Psychic Read online

  “You are as gifted as ever,” he said. He dropped his hands to his sides and took a step toward her. “Samantha.”

  The gush of rage was like storm clouds rolling across the sun.

  “No.” She held up a hand, jerking it to one side, then raising it toward his face. “No. You will not interfere with me today.”

  “Samantha. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “Carter, you spectate or you leave. The turnabout on this one will bite you.” She looked at the door. “I have forty-five minutes. Did you bring it?”

  “Of course,” Carter said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a plastic bag full of some kind of crushed, dried herb. Samantha took it.

  “Excuse me.”

  She went back into the bathroom and Sam heard the lock on the door turn.

  “What’s going on?” Jason asked. “What was that?”

  “Henna. She’s starting a streak,” Carter said distantly, looking at the door to the bathroom. A corner of his mouth turned up.

  “Has she done this before?” Sam asked.

  “I’ve seen her like this once before,” Carter said, “right after Justin died.”

  “What do we do?”

  Carter looked at him, as if only just remembering that he was there.

  “Do? You hold on and hope to hell not to get killed in her wake.”

  “What did you do?” Jason asked. Carter grinned.

  “I sat back and watched her do some of her best work ever.”

  <><><>

  Samantha came back out of the bathroom thirty minutes later wearing new clothes again. She pulled a chair away from the table and placed it some distance from the door, then sat down and started assembling the parts of something.

  “You’ve kept that in working order?” Carter asked from where he had his feet propped up on the table.

  “Of course,” Samantha said. Carter grinned.

  “Is that a crossbow?” Jason asked.

  “It is.”

  “With a stake?”

  “Iron frame, teak, rosewood, blackwood, and tigerwood sections,” she said. There was more treating and assembly as she loaded the stake. She stared at the door. Carter watched her like a circus goer. Sam and Jason attempted conversation for a while, but that was destined for failure.

  They sat.

  Finally, she looked at Sam.

  “I need you to open the door and walk away. Just pull it so it will swing open.”

  As he started toward the door, something else occurred to her.

  “You should probably stay away from the window.”

  “What?” Jason asked. Sam was too tired of fighting the internal battle of moods to question anything. He pulled the door and went back to the bed and sat down. A moment later, a bulky man with a stained white tee shirt walked into the doorway. Sam had seen him before. This was the vision. Only, something was wrong. Before, Samantha had had Lahn out, waiting for him. Now she was sitting with her feet well in front of her in the chair, crossbow ready.

  She said something to the man in angeltongue, and he grimaced, clenching his fists as he looked at the doorway. The winding on the crossbow sprung, and the stake buried itself into his chest. He looked down at it, then back up at her with an exasperated, angry look. She was already across the room as he lifted his foot to take the first step in, and she pushed the stake with the heel of her hand. It depressed a full six inches. Sam looked at Jason and frowned, but Jason clearly had no better idea of what was going on. Samantha pushed the demon back out of the room and carelessly flicked the door shut behind her with her foot as she walked back to the bathroom.

  “We’re leaving,” she said.

  “What?” Jason asked.

  “What about…” Sam started, then there was a violent explosion outside. The window sprayed dark. Carter was grinning madly.

  “The neighbors aren’t going to like what we did to their car,” Samantha said.

  “Neighbors… car…” Jason said. “Gwen is out there.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind getting my stake, I’d appreciate it,” Samantha said, closing the door to the bathroom behind her.

  “Genius,” Carter said, going to the door and opening it. “Genius.”

  The door was nearly solid red with pea-sized flecks of tissue running down it. Sam went and looked over Carter’s shoulder to find the sidewalk, the entire front of the building, and the nearest three cars in the parking lot similarly covered. The explosion radius was maybe ten yards, all told.

  “What did she do?” Jason yowled.

  “Holy water and anointing oil,” Carter said. “One after the other in the injector. Shoot ‘em into the demon after you’ve got the stake set, the holy water super heats and ignites the anointing oil. Demon bomb. But to keep him from ashing…” Carter surveyed the area with an open-mouthed smile. “Sometimes I think I may actually underestimate her.”

  “What did she do?” Jason cried again, looking for a path across the sidewalk that wasn’t steeped in gore. A sharp pain stabbed Sam in the forehead and he stumbled backwards.

  “Yeah, you should get back inside,” Carter said. “Not that that’s going to help anything.”

  Sam put his hand to his head as the headache spread, crawling across his brain like glacial lightning.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Jason asked.

  “He had a vision that changed. Psychics tie themselves to the future the way they see it. And if they stay out of it, it’s most likely to happen the way they see it. If they change it, though… Their brains get torn up a bit, trying to make the two realities meet inside their skulls. Psychic migraine.”

  “He needed to learn,” Samantha said from the doorway of the bathroom. Sam stumbled to the bed, clutching his head. He had never before known pain like this. The room turned colors, violent, electric colors, and while he was still able to understand what he was seeing, he could no longer see it. Something slid over his head and he grasped at it, but Samantha’s firm hands pulled his fingers away.

  “It’s the only thing that helps. Let it be,” she said. His fingers told him silk. His eyes told him nothing as the riot of colors swirled and spun in waves and snakes before his eyes, closed or open.

