Psychic Read online

  “I’m pretty sure they don’t have a gym here,” Jason said. She slunk, cat-like across the bed, watching him.

  “Oh, I don’t need a weapon and a lot of space to beat you,” she said. Jason draped his arm across the back of the couch and crossed his ankles.

  “Bring it on, Sweetheart,” he said. She got up motioned for him to stand. She grabbed the corners of the coffee table and jerked her head at him. He lifted the other side and they moved it to between the beds. She went and sat on her knees in the empty space where the table had been.

  “Face me,” she said. Jason knelt in front of her and she scooted away a few inches, putting her arms out to measure that her palms reached his shoulders.

  “I’m not sure I get it,” Jason said.

  “Bending time when you’re fully committed is one thing,” she said. “Small control is much harder.”

  “So…”

  She put up her hands in front of him.

  “Learn the pattern,” she said, moving her a hand slowly across, toward his face. He watched. “Block me,” she said. He put his wrist up in front of her hand. She grabbed his other wrist and moved it through a smooth arc toward her own face, letting go to block with the same hand. She came across back-handed, then took his other hand through a front-handed motion, and onward. In all, there were twelve motions, a not-taxing sequence of open-handed motions with matching blocks.

  “Yeah?” she asked.

  “Once more,” he said. He went through it without guidance, then nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Faster, don’t bend time yet,” she said. If he missed one of the blocks, she was going to slap him. That was going to be embarrassing. He managed the blocks without too much effort, but was already worrying about what was going to happen next. She put her hands on her knees.

  “So that’s fair. You’re on your own.”

  He bent time a little, just to remember how, and waited. She raised her eyelids to warn him that she was starting, and he bent time harder, feeling his chest rise as he began to draw breath and her hand rose. He floated his arm out in front of hers. He was there way before she was, then realized that his elbow hadn’t stopped yet. He pulled it back down, and his arm floated first up, then down, and then he wasn’t blocking her any more. He pushed back the other way, but she was across. He couldn’t catch her any more. He watched in slow motion as her hand came in contact with his face, and he lost his grip on time. His face stung, and Sam howled.

  “Keep going,” Samantha said. He squeezed his eyes shut for focus, and launched his first attack, which she blocked easily. Her second strike, he overshot completely, and she hit him with the back of her hand while his arm was straight over his head. He dropped his grip on time to see if he could just block her based on reflexes, and she smacked him again.

  “I’m waiting,” she said. He gritted his teeth and bent time, managing to block two of the next, then missing the one after that. They continued.

  By the end, his face felt swollen, even with time slowed all the way down, but he could get through all twelve points without letting her hit him. He never landed a strike. Samantha looked focused, but he guessed that was for his benefit. Her control was perfect. That he was stronger than she never came into play; she was a bit faster, and that was all that counted.

  He eased his grip on time slightly, letting himself enjoy the feeling of muscles running through a smooth, tight sequence. He was fast. He could feel how fast he was. Deciding where to put his body with that much time to think about it, he was nearly perfect. She let him go through the sequence twice more, then dropped her hands again. He found that he was sweating. She pushed herself up onto her feet.

  “Good work,” she said. He wiped his forehead. His ears buzzed.

  “Wow,” Sam said. Jason rubbed his face.

  “Not that impressive,” he said. She shrugged.

  “It’s a standard warmup,” she said. “We’ll do it again tomorrow, with more elements.”

  “My wrists hurt.”

  “You’re still over-committing,” Samantha said.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. She stretched her arms over her head and nodded.

  “We should scout some of the older hotels in the cities in the next zone tomorrow,” Sam said.

  “You got it,” Jason said.

  When he got out of the shower, the lights in the room were off and Sam and Samantha were whispering to each other in bed. By the time he turned off the light in the bathroom and closed the door, they had fallen silent. He had almost expected Samantha would sleep with him, after she and Sam had re-bonded that morning and even more after how distant she had been on the drive in, but he was glad to see that they didn’t appear to be avoiding each other. Maybe he had over-reacted.

  <><><>

  They hit the road first thing in the morning, headed for one of the hotels Sam had found that was old enough to fit the pattern. Again, Sam and Samantha were quiet. Sam had pulled down a list of more than fifty violent deaths that Simon had found so far - apparently the Seeker had worked all night - and Sam and Samantha had split them to read while Jason drove.

  “Sex,” Sam said. “Does it have to do with sex, or are they already there?”

  “Infidelity?” Samantha asked.

  “We’ve looked at all of the couples so many times,” Sam said. “I don’t think there was a theme where they were cheating.”

  “So what makes a ghost take interest in them?”

  “Maybe it’s because they liked weird stuff,” Jason said. Sam looked at him sharply.

  “What?” Jason asked.

  “In three cities every six years?” Sam asked.

  “Died in the middle of it, maybe?” Jason suggested.

  “I haven’t seen anything like that,” Samantha said.

  “Would they report it like that?” Sam asked. “Or would they hide it?”

  “Could be.”

  They returned to their laptops and Jason watched the road.

  “Six years,” Samantha said. “Why six years?”

  “Simon will have spent the last five years working on that,” Sam said.

