Chapter Thirty-Four
Shear
I hadn’t told Yun what we were doing, at least not all of it. Telling her would have caused her more anxiety, because I would have had to explain my suspicions.
Instead, I’d only said that with The Pitt opening soon, she needed a good night’s sleep, so I would remain with her to help prevent nightmares. She’d jumped at the chance, which went to show how unnerved she was.
Her brain waves were all over the place, but that was easy to blame on the attack and all the other stress facing us all.
She wore a pair of her pajamas and was curled up in bed.
It was strange to think this was the same woman who had flinched away from me every chance she’d gotten before, who wouldn’t even so much as let me brush against her.
Now she had no reaction when I curled up behind her, when I wrapped my arm around her.
If anything, she scooted back to gain as much contact as possible.
“Close your eyes,” I told her. “You’ll feel me in your head, but I’m not reading your thoughts.”
“Good,” she muttered, sleep already heavy in her voice. “My thoughts are private.”
“Oh are they? Well, now I find myself curious.”
“Liar. You aren’t curious about anything, and certainly not anyone.”
“And yet here I am, always fascinated by what you are thinking and doing and plotting.”
“Plotting? That sounds rude.”
“Would you prefer scheming?”
She huffed, pulling my arm tighter around her, but she didn’t argue anymore. Instead, she slipped into sleep so easily, it made me wonder if perhaps just my being next to her helped.
Or perhaps she was simply so exhausted from the day that she would have fallen asleep just as quickly even in the middle of a busy airport.
When her breathing evened out, I closed my eyes and focused, first on my own mind, on the small section of it far less empty than it should have been.
“He needs some furniture,” Kenyon said.
“His brain is like the inside of a college kid’s first apartment. He might as well put a TV on some empty moving boxes over there.” Carter gestured to a dark corner of the space they occupied.
Ingram had his hands on his hips, turning around in a circle as if to survey, despite the fact he couldn’t have possibly seen much of anything. “Well, I say we bring some artwork to put up. Let’s get posters of naked anime girls.”
“You should be thankful I even allow you here.” I took form behind them, enjoying the way they all jumped. Even if they could outclass me in many ways, here, in my own mind, they were little more than playthings. This was my world, my element, and they could do nothing against me.
“Don’t sneak up on people like that.” Ingram had his hand over his heart. “It’s rude!”
The fact he’d just said that, a stealth expert who constantly did just that… I could only shake my head in response.
“She sleeping?” Kenyon asked, uneasy.
“Yes. She fell asleep easily and has no idea what is going on.”
“So how does this work?” Carter asked. “We just click our heels or something?”
Again, I wondered how three powerful espers like these could be so childish at times.
At times meaning virtually all the time.
“I will bring you with me into her mind. Because she is asleep, I will help to keep her under, and she won’t recognize any of us. If she does notice us, she will assume it is a part of a dream.”
“Oh really?” Ingram hiked up one of his eyebrows like that was the best news he’d ever heard. I didn’t even need to read his mind to know that his thoughts had delved right into filthy ones, that he pictured all the ways he could play with her like that.
“That isn’t what we’re doing today,” I reminded him.
“Today? That means another day?”
“Maybe.”
They all turned toward me as though that were the last thing they expected. I shrugged, not seeing a reason to explain myself over it.
“When will we know if this is working?” Carter asked, getting us back on track.
“I’ll notice when the nightmare starts, and I should be able to tell if it’s a real connection or just a memory. Like I said, it could just be a manifestation of trauma, adding in with whatever parts of himself he left inside her. We won’t know until we’re there. Ready?”
Kenyon nodded, Carter gave me a thumbs up, and Ingram just flipped me off. I took them all as agreement, and used my powers to transfer us from that section of my own mind into Yun’s.
One look around said it appeared just like it always did.
The darkness, the heaviness, the streaks in the sky that appeared not just in any dungeon, but The Pitt.
Now that I understood more, I recognized more within her mind.
Even at the outskirts were the dim, slightly shining eyes of monsters, as though they waited there to tear her to bits.
“Fun place,” Carter said, but beneath the false cheer of his voice I heard the strain. He understood better than most just how dangerous a place like this was, and the truth that she’d been here in real life before.
“Why is her mind like this?” Kenyon asked.
“People’s minds are built by their own experiences. Most people have no idea what their own mind truly looks like inside, not unless a mentalist tells them or shows it to them.”
“What’s mine like?” Ingram asked. “I mean, you’ve played around in my head before, so you should know.”
I sighed, hating my powers being reduced to a cheap party trick. “Your mind is like a dark, empty club. And before either of you asks, Kenyon, yours is a farm, and Carter? Yours is a circus. It’s weird and uncomfortable and that is yet another reason I choose to stay out of your mind.”
Carter shrugged as though entirely unbothered by the quip. “What can I say? I’m a child at heart.”
I didn’t believe that for a moment. In fact, a part of me had always wondered if Carter had someone managed to create that facade to hide his true inner world.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible for most espers, but I’d learned never to question Carter too much.
He managed things that no normal esper could have ever done.
Besides, it didn’t really matter. For all of Carter’s faults, I trusted that he meant me no harm. Let him hide his mind away if he wanted to—I didn’t need to see the truth of it anyway. Some things were far too terrifying for me to witness firsthand.
