by Hondo Jinx
Self-doubt is an assassin. It slides silently through the darkness of your personal midnight and stabs you in the back with a blade of your own making.
And to hell with that.
But when you’re up against it, sometimes, it’s not enough to just kick yourself in the ass.
Sometimes, you have to change things up.
So rather than just climbing aboard the double strand again, Brawley grabbed hold of the Gearhead strand and pulled a length of sparking silver force.
He straddled the sleeping braid and looped the sparking silver strand under it like a bull rope. He cinched it tight, gathering the excess in his riding hand, and cooled his mind.
Then, with a quick “open the chute” nod, he hauled back on the three strands with everything he had.
Brawley shot into the air, gripping the silver strand with both hands.
The braid thrashed violently, trying to buck him. It shook and dove and snapped like a whip.
But Brawley knew its tricks now. He minded his hips, focused on keeping his balance, and didn’t let the damn thing get out in front of him.
The spliced braid dropped into a pile, smashing Brawley’s boots into the foundation of his mind.
Knowing what was coming next, Brawley squared his shoulders and hauled back, riding the thing as it rocketed into the air.
The supercharged braid spun into its final act. Brawley tilted his hips, clamped his knees, and choked up on the silver strand.
The thrumming column of force swung into cyclone mode.
The tornado spun ‘round and ‘round, whirling Brawley faster and faster in ever-tightening revolutions.
A maniacal grin stretched involuntarily as a death rictus across Brawley’s face.
Come on, he challenged the whirling braid. You can’t buck me off!
In life, fortune truly favors the bold. You can’t splice if you don’t swagger.
The braid slammed to a halt.
Brawley jerked hard. His legs thrust straight out like a compass needle pointing toward failure. Brawley roared with defiance, tendons creaking as he held tight to his makeshift bull rope.
Then it was over.
All the fight went out of the braid, which thrummed with incredible power—Brawley’s power.
He hollered with savage joy. He’d done it again, broken and mastered the pulsing triple strand.
Insane power flooded into him.
Then he was back in Red Haven. Back in the cabin, boiling over with power.
For a second, he rocked on his boot heels like a drunk cowboy staggering out of a saloon on dollar pitcher night. From the pointed toes of his boots all the way to the top of his skull, where a damn hat should be sitting, he was chock full of crackling energy. So much it felt like he’d blow the hell up if he didn’t release most of it here and now.
The impending explosion demanded its conduit.
Brawley dumped the force into his Unbound strand, marched across the wide-planked floor, and threw open the door. He scanned the surrounding red waste, his vision staticky with the force sparking within him.
He locked onto a distant butte and pulled the psionic trigger.
He released only a portion of the force like a man cracking the release valve on an overheating boiler.
Or rather, that’s what he tried to do.
But the pulsing triple-strand of telekinetic force didn’t give a shit about his intentions. The whole damn thing jumped out of him in a single wallop and shot across the red wasteland like a psionic howitzer round.
The butte exploded with a thunderous boom that shook the valley like an earthquake. A red mushroom cloud pillared skyward, blotting out the horizon.
A shockwave thick with grit slammed into him, making him squint and stagger backwards until he stood in the doorway, shielding his eyes with a forearm and squinting out at the roiling, red destruction that looked like nothing so much as a West Texas dust storm.
The red cloud spread over the shaking world, raining debris. A bus-sized chunk of stone slammed into the parched ground between Brawley and the blast, and a hail of gravel pattered across the land and rattled across the roof of the cabin.
Staggered, Brawley stood in the doorway watching as the cloud broke apart and drifted away, revealing all that remained of the rocky formation: a jagged and spindly ridge of stony spikes rising within the shockingly palpable vacancy where formerly had squatted a massive formation of stone now reduced to dust and talus.
“Hell yeah,” Brawley said, his voice vibrating with the last aftershocks of the explosion.
