Copyright 2014 Wanda Lotus.
Part 8
I knew better than to push the issue of Prince with Kacela. So I did what I do best: I worried and wondered what she was up to.
Less than 24 hours later, I found out. I was sitting on my porch the next evening at dusk when I felt electricity in the air. Soon an electrical storm began to crackle, lighting up the sky near Lake Onondaga.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Cursing a blue streak, I jumped into my car and sped towards the lake. I picked up Kacela’s energy signature and followed it down Cold Springs Trail. At the end of the trail was a clearing. I skidded my car to a stop at the edge of the clearing and jumped out. “Kacela, no!”
She had Prince trapped in an orb, suspended a few feet in the air. Her eyes glowed from rage more powerful than any I had sensed from her before then. He was going to die, she knew it, and she was determined to enjoy watching it.
“Mind your business, Mya! This is between me and him.”
“Put him down!”
“The hell I will. He’s going to cause trouble. I’m making sure he doesn’t get a chance to.” The connection between her and the orb sparked as his energy was funneled out of him into her. He was half dead already.
“Kacela!”
She turned to me, and even if I hadn’t read it in her energy, I could tell from the expression on her face that she was beyond reason. Her voice was cold, every word clear and crisp. “I am going to tell you only one more time, mind your business. If you interfere, I am not responsible for what will happen to you.”
I severed the connection between her and the orb as soon as the words were out of her mouth. “I don’t take kindly to threats, Kacela.” She howled in rage and began to fling orbs at me, which I easily deflected without looking at them. Prince lay where he fell, moaning weakly. I ran to his side and crouched down, shielding both of us against the shots Kacela was taking at us. “What the hell happened? You know what she’s like. You were a fool to start anything with her!”
“I didn’t,” he gasped. “She found me and said she was sorry about what happened to my brother and wanted to make up. I believed her and agreed to meet her here tonight. She attacked me during what I thought was a polite conversation before I could get my shields up.”
“Shit. I forgot most EMs can’t read energy as deeply as I can.” I generated a wave of energy to push Kacela back a few feet, since she had moved closer. She was hurling epithets as well as orbs by then. “My car’s unlocked. Do you think you can make it there, if I cover you?”
Some of the color was returning to his face. “I think so.”
“I’ll help you. Crawl into the back seat and lie down. I’ll handle her.” I half walked, half dragged him to my car and made sure he was safely stretched out across the seat cushions. Then I marched across the clearing towards Kacela, who was still flinging orbs at me. “Enough, Kacela! Since when do you lure an innocent person to their death? What the hell is the matter with you?”
“I’m not explaining anything to you!” She flung another orb, which dissipated as soon as it touched my energy shield.
“Calm your fucking nerves and get a grip. You started a fight with someone on false pretenses! I can’t let you get away with shit like that!”
She froze, hands on her hips. “First, don’t swear at me. Second, If I’ve told you once,” I felt her energy gathering for another strike, “I’ve told you a thousand times: Don’t. Lecture. Me!”
“Don’t do it, Kacela. You’ll regret it.”
“Whipping the EM who’s protecting my enemy? I won’t regret that at all.” She flung her orb. I whipped up an energy shield close enough to make it look as though I had caught the orb full in the face, then made a good show of falling backwards, slamming my back into a tree and landing in a seated position on the mossy ground beneath it. I stayed there, breathing hard and shaking the dust from my face. Since she had started to care for me I thought maybe seeing me down would shake her enough that I could reason with her.
Kacela walked slowly towards me, her eyes burning through the darkness. “That guy ran me out of one place where I was finally starting to be happy and would probably run me out of this place, too, if I don’t stop him.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’m not waiting around to find out. And since he told me his friends saw you in NYC last week, I bet you’re the one who told them where I was. You’re probably in cahoots with him.” She flung another orb. Her resolve was wavering, so instead of hitting me, that one hit the tree right over my head, showering me with wood shavings. When the dust cleared, she was standing in front of me with tears in her eyes.
“Kacela, you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions, and none of them are right. Calm down!”