  “Why five?”

  “He’s only been our Seeker for five years,” Jason said. “We both got upgraded at the same time.”

  “Huh.”

  More exits went by, and Jason turned off, following the instructions on his phone to the hotel.

  “I need paper,” Samantha said. “They should have an office where I can print all of this off.”

  “Okay. We’ll go get the layout of the place,” Sam said. Jason checked in and he and Sam found the room. They unpacked and started wandering hallways. The hotel had been renovated maybe fifteen years ago, and the hallways were well-lit and painted rich colors that matched the thick carpet.

  “Is it just me, or do we look out of place here?” Jason asked.

  “Still just a hotel,” Sam said.

  Jason nodded.

  “So. There’s a ghost. Let’s say it’s here, or it’s going to be here. And there’s a couple. They probably aren’t here yet, but let’s say they’re going to be. How do they get together? The couple, the ghost? How do they end up here?”

  “Maybe the ghost pulls them,” Sam said. Jason nodded.

  “Picks a location, pulls in a couple,” Jason said. “Sure. Okay. Probably. The random couples probably don’t end up here by coincidence. Why here?”

  “One, two, three,” Sam said. “The Chicago area is important… the rest of it is just an important geographical pattern.”

  “Something about its life,” Jason said. Sam nodded. “Sex in those three cities…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you pick this place?” Jason asked.

  “It’s nice,” Sam said.

  “You okay man?” Jason asked. Sam frowned.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I don’t know. You’re off. This about Sam?”

  “I guess maybe it is.”

  “You two okay?”
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  “I think so. I don’t know.”

  “Tell me what it’s like,” Jason said. Sam laughed.

  “The printer doesn’t work right. She’s taken it apart and put it back together. I think the paper keeps jamming.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She likes puzzles. She likes fixing things. But she thinks printers should just work. She’s frustrated, but secretly happy that it doesn’t work. And then when it didn’t fix, she got angry. She hit something. Not hard, just… I felt the sting when she hit it.”

  “You still believe her that you two being together would be dangerous?” Jason asked. Sam looked at the floor.

  “More than ever.”

  “But, you were okay in New York.”

  “Only just barely.”

  They walked. Jason looked at him.

  “Is it enough?”

  Sam rubbed his palms over his face, the sound of dry skin over dry skin, and shook his whole head, his hair re-settling.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dude,” Jason said. Sam nodded.

  “Yeah.”

  They walked.

  At the end of the last hallway, Jason leaned against a wall. Sam leaned next to him.

  “So a ghost pulls in a random couple to avenge something or salve some injury from his or her life. What, traps them in a room? How do you make people have sex?”

  “We’ve seen ghosts who can do more, once they get a grip on someone,” Sam said.

  “True. Why would a ghost want someone to have sex?” Jason asked.

  “Not a clue.”

  They looked down the length of the hallway.

  “Sam is back at the room,” Sam said. “I should see if Simon has anything new.”

  “Missing persons,” Jason said.

  “Yeah.”

  <><><>

  Samantha and Sam went to get lunch and Jason started paging through the deaths Samantha had printed. Some of the pages were accordioned. He smiled.

  The stack was now more than a hundred deep. Men, women, children. Some of the reports were thorough. Some were just a set of dates.

  A woman had drowned her children in a bathtub in 1934. Her husband had cheated on her with his secretary. He put it in the stack of possibles.

  A man in his late sixties had shot himself in the head. Jason looked at it again and put in the stack of probably-nots.

  He got bored and turned on the television.

  An hour later, he checked his watch and got up to get his cell to call Sam, but the door opened.

  “Where have you guys been?” he asked.

  “Talking,” Samantha said.

  “Is the food still hot?” he asked. Sam threw a bag on the table. Jason opened it and pulled out his lunch. He looked at Samantha over a full mouth.

  “Weird time for you to get all introspective,” he said. She shrugged.

  “Sorry.”

  She sat down across from him and pulled over the stack of pages to start going through them. Sam went and sat on the bed. Jason glanced at him as he finished eating a few minutes later, but Sam was staring at the ceiling, somewhere else. Jason jerked his head at Samantha.

  “Give me a stack of those,” he said. She looked up at him and down at the page that she was reading, then split the stack and handed him the bottom half. They read, shuffling papers from one stack to another.

  “You two have a fight?” he asked.

  “You could say that,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it, if that’s okay.”

  He shrugged. Sam got up from the bed and came over to the table, taking the maybe pile and going through it. Jason looked up, noticing Samantha’s expression. She looked over at him, then tapped the bottom edge of her pages on the table and set them down.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” she said. Sam didn’t look at her, even as she stood and left.

  ‘What’s going on?” Jason asked.

  “We don’t really agree on something,” Sam said, going back to the bed. Jason set the reports on the table and turned to look at Sam.

  “Seriously? You guys decide to have your first big fight now? It’s possible our ghost has actually taken its next couple. We need to figure out what it is so that we can find it and take it out.”

  Sam looked at him and back at the stack of papers in his lap.

  “I’m working,” he said.

