Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DEUS
The darkness creeps around me. I can hear her blaming me for her death as she does every night, and I push it back. She wants to lead me deeper into it. I know she does. She wouldn’t mind if I destroyed myself.
A hand slides into mine. I can’t see it, but I can feel it. I can feel the way it wraps around my skin, drawing me away from the darkness and away from her.
I sure hate being a monster.
“Don’t stop. Why are you stopping?” Ellison asks as his hand tightens. “You need to stay focused or you’re going to slide right back into that darkness.”
“I’m focused,” I lie.
“You should only be focused on me,” he says, so I put my trust in him and let him pull me into the hallway. We start running before I sense someone to my right and yank Ellison back. I grab the man by the back of the neck and slam him into the wall.
“Don’t hurt him. It’s a guard being controlled,” Ellison says.
I throw the attacker to the ground, hoping we’ll be gone by the time he gets up.
“Come on,” he urges as I realize how strange it feels to have someone to rely on.
To work with them when they’re helping me…
I don’t have to waste moments questioning how he might stab me in the back.
It’s not my first time feeling this way when it comes to this group, but I’m still not used to it.
I’m not used to having someone to rely on, so it makes me want to protect them all the more.
“I don’t like leaving your body in that room,” I say.
“I’m fine.”
“And if you’re not?”
“Asmodeus, do you not trust me? I can use this illusion and I can pay attention to my other illusions at the same time, you know this.”
I want to fight him on this, but I’m also aware that I have to stop the woman doing this so everyone will be safe.
“We’re going through a doorway here,” he cautions as he slows me down. “Step up. There’s an edge. I’m not good at describing the path.”
“I’m not worried,” I say while I step over the rise in the floor and move inward.
His arm guides me to the right when I hear another noise.
I draw him closer, well aware his illusion can’t get hurt, yet still, I want to protect him.
I pull him back as I sense a weapon moving through the air.
I can hear it. I can feel the wind of the weapon whistling by my face, but I can’t see it.
I jerk back before I hear the weapon slam into the wall.
From the sound of it, it seems blunt. Maybe a pipe.
It’s disorienting, but I listen to their steps and know that they’re coming from the right.
Shifting, I dive in, wishing I had a weapon of my own.
I slam my hand into what appears to be a man’s face, ramming the palm of my hand against his nose.
I hear bones break and sense the weapon coming from my right as I narrowly avoid it.
Lifting a hand, I’m able to feel up his arm, using his own momentum to drive his arm down and back.
It forces him to loosen his grip on the weapon until I feel something I’d never heard slam into my back.
“I’m sorry, I never saw the second person.
I think their power is to move quickly,” Ellison says, but I hesitate and listen to the attacker make that momentary step they take between leaps.
And just as I hear them blur past me, I shove the first guy toward them, pulling his pipe free from his hand and smashing him on the side of the face hard enough he goes down while I wrap an arm around the second person.
My arm tightens around their neck and the instant they stop struggling, I drop them to the ground.
“Fuck,” Ellison whispers.
“More?” I ask.
“No… I just… you sure you couldn’t see them? You move like you have perfect sight.”
“Positive. If I could, they’d have both been down within three seconds. You’re the only man I know that I can’t lay down in seconds.”
“Is that a sex joke? Because if it is, you really need to work on your sex jokes.”
I smile, thrilled with my joke as he wraps his hand around mine and leads me forward. “This feels like a date. I’ve never been on one, but this feels like a date.”
“I have been on dates, and I can assure you, this feels nothing like one,” he says, pulling me down the hallway. “I think this is the west wing.”
“So, I just smack the fuck out of anyone I see?” I ask.
“No, how about we make sure we find the right person.”
“That sounds boring,” I complain as I’m brought to a halt.
“There’s a woman in there who’s very focused on something. I think this is the room. What are you planning on doing with her?”
“Not sure,” I say before darting through the doorway.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asks. I hear her scramble off her bed, and I throw the plastic fork with enough force that it embeds in her forehead.
She screams and reaches for her head, which gives me enough time to thwack her in the back with the pipe.
