Playing with Passion Theta Series Book 1 (43 page)

“It wasn’t a simple procedure, but now
we can mind speak. This means we’ll be able to communicate with
Gene at headquarters mind-to-mind, even from a distance,” Mack
said.

“There are other benefits. When we
need the extra edge, we can focus our senses more strongly,” Gene
added.

“In what way?” Johnny
asked.

Gene grinned. “The last guy who
visited the liquor store out front couldn’t decide between the
Russian vodka and the Polish.”

Johnny looked incredulous. “You can
hear from that distance?”

“Farther.”

“Tom laughed. “What did he
pick?”

“Both, of course.”

“What’s the difference between a
hunter and a rover?” Mack asked.

“We take on both roles. Sometimes we
rove the neighborhoods, taking care of trouble when we find it.
Sometimes we hunt down specific bad guys.” Johnny explained. “When
are you gonna show me how to talk mind to mind?" Johnny said
impatiently.

Gene and Mack glanced at Ingrid with
matching worried expressions. "I'll try, but it’s…it’s intimate,
You have to open all your shields and trust me completely.” Ingrid
admitted.

“Oh.” Alan was blushing and Johnny
looked extremely uncomfortable.

To change the mood, Mack jumped onto a
tabletop as gracefully as any dancer. “I’m calling for a vote. I
nominate Gene Hudson as CO.”

“I second,” shouted Sam.

“All in favor?” And everyone was, even
Liz—although she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic.

Gene shook her hand. “Thank you,
Elizabeth. Your vote of confidence means the most to me.” Gene
tilted her head up with a touch of his fingers, so she'd have to
look him in the eye. "For the record, those women you saw me with
in magazines were in the same boat I was, paired up with me by
their bosses for publicity purposes. They were all humans trying to
survive. Not slutty celebrities. I’ve never been free to choose my
own dates.”

Ingrid thought there might have been a
hint of invitation in his eyes, but when Gene tried to push a clump
of hair out of Liz’s face, she slapped his hand away, unsheathed
her knife, and glared at him in anger. He raised his hands in a
gesture of surrender, but didn't lose the smile.

Liz spoke through gritted teeth.
"Don't ever touch me again unless you want to lose that hand." She
started backing away, visibly upset. "You troupe thetas think you
can seduce any female in the city with your sexy voices and your
good looks. Well, I'm not any female. I'm a hunter, and I've killed
almost as many people as you've fucked, so stay away from me." She
stormed down the hall toward her room.

Gene grinned at Ingrid and Mack. "I
think she really likes me."

Tom explained. "She's still young,
only twenty-one, and she's been through a lot of shit. She doesn't
trust men. In fact, she only wanted us to bring in Ingrid and leave
the rest of you to fend for yourselves, but Johnny knew Ingrid
wouldn't have gone for that. Liz is pissed off at the two of us as
much as you guys."

Johnny added, "Leave her in peace,
because if you break her heart we'll lose our best hunter and then
we'll have to kill you." He and Tom both chuckled.

"You two aren't together?" Gene
pointed at Johnny, and then down the hall where Liz had
disappeared.

"Nah, I have a girl, but she's at the
other safe house." He looked back in the direction of Liz’s room.
"She's brilliant in the field. In fact, the only time I see her
happy is when she's hunting and roving. She needs to learn how to
trust someone again."

Gene's eyes lit up,
bringing a scowl to Ingrid’s face. "
Don't
go falling for the first female you meet,"
she warned.

"A girl with issues can be
challenging. Ask Mack."
Gene winked in a
very exaggerated fashion.

“I’m not
challenging.”
Ingrid rested her hands on
her hips.

“Oh no. Never. Right,
Mack?”

“Never.”

Ingrid grabbed Mack’s
shirt and pulled him down closer so they were eye to eye.
"So what's my name?"

"How do you feel about
Chubby Cheeks?”

“Is that another fat ass
joke?”

“Would I do that?”
He squeezed one of the cheeks under
discussion.

"You’re stalling. Did you
forget to think of one?"

"No, of course
not.
" He squeezed the other
cheek.

“Are ass cheeks an
obsession I should be made aware of?”

“Only yours, my
love.”

“And what’s so special
about mine?”

“They offer a male a
wonderful place to rest his hands when you’re having your way with
him.”
He’d added a slight brogue, charming
and sexy at the same time.

“Ah, truly? And where
should a maid place her hands in such a situation?”

“I’m verra fond of
watching a maid pleasure herself, ya know.”

“We’re not
alone.”

“We can be.”

“Important meeting,
remember?”

“Salome.”
Mack hissed. She giggled.

C
HAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“What happened to the money I gave
you?" Ingrid asked Johnny, as she and Mack helped him clean up the
kitchen and check through the cabinets for supplies.

"It fed about seventy people in three
different safe houses. Some of us hadn't eaten in a couple of days.
Thanks for that, Ingrid."

Diane and Dave were back among the
living, still wary, but insisting they'd decided to stick it out
and see how things progressed. Staci sat down with them, trying to
ease their minds about what the future might be like now that they
weren't part of a troupe. No one mentioned anything about the
organization they’d formed, deciding to wait until they knew for
sure that the two former divas were sticking around for
good.

It turned out that lunch was either
tuna salad or peanut butter and jelly, both on whole wheat bread
with a bag of chips, an apple, and a glass of juice. Gene joked
that he was back in the cafeteria at the institute. After the meal,
Mack heard Staci speaking to Johnny and Tom. "If we don't eat well,
we lose power. I'd like to make a trip to the supermarket, if
that's okay. We need meat, fresh vegetables, dairy...and probably
vitamins, too. We'll buy enough for your friends who we've
displaced.”