  “If you and Sam had a fight, I’d lay odds it was your fault,” Jason said. “So if she’s mad enough to be so distracted she can’t work, I think you should go tell her you’re wrong and get her back here.”

  “Not that simple,” Sam said. “Please, can we just work?”

  Jason rolled his eyes and sighed.

  “You know I hate this part.”

  “I know.”

  <><><>

  The hours passed. Jason got to the end of the stack and gave Sam the rest of his ‘maybe’ pile, then started on the ones Simon had found since the morning.

  A man jumped off of a bridge nearby after losing his job. No.

  A pair of men robbed a gas station and shot the attendant. No.

  A woman killed her fiancé and another woman, then shot herself in a hotel in Chicago.

  Jason pushed away from the table and dropped the laptop down into his lap to read more carefully. Claire Catskill, 26, her fiancé of six years, Peter McGill, 28, and another woman, Delores Baker, 29, died in 1933 when Claire came up to Chicago to visit Peter and found him with Delores. Claire’s and Delores’ native cities were both listed in the report, and Jason pulled up a map.

  “Damn,” he said. “Simon should have flagged this one. This is it. Her name is Claire, and she’s…” he frowned. It didn’t explain the sex. Well, sex made sense, but it didn’t explain why. He searched online for any records about Claire, Peter, or Delores, but there was nothing to find. He looked over his shoulder. “Sam. I said I found it.”

  The bed was empty. He looked around the room. Somewhere in the time Jason had been reading, Sam had left. He put the laptop back on the desk and went to get his cell.

  “Dammit, Sam,” he said. “This is not the time for a fight with your girlfriend.”

  There was a piece of paper under his cell.

  418.

  He picked it up and looked at it. Six years. Six years was a long time to wait to be with someone. And then at the end to not be with him…

  Maybe the ghost pulls them in, Sam had said.

  “Dammit, Sam,” he said, going back to look at the article once more, then running out the door.

  <><><>

  Jason counted room numbers down the hallway at a jog. 418. He pounded on the door.

  “Sam. Sam, I know what’s going on. Open the door.”

  He got no response, so he pounded again.

  “Open the door.”

  There was still no response, so he leveled his shoulder into the door - he didn’t have any other way around the electronic key reader - once, twice, and once more. The door gave and he stumbled into the room. Sam and Samantha were tangled on the bed. Sam was pulling the blankets up over them, but it appeared Samantha was still at least partially clothed.

  “Guys. Enough. She’s done something to you,” Jason said. They ignored him. He started toward the bed, but something jerked him back.

  “Stop,” she said. He turned to see an attractive woman, just slightly smoky with transparency, standing near the far wall.

  “Let me go,” he said.

  “No, wait. Look at them.”

  He looked back over at his brother and Samantha, entwined in an increasingly tangled sea of sheets. Passionate.

  “Is this really that bad? They’re happy,” the woman said. “Believe me. They’re so happy.”

  “Claire,” Jason said.

  “Yes.”

  “Look. I’m as big a fan as anyone of the two of them finally getting this out of the
way, but… why them?”

  “They’re so hungry,” Claire said, stepping forward. She looked at him, her eyes lingering on his chest. “You’re empty. You have no hunger at all.”

  Jason raised his eyebrows at her, then it clicked. Oh.

  “Guilty, I guess.” He stole another glance at Sam and Samantha. “I don’t usually find ghosts this talkative.”

  “Being a ghost is terrible. Time. Space. They don’t make any sense. But here…” She looked around the room, smiling at the pair in bed before she looked back at Jason. “Here I feel real again.”

  Jason went to lean against the doorframe, folding his arms.

  “Sit with me,” she said. “Let them do what we both know they want to do, then I’ll leave. No harm done.”

  “I’m sympathetic,” Jason said, reaching out the door. “I really am. But I can’t let you do it. They deserve better than this. So does everyone else. Look here.”

  He pulled the full-length mirror from the hallway and held it in front of him. Claire tipped her head to the side and floated toward the mirror.

  “I haven’t…” she said, reaching out to touch it. He propped it on the ground and moved around to the front side, looking at her in the mirror, keeping her out of sight behind him. “I haven’t seen myself in so many years. I was quite pretty.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Your fiancé was a jerk. But you can’t keep doing this.”

  He pulled the bottle of paint out of his jacket pocket and poured it across the top of the mirror, then slid the squeegee out of his hip pocket and, with a quick motion, slicked the paint down the mirror in an even coat. Claire’s scream was cut short as the paint hit the bottom of the mirror, and he quickly smoothed over the edges, standing back to make sure there weren’t any bits of mirror showing any more. He looked over at Sam and Samantha and sighed.

  “Party’s over, guys.”

  <><><>

  The world throbbed and rushed in a black universe of nerve tingle and want and Sam. And Sam. She was only conceptually, distantly aware of bodies. Somewhere, there were bodies. And sound. A sound that didn’t belong, but didn’t matter, either. She had, for an instant, eons ago, been aware of a second Sam. The one with the vision. She had been jealous that he had gotten to watch. Her Sam, the one she was tied to and the one who knew everything about her the moment it existed, had been aroused that she was jealous.