Sleight of Fantasy

by Dima Zales

  “Sure,” I say, though I was just trying to calm myself.

  Fluffster jumps onto the bed to better observe me. A feline eye looks at him hungrily from under the blanket, but to my surprise, Lucifur doesn’t attack.

  “The cat is a quick learner,” Fluffster says smugly in my head. “Now if I could train her to like a less expensive brand of cat food, she’d be perfect.”

  Shaking my head, I attempt to access Headspace.

  My power must be fully recharged because it works right away.

  I float there for a while, just enjoying the weightlessness-like sensation.

  Not having a body can be rather soothing—especially when I know I’m not fighting for my life in the outside world.

  It has never occurred to me before, but Headspace is an excellent place to get away to think. In fact, because time doesn’t seem to pass in the outside world, I can do thinking without wasting precious moments of my life.

  Hey, maybe the next time I need to think up a magic effect, I will do so in Headspace. Maybe this is how I’ll invent a show that would impress the Cognizant. After all, if Nero really liked my cheat-at-cards demonstration, other supernatural beings might also.

  I float for a moment, trying to figure out what I should do with this current Headspace session, when something dawns on me.

  It’s been a while since I tried to make a Headspace call to Rasputin—my biological father.

  Reaching him should be easier now that I learned more about him during Nero’s rare moment of candor.

  Yes, that’s it.

  I should’ve started with this.

  Imaginative, Nero had called him, and I bet Rasputin is that—assuming he purposefully crafted the mystery-man persona in the human histories.

  Quirky—that was another epithet Nero had given him, and that makes sense too. When I think about the bearded picture of the man, quirky and eccentric are definitely terms that come to mind.

  Nero had also called him resourceful. This is easy to believe as well. According to history, my father had been excellent at manipulating the Russian royal family—so much so that people eventually wanted to kill him for it.

  The only description of Nero’s that I don’t agree with is loyal. How could that be true for a man who had abandoned me, his daughter, to be raised by strangers in a foreign land?

  Nevertheless, I do my best to focus on the essence of the man—including everything Nero had said.

  To my huge surprise, it works.

  Or at least I assume it does because a Headspace entity turns up next to me.

  One that isn’t Darian or the bannik.

  The entity pulses with equal measure curiosity and dread.

  I reach out to him/it.

  The entity reluctantly returns the favor.

  Perhaps it’s my imagination, but the mutual metaphysical touch brings to mind scenes of family members hugging each other after a long time apart.

  Our minds meld, and I prepare for a wild ride.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  I’m sitting on a bed, brushing a woman’s hair with an ornately designed brush.

  My hand is strong and masculine—evidence I might be in Rasputin’s memories, or those of some other male seer.

  The woman is turned away, so I can’t see her face. Her pale shoulders and graceful back remind me of a ballerina, and the way she moans and purrs in pleasure when he/I groom her is the kind of seductive that borders on pornographic.

  Could this be my mother?

  Am I about to see a memory of my own conception?

  That would be like walking in on your parents, but exponentially weirder.

  Or is this their post-coital bliss?

  “I love how unpredictable you are,” I say in Russian in a deep male voice. The language is another clue that this is my father’s memory.

  “That’s not the only thing you love about me,” the woman answers, her voice soft and lilting.

  Though she says the words in Russian, I understand them—a perk of being inside the head of a native Russian speaker. I can even tell she has an accent when she speaks—though what kind is unclear.

  She starts to turn, but before I see her face, the memory changes.

  I’m standing in an opulent, onion-domed building filled with gold decorations and religious icons in the style of the Russian Orthodox Church.

  If I really am in Rasputin’s memories, this might be a church inside the Winter Palace.

  Nero stands next to a fancy candelabra dressed in clothes that seem to have jumped out of a black-and-white photo taken in Russia circa early 1900s. Rasputin must be very tall—I’m looking down at Nero, which is an odd experience.

  For someone who will become my boss a hundred years from now, Nero looks exactly the same. Well, except for that perfectly trimmed beard that brings to mind an overzealous hipster.

  “If we follow this course, she will have a peaceful life all the way to her twenty-fourth year,” Rasputin/I say. “I can’t see further than that—though I can tell something will happen that year that will splinter her futures beyond reckoning.”

  “I’ll be extra vigilant when I get there,” Nero says. “Now about—”

  The memory switch happens again, and the hustle and bustle of JFK surrounds me on all sides.

  He/I am holding a little girl by her tiny hand.

  Her skin is pale, and her big blue eyes are looking up with a frightened expression.

  I recognize that face.

  This is what I look like in the first pictures my adoptive parents took of me.

  “How can I leave my child?” is a thought that swirls through his head, and the pain he feels is overwhelming. “It’s the only way,” he then tells himself, over and over. “It’s the only way I could think of,” he whispers to the girl.

  Some sadistic part of me actually likes it that he’s upset.