She shook her head. “I’ve heard that, before. I thought you were my friend, Mya. I was a fool to trust you.” Wrinkling her nose at me in disgust she spat out, “Look at you. You won’t even fight back.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
She snorted. “You’re soft.” She crouched until we were nose to nose. “You act like you’re so big and bad, but even with all of your power, I bet you couldn’t hurt a fly. That will be the death of you.” Her face told me she was done wavering. I didn’t need to read her energy to discern her intentions. “I won’t kill you right away. I’d rather have a little fun watching you squirm, first.” She whispered her next words. “Maybe that’ll help me feel better about how much you’ve hurt me.”
She held out her index finger and watched as a tiny orb formed on its tip. “This is going to sting a little.” She made a show of blowing gently on the orb and watching it drift towards my left nostril.
Her victim mentality and oversized ego blinded her to the fact that my heavy breathing was an act. If she had been paying attention, she would have noticed my eyes were perfectly focused on her. But I am not dramatic, so my complete stillness fooled her. When her orb rapidly swerved and dove into the ground between her feet, she was caught off guard and fell backwards. Before she could recover and sever the tie between herself and the orb I had grounded, I swept half of the energy out of her body and into the ground without moving a muscle. The grass around her crackled from the power surge. I made sure to direct a healthy shock through the ground into her ass, for good measure. Then I severed the tie between her and the orb.
She yelped and tried to scramble to her feet, but the sudden drain on her power left her breathless. I felt her temper flare as she attempted to conjure another orb. I crossed my legs and watched her, waiting for her to realize what had happened. It took a minute, but when she realized she couldn’t conjure another orb, she spat out, “What did you do to me?”
“One of the dangers of thinking you don’t need anyone to teach you anything is that what you don’t know can hurt or kill you.”
“Stop talking like a philosopher and tell me what the hell just happened!”
“Oh, so now you want to listen to a lecture? Interesting.” She was too scared to take her eyes off me or talk back, so she sat there rubbing her singed behind and glaring.
I casually studied my nails, picking the dirt from my stunt fall out from under them. “I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I am far more dangerous to you than you could ever be to me. There are only a handful of EMs in the world who are powerful and skilled enough to deactivate an EV.” I glanced at her, then stretched my fingers in front of me, admiring how clean I had gotten them. “You just made the supremely poor decision to attack one of them. I’m also one of the most respected elders in the community, in spite of being the youngest of them by almost ten years. Any EM or EV with a basic knowledge of our community knows my name and what I can do. That’s why Prince wisely bowed out of a confrontation when he realized which Mya was speaking to him.”
She gulped as she turned my words over in her mind. “What do you mean by ‘deactivate’?”
“I mean stripping you of your power, a process you would not survive. Quite frankly, with your bad attitude, I’m surprised you haven’t stepped on the toes of one of us and been deactivated already.”
“I didn’t feel like I was going to die.”
“I didn’t deactivate you. I grounded you to teach you a lesson.”
She snorted. “You are soft.”
“Want me to finish the job?” That shut her up, so I continued. “An EV cannot survive being stripped of their power. If the physical stress doesn’t kill you, the psychological stress from being unable to absorb anyone’s energy will. That is a far more agonizing way to go. I’ve seen former EVs linger in the agony of withdrawal for decades before their bodies finally gave out.”
I stood and brushed off my hair and clothes. “You’re still relatively young, so you’ll be back to normal in a few days, a week at most. Oh, and not that I owe you an explanation, but I was in the city last week meeting with the elders to deal with those asshole EMs you told me about. I want to make sure they won’t bully you or anyone else, again. That includes Prince. We already have plans for him.” She looked deflated as she watched me. I felt as deflated as she looked. Whatever Prince had told her and her knee-jerk reaction to it had entirely ruined the trust between us. While the lack of trust would make it easier to deactivate her, should that become necessary, it had been nice to have a friend of my own kind for once. I admired her adventurous approach to life and the way it balanced my solitary, conservative one…plus she was damn cute. I rapidly redirected my thoughts away from that landmine-laced field and walked away. “You can get home on your own.”
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