Between (Alternate Places Book 2)

by Power, P. S.

  Alternate Places: Book Two

  Between

  P.S. Power

  Orange Cat Publishing

  Copyright 2014

  Alternate Places is a completely new series that takes place in a unique universe. It is similar in some minor respects to Other Places (the series) but takes place in a different reality scheme. No matter what you're thinking this is, it's different than that. It contains adult themes, sexual conduct and violence. This series is not recommended for those under fourteen or people that are sensitive to adult material. Reader discretion is advised.

  Chapter one

  Zack recognized the woman in front of him. Older looking, being in her sixties at a guess, with touches of gray in her hair. Though he could tell, thanks to some recent lessons about such things, that she'd colored her hair regularly for a long time. Letting it lapse finally into gray within the last six months or so. Her face had a fine tracery of lines to it, and seemed soft. Signs of having lived a good, normal life, untouched by the kinds of strangeness he lived with each day.

  “I don't know if you remember me...” The older woman began, her Shadow self, the representation of her subconscious mind and inner being a thing that Zack had to fight to ignore, told him her name, Martha.

  “Christmas centerpieces with apple-spice candles? I think... And forgive me if I get this wrong... Martha?” One of the few perks he'd found over the years of communicating with people's inner selves, was having them prompt you with their names and basic information. He smiled at her, using his own Shadow self as well as his regular face. Everyone could see these things, in fact they did see them all the time. The only difference being that most people didn't realize they did it. Zack did.

  The woman looked up at him, a bit surprised at being remembered so well, and smiled back. He could tell what she thought about what she saw, since like everyone, she told him pretty plainly. A thin, pale young man, with sandy blond hair, cut short, wearing nice clothes. Almost too nice for a store clerk, a kind face that she'd never seen without a smile on it for long. If she were forty years younger, she told him, or even twenty, given the new trends that allowed older women to date younger men...

  Before Zack could blush at where her mind went with this, she continued on.

  “People loved the candles. I couldn't keep the orders filled this year. A friend of mine and myself are actually going in to designing and making them full time, I have some samples here...” Picking up the box she had put on the floor, Martha opened it and set an array of wreaths and table centerpieces, made with fake plants and flowers mostly, held together, he noticed, with green craft wire. Subtly woven within somehow making it almost invisible. Almost as if the fake plants had grown that way. It was very well done. In the center, of each, a spot remained opened for a large candle to sit.

  He examined them closely, her inner self filling him in calmly about what she wanted from him, which had returned to being all business he noted, to his great relief. Not that the older looking woman seemed unwelcome to him. Really there was no time for another relationship right now. That was all.

  Zack found himself wondering then if he had problems setting boundaries, and not for the first time he realized that he very clearly did. If a woman came to him and managed to be nice for even a short while...he had an awfully inconvenient habit of incorporating them into his life.

  Martha though, had just come to see if she could get a line on candle wholesalers, not knowing where else to look.

  She explained all this to him, out loud, when Kaitlyn, his assistant, came in holding boxes of food from the Chinese place in the mall where his wife, one of them, he corrected internally, worked full time with her brother. His protégé looked at the center pieces arrayed on the counter as she dropped the food gracefully next to him.

  “Hey, these are nice! Are we finally adding some new stock?” She grabbed the smallest box, the one on the top of the pile and opened it greedily, then stopped as Zack stared at her. Her Shadow self clamped down on her hunger and closed the box again, so as not to be rude to the woman standing there trying to do business.

  He grinned and gave her a small nod.

  “That's the plan, if Martha will sell them to us. We need to talk prices, oh and get one of the new copies of the ordering catalog from the back, please? I don't know where they are or I'd get it myself. So how about it?” He redirected his attention solely to the woman in front of them, Kaitlyn having moved next to him, edging closer to him than most people would be willing to stand, without noticing she'd done it.

  This delighted Martha, both the sale and interplay she imagined she saw in front of her. Not realizing the full situation, that the younger looking woman was a Succubus and that her nature caused her to crave contact with others, she'd leaped to the wrong conclusion. Zack let it go though. Life, he knew, had far too many important things to worry about without trying to correct the thoughts of every person you met.

  Over the course of twenty minutes they hashed out a price for wreaths, got her an ordering catalog with wholesale prices and ordered twenty units from her. His stomach started growling embarrassingly loud, which caused her to hurry away, order in hand. So that the kids could eat. She felt really good about them as she left, even though she thought Kaitlyn might be a little young for him. Not too much however, since the girl looked to be about eighteen to her and Zack only about twenty. She left the full box of samples for them to sell, which he paid her for. Full price, he insisted, knowing that she needed the money to buy the materials for the new ones she'd be creating for the store.

  He fell on the food ravenously. They both ate quietly for a while, then, between bites, asked Kate how things were going, since he hadn't seen her for about ten days.

  “Good. Norris finally thinks I'm not a threat to the world any more, since I passed all his tests. Even he had to admit that not letting me touch anyone for a week, slowly starving, then throwing me those guys should have caused even someone pretty disciplined to just fall on them, possibly going rogue in the process. He reported everything to our council...”

