Chapter Eighteen
Shear
I found the lust that poured from Ingram as repugnant as usual. He behaved like a bitch in heat, content to spend his life sniffing the asses of others just to pass the time.
After all these years by his side, however, I’d grown used to it.
In fact, I had done far more than grown used to it, helping him at times when he was too far gone to seek out companionship.
We all had our quirks, after all, and I had to admit to my own.
If he put up with mine, I could ignore the way he eye-fucked everything that walked.
At least, I could because Carter had stepped in before he’d done anything more, before he’d crossed that line.
With my powers, I could sense the lust in Yun as well, as though written in scrawling letters across her face.
Ingram was always searching for the hidden, for the darkness inside people, but for me? There was no search.
I could read it, every emotion so plain, like a label on a bottle, telling me all I needed to know.
Without physical touch or eye contact or true effort, I couldn’t go deeper, couldn’t gain previous memories, couldn’t dig around, but those things required effort and energy. They exhausted me.
And more often than not, I’d rather avoid it anyway.
I didn’t see any real reason to concern myself with the feelings or thoughts or memories of most people.
Who cared what the cashier at the store had for breakfast or why the crossing guard hated the dark or any of the mundane nonsense that formed people’s fractured psyches?
It bored me.
Still, when I looked at Yun, I didn’t experience that nagging boredom. I didn’t want to retreat, to pull away, to get as far from this and her as possible. In fact, an odd desire urged me forward.
“Your turn,” Carter said after he got Ingram out of the seat—no small task, given the man’s reluctance.
The way all three had reacted so far had me curious about Yun’s guiding.
We’d experienced guiding plenty of times, and it had never mattered. It was much the same no matter who did it.
So why did Ingram and Kenyon act as though this were somehow special?
It felt like watching someone eat a chocolate chip cookie and marvel over how amazing it was, and me wondering how that version of someone so common could be that amazing.
How could it be unique?
It made no sense to me, but I’d learned to never take things for granted, that nothing was ever quite as it seemed.
I eyed the spot that Ingram had been, unsure about it, as though something from him would get on me.
“Don’t be like that,” Ingram said from across the room, amusement coloring the words. “Ain’t like you haven’t had my cum on you before.”
He wasn’t wrong, so I refused to give him the satisfaction of getting a rise out of me. Ingram enjoyed that far too much. Instead, I took a seat, the position placing me close enough to Yun for guiding to take place without contact.
Her gaze shifted between Ingram and myself, the back and forth like she watched a match and followed the ball from player to player. Curiosity rested in those dark eyes of hers, questions that she desperately wanted to know but didn’t dare ask.
And I had to say, I didn’t mind her curiosity. I normally loathed when people wanted to dig into my privacy, when they wanted a glimpse beyond the placid facade I’d built, but Yun?
She somehow proved immune to that reaction.
However, I wasn’t sure how to explain my relationship with Ingram, so I ignored the unasked questions and focused on her.
Her irises were dimmer than before, a darkening shadow in the soft valley beneath each eye. Even without my powers, the exhaustion that hung on her was easy to see.
“She’s done,” I said, hiding my disappointment beneath a blanket of indifference.
“We said she’d guide each of you,” Carter argued.
“Look at her. She is exhausted and needs rest. I can do without.”
“I’m fine,” she said, voice soft and unsure.
I refused to break eye contact, instead staring right into the darkness, bridging that gap with her.
I spoke—not aloud, but inside her head.
“You’ve done enough.”
“I can do it. Stop doubting me.”
“I’m not doubting you—I am saying you don’t have to push yourself. I can manage.”
And I could. The truth was that for me—for most of us—corruption was so constant a companion that it hardly bore the worth of noticing.
It was like owning a tiger that snarled and lunged at the cage and occasionally managed to swipe when you ventured too close.
Live with it long enough and most stop noticing it, stop thinking about it, stop worrying about the bit of blood it draws.
“If you don’t get guiding, you sit this dungeon out,” Carter said, a stern voice full of no humor.
The worst part was that I knew him well enough to identify his little plans. I couldn’t always see what he was after, where he was headed, but I always knew when he moved us around like game pieces.
He didn’t care about my guiding—he knew I could handle this. Instead, he cared about the connection with her, that we forge some bond, and had likely planned for me to go last on purpose.
Her guard would be down after guiding the others, making it easier for me to slip into her mind and take her unaware.
The bastard.
It wasn’t that I disagreed with his plan, but I never cared for feeling manipulated, not even by Carter.
“It’s really okay,” Yun pressed, her voice stronger. That was likely all stubbornness, but I had to respect the backbone all the same.
“Fine. Only guide as much as you feel able to, though. You do not need to do a full session.” I added weight to my words, wanting her to understand the meaning.
This was not a battlefield issue, where guiding me could be the difference between losing myself and not. She didn’t need to bring me down from that edge so I could save lives, so I could keep her and others safe.
She nodded, but the set of her lips suggested that she would do as she pleased—and I begrudgingly had to respect that.
She took a deep breath, her chest rising and falling beneath her shirt, a moment before a gentle pull against the corruption that spanned inside me.
She didn’t yank, didn’t pull hard, but offered an almost sweet acceptance that had the corruption snaking out of me, vacating me in a way I’d never felt before.
It surprised me so much that at first, I forgot the rest of my job.
No matter how pleasant this seemed, I couldn’t forget the plan or the opportunity.
It meant that I used her distraction, the unavoidable closeness that came from guiding, to slip past any natural defenses she might have had and into her mind.
And fuck, was it a mess.
I’d known it from a few of the sparks I’d spotted before, the times when her entire psyche lit up in pain and fear and anguish. That sort of thing only happened with deep-rooted trauma, with wounds that went so far into a person they never could fully heal.
