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AngelWatch Ch. 02

By: HandsInTheDark



"Keiko! Focus!"

Windy brandished the knife at me again. I sighed, stepped back and pushed anxiety at her. She flinched – she was faking it – and then came at me again. 

I spun to the left, and lashed out with a foot. She leapt over it – she knew what I was going to do the moment I did, every time – and then made of show of falling to her knees, as if my kick had knocked out her shin. 

I made the gesture that signified "This is the part where I run screaming, find an authority figure in a blue uniform, and weep at him to protect me."

She got off the floor, genuinely angry. She had storm-grey eyes, a little unsettling to look into at the best of times, but compelling and frightening when she lost it. The others had made it a practice to be elsewhere when she trained me, because she tended to lose it with me quite a bit.

"That was pathetic," she snapped at me. "This is not optional training. Your life will depend on this someday. You can not depend on mental tricks. You will be up against people who can decide that a knife in your heart is better than a blast to you brain. And if you treat him the way you treated me you will not survive!"

I sighed. This was not the first time I'd heard this speech. "Look... It's no good. This is all so fake, don't you understand? I push emotions into your brain – except I don't, I push where anxiety would be if you had a human brain. And that knife might as well be rubber – I know I'm never under any real threat with you-"

Her hand blurred, and suddenly the knifepoint was an inch into the flesh of my forearm. I screamed, watching blood well up immediately. She pulled out, stepped back, and said "your throat is next." And went for me.

You have to understand – she'd been training me for two weeks, mentally and physically. The mental training I don't even have words for. The physical training was demanding. But at no time had I felt threatened. She'd been annoyed, exasperated, angry... but underneath it all she'd been superhumanly patient.

Until now. Suddenly she was trying to kill me.

I've never had a serious cut, let alone a knife wound. It didn't hurt as badly as I expected; what I felt was weakness and nausea. And then terror, as the bloodred knifepoint arced for my throat.

Maybe the two weeks of training hadn't been for nothing after all; or maybe I just panicked and lashed out. But I stepped in towards the swinging knife, and smashed both my forearms into the arm that was swinging it, stopping it dead. And now I was inside her guard. Instantly I snapped my right hand at her throat, chopping it brutally. I forgot about pulling punches. She made a gagging, strangling noise as I nailed her windpipe, and she blasted me with self-loathing, one of her favorite attack forms. I felt a moment's horror – how dare I, a nothing, a worm, strike this woman – but then I was on top of it, and I pivoted on one foot, driving my other hand into her solar plexus. She bent over, gasping. My left hand snapped back and reengaged the wrist that held the knife, and twisted, forcing her to drop it; my right went into her hair and pulled her to her knees. I was about to knee her viciously in the face when I realized what I was doing.

There was blood everywhere – mine. I was suddenly sane again and I gave a terrified sob. I'd just beaten the shit out of Windy, oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck-

"Better," she gasped. "Just pick up the... phone there and say 'doctor', and we'll get that... stab wound cleaned-"

"You – you stabbed me!"

"Only... a little," she wheezed. "Phone. You're bleeding... all over."

I was. There was redness splattered everywhere. I grabbed the phone, feeling suddenly dizzy. "Doctor! Hello? I've been stabbed!"

"Right," said a calming voice. "Press your hand over the forearm, firmly, and hold it. Elevate the wound over your head."

"W-wait... how do you know where I was stabbed?!"

"You're not the first person to train with Windy," the voice said. "Someone will be there in two minutes."

I hung up. "What... the fuck..."

Windy was up, but her breathing was still messed up. "Not bad. You were a... little slow in blocking the blast, but that... was a nice pivot and punch. Remember to keep your... right hand in the block position if you're going to... go straight for my solar plexus; my left hand could have done... you some damage while you were punching in. Otherwise very nice. You might have survived that time."

"You – you stabbed me!"

She managed a deep breath. "Yes. Only a little. Do we have to have every conversation twice?"

"I can't train with you anymore. I can't possibly trust you-"

"That's why you're going to keep training with me. You were trusting too much, it was all pretend time for you. Now you know what a stab wound feels like, and it will never be pretend time for you again. Next time I pick up a knife, you're going to focus like anything."

She moved off, got a bucket and a mop, ad began cleaning up my blood. That was Windy. She'd made the mess; she'd clean it up.

**

You may have just gotten the impression that Windy was a psycho bitch alien with a taste for human blood. 