  The look she gave him didn't seem shy or nervous, though he could tell she desperately wanted to have sex with him. Possibly on the counter in front of them, or the floor, if he wanted. Her thoughts turned to pushing the arrangements that had been left there onto the floor to make space. She clamped down on that suddenly, her Shadow self going completely still, like he'd taught her to do.

  “Wait, Kaitlyn, he didn't feed you at all? Come with me.” Her kind ate sexual energy. Most of them would go insane without it, slowly fading away into a decrepit death. That or start spraying stronger and stronger signals of lust and pleasure around, forcing people around them to devolve into mindless sex machines, in order to get the energy they needed. That she'd managed to go so long without doing that...

  Luckily for him, and for the starving girl in front of him, he could fix that without sex. In the manager's office he put his hand out as she lifted her shirt, and started adding to his already strong energy circulation, passing some of the energy of every breath to her through his hand. In about seven minutes she started shaking in pleasure. She grabbed his hand so he wouldn't just stop.

  “Please...” She begged, needing the contact as much as the energy.

  Normally he'd have cut her off then. The amount of pleasure involved in this became...Intense, and once the shaking started, highly sexual. On some level he still thought of her as being the same troubled sixteen year old girl she looked like, not the nearly thirty-five year old woman she actually had become inside, after spending years in the void with him, learning to control her mind and abilities.

  Going further with her felt... Perv
y to him. Even though not related at all, it felt a bit like hitting on his step daughter or something.

  Making her go without any contact for that long though, making her resist sex when offered to prove herself, had been pretty harsh. More than anyone else of her kind would have been able to manage. Which was Norris's point. A great test of her resolve, sure, but in a hard core way. Like making a normal person go for ten days without water.

  Would he deny a person water after that? Knowing he wouldn't he continued, the girl holding on far longer than any of the other Alede, what Succubi and Incubi called themselves, ever had.

  He heard a soft gasp behind him and knew Lisa, their boss, had come in. She watched as the younger looking woman, that had turned her own age in a few weeks, she knew, writhed and bucked, as waves of pleasure and orgasm passed over and through her.

  This went on for another ten minutes or so, Lisa staring in wide eyed amazement.

  Finally the girl pushed his hand away violently.

  “God! That's so freaking intense.” She leaned forward and kissed him hard, then pulled back suddenly, realizing that he didn't kiss her back.

  “Oh, sorry.” Her Shadow self didn't apologize though. Just staring at him, satiation flowing out of her toward him.

  Ignoring the thoughts that came off of both women, he left the office without speaking and went to grab his second box of food. He had to eat regularly now, every few hours if he could, or else his weight would start to drop rapidly. When he'd developed a bond with Claire, the cute Vampire girl from the frozen yogurt shop about a month ago, developed-meaning they'd drank each other's blood in perfect exchange for hours, the hunger started happening and hadn't let up yet. He ate more than six times what he used to now, in an attempt to put a little bit of weight on his lanky frame. It meant eating a lot each day. Enough that he'd started feeling a little sick of it, to tell the truth.

  He quickly came back to Lisa's office, finding his boss sitting behind her desk, and Kaitlyn standing exactly where he'd left her.

  “Zack, I... think you broke her.” Real concern touched her voice, even while a part of her spoke to him of how envious she felt. She hadn't had more than a hug or a peck on the cheek since Deidre had left her two months before.

  Waving this concern away as being silly, he outlined the new centerpiece deal he'd made and provided her with the contact information, prices and everything else he could think of. Lisa was, after all, technically his boss at the store, as well as the Assistant Ambassador for her own people there. The very Human-like Mages as well as being the person that managed most of his day to day scheduling. Also technically married to him by some ridiculous contract that all other groups that had Embassies at the Underwood complex had made up for him. He'd been happy to find out that Lisa at least didn't think of the marriage as being anything other than a joke of sorts that named her as one of his personal management team.

  Zack ate while talking, even though he knew it to be very poor manners, though he made sure he didn't talk with his mouth full. His grandmother had drilled that much into him as a child, not that he'd talked much back then anyway. Not after he came back from the void. He'd just gotten out of the habit of speaking out loud, he realized now. Back then everyone had assumed it had to do with trauma and shock, since some pretty awful things had happened to him. It made sense as an assumption, but had been wrong. His memories of those events had all been locked away from him back then.

  “Well, food's gone, and I need to get to Lesser Shia. Duty calls and all that.” He rounded the corner of the desk and leaned over, giving Lisa a brief hug.

  His ability to walk the lines between places, especially to use the Nodes, inter-connected weak spots in the fabric of reality, made him a valuable commodity that everyone seemed to want to exploit. Demons could do it too, though not as well as he could. Not even close. They also charged so much for their services that most people would rather die than deal with them for anything.

