Reluctant Adept: Book Three of A Clairvoyant's Complicated Life (13 page)

"Is that so?" He gazed at me archly. "And now that you know me for what I am?"

My heart jolted and sped up.

Jeez. Calm down, idiot. He's not asking you to share his blood. He wants to know whether you trust him.

"You wouldn't do anything to hurt me. I know that."

But people often hurt each other, even without trying to.

Dismissing the thought, I glared at him. "But you're still on my shit list for putting me to sleep."

"Although you understand why I did," he replied without hint of remorse.

Honestly.
Sidhe and their damn superiority. It made me want to argue, or maybe accidentally pinch his ear. But he was right. I did understand.

I just didn't have to like it.

"I wasn't going to run off," I muttered. Knowing that wasn't strictly true, I rolled my eyes and added, "At least, not right then." Even to my own ears, I sounded sullen.

He snorted.

Someone was a little too full of themselves for my taste.

"So …" I said, leaning against the low wall. "Our connection is increased if you're touching me, eh?"

His expression didn't veer from neutral, but something flickered behind his eyes. Unease, possibly.

He nodded.

"Are you touching me right now?"

He responded with silence. He wasn't dumb. He knew a loaded question when he heard one.

I didn't care that he wasn't the type to grope me while incapacitated. He had his hands on me when there was nothing I could do about it.

Not. Cool.

I folded my arms. "Then you know how that makes me feel."

He wiped a hand over his jaw, trying to hide his chagrin, and, for the first time, his gaze veered away.

It was a new look for him, boyish almost, but I refused to soften. "What do you think you should do about it?"

He sighed, flashed me with a crooked smile, and then blinked out of my dream.

"You'll be lucky if I don't kick your ass when I wake up!" I bellowed at the sky.

As my surroundings faded to black and the echo of my voice reverberated in my ears, I wondered whether my threat had been 'focused' enough for him to hear.

I smiled, sure of it.

We hit the South Lake Union neighborhood well after midnight. Fisk deftly parallel parked his luxury import between a beat-up Chevy pickup and a blue, late-model Subaru Impreza, two blocks from the red brick building that Michael and more than a dozen Invisius telepaths called home. I shivered as I unfolded myself from the backseat onto the damp, downtown Seattle sidewalk. The cool late-night air bit into the warmest parts of my body, drawing out goosebumps and making late spring feel more like winter.

Not all of my shivers were due to the cold. Less than three weeks ago, I'd stood not far from this exact spot with Kieran, Michael, Daniel, Kim, and Jackie, on the morning of our attack on Invisius. Now, Daniel was dead and I found myself at odds with the very people I still considered allies, if not friends. The reversal didn't sit well.

Hugging myself against the cold, I examined the moonlit street.

At least this time around, I didn't have to worry about the possibility that I might need to kill someone.

I frowned at the thought and turned to Fisk. "These are friends. I want the draíoclochs, but not enough to consider hurting anyone. No physical force. Understand?"

Even standing in the shadow of the nearest maple tree, Fisk's disgust wasn't difficult to read. "No. Really? Any other pearls of wisdom to share?"

"Sure," I replied sweetly. "Don't antagonize the person who's about to sidestep your ass into another dimension. She might be tempted to accidentally leave important bits behind."

To my delight, Fisk's eyes grew wide as I engulfed both him and Tíereachán within my telekinetic grip, but before I could get a feel for Fisk's resonance, his shroud slammed over his body, shutting me out and reflecting my magic with a reverberating slap.

I gasped and staggered backward at the unexpected jolt as I scrambled to reabsorb the backwash that boomeranged into me. Maybe if I'd been prepared for Fisk's indecorous reaction, I'd have successfully redirected the returning magic, but the surprise left me flat footed. With the power I'd spooled to sidestep readied and flowing through me, the profusion had nowhere to go. The surplus power spilled over, following the lines of my magic like the overflow drain in my bathroom sink, and surged into Tíereachán.

