Allied
The PTB Alliance Book 3
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living, dead, undead, masked, or unmasked, events, places, or names is coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced or transferred in any form or by any means without the written permission of the author. Upload and/or distribution of this book without permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law.
Text © 2020 Katelyn Beckett
Cover by Enchanted Ink Studio
Hey, wait a minute! This is book 3 of a completed series. If you haven’t read the other two, go here to find them first. Or read them out of order. I do love a rebel. -Katelyn
This one’s all for the reviewers out there. We literally could not do this without you.
Chapter 1
I stood on a grassy hill, the oversized and underutilized mansion off in the distance. I threw the frisbee. The big, blue great Dane ran away to get it then returned to me, his gaze begging, his tail waving. Again, I threw the frisbee. Again, and again, and again.
I was 17.
And it wasn't real.
In my heart, I knew that I was stuck inside a Psychic's dying scream. She had created the Dream, as we'd all taken to calling it, a place where reality bent and broke. And after days or weeks or months inside of it, I was starting to be able to play with it myself.
Ever seen Inception? Yeah. I snapped the hill off from the rest of the land and sent the dog and I soaring out into the cosmos. When I tossed the fucking frisbee again, the dog shot into outer space. And then I folded the universe in on itself.
You get bored when you've been stuck in the same place for an incalculable amount of time, all of your loved ones split off from you. For a brief period, my boyfriends, former girlfriend, and I, had stayed together. We'd clung to each other like we were dying, drowning in whatever purgatory the Dream had created for us. At that point, it had just been an ever-changing mass that frustrated more than concerned.
But at one point, it had decided to get frisky with us.
One by one, we'd been disappeared until I was left sitting on this hill, throwing this frisbee until the apocalypse; or maybe afterward. I'd thought prison had been bad, but at least you knew what was going to happen when you were in there. You were fed lousy food, let out into the yard now and again and, if you kept your head down, you probably didn't get stabbed over a Snickers bar.
My cousin's wonderful nightmare of a Dream wasn't anything like that. There was no reference point, no way to interact or really do anything except twist it around. I reached out for my lovers and loved ones, finding only a vast, unending blankness.
When the Dream had taken us our mentor and boss, Scribe, had been in the hospital. I assumed he would find a way to set it to rights when he got out, but how long would that take? What if he never got out? Who knew what the brass at the top of the PTB Alliance would do for us? Superheroes, like most of us, were inevitably disposable.
And we knew it. It was something that was outlined the moment you signed the contract. The civilians always came first and that was fine; but the Dream wasn't affecting the civilian population, as far as I knew. It would have been nice to be the rescued, not the rescuer, for once.
That didn't seem to matter. No one had come for me. No one had come for me when I'd been in prison, either, at Scribe's command. It made me wonder if he was trying to get rid of us, but no. That line of thought led to bad places and I shooed it away, letting it die out in the untouchable vastness beyond me.
I threw the frisbee again.
And again.
...And again.
No one was coming for me. I was going to be alone in this place forever, trapped, and throwing a toy for a dog that had been sent to my grandparents' farm. That wasn't some terrible euphemism either; he'd wanted more room than we'd had so we'd taken him to the farm on his fifth birthday. Jarrett had spent the next ten years traumatizing the chickens and roughhousing with the horses before he'd passed away in his sleep one night.
Which made me a little jealous. It was likely that I'd be killed on some abandoned street corner, not snuggled down in a cozy bed all safe and warm. Hell, I'd nearly died fighting my boyfriend's sister to save the Alliance. And all I'd gotten for my trouble was shorting myself out and losing my powers.
It wasn't uncommon for a Blitzer like me to burn out, eventually. We're able to pack an enormous punch with overacting adrenal glands, but that takes its toll. Thanks to my psychotic cousin's torture, my powers had come back with a vengeance; I'd blown myself through a freaking brick wall on accident. But it still hung over my head that I, a Blitzer born to a massive lineage of Psychic superheroes, would one day be useless. That I would, again, burn out.
And when that happened, my body would take inventory of my host of injuries. Most Blitzers didn't last more than a decade after retirement. If I ever got out of the Dream, I could be dead in my 40s.
Of course, that meant that someone outside of the Dream had to throw me a fucking bone and help me get out.
Frisbee. Dog. You get the picture.
"I bet my parents could figure it out," I muttered. "If they'd bother. They retired how many decades ago?"
That wasn't fair, but I wasn't in a mood to care. My parents had mostly retired to take care of me. They'd had plenty of money to do it and were tired of getting stomped; everyone gets to that point eventually. You ask anyone in any frame of work if they'd retire if they had the cash to do it and most over my age will jump at the chance. No one bothers to tell you this when you're in high school trying to pick a job, but you get tired in your 30s.
