“You and I…”
“Zoe…”
“I’m just going to come out with it: you and I had sex. The first night. You were kind of out of it because of the concussion. So I am admitting that I took advantage of you. Or, at least it seemed at the time that you wanted it. Don’t say anything,” she told him as he started open his mouth. “I’m just telling you this now because we may die. And so you can get it wiped from your brain again later if we don’t.”
“I had the memory wiped?” Sam asked.
“That’s why we were in the market when the Southern Alliance police came for us. Because you were having it wiped. Anyway, confessions are done. That’s all that happened.”
“Dammit…”
“I know, I shouldn’t have said anything,” Zoe said, turning away from him.
“No, it’s not that. I would have to confess the same thing to you. Although I wouldn’t have taken advantage of you while you were suffering from a concussion.”
“You seemed like you wanted it; you even activated your enhanced sense of touch.”
Sam cringed. “Shit. I did?”
“Yep. Maybe I was just excited to be alone with you for once. But don’t worry, it wasn’t like it was good or anything,” she said, lifting her chin a bit.
“What you mean it wasn’t good?”
“You don’t remember any of it?”
“I thought that it was a dream. In fact, I was ashamed of having this dream. So no, I don’t remember any of it.”
“It wasn’t as long of a session as I would have liked, let’s just keep it at that.”
Sam sighed deeply. “Now I am regretting that you told me this. I mean, I was dreading it at first, then I was okay with it, and now I am regretting it again.”
“Yep, that means it’s time to go. Let’s go save our friends, or die in the process.”
“You know I’m going to have to do something about this,” he said as Zoe moved away from him. She stood, shaking her arms out, and quickly tested both her wrist guards, the energy blades glowing with intensity.
“You can do something about it after we rescue them,” Zoe said. “I will personally take you to the best telepath we can find in Centralia.”
“Maybe… No, that’s probably the best idea. We can just decide then. Let’s try to see if we get through this first.”
“Exactly what I was saying,” Zoe told him as she led the way. “And I still am sorry, no matter what happens next. Sorry for everything. From the start. All of it.”
“It’s fine,” Sam said, growing quiet as he followed behind her. His relationship with Zoe had been intense, and it had petered out nearly as quickly as it started. At least it felt that way.
There had been a time a few months back when they ran into each other, both just happening to be in the same park at the same time. Serendipity. But nothing came of it, and he really hadn’t known if he would see her again, that was, until they reunited at the police station, of all places.
Sam let the memories go.
He let the thought of what Zoe had just told him go.
He let anxiety about the future, and remorse about the past go.
Now wasn’t the time.
The two would-be heroes were literally trudging through the snow on their way to certain doom, and what was possibly the riskiest thing they had done yet. Sure, there had been some pretty crazy adventures over the last week or so, but nothing like going to address a powerful foe with only two members, one of whom had a power that was far more support than it was offense.
The wind whipped around them, Sam keeping his eyes on Zoe.
Occasionally she would stop for him to catch up, sniffing the air, Sam doing the same and confirming that his sinuses were still acting up. Or not sinuses, whatever the hell the cold was doing to his nose.
He wished Ozella was with them; she would have known what was happening to his sniffer.
As they grew closer to the School of Heart, Zoe crouched even further. Sam tried to mirror the way she was moving. But he ultimately couldn’t, not without his back hurting. So he tried to squat walk instead, as if he were carrying a heavy object.
Zoe paused, her ear standing to attention.
Sam readied his weapon.
He had a blaster on one arm, and an energy blade on the other. Just to be sure, he had set his blast to stun, knowing full well that he would probably need to twist the knob to lethal in the nearish future.
“Something is different here,” she said.
“I can’t smell anything,” Sam told her. “My nose is seriously out of the picture.”
“Try activating something else.”
“Okay.” Sam took a knee, knowing that he might need the stability, ignoring this cold snow now pressing against him. “Power-up, sight,” he said, his eyes closed for a moment as Zoe approached him.
She placed a hand on his shoulder as Sam opened his eyes, taking in everything at once.
He stared straight ahead for a moment, the wall of the school coming into shape, bits of light emitting from some of the windows.
And that’s when Sam saw it.
It was very light, reminding him of a bubble in a way, but it was definitely surrounding the structure.
“They have some sort of shield up; probably some sort of spell that alerts them,” he said. But…” Looking straight ahead, Sam could see an opening in the shield, big enough for them to go through. “There’s an opening.”
“Does it follow this path exactly?”
“Which path?” Sam asked, too many details coming into his eyes to actually make out the space in front of him.
“I mean, directly ahead. If we keep going in our current direction, will we pass through the opening?”
“I believe so,” he finally said. “Power-up, off.” Sam stood and dusted off his knees. For a moment, Zoe kept her hand on the shoulder, looking at him intently.
