Courts and Cabals 2 G.S. D'Moore (the little red hen read aloud .txt) 📖

to me as I thrashed. At some point in the epileptic fit, my eye met the battered woman’s.

I had no idea what she looked like under the blood and bruises, but her eyes – the blue in them – triggered something in my memory. The eyes were windows to the soul, and I felt like I was falling into them, and she was falling into me. I saw flashes of a desert with wild animals running all around. A kid laughed and played. Then there was a beach, people everywhere; and water, it curled over me to form a tunnel I slid through on a board.

“Not me,” my brain told me as the electrical signals in my nervous system went into overdrive.

I didn’t know how to surf. The girl was in my head, and I was in hers. It was so familiar, and at the same time, so foreign. I thought I’d been mindfucked before, but this girl had a huge fucking dick for her mind and it was fucking the shit out of me.

“Wait,” Vernon yelled as the EMT team raced toward us. “We need to . . .” he never got to finish.

They kept coming, and once they were a few feet away, I felt power inside me activate. Not my Fae power, but the thing that made me other. Fire and lightning raced through me in an avalanche of sensation. All the pain vanished, but my back arched as pure power raced through me. I didn’t see it, but the same thing happened to the girl.

“Stop!” Vernon yelled.

The EMTs pumped the brakes when confronted by an angry werewolf, but it was too late. My finger gently grazed the outstretched hand as the girl on the stretcher skidded by me . . . and the whole world went to hell in a handbasket. I felt reality lurch, and it wasn’t just in my head. The whole building heaved like it had its own bout of food poisoning.

I heard concrete crack, steel buckle, and glass shatter; all to the backdrop of people screaming in horror. The lurch threw everyone in the hallway to the side, so we landed in a heap. Despite the jarring movement, my finger was still attached to the girl like some type of magnet.

“Get them apart,” Vernon yelled, as he tossed aside EMTs like dirty laundry to get to me. “Becky, quick, or we’re all dead!”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. All the pain was gone, and I felt good; really fucking good. The connection with this mysterious woman gave me strength, power, and some unknown reassurance. I didn’t believe in a capital G god like the monotheists; not when I’d met people like Lark and Venus. However, at this moment, I felt a higher power smiling down on me. It felt awesome.

Vernon wanted to end that. He grabbed me around the waist and pulled, while Becky grabbed the battered woman. They stretched us out to our full length, so only the tips of our fingers touched like Michelangelo’s fresco of The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I felt Vernon’s muscles strain around me as he pulled, and I saw a vein on Becky’s neck protrude as she put all her effort behind it. Still, our fingers wouldn’t come undone.

I felt the double wave of magic as the two shifters exploded into masses of muscle and fur. Suddenly, eight feet of hulking werewolf surrounded me, and I was looking at a hot-as-fuck lioness who’d shredded a good deal of her clothes in the transformation. From the look on Becky’s face, she didn’t care one of her tits had busted out of her bra. She looked afraid.

“But it’s so glorious!” I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The fire and lightning that filled me was a blessing, not a curse. I knew that now. I was meant for this, whatever this was.

“On three,” Vernon commanded. “One . . . two . . . three!” the two shifters threw their combined, considerable strength into it.

I felt the power connecting me and the woman give, and something ripped. We flew apart from the pressure being exerted by the shifters. I went flying backwards, still enclosed in Vernon’s arms. There was a jarring sensation as we hit the door more than a dozen feet behind us, and went through it into the impressive foyer. Blinding light swarmed all over me, and I closed my eyes with a groan as exhaustion seeped into every fiber of my being. It felt like I’d just run a marathon, as a human, with a hundred pounds sack on my shoulders, and on only one leg. I was fucking beat.

“Get him out of here!” someone yelled before I shut my eyes and gave into the exhaustion.

“I’m just going to rest my eyes for a minute,” I told myself before the darkness took me. “Then I’ll figure out what the fuck is going on.”

***

The car door slammed shut and woke me out of my stupor. “I’m up,” I groaned, but it was drowned out by the revving of the car’s engine.

“Shut up and stay down,” Vernon snapped.

That wasn’t a problem. I felt like hammered shit. Laying down, with the cool leather seat pressed against my aching face, was fine by me. I slid back against the seat as Vernon floored it. We wound around in circles, so we must have been in some underground parking garage. Finally, the car tilted upward and burst into the light.

There were also screams, sirens, and every other sound imaginable associated with a major tragedy.

“What . . .?” I started to lift my head up.

“Stay down,” Vernon reached behind the seat and shoved me back into the leather; but not before I saw it.

The ground level of the UN building was a clusterfuck. Emergency vehicles were