Psychic

by Chloe Garner

  “What’s going on?”

  “Sam just went unconscious.”

  <><><>

  Samantha groaned, squeezing her eyes shut as she felt out her body. Something had gone wrong. She was confused and… something had gone wrong. She didn’t know what. She didn’t… remember. Why had she stopped remembering?

  The back of her head hurt, a broad, dull throb that made her feel her pulse in her ears. She opened her eyes. Her wrists were tied to her ankles and she was sitting against a wall - somewhere, she couldn’t identify where - with her arms around her knees. A tall, over-muscled man with a reddish complexion stood watching her.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I am Cobalt.” His voice was deep. His face didn’t move.

  “Where is Alexander?”

  “He is around.”

  “I want to see him,” she said.

  “I do not care.”

  “Are you a demon?” she asked in angeltongue. He grinned, revealing perfect, blocky white teeth, but didn’t answer. She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing herself to become more aware of what was going on. She couldn’t hear Alexander, and the room she was in was barren of any furniture. It was good-sized and well-lit. The basement of the apartment building, maybe? Somewhere else? She reached out for Sam.

  He was coming. He felt her wake up and was worried, but calmer now that she was awake. She pulled at the ropes hard enough to inflict pain so that he would know she was tied up. The danger, whatever it was, was not imminent, though, because she was still alive. The demon called Cobalt wanted something from her. She pushed Sam back gently. Go slow, be careful. She was okay for right now. She opened her eyes and looked at Cobalt again.

  Sam was directly above her. Basement. Why was she here? He was relieved at something, and she frowned.

  “Do not think you are going to surprise me with the angel blade on your back,” Cobalt said. “I cannot touch it and obviously the boy did not find it, but you will not have opportunity to use it.”

  She frowned.

  The boy.

  Her eyes flew open and she saw the delight on his face, but her real concern was…

  She dropped her head forward involuntarily under the blow. It was too late. She hadn’t been quick enough to warn him. Sam was out.

  The demon watched her with feline smugness as they waited.

  “I will not give you my fear,” Samantha said. He licked his lips.

  “You underestimate me.”

  She looked around the room once more, then down at the ropes tying her. She was barefoot, and the knots were well-tied. She wouldn’t slip them or untie them easily. She pressed her back against the wall, comforted at the shape of the pressure of Lahn’s sheath. It didn’t matter that the demon knew she was there, Lahn was her best ally. At the far end of the room, the elevator doors dinged open and revealed Alexander standing in the middle of the elevator, holding both Jason and Sam by their shirt collars. She shook her head. He’d gotten both of them. How had he done it?

  Alexander dragged them across the room to the corner to Samantha’s far right.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked. His face was stern, frozen in anger. He glanced at Cobalt, who nodded permission, then walked over to Samantha and squatted in front of her. They stared at each other, less than six inches apart. His face was completely changed. She had never seen him without a smile, his eyes dancing. Now they were angry, his mouth dead, expressionless.

  “Why?” she asked again. He slapped her. Hard. Her neck snapped and she coughed on a sob of anger as her chin hit her shoulder.

  “You don’t remember me,” he spat. She slowly raised her face, and he hit her with the back of his hand, knuckles leaving marks her face remembered as she stared away, shuddering with fury and the stinging shock of betrayal.

  “Who are you?” she asked, not looking up. She buried her face against the side of her knee.

  “You killed my brother,” he said. She frowned and looked up.

  “I did not.”

  He slapped her again and she choked on another sob. Her mind was shaken. She couldn’t focus. She struggled to pull herself together.

  “You left him to die,” Alexander said.

  “Please tell me what I did,” she said.

  “We went to New York for his graduation,” Alexander said. She heard him settle from his feet into a seated position and she looked up. He raised his arm to hit her and she ducked her face back down behind her knees. “We were going back to our hotel from a museum, when he fell down and started shaking. I yelled for help, but no one came. When he got up, he wasn’t my brother. He laughed at me and ran down an alley.”