Six hundred points of telekinetic force made for one hell of a cannon. He wasn’t sure it would kill the Tiger Mage, but one way or the other, he didn’t reckon it’d do the black-striped son of a bitch much good.
Brawley wobbled there, gasping for air, badly rocked. Man, was he beat. And hurting, too, he realized.
Splicing took a damn toll. He felt like he’d gotten bucked and stomped.
And yet he smiled.
Because he’d done it again. He’d ridden a triple splice. Conquered it.
Sometimes, agony is a small price to pay for victory.
But triple-splicing wouldn’t be enough, he knew. Because training was one thing, and combat was a whole different beast.
Combat showed up when it wanted, where it wanted, under any conditions.
When it was time to splice for real, he might not have the juice for three strands. Or he might be in a position where the power of a full triple splice would do more harm than good.
So he needed to keep training and figure out how to dial things back and cover a double strand.
Then, down the road, who knew? He might try adding a fourth strand.
Might.
But he doubted it. Because from everything he’d heard, splicing three strands was madness, and anything beyond that was like strapping yourself to a mountain of dynamite and lighting the fuse.
As if to underscore this caution, something exploded in the near distance, booming and rolling like a fighter jet breaking the sound barrier on a low flyover. And indeed, an instant later, Brawley saw an indistinct object hurtling through the upper reaches of the red blast cloud.
Not a plane but a figure, perhaps humanoid, perhaps not, streaking straight at him out of the sky, splitting the air with a high, keening cry of rage like the shrill whistle of an incoming artillery round.
Brawley’s danger sense went ape shit, screaming for him to get the fuck out of the way.
He hurled himself inside the cabin, slammed the door, and threw the bolt.
In seemingly the same instant, a tremendous explosion rocked Red Haven. The blast was deafening. The door squeaked, straining in its frame, and the whole cabin shuddered with impact.
But Red Haven still stood.
Brawley staggered backward and dropped his ass into a chair, staring at the door, ready to say the words that would send him rushing back to the ranch.
Outside, some great, mysterious beast smashed into the cabin, pounding at the door over and over, roaring like a dozen barbarians with a battering ram.
And yet the door held. This place was strong, armored in powerful magic.
The thing outside raged on, roaring and growling, slamming its bulk against the door.
Meanwhile, Brawley’s Carnal strand was working its magic. His pain dialed down to half-volume. Shakiness abandoned him, replaced by crushing thirst and ravenous hunger.
He stood, happy to have his balance back, and crossed the room to where he and the girls had earlier stockpiled food and water.
Outside, the monster he’d summoned hammered away, wanting to smash the door and inhale Brawley like a bird pulling a snail from its cracked shell.
Knock yourself out trying, asshole, Brawley thought, because he was sure now, just as sure as he was of his own bones, that Red Haven would not break under the beast’s passionate attack.
He chugged three bottles of water and grabbed a plug of jerky. Then he just stood t
here chewing and watching the walls shake as the clamoring beast circled the cabin, testing every side with blast after blast of titanic blunt force.
Red Haven held.
Strong magic, indeed. And damn good to know.
Brawley finished the jerky, drank another water, and returned to the chair.
He was anxious to get home and back to work. But he needed to power up first.
And thanks to Remi’s tutelage and Red Haven’s time dilation, the thirty minutes he needed to refill his psionic cisterns here would cost him only a few minutes at home.
So he settled in.
Who knew? By staying a bit longer, maybe he would hit the jackpot, and that thieving red-haired woman would drop in for a visit.
Not damn likely.
He had a sense he was going to have to track her mysterious ass down. He didn’t even know where to start. That was the hell of it. He had gone back in his memory, held her broadcast image in mind, and thrown some Seeker juice at it, trying to crack her identity.
No luck. Not a damn peep.
But hunting her was going to be priority number one as soon as he rescued Winnie.
He wanted his damn book back. Not to mention the third gift.
Whoever the mysterious woman turned out to be, she was the key to his destiny. He needed to find her. Pronto.
