little more than a day later, he would be on a quest to secure seven wives.

  What about seeking the past to know the future? Is that what they had done with Hazel? Was the key to his future figuring out the truth about his parents?

  Did this mean the albino tiger was real, too? It sounded like pure insanity, but Brawley couldn’t be sure. His notions of the possible had opened its throttle wide after all that he’d seen and experienced over the course of the last day and a half.

  One way or the other, being a Seeker was dangerous business. Go staring at too many pennies, and you could end up like old Bug Beard. Even if the guy had shouted truth, he was still crazier than a soup sandwich.

  That was a risk of Seeking, Brawley realized. If you locked onto the truth hard enough, you ceased to matter. It would be a simple thing to go from being obsessed with truth to being possessed by it.

  Best to tread lightly.

  But the bull rider in Brawley wanted to climb back onto the larger problem and try again to splice energy. This time, he would release red energy, not yellow. Just a trickle. Simultaneously, he would attempt to consciously absorb the energy into his other hand.

  It was risky, but with so many people hunting him, he needed to learn how to splice. Otherwise, he would be no better than a pair of psi mages trapped in a single body.

  Poor odds in that. Starkly poor odds.

  A quick check of his Seeker psi score showed he was still at 151, confirming his suspicion that the energy he’d drawn had already been deducted from his visible totals.

  An engine growled in the night, approaching from the south.

  A split second later, a bull snorted in his mind, and its hooves pummeled his calm.

  Danger. That vehicle was coming for him and his women.

  Headlights appeared.

  Brawley drew his XDS and hunkered down in the high weeds bordering the turnoff.

  The approaching engine downshifted, and a dark Chevy Suburban with tinted windows emerged from the gloom. The driver killed the lights, pulled across the highway into the turnoff, and rolled to a stop twenty feet behind the RV.

  For a moment, all was silent, save for the ticking of the Suburban’s radiator and the sound of Brawley’s breathing as he crouched there, holding his pistol and forcing his mind to remain calm.

  Big vehicle. Could be a lot of people inside.

  Which people?

  Psi mob? FPI? The Order?

  The driver’s side door opened. A heavy engineer boot emerged, followed by a leg clad in black leather. The driver stepped clear of the SUV, and Brawley was staring at a painfully beautiful brunette whose muscular, tattooed body had more curves than a barrel of snakes. Jutting up over one shoulder was the curved end of what Brawley recognized as a shotgun with a pistol grip. The weapon’s sling stretched across her body, flattening the black tank top between her breasts and pulling down the black fabric to expose the upper swell of
their spherical perfection.

  Remi had come for them.

  8

  How the hell had she found them? Even if she had a Seeker on board, Brawley and the girls were cloaked, and anyone looking at the RV would see a yellow shuttle bus. Yet Remi had pulled up behind them without hesitation.

  Then he thought of the business card she’d left in his room and understood.

  Son of a bitch.

  Remi hadn’t used psionics to find them. She had put a tracking transponder in his rucksack.

  She was a crafty one.

  But if she was so smart, why was she alone?

  Foolish, that. Surprisingly foolish.

  Of course, Remi wouldn’t know about Sage. But even if she assumed that only Nina and Brawley were inside, why would she try overpowering them on her own?

  Remi didn’t seem like the type to underestimate her quarry. After all, she was still alive despite hunting fuggle criminals and rogue psi mages alike. That suggested a degree of cunning and caution. Either that or Remi really was the world’s biggest badass, the hot female version of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Chuck Norris all rolled into one.

  Remi unslung the shotgun, a stubby, black pump that was probably a Mossberg 500.

  Several items hung from her belt like scalps from the waist of a barbarian. A heavy mag light, two pairs of strangely thick handcuffs, and another pair of what looked like dog collars.

  No, not dog collars, he realized, taking in the size and composition of the metal rings. They looked like slave collars.

  Were they psionic blockers? Nina had mentioned psi-hobbles.

  Yes, his intuition responded, crackling with yellow energy. That’s exactly what they were. Psi hobbles. So were the cuffs.

  Remi crouched alongside the rear tire and pressed up against the RV, probably listening for sounds of movement within. She leaned, distracting him with side boob as she propped the shotgun against the Winnebago and messing with something on her belt.