She wasn't. Most of the time she was honey-sweet and feather-gentle. But when she got serious, it was all serious. And when she trained me, it was non-stop serious time.

Part of the problem was I was barely over five feet tall, in heels. I'm small and weak and if someone decided to be rough with me, there just wasn't a lot of me to be rough back with. 

That clearly worried Windy, and she treated my martial arts training as a life or death matter. And, to her, the fact that it was life or death justified extreme measures. She'd stabbed me the moment she realized she couldn't lecture me into taking my training as seriously as she did. In the world of Windy, things that mattered, mattered absolutely, and she acted accordingly.

That was where she and I were most different. I believed a lot of things, sometimes passionately, but... that didn't mean I had to do anything. For me, beliefs were just beliefs. For her there was no difference between belief and action. And that made her just a little terrifying. She was always in the moment, always applying herself to the situation at hand, without hesitation. Whether it was pulling me to her shoulder so I could cry – and I cried a lot the first coupe weeks – or driving a knife into my forearm for the Greater Good, she was always in, and all in.

Once I asked her, as a joke, "Does it matter? And if it matters, does it matter that it matters?" And she stared at me like I had two antennae growing out of my head, and said "Only a human could have come up with that. Good stars you people are strange..."

**

It would be nicely mythopoeic to say that the stab wound left a scar that I carried to the end of my days, reminding me forever of the seriousness of my task. But it didn't; it was cleaned up very nicely and professionally and didn't leave a mark. That was how AngelWatch, the informal nickname for the... agency?.. I was part of, worked. We didn't leave a mark. We operated without a trace.

AngelWatch was an odd name, and odder still if you met the people in it. Very early on I asked Windy how the name had been chosen.

"It's not because we're angels," she said cheerfully. "It's because we're on watch for angels. The fallen kind."

"So DevilWatch, really."

"Doesn't flow as well."

And that was that.

**

The hardest part of my new life, was my parents. My third day in Wales, I called them and told them I wasn't in the states and no, I hadn't run off with a boy. (I did that once when I was 16, I was gone for a week, and it scarred them for life. And me, too.)

The problem, of course, was that the truth was out of the question. Explaining that an alien had gifted me with mental powers and was training me to take out psionic psychotics... I mean, right? I couldn't have told them than even if I hadn't been sworn to secrecy. (I'll explain about that broken promise, eventually.) 

So I told them the only thing I could – I'd signed up with the US army as part of a special program to do secret, classified stuff involving code breaking, in exchange for tuition money, room and board. This was an incredibly flimsy story; I'd had a total of two programming courses (and had not aced them), and I was widely known to have real issues with the US military and US interventionist policies in general. But being able to say "I can't talk about that – it's classified" saved me from having to explain a thousand things, like where I was and how I spent a lot of my day. I could even say my muscle gain was a result of army workouts. 

My story earned me a thirty minute lecture from my mom about army men, which made me wonder where she'd learned so much about them. But her lecture was the worst of it; the story held up, or at least she didn't care if it didn't as long as she heard from me and knew I was ok.

AngelWatch would make good on the tuition, room and board promise. It didn't lack for money, though Windy was, for once, vague about specifics as to where it came from.

**

"Ok, Windy. It's time we had... the talk."

"Oh... dear. Yes. Very well. The talk. About boys."

"Yes. Boys. How the hell," I said, "am I ever supposed to have a normal relationship with a boy again?"

"Er... quite," she said. She had the odd habit of lapsing into outdated English speaking styles, despite the fact that she looked Irish and we were in Wales. "I quite see your point."

"Damnit!" I said, with tears near the surface. "I just got back from the pub. Where I met boys. Lots of boys. Nice looking boys with charming smiles and sweet accents and warm eyes and bloody fucking hell I couldn't block out what they were feeling on the inside, and shit, Windy-"

"Er, yes. Boys will be boys."

"It's a thousand times worse than I thought! I knew they all thought with their cocks, but-"

"I, um, know," she said.

"What am I supposed to do? It was- it was-"

"I know what it was," she said quietly. "Half of you was repulsed and horrified at the pure, animal shallowness of it all. The other half was so totally turned on that you soaked your panties, which was infuriating and degrading. It other words, business as normal as far as boys go, but amplified off the charts..."

"I- fuck- shit- I used to be able to at least pretend boys were nice, maybe! And they're not! Not one fucking one of them!"

