Psychic

by Chloe Garner

  “Awesome,” Kara said. “And the boots. Girl. I don’t think I could walk in those.”

  “I bet you could,” Samantha said. “What size are you?”

  Kara told her, and Samantha unzipped the boot.

  “It’ll be a little too small, but it’s probably close enough to get a feel for it.”

  Jason looked around at the rapidly closing crowd, feeling surreal. Kara took her boots off and handed them to Samantha, and Samantha took off her second boot, handing it over.

  Kara was almost as tall as he was when they were both barefoot, and they tended to wear the same thickness of outdoor heels. In Samantha’s boots, Jason found Kara’s mouth even with his eyes.

  “Just don’t think about it,” Samantha said. She was wearing Kara’s boots as they made their way to the door of the restaurant.

  “You look like a dancer,” Kara said out in the hallway. “I like these.”

  She stooped to take the boots back off and they swapped again.

  “Paso doble,” Samantha said. “The dance of the bullfight.”

  Kara stood, in her own shoes, and looked at her for a long time. Samantha’s face was passive, not haughty like it had been earlier, but not giving anything away either.

  “Most people underestimate you, don’t they?” Kara asked. Samantha swallowed and glanced at Jason.

  “Probably.”

  “You going to bed?” Jason asked. She shrugged. “Sam was worried about you.”

  “Yeah, and he sent you,” Samantha said. “Caroline wouldn’t like to think he’s worrying about me while the two of them are rolling around in bed.”

  Kara snorted.

  “As it turns out, you didn’t need to get your own room,” Jason said as they walked to the elevators. “There isn’t anyone in ours.”

  The doors dinged open when he pushed the button and they got on. She stared at him.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Tomorrow morning, I am going to rent a room at a gym and I am going to beat you until you plead for your life,” Samantha said.

  “Oooh,” Kara said. “Can I watch?”

  Samantha bent at the waist, her head tipping up as she bowed at Kara, her eyes never leaving Kara’s face.

  “As you wish,” Samantha said. Kara grinned and dug a knuckle into the yellowing bruise on Jason’s side.

  “Why do you people all insist on doing that?” he asked.

  Samantha’s skirt made cracking noises like the heavy canvas of a flag as she walked down the hallway ahead of them and unlocked her door. Jason winked at Kara and gave her a nudge to keep walking. She nodded. Samantha turned in the doorway as Jason stopped.

  “What would have happened if Sam hadn’t sent me?” he asked. She looked up at the ceiling and took a breath.

  “An explosion of non-identity… a room no one could remember… maybe a net of people all trying to remember the same thing they didn’t ever see… Hard to say. I was making it up as I went along.”

  “Uh huh. Do I need to keep a closer eye on you?”

  “Obviously Sam’s got it under control,” she said, looking away down the hallway. He cocked his head to one side.

  “There’s nothing I can say, is there?”

  She looked directly at him with an unsettling focus.

  “No one can fix me. No one has ever been able to. That’s why Carter was so good at shaping me. He was never trying to fix anything.”

  “You’re having a bad day. It will be better in the morning.”

  Her eyes went distant again.

  “Tomorrow is just another day. I’ll train you, I’ll train Sam, should I get the opportunity. I’ll do my job.” She glanced at him, but she was turning away, disconnecting from whatever had held her talking to him. “I do my job. I expect nothing.”

  He stretched his mouth to one side as she closed the door on him. Maybe he should have had Kara talk to her.

  Kara was waiting for him in the doorway of her room. She crooked a finger at him and he grinned, running down the hallway and grabbing her around the waist, spinning her as he carried her into the room.

  <><><>

  Jason knocked on Samantha’s door the next morning. He hadn’t gotten much sleep, but he was feeling energized. Dawn was like the first breath coming up from underwater, and he wanted to get out. His body was still on the North Carolina routine, getting up with the sun to go train. Kara leaned her head against his shoulder as they waited.

  “You suppose she went back downstairs?” she asked. He knocked again.

  “I guess we can check,” he said.

  She wasn’t in the restaurant, either. He checked the computer lab where the Seekers were, but they hadn’t seen her at all. He got the impression they all would have known her on sight.

  “She still have your car keys?” Kara asked.

  “Mmm,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “She couldn’t have gotten far,” Kara said. “I’ve got her credit card.” She checked her pocket then frowned. “Or I did.”

  Jason grinned.

  “I bet she lifted it,” he said.

  “She can do that?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

  They found her in the back of the Cruiser, sitting on a box cleaning knives. Jason opened the back hatch.

  “You have everything squared away?” he asked her. She nodded.

  “I borrowed the phone at reception. I’ve got a workout room booked at a gym a little ways from here,” she said.

  “I’ll drive separate,” Kara said. “I may need to leave from there.”

  He kissed her forehead, then went to the driver’s door and tried it. Locked. Samantha crawled over the back seat and into the passenger seat, unlocking the doors and handing him the keys. He started the engine and she gave him the first few turns out of the hotel parking lot.