Tíereachán stiffened and bit out a Silven curse at the unheralded deluge.

Too late, I banked my power and strengthened my psychic shield to prevent further backwash from inundating him.

Bonehead!

This never would have happened if I'd drawn the power I needed, instead of topping myself off like a greedy child taking yet another cookie, in spite of having one in each hand and another stuffed in her mouth.

Overspoolers are preschoolers.
How many times had I heard that annoying rhyme, growing up? Even though overspooling was something only offensive psychics had to worry about, you'd think the lesson would have sunk in, regardless. I'd heard the inane verse chanted around the playground enough times, for God's sake.

Worse, I'd allowed my excess to spew all over Tíereachán! Why didn't I stamp an 'L' on my forehead and have done with it?

"Shit!" I croaked. "Sorry."

Ignoring me, Tíereachán leveled Fisk with a furious scowl. "Are you thick? If she saved a fallen good-for-nothing sidhe like me, she's certainly not going to harm you, even if you
are
an unmitigated ass."

"What did you expect?" Fisk growled back. "She's overtopping and slinging magic faster than a
ùruisg
in heat."

Tíereachán leveled him with a withering glare. "Had she years of experience, I might echo your sentiment. But she's had a mere three phases to learn control—with little instruction. Even if you are so arrogant to believe you could do better under the same circumstances, she doesn't deserve censure."

After a moment of dueling with their belligerent stares, Fisk looked at me, ground out a half sincere apology, adding crisply, "A little warning before you force your magic on me would be appreciated."

"Because, when you put me to sleep,
twice
, you did the same for me, right?"

Tíereachán cut in, "Enough! You two are worse than an unhappily mated couple in their second thousand years."

Eww.
I wrinkled my nose at the thought of being mated to Fisk. The guy was grumpier than a gorgon on a bad hair day.

What the hell was Fisk's problem anyway? I couldn't figure out what I'd done to warrant his near constant animosity, other than simply breathing.

Okay … yes, there was that time when I'd helped break the defensive ward in the Invisius telepaths' basement. We all thought the elders had erected it to keep everyone except their brainwashed telepaths out of the building. How were we supposed to know Wade had placed the ward to restrict a demonic gateway? If they'd bothered to warn us, we'd have left the darn thing intact. That's right,
we
. It had been a group decision to bring the ward down. But for whatever reason, despite Kieran, Michael, Daniel, Kim, and Jackie all being there, Fisk chose to blame the whole thing on me!

Now that I thought about it, Fisk's surly attitude went all the way back to when I'd first met him in FBI Agent Cunningham's office, weeks ago—
before
the whole ordeal at Invisius and prior to my initial meeting with Kieran and Maeve. At the time, I thought Fisk was nothing more than a prickly FBI agent annoyed at needing a clairvoyant's unique skill. I'd chalked up his animosity to the fact that I refused to help him with the case he'd been investigating … but maybe there was more to it. Perhaps he'd disliked me from the start because of who I was: A clueless human psychic everyone had pegged as the next adept.

I sighed. Whatever. Derision was nothing new to me. Every day, people avoided, even scorned me, because of my gloves and what they meant. The reaction was so familiar, I hardly noticed it anymore. Of course, those reactions typically came from normals, plain humans, not the magically inclined. But lately, with all my blundering, it was little wonder Fisk treated me like an airhead who'd play hopscotch on a pile of explosives.

I turned a jaded eye to Fisk, but I resolved to stop rising to his bait. "I have your back, for however little you think that's worth. Hate me or not, I don't give a crap. We're on the same side. Either you trust that, or you don't." Ignoring his rigid stance and affronted expression, I said, "I plan to sidestep the three of us so we can enter the basement in secret. That's what I was about to do until you shoved your shroud in my face."

Before he could issue what was surely an indignant retort, I added, "It was rude to grab you without warning you first. From now on, I'll try to remember." Somehow, the grudging admission didn't choke me as it left my mouth.

