by Hondo Jinx
During these moments, Callie sounded exactly like what she was: a grieving teenager alone in the world, driven half out of her mind by terror and ready to blow a hole in anyone who threatened her.
Dangerous yet malleable.
At least Remi hoped she was malleable.
She had to play this just right. She couldn’t become suddenly super friendly, or Callie would scare off. But she did have to manipulate the girl’s view of her. She had to win her over bit by bit while staying calm and strong, which would in turn calm the high-strung Beastie.
“Thanks for that,” Remi said, stretching her naked torso as if working out some kinks. “I feel a lot better. But I could be of more help if you would just—”
“No,” Callie interrupted. “I’m not freeing you until we find Brawley.”
“Let’s go, then,” Remi said, and started marching down the deserted street. They were probably too late. But as a bounty hunter, she had learned that few things were more valuable than near misses.
“Where are we going?” Callie asked, hurrying after her.
“Heaven and Hell,” Remi said. “It’s a super-exclusive Carnal nightclub. Basically, Eyes Wide Shut on acid.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry about it, kid.” Remi shook her head. “You’re kind of weird, you know that?”
“Why?”
“Well, on the one hand, you’re this cold-blooded killing machine, but on the other hand, you seem all sheltered and innocent.”
Callie didn’t say anything for a second. She had drawn almost even with Remi now. Close enough that if Remi wasn’t wearing the stupid hobble, she could take the pistol before Callie could even react, cat-like reflexes be damned. But with the collar, she didn’t stand a chance.
“My uncle tried to protect me,” Callie said.
“That didn’t work out so well,” Remi said.
Callie hissed, and lines of fire burned across Remi’s arm.
“What the fuck?” Remi said, slapping a hand over the shallow cuts.
Callie’s amber eyes were huge, and her ears were pinned flat. She held up the offending hand, which looked human, save for the calico fur and long claws glistening with Remi’s blood.
“Don’t joke about my uncle,” Callie said. “Now, tell me about this nightclub.”
“Carnals put on costumes, then get super high, dance, and fuck. All night, every night.”
Callie looked at her for a second, her tail twitching. Then she looked straight ahead. “That sounds weird.”
Remi blinked, a grin coming onto her face. “No shit,” she said. “You’re a virgin.”
Callie hissed and raised her claws.
“Take it easy, Psycho Kitty. I was just surprised, that’s all.”
“You’re rude,” Callie said, ears still flattened.
“Me? You’re the one who killed half a dozen people and just cut me for saying something.”
Callie’s eyes narrowed, and she nodded. “Is this it?”
“Yes,” Remi said, happy to see the door vomit a pack of laughing Carnals.
Remi walked right past them. They were typical South Beach Carnals. Perfect faces, perfect bodies, smooth skin without the tiniest scar or imperfection. Shouting laughter and talking over each other, everyone trying to be the center of attention.
Fuckwits.
She was so glad her parents had broken away and formed the motorcycle club, which lived in defiance of all this narcissistic idiocy. Even the gang’s name, The Scars, was a big old middle finger aimed straight at assholes just like these.
The Carnals glanced at Remi and disregarded her, unfazed by her naked breasts after a night of fucking and partying. They blinked a couple of times at Callie, noticing the gun, but none of them seemed concerned. And why should they be? They weren’t hobbled, after all.
Approaching the door, however, Remi made a much different impression. “Vance.”
The doorman, who’d been wearing a cool guy expression, suddenly looked like he might piss his designer jeans. “Remi. What are you doing here? I don’t have any warrants.”
“You sure about that?” she said, and just stared at him.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said. But she let him think for a second, and he said, “Right?”
“Let’s pretend you don’t,” Remi said. She reached into her remaining back pocket and pulled out the photo that had luckily survived her accident. “Have you seen this guy?”
15
Brawley fled across a dry land on wobbly legs, the parched ground crumbling to dust beneath his feet.
Only he didn’t have feet. He had hooves.
Hooves that with each shuddering step sunk into the clutching soil of the baked land across which he traveled. The plain was flat, its unrelenting sameness broken only by tufts of brittle grass, skeletal trees that stretched like gnarled hands from the cracked land, and occasional tumbleweeds, which spun past borne upon hot winds full of grit and ash and strange, otherworldly aromas.
Overhead, a familiar sky churned, lurid purple shot through with runnels of darkness like spindles of infection brindling bruised flesh.
It was the sky Brawley had seen over Nightshade Lane, only this wasn’t the Miami cemetery, and he wasn’t Brawley.
At least his body wasn’t his own.
He was a fresh-born calf, searching for his mother as he fled across this burnt and blasted wasteland. With every wobbling step, the drought-stricken country clutched at his hooves, threatening to pull him down forever beneath its pall of pale dust.
Across this nightmare landscape Brawley struggled forward. He needed to find his mother, his father, his herd. But he was weak and alone, ill-prepared for this long journey beneath a churning purple sky, and an unknown menace pressed down heavily upon him, further slowing his stumbling retreat.
Brawley cried out with a terrified blat, which evaporated weakly into the hot, dry air.