  Recognition dawned on Samantha.

  “You wore glasses back then,” she said. “And you’ve… bulked up a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was chasing a jumper,” she said. “I remember. It got your brother.” She looked up, not caring if he hit her again. “I pulled it out of him.”

  Alexander’s eyes remained angry.

  “Yeah. You said he was going to be fine, then you ran off again.”

  She nodded.

  “I hadn’t sent him back across. He just jumped to the next person. I had to go find him and actually catch him.”

  Alexander licked his lips again.

  “We went home, and for a little while, everything was okay. We just didn’t talk about it. Like it was a dream. Then he started hearing things. He started scratching his arms. We cut his fingernails off, and he got a comb out of my mom’s bathroom and started scratching with that.” Alexander paused, remembering. His eyes didn’t leave her face, they just got angrier. “He scratched all the skin off his arms before we put him in the hospital. He screamed that they were watching. I tried to find you. I even went back to New York. Everyone thought my little brother was crazy, but you left something bad inside of him. He gouged his own eyes out with his fingers a few weeks later. Did nothing but scream. No words. Just screaming. And then his heart stopped. They said it was schizophrenia. That he had a heart attack. You killed him.”

  She closed her eyes and dropped her forehead onto her knees.

  “I…” The jumper had been the week before Justin had died. She might have followed up with the innocents she had pulled the jumper out of, maybe, but… She wouldn’t have been findable at all, when Alexander was looking for her. She’d been on a crazy streak. She remembered little of it, even now. She looked up at him.

  “I will carry your brother as a deep regret for the rest of my life,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

  His lip turned up in a sneer.

  “You bet you’re sorry, now. Where were you when I needed you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No.” He stood. “I’m going to make you sorry. He said he knew the ways to punish you for what you did, worse than anyone else.”

  Cobalt approached.

  “What did you do to him?” Samantha asked. He smiled.

  “Nothing he didn’t want.”

  She shook her head, rage bubbling up in her chest as Alexander walked back over to Sam and Jason. He had Jason’s gun. Cobalt was watching Samantha with a passive glee. Her chest felt like it was going to explode. She wanted to scream. It was all wrong. Her sweet, happy Alexander, twisted like that. By a demon. Because his little brother had died of demonic infection years prior. She closed her eyes, feeling a ball of power expand from her heart. She gritted her teeth at the pain of it, but it was a pain she welcomed. Her head throbbed and burned, and she smelled something. Burning rope.

  She stood.

  <><><>

  Jason struggled to wake. It was like a thick wool blanket was over his head, but he couldn’t pull it away. He twisted his head to one side, wildly unaware of where he was, what he was doing there. Alexander was pointing a gun at him.

  His gun.

  That made things clear up in a hurry. He growled, but Alexander wasn’t looking. Samantha was stan
ding in front of a towering man with red skin. They were just staring at each other. He reached up, quietly flicking the safety back on on his gun, then easing it out of Alexander’s hand. He looked over at Sam, who was slumped in the corner and slowly regaining consciousness.

  The little punk had taken them both out. That’s bad for a reputation.

  Samantha drew Lahn and, as if she were preparing to carve something into a tree, shoved it into the man’s chest. That he didn’t die confirmed what Jason had guessed about the humanity of the red man. They stared at each other for another moment, then the red man drew the knife back out of his chest and flung it toward Sam and Jason without looking. Without so much as twitching her head, Samantha shot an arm out and flicked her hand in a rotational motion, and Lahn dove point-down into the cement, burying several inches of steel into the gray floor. Jason stared at the steel blade for a moment as the tone it generated, vibrating in the floor, died away.

  “Damn,” he said.