  “That’s cold, Sam,” Carter said. Sam crumbled to his side, pain radiating down his spine as his stomach churned in response.

  “It’s what you would have done,” Samantha said.

  “Exactly.”

  Sam blacked out.

  <><><>

  Jason felt out of control as Carter and Samantha stared at each other. He simply couldn’t believe that Samantha would let something bad happen to Sam on purpose. It wasn’t possible.

  “Is she sleeping?” Carter asked. “At all?”

  “Carter,” Samantha warned.

  “No,” Jason answered, watching as Sam jerked in pain on the bed. Carter put a hand up to Samantha and said something. She crumbled to the floor.

  “What is going on here?” Jason asked.

  “She’s shut off the parts of her body that enforce sleep,” Carter said. Jason frowned and Carter raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, demons aren’t the only ones who know how to do that. Fortunately for all of us, I’m a lot stronger than she is. I can put her down.”

  “You’ve done that before?”

  “Used to do it all the time. It’s funny.”

  “What do you do when she wakes up?”

  “Oh, I’m not staying. She needs sleep, no question, but I’m not going to be the one who has to deal with her when she wakes up. Good luck with that.”

  “Wait. What do I do?”

  “Get them in the car and drive away. To a car wash, from the look of things. Sam will be a mess for maybe the next twelve hours. Samantha will sleep for as long as her body needs her to sleep. Now, I don’t know how long that’s going to be, but I do know that when she wakes up, she’s going to be pissed, and she’s just going to keep doing what she’s doing. If all three of you are very lucky, she’ll get over
it before she sleep-deprives herself to death.”

  “She can do that?”

  “I trained her. Of course she can.”

  “When will she get over it?”

  Carter looked at her, one eyebrow raised.

  “Whenever she feels like it.”

  <><><>

  Samantha had unsettled dreams that came at her in waves, each replacing the memory of the last with a new short coming, a new desperation and something she couldn’t quite manage, someone she couldn’t quite save. A few times, she felt Sam trying to intervene. To save her or pull her away or help her, but the specifics slipped away with each new tide of dreams. Her brain was angry, restless, and yet she couldn’t wake.

  In her early days with Carter, when the things she saw still terrified her, she had learned to command herself to open her eyes, in dreams. This isn’t real. Open your eyes. It isn’t real. Open your eyes. And the muscles would react as her eyebrows pulled to help with the lift, and she would find herself in the little bed in the closet in the dark, heart racing, beating fast enough that what her ears felt wasn’t so much as sound as pressure. Then she would find a cool spot in the bed and roll onto her other side and wait for her pulse to drop and her senses to stop forcing data at her, and she would sleep again. Many nights she would cry.

  Carter took that away from her when he started forcing her to sleep. Where she turned off the systems that demanded sleep, he pushed them to stuck-on. Her conscious mind lost its ability to fight it, and her lucid mind lost its ability to wake her from dreams.

  So she plodded on, racing to in one dream and from in another. A steady input of fear and anger and clutching, groping desperation wore her mind thin, and she finally woke somnolent to the point of walking comatose. Sam put a cup of coffee in her hand and led her to a table. Her scope of awareness was too narrow to know where she was or what time it was, but she was thirsty and the coffee scored the inside of her throat and chest in a blossoming sort of way. She did know something was missing. She tried to look for it, but couldn’t see what she was looking at.

  “Jason is getting dinner,” Sam said.

  Jason. Food. Evening. She processed slowly, sipping at her coffee. Food. Did she want food? She hated Carter. She nodded at her coffee. That was one thing she knew. She hated Carter.

  Bloody Carter.

  “You’ve been asleep for two days,” Sam said.

  Samantha blinked at what she was slowly identifying as a wall. Two. Is two big, or small? Two is a small number. The wall had a picture on it. She didn’t think she liked it. It was all pink and yellow and light blue in sweeping shapes, like… like the person who had painted it had been happy.

  She didn’t like happy people.

  That wasn’t new.

  That was old.

  Why didn’t she like happy people?

  Sam.

  She looked at him, seeing him as an image rather than an idea, now. Sam was important.

  There was a hole in his head.

  No, not in his head. In his chest.

  She reached out and touched the spot that she had stitched shut, remembering magic. Powerful magic. Sentient magic. She couldn’t have tied her shoes, but she remembered every word of the spell, in that moment.

  “I’m a mage,” she said. Sam frowned.

  “Not if you don’t want to be.”

  She smiled. It was perfect. He was so not-Carter.

  “You’re alive.”

  “Yeah.”

  Why didn’t that make her happy?

  She dropped her eyes back to her coffee. Her cup was empty. Sam took it, and a moment later she had a full cup in her hands again. Like magic. She drank. Slowly the fog of sleep lifted and she began to remember.

  <><><>

  Jason returned to the room to find Sam sitting at the table, resting his mouth on his fingers and watching as Samantha paced around the room. She appeared to be having an argument with herself in alternating angeltongue and hellspeak.

  “What happened?” he asked. Sam shook his head.

  “I don’t know. One second she was sitting here drinking coffee, and the next, she was just… this, again.”