And that meant taking risks.
But first, tomorrow’s trip. Then Winnie. Then he would hunt the elusive, red-haired book thief.
Piece by piece his life and mindset were reconfiguring.
After weeks of running and hiding, it was finally time to go on the offensive.
So he stretched out his legs and crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. He instructed his mind to wake him in thirty minutes and, ignoring the roaring beast and shuddering walls, plunged into deep slumber.
11
When he rematerialized beside the shed where he’d killed Blanton Cherry, Brawley saw Arabella Louise Carter smiling at him.
“Well, fancy meeting you here, stranger,” Arabella said.
The manipulative Bender was perched atop a picnic table, drinking a beer. She looked stunning in a tight blue dress of powder blue silk, knee-high gladiator sandals, and her hobble collar.
The dress hugged her fantastic curves, leaving little to the imagination. The plunging neckline exposed her tanned cleavage, and a slit ran up the side from knee to waistline. She sat with her knees spread, opening the dress and baring her tanned and shapely inner thigh to the top.
Arabella sipped her beer and smiled, giving him sultry bedroom eyes while he looked her up and down.
She looked incredibly sexy—and at the same time dumb as hell. The collar was part of it, but mostly it was just that she looked so out of place here with her perfect hair and makeup, sitting on an old picnic table in a fancy silk skirt that had no business on a ranch.
Hell, the thing was so thin he reckoned he might rip it just by looking too hard. He could see every curve of her body. She obviously wasn’t wearing a bra because her nipples and areolae printed clearly against the thin silk.
She had been waiting for him in that ridiculous dress, and he knew she was going to try again to manipulate him. The cocky, cutesy look on her face made him want to boot her straight back to the Mitchell place where she belonged.
But man, oh man, she was a fine-looking specimen of the female species. Every firm inch of her shapely body radiated youth and health and ripeness.
And there was something else. An alluring otherness.
Something foreign to Brawley, something that hit him on a subconscious level, suggesting bedrock value on a scale he did not know or understand.
A thing like class, maybe. Though sitting there on the picnic table with her legs spread and a beer in her hand, Arabella wasn’t exactly the picture of sophistication.
But it was something like that. Privilege, maybe. Wealth. Something. It was stitched into her, shining out from her beauty queen smile and perfect hair, her Southern belle drawl, her confidence.
She thrummed with otherness. This haughty, manipulative beauty came from a land Brawley had never traveled. Where Arabella came from, smug, silver-spoon hotshots would poke fun at Brawley’s name, his hat, and his accent. They would even laugh at his gold buckle. To them, all the years of hard work and suffering he had endured to win the professional bull riding world championship would be a big, fat joke.
Because people from Arabella’s world were born into money. To them, working your way up the ladder was pitiful and hilarious.
All this came to Brawley in a rush of recognition that stirred his emotions. And that wasn’t all that was stirring. His jeans were growing tighter by the second.
He felt a quick twinge of indignant anger. For a second, he considered giving the girl what she wanted and more. Just tear off that skimpy, thousand-dollar nightie and stuff it in her mouth, gag her while he grudge-fucked the aristocracy out of her with his massive redneck dick. Crack her strand, break her like a wild mare, and pump that old-money womb full of country boy seed. Breed the breeding out of her and leave her panting on the ground, begging for more like a cheap slut without two pennies to rub together.
These notions passed over him in a dark cloud that left him hard and stern. But he fought down his urges. Yes, she was ripe and beautiful and aggravating, but bonding was forever, and he wanted more out of his sixth wife than looks and the pleasure of tainting her blue blood.
“You were waiting for me,” he said.
Arabella played it coy. She dipped her heart-shaped face, bit her lip, and fluttered her long lashes, which were thick with mascara.
All an act, Brawley knew, all premeditated.
“Why yes, I was,” Arabella said. She held his stare for half a beat. “I was hoping you might help me out of this thing.” She shimmied back and forth on her perch, wiggling her curves.