“Beware the…” a wild voice warned before fading into the dim vastness at the far reaches of this boundless, nightmare country.
Brawley couldn’t place the voice, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the spirit of the warning. The ultimate truth behind it.
Because something was coming for him.
Something great and terrible, something—
Its roar boomed down like thunder from the churning purple sky.
Brawley gave another blat and surrendered to his terror, trundling across the powdery land, which sucked at his shanks with ever step, slowing and tiring him, doing its best to pull him down and down and down, where it could end him, bury him beneath its brittle surface, and reduce him to so much dust.
At last, he sunk all the way to his heaving chest and could run no farther.
He cried out one last time to his mother, but the sound of his voice was lost as the great predator roared again, coming for him.
Eyes rolling with terror, Brawley twisted his head around and stared with incinerating horror up into the roiling purple sky, where an enormous pair of malevolent gray eyes glared down at him, shining with primordial hatred and triumph.
A deep voice shook the land. “Power Mage.”
Brawley bolted upright, gasping for air, his naked body covered in sweat. Beside him, the girls stirred, murmuring lazily, and faded again into slumber.
He drew a deep breath in through his nostrils and held it, thinking, Just a dream. That’s it. Just a dream.
Only he could still feel the hot wind on his face, and his heart continued to jackhammer with the terror he’d felt.
In the waking world, he had pretty much mastered fear. As much as any sane man could, that was. But in that blasted dreamscape, he’d been laid open to raw horror that still had his hands shaking.
Those eyes.
Those gray eyes.
Hazel had seen them in his future. Gray eyes in the sky, searching for him.
What did this dream mean? Had the watcher in the sky spotted him?
He forced his m
ind into a calm state. Then he released a trickle of Seeker juice and checked his cloak. It still thrummed at full power.
All right, then. They were safe. For now, at least.
Glancing at the clock, he realized they had only hit the rack twenty minutes earlier.
Best to lay back and catch some sleep.
Yeah, right. He was wired.
He rose and pulled on his jockey shorts and crossed the large hotel room and tugged a curtain aside to peer out at the breaking day. They were ten floors up in a high-rise suite. The sun was a burning arch on the horizon, dappling the sparkling ocean in hues of blood and fire.
Brawley dropped the curtain, walked into the kitchen, and set to making coffee.
It was a nice suite with a king-sized bed and a fancy bathroom and one of those big-ass showers with a tile floor and glass walls and a two showerheads the size of sunflowers.
They were short on cash, but he’d gone ahead and paid with his credit card.
He wasn’t worried about the money trail. Renting a room in Miami was a far cry from buying a wheelbarrow load of ammo back in the Keys.
Generally speaking, though, he avoided using his credit card. Cash was real. Credit was smoke and mirrors. And it’s a lot easier to keep tabs on your spending when you can see your wallet getting thinner every time you buy something.
But he reckoned these women deserved a splurge after all they’d been through. Besides, this was as close to a honeymoon as they would get anytime in the near future, so why not do it up right?
Looking around at the empty beer cans and pizza boxes and remembering how they’d partied in the shower, he figured they were off to a pretty good start.
Cutting loose would be easier after they ditched Miami and headed west. Well, it’d be easier so long as he could meet a nice Carnal girl.
Maybe things would work out with Bella. She seemed all right and was pretty enough to make a man plow through a stump. Maybe it would work. They’d see later, after he spent some time with her.
Like Grandma Hayes used to say, you can’t tell what’s in the pickle barrel ‘til you pop the lid.
And since bonding was forever, he’d be a damn fool to let himself be blinded by Bella’s beauty. A pretty smile doesn’t mean shit if it’s full of ugly words.
He opened the fridge and got a slice of cold pizza and popped a beer, then sat down on the couch, chewing and sipping and thinking.
Big day ahead.
He wondered what they would find on Nightshade Lane. Something important, according to Hazel. Could be good or bad, he reckoned, but something he needed to see, one way or the other.
First, though, he’d hit the bank. His curiosity wasn’t too happy about putting off Nightshade Lane, but he kept his promises, and if he went and got himself and the girls killed in that cemetery, who would send Tammy the money he owed?
No one, that’s who.
So bank first, then the cemetery.
After that, he knew the girls wanted to pick up a few things. Shampoo, lotion, that sort of stuff.
And costumes for the party at Heaven and Hell. They actually seemed excited about that. He wasn’t much for playing dress up himself.
The rest of the day they’d just lay low. He had tossed Remi’s transponder and cleared the rest of the RV, but the bounty hunter was still out there somewhere and might even be searching for them again by now. Remi and God only knew how many others.
So yeah, they’d lay low. Maybe screw and do some training.
Speaking of which, he thought, polishing off the pizza crust and knocking back the last of the beer, no time like the present.
He slipped instantly into the cavern of his mind, where the strands were as he’d left them. Two bright and pulsing, five others dead as driftwood.
Which one was his Carnal strand?
He had no clue.
But his yellow strand trembled, bleeding off a little shine, and he focused on a dead strand on the far edge of the strand.
That’s it. That’s the Carnal strand. Bring that fucker to life, and you’ll have super strength, speed, and healing.