"Let's try to be fair. I know it's... well, awful. But you were at a pub and the guys there were looking to score. And look at your clothing. Did you notice that the other girls we a little more modest about hemlines?"

"You're going to lecture me about my outfit?"

"I don't have to. The other girls in the pub did, with their eyes. But in that pub you were the Hot American Girl, and that archetype means sex the world around. You saw guys at their worst, but it wasn't entirely their fault."

"I can't believe you're defending-"

"Keiko, stop. If you go around openly reading people, you're going to learn things about your species that I guarantee you wish weren't true. You have to learn to deal with that, and that's all there is to it. And I know the temptation to peek at their cards is overwhelming. You'll do better if you control it, though. Save the peeking for someone you've gotten to know better in other ways."

"They were emoting so loud!"

"The first thing I taught you to do was block. This is a big part of why. And anyway, you're mostly pissed because knowing how badly they wanted you, made you so fucking hot they could smell it."

"Shit, Windy!"

"Well, it's true. Normal women spend all their pub time thinking 'Does he like me? Does he think I'm pretty? Should I go hotter, or less hot?' Well, you didn't have any of that to distract you. Deep inside many women, and very much inside you, is something that responds to male desire, something that aches to yield and be pleasing. By reading guys, you leave yourself wide open to that response. You've been given a very dangerous gift, Keiks. You are going to have to learn to master it, not be mastered by it."

"I feel violated!" I exploded. "First Ink, and now this... this... change in... it's not fair!"

"I know it's not." She sighed. "But there are larger issues at stake. You need... yeah. I have an idea. I'm going to change up your training, right now. There's an exercise that we'd normally do in a month, but..."

"It's nearly midnight."

She appeared to ignore this, and popped open her cell. "Call Henry... ... Hey yourself. Is 143 still expected... Oh?... No. I'm going to bring the new girl... Yes.... No... Exactly. Leaving soon, see you at Angel Six.... Look, sleep is overrated. Bye now."

She snapped the phone and looked at me. "Pack for two days. Dark clothing, jeans, quiet shoes. We're going to London, leaving in twenty."

"Are you going to tell me why?"

"No."

**

On the drive we mostly talked about boys and relationships, which I found eerie seeing as she wasn't human. "So... you... as an alien... spend time with, um..."

"Try not to think about it."

"So the species thing doesn't matter to you?"

"Urg. It kind of does. But, well... look my mind is different, but it's adapted to this body, to this hormonal structure, and things... cross over easily. Earth Boys Are Hot. But I don't get to have long term relationships – there's too much I'd have to explain, and honestly, I want my own species more than yours. I want my antenntae nibbled while both his... um, hands... slide relentlessly deeper into my – look, let's just change the topic."

"Yes God please let's. So this is London?" I looked around. It was an ugly, grey early morning.

"Outskirts, yes. This is not a good neighborhood, and we're nearly at our destination."

Two minutes later she pulled into a garage in a nondescript building, and a door opened as we got out. A guy looked out, maybe mid-fifties, and ugly as sin.

"Windy!" "Henry!" He kissed her forehead, and she smirked. "Charming as always, Henry. You know I'm too old for you..." 

"You don't look a day over two hundred." He turned to me. "My, you're lovely, Keiko. Welcome to station six. No, I'm not going t' kiss your forehead. Any idea what Windy would do if I tried? Come in, I made tea."

It was impossible not to like him. "Are you, um... an alien, too?"

"No, I was born in this country," he said with a straight face. And then grinned. "I'm human. Only two of us isn't, and the other is across t' world."

We landed in a grungy kitchen, and he poured out tea from an impeccable silver tea set which didn't belong in this kitchen, or in this neighborhood. "So. Incident 143. Almost certainly tonight, but yesterday was a close call. She's substantially unaware, but... well, you know the details."

"I certainly don't," I said. "I have no idea why I'm here. What's a 143?"

Windy put a hand over Henry's wrist. "I'm going to tell you, Keiko... but not now. Tonight, you and I are going out with Henry. You're going to see a little part of the work we do. Drink your tea, and then we'll sleep. We might be up all night tonight."

I was learning she wasn't worth arguing with. "Yes, Mistress," I said a bit sourly.

**

It was 10 pm, and Windy, Henry and I were tucked into an abandoned car on a side street in a dismal corner of London. There wasn't a palace guard to be seen; this wasn't the London I'd ever pictured.

"There," said Henry. "Right on time."