  The red man grabbed Samantha by the shoulders and Jason raised his gun, but Samantha’s head tipped back and the red man yelped, letting her go as if her skin had burned him. She murmured something, rising slowly off the ground, head still tipped all the way back. Jason’s arm dropped to his side, unnoticed, as he stared. He was only vaguely aware of Sam coming to stand next to him. Samantha’s voice rose, underscored with the sound of wind or thunder, calling words like hammer strokes. The demon stared, stepping back further and further away from Samantha as she continued to rise.

  Her head tipped forward and her eyes opened, and she began to glow. First it looked like her skin was lit from within, then the light radiated off of her like it was flaring from off her skin in sharp spikes. For a moment, it looked like she was wearing a long white dress, then there was a whoosh of air and something like wings spread from her back and clapped in front of her. The demon fell to ash where he stood, and she slid to the ground and crumpled on the floor. Jason put his gun back in his pants and grabbed Alexander, slamming him into the wall. Alexander was speechless.

  Jason looked over his shoulder as Sam scooped Samantha off the ground, cradling her against his chest like a doll. He had seen them like that once before, what felt like a long time ago.

  “Lahn,” Samantha whimpered. Jason slammed Alexander against the wall again, then pushed him into the corner hard enough to make him stumble. He landed on his hands and knees and quickly curled up in the corner, staring along the wall. Jason frowned at him, but went to go get Lahn.

  “Lahn,” she whimpered again. He pulled at the handle, but the blade didn’t give any impression of moving. He didn’t want to rock it back and forth in the cement for fear of breaking it.

  “Sorry, Sweetheart. You’ve got a sword in the stone thing going on here,” he said. She tossed her arm toward the blade and Sam walked over to it and knelt so she could reach it. She wrapped her hand around the handle, but had no apparent strength to pull beyond that.

  “Pull,” she said. He frowned, and she rolled her head in against Sam’s shoulder. “Pull.”

  He wrapped his hand around hers and made a show of pulling, unwilling to crush her hand with the force it would have taken to free the blade, but it slid out of the floor easily. She coiled her arm up against her side, cuddling Lahn against her chest with a sigh. He looked over at Alexander, taking his gun out again.

  “You probably shouldn’t be here for this,” he said.

  “No,” Samantha said as Sam turned to go.

  “No?” Jason asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Sam said.

  “He ambushed us for a demon,” Jason said. “You want to just let him go?”

  She bounced her head against Sam’s shoulder a couple of times in order to turn it far enough to see Jason.

  “It takes a very strong, very clever, very high level demon to create that level of cognitive dissonance in the mind of a human,” she said.

  “Cognitive dissonance?” Jason asked. She sighed with effort, then shook herself and swallowed, nodding to Sam. He carefully put her feet down and she leaned against him for a moment, then stood.

  “Cognitive dissonance is believing two obviously conflicting things. Like, you believe that there are six billion people on the planet, and that, yet, you are special.”

  “I am special,” Jason said. She shook her head.

  “You aren’t.”

  “You think Sam’s special,” Jason said.

  “He is,” she said.

  “And you think you’re special,” he said.

  “Did you see what I just did?” she asked.

  “But I’m not special?”

  “Sorry.”

  “So what did he believe?” Jason asked, motioning to Alexander with his gun.

  “He really did love me,” Samantha said. “And he wanted to kill me. He is going to have to live with that for the rest of his life, and he’s never going to make peace with it. Pity, Jason. Now is the time for pity.”

  Alexander was staring down the wall, mouth forming words with no sound. Samantha knelt in front of him and he looked up at her.

  “What did I do?” he asked. She put her thumb on his forehead, her fingers spread across the side of his head.

  “I can’t help you with what happened here,” she said. “You chose it and I can’t undo it. I’m so sorry. But know that I will carry your brother with me as a regret for as long as I live. I am truly sorry I couldn’t save him.”

  “But…” Alexander said, eyes drifting away again. “I… What…” He started whispering again, and Samantha tried to stand, staggering against the wall. Sam came and put his arm around her waist and she leaned against him, taking a deep breath.

  “We should go,” she said. “I need some time.”

