A Storm in the Making

Chapter 9--Voices In My Head

As if I’d suddenly become pyschic, I could feel things about him no one should know about another person. I smiled inwardly at his being afraid of heights, shivered with him at the memory of the taste of Gatzu—whatever that was, but his thoughts made it sound horrible. Shared his embarrassment at wetting the bed until almost six. Felt his confidence in being excellent swordsman. Yet understood and respected his repulsion of killing someone.

On the flip side of that coin, he cringed with me at my fear of tiny crawly things, and understood why, after sharing my memory of falling into a tank of live shrimp my first trip out on the shrimp boat when I was thirteen.

He felt empathy for my embarrassment about my breast size. He accepted I snored if I slept on my back. Comprehended my emotional scars at being teased all my life because of my red hair. as he himself had been badgered most of his life for being half Lithian. He didn’t feel so bad for being a virgin still, after learning I was one, too.

Intimate things we’d both rather die than have someone else know. Nevertheless, they were all laid bare in the flow of exchanged knowledge between us that neither of us knew how to stop.

Synapses firing and tumbling together. Uncontrolled. Like the conflux of two powerful rivers, a cascading waterfall of information swept us over the edge of a mental prepepice on a current of emotion impossible to resist.

I found his interest in me incredible. That I could be interested in him—he found implausible. As if he had discovered a miracle, Julius became elated and excited.

He demanded--no compelled--a response from me; testing the limits of this wonderous event. I had no idea what kind of response he expected. However,I would have given it willingly, had I known what he wanted. Anything to please him.

For every place our minds touched, set up a thrumming that vibrated through my body like someone plucking a single, achingly-beautiful, note on a harp and then letting the sound resonate through the room. The whole world fell away around me. Nothing else mattered but us.

No secrets lay between us as we shared an ecstasy far beyond a mere joining of two bodies. Instead, we soared to the stars and beyond with our souls happily locked together. I couldn’t speak for Julius, but if I had died in that moment, I would have died happy.

Then our happiness shattered. Like the crash of clashing, discordant cymbals, I felt Julius’s conflicting emotions. Shame warred with desire. He wanted me. Yet, I sensed his bone-deep revulsion with himself, and an overwhelming guilt at doing the forbidden.

Forbidden? I heard the echo of that word from somewhere outside myself. Then, without warning, Dr. Spinner shouted the word from inside my mind.

What the hell? Where did he come from? How did he get inside my head, I wondered?

By the gods of Azul! I heard Dr. Spinner’s appalled thoughts as clearly as I had Julius’s. Felt his dreadful astonishment at finding Julius and I linked together. If he’d caught us naked having sex, I could not have been more mortified. Then my mortification turned to anger as my temper flared!

What the hell was his problem? Was I not good enough for his son? Why did Dr. Spinner think we were doing the impossible? Why did he beg Julius to stop? What the hell was a Bond?. I wanted to ask Julius, but he couldn’t hear me.

Our connection, so intimate and beautiful, had been broken. Shattered beyond repair, though I could feel Julius’s struggle. His desire to restore it on the one hand, against his knowledge that what he wanted was forbidden.

In that moment, I hated Dr. Spinner. I heard him in my head screaming at Julius. “For God’s sake, stop, Julius!” His voice pierced my brain with its urgency. “Break the bond! You have no right! The girl is an innocent. Son, I beg of you! Stop!”

Julius became a drowning man fighting a riptide of emotion—not only his, but mine as well. I wanted him to complete The Bond, as they thought of it. We had been so close. I could feel it strong between us, still. Too strong for one man to fight alone.

Julius realized it, too. I heard him cry out, Help me, Leon! Then as quickly as they entered my head, they were gone, and I was alone inside my head once more.

My brain felt ravaged. Sore. Throbbing. Bereft. Too big for my skull. As if they had stretched it too far, and it would never convert back to its original size again.

I opened my eyes, still dazed. The room slowly swam into focus. Dr. Spinner stood next to Julius now; the two of them locked in a silent battle of wills. Princess Ranaloxa still stood on the other side of me. The students still stood by the wall.

How much time had passed? What had just happened? Did I dream it? The questions tumbled around in my too big mind, searching for answers that made sense. I heard Dr. Spinner’s lecturing voice, but it took me a moment to focus in on what he said.

“Now why don’t you give it a try, Princess,” Dr. Spinner coaxed calmly, turning to Princess Ranaloxa, as if he and his son had not just been inside my head like the alien invaders they were. My eyes flashed to Dr. Spinner with loathing in them.

His eyes met mine apologetically, his arm laid loosely across Julius’s back to all appearances. However, I couldn’t help but notice the tight grip his fingers made as they curved around his son’s shoulder like talons.

Could I have imagined what had just happened to me? I had almost convinced myself of that, until I glanced up and saw the expression on Julius’s face. He looked like a man who had just witnessed a horrific accident. Shell-shocked.

He glanced at me for a second, some wavering emotion in his eyes that I could not understand and then wrenched his eyes away from me as if I were some loathsome disease he might catch.

Julius lifted his hands away from my side like a man snatching his burning hands out of a fire the moment Princess Ranaloxa slipped her hands in place under his. The absence of his touch was like the absence of the sun, only a thousand times worse.

 I halted my thoughts right there, remembering they were no longer private or sacred. I hardly noticed the smaller, gentler hands that replaced Julius’s much larger, stronger ones.

I scarcely felt their warmth, nor the soothing alien sensation I had no name for, as Princess Ranaloxa Exertonez knit my bones back together using only her mind.

I watched instead, the dark-haired, green-eyed healer who strode stiffly from the room beside his father. They fled the room to be more precise, leaving the frozen wasteland of my emotions in their wake. Dr. Spinner, I noticed, never let his hand slip from his son’s shoulder. More painfully yet, Julius never looked back. I know. I watched him disappear around a corner without a single glance back at the human whose mind he’d just invaded.

Zero for the earth girl, I thought, my heart breaking, as I watched them go. Tears I refused to shed pricked my eyes. Sheesh, how had this place turned me into such a crybaby so fast?

I blinked back my tears and decided Julius and Dr. Spinner could both go straight to hell. I turned back to Princess Ranaloxa and waited for her magic healing to work. I couldn’t wait to get off this stupid planet.