A door had opened. A woman stepped out. The light wasn't great, but the essentials were obvious. Dyed blond hair, nice high heels, mid thigh blue sweaterdress. I flinched inside. Wrong neighborhood for that look. Wrong by a mile. Something in my belly crawled a little.

Windy and Henry pulled out magnets – I'll explain about that sometime. Windy sighed, and Henry frowned. "She's gotten a lot worse," Windy said.

"Explain," I said, suddenly.

"You already understand, don't you lass?" Henry said, quietly. "This is the preliminaries to a rape."

I said something short and ugly, and tried to read the blonde, but she was too far off for me. "You think she'll be raped, and we just sit here?!"

"We're going to follow her," Windy said. "At a distance. You're about to learn more than you ever wanted to know about our work, but it's things you have to understand. Let me give you the outline of this, very quickly. There was someone in London, someone like Ink but not as strong, who got his hooks into her, a bit like what happened to you. Not as intense. Not as blatantly evil – but it still did her harm. She's here trying to be raped, though she doesn't understand that. There's a guy on these streets – your skin will crawl when you see him. He's not a controller, not psionic, he's just a rapist, and she knows, at some level, that he's out here and that he'll find her. We've been watching and it probably happens tonight."

"...the fuck?" I whispered. "Grab her! Fix her brain! You fixed mine, fix hers!"

"It's not that simple," Windy said grimly. "I can't just do that without her knowing what I did. If I just walk up and interfere like that, she'll know that mental abilities exist, and we cannot let that happen. The onlychance is to slip into her head during an intense emotional experience. In your case it was different, I knew you'd become part of AngelWatch, or least that I could get you to keep the secret. She's not able to keep secrets, or do this work, she can't be one of is. She hasn't got the necessary mental material. Listen to me carefully, Keiko – evil is real and it leaves real damage in its wake. Tonight I and Henry will try to do everything we can for her, but it won't be as neat and clean as waving a mental magic wand. It's going to be horrible and your role in this is going to be to read her, be in her mind, as things happen."

"Why?!"

"It's another knife in your forearm. You have to understand what you're up against, why we do what we do. We need to put your boy problems in perspective. Some people can just be told, and they get it. You need to be shown. So I'm going to show you."

I looked down the street at her. She wasn't swaying her hips, she wasn't swinging her hair. Her head was down and she was walking quickly, nervously. She didn't look like she was asking for it, and I understood, without reading her, that it was because she wasn't asking for it. Not consciously. Except for the clothing. I suddenly knew what an innocent victim looked like.

Henry gasped a little, turning the magnet in his hands a bit. "He's around. He hasn't seen her yet but he expects to, soon. Let's move."

Windy handed me her magnet. "This help you focus. You'll figure it out," she said. "Be in her mind only. Not his. Read only. Don't attempt to intervene, you'll only do more damage. What intervention can be done, I will do. Don't get closer to her than I do. Move quietly, stay near the buildings, don't look at her. Let's go."

We got out, walked, together, quietly, pretending to be friends, nothing to see here, two young girls with their uncle, maybe, nothing of consequence. I fiddled with the magnet... suddenly it made everything easy. I found the girl. I was in her mind.

So many emotions! I couldn't sort it out, so many layers, but something was wrong- so wrong-

And then, the voice.

"Evening, lassie," Deep, guttural. "Nice night don't you think?"

The thrill of... fear? In her. No. Terror. No. Inevitability. She already knew how it ended.

"Don't," she whispered. "Go away."

"Why? I know why you're here. Don't you?"

Oh God no, don't let this happen to her. He was close, too close. She was shaking, she couldn't breathe, and deep down, deep down, a horrible litany began: This is all I'm good for...

"No, I'll... I'll scream," she whispered.



AngelWatch Ch. 02



"Oh baby yes you will, at first," he said – and then the hand in her hair, her dress hauled up, her head smashed against the wall, and oh the horror, I was going to vomit, I tried to block instead of read but I couldn't remember how-

Violation. He was pushing inside her, and I could feel her mind fall apart, I could feel time slow, I could feel her soul shredding – I fell to my knees, and threw up. Everything she was, was being manled by this one simple, evil act. She was redefined by it, she was made nothing by it, and the litany changed: this is all I will ever be, this is all I can ever be...

"You there!" Henry's voice sang out. "Stop! I've got a gun and I won't hesitate!"