It doesn't matter how cool you are, how much you love your work (and don't get me wrong; I do), or how you feel about the impact of that work on the rest of the world. You can be the most successful person in the universe and you're still going to want to have a break by the time you've been doing it for a couple of decades.
Some treacherous part of me hadn't hated being powerless. There were options in it; settling down, maybe getting married, or having kids. You could stop breaking bones and willing them to get healed faster. You could stop worrying about staying in peak shape and have a couple of love handles if you wanted them.
Active superhero work was fulfilling. You literally saved babies from raging fires and helped the general public avoid getting taken out by terrorists. I'd fought aliens, villains, and my own Alliance family from time to time, always ending up on top.
But, in my isolation, I'd come to admit that maybe I needed a real vacation from it all. I needed to sit down and discuss things with a professional so I could work through my feelings. When I'd lost my powers, I'd been frustrated. But I hadn't been broken over it.
And that bothered me.
Maybe the Alliance and I weren't a good match anymore. Again, it didn't matter until I got out of the Dream. Maybe those thoughts were the work of my cousin, Allison alias Dreamweaver, who'd shoved me in this hell. Psychic superheroes were tricky sorts, always knowing too much and most of that being exactly how to manipulate their enemies.
God, how far had my family fallen that those involved were enemies within? Even as kids we'd been encouraged to stick up for each other at school and show ourselves as a unit. That hadn't always happened because kids will be kids, but it had been enough that I'd hadn't always turned up back at home black and blue.
I concentrated on Jarrett and dropped the frisbee. Maybe if I broke the pattern, something else would break within the Dream and I'd be free. Instead, the dog just climbed onto my lap and wiggled s
o hard he threatened to cause an earthquake. I sighed and wrapped my arms around his ridiculously thick neck, pressed my head into his shoulder, and took a long, deep breath to prevent myself from bursting into tears.
Everything was terrible and I felt like that had become a running trend for me in the past few years. I'd accidentally killed my girlfriend, spent years in prison, and then found out she hadn't been dead at all; my cousin had trapped her in the Dream and had been cruising her body around to do superhero work whenever she'd wanted.
And when we'd gotten her back? Yeah, she'd been offended that I'd moved on romantically.
Hell, did I really want to come back from the Dream? At least things were simple, a blank canvas that I was learning to manipulate to my will. I could do neat tricks, spin things how I wanted them spun, and work to find solutions for problems that I couldn't on the outside. Like, all my feelings? Those didn't matter so long as i was trapped within the Dream.
Yeah, super healthy way to deal with that.
"Cassie?"
I knew that voice. I looked around the endless void, frowning. "Mom?"
"Hi, honey. You just give us a few more minutes and we'll have you out of there. You've gotten yourself all turned around and confused. Don't know how you did it, but it's an impressive little knot."
I blinked and shook the thought away, certain it was some new trick. Allison was close enough with my parents, whom I hadn't spoken to since I'd been put in prison, that she would have been perfectly capable of creating a great impression of my mother. Memories of her came shooting into my mind, which just reinforced the fact that it had to be fake.
Then again, would Allison think to give my mom the condescending tone? Would she consider that my mother would, somehow, blame me for ending up trapped in the Dream in the first place? I frowned and tried to reach toward the voice, both physically and with whatever dim sense of psychic residue I had control of.
But I had no idea what I was doing and it wasn't as if I'd be able to recognize my mother anyway. Psychics always said there was sort of an aura around each person, like a fingerprint. It was individual enough that you'd likely never run into duplicates as long as you lived. That meant that you could sort of tell who it was you were communicating with. I thought of it like an energy signature on all those Japanese cartoons I'd watched as a kid.
No one in my family had been particularly fond of that explanation, but it was pretty normal for that to happen with me regardless.
It took me too long to realize, as I'd said, that I wouldn't know my own mother's aura if it hit me in the face. I just wasn't a part of that world, no matter how much my inner child desperately wanted to be; if for no other reason than to please my parents. When your family marks you as the biggest disappointment of your entire generation, it doesn't ever really fade from you.
I sighed and waited. The frisbee flew another ten thousand times in that innumerable period. I had my phone, or some appearance of it, but the only thing it could do was play Candy Crush Saga. Whenever I tried to look at the time or pictures, everything was blurry and faded; as if the Dream couldn't predict exactly what I wanted and therefore it couldn't deliver.
Jarrett finally grew tired of the frisbee and fell asleep, his head flopped on my lap. I scratched his ear as I tried to make all the little candies inevitably tasty. Or so delicious. The voice was all wrong, tinny and shrill, like they'd miniaturized the poor guy. I wrinkled my nose at it and turned it off.
