Mind Games (7 page)

“This is an on-call lifestyle. Plus, you’ll be pretending to be in a different profession. I wonder if you can guess what that might be.” He has that glow again. Clearly, this is something I’m going to like.

“I don’t know.”

He gives me a sly look. It’s intoxicating. “You’ll tell them that you’re a nurse.”

I can barely breathe. “I’m going to go around pretending to be a
nurse?”
I’ve always wanted to be a nurse, but of course, it’s impossible for somebody like me.

“Surely you grasp my reasoning.”

“Oh, yes,” I whisper. Shiver. “People would listen to what I said about health if I was a nurse.” I gaze into his pale green eyes. “You’ve thought of everything.”

“I have,” he says, like it’s a matter of life and death. There’s this hush between us where we understand each other on a new level. I feel like he gets the depth of my impossible dream of becoming a nurse, and I suddenly get how important the success of the disillusionists is to him.

I say, “It’s all very deliciously diabolical, my friend.”

He smiles, and I smile. We’re both pretty pleased with the plan. And increasingly pleased with each other.

“Right.” He taps his pen on the table. “Anyway, targets will trust you because you’re a nurse, but they’ll also trust you because, after you zing them, they
bind
to
you, because it’s your fear they feel. They won’t know why they feel a mysterious connection to you, but they will. It makes them easy to work with.”

“Does that mean you bind to me when …”

“Of course not. I’m not affected by a zing.” He gestures between us. “There’s nothing—” He pauses. There are many words to describe this smoldering thing between us.
Nothing
isn’t one of them.

“Right,” I say. “That’s good.”

Packard looks at me without expression. My heart pounds too hard. He pulls out his laptop, and we go online and order some nursing textbooks. I’m to pose as a nursing student for the Silver Widow case. They’ve brought her up a few times now.

“You know, I won’t go after some poor vulnerable old woman. A hypochondriac attack would be devastating to anyone elderly, because the chances of something being wrong are so much higher.”

He gives me that look of awe again; he loves when I talk like a hypochondriac. And I love that he loves it.

“The Silver Widow is as far from poor, old, and vulnerable as a woman can get,” he says. “She’s a killer.”

“Obviously they couldn’t prove that in a court of law.”

“Not for want of trying. Believe me, we check these people out. You haven’t officially met Strongarm Francis, but he used to be a detective, and he does a lot of work to make sure our targets deserve to be hit. Most of them are killers.”

“That feels like vigilantism.”

“Think of it as a mechanism of nature. Karma catches up with people one way or another. We just speed it up.”

I don’t see what part of that isn’t vigilantism, but I keep my mouth shut. I said I’d give them a fair try. If I don’t like it, I’ll quit.

“You’ll get it when you meet her. Now.” He rests his hand on the table between us, and I gaze at its knuckled, sculptural beauty. “Let’s see your hand.”

“Oh.” I flatten my hand to the table in front of me.

“You have to practice feeling that space around you, pushing your awareness out through your energy dimension. Once you have that, you’ll work on pushing out while you’re touching other people. You’ll be able to touch their energy dimensions the way you’d reach out and touch a solid object. These are all things you can practice here and on your own. Once you have that, we’ll work on burning the hole.”

“You
burn
the hole?”

“With your focus,” he says. “Like sun through a magnifying glass.”

“It didn’t feel like burning.”

“It’s dimensional. You’re thinking physical. Two warnings,” he says. “Number one, never go deep inside a target’s energy dimension. Stay near the surface. If you plunge into somebody, there’s no guarantee you can get back out. Very dangerous.”

“But wouldn’t you stop at their skin?”

“Your skin would stop at their skin, but your energy dimension would keep going,” he says. “Again, you’re thinking physical. This is dimensional. And here’s the other thing—I’m going to tell you, even though you’re not able to zing yet, because it’s so important—never zing somebody I haven’t told you to zing. If you zing somebody who is not compatible, it will fry your brain.”

“Yikes!”

“Your fear is like an electrical charge, and if you zing somebody incompatible, the blowback will destroy your mind. It would be like zinging yourself.”

“How do I know if somebody is compatible?”

“I alone
can recognize safe targets,” he says.

“So zinging a random person would be out.”

“Unless you wanted to become a vegetable.” He gets this faraway look. “Which I suppose might be smart if you were about to be brutally tortured.” He slides a piece of paper in front of me. “You can leave as soon as you memorize these numbers.”

I stare at the three columns of numbers, not really seeing them.

“I’m serious,” he says. “Being a disillusionist is a game of concentration and focus.”

I watch him walk off. Frankly, I’m still stuck on the concept of
brutally tortured
.

          Six

M
OST MORNINGS
Cubby and I talk and sip lattes at our favorite coffee shop. Our relationship has greatly improved since I had my “breakthrough.” Or at least Cubby likes me better. This scrubbed version of me, anyway.

I put in my notice at Le Toile and inform Cubby that I’m considering something new, career-wise, possibly something in security. Cubby finds this amusing. “You do get all worked up about people in trouble, though,” he says. “And people breaking laws. Maybe you could get a little uniform and badge.”

“Maybe I could.”

“Maybe you could be a meter maid,” he says.

I hit him with a rolled-up newspaper. Really, I hate lying to him.

I usually show up at Mongolian Delites around nine bearing a large coffee from the corner deli. Packard acts annoyed by this and makes me turn it over to him, but I suspect he’s secretly grateful for a decent cup of coffee. Why he doesn’t just walk down there and buy coffee for himself or—brain flash!—get better-tasting coffee for the restaurant, I don’t ask. Questions about the restaurant plunge him into a mysteriously dark mood. Packard is a man with secrets.