Glancing at the others, he wondered at the power lying dormant within the lifeless strands. Brought to life, they would allow him to control thoughts, machines, beasts, and… what, exactly?
He still didn’t have a good handle on what Cosmics did, and he avoided forming a direct question now. He knew Cosmics were strange and that they used their energy to tap into external sources of power. Magic, basically. And shit from other planes of existence.
A long time ago, when a Cosmic named Eleazar Blackthorne stirred up trouble, the Order smashed the Arcane Mages. Now the Cosmics were few in number and lived on the fringes of the psionic community. They often went Chaotic.
That was all he knew about them. But that was enough for now.
Because what he really needed now was to learn how to splice. Otherwise, even if he opened all seven strands, he was still just the psi mage equivalent of a Swiss Army knife.
And one dude able to do a bunch of different shit didn’t stand much of a chance against thirty or forty mages who could do the same stuff.
Splicing was the holy grail here.
All right, then, he thought. Get to work.
First, he drew his arms full of juice, the way he had alongside the road earlier that night. Nina and Sage had never heard of anyone storing energy like that and figured only power mages could do it.
They also didn’t know why someone would want to store force in their body instead of drawing it from their minds, but Brawley was happy to have it. He wasn’t experienced like they were, so unless he was in a state of biological desperation, as he had been with Marco, drawing energy still took several seconds. That was bad news if he squared off with a veteran force mage.
The energy in his arms gave him a quick draw.
Once he’d reloaded both arms with buzzing force, he considered trying to pass energy from one hand to the other. But his gut called bullshit on that, suggesting that once energy was drawn, it couldn’t be fused.
Besides, who knew what hell he’d raise, trying to splice externally drawn force inside this luxury suite?
So he went back inside, coaxed forth a bit of both strands, and stood there in his mind, trying to figure out just how in the hell he was supposed to splice them together.
Holding that question in his mind, he released a dash of yellow energy. A second later, he felt compelled to wind the glowing strands together.
His inner self crouched down and wound the warm, buzzing strands back and forth, twisting them like he was braiding ropes for extra strength.
When he finished, nothing happened. He just stood there holding two separate strands woven together.
But then a notion occurred to him, and he hauled back a little, drawing a bit more of each strand, and—
Holy shit!
The braided strands bucked, knocking his inner self off balance, then yanked hard to one side, glowing bright white.
Brawley held tight.
The fused strand jerked hard, lifting like a giant serpent and whipping him into the air.
Brawley threw an arm around the strand and hauled back with everything he had, trying to muscle it, but the glowing braid just lashed harder, shaking him back and forth like a dog killing a possum.
He started hunting his balance, but it was too little too late. The supercharged strand arched back and shot forward, cracked like a bullwhip, and threw Brawley into the darkness.
Brawley snapped back to consciousness on the couch and sat there, panting and bewildered, much as he had after waking from his nightmare.
Only instead of filling him with dread and restlessness, this experience had charged him up like a lightning rod in a thunderstorm.
Sure, he felt kind of twitchy inside, and one hell of a headache was setting up shop in his noggin, but he had done it. He had spliced.
The double strand had kicked the shit out of him, but he’d spliced the two power s
ources, and that meant he would master them. After all, every cowboy fell off his first bull. What mattered was if he climbed up again.
And Brawley didn’t have an ounce of quit in him.
16
Remi woke chained atop the uncomfortable bed by hobble cuffs. Dawn illuminated the large window at the front of the shitty motel room, slicing through the slats of the decrepit louver shades and bringing the stale, hot air to life with sparkling motes. Only this wasn’t fairy dust. It was just plain old dust, soot and dandruff and skin cells.
The light hadn’t awakened her. Sounds had.
Soft moaning and a faint, rhythmic squeaking from the other cot, where Callie lay on her back, pale and naked, masturbating atop the covers.
Remi was surprised. Not only by what the girl was doing but also by how she looked, lying there half-exposed in alternating strips of light and darkness. In her human form, Callie was just a spindly little thing, all limbs and ribs and hip bones.
Girl needs a sandwich, Remi thought. Along with better judgment. And maybe a Xanax.
Callie’s upper face was lost to shadow, as were her breasts. In the shaft of light between, Callie bit her lip and arched her long, pale neck. One skinny arm cut across the taut expanse of her visible abdomen and disappeared again in the shadows that covered her from waist to midthigh.
But there was no mistaking what was going on over there on the other side of the room. The nervous little cat girl was rubbing one out. Feverishly, it seemed.
Probably self-medicating, Remi figured. Trying to relieve tension and maybe catch some sleep.
Which made sense, because the girl was wrapped tighter than a weasel’s asshole. That much had come increasingly clear with every minute they spent together.
Callie wasn’t just afraid. She was fucking terrified.
The cat girl had come to the ends of her personal earth. She was naked because she was alone in the world, an orphan without even a scrap of clothing. With her uncle dead, she had no one and nothing. Well, nothing except a Desert Eagle, Remi’s psi hobbles, and a stolen truck full of worthless junk, much of which would probably be stolen overnight, given the state of the neighborhood where they had found this cut-rate motel.