See? I could be professional.

He evaluated me, coolly assessing, until the invisible, oblong bubble that surrounded him disappeared.

"Okay, then," I said tentatively. "Here goes …"

Taking it slow, I eased my magic around the two men, spooling the power I needed to encase them within my telekinetic grasp and no more. With scarcely a thought, Tíereachán's resonance nestled into my mind, as familiar and comfortable as a favorite pair of fuzzy slippers. I might have worried about the speed and ease of our connection, but the dreaded anticipation of so intimately touching Fisk smothered what might have otherwise freaked me out.

I turned my attention to Fisk, forcing the invisible fingers of my magic to wreathe around him. As my magic slid over his body, each of his stiffly coiled muscles twitched in response. He was worse than a skittish horse, watching its groomer with wary eyes, poised to deliver a swift kick. Honestly, I wasn't any happier than he was. Fisk was the last person I wanted to know so thoroughly.

The guy was
physically
attractive; I'd give him that. Beauty seemed to be a universal sidhe trait that extended to part-bloods too. Fisk was six-feet-four inches of able-bodied, square-faced good looks with arresting amber eyes that made me think of the deadly allure of a lion. And, while not as heart-flutteringly gorgeous as Tíereachán (or as darkly handsome as Kieran), Fisk's physique made him the most imposing of the three men. He outweighed Tíereachán by a good thirty pounds, all of that surplus bulk in the form of toned musculature and four extra inches in height. Where Tíereachán's physique was cut and defined, like a swimmer's, Fisk's was brawnier, more befitting of a linebacker.

I held their unique resonances in the fore of my mind, like fondly remembered melodies, and then slipped every one of our finely tuned molecules …

… one

     … dizzying

          … whisper

               … sideways.

The darkened street warped and elongated as it both veered away and rushed closer. My stomach lurched and my ears throbbed with the familiar feeling of movement while my feet remained incongruously rooted to the solid yet now distorted ground.

I laughed at our arrival, the joyous sound echoing oddly in the stagnant atmosphere, but stopped myself short before I could spin around, hands raised in the air. When I caught Fisk's eye and took in his sickly grimace, I almost cracked up again, but by sheer willpower, managed to squash the impulse. I didn't need to give him yet another reason to hate me.

Ignoring his obvious discomfort, I considered our dark, deformed surroundings. "Crud. The last time I did this, it was early morning. It's going to be hard to find the building in the dark with everything so …" I trailed off, looking at the obscured, topsy-turvy world around us, and then settled on, "wonky."

"Ever heard of a veil?" Fisk rasped, along with something that sounded suspiciously like, 'fucking amateur.'

My hackles rose.

"Jesus," I spat. "I got the message already. You hate me.
Get the fuck over it.
I'm doing my best and being an asshole won't make it any better."

Anger had kept my voice at an even, if not indignant, keel, but on my last word my bottom lip trembled alarmingly. I bit it, hard, welcoming the pain as it forced any self-defeating emotions back where they belonged—buried deep.

Fisk would not,
could not
, hurt my goddamned feelings. I didn't have time for this shit.

"Oh, I don't think it's hate, precisely," Tíereachán murmured, his arms folded, gazing down his nose at Fisk in a superior, assessing way, as though he'd discovered something interesting.

"Close enough," I bit out.

If Fisk was in the least bit sorry for his behavior, it didn't register on his broad, chiseled face. Whatever. It no longer mattered. I was done worrying about the jerk. Obviously, he had a problem with me, but it was just that:
His
problem. Not mine. And I'd be damned if I let myself be a party to it any longer.

Strengthened by my resolve, I calmly addressed both men, "Your veils would cover us on the street, that's true, but Jackie warded the building a couple weeks ago. It announces all arrivals, even those keyed to it, like Tíereachán and me. But it won't allow
you
inside at all," I said, flashing my eyes at Fisk. "Unless you want to go in neutered. Magically speaking, of course."