Psychic Spiral (of Death)

by Amie Gibbons

  I didn’t like this.

  Not one little bit.

  And I was still moving.

  The cave tunnel opened up into another wide cavern, the place glowing with an unearthly light from nowhere and everywhere at once.

  And the string stopped, dropping me in the dead center of the place.

  Emphasis on the dead.

  Bodies lay around me, almost perfectly arranged with one laying crossed over the next’s legs and so on and so on.

  “This is so disturbing,” I whispered.

  Like I was afraid they’d wake up.

  Wait. Why did I think they were dead? They could just be asleep.

  But something about the pale faces and slack, loose skin said it was the first.

  They were dead. And I was in the middle of them for some reason.

  And I swear I recognized them from somewhere.

  I’d never been great with remembering people from large groups. I could do names, but faces would blend together, but these guys all looked vaguely familiar.

  That one with the blond hair and pushed up skirt, like she’d been violated. That one with the long red hair, ratty after not being washed. That guy burned to a crisp.

  “Oh my god!” I said out loud.

  These were all the people I’d investigated the deaths of over the past year and a half at the FBI.

  “Oh dear,” I said.

  What did this mean?

  “Why am I here?” I asked out loud, voice echoing off the walls, shooting back at me almost mocking.

  The bodies stayed where they were and nobody answered me.

  I found that oddly comforting.

  “Okay,” I said. “Y’all are creeping me out, so I’m gonna step over you. Nobody move! I mean that. I don’t do zombies. I played a zombie VR once and I swear, I almost had a heart attack.”

  Then again, that was before I had my powers and saw a lot worse than some scary zombies on a realistic but fake landscape.

  I inched forward, keeping my eyes glued to the bodies below me.

  Because this was the part of the horror movie where the bodies suddenly woke up and one grabbed the hero’s ankle.

  I shuddered and took a deep breath, running forward as fast as I could and jumping outta the circle.

  And nothing happened.

  “Well that was anticlimactic,” I told the dead bodies.

  And threw my hands up. “Not that I’m complaining or nothin’. Please don’t start moving.”

  I looked around. The blue line hung out just above my head.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to the line.

  It didn’t move.

  “You were supposed to take me to the person who put the hit on me,” I said. “You don’t seem to be doing that.”

  I half expected someone like that Fenrir wolf guy to suddenly pop up.

  I really did.

  Cuz me all alone like this? I wasn’t sure what to do.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said out loud.

  Nothing answered.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re in the astral plane. I should be able to do whatever I need to do here. I should be able to just snap my fingers and go to the person who sent the text, according to Carvi. So what’s the problem?”

  I focused my mind on the blue line and pulled.

  It drifted down to me.

  I grabbed onto the end of it.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “Trap,” came from the string, vibrating through my arm and making my teeth hurt.

  “I’m in a trap!” I yelped, almost letting it go.

  “Can’t have the psychic following it back. Have to be ready for her,” a voice said.

  It was a female voice I’d never heard before in my life.

  If there was one thing I knew, it was voices.

  Why would someone I’d never met want to kill me?

  But something in the pit of my stomach said that was the person who’d put the hit out on me.

  “We’ll drop her there if she tries to follow us, and come for her,” another voice said.

  That one was male, and definitely sounded familiar.

  Come for me?

  “Crap on a cracker,” I said, heart rate picking up.

  No, no. I couldn’t panic.

  Me being dropped in a trap didn’t mean I couldn’t get out.

  I’d done it before.

  “Yeah,” that evil voice in my head that sounded strangely like my sister Ava said, “with Carvi’s help. Not like you can do this on your own.”

  Except I could.

  I was the one who’d powered us outta the last trap. Sure, Carvi guided, but I wasn’t all alone in here anyway. I had my vampires’ blood flowing through me.

  Both of them.

  And if that didn’t make it damn near them both being in here with me, I didn’t know what did.

  I was in a cave, and the string had dropped me here.

  “Can I take you back out?” I asked it.

  “No,” it said in that same vibration without real noise kinda way.

  “How do I get out?”

  It didn’t answer.

  Because it didn’t know.

  The trap wasn’t made for people to escape from it. It was made to hold someone till another came to get them.

  But there being a way in meant there was a way out.

  I just had to find it.

  Then figure out how to really follow that string to the text sender in the meantime.

  Not hard, right?

  The place was meant to hold psychics, but not me. Not whatever I was.

  And Fenrir said they didn’t have a word for what I was. So that had to mean I was special, right?

  “Unless he was lying,” that same evil voice said.

  “Shut up,” I said to it. “Oh great, now I’m talkin’ to myself.”

  I looked at the pile of bodies.

  Why were they here if not to stop me?

  Guilt, popped in my head like a zit.

  Why would I feel guilty? These were people whose deaths I’d investigated. That didn’t mean I should feel guilty.

  “But you weren’t able to stop it, to save them,” the voice said.