  “You sleep at all last night?” he asked. She looked out the window, shaking her head slightly. She was Samantha again, hair down, button-up shirt over jeans and the tall brown boots that always had a knife stashed in them. Much as her dressing up amused him, he was relieved to find this version of her this morning.

  “You sleep after Alexander…?”

  She shook her head again.

  “So it’s been two and a half days… since the drive to Alabama…?”

  “I’m not crazy. I’m just angry,” she said.

  “Uh huh.”

  She looked at him.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’d have gotten drunk and gone home with someone exactly like him, if I were you, but neither of those is on the table for you, is it?”

  That elicited a smile.

  “Nope.”

  She shifted.

  “Oh. Um.” She reached into her pocket and handed him a stack of bills. He dovetailed them between his thumb and index finger to split them far enough to read the denominations. It might have been as much as two-thousand dollars.

  “What’s this?”

  She sighed.

  “So… the spell wasn’t the only stupid thing I did last night.”

  He grinned.

  “Spill it.”

  “This guy… He kept asking to buy me drinks. It was so stupid. He thought he was going to get me drunk, so I told him I could drink him and his four best friends under the table, and then someone said they’d pay to see that, and then there was betting and…” She glanced at him. “I don’t want it. I feel sick thinking about it.”

  He shifted to pocket the money.

  “Done. I’d’ve done it, at some point, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Set up a bet that you could out-drink some trucker, somewhere. Wish I’d been there to see it.”

  She looked back out the window.

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “You were with Kara.”

  He looked at her and shook his head, smiling.

  “Okay. You’re right.”
/>   She nodded.

  “You love her.”

  He stopped at a light and looked at her, then back at the road.

  “Okay. Sure. So what?”

  “You should tell her.”

  He laughed softly.

  “She knows. What’s your point?”

  She shook her head.

  “You should just tell her.”

  “This isn’t you trying to make me monogamous?”

  “Kara isn’t.”

  “No. She isn’t.”

  She sighed.

  “If you had asked me when I was nineteen, I would have told you that the relationship you have with Kara was the most dysfunctional thing I could imagine,” she said. He snorted.

  “Now you and Sam get the blue ribbon?”

  She shrugged.

  “Probably me and Carter, actually.” She looked at him, and for a moment he wished he hadn’t been driving, so he could have actually watched her with his full attention. “I’m not going to try to change you. Only person who can do that is you, and only when you decide you don’t want to be what you are, any more. My opinions on what you should be don’t matter. I accepted that a long time ago. Before I died. I can’t make the world into what I want to. I can’t make any single person in to what I want them to be, other than myself.” She snorted. “I can’t even do that.” She paused. “But you should tell her. If it’s true and it’s important, you should say it.”

  He watched a car switch lanes in front of him, slowing to get himself the space he preferred to have.

  “I think she’d refuse to ever sleep with me again,” he said. He heard Samantha smile.

  “I bet she wouldn’t.”

  <><><>

  The training session was aggressive. She pushed him to his limits, leaving him at the edge of his capability for as long as his body held up, easing only as exhaustion claimed him, little by little. He didn’t feel it, not yet. Exhaustion, when you bent time as hard as he was, wasn’t something that you noticed. You were too focused on time and motion, your brain focused on the millions of things you could see that you never would have noticed in normal time. She could see it, though. His body didn’t respond like it did at first, despite the precision he was beginning to develop. He poured sweat; she blinked it out of her eyes and felt it trickle between her shoulder blades under Lahn’s sheath.

  She couldn’t settle into it, though. The focus and precision and discipline of working out combined with the purpose of training normally pushed her away from her over-thoughtful center off into a clean part of her brain that just operated mechanically. Do. It wasn’t concerned with why, or even that much with what happened next. It was just there to execute. And it abandoned her, this morning.

  She hadn’t expected it to show up. Dancing the night before, it hadn’t. She had instead dropped into a black pit of instinct and un-awareness that she had formed in recent years to give her space to work magic that she didn’t understand. She should have known better, but she hadn’t anticipated that her base desires could make their way into that pit. Normally, she just pulled the curtain and stepped away from everything else that she was, and the magic came. This time, she had pulled part of herself in, too, and that frightened her. She didn’t know what it meant.

  The rational part of her brain knew she was just upset. Alexander had pulled the rug out from under her, hard, and the one person she had really wanted to be there for her was… Well, he was asleep, holding the woman that he… He didn’t love her. Not yet. Which made it sting worse. It wasn’t the woman he loved, it was the woman he wanted. She hated the animal base of her instinct that found him wanting someone else more insulting than him loving someone else.

  Jason was flagging worse and worse, and she knew she should call the end of the session, but she didn’t know what was going to happen next. At least with a practice sword in her hands, a firm grip on time to slow it down, give her a chance to react to all of the details, all of the stimuli, she knew what she was doing. She was good at this. After this, Kara was going to leave and she was going to face a whole day of not knowing where she went.

  She pushed him on.

