15. Cheribelle
Cheribelle
Bad Anatomy
Ow!
I hit the floor, and I hit the floor hard, bouncing several feet into the air before I slammed back down.
It felt like an entire NFL team had tackled me.
Not for the first time, I found myself wishing I had the fancy healing powers of the shifters all around me, because I was pretty sure in an hour or so, I would resemble a moldy banana.
However, if I were a shifter, I would no doubt be as immobilized as most of them had suddenly become.
I had no idea what was going on, but I figured it had to be some sort of pack thing.
That was when I’d gone booking it outside for some sort of weapon that could give me an advantage against the über assassin that had dropped into the middle of our trap.
A trap that wasn’t quite working out how I’d pictured it.
Congratulations, Cherry. So far your plans are zero for two. Not the time, man!
Normally, my mind would spin off into feelings of failure and thoughts of how much of a loser I was, but adrenaline had a funny way of regulating my system—as it did for a ton of neurodivergent people. Those voices quieted, and I was able to concentrate in a way I normally couldn’t.
And what I was concentrating on was utilizing the tiniest shred of an advantage I had by landing on top of the assassin. An assassin who looked an awful lot like Paul’s dead brother. Had to be a trick, because that guy was dead-dead.
“Hey! Look up here!” I screamed like a banshee. Getting him to look at me wouldn’t really accomplish anything but startling him could only help me. He was stronger than me, faster than me, had blades and a shit ton of magic at his beck and call, so I had to be smart if I wanted to live.
Because there was no way I could beat him on my own. But what I could do was delay and disorient him. And if there was one thing in the world I was really, really, good at, it was being fucking distracting.
“What formula will get you the area of a circle using its radius?” I shrieked again before clapping both of his ears as hard as I physically could.
A mean move, that was for sure, but when I’d gone to MMA camp, they’d taught us some moves to use outside of official fights.
For when our lives depended on it and there was no such thing as fighting dirty.
Thank God for those counselors and their insight!
The thing was, I’d fought plenty of people before, and while they ran the entire gamut of emotion, they always had at least some sort of reaction.
But not our assassin friend. There was no anger in response to the pain I knew I had just caused him, no shock.
No dogged determination, no bewilderment, no sadness either. Just nothing .
It was the most alien and unnatural thing I’d experienced since I’d first started realizing my ability, and that was saying something considering I had witnessed a pig fly before I’d even turned twenty.
Freshman year of college really was wild.
How did we manage to coax a sow onto a trampoline?
If it weren’t for the slight recoil of the man below me, and the squint to his eyes, I would have thought I hadn’t just battered his ears with a whole bunch of concussive force all at once.
He lifted his arm, and I barely had the wherewithal to lean backward as a smaller blade popped out of the cuffs he had on his wrist and nearly sliced my nose off.
“Okay, Ezio Auditore!” I spat, reaching further into my bag of tricks. “ Assassin’s Creed this!”
I whipped forward, tucking myself right against him so we could have made out if we were so inclined (which we most certainly weren’t), then jammed my pointer finger and middle finger of my right hand into his eyes as hard as I could.
He jolted at that—finally, some sort of reaction—and it was such a forceful move that I was almost thrown. If my feet weren’t tucked around his massive thighs, I was sure I would have gone flying.
But once again, even though his body reacted, there wasn’t a single drop of emotion.
It was like he was a robot, able to feel physical sensation but having no input in response to it.
I felt blind in a way that made my skin crawl, and that reaction only increased in intensity when he grabbed the back of my shirt and began to rip me backward.
As I clung to him, I could feel the muscles of his abdomen bunching even through the layers of fabric between us, and I realized he was indeed getting the leverage to fully stand up.
If he did manage to fully rise, I would be donezo.
He was either gonna throw me down, run me through, squish me against the wall, or any number of grizzly ends that I really was not down to clown with.
Time to pull out the big guns.
Am I sure? I’ve never actually done this before!
I can do it! I can do it! I can do it!
What if nothing happens?
What if this guy doesn’t have any emotion to connect with?
