PsyCop 1: Among the Living (11 page)

Ziggy Stardust thought that was funny. He stretched his arm closer to Jacob, going in slow motion to savor my reaction to it all the longer.

I was getting nowhere fast with the gun. I didn’t fling it aside or anything melodramatic like that. Heck, I might still need it. But I used another weapon that I supposedly had in my arsenal, at least according to Camp Hell.

I shot a blue bubble of protection from a space between my eyes and above, a little outside my physical body. Third eye, pineal gland, seventh chakra, it’s all the same. When you’re psychic, it’s where all your weird shit lives.

The bubble was so strong I actually saw it. Maybe nobody else would’ve, but I saw it in the same way I’d seen the dead baby in my basement or the spirits hovering around the accident. It sealed Jacob up tight. I let go of it, and it stayed there.

Take that.

The incubus saw it, too. He poked at the bubble and it stretched a little, but held. He looked back at me, his eyebrowless forehead hitched in the middle to show me his displeasure. He grabbed at Jacob more forcefully, but his hand glanced off the bubble.

I knew what I needed to do. Send him toward the light. I took a deep breath and then shot a sphere of light out toward him. It encircled him like a psychic spotlight, glowing beautiful and pure.

He touched it, and it shattered.

He smiled, showing Bowie-esque teeth a little square and crooked, but I could still feel the blackness lurking there behind them. “Aren’t you just a breath of fresh air?” he said in a melodious English accent, his voice carrying effortlessly over the grinding cacophony of the electropop. “And what’s that little trick you just tried to pull?”

I leveled the gun at his face.

“Now, now. Why so jumpy? I just want to talk. There’s no harm in talking, is there?”

Probably. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reply.

Instead, I made another white bubble, and I imagined it was a hundred times stronger, swirling with layer upon layer of psychic energy, impenetrable. And I flung it.

It engulfed him, pearlescent white whirling around him like a cloud cover. It held for a moment. And then it shattered.

“How did you do that?” it asked. “You’re mortal. I can smell your soul. Come on,” he coaxed, easing forward, “Let me get a better look at you.”

I backed up a step. That was a good white bubble, a damn good one, and yet the incubus was just too strong for it. It was a stupid idea anyway, trying to scare off a demon by putting him in a bubble like Glenda the Good Witch. What I needed was a house to drop on him.

He took a dainty step forward, then another. “You don’t need to be afraid,” he said. “We’ll just get to know each other a little better. I can make you feel very, very good. You’re such a fascinating chap—I promise I won’t kiss you until you grow tiresome.”

He was on me now, his pale, slender hand reaching toward me. I didn’t know how I’d respond to physical contact with him, since it was possible he’d trip some psychic synapse in me, maybe short me out. “Your pickup lines need a lot of work,” I said, and then I pulled an image from the cop portion of my brain. I imagined something black, thick and suffocating, a shape that was man-sized, yet vague and featureless. I wrapped him up in a psychic body bag and zipped it up tight. And then I imagined it was totally lined with mirrors and sent that idea blasting toward him.

He just stood there for a second while I waited for him to shatter my shield. He flexed and wriggled, but my body bag stayed solid. I poured more energy into it, imagining the mirrors inside showing him a hundred thousand reflections of himself, except maybe there really wasn’t anything to see, only blackness. He let his sonic scream rip, and the bag muffled it and made it even more shrill and ugly, psychic feedback. And I poured strength into the body bag until I started getting lightheaded.

And then I emptied the whole clip into it.

Chapter 15

There was no body to recover, just a bunch of stringy slime—which analysis found to be inconsistent with human remains. And though I’d left twenty bullet casings scattered in an arc around my feet, only a single bullet was recovered, the one I’d aimed at the incubus’ arm. That one had lodged in Jacob’s bedroom wall.

Jacob’s condo was now a crime scene. I’d invited him to stay with me and he’d accepted, though he was still too groggy from the incubus’ sleep-whammy to shuttle me to and from the eye doctor’s. I’d been about to call another cab for my trip home when Lisa called my cell phone and offered to pick me up.

Lisa waited right outside the clinic, idling in a little red hatchback. She’d walked right out of lockup and bought herself a used car. Not quite the reaction I would’ve had to incarceration, though she’d had the
sí-no
to keep her company, while I would’ve gotten a dead serial killer hanging by his shoelaces for a cellmate.
 