I didn’t enjoy poking at wounds like that. Trauma was far more common than most believed, and because of the way people experienced it, it was impossible to qualify.
I’d once dealt with a teen boy who had the pattern of someone who had been abused and tortured.
I’d been asked as a favor from a family member to look into it, as he had struggled, and I had prepared myself for the worst. I’d readied myself to relive sexual abuse, to find rape or severe physical assault.
Instead, I’d found a spoiled rich boy whose largest problem had been that his mother had taken away his gaming console.
The truth was that minds were horribly unreliable. Add that individuals experience things through relativity, and what was traumatic to one was a Tuesday to another.
It meant that even though I felt certain Yun had suffered something to cause such a reaction in her mind, I couldn’t know how significant it truly had been from the outside.
Still, stepping in, there was no doubt of her suffering. Her mind resembled a funhouse full of cracked and splintered mirrors, something twisting and impossible to navigate.
Her thoughts were jumbled, passing her by as she focused on the guiding rather than any specific line of thought.
Almost done. Hold on, just a little longer.
Was she hyping herself up? I nearly smiled at the thought, at how she’d so confidently told me she could do this and how much less sure she was in her mind.
I turned, taking in the space, the snaking darkness inside of her. It almost seemed as though some of it were the deep purple of corruption, as though somewhere along the way, she’d taken in too much, as though her body had been unable to rid itself of the damaging substance as it should have.
But that made no sense. Guides could take corruption in as they did because their bodies converted it to normal energy, they dissipated it until it turned harmless. If they took in too much, it would only cause them to pass out, not do any long-term harm.
Which meant the corruption I spied could have only been a mirage, a mirror of trauma and fear and the doubts inside her.
That made sense, given her life as a guide. Her worries had to revolve around espers and corruption, didn’t they?
I raised my hand, easing her mind more, relaxing any hold she had on it. This would allow her thoughts to pass more easily, to slip from one to another. It was like being in a meditative trance, and due to our bond and the guiding, she wouldn’t be able to tell I’d done anything.
The memories played across the space, above me, like holographic movies, all first person from her point of view.
She recalled walking into our office just days ago. I hadn’t been there at the time, but her thoughts whispered as she relived it.
The thoughts were hardly positive, but who could blame her? She hadn’t wanted to be there anymore than we’d wanted her there—just misfits forced to work together for our mutual good.
From there, it slid backward…to a hospital? An esper lay in the bed, eyes closed, the soft whir of machines and the beeping of monitors loud in the silence.
This is my fault… Guilt assailed her, piling up so heavy that I was amazed she could stand.
Ah, so that had to be one of the espers she had shocked. I’d heard about it, but I had hardly been able to believe the truth of it. What guide could do that? It was so unheard of, I couldn’t bring myself to accept it.
At least, until I saw this, until I watched the esper there, helpless. If I were truly there myself, I might have been able to sense whether the esper had any brain activity at all, whether he would recover, but like this? I was as helpless as her.
Again, it all changed around me, this time to that same esper awake, standing, the pinnacle of life.
I didn’t recognize him, but I usually tried not to know anyone well enough for that. He stood so close to Yun that he towered over her.
Were his hands on the wall to either side of her? Caging her in?
Their conversation was muted, soft, but I could catch it.
“You’ll like it.”
“You know my rule. No touching.”
“Come on—I know you want me, too. All guides do. You’re going to try to tell me you don’t feel that?”
“Please, stop.”
Her heart hammered so loudly that I struggled to hear their conversation over it. Inside her?
Lust? Maybe, but it was muted and distant and unwanted.
Instead, fear had a full front seat, controlling her actions, sending her mind into fight or flight. I could feel her beg him to stay back, but the arrogant prick couldn’t see beyond the tip of his own hard cock.
He reached out and cupped the back of her neck, then pulled her in and all but slammed his lips to hers in a crushing, domineering kiss.
It lit the parts of her brain that had suffered whatever trauma had caused this, sparking them to life until that current of power rushed over her skin.
Normally it would only be enough to startle an esper, perhaps to drive them back, like a static electricity charge, but this?
It was so overpowered, so far past that that it flung the esper backward, crashing him into a table and leaving him unmoving on the floor.
Before I could gain anything else, the scene changed again.
It was the good and bad thing about this method of insight.
The good was that the subject knew nothing about it, that the information gained was more natural, but often things went unanswered.
I couldn’t control the direction, couldn’t stay with something for more information, so I could only glean what I could from the flashes she relived.
I got only part of the story, and was left to fit together pieces and make guesses for all I didn’t see or know.
Everything went dark around me, and for a moment, I wondered if the bond had broken.
Black streaked with dark purple filled the sky above the memory, and I knew the sight instantly.
Some things burned themselves into memory. They dug so deeply that nothing could free them, nothing could pry them loose, and the sky of a dungeon was one such thing.
The lower levels had less purple, appeared more similar to the real world, but the higher-level dungeons? They looked exactly like this.
How had she seen this?
The question confused me all the more when the memory turned, and a monster leapt at her, with huge fangs inside its wide open mouth, its massive body barreling through the air at her.
She didn’t even have time to scream before the memory shut off and I found myself thrown back to my own body, back to my own mind, the connection severed.
It happened so fast that I struggled to regain my senses, to work out where I was, the memory so real and so fresh that I wanted nothing more than to feel a blade in my hand.
Except, there was nothing here to fight.
Across from me, Yun was slumped over in the chair, having passed out. From guiding? The exhaustion from guiding three of us must have proven too much, especially when faced with that memory.
It left me sitting there, staring at her, unable to avoid considering the only possible meaning, even if it made no damn sense at all.
At some point, Yun, a guide, had been the one place she should have never been…
A dungeon.