“Is that right?” Brawley said.
Arabella dropped her mouth wide open and muffled sudden laughter behind splayed fingers. “Oh, I meant help me out of this,” she said, plucking at her collar. “Not my…”
She ran her hands down the shimmering dress, smoothing it over her breasts, bringing her nipples to full hardness, and over her torso. One hand rose to her smiling lips. The other hand remained below, its cherry-red fingernails very bright against the naked flesh of her inner thigh. “Brawley, you are a bad, bad boy thinking that way.”
“The answer’s no,” Brawley said, and he glanced across the driveway to his ranch house, where he reckoned his wives would be waiting on him.
“How can the answer be no when I haven’t even asked a question yet, sugar?” Arabella said.
Brawley said, “You think you can play me, control me? Darlin, you’re barking up the wrong tree.” He kept his voice even, but anger rose in him. Not so much at her but rather at the traitorous erection throbbing away in his jeans. “Let it go before you get yourself hurt.”
Arabella feigned confusion. “I don’t have the foggiest notion of what you mean.”
“Yeah, you do. You just got it in that pretty head of yours that I’m wrong. You’ve been wrapping folks around your little finger since you were in diapers. Go ahead and shoot me if I’m wrong.”
“Ugh, that is a barbarous figure of speech. And so what if I have been fighting for what I want over the years? Is it a crime for a woman to stand up for herself?”
“Darlin, everybody in this world, be it a man or a woman alike, had better damn well stand up for themselves. But you find yourself in the company of a person who knows what he wants and does what he sees fit. You can’t change that. I reckon this is a first for you, not being able to control a man, and it’s driving you crazy.”
Arabella crossed one long leg over the other and lifted her chin a touch. “Well, Mister Hayes, you certainly have a lofty opinion of yourself. I just want to be treated with decency is all. But instead, you keep me in a collar like some kind of dog. I demand you—”
“No,�
�� Brawley said.
“You don’t even know what I was going to say!”
“Yes, you were going to tell me to take off your collar. The answer is no. I don’t trust you. Not yet. You keep using telepathy on the other girls.”
“Who told you that?” Arabella said, mock-offended.
“I caught you at it, remember?”
“Once,” she said. “One harmless little slip. Besides, that wasn’t what I was going to say, Mr. Know-It-All.”
“No?”
“No,” she said. Slipping down off the picnic table, Arabella slid back into coy mode again, acting like a child harboring a delicious secret she wasn’t supposed to share. “Aren’t you curious?”
“The only thing I’m curious about is how to get it through your thick skull that you can’t slip a bit in my mouth.”
Arabella laughed, putting too much into it. “Oh, sugar, you do make me laugh. But hear me out. Because I guarantee you will want to hear this. See…” She paused and looked down at her sandaled foot. “It’s so hard to say the words.”
“Well, either say them or don’t, but make up your damn mind. I gotta go.”
Arabella stamped her foot, giving him half a second of fake anger before smiling sweetly again. “I like you. Okay?” She laughed, hiding her face behind her hands for a second, then said, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I said it. I can’t believe I told you.”
Brawley just looked at her.
Arabella slid smoothly into puppy dog mode. “Don’t you even care? Are you that cold-hearted? Don’t you like me even a little bit?”
“Gotta go, darlin,” he said, and started to turn away. “Early flight in the morning.”
Arabella rushed forward and grabbed his hand. “You can’t treat me like this. I refuse to be ignored!”
“I didn’t ignore you. I listened. Now, I’m leaving.”
“Oh no, you aren’t,” she said, and a transformation came over her. Her bright blue eyes flashed with hot emotion. She stood up straight and pulled her shoulders back, thrusting her incredible cleavage forward until it seemed like her breasts might tear free of the thin silk. “I don’t just like you. I want you, okay? Do I have to spell it out, you old meanie? I want you.”