Diane and Dave offered to help, so
along with Tom and Sam, the group morphed, leaving the safe house
in pairs and trios. The masking spell that hid the building,
extended all the way out to the end of the parking lot, so they
were able to get into their beat-up vans without being
noticed.

Alan, Mack, and Ingrid sat down to
talk, while Gene scowled at his tablet, working
furiously.

Ingrid was nibbling on a small bag of
trail mix. “I like the idea of being here at the start of
everything.”

"The start?" Alan asked.

Gene piped in from the other side of
the room. "The first days of our lives as free supes. The beginning
of the revolution, the uprising, the insurgence. Whatever it’s
called, we’re here as witnesses to the early days."

"A free life and a revolution are two
totally different beginnings," Mack said, stealing an almond from
Ingrid’s bag.

"There's no freedom for us
without change. As long as The Director and his cronies treat us
like slaves, we
are
slaves."

"We can't take on every other
supernatural group," Alan argued.

"Most mid-level supes would back us
against the jerks that are running things now. I think they'd at
least stay out of our way. They've also suffered under their
leaders. Maybe if they see what we're capable of doing, they'll
negotiate a peace with us."

"What exactly are you thinking?" Mack
asked.

Gene turned to him. "You must see the
potential. We can kill...kill with our minds.” He glanced at
Ingrid. “You did it yourself. If you'd told Joseph Herron to aim
his gun at his own head and pull the trigger, he’d be dead." He
shifted away, his hands scanning the image displayed in the air in
front of him.

Ingrid sat in the chair next to
Gene’s, peeking at his projection currently displaying the site of
a local real estate office. "Gene," she whispered. "We need to help
and train these people before we start attacking anyone." He didn't
look up. "C'mon." She laid her hand on top of his, bringing it down
to his side. "Where's my easy-going southern boy?"

He smiled, touched by her affectionate
words. "I'm here, sugar. But look at this."

He had accessed The Director's
website. Pictures of their entire troupe were splashed across the
screen, constantly changing to show posed photos, candid photos,
and even pictures of them performing.

"They're searching for us using dart
guns loaded with Psycho32." Psycho32 was the nickname of a
particularly powerful hallucinogen used to discipline thetas in the
institute. "Have you ever seen what that drug does to a
theta?"

“I have,” Mack said. “One boy, around
thirteen years old, had been defiant, not willing to practice the
amount of hours mandated by the teachers at the institute. They
gave him the drug in front of the other males in his grade, locking
him in a room down the hall from mine. The kid screamed non-stop
until he lost his voice entirely. When the drug wore off, he spent
ten days in the clinic. On his last night before being allowed back
into the general population, he killed himself by slitting his
wrists with a broken glass. At least that's what we were
told.”

Gene explained further to Alan. "The
drug brings on fantasies, horrible nightmare projections that are
so real, you believe you're being eaten alive or burned or one of a
dozen other horrendous things. It's a drug keyed in directly to our
psycore energy."

Gene scrolled down The Director’s page
to the section under the troupe’s pictures. "They have orders to
bring Mack, Ingrid, and me in alive. Everyone else is to be
questioned upon apprehension to see if they have information
regarding our whereabouts. If not, they die right then and
there.”

Mack squeezed Ingrid’s hand as Gene
continued to summarize what he was reading. "We’re to be executed
before a live audience at the Eastern Arena.”

“I wonder how much he’s planning to
charge for tickets?” Mack’s gut had coiled into a tight
spring.

There was a commotion at the front
door and Sam rushed into the room. "Diane and Dave took
off."

"What?" Mack stood, moving closer to
hear the rest. The others were filing in with grocery bags, looking
worried.

"They shopped in the store with us and
checked out at a different register. We think they bought food and
supplies for themselves. They left before we did, but we figured
they'd be waiting by the vans." Staci said, distraught.

"When we finished shopping, they'd
disappeared. We checked all over, but there was no sign of them
anywhere." Sam added.

Gene got to his feet. “We’ll have to
pack up and get out now.”

Everyone stared at him in shock, not
moving. Mack took Ingrid by the hand, urging her toward the door to
their rooms. "He's right. They'll be captured and interrogated. We
have a couple of hours, tops."

"Shouldn't we keep searching for
them?" Staci was crying.

Sam pulled her closer and wiped her
eyes. "They've made a choice. We have to protect ourselves and the
others now, honey."

Tom added, "We have a small truck.
We'll take what we can to wherever you decide to move, but we won't
take you to another safe house. We have to protect our
friends."

Gene smiled, shutting down his H-tab.
”That's not a problem, because I'm about to buy a
building."

Mack didn't have time to question Gene
about the purchase. Instead, he spent the next two hours racing
around helping Johnny, Liz and Tom pack up as much of the safe
house as they could and loading it into the truck they'd driven
over from another house. Morphing their bodies to look like moving
company employees, coveralls and all, they left behind most of the
furniture, taking only mattresses, bedding, towels, one picnic
table, a bunch of folding chairs, kitchen supplies and the food.
Gene said the building had working office-sized refrigerators and
bathrooms with showers on every floor. Later that evening, Tom and
Alan would go out to purchase camp stoves and anything else they
might need to keep them going temporarily

The building Gene was thinking of
purchasing was half a mile away, in the Port Richmond area. The
real estate agent met them on site, and Gene took over the
exchange. The female agent left with a happy smile and a promise
that the money would be wired from an offshore account. After the
deal was complete, Gene planned on stealthily hacking into their
system to wipe out any information pertaining to the listing or the
sale.