  He’s about to abandon me like a bag of trash.

  He should feel like shit.

  He/I look at the nearby bar.

  Younger-looking Mom and Dad are sitting there, drinking cocktails.

  “They shall be good parents to you,” he/I say to the mini me in Russian. “It’s the only—”

  My/Rasputin’s eyes are closed.

  I recognize the constriction in the wrists and around my chest from my escapist training.

  This is what it feels like to be tied to a chair with rope.

  If I could, I would wrinkle my nose. Wherever we are smells like an underground morgue.

  Then a fist slams into my stomach.

  Well, Rasputin’s, not mine, but the pain makes me forget who is who for a moment.

  Air escapes our lungs and we gasp for air—but keep our face as placid as is possible under the circumstances, with our eyes closed.

  “When this torturer sees the pain, the beatings are much worse,” Rasputin thinks, resisting the temptation to squeeze his hands into fists.

  The next blow is to the kneecap—and the pain is so intense he fails to keep in a pained gasp.

  Ow, ow, ow.

  I need a way to disconnect from this memory, fast.

  The pain is all too real.

  “I deserve this,” Rasputin thinks as another blow makes him want to scream. “Everything they do to me I deserve for leaving my child.”

  Chapter Sixty

  I find myself in a vacuum-like blackness for the third time, facing a synapse-hologram of a man I do not recognize.

  Bald and beardless, at first he looks nothing like the images of Rasputin I saw online.

  Except for those eyes.

  The eyes look the same.

  And there’s his now-exposed chin.

  It looks just like the one I popped pimples on as a teen.

  My chin.

  “Grigori Rasputin?” I ask tremulously.

  Every possible human emotion seems to kaleidoscope on his translucent face as he nods and points at me. “Sasha?” he asks, pronouncing my name in that Russian manner that Fe
lix’s parents do.

  I nod.

  He rattles out something in rapid-fire Russian and floats down.

  “I don’t understand.” I float to his level. “I don’t speak Russian.”

  The pain in his eyes seems to intensify.

  “Ya ne govoryu po-angliyski,” Rasputin says very slowly and points at himself, then at his mouth, then at my mouth.

  “You don’t speak English,” I guess.

  He shrugs.

  If he doesn’t speak English to the point where he doesn’t know that phrase, his English must be as bad as my Russian.

  Or maybe worse. Felix taught me how to say hello and a couple of versions of goodbye in Russian—and at least a few curse words.

  “Opasno.” Rasputin points at our surroundings, then at the entities, himself, and me. “Opasno.” He repeats it a few times.

  “Opasno,” I parrot, and he nods.

  “I have no idea what that means, but I’ll find out as soon as I’m out of here,” I tell him.

  He shrugs and repeats the word one more time.

  “How do I find you?” I ask. Pointing at him, I pantomime legs walking with my index and middle finger. “I want to meet you.”

  “Nyet.” He shakes his head vigorously, then points at me, then at himself. He then does the walking gesture and makes a cross with his arms.

  The message is loud and clear.

  He doesn’t want me to come find him.

  “Why not?” I demand. “Where are you? Who was torturing you? Why?”

  “Proschay,” he says solemnly, and I feel myself getting ripped away from him.

  Felix taught me that word.

  It means goodbye—but the type of goodbye that has connotations of never meeting again.

  “No. Wait!” I shout, but the feeling of getting ripped apart intensifies until something disconnects, and I’m thrust back into the real world.

  I sit there recovering for a moment. My father must’ve used a burst of power to disconnect from me—a seer’s version of hanging up.

  I pull out my phone and search the word “opasno.”

  It translates to “danger.”

  Okay. What did he mean by that?

  He was pointing around when he said it, so maybe he was telling me the same thing as Darian, about how dangerous it is to speak in Headspace that way.

  I get up and begin to pace around the room.

  “What’s the problem?” Fluffster asks. “Did you see a disturbing vision?”

  Feeling silly that I forgot he was even there, I tell Fluffster what happened—and when I’m done, he confirms that opasno indeed means danger, and that proschay is farewell.

  “Maybe those conversations are dangerous because they make your future harder to predict?” Fluffster cocks his head. “Darian said no one could foresee those, so—”

  “Maybe,” I say, my eyes falling on the map to Buyan. “Hold on a second.”

  I stare at the map as if seeing it for the first time.

  Something about it has been gnawing at me ever since Kit drew it, and the current context seems to help.

  Yes. It has always reminded me of something—something to do with Rasputin, I now realize, though I still have no idea what.

  On a hunch, I unlock my phone and start browsing through the pictures there, and as I do, I finally recall where I’ve seen this kind of map-meets-Venn diagram before.

  And how it ties to Rasputin.

  Swiping past the photos of the contract between Nero and my father, I find it.

  It was in my phone this whole time.