Before anyone had the chance to ask any other stupid questions—and I could guess they would be stupid without even hearing them—Yun appeared.
She wore a long black dress, one that made her look delicate and sweet. Her hair had those soft curls in it, and the black reflected the purple in the sky. She didn’t seem overly bothered by our presence, just mildly confused. “What are you doing here?”
“You dream about us often, don’t you?” Carter asked, his voice soft and coaxing.
“Yeah, but not like this.”
“Then like what?” Ingram asked.
Her cheeks flushed, and she glanced away.
Which made me wish we had the time to question her about that.
I’d love to have known just what went on in her head when she dreamed about us.
Sure, I directed a few thoughts in that way, but as I had told them before, I had no way to actually see the results.
I’d wanted to remain distanced, since that would allow her the most refreshing and natural sleep.
Often a light touch did more for a person than a sledgehammer.
She opened her mouth as though to speak when a tearing sound echoed in her mind, one that reminded me of what a large dungeon opened, the ripping apart of two realms.
She twisted, terror on her features. It was the type that suggested a person knew exactly what was happening. Fear of the unknown was bad but fear of the known was always worse.
A shadow appeared as though grown from her nightmare.
“So, is it real?” Carter asked from behind me.
The figure stepped forward, but his face remained bathed in shadows, obscured.
“I don’t know,” I answered, searching the energy.
Where did it come from? I closed my eyes, trying to follow it.
First, I crossed off the initial option—just a nightmare. If it were nothing more than Yun’s own mind crafting it, there would be no other energy. I had already suspected this wasn’t the case, given my difficulty in accessing her mind during these nightmares, but I now knew for sure.
Another energy coursed in her mind, stronger than before, as if it had formed into an actual creature.
So, not just a nightmare.
That left me with two options—one bad, the other worse.
I didn’t bother to watch the figure, leaving that to the others. It was more important for us to find the answer than anything else. Only once I understood it could I fix it.
“It’s not just a nightmare,” I said.
“So it’s real?” Carter verified.
“I don’t know. It could be just left over energy, like the corrupted left a tiny piece of themselves in her mind.
It could be activated by the nearness to The Pitt opening, but it might not be an actual connection.
” I followed the flow of energy, searching for where it had taken hold.
If I could remove that, rip it out, then she wouldn’t suffer from this anymore.
“He’s real,” Yun said, her voice gentle and terrified.
I forced my eyes open to find her staring at him. He was still little more than a shadow to me, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see all the details. Minds were interesting things, never easy to nail down or follow clear rules. They changed, shifted, never remaining the same for long.
“You don’t know that,” I told her, hating the defeat in her voice.
I’d never heard that from her before. Anger? Fear? Desperation? Sure, but never defeat. It took me back to the idea that she’d been willing to die before to escape, and how easy it would be for her to end up in that same darkness again.
“She’s right,” the figure said. His voice was dark, twisted, echoing so much I couldn’t say whether it was familiar or not. He took slow steps forward, but I knew better than to listen. Even figments of the imagination could spout lies, could twist the truth.
No matter what I did, though, I couldn’t find the pocket inside her brain that held this sliver. Instead, her brain felt as though corruption soaked through the walls, like it filled every crevice, every space, every molecule within her, and pulsed each time that figure spoke.
Which meant…
I focused entirely on him. “He’s real,” I whispered.
“Of course I am. She’s told you that, hasn’t she? She’s suspected it for a long time now, that I never really let her go.” He reached out, cupping her chin.
I couldn’t move, as though he controlled all the space here. A mentalist who could not only resist me, but keep me from moving?
Then again, corrupted had proven how powerful they could be…
“Don’t touch her,” Carter snapped, though he didn’t move either.
“You have no say here. You’re nothing but annoyances who got too comfortable touching what isn’t yours.”
I struggled against his hold, but it felt impossible to break. It wasn’t just that he held our minds, but he seemed to control the very space inside Yun’s mind, turning it to concrete around us so we couldn’t shift a single muscle.
“She doesn’t belong to you,” Carter said.
“She sure as fuck won’t once we slit your throat,” Ingram tacked on. “Dead people don’t own shit.”
The figure let out a soft chuckle, which confused me all the more. I’d dealt with corrupted, and they were insane. Their minds warped due to the excess corruption, and it made them unable to think things through, and quick to violence. The restraint this figure showed made no sense.
Was it because he was technically in a dungeon?
I recalled how Yun had said the monsters calmed when the portal closed, as though the portal somehow turned them to madness. Could a closed dungeon offer a reprieve?
Did it matter? Whether he was sane or not didn’t change what he’d done, or that we could not allow him to continue to live.
“You have that backward,” he said, his voice vicious yet still controlled. “The last thing I need is to risk any complications when I am ready to retrieve my guide. I certainly don’t need the four of you getting in my way.” With that, pain lanced through my temples.
Worse? It wasn’t mental pain, not fully. Even in this state, I felt the blood leak down my face as my physical body lay with Yun. The bastard wasn’t just causing us psychological pain—he was hurting our bodies.
I suddenly understood the truth. He could kill us if he wanted.
And he certainly wanted to.