Page 86 of Power of the Mind

I stalled when I found him, face slack, glasses crooked, and air passing through his parted lips.

For the first time all day, I allowed myself to openly admire him, the man who’d taken me to bed the previous night. The man who’d dismantled my armor. The man who’d made it okay for me tonotbe okay.

The only other person who’d given me that kind of freedom was my therapist.

Tallus would be my undoing, and the more I considered his words and gentle touches, the more panicked I became. I would fuck this up. I would hurt him. I could never be what he wanted me to be. It was impossible.

My father would always be in the background of my mind, laughing and calling me a failure, a useless waste of space. Eventually, I would believe his taunts and run.

I scanned the apartment, unsure what to do.

I didn’t want to wake him or kick him out, but I couldn’t bring myself to share a bed. It was a level of intimacy beyond my reach. Quietly, I collected the papers and notepads he’d gathered in his lap and set them aside. He could have the whole couch if he wanted. It was a loveseat, and Tallus was tall, but it was better than nothing.

I retrieved the blanket off my bed—I didn’t have an extra and the aircon was making the room cold—and laid it on top of him.

He didn’t stir.

Next, I removed his glasses and placed them on the table nearby.

Okay. Good. Perfect. This could work. Tallus could sleep on the couch. That was fine. Safe. If he woke in the night and wanted to go home, he could.

I lingered, unable to take my eyes off him, wanting desperately to touch him, feel his mouth on me again. Tallus made it seem so natural.

Defeated, I used the bathroom, collected our research and my iPad, and crawled into bed. I had ways of getting answers. I hadaccess to places I shouldn’t. If I could figure out how the last five people died, maybe it would help.

But a severe lack of sleep caught up with me before long, and I was out cold in no time.

***

I awoke midmorning the following day peppered in sweat and with the vague impression of a nightmare lingering on the outskirts of my brain. My muscles ached like I’d spent three hours at the gym, pushing to failure on every set, but no matter how hard I strained, the details of the dream wouldn’t come back. It was bad, whatever it was. The suffocating pressure against my sternum and an ominous disquiet kept me on alert as I crawled out of bed.

I’d lived my whole life a coiled spring. The sensation wasn’t new, but it was uncomfortable.

Tallus was gone, of course. The blanket I’d given him was folded on the couch. I found a sticky note pinned to the fridge when I retrieved a bottle of water.Keep me updated andcall with any information, or I will hunt you down.My case, Guns! You’re my bitch, remember?He’d signed itHolmes.

I huffed and left the note where it hung as I packed a gym bag and headed out for an hour to decompress and shower away the lingering stress that had woken me.

Tallus wasn’t technically a paying client. As interesting as his psychic case had become, I had real work to do if I was going to pay the bills and keep my head above water. So after my session at the gym, I spent a few hours returning phone calls, responding to emails, doing research for an independent company that was struggling with an employee who they were convinced was skimming the books, and compiling data for thelawyer I’d spoken to several days ago. I picked up a surveillance job and another dime-a-dozen case of suspected infidelity.

It was close to five when I sat down with the information we’d collected. I hadn’t texted or called Tallus. Based on the stream of raging messages he’d sent over the course of the day, he wasn’t pleased with my silence.

I didn’t have anything yet. What did he want from me? I wasn’t exactly a chit-chat-about-my-day kind of guy. He knew that. Was I supposed to send him pictures of my breakfast? Ask him how life was going? Fuck if I knew, so I didn’t respond. He’d be off work and breaking down my door within the hour, so what was the point?

Keeping busy had reduced my stress by several degrees, and if I could keep it under control, maybe I would be able to lay off the goddamn cigarettes. Again. As it stood, I’d fallen back down that miserable hole and was having trouble getting out.

I started by printing physical copies of the information we’d found. Spreading the pages on my desk, I arranged them into two groups: Living and dead. The first group I dismissed. The second group I organized into three subcategories: Suicides, overdoses, and unknown.

Technically, drug overdoses could fall into the realm of suicide. Had their deaths been intentional? Accidental? It wasn’t always cut-and-dry. I kept that in mind.

Amber, Allan, and two new people landed in the suicide pile. The newbies were a thirty-two-year-old guy named Collin and a forty-five-year-old woman named Virginia.

In the overdose pile, I had a twenty-two-year-old kid named Ezra and a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Kennedy.

The remaining five, the unknowns, were people of various ages as well. The youngest was twenty-three, and the oldest was sixty-one. I drew the stack of unknowns in front of me and got to work, seeing what I could find. I started with my connection atthe Center of Forensic Pathology, but Kelly refused to help even when I offered to up his payment.

“I’m sorry, man. I can’t afford to lose my job. Checking out one autopsy, sure. Eleven? Fuck no. Someone’s gonna ask questions. If I poke into one and someone notices and asks why, I can say the family showed up with questions, and I helped them find answers, but if I’m flagged accessing eleven files, I’m going down. They monitor us, you know. It’s not like the old days.”

“Two hundred.”

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