The training continues to be intense, and it’s a constant
mental struggle to keep Packard in the boss category and out of the man category. Usually it’s just the two of us there, alone, until the cooks arrive. Ling, the day manager, rolls in at around eleven. No matter what time of day it is, I notice, it always seems like night inside the restaurant—it’s because of the orientation of the windows and the height of the neighboring buildings.

On a typical day, I take his hand and push out my energy dimension to make contact with his. I find I can touch his dimension easily. It feels like a powerful presence, warm and mysterious and inviting. It’s especially difficult in these moments not to dwell on topics like how good he feels, or what he would look like naked. But my quickly increasing ability to concentrate seems to be helping.

To his credit, Packard stays businesslike. He’s a man who will respect my relationship with Cubby as long as I do. Which, ironically, only makes him more attractive. It doesn’t matter. I’ll never let Cubby go. My dream of a normal, wholesome life with him is closer now than ever.

It turns out that disillusionist training involves numerous memorization and observation exercises. Sometimes I do multiplication in my head. One Monday, Packard instructs me to move a napkin across the table using the power of my mind. We’re sitting across from each other in the booth, and he places the napkin on the table between us and goes back to his paperwork. Some sort of condiments order.

“I don’t see how I could possibly move a napkin with the power of my mind,” I say.

“All will be revealed,” he mumbles.

“Did you just say ‘All will be revealed’?”

He looks up. “Yes.”

“Who says ‘All will be revealed’?”

“I do,” Packard says. “Just perform the task.”

“The task. Ah, please, forgive me for interfering with your diabolical restaurant supply order.”

He scowls down at his papers and forms. He really is one of the most teasable men I’ve ever met.

I try to move the napkin—I do—thinking, like a fool, that maybe I’m now capable of this sort of thing. And when I fail over and over, I feel more upset than I ought to. It’s just that I’ve never been good at anything, and I so want to be a good disillusionist.

After a discouraging three days of trying to move the napkin—yes,
three
days—Packard informs me it was just a random exercise he devised. “I never imagined you’d do it,” he says offhandedly. “You’re not a telekinetic.”

“What, are you making this up as you go along? Why have me try to move things with my mind if you know I can’t?”

He steeples his fingers. “Imagine, if you will, that I asked you to roll a two-ton boulder across a field. You wouldn’t be able to do it, but it would be an extraordinary workout.”

“God, Packard! Do you know how hard I worked at it?” I twist up the napkin and whip it at him.

He deflects it. “There we go; I knew you could do it.”

My mouth falls open. “Very funny.”

He just laughs.

“I can’t believe you!” I get up out of the booth and clamber onto his side, smashing my hands into his upper arm, pushing him playfully toward the wall while he laughs some more. “You’re crazy!” Then I stop short, and we regard each other from a kind of still point, and I’m conscious of my fingers on soft flannel, warm muscle underneath, and that I want to kiss him. I hastily back out and go sit down over on my side again.

And for the first time in a long time, I feel alive. Completely and exquisitely alive.

   I practice a lot, even at home. I push my awareness out my fingertips like Packard taught me and touch Cubby’s energy dimension, which is pleasantly dense and solid. This is something I try to keep very high in my mind, that Cubby is the good solid sort of man that I have always aspired toward, whereas Packard is simply new and exciting. Furthermore, Packard’s a highcap, and highcaps tend to bond with other highcaps. Though oddly, I never see him with other highcaps—that I know of. It’s not like you can tell.

Soon I can make contact with a person’s energy dimension with a brush of my fingertips. The girls at work have distinct energy dimensions; sometimes their energy dimensions relate vaguely to their personalities, but sometimes not. I’m always careful not to sink into them, though, like Packard warned. I would hate to get trapped inside one of my underlings. Nothing against them.

In training, we move on to burning a hole in my energy dimension, which requires pinpoint focus on a spot just beyond my right pointer fingertip. I spend long hours at the booth concentrating on it. Sometimes Packard comes by and touches it and says whether I’ve burnt one. After a while, I can feel the progress myself. It feels like heat. Packard seems pleased and proud, and this makes me happier than it should.

I also practice stoking up my fear on command. I still need the magazines, which is sort of embarrassing. If I need a juju item, at least it could be an amulet or an orb or something. Packard likes to tease me about this. And I often tease him about his dark lord talk. One time he actually uses the word
brainchild
in reference to the whole concept of zinging, and I get a ton of mileage out
of that, applying the word to pretty much everything he thinks of.

Like mature adults, we develop what I come to consider a very nice friendship over our crackling chemistry. I find I can be honest with him about things like how grateful I am to belong to the group, and how badly I want to excel at this one thing. He often talks about the importance of what we’re doing; stemming crime in this crazy way apparently means a great deal to him. He still strikes me as a man with secrets, however. Some mornings it seems clear he hasn’t slept, but he’s not much for discussing that sort of thing.

It’s around this time I remeet the burly, caterpillary man I saw the night I joined—the one who had the mysterious stare-off with Packard and then stormed out. The ex-detective, Strongarm Francis.

“The hypochondriac.” Strongarm Francis takes the seat next to me at the bar while I’m waiting for Packard to get done with somebody back at his booth. We shake, and then he looks at me hard through those fat, round glasses. “So. Things going good?”

“So far, so good,” I say.

“Good.” He looks away, nodding, like my answer is packed with meaning.

“What? Should things not be good?”

“No, not at all.”

He’s hedging, I can tell. “You sure? Is there something I should know?”

He looks at me with the stony expression older guys use to shut up younger guys—or younger gals. And it works. Because really, where was I going with this? What exactly do I think he’s lying about? That things are good? No disillusionist thinks things are good. We’re all too screwed up.