Oh God, men could be beautiful sometimes. The rapist whirled, interrupted, using the girl as a shield. I didn't look at him. I only had eyes for the girl. I have never seen anything as horrible as her eyes. They were empty. And he had a knife to her throat.

"Nor will I," he rasped. "You'll do nothing, unless you want her meat on the street."

And then, a surge of... I didn't know what, but it came from Henry, and the rapist suddenly dropped the knife. And then a surge of something from Windy, and the girl closed her eyes and slid to her knees, and wept. "Got her clean," Windy whispered.

But Henry growled and whispered, "I missed. He knows."

The girl's mind came back together, like a video of a shattering vase running backwards; it's the only way I had of describing it. She felt profound gratitude, and the horrible litany stopped. And best of all, she had no idea she'd been meddled; all she could think about was Henry rescuing her.

"What- the fuck- are you people-" the rapist stuttered.

That's what Henry had meant. The rapist knew he'd been meddled.

He turned to run-

I exploded. 

Rape. Ink. Injustice. The girl's tears. I'd felt what he'd done to her, and I couldn't unfeel it. He did that, and now he was going to run?!

No.

I reached out. The magnet made it all so easy. His mind was trivial. He was trivial. He'd never run again. Something inside me leapt into the sky and then came down, came down on him like a hammer, and he shrieked, stumbling, falling, smashing his head against the pavement. Oooh, that would work. I struck again, and he smashed his head against the pavement again, over and over, fear and loathing and an unanswerable shame that he'd never felt before filling every corner of his mind, leaving no room for his thoughts-

And then I made a tiny twist in his mind, and he lie still. Utterly still.

"One problem solved," I whispered.

Windy turned to me, and did something. Or she tried to. But I was Angry. And Angry was... 

Angry was wonderful. And powerful. Windy's something went nowhere. She wasn't getting in my head today.

"Keiko, no," she whispered. "Henry..."

No. They weren't ganging up on me. That just made me angrier.

"Did I break rules?" I said. "I'm sorry. Windy, you were right and I was wrong. About beliefs and actions. I thought I had beliefs before, but... I didn't. Now I do. I believe in right and wrong, good and evil. And beliefs, real beliefs... they lead to actions, don't they."

"Don't you turn all Solomon Kane on us," Henry snapped. I didn't get the reference (but I looked it up later. What a guy!)

"We can't let you do this," Windy said softly. "I'm sorry, but-"

As it turns out, there are many powers. I don't know how many and probably no one does. But I'd been... experimenting, and I knew of one that I don't think anyone else did. I'd tried it before, quietly, and it had worked, even on Windy. She'd had no idea. No one did. It was mine and mine alone.

A mental gesture – and I vanished. They could no longer see me or hear me or find me. Their eyes saw but their brains did not perceive. I was invisible, inaudible, I was simply Not At Home.

I walked away.

**

There are about 2,000 rapes reported in London a year. About seven a day. I was going to be very busy.



AngelWatch Ch. 03



"...right, let's get started," Windy said quietly. "Thanks for our remote sites for calling in; I appreciate the sleep some of you are giving up. I'm sure everyone knows what's happening -- we don't call these meetings for anything else, it seems." She chuckled, a little bitterly.

"So I'll get right into it. Our newest has gone rogue. And as bad as that is, she's got special characteristics that could make this our worst breach, on my watch at least. I've sent the details; you should all have it now-"

"Singapore here. It didn't arrive."

"Hello, Marcus... um, you're definitely listed on the distribution."

"I've checked twice. Nothing."

Windy sighed. "James, could you get on that? The last thing we need right now is a network problem."

James started clicking furiously on his laptop.

"Alright, for Marcus and company's benefit, here are the high points. About a month ago, Virginia chapter did a rescue and conversion. Keiko ----, aged 20. Very deep damage had been done by a strong and unusually savage independent isolationist; you'll all remember the decision to put him down. Keiko induced well, and immediately began showing signs of significant power and skill. Unexpected power, I'll add. I knew she'd be strong, but she started showing unexpected gifts right from her second day. So I took over her training exclusively...

"Well, they do say pride is a sin, so paint me a sinner, friends. I should have parceled out her training; I know that. All I can say is that it seemed to be going well, well enough that I rearranged the training a little. And that, I think, just have been the biggest mistake of my watch. We took her on a rape intervention, and to put it simply, she snapped. And got away."

"Marcus here. She got away. She got away from you?"