I can’t do it.
I can do it! I don’t even know if it’s a real thing! Of course it’s a real thing!
Mom trained me for this !
Mom theorized that this was possible! She had no way of knowing it would work.
My mind would have kept going, but now the assassin was fully sitting up and I was in his lap, staring into those completely vacant eyes of his.
“Stop!” I ordered, putting every ounce of command I possessed into my voice, which really wasn’t all that much considering that the only beings I consistently ordered around were myself and a cat, and neither of us usually listened.
So, I clapped both of my hands to his face again, but this time, instead of going for his ears, my palms connected with either of his cheeks, and I bent down so that our foreheads touched . “I said, stop !”
It had indeed been my mother’s theory that if I grew strong enough, I would be able to directly manipulate people’s emotions.
I’d never been interested in the practice, because it seemed awfully invasive, but I put all my concentration into forcing my gift from my brain, down my arms, and through the point of contact I had with the monster who had killed two of Paul’s family members.
I had no idea what was going to happen, truly, but instead of him shuddering to a stop, or me feeling some sort of capitulation on his part, it was almost like my mind was fully sucked into his.
I gasped, or maybe it was more of a squeak, and then I was fully submerged in an overwhelming tempest of... of...
It took me a moment to get my bearings as the worst kind of over-stimulation I’d ever experienced set in, but once I did, I realized that the mass of roiling colors, explosions, and sheer chaos around me was emotions . The assassin’s emotions.
I couldn’t discern any of them as they moved through time and space around me. It was like I was in an IMAX theater, but instead of seeing a full summer blockbuster, it was just an endless TikTok reel; the moment I locked onto anything, it instantly flashed to something else entirely.
Flashes of crimson agony consumed the world around me, then boom, it was washed away in a flood of pitch-black mourning so deep that it felt utterly endless. Lightning bolts of fury. Gaseous clouds of unending sorrow. The bleak rain of hopelessness.
It was all-encompassing, and it was threatening to overtake my mind. It was the air around me, the floor under me, hell, it was even inside me. Somehow, in my effort to exude control over what the assassin was feeling, I was swallowed up instead.
Find your control.
You’re the empath, not him.
Emotions are your gift, use them!
How? I can’t do anything!
Oh God, I’m going to drown!
Calm down.
Be like Paul.
Would Paul give in to the panic?
Embrace the brick wall . Don’t let these emotions overwhelm yours.
You are in command here.
That was right! I was the one in command.
I was the empath. I let that idea burn bright in the forefront of my mind before tearing at the endless ticker tape of horrors.
It rippled just like film would, and I stumbled forward only to fall head-first through the awful storm into something. .. into something I had no words for.
All I knew, as I was enveloped in this new reality, was that everything washing over me was both real, and very, very old. Formative emotions. The kind that shaped entire personalities.
That was where I saw the pleasant pink of light kisses, the soft, grassy greens of dreamy picnics in the park.
They rolled by like waves, occasionally cut into by the dark umber of loss and defeat.
I pushed those out of my way, delving deeper, and I saw a romance that spanned years, hundreds of little moments of stolen paradise and quiet affection.
But what did it all mean?
I had no idea, but just when I felt like I was reaching the center of the furor, I was thrown back, both metaphorically and literally. My back slammed into the hard floor as the world spun around me.
It took a wheeze punching out of my mouth to realize I was back in the real world, and not some abstract landscape my powers had teleported my mind to. Too bad I didn’t realize that before the assassin was on me, reversing our earlier positions.
“H—” I started to say, but that was as far as I got before his hand wrapped around my throat. While I was normally down for a little light choking during sexytime, this was not a situation where it was welcome.
I punched at him, scratched his face, but he had no reaction.
Despite me having been nearly completely overwhelmed and mindfucked by everything the assassin was feeling and had felt, now there was absolutely nothing coming from him.
No expression, no look in his eyes, and not a single color filling the air around him.
Fucking uncanny.
It really was like he was a robot, or that someone was forcing him to be a robot. Was that a thing? Because I felt like it was definitely a thing!