The clinic’s automatic doors whooshed open and I stepped through, blinking against the glare of the sun. The ophthalmologist had dilated my pupils to look around inside my eyes, and he’d told me the residual blood in the whites looked much worse than it actually was and it wouldn’t affect my vision in any way. I made him look inside again just to be sure. They say if you lose your sight, your other senses increase. And if my sixth sense got any sharper, I’d probably kill myself by tripping and falling on it.

Lisa gave me a big grin and reached to turn down the Mexican radio station as I climbed in. “It’s okay,” I said. “Leave it.”

She ignored me and left the volume low anyway. “What do you think of my car? Is it haunted?”

I grimaced and took a quick look in the back seat before I buckled myself in. “Nope. Sorry.”

“I didn’t think so.” She pulled away from the curb and swung around the U-shaped arc of the driveway, slipping into traffic with an ease that made me think she was learning her way around just fine. No GPS unit strapped to the dash. Maybe the
sí-no
was a more accurate way to travel anyway.

“I had a hard time deciding,” she said as we idled at a red light. “I think I started out asking the
sí-no
the wrong questions. ‘Is this car gonna last me five years?’ I got a ‘no’ on everything, and was starting to think the lot was full of lemons.” She put her left turn signal on and crept into an intersection. The oncoming traffic showed no gaps, but she waited for the end of the yellow light without any trace of anxiety and took a smooth turn just before the cross traffic gunned into the intersection. “Then I started worrying that maybe I was gonna be crippled in five years, not able to drive a car. Or maybe even dead.”

I looked out my window at the line of orderly brownstones we passed. I didn’t trust myself to attempt a reassurance that’d probably come out awkward and make things worse.

Lisa waited for a moment, maybe giving me some time to respond, and kept going when I didn’t. “I talked to Carolyn. She told me I was reaching out too far. That I should ask questions like, ‘Does this car have any mechanical problems?’ Or, ‘Will I enjoy driving it?’“

“Makes sense,” I said. I noticed the leaves on a maple coming up were starting to turn gold. One more year just passing by.

“She’s real sorry about leaking our plans to Warwick, you know.”

I sighed. “Yeah. I know. I told her it wasn’t her fault.”

“When Warwick asked her what we were up to, she didn’t even answer him, did you know that? He suspected, though, and when she wouldn’t say whether you were talking to me or not, he just took it as a yes.”

“I get it. I just said it was okay.”

Lisa pulled into a space a couple blocks south of my apartment building. I assumed the
sí-no
had told her there wasn’t anything closer. “She thinks you hate her now.”

“Jesus. I don’t hate her. It just scares the shit out of me, how it happened. The thought that Warwick could use her own powers to manipulate her. The idea that maybe someone could do that to me.”

Lisa cut the engine and slumped back into her seat. “Yeah. Me too. That’s why I think I’m gonna get some training.”

I swung around to grab her and shake some sense into her, but the seat belt caught me by the neck. I swore at it and clicked it open, but by then I’d calmed down enough to stop myself from acting like a lunatic. “Did Warwick talk you into it? He probably believes that fucking brochure that Heliotrope Station sends out, but lemme tell you….”

“Vic,” she said quietly, putting her hand on my knee. “Calm down. Not Camp Hell. There’s a new place in Santa Barbara. It’s called PsyTrain.”

I hated PsyTrain instinctively, but since I’m not precognizant, my instincts weren’t worth much. “Sounds like a fucking disco locomotive.”

“The department will pay for it. And when I’m done, I’ll have a job waiting for me.”

So that’s how Warwick had talked her into it. He’d let her keep on being a cop. Shrewd fucking bastard. “Visit this PsyTrain first before you go,” I said. “More than once. And make sure you talk to some people that’ve trained there, lots of them. And not just the ones they recommend, either. Find some on your own and….”

“Don’t worry. Carolyn’s going with me to make sure they’re honest.”

I didn’t suppose Lisa could do any better than having the human lie detector in tow, but the mere thought of Camp Hell had sent adrenaline pumping through my veins and I think I wanted to keep on arguing just for the sake of it.

“If something doesn’t feel right, I’ll back out of it,” Lisa said. She gave my knee a squeeze. “I promise. But Jacob’s waiting for you. He’s worried about your eyes. You should go tell him they’re okay.”