  “So?” I asked it. “That wasn’t my job. It wasn’t on me to play superhero, to stop whatever might attack. I’m an investigator.”

  Of course, I could be more.

  I could be out on the streets, playing vigilante.

  Who knew, if I was out there, maybe they wouldn’t have died?

  Where was this all coming from?

  “That part of my brain that thinks I should quit,” I said.

  “No,” I answered myself. “The part that makes me doubt myself. This is the insecurity. The part of my brain that harps on every mistake. That’s what this trap is, isn’t it?

  “You know if you wanted to get me on that, you should drag up my sexual history, I got a lot to regret there. These people aren’t on me. I wasn’t even psychic when some of them died. I certainly wasn’t trained to find every crime being committed and stop it. I’d never be able to keep up, even if I could learn how to do that. They aren’t on me, and I did find and stop all their killers.”

  The bodies disappeared.

  Huh.

  So somebody was answering.

  Maybe this place was some kind of trap made from regret?

  If so, there’d be more than one guy I’d slept with showing up here for sure.

  Not to give the trap ideas or anything.

  A sole body appeared in the middle of the cavern where I’d dropped in at the beginning of this little drama.

  A short man with nice muscles and beautiful eyes I could see from here were already dead.

  My heart seized.

  Because that one, that one I not only could have saved, he was dead because of me.

  He’d died saving me.

  He was my greatest regret.

  He’d died cuz I couldn’t protect myself.

  Someb
ody else had had to.

  And it’d cost him his life.

  My heart ached like someone was squeezing it and I fell to my knees with a sob.

  The fake Milo crumbled in front of me, just as he had back then when he’d died.

  But back then he’d been in my arms.

  The world moved and I was suddenly holding him, just as I had six months ago.

  With his chest caving in, his body dissolving as the silver disrupted whatever it was in the vampire body that kept it alive and animated.

  His torso caved into a bowl of goop and his arms and legs shriveled away.

  Until I was holding nothing more than a pile of Milo guts and dust.

  I sniffed, tears stinging my eyes as everything between the pit in my stomach to my head seized up.

  I bent over him, crying for my lost friend.

  And pulled up with a sniff.

  I had to keep moving. Had to keep going.

  “It hurts.”

  My breath caught as the small teenage voice echoed weakly, bouncing off the walls.

  I had told the trap to go after my love life.

  My heart seized for a whole different reason now, taking my stomach along for the ride.

  “No!” I screamed, the sound echoing off the cavern walls. “I don’t regret his dying. I should’ve saved him. I should’ve saved myself. But his dying made me and Carvi who we are. It brought us together. And we are both better people for it. We are both honoring Milo. His dying made two people like him. Made two people who will spend millennia making sure he didn’t die in vain. So, you can drop it.”

  Wow.

  Where did that come from?

  Because it was the truth.

  I wasn’t planning on dying any time soon.

  I was going to become a vampire one of these days.

  And if I could become even half the psychic Milo was, he’d consider his death worth it. He’d been proud at the time to go as he had… protecting a lady.

  And I wasn’t touching that second thing the trap shot at me.

  Even as the whimpers and whispered promises that it’d stop hurting soon haunted me, running circles around the cavern.

  I wouldn’t let Milo’s sacrifice die in here, crying while I waited for some jerk to come scoop me up.

  I’d promised myself eight years ago, and again last week when this all came up again, that I’d never be that helpless again.

  Then again, if the person did come for me, who was to say they wouldn’t take me to who hired them?

  Who was to say they’d be able to hurt me? Or would even want to? If I was worth more alive, then wouldn’t they hold me in here while they tried to get my body?

  Then again, that’d mean they’d go after my friends, and possibly hurt them to get to me.

  Which wasn’t an option.

  Still, if I could escape…

  Did I dare risk it?

  Did I have a choice?

  I could try getting out, fight to get out, and then if they found me, then they really wouldn’t suspect me of trying to follow them back to the hirer, right?

  Was there a better word for that?

  Did it really matter?

  I took a deep breath and stepped past the Milo remains, walking back into the tunnel I’d zipped through.

  If someone wanted me, then darn it, they’d have to chase me down.

  And if they caught me, well then, I’d have a way of finding who hired them.

  ###

  I felt like I’d been walking forever when I stopped to rest.

  The tunnel didn’t branch or anything. There was only the one path so there was no way I could get lost, but it just wouldn’t end.

  There was no place for me to go but to keep trudging.

  And at the same time, there had to be a better way.

  I’d tried more than a few times to focus on the outside, to will myself out.

  It hadn’t worked.

  And now I was seriously fighting not to panic.

  I don’t like being trapped.

  I took a deep breath, pushing off the wall.

  And started singing Taylor Swift’s ‘You’re Not Sorry’ at the top of my lungs.

  It made me think of Grant.

  No clue why.

  I sang as I walked, going from one T Swift song to another. She was one of my favorites, since she wrote her own music.