Windy sighed, "Yes. She literally vanished from sight and sense. Some of you will remember the account we have of Saint Ferrier, back in the thirteen hundreds. Something like that, but she vanished from the sight of everyone on the scene. This was right after she killed an aggressor with a direct insertion. Worse, right before she killed him, it appears she forced him to take specific physical actions, at least that's what it looked like when he started smashing his head against the pavement-"

"Shit!", crackled Marcus's voice.

"Indeed," Windy said, sourly.

"Direct physical control? Puppetmastering? That's supposed to be impossible!"

"And I hope it is," Windy said. "But I couldn't unravel what she was doing in time, and it didn't look familiar. Maybe he was just banging his head out of induced self-loathing -- but I don't think so. Right, let me stop jumping around and just summarize. Keiko was last seen in London two days ago. Known abilities are visible and aural perception alteration, right up to invisibility, limited mind reading, a vast skill at emotional manipulation, forced kill, and maybe puppetmastering. And we don't know what else. That list should terrify everyone listening. Emotionally -- she looked unusually stable right until she snapped. She was badly abused, and had recently discovered how difficult it is to deal with guys as a reader. There was also a boyfriend, in her teens, who turned abusive. She's very, very angry."

"But young and confused," added Susan. "I spoke with her some. I know it sounds odd given the current events, but I was in her head a goodly amount, and she's not malicious. She's not aggressive by nature. She's rather quiet, submissive and gentle at heart. Yes, I know, it's always the quiet ones -- but while she's gone all Avenger on us, she's likely to confine her game to rapists."

"And let me stress, that doesn't make it right," Windy said. "No watcher may kill without the unanimous consent of the whole organization. If any of you feel tempted to let her go because we need less rapists in this world, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. She's part of AngelWatch whether she thinks she is or not, and we do not operate that way, ever. She's to be treated as dangerous, uncontrolled and unstable."

"And a hacker," James said.

Windy choked out a "What?"

"Someone redirected your message to Singapore. The redirect happened in London."

"Can't be her," Windy said. "Her cover story was mil-hackery, but that was only a story. She didn't do well in software courses. I checked, when we were writing her background story."

"All I can tell you is that someone broke our encryption -- yesterday I'd have said we were safe even from the NSA -- and then re-addressed the message to Singapore."

"That's insane," Henry interjected. "A hacker won't redirect a message, he'd copy it, and let the original continue on. Redirecting it just tells everyone they've been hacked."

"...Oh," said Windy. "Then it's her. She wanted us to know. It's her way of saying she hasn't forgotten us and she knows we're after her. Where she got hacking skill, I don't know. But she talked about belief and action... she's learned to Act, and she wants us to know it."

"Windy," Susan said. "It has to be asked. Is this going to turn into a kill?"

"I spent last night doing two things, Sue. Walking London looking for her, and praying this would not turn out that way. I don' t know. She's killed someone. She's a very clear and present danger. But I'll save her if I can, you know that."

"You'll save her, Windy?" Henry said.

"I will, if I can. This is my mess, and I'll clean it up. So I'm stepping down as head of the western watch, as of midnight local -- Susan, please run the balloting. I've already withdrawn from the university and I'll be spending full time on Keiko."

"Inappropriate, lass" Henry said. "You're too close to this."

"Yes, it's inappropriate," Windy said, softly. "It's also how it's going to be."

"Shit," James said, suddenly. "There's an extra caller on the line. Been there the whole time I think... yes."

Windy sighed. "Hello, Keiko. Please listen to me, please please. You know we have to come find you, at any cost. Please don't take us all down this road. Please, Keiko. Please come back before more people are hurt."

I said nothing.

"As you wish it, then," she said, and I heard the soft catch in her voice; I could picture the tears already forming in her eyes. "There is a saying: love is the circumference of need. I have love and you only have need. You can't win this. I will find you, and no power you have is going to overcome my love and concern for you. Give up now because I'm never going to, not as long as we both live. Eight, Memory Lane. That's all I have to say. James, end the call."

There was a faint click, and silence, except for the whimpering form next to me. I shivered; Windy had meant every word she'd said. But I put my feelings aside and turned to the kindly, elderly gentleman next to me. He stared, sightlessly, at his computer.

"You've done well," I whispered to him, my lips against his ear. "I'm sorry I can't be kinder to you, but... I don't know how to affect you so that you don't remember this. But I think my friends can. So I'm going to have to leave you a little broken, a little... wordless. They'll find you and help you. And at least I don't have to use fear. There's another way."