  “What is this?” Jason asked, setting a bucket of chicken wings on the table and sitting down next to Sam.

  “Hell if I know,” Sam said.

  Jason crunched on a piece of chicken.

  “So what do you want to do about it?” he asked, putting his hand in front of his mouth to at least pretend to try not to spit crumbs.

  “Demon,” Samantha said.

  “Where?” Jason asked.

  “I need a demon,” she said. She charged at Sam, but Jason was quick enough to get in front of her.

  “You going to explode it all over my car again?”

  She frowned, her forehead creasing deeply.

  “I don’t know. Ask him.”

  Jason turned.

  “Is she going to…” he turned back. “Hey. I see what you did there.”

  “Not again,” Sam said. “I learned my lesson.”

  “Need a demon,” Samantha said.

  “What is going on with you?” Jason asked. She head-butted his chest, then rolled her face to the side, just leaning against him. He cautiously put his arms around her shoulders, but she didn’t thrash away.

  “I’m empty. I’m angry. Just let me kill something, okay?”

  “You promise you’re going to get off the crazy train soon?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He laughed into her hair as she stood and wrapped her arms around his chest.

  “You going to be okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. You can hold me still.”

  “Okay, then,” he said. He settled her tighter against him, putting his hand over the side of her head.

  “So it doesn’t surprise you, when you let go of me, I’m going to trigger a vision and get myself another demon sighted.”

  “Are you going to keep acting like a one-man tribute to crazy?”

  “Probably.”

  “Let us know if there’s anything we can do,” Jason said.

  “Demon,” she said, pushing away from him. “Get me a demon.”

  <><><>

  Sam looked around.

  “This is it,” he said.

  He recognized the mailbox from his vision. He was getting better at controlling them, and getting an idea of where he was before he lost them. Samantha was out the door before Jason had the Cruiser in park.

  He hadn’t seen anything specific about the man who lived here. He was certain that he did live here, though. Gray-haired, slightly stooped, he was sitting in his living room when Sam had seen him. He had seen Samantha’s face through the window, but he hadn’t mentioned it to her. As Jason finished parking the car along the curb, he saw her peek. That was the point where he had quit watching. He was clear. He saw her draw Lahn, as he and Jason walked across the street nonchalantly.

  “Girl draws too much attention,” Jason said. “It’s still light out.”

  Sam nodded. She was singularly aware of the demon inside the house. He thought he might have been able to get hit by a car without her so much as noticing.

  “Will you put that away?” Jason scolded, kneeling next to her. “I don’t want to deal with the police.”

  “No body, no crime,” Samantha said. “Just a pile of ash.”

  “Tell them that at the trial,” Jason said, grabbing her elbow and dragging her away from the window. “We go in the back.”

  Samantha strained.

  “He’s just right there.”

  “Is he going anywhere?” Jason asked. She looked in the next window on the way by.

  “No.”

  “Then he’ll still be just right there when we go in the back.”

  Sam closed his eyes, willing himself not to act out of place. Samantha arched her back to see in the window another moment as Jason dragged her along, but at least she was going along with it. If a fight broke out in the front yard, the right thing
to do would be to just drive away, but he could feel that Samantha might simply break, first.

  They reached the corner of the house and Lahn was out again, swishing through the air like the tail on an angry cat. Jason sighed, but relented. Thick bushes ran along the side of the yard, putting them in enough shade that she wasn’t going to catch sun glare, at least. She got ahead of them, now, waiting at the back corner impatiently, then disappearing again. Jason ran to keep up. Sam walked, trying to be aware of the things that Jason and Samantha were missing. He could feel Samantha standing at the back door, waiting for Jason to let her in. She wasn’t going anywhere for right now, and Jason would wait for him.

  Loose, sandy soil. Bad for running, bad for tracks. Thick greenery everywhere, but well-maintained. He wondered if the demon had a gardener or did the yard work himself. A small gazebo in the back corner of the lot. Empty.

  He got to the door as Jason timed finishing the lock, and they let themselves in. Jason drew the gun that he had simply co-opted from Samantha, and Sam shut the door. He had a handgun stashed, but at this point he just wanted to make sure he and Jason were both clear when the fighting started. As Samantha had slept, he had caught glimpses of the intricate work on her sides and arms, where her shirt shifted. Black marker matched up against intricate brown ink, creating a latticework of conjoined symbols almost everywhere a short-sleeved shirt would cover. She was a different animal than they had yet known.

  She looked back at him, arm back and above her waist like a hunter. He indicated the direction to the living room and she nodded, leaning her back against a wall, then spinning around into the room.

  “Come in, dear,” the man in the next room said. Jason and Sam stuck their heads around the doorway. “Yes, I know about you two, as well. I have the latest in home security,” the gray-haired man said. “There’s a little old woman across the street who’s sweet on me who called to tell me I have a trio of teenagers in my yard.”

  Jason edged back. That meant police. Samantha walked into the room, Lahn cutting an angry rhythm in the air. The man rolled his eyes far to one side to see Jason while facing Samantha.

  “I told her you were my grandchildren,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you, or someone like you, for many years now.”