  And then Sam started a dream. She felt the flood of chemicals as it opened. She had dreamed with him, like that, before. But he wasn’t looking for her. His attention was somewhere else. She tried to ignore the amplified dream-state desire, but couldn’t shake it out of her head. Jason was too slow to block her next swipe, or the one after that. He stumbled, and she struck him again. She tried to make herself quit, but the anger and betrayal and the bitter disappointment that she couldn’t escape, couldn’t just put away in another part of her mind, it made her muscles seize, and she hit him again, a burst of adrenaline spiking her heart rate. She gasped and raised the practice sword as he rolled away. She found arms around her chest.

  She fought, thrashing against the elbows, where the hands wrapped under the other arm, locking her in. She dropped the sword and grabbed the arms, pushing them, trying to get away.

  “Shhh,” Kara said. Samantha coughed, then turned and sobbed onto Kara’s shoulder. Kara held her, stroking her wet, cold hair against her neck. “Shhh,” she said again. Samantha was shaking. “Baby,” Kara said. “Fight for him.”

  Samantha shook her head.

  “I can’t.”

  Kara pulled Samantha’s shoulders back and looked at her, putting her hand against Samantha’s cheek.

  “You can. Fight for him.”

  Samantha took several deep breaths, trying to regain her composure, then hugged Kara hard. Kara rocked her back and forth, then nodded.

  “Don’t kill Jason while I’m gone, okay?”

  Samantha nodded, wiping her nose on the back of her hand.

  “Yeah.”

  Kara smiled, eyebrows wrinkling her forehead.

  “Honey. It’s gonna be okay.”

  Samantha laughed.

  “You actually believe that?”

  Kara nodded.

  “If it isn’t okay, drink more scotch.”

  Samantha hugged her again.

  “I’m going to get everything packed up,” she said, looking at Jason. “I’ll meet you guys outside.”

  He was leaning against a wall holding his side, breathing hard.

  “You okay?” she asked softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing broken but my pride,” he said. “Carter push you harder than this?”

  She thought of the days that he had let her exhaustion overwhelm her before he had let her quit, and nodded.

  “Yeah. He did.”

  Jason nodded, pushing himself off the wall.

  “Then I’ll be fine.”

  He wrapped his arm around Kara and Samantha stood, watching, as they walked out of the room, then packed up her bags, waiting a few minutes to follow.

  <><><>

  Jason sat on the hood of Kara’s beaten up old car, holding her between his knees. He was too protective of Gwen to even lean up against the door panels without checking where he was wearing metal, but he and Kara had had sex on the hood of this car. He was pretty sure he could identify the scratches his belt had left.

  “Samantha says I should tell you I love you,” he said. She stood a bit straighter.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “No. I never realized you were that much of a chicken,” she said. He frowned. She laughed. “You’re testing me to see if I want you to say it or not, hiding behind her. That’s pathetic.”

  He looked at her, locking his fingers behind her back, then took a breath.

  “It’s true. I do love you.”

  She nodded, eyebrows up, bemused.

  “I know. I love you, too.”

  It was the bit that came next that he was afraid of. She kissed him and laughed.

  “What? Nothing just changed, Jason,” she said. “I still have to go, and you’re still going to find someone to share your bed with you tonight. And I probably will, too.” She kissed him again
, longer, sweeter. “We just have one less regret if one of us dies tomorrow.”

  He hugged her, sliding off the end of the car to wrap his arms around her, and she hugged him back, breathing out and squeezing him hard. She took a step back and put her hands on her hips.

  “Don’t you go getting sentimental on me, Elliott. You’re the best I’ve ever been with, and I’ll take it back if you get all needy on me.”

  He laughed, putting his hand on the small of her back and drawing her toward him with his fingers. He slid his hand under her hair, running his thumb along her jaw line, then pulled her mouth against his, kissing her hard.

  “You insult me,” he said. He heard the door to the gym open behind Kara, but he held her against him for another minute, just breathing, then Kara pushed him away.

  “You stink,” she said. “And you’re getting my clothes all smelly.”

  “Be safe,” he said. She nodded.

  “Back at you.”

  She hugged Samantha, the two of them acting like old friends even more than normal, then got into her car and waved as she drove away. He looked over at Samantha.

  “You want breakfast?”

  <><><>

  Sam and Caroline didn’t turn up for breakfast. Samantha worked hard to focus on food and anything Jason could come up with to say, but she knew she wasn’t very good company. She was painfully keyed in to how aware Sam was of Caroline.

  “Hey,” Jason said. “Hey.” He snapped in front of her eyes and she wondered how long the ham on her fork had been hanging in midair. She put it back on her plate and looked up at Jason apologetically.

  “What’s going on?” Jason asked. She shook her head.

  “Sorry.”

  He rested his fork against his mouth as he chewed for a moment.

  “What set you off? At the gym?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, buying time.

  “You were wrapping up. I could tell. I didn’t know I was spent yet, but you did. And then you just came at me. Why?”

  “I said I’m sorry,” she said. He pursed his lips.

  “That isn’t what I’m talking about and you know it. Why?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Right now, I don’t freaking care. You’re coming apart at the seams. Is this about Alexander?”