But Roman wasn’t anyone.
And his thoughts mattered, especially when it came to inanimate objects.
His dead wife’s eyelids began to twitch, and seeing them flutter only caused Roman to double down.
He licked his lips, willing more power to the corpse, watching as her nose crinkled, her cheeks relaxed ever so slightly, her head shook, and her shoulders began to move under her funeral gown.
His dead wife opened her eyes, giving him the deadest look Roman had ever seen, and he gasped, sucking the life away from her in an instant and watching her settle again, no longer moving.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Celia the doll whispered. “I think it’s a bad idea.”
“I know…” Roman sniffed, a single tear falling down his cheek. “I shouldn’t do that.”
He turned away from the coffin, his chest heaving up and down as he tried to catch his breath.
“Celia,” he told the doll, “please take a seat over there.”
“Are you sure?”
Roman simply nodded. Celia moved to a padded bench that had been pressed against the wall, a beautiful bench likely created by an elementalist. Once she was there, Roman powered her down, keeping his back to his dead wife.
“I’ve made a promise to you,” he whispered, not able to look at the corpse.
Roman was afraid of his own power, and now that he had a good amount of it with two of his dolls powered down, he was afraid he would do something he would ultimately regret, something morbid, something that shouldn’t be possible.
And he didn’t want her to be with him in that state.
The real Celia was dead, and all Roman would be able to do was implant his own emotions into her, which would make her inauthentic, something else entirely.
No, Roman knew better. And that was why he kept his back to her.
“I’ve gotten into some things, some strange situations over the last two days,” he confessed, “but I made a vow to you, a promise, and I will keep it. I mean that, Celia. It may take me some time, and I might have to go at it in a different way than I’d originally hoped, but I will make it happen.”
Roman thought of the information he had shared with Nadine earlier about the eradication of the world’s healers and how this may relate to the disappearing Easterners.
As long as she could wipe his mind later on, Roman was game to help her.
People needed healers, it was as simple as that, and this was something he could help expose that would be good for the public, not just for his own selfish desires.
He squeezed his fists together as he took another step away from his wife’s coffin. Roman felt his knees buckle, an invisible force pulling him backward.
“I can’t,” he told her. “I’m afraid of what I may do.”
He reached the door, and as he did, Roman transferred power back into the Celia the doll.
She joined him, a solemn look on her face as her hand came into his.
One final moment, one final breath in and Roman stepped out of the hallway.
He saw the funeral director, a bug-eyed man with loose hairs crossing the top of his head. If the man thought anything of Roman holding Celia’s hand, he didn’t say. He simply gave Roman the bill, offered his condolences, and returned to his desk.
Chapter Nine: By Any Means
Nadine stood before Oscar, the Eastern Province communicator, a mysterious, seasoned espionage veteran with one blue eye and one yellow eye. The well-dressed man wore the necklace that granted him telepathic abilities.
“What is it?” Nadine asked, annoyed with the indecipherable look on his face.
They were at their typical meeting location, and even though it was midmorning, the interior was still covered in shadow. The only thing lighting the space a faint glow at the back of the room coming from the area where they normally transmitted information.
“I’m glad you came,” Oscar said. “I was just about to send a teleporter…”
“I told you I was meeting with Roman. He has agreed to help us save Lisa.”
“I’m here.” Lisa Painstake stepped into Nadine’s view, the young exemplar’s body bathed in sparkling light that softly illuminated the space around her.
“How did you make it out?” Nadine swallowed hard, knowing the answer would come in due time. There could have been a trade-off; Lisa could have given out information that she shouldn’t.
“Come, let’s get more comfortable,” Oscar said, inviting Nadine into the other room.
Nadine approached Lisa, shielding her eyes a bit, the exemplar with the power of Soul Speed a beacon in such a dark space. “It’s really you,” she finally said, her heart relaxing some.
Rather than sit in their normal place against the wall, where they transmitted information, Oscar led Lisa and Nadine to a circular table in the corner. He ushered Nadine into a spot next to him, and Lisa took the seat across from them.
Lisa cleared her throat. “I’m guessing you have questions.”
“I’m happy to see you,” Nadine said, not able to stop the truth from exiting her lips. “I was already in the process of trying to get you out of there.”
“Were you?”
“I wouldn’t have said that if I wasn’t.”
“I know,” Lisa said. She was staring at the table, or at least that was what it looked like, her features blurred by the light emitting from her spectral form.
“How did you do it?” Nadine asked again, quieter this time.
“I didn’t do it. Someone broke someone else out of prison. I simply slipped through the hole they made.”
“There was a prison escape?” Nadine looked at Oscar.
“It appears so,” said the communicator. “And it wasn’t just any escape. The suspect in question was broken out of the maximum-security ward for exemplars, the most heavily guarded part of the prison.”
“Who did it?” Nadine asked.
“A hooded woman and a big, muscular man with red skin,” said Lisa. “I didn’t see the man they rescued—well, not enough to get a good look at him anyway.”
Nadine’s throat tightened. “Did you say a red man?”