And then the dog vanished. My brows raised at the spot he'd once occupied. That was different. I checked the phone in my hand to watch it ooze through my fingers, dripping on the grass around me. Ants the size of horses rattled past me, intent on tearing apart the world. Each of them grabbed a chunk of grass, of sky, and carried it away with them. I didn't dare move, hoping that they wouldn't notice me. The last thing I wanted was to be carried off, too.
Maybe the Dream had realized I didn't want any part of it and had decided to get rid of me. The ants ripped everything apart except for my tiny plot of land and vanished into the distance in a hoard of Black Friday shoppers. I curled up on my little tuft of green and swallowed. I'd complained about throwing the frisbee for the dog, the frisbee having been snatched by the ants, too. But at least it'd been something to do.
I sat in a void, in a big open area of nothingness, and I plucked at the grass beneath me to try to settle my nerves.
"This isn't going to be comfortable for her," my mother said. "We can't do it any other way. Expect her to come out screaming, maybe fighting. Do we have any restraints?"
"I'm sure Edwin could loan us something."
Scribe's voice echoed the area and a breath of hope fluttered to life inside of me. If he was really out of the hospital, maybe I was really about to be released from the Dream. It wasn't likely; Allison had known Scribe well enough to imitate him for certain and she had all my memories of him to draw from, too. It would be easy to fabricate him, but maybe not so much to sneer about Edwin's secret trunk of wonders.
I only knew about that because of a night they'd needed to keep me... occupied.
How the hell did Scribe know about it?
I was suddenly being forced into a tube, smashed with my arms flat at my sides. I couldn't breathe, couldn't see. Was this what being born was like? Fuck, no wonder kids came out looking traumatized. The grass vanished and only darkness reigned around me, fascinating but foreboding. I closed my eyes against it all and hoped beyond hope that this wasn't some fresh horror Allison's ghost had thought up, but rather that I was really being saved.
Reality shattered around me and I was in a bed, soft and warm. Nate held me down to the headboard, his hands familiar and reassuring. I blinked up into those gorgeous amber eyes and smiled. "Are you real?"
"Pretty sure I am, Strikes."
I blinked at him, then turned my head to look at a matched set of people. They were in their elder years, each of them with dark hair and weathered faces. And they were dressed exactly alike, blue shirts and blue jeans. I couldn't see their boots, but I assumed that they matched, too. I searched the room for Scribe, but he was nowhere to be found. Edwin, Adam, and, unsurprisingly, Nishelle, were missing, too.
"I think I'm safe to get up," I told him and Nate released me.
To be honest, I'd have been just fine with it if he'd wanted to hold me down a little longer. I'd have just needed my parents to get out. But you can't have everything in life, I suppose.
My mother came forward with a penlight and shone it in my eyes. "Name, birthday, alias."
"Cassandra Clark, Strikeout, and that's not what you're supposed to ask ladies," I said, flinching away from the brightness. "How long have I been out?"
It wasn't as if the Dream had been a dark place, but I had a feeling that didn't matter to my actual eyes. If the way they felt was right, I'd been down for ages.
"A day," Mom said. "Maybe a few hours more, but not enough to cringe like you've never seen a flashlight before. Everything feel right?"
She offered me her hand to help me up. I grabbed the bed and pushed myself up instead. "I feel like I haven't moved in a century. Where's everyone else? Still stuck?"
"Of course not. You were the only one capable of getting yourself into such a mess. It took you long enough to Awaken, but I suppose some of us just have to change our skillset in our 30s, don't we, dear?"
I gripped the knob on the end of the bed for support and froze. No, it wasn't true. She was just pulling my leg and enjoying the confusion. Mom had always been the sort to headfuck we kids, even in games as simple and sweet as hide-and-go-seek. Slowly, I turned to stare at her, but it was Dad that answered.
"We'll have to get you into training as soon as we can. Scribe's gone to see what we can do about that, given your endlessly busy schedule with all these men."
Nate shrugged. "There's only three of us, sir, begging your pardon. And she's a grown adult who can make her own decisions."
"Be that as it may, we didn't raise a hussy
," Dad said, looking down his nose at Nate.
And despite Nate's stature, Dad could do it. Adam was, perhaps, of a height with Dad, but no one else I knew was anywhere close. I shook my head. "I'm not a hussy and I'm not a Psychic. I'm a Blitzer."
"You can be more than one and if you have any sense, you'll make it a priority to re-sign with the Alliance as a Psychic. They make much more than smashy crashy types," Mom snapped. "And we'll talk about all these boys of yours, later. Not you, Nate, honey. You're fine. But really, Cassandra. A Reed boy? What were you thinking?"
Yeah, no. I sat back down on the bed and put my head in my hands. I'd thought they'd come to my rescue. Really. What had I been thinking?
Chapter 2
Cassie's parents hated me and she was still stuck in the dream.
Allied: A Superhero Reverse Harem Romance (The PTB Alliance Book 3) Page 1