“Okay,” she said, moving away. “I am going to guess that they went in through the front.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Again, a hunch. Kidding. Helena said they were, and if you haven’t figured it out already, Helena is a very straightforward woman. Plus she hypnotized everyone to believe she was invisible. In that case, she could go right to the front gate. All this to say that we will have to go through the back. So let’s head to the wall, and take a left rather than a right.”
“Sweet, let’s do it.”
Zoe continued forward, her tail bobbing up and down as she walked. “We’ll have to keep our voices down from here on out. We’re probably already talking too loudly.”
“Right,” said Sam. “Let’s just get to the wall, head to the back, and figure it out from there.”
Chapter Forty-One: Thank God for Random Love Affairs
(They make the rockin’ world go ‘round.)
“This way,” Zoe said once they reached the school’s wall. Sam had never seen her more alert, and even with the snow still swirling around them and obscuring things, he could see her ears were perked, every bone in her body ready to spring into action.
She wasn’t the only one.
Sam found himself continually checking his wrist guards, making sure they were ready to go. Even if it was cold outside, he could feel himself sweating under all the warm clothing, nervousness surging through him and needing some type of outlet.
Keeping low and staying quiet, they moved along the perimeter, Sam’s heart thrumming in his chest.
“Do you hear anything?” Zoe asked, pausing for a moment.
“Power-up, hearing,” Sam said, everything around him becoming louder.
He could hear the snowflakes swirling in the air landing on the snow, one of the sentries at the front of the school coughing, murmuring inside the school’s various buildings, his feet crunching in the snow, but nothing that indicated they had been discovered.
Still, he focused on his ability just a bit longer, pausing and listening for any sound that would indicate t
hey had been discovered. Even though he knew it would be cold, he pressed his ear on to the surface of the wall, closing his eyes, ignoring the instant chill.
He could suddenly see the outline of some of the sentries in the courtyard playing out on the inside of his eyelids, his enhanced ability giving him some understanding of his spatial surroundings, their forms outlined in a way that made sense in his mind, something Sam could have never actually described to someone if they asked what he was experiencing.
“Power-up, off,” he said, feeling a transition of energy from the sides of his face back into his nostrils. “The guards are mostly at the front,” he told her.
“Just as I hoped. Now we just need ourselves a good ol’ fashioned back entrance,” Zoe whispered as they continued along the perimeter of the school.
It was a long wall, and it felt as if they had walked close to a mile by the time they got to the end, the wall curving right, not quite as angular an edge as Sam would’ve expected.
“Any idea of how far it is from the entrance?” Sam asked.
He was second-guessing himself now; there was no way that it was a mile long.
“Felt like a mile to me, but I’m not good at those types of distances,” said Zoe. “And the snow is warping my already warped sense of distance. But we can be certain that it’s a pretty big school. If there is an entrance in the back, they will have guards.”
“Well, I’m ready.”
“Me too,” said Zoe, lifting her wrist guard.
“I really hope we don’t have to climb this thing,” Sam said, looking up to the top of the wall.
One way he had already thought of to climb it would be to use his energy blade to shimmy his way up, but this didn’t seem realistic; it seemed like something he would have seen in a comic book.
“Same here.” Zoe nodded him forward, and they continued along the wall. She paused at some point, lifting her finger in the air, Sam stopping in the snow behind her.
The smell hit Sam in the face, nearly tossing him aside.
His nostrils may have been runny, but as soon as he caught the smell of food wafting through the wall, he knew they had stumbled upon the back entrance to the kitchen. Sam’s mouth immediately started watering, the bodily function reminding him that he hadn’t eaten in quite some time.
“Food is around,” Zoe finally said, licking her lips.
“And it smells good too,” Sam added.
“There’s probably a back entrance. There has to be,” said Zoe as she looked around. “I wouldn’t think that they take the food all the way from the front entrance to the back here, cutting through the courtyard. No way. They’re definitely going to have a back entrance here somewhere, and it’s going to be along this wall. I haven’t sensed any guards yet. Do you want to activate your visual power? Maybe you can look ahead and see if there’s anyone out there.”
“Sure thing,” Sam said, taking a knee again. It was easier to use his enhanced vision this way, the stability allowing him to focus better. “Power-up, sight,” he said, immediately sensing the outer rim of energy that surrounded the school.
It took him a moment to really focus, but eventually, Sam was able to see all the way to the end of this part of the wall, through the swirling snow, and even with the darkness along the periphery.
“No guards,” he said. “Power-up, off.”
“Good. A backdoor has to be somewhere around here…”
It didn’t take them much longer to find the door in question, a wooden one that was twice the size of a normal door, which Sam assumed allowed for them to bring larger crates of food in.
“I know the answer to this puzzle is not to knock,” he whispered.
“As easy as that would be, yes, you are probably right.”
“Then how?”
Zoe looked at the door for minute, and as she did, Sam noticed that there wasn’t a handle on the outside, that it could only be opened and locked from the inside.
“I can explode it with one of my cherry bombs,” Zoe said, tapping the front of her jacket to indicate the pouches she had along her waistline.