I took out a small screwdriver, and opened his laptop, removing the hard drive. The email on it, his phone hack, all of it, couldn't be allowed to survive. Then I placed my hand over his cock, though his pants.

"Pleasure can break people. It's... my little compromise with my conscience. I'm not a bad person. There's just things I have to do. Action... Belief alone is not enough. Windy would understand..."

I pushed deep into his mind. When I left, three hours later, he was gibbering softly, smiling vacantly, twitching, and lost in dreams he'd never find his way out of, unaided.



AngelWatch Ch. 04



My modus operandi was simple enough.

I'd hit a bar, dressed rather conservatively, so I didn't get pounced by guys instantly. I'd walk the crowd, looking for the damaged girls. There's always a few. You can spot them even without my abilities; the guys certainly could because these girls were often sitting alone or with other girls. They'd be too quiet. Raped girls are always a little too quiet.

A sympathetic nod, a sad look... they'd be the ones who were lonely in a crowd, and it wasn't hard to strike up a conversation. There's always clothing to talk about. I wouldn't bring up boys. 

Sooner or later she'd ask why I wasn't out there fishing with the rest, and I'd give the spiel. Couldn't handle guys right now. Just... needed to get out of my apartment... no, I don't really want to talk about it.

The ones who'd been victimized would give me a look at that point. Just for a second, the pain would shine on their face, nakedly. If I saw that, I started to read. We'd exchange phone numbers. Two days later, we'd be on the phone sharing our abuse stories. Mine was part fiction, but the emotions behind it weren't.

Sometimes she wouldn't know who her assailant was, and there was nothing I could do. Occasionally, the rapist would already be in jail, and I'd take that as sufficient justice. But sometimes – often - she hadn't tried to prosecute; or she'd tried, but the guy had been declared innocent. I'd push, and eventually I'd get a name.

Rapists always seem to have Facebook accounts. They're always trolling for the next victim, consciously or not. Once I had a name they were never, ever hard to find online, and then I'd have a picture, and a little personal information. After all, they didn't have to hide; they knew that. They thought of themselves as the guys who could get away with it. Sometimes their webpages even had little hints about their "accomplishments", if you knew what to look for.

Most of the time they weren't in a relationship. Sometimes they were, and I'd stalk the girlfriend or wife. Even on Facebook, these women were always a little too quiet. You could feel the damage, coming right off the webpage.

And the anger would kick in, deep inside of me. The addictive, blazing rage. Once I got to this point I was committed. I'd stalk the web and the streets, and I'd find the guy. My record was three days, my worst was a month.

My typical target? No such thing. Rapists come in all flavors. One day it would be the college guy who thought the girl just needed a little more "persuading", even when she was bruised and begging for him to stop. Another time it would be the thirty two year old professional, athletic and cheerful, with a wife he treated like flawless crystal. He'd have a thing for teen girls, and assault and battery with his rape. One was in his 60's, one was 16 (and had raped three girls in a month). One was a middle aged woman. Rich, poor, young, old... they were all people who had figured out that they could take without permission, and if they got away with it once, they were addicted to the power, to the sense of invulnerability, and to the cruelty. Only once did I meet one who was sorry for what he'd. (I spared him.)

My first takedown was in his early thirtys, had money, decent looks... I tracked him to a favotite bar and I was dressed to kill, as the saying goes. Body con barely begins to describe it, and the heels were pure slut. I sat at a table, and when he came in I made brief eye-contact; then looked down and blushed. (I can poke at my own emotional state and trigger the blush reaction at whim. It's very useful.)

He came right over.

"Well good evening. Can I visit for a bit?"

"Um... hi. No. My boyfriend will be here any minute. He should have been here an h- anyway, sorry, thanks, but..."

"An hour? Oh, sweetheart. Let him come in and see you've been properly entertained the whole time. That'll teach him, eh? What are you drinking?"

"No, really, he's the jealo- um, he'd get angry. I don't want trouble with him, honestly, I appreciate you're being kind, I appreciate it very much but it's... not worth the trouble it causes-"

I looked down, blushing again.

Here's a fact. Rapists are often attracted to the submissive ones, the quiet ones. Not always. Some love to take down the bold, bright social butterflies. But many can smell weakness and pounce when they see it. The picture I was painting for him was irresistible. He was smiling.

"That's a beautiful dress, by the way."