  A picture of something else in Nero’s safe.

  Another Otherland map in the style Kit had utilized.

  A map that Nero kept in the same folder as everything else pertaining to Rasputin and me.

  Could it be?

  Have I found a way to my father?

  Something—probably seer intuition—fills me with the certainty that I have.

  Yes.

  I know I have.

  Just as I know something else.

  Wherever Rasputin is, he’s being tortured—and his coping strategies imply that it’s something that happens to him often, maybe even every day.

  Which leaves me with only one course of action.

  No matter what he told me, I can’t stay away.

  He’s my father.

  That he didn’t raise me was his choice, and this will be mine.

  One way or another, I will find him.

  Even if this map leads me into the very depths of hell.

  The End

  Thank you for reading! I hope you’re enjoying Sasha’s story! Her adventures continue in Paranormal Misdirection (Sasha Urban Series: Book 5). To be notified of new releases of my books, please visit www.dimazales.com and sign up for my mailing list.

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  Want to read my other books? You can check out:

  Mind Dimensions - the action-packed urban fantasy adventures of Darren, who can stop time and read minds

  Upgrade - the thrilling sci-fi tale of Mike Cohen, whose new technology will transform our brains and the world

  The Last Humans - the futuristic sci-fi/dystopian story of Theo, who lives in a world where nothing is as it seems

  The Sorcery Code - the epic fantasy adventures of sorcerer Blaise and his creation, the beautiful and powerful Gala

  I also collaborate with my wife on sci-fi romance, so if you don’t mind erotic material, you can check out Close Liaisons.

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  And now, please turn the page for an exciting excerpt from The Thought Readers.

  Sneak Peek at The Thought Readers

  Description

  Everyone thinks I’m a genius.

  * * *

  Everyone is wrong.

  * * *

  Sure, I finished Harvard at eighteen and now make crazy money at a hedge fund. But that’s not because I’m unusually smart or hard-working.

  * * *

  It’s because I cheat.

  * * *

  You see, I have a unique ability. I can go outside time into my own personal version of reality—the place I call “the Quiet”—where I can explore my surroundings while the rest of the world stands still.

  * * *

  I thought I was the only one who could do this—until I met her.

  * * *

  My name is Darren, and this is how I learned that I’m a Reader.

  Excerpt

  Sometimes I think I’m crazy. I’m sitting at a casino table in Atlantic City, and everyone around me is motionless. I call this the Quiet, as though giving it a name makes it seem more real—as though giving it a name changes the fact that all the players around me are frozen like statues, and I’m walking among them, looking at the cards they’ve been dealt.

  The problem with the theory of my being crazy is that when I ‘unfreeze’ the world, as I just have, the cards the players turn over are the same ones I just saw in the Quiet. If I were crazy, wouldn’t these cards be different? Unless I’m so far gone that I’m imagining the cards on the table, too.

  But then I also win. If that’s a delusion—if the pile of chips on my side of the table is a delusion—then I might as well question everything. Maybe my name isn’t even Darren.

  No. I can’t think that way. If I’m really that confused, I don’t want to snap out of it—because if I do, I’ll probably wake up in a mental hospital.

  Besides, I love my life, crazy and all.

  My shrink thinks the Quiet is an inventive way I describe the ‘inner workings of my genius.’ Now that sounds crazy to me. She also might want me, but that’s beside the point. Suffice it to say, she’s as far as it gets from my datable age range, which is currently right around twenty-four. Still young, still hot, but done with school and pr
etty much beyond the clubbing phase. I hate clubbing, almost as much as I hated studying. In any case, my shrink’s explanation doesn’t work, as it doesn’t account for the way I know things even a genius wouldn’t know—like the exact value and suit of the other players’ cards.

  I watch as the dealer begins a new round. Besides me, there are three players at the table: Grandma, the Cowboy, and the Professional, as I call them. I feel that now almost imperceptible fear that accompanies the phasing. That’s what I call the process: phasing into the Quiet. Worrying about my sanity has always facilitated phasing; fear seems helpful in this process.

  I phase in, and everything gets quiet. Hence the name for this state.

  It’s eerie to me, even now. Outside the Quiet, this casino is very loud: drunk people talking, slot machines, ringing of wins, music—the only place louder is a club or a concert. And yet, right at this moment, I could probably hear a pin drop. It’s like I’ve gone deaf to the chaos that surrounds me.

  Having so many frozen people around adds to the strangeness of it all. Here is a waitress stopped mid-step, carrying a tray with drinks. There is a woman about to pull a slot machine lever. At my own table, the dealer’s hand is raised, the last card he dealt hanging unnaturally in midair. I walk up to him from the side of the table and reach for it. It’s a king, meant for the Professional. Once I let the card go, it falls on the table rather than continuing to float as before—but I know full well that it will be back in the air, in the exact position it was when I grabbed it, when I phase out.