Lisa nodded. “Yes, several feet taller than me. But there was something off about him, and his body was covered in some sort of armor. But it looked kind of gross. I don’t know what he was exactly.”
Roman had told Nadine he’d killed Ian Turlock, but Lisa’s description sounded exactly like the man who had kidnapped her. And if Ian was working with this hooded figure, could that have been Paris?
“So there were three, but you didn’t get a good look at one of them, correct?” she asked. “Are you sure he was a male?”
“Definitely a man.”
“And did you happen to see or experience the hooded female’s power?” Nadine asked.
“She tried to stop me from escaping after she freed me from my cuffs, but I just turned invisible, and there was nothing she could do at that point.”
Nadine chewed on her lip for a moment. “They had cuffs for you?”
“The cuffs made it impossible for me to turn invisible or move through objects,” Lisa explained. “So after I noticed a hole had opened up in the floor, I slipped out into the prison courtyard. The woman and the big man came over to me, and I made her think I was going to join them until she freed me. Then I disappeared into the ground and ran.”
“How did she free you?” asked Oscar, who clearly hadn’t heard this part of the story. “The cuffs they use in these types of prisons are made to withstand pretty much anything you throw at them. I know because our government invented them.”
Lisa shrugged. “They just came off. I can’t really describe it, aside from saying they were on, and then they were off. But if you’re asking about her power, she did try to use the ground to stop me from disappearing.”
“An elementalist?” Nadine asked, looking to Oscar for confirmation.
“Maybe…”
“Well, regardless, I’m glad you came back
to us,” Nadine said.
“How am I going to fix this?” Lisa turned her palms to them. “Does your government have any tech that could do the trick?”
Oscar was silent for a moment. “There’s a lot they keep from us. But from the people I’ve spoken to already, our only hope may be the Brattle Region, in particular the city of Brattle, where you’ll find most of our country’s techs.” He turned to Nadine. “I believe we should discuss this in private for a moment.”
“Excuse us.” Nadine joined Oscar, doing her best to mask the confusion on her face.
Oscar started speaking as soon as they were out of earshot. “I know what you’re going to say, Nadine, but the likelihood that one of our techs will be able to get to the bottom of why she is unable to rejoin her body isn’t very high. And I don’t know if we’d get approval for you to take her there in the first place.”
“Our techs can do it; I believe they can do anything.”
“Wishful thinking…” Oscar said.
Nadine nodded, suddenly feeling a fourth presence in the room.
Lisa’s physical body was lying on a table near them, her form warm to the touch but otherwise lifeless.
It was Nadine who had sent the body via a private teleporter to Oscar. Now that they were close to it, even though her training had instilled in her detachment from this particular emotion, Nadine felt guilty.
“We have to do something,” she said, gritting her teeth. “Can’t just leave her in that form.”
“She knew what she was getting into when she signed up.”
“No…”
Oscar waved her concern away. “And I know you don’t want to hear that, but we have to remember not to get too close to our assets. Lisa’s power was useful,” he said in a soft voice, “but her choices led her to an immigration violation, which led her to you. And you have to remember that.”
“No, I’m not going to leave her like that,” Nadine said with a quiet huff. “I know there are rules in this game, but we have someone who is useful, someone who has helped us discover things in the past, someone who has an ability no one else has. We shouldn’t just cast her aside.”
Oscar stared deeply at the conviction in her eyes. Finally, he placed his hands behind him and leaned back a little. “You’re going to get a lot of pushback on this.”
Nadine took a step closer to Oscar, damn near getting in his face. “I don’t give a shit if I get pushback. We are on to something, and I haven’t even briefed you on the new details I’ve covered, something that may possibly be related.”
“New details?” he asked, maintaining his composure.
“Healers. Dammit, Oscar, you’ve got me riled up here. I was going to brief you on everything, and now…”
“What have you discovered?”
“You know what, maybe I’ll just tell you later.” Nadine turned from Oscar, her arms crossing over her chest.
“And here I thought we’d trained that out of you.”
“What?” she asked over her shoulder.
“That attitude, that sense of entitlement, stubbornness. Call it what you will.”
She felt Oscar’s hand land on her shoulder. And in that moment, Nadine had the urge to attack, throw an elbow, come around with a fist, a foot between his legs—neutralizing him.
But she knew he meant well. He was a veteran in this game, and he’d seen it all. Hell, he had probably been attacked before, betrayed, tortured, anything that came with the territory.
So rather than do something she would ultimately regret, Nadine turned back to him, his hand naturally dropping to his side.
“Healers,” Nadine said. “Centralia, or someone, has killed all the healers aside from one, at least according to Western spy sources. Roman seems to believe this is somehow connected with the cross-border kidnappings, and I don’t know, that somehow makes sense to me.”
“Huh.”
Nadine took a step back, alarmed by the look on Oscar’s face. “What do you mean, ‘huh’?”
“I suppose that’s information I can share with you,” he said after a long exhale. “Yes, healers vanishing is a real thing, and we have a few people already looking into this. They haven’t covered much, and I don’t quite see the connection between disappearing healers and disappearing Easterners.”