“But that would draw attention…”
“Exactly, and we don’t want that. Dammit.”
“What if we listened to hear if anyone was on the other side, and then we blade our way in? I’m assuming that there’s a door handle…” Sam used his hand to trace a circle where the door handle normally would have been. “We could just cut our way in by slicing through this entire area.”
“The only problem with that is if someone discovers it, they will know that there has been a break-in.”
“Dammit,” Sam said. “I really wish we had Dinah with us.”
“We may just have to wait to see if someone eventually uses the door. Unless you can think of something else.”
“Why would anyone use this door?”
“No idea,” said Zoe. “I’m assuming they keep trash inside, and who would want to come out in this cold anyway…”
“What if we could get Dinah to help us,” Sam asked suddenly.
“Dinah won’t come unless Ozella is awake,” Zoe reminded him.
“I know, but if Ozella is awake, Dinah can move about freely. We have seen that before. Hell, it’s how we found those dudes back at the spa. She was on the lower-level, and she came up and told us what was happening.”
“So we’re supposed to sit here and wait for Dinah?”
“Is that any better than waiting for the door to just open magically?” Sam asked.
“But for Dinah to come, Ozella has to be awake. And if Dinah isn’t coming…”
Sam gulped. “Don’t say that, Zoe. They can’t be dead. They really can’t.”
“No, they really can,” Zoe told him, glaring down at the snow. “That’s what these types of people do. I don’t know why they would keep them alive. We may have already waited for too long…”
“Shit…” Sam brought his hands to his temples for a moment, starting to feel pressure. They had already been over the fact that this was a suicide mission, and up until this point, he’d been well aware of this and had accepted it.
But now, with the thought that the others may actually be dead…
The door started to rattle. Zoe and Sam looked at each other, both going wide-eyed as they got out of the way of the door.
The door opened, then shut, then opened again, a man and a woman stepping out into the cold. The man wore an apron, the woman a jacket and robes.
“It’s so cold out here,” she said between kisses, the woman clearly younger than the man.
“I know, but no one will see us out here. I always wanted to do something like this…”
The door now hanging wide open, the man pressed his back against it for a moment as he started to guide the woman down. He shifted his apron to the side, and began unbuckling his zipper.
“Out here? In the cold?”
“Just use one of your runes to keep your mouth warm,” the man said with a grunt.
“I don’t know if I can do that…”
“Then what are they teaching you in this school anyway?”
“I guess I can try…”
“That’s the spirit!”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Zoe said, appearing to their right.
And before the man could react Zoe was on him. She shoved the woman to the side and used her hand to drive the man’s head into the wall, hard enough that he instantly passed out.
As the woman stood, about to scream, her eyes taking in Zoe’s intimidating form, Sam stepped behind her and grabbed her by the waist, his other hand going over her mouth.
“Shhh… Not a word,” Sam whispered in her ear. “And no runes.”
“We’re not going to kill you,” Zoe said. “In fact, you just made our little situation that much easier…” The woman fainted, the shock instantly getting to her.
“Okay, that was…”
“Serendipity?”
“I don’t know if I would call it that,” Sam said
as he held the woman’s limp body. “We should get them inside though; they’ll die if we leave them out here.”
“What do you think was going on between these two anyway?” Sam whispered as they dragged them into the back of a food storage area. It was rather large, and filled with boxes, all the lights currently off.
“I don’t know,” said Zoe as she dropped the man. Sam was glad when she shut the door, preventing more of the cold air from slipping into the relatively warm space. “But it looks like she’s one of the students here, and he’s the help, so I’m assuming this relationship is not sanctioned.”
“He looks pretty young though,” Sam said.
Zoe smirked. “This fucker was about to get lucky, and then we actually got lucky. I don’t know what giving a blow job in a blizzard would be like, but we may have just saved them from having her mouth frozen to his cock, which I’m guessing would’ve been a whole ‘nother situation. See if you can find something in here to tie them up with, and we’ll need to gag both of them too.”
“Hmmm… there may be cleaning supplies in here,” Sam said. “But how about I watch them, while you search around. It’s dark in here, and my sight ability can be a bit overwhelming in close quarters…”
“Right,” Zoe said as she dropped the man, moving off into the darkness.
Sam heard some rustling for a moment.
It stopped, silence circling all around him. He felt alone in those long, exhausting seconds.
But eventually, Zoe emerged from the darkness with a bucket full of rags. She tied the man’s hands together and gagged him. She blindfolded him as well, propping him up against the wall of a dark corner.
“Now it’s her turn,” she said, approaching Sam.
They went through the same routine for the young woman, and placed her next to the man.
“If they do wake up, it will be a while before they can figure this one out. At least I hope.”
“Yes, that’s the last thing we need, these two sounding the alarm,” said Sam. “You know, as much as I like being with you, our powers really don’t work very well together. But we still seem to figure it out each and every time.”
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