  Sam looked at Jason meaningfully and led Samantha over to the elevator. Jason leaned down over Alexander.

  “She can spare you once,” he said softly to the mumbling man. “I ever see you again, I’m going to put a bullet in you, and I won’t even tell her. Got it?”

  Alexander’s eyes turned to stare at him, wide, afraid, and he nodded.

  “What did I do?”

  “You screwed up the best thing that is ever going to happen to you,” Jason said. “Happens to the best of us. See you again, shoot you. Promise.”

  He stood and ran across the basement floor, glancing once at the pile of dark demon ash, to get on the elevator that Sam was holding for him. Samantha was leaning against Sam with her eyes closed, her face the picture of pain.

  “He really did love me,” she said softly, tears beginning to run down her face.

  <><><>

  At the hotel, Samantha asked Jason to break into the neighboring room for her. She needed space, she said. Jason fell asleep shortly after that, but Sam couldn’t even lay down. Samantha’s heart was broken. At the apartment complex, he had felt her rational mind take firm control to deal with Alexander. Her compassion had been real, as had her sense of justice. Once they reached the elevator, though, it gave way to the emotional reaction. She was betrayed, abandoned, alone. She beat herself up for letting it happen, guilt, regret, shame, she had fits of anger, presumably at Alexander. Coughing, gagging, wallowing despair.

  Finally, he could take it no more. He stood and went out the door of his room and simply stood in front of the door to hers, waiting. He didn’t knock. He didn’t ask. He simply stood, with the calm resolution that he wasn’t going to move. Even if she didn’t let him in, he would stand at her door and wait, because she wasn’t going to be alone. Not like that.

  She lashed at him, anger, bitter resentment, then, after about fifteen minutes, she opened the door. Her hair was wet from crying. She walked back over to the towel she was laying on on the floor and curled up. He closed the door and lay down next to her, curling his body around hers and holding her while she cried.

  <><><>

  The next morning, Sam woke on the floor to the sound of Jason’s knock. Water was running in the bathroom. He got up
and opened the door.

  “How is she?” Jason asked. Sam took a breath, listening over the bond to the numb, dull grief overshadowing a sense of relief, of moving on. He nodded.

  “She’s going to be okay.”

  “We still up for Little Rock?” Jason asked.

  “We aren’t skipping Little Rock,” Samantha called from the bathroom. She came out, face washed, hair brushed, and looked at Sam. He was ready to argue, but she was unyielding.

  “You sure?” Jason asked.

  “We aren’t skipping Little Rock,” she said. “Are we packed?”

  “Just finished.”

  “Sam is in the back seat,” she said as they walked out to the Cruiser.

  “Why?” Sam asked as she got into the front passenger seat.

  “Laptop,” she said, reaching behind her. He pulled it out from under the back seat, finding bags and bags of food before he located it, and handed it to her. She plugged it in and took a deep breath.

  “So that you two don’t have to turn around to stare at me,” she said, turning on music and tipping her head back against the head rest as she turned it up. Jason glanced back at Sam and they shrugged. Not a bad plan, really. Jason started the engine and Samantha began to sing, barely audible over the speakers. No talking, no obvious staring. They’d be in Little Rock by lunchtime.

  <><><>

  Samantha leaned against a wall while Jason got room keys. Sam was still watching her like something was going to bump into her and break her, but with all of the people in the hotel lobby, he was finally distracted enough that she didn’t feel like her brain was the target of a search beam.

  “Sammycat!” Kara crowed, launching through the crowd and clobbering her. Samantha laughed, hugging her back. Jason frowned.

  “What’s this now?” he asked. Kara wrapped her arm around Samantha’s waist and stood hip-to-hip with her, grinning.

  “I figure as long as you get to rip my clothes off at some point tonight, you don’t care who I’m happiest to see,” Kara said. Jason shrugged.

  “Fair enough. I’m going to go get something to drink.”

  Kara laughed and bumped her hip against Samantha’s.