  It meant the schedule in Lesser Shia, the famous market place said to have absolutely everything a being could ever want, had become intense over the last few weeks. He'd been putting in an extra hour each day there to make everything happen, and the people in charge suggested raising his rates, to slow down business a bit. He resisted this though, knowing that, if he could do enough, long enough, it would eventually take a bite out of the Demons income stream, a prospect that delighted him on a deep level.

  Not all Demons were evil all the time, he knew, but enough of them were that you couldn't trust any of them. Ever. Digging into their business, even a little bit, made him feel better about a lot of things.

  Like Libby.

  Zack still couldn't believe what had happened there. How a group of Demons had gotten together and used some old debt her family had to make his friend, a woman he loved, turn against him unless she wanted her whole family to die in about the worst way imaginable.

  It was impossible to blame her, now that he knew what her options had been. He also didn't know what to do about it. Zack finally shook his head and put the whole episode from his mind, a talent learned in the void, so very long ago.

  After Lesser Shia was done, which was intense that day, Zack got back late. It was almost six-thirty, having had a few stragglers to deliver home after their day trips to the market. Back in his store, Candles and More, he quickly swept up before he left, leaving Kaitlyn to man the front desk and manage scheduling for the next day. They were required to stay open until nine each night, seven days a week. It was part of the Underwood Charter.

  She looked up from the papers in front of her and got a dreamy expression on her face when she saw him.

  “That was... Really great, earlier.” Taking a deep breath, she focused, clearly shutting off her emotions for the moment, as he'd shown her how to do, and drilled her on mercilessly for years in the void. Literally over a decade. Time didn't flow the same way there and the day to day needs didn't exist, so it was a thing that could be done.

  “Anyway, Patty wanted me to remind you that you two have a date tonight at her place? She's making eggplant Parmesan, handmade noodles, garlic bread, the whole works. She's been planning this for days. In fact she told me that if I came home before two in the morning she'll hate me forever...” The girl raised her eyebrows and smiled at him knowingly. Knowing both that her mother had been kidding and that she better not be back before two.

  "Are you staying at my house tonight then?" It was the only other place Kate had to sleep that he knew of in town yet, not having had a lot of time to make friends there.

  "Yep. I want to check on Troy and make sure he's all right. We set it up to see other people before I left, since that's the Alede way. Besides, just because Norris was going to starve me, well, no reason Troy should have to as well, right?”

  He tilted his head sideways and thought about this for a second, realizing this to be an innate cultural difference between regular Human society and the Alede. She liked Troy for himself, so hung around with him. They had sex, played video games and occasionally, he'd been told by Troy, went shopping. Basically meaning she was Troy's girlfriend, he knew. In her mind, though, the idea of him having sex with other women, or even men, if Troy had been into that, seemed normal and even healthy.

  Troy, for his part, identified himself as being a 'player' which meant that he tried to have sex with as many women as possible, mainly because he didn't feel worthy of real love. He'd told Zack once about a year and a half before showing remarkable insight into his own being. Not yet at least. Still, Troy had a little bit of trouble accepting Kaitlyn for herself, even knowing that, under normal circumstances the girl would pretty much have to have a full stable of lovers just to survive.

  He shrugged, then winced about it, remembering that he'd been trying to break that habit. Instead, decided to tell her his thoughts on the matter. After all he liked them both and didn't want them to have a falling out. Especially since Troy lived with him and Kaitlyn spent most of the day with h
im at work. A little selfish on his part, Zack knew, not being involved in it himself directly.

  “I just want to avoid meltdowns later. I know you can handle it, but probably wouldn't even get why Troy had a problem with it. He needs to understand and learn to accept you totally, or this isn't going to go well, I don't think, not in the long run.” Zack looked at her meaningfully, or at least with the look he'd been practicing that he thought gave weight to his words. He still had problems with facial expressions, having not really had a normal upbringing. Zack didn't just smile, laugh or even frown spontaneously. He had to make a point of doing things like that on purpose.

  Smiling she walked around the counter and hugged him, then playfully poked him in the ribs lightly. Her look turned considering for a moment and then she finally shook her head.

  “No. That won't happen. He doesn't love me, he just likes me and I sleep with him, even though he thinks I'm out of his league. Considering he's had sex with a half dozen really hot women in the last two months, one of them a movie star, you'd think he'd get a swelled head. Instead I think he's actually beginning to realize just how out of his depth he is around you. He also worries a lot that he's falling in love...”

  The girl spoke as if this would be a secret to Zack. He didn't shrug, though he did shake his head and grin.

  “I know. Hilda. I wouldn't have thought it, if you asked me a month ago. Good for Troy. Still, that's almost as big a problem as if he fell in love with you. Her culture is so much different than ours...” Indeed, her people didn't even have the concept of dating, much less marriage, though she'd signed up to be one of those manager-wives everyone had foisted upon him a few months back, not really understanding what it all meant and still not really getting the idea clearly. To her they were just really good friends, which Zack had no problem with at all. His plate had been filled too full, too fast, he knew, with too many women for one man to really handle.