  Mama always thought I should’ve become a singer, but the main reason I hadn’t, besides wanting to help people with my job as a psychic, was because I couldn’t write. I’d tried when I was a teen and kept winning singing contests, but nothing came out sounding right.

  Nothing sounded like a real song or captured emotion like a real one did.

  So, I just sang others’ songs and enjoyed doing that for fun.

  And my passion wasn’t there.

  I was good at it, but it wasn’t what I considered a worthy thing to do with my life when I could see things like I did, when I could save lives.

  I walked faster, my lungs not even burning in this not quite real world.

  I picked up the pace more, giggling through my song.

  And ran.

  My little legs pumped, the song fueling me.

  And I ran straight into a bright light.

  Flash.

  “Can you make that stop, shorty?” someone asked. “For one, it’s like early nineties here, there’s no Taylor Swift yet. And two, bitch country bugs me.”

  “That’s just because you’re the kind of man-whore girls like this write about and you’re terrified you’re going to fuck the wrong girl some day and end up in a song,” a girl said. She sounded small, like her voice was kinda high and squeaky, but holding a bossiness that said she wasn’t any younger than me.

  I couldn’t see, but the place had a smell I recognized.

  Stale cigarette smoke saturated the walls, and there was a musk from men wearing too much manly-men cologne, and whiskey.

  Pool balls knocked together and I smiled, warmth seeping through my soul.

  This was Carvi’s bar.

  I couldn’t see anything but the white light, but I knew.

  “Seriously?” the guy asked. “You’re not going to cut that out?”

  “I’m trying,” the girl said. “You know I can’t always control my projection.”

  Balls knocked together again and I tried to place the Taylor Swift song playing above.

  Wait a minute.

  This was back in the early nineties.

  So why was Taylor Swift playing on the sound system?

  “You don’t even like country music,” the first voice, a guy who sounded kinda frat boy, said.

  “I know!” she said. “I like her somewhat, some of her songs. Well, some of them fit.”

  “That jackass shouldn’t-” he started.

  “I know!” she said.

  “Know what?”

  Now that voice I’d know anywhere, no matter what the time period.

  That was Carvi.

  “I… um,” the girl said. “You heard that? Who are you?”

  He chuckled. “They call me Carvi.”

  “And you can’t get them to stop,” the guy scoffed. “Back off, buddy. She’s taken.”

  “No, I am not!” The girl’s voice went sharp. “We’re not… He doesn’t… there has been no taking!”

  “I was saying by me, shorty,” the guy said, sounding exasperated. “To get him to back off. That’s what guys do for their friends when they want pervs to back off. Fuck, we need to work on your people skills.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she said.

  “Obviously,” Carvi said. “What are you? You aren’t from around here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your magic smells wrong, and way too powerful. And it’s doing something to my sound system. Who is this?”

  The mood shifted.

  I had no clue how I knew.

  But I could feel tension crackle through the air.

 
; “You can tell,” the girl said, voice flat.

  It wasn’t a question.

  “I can tell more than that,” Carvi said. “For one, I can tell you meant it when you said no one’s done any taking. I can help you with that.”

  I could smell her blood rise as a blush covered her face.

  Was I inside Carvi for this?

  “What’s that?” Carvi asked.

  “The phone?” the girl asked.

  “That’s a phone?”

  “Ummmm,” she said. “No, obviously not, because phones aren’t that small here. I mean… Oh fuck!”

  He burst out laughing. “Don’t tell me you’re time travelers.”

  “Not technically.”

  “Shorty,” the guy said.

  “Maybe he could help,” she said.

  “He’s a fucking vampire,” the guy said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I’ve learned how to spot them here. These ones are colder than ours.”

  What the quack were they talking about?

  “Colder than yours?” Carvi said slowly. “You really aren’t from around here.”

  “No,” the girl said. “And we’re looking for a friend of ours.”

  “You really think a fucking vamp’s going to help us?” the guy said.

  “He might,” the girl said. “We could do a trade for information.”

  “How about names to start?” Carvi asked.

  “No!” the girl said quickly. “I know what people can do with names in this reality.”

  “Reality?” Carvi asked. “You… aren’t joking.”

  I could practically feel him looking around. “We should go someplace private to talk.”

  “No,” the guy said.

  “C-” the girl started, then caught herself. “Let’s call him C, and me… Shorty, I guess. I can’t get him to stop calling me that.”

  “She’s not yours?” Carvi asked.

  “She’s not anybody’s, dude,” C said. “Trust me. She’ll shoot you if you say she is.”

  Carvi took a deep breath I could feel.

  I could taste.

  The tiny woman, barley more than a girl in all but attitude, reeked of apples and lightning. It was the smell of her magic.

  The young man had muscles that made Carvi want to tie him up, and smelled overwhelmingly of campfire.

  They were both carrying at least a gun each, and there was a hint of ceramic that suggested a specialty knife.

  “I like that in a woman,” Carvi said, pitching his voice low.

  The girl blushed again, blood rushing to more places than her face.