“One thing I noticed when going through the documents Lisa and I stole was that many of the kidnapped Easterners came from the Brattle Region,” Lisa explained, “which just so happens to be the tech hub.”
“I remember seeing that in the documents you submitted,” said Oscar.
“If I go to the East to look into this, I can also take Lisa with me. I can see about disappearances and get her examined at the same time. Two birds, one stone. It makes sense.”
“You really are hell bent on helping her, aren’t you?”
“Oscar, think of it like this: she has an incredibly unique power that allows her to move through any barrier we have yet created. She can become completely transparent; she can also interact physically with her environment in that state. What if, by finding a cure for her and allowing her to move back into her real body, we can come up with some advanced technology? What if we can make a suit that allows someone else to do this? Or maybe we can use it to create an even more impenetrable wall? Please help me push for this.”
“You think I have that type of power?” Oscar laughed. “I’m flattered, truly I am, Nadine. But I’m an old man.”
“An old man with a great deal of influence,” Nadine said. Once again, she moved closer to Oscar, until she was inches away from his face. “Think about it,” she finally whispered. “I have another request as well…”
Chapter Ten: The Start of a Plan
Kevin’s hand rested on Obsidian’s rear, lightly drumming his fingers against her ass cheeks.
She was facing him, the black-haired cat girl resting on her side, still asleep and completely nude. Kevin’s hand slowly sank between her ass cheeks, feeling her soft flesh, moving up to the base of her tail, rubbing his thumb against the furry appendage, lightly touching her anus.
Even though he had been with the two cat girls long enough to have seriously contemplated their anatomy, the fact that they were hairless aside from their hair, their ears and tails still fascinated him, along with their small bone structures, their ability to grow claws at a moment’s notice, and their toxic secretions.
The neurotoxin he’d grown so fond of.
The part of Kevin that liked digging deeper, liked researching and understanding more about exemplars, was enthralled by the two and their uniqueness. If only Kevin could get to the Western Province right now rather than do what it was he planned to do in Centralia.
And this was on his mind as he continued to trace his fingers along Obsidian’s ass, his thoughts awakening with the morning sun, the silence of the room making him feel exposed, vulnerable.
Shutting his eyes only made things worse.
Each time he did so, he saw his wife Susan’s face as she died, the flying exemplar she’d been fucking dead too, his throat torn out and eyes torn from their sockets, Obsidian and Turquoise crouched nearby flicking the blood off their claws.
Gruesome didn’t begin to describe what he’d seen.
Kevin pinched the bridge of his nose and clenched his eyes shut in an attempt to forget the image. He couldn’t be weak—not now—and to combat what he was experiencing, he sat up, moving his arm out from under Obsidian, who let out a cute cooing noise as she shifted to her other side.
He saw Turquoise sitting on the floor, cross legged, in front of a small altar she had erected. Her ears twitched, and with a deep breath out, the slender cat girl looked over her shoulder to Kevin, blinking slowly.
The heavy man stood, his half erect penis flopping to the other side. Regardless of what was going through his head, his lower region had a mind of its own, and fiddling with Obsidian’s ass had taken its toll.
“Come here,” Turquoise said, turning back to her makesh
ift altar. Kevin had a vague sense of where they were, some friend’s home in central Centralia. A dark place, but an empty place that provided them privacy.
Never one to disappoint, Kevin approached Turquoise from the side, noticing she was also nude and she sat on some type of bolster. Her tail lightly flickered against his leg, moving in the direction of his cock. It stayed there for moment, lightly moving up and down Kevin’s only claim to fame. Even half erect, his penis was almost halfway to his knee, a whopper, something that seemed at odds with his pudgy body, short stature, and blotchy pink skin.
Turquoise turned to him and wrapped her arms around his neck, looking up at him. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Kevin could feel her prayer beads against the side of his neck, and as he looked down at her, his hands naturally came to her waist, up to her breasts, where he kept them before returning them to her sides.
“I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Is something on your mind?” Her light, blue-green hair was pulled into a ponytail at the side. Turquoise still had a dark look to her eyes, something she always had when she was meditating, but it was starting to fade as she took in Kevin’s worried form.
And it wasn’t a second later that the former immigration advisor found his lips moving, words coming out that he hadn’t planned to release. “I don’t really have a power,” he whispered, feeling relieved to come clean.
“What’s stopping our power then?” Turquoise asked. Taking Kevin’s hand, she led him to the other side of the room, to a couch in the corner, away from sleeping Obsidian just in case she woke up and heard them.
“Do you remember that woman we rescued at Paris’s warehouse?” Kevin asked her. “The one I formerly worked with?”
“I remember.”
“It came from her. It was her ring. I don’t know why she would have a ring like that—she was just an administrator like me—but I took it from her finger.” Kevin hung his head in shame. “The ring has a power.”
A soft smile moved across Turquoise’s face. “And?”
House of Dolls 2 Page 7