I swallowed back the urge to bicker and opened the car door. I hadn’t told Lisa my eyes were okay—but she knew. I wondered how long it would be before HMOs started scooping up psychics to cut down on the cost of medical testing, and then slapping them with lawsuits whenever their diagnoses failed.
 

One last look at Lisa’s back seat reassured me that the hatchback’s former owners weren’t along for the ride, and I gave her a brief, sullen wave as she cranked the Mariachi back up and pulled away from the curb.

I could’ve said something like, “Hi honey, I’m home,” when I came in, but that would’ve implied that I was in a good mood. Which I wasn’t.

My futon looked strange, small and a little bit cheap, with Jacob on it. He sat there in plaid pajama pants, hunched over the glass-top coffee table, shirtless and insanely buff, poring over one of my old textbooks. I suspected he’d already read the one about Psy-ethics. He looked up as I came in, his finger marking the spot on the page where he’d stopped reading.

“My eyes are fine,” I said. “They just look bad. But they’ll clear up in a week or two.”

Jacob smiled his broad, infectious grin.

“I’m, um…gonna go lay down,” I said, and ducked into the bedroom. Part of me wanted him to follow and help me blow off a little steam. And part of me was drained and exhausted and just wanted him to stay put. I guess I’d get my wish either way.

I kicked off my jeans, pulled on an old pair of sweatpants, drew the curtains and slipped into bed. A few minutes later I felt Jacob’s weight settle behind me. “So tell me about this third eye,” he said.

I managed to not turn it into a dirty joke, since he was so earnest and all, and I didn’t feel much like joking anyway. “What about it?”

“Does it feel like an actual eye to you? Does it blink? Did the incubus’ scream affect it, too?”

“It’s all a metaphor,” I said. “It’s not a real eye.”

“But the text….”

“Is incredibly hokey and inaccurate. I used to think it was translated from Russian. They had a handle on Psych stuff a long time before we figured it out here. Them and the Chinese.”

Jacob eased his arm around me and spooned my back into his chest. We fit our bent legs together, and his knees nestled behind mine. “I know you think I’m pushy for asking….”

“What? No, no I don’t.”

“I can tell. You sound disgusted when you answer me. But you’re a difficult man to get to know. And I’m only trying to understand.”

I felt bad. Just a little. “Look at the part on chakras in one of the newer books, the one with the guy on the cover who looks constipated. That’s a little better explanation.”

I think the cover model was supposed to be expressing some sort of psychic talent in action, but I’d always wanted to slip him an Ex-Lax. I half expected Jacob to leap out of bed to go find it since he was so into the whole Psych thing. But instead he just snuggled tighter into my back, his breath warm against my shoulder blade.

And his stiff cock hard against the back of my thigh.

All I had to do was reach back and take it in my hand, let him know that I was ready if he was. And yet I still felt peevish and out of sorts. He sighed and pressed a little harder, his fingertips fanning over my ribs as he held me. I felt a flutter of arousal at his touch, and his warmth, and the sheer solidity of him.

And yet.

Jacob pressed his mouth to my ear. He had a sexy voice and he was shameless about using it. “Make love to me,” he said.

I turned my head toward him and his mouth covered mine, the light bristle of his short beard scraping at the criss crossed network of fine scabs on my cheek. His tongue traced my lower lip, drew my tongue out to meet it, but only reluctantly. I knew the incubus had used heavy psychic stuff to seduce him. Call it a glamour, or some kind of mesmerism. But I couldn’t help it. I was jealous.

I turned my mouth from his. “I don’t have any condoms or lube,” I said, and did my best not to count the number of years it’d been since I’d dated someone steadily enough to need such things. The record store guy. Too many years.

Jacob’s mouth went to my throat, and he traced a long lick down the sinew of my neck. “Who says I need them?” he asked, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “I just want to touch you. Taste you. Hold you.”

His hand skimmed up my body and his fingertips found my nipple, took it firmly this time, and squeezed. Arousal surged toward my groin as if the two points were magically linked, and then he gave a little twist that made me whimper.

His lower hand slipped palm-down beneath the waistband of my sweatpants. My breath shuddered out, but I bit back the moan that threatened to escape me. It wasn’t fair that he could make me so hard so fast. He cupped my balls with his palm and twisted my nipple again, and I writhed against him, feeling his hard cock settle in the cleft of my ass.