Then I scoop her up and pull her into a choke hold as the darkness in my mind threatens to consume me.
I can hear my victims blaming me for their deaths.
Too bad for her I was born in darkness and know just how to deal with it… which I do by twisting the fork in her forehead while choking her out.
As she claws at my arm and tries to fight back, the darkness in my mind begins to melt away until she’s unconscious and I drop her to the ground.
“That was fun,” I say.
Ellison raises an eyebrow. “Please don’t tell anyone else that.”
“You don’t want others jealous?” I ask, kicking the limp woman.
“What should I do with her?” I lift her up and aim her head for the trash—and would have succeeded if the fork in her forehead hadn’t gotten stuck on the edge.
I’m trying to fix the problem when the security guards come rushing in, having figured out who’d just fucked with their minds.
“I can also drown her if you’d prefer,” I offer.
Strangely, they don’t seem to prefer it, and instead, they inject her with something that’ll likely keep her under.
The guards are swarming the place when we head back to Nolan’s room, which seems to be in disarray as Landon and August kneel on the floor while holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes.
“They have been taken over by mind-probing aliens; we should put them under,” I declare, wishing I still had my fork they refused to let me pull out of her forehead and take with me.
“They’ve been like this since they learned they were trying to attack each other,” Nolan explains. “Are you two okay? You must have succeeded since her mind was suddenly filled with something about a fork being rammed into her head.”
“How peculiar,” I say.
A guard peeks into the room. “Is everyone okay in here?”
“We are. We’ll help you get the building under control,” August says as he realizes that maybe his attention should be on other things than staring longingly into the eyes of his lover.
I pick up the box of potato wedges and pull out a piece to munch on. “If there are any more skulls to bash, I am your man.”
Brandon’s girlfriend looks oddly horrified, like she didn’t just stand there and do nothing for the mere moments it took me to gain control of the facility. If I were her, I’d have been bored, not terrified.
“Brandon, why don’t you get Paisley out of here? I think that’d be for the best,” Nolan suggests.
“Ooh, right! We could go get ice cream!” Brandon says, also not too shaken up.
“Y-Yeah, leaving this place sounds really good,” she murmurs.
I head out into the hallway, looking for anyone else worthy of my attention, when Ellison’s illusion nearly trips me.
“You like seeing me in peril, don’t you? But only caused by your hand,” I say, proud of myself for not falling on my face.
“I was simply existing and you ran into me,” he responds dryly.
“I’d like to do more than run into you, if you get my drift.”
“I do not,” he says before he walks off.
“Ellison, please, don’t leave me,” I whine as I trot after him only to find that when I turn around the corner, he’s gone.
“Asmodeus, you’re needed this way,” Ellison says from behind me.
“You can’t decide which way to pull the strings of my heart.”
“Or maybe you’re easily distracted?”
I shrug, feeling like that is such a boring way of looking at it.
“I can’t look away from any of you for even five seconds!
” Valerie screeches when she enters the facility.
Working together, we’ve dealt with the villains in the facility, which she could compliment us on, but of course she can’t do that.
It helps that almost all of them are on medication that dampens the strength of their powers to a more manageable level in case something like this were to ever happen.
“I think she’s infected,” I say as I pick up another fork. “It’ll be my honor to put her down.”
Ellison takes the fork from me.
“You have chosen to saddle yourself with this task. Sexy,” I declare.
Ellison’s expression informs me that he’s not thrilled by her possible execution. “We’re not… ‘putting her down.’”
I tsk as she takes the fork from Ellison and throws it at my face. The plastic thing lightly smacks my cheek before dropping. I can grab it and swing it up so the prongs settle against her throat, my newest invoice dangling from them.
“My invoice for saving your precious little heroes again today,” I say while I dust myself off with my free hand.
Valerie yanks the invoice off the prongs, eyes it, then shreds it.
At least she read it this time, unlike most of the other times that she goes directly to shredding.
“I’m not paying you fifty thousand dollars for stopping that woman,” she snarls.
“How much would it have cost to compensate the families of every single employee who works here after they slaughtered each other? What I’m asking for seems like mere pennies compared to that,” I say.