"I hate it," I whispered. "He picked it out for me. It makes me look..." I looked up. "Please, you're very sweet but if he shows up-"

"If? Does he send you to bars and then kind of forget to show up?"

"No. Just a few times- Please, let's talk about something else!"

He sat down. "Michael," he said. "You?"

"Angelica. Please, I should just go home, I guess. I'm not good company right now."

His face was a study in compassion and sympathy. "Look, I was just going to flirt a little, but maybe you a little genuine kindness more than the compliments. Let me stay for a few."

I read him.

He was burning inside. Not with lust, though he certainly liked the way my breasts were presented by the dress. It was energy, power, excitement. He'd found prey. He had the scent and he was going to take me down. He was already exulting in his victory.

I was burning too. Rage. I'd looked into his last victim's soul and seen the claw marks, the hopelessness, the horrified certainty that she'd never be able to trust again. He'd laughed, she told me. He'd called her a good girl, and then fucked her again as she'd sobbed. He'd fucked her until she came – that's not unheard of in rapes – and then the real cruelty emerged. He told her he'd always known she needed it this way... he laughed and told her that he'd find her again in a few days and show her some things she'd really like..

I looked up into his eyes, and smiled a little. "I... ok. But not here. I guess he's not coming, But if he does I don't want him to see you."

"Plenty of decent bars in London. Come along now."

His mind was screaming in exultation. 

So was mine.

Another bar, a drink. He kept my mind off my "boyfriend", and talked about world events, and kindness, and how pretty I was. I talked about studying in the states, and the nice older guy I'd dated. 

"Look," he said, suddenly. "I'll admit you're more than a little interesting. And you need a better boyfriend, if I can say it. Let me have your phone number."

"We just met. But... look, you're right about the boyfriend. I don't know how he talked me into things... you've really been very kind. But I shouldn't have taken up your evening. I'm... a little too young for you, I think?"

"Your age isn't a problem for me. Not having your number, is. Angelica... I'll just say it. I want you to come back to my apartment with me."

"Michael... I've given you the wrong impression I think. I mean I'm in a relationship, you know that. I can't say yes."

He ran his hand over mine, slowly. I looked down. "No," I whispered. 

"I've never heard a no that sounded more like yes." His hand kept stroking.

Even though I was only playing a part, what he was doing was arousing. He knew how much to push, and his confidence was hot. And having to read him, left me open to the fountain of arousal in him. But the arousal I felt only fed my fury.

"You're... persuasive. But... I can't promise I'll be what you want." And truer words were never spoken.

"You are already what I want."

"And you don't mind that if I go with you, it's only to get back at my boyfriend?" And truer words....

"Is that all it is?"

"Decency requires I say yes."

"Come with me, Angelica." He pitched it just right, the confidence, the authority, but still gentle... and then he stood.

After a moment, looking down, so did I.

**

In his apartment, I lost no time. My mouth found his, and I slid my hands down his torso. I was kissing Ink again. Kissing Ink had been intoxicating, because he'd twisted my emotions as he controlled me, he had made it impossibly good. He'd made me love him even as he'd raped my soul and oh fuck, oh fuck, Windy had removed from me the compulsion, the need, but she could not remove the memory; and lust and fury merged and became something I did not understand. I pressed my hand along his cock and rubbed, quickly and firmly. "I'm going to make you feel so many things," I whispered against his mouth, and truer words...

"Easy, baby, we have all night," he whispered.

"No," I said. "There's no time at all." And I reached into his mind and pulled the levers of pleasure and hunger, and he moaned like an animal. And I felt fear in him, because what I'd just done to him was not natural, the intensity was all wrong; he knew that whatever I was doing was exactly what he wanted but it was too intense, too addictive, it was overload, it was bad. And I opened his pants and pulled down his shorts and he was in a terrifying heaven now, and I worked his cock, the thick hard battering ram that had destroyed a girl. I kissed his mouth wetly, frantically, and I pushed in, and in, and twisted....

He cried out like an animal, and came, but his eyes were blank, and he sagged to his knees. Kneeling to his destroyer. I pulled my dress down and rubbed my nipple against his unresponsive mouth; he made soft, incoherent noises. 

"Don't you know what to do with it? Oh, well. You didn't know what to do with her, either." I forced another orgasm out of him, sick and wrong and far too fast and far too intense. He couldn't speak. He couldn't breathe. Looking at him, I wanted to come, but that would wait...

"I'm sorry, Michael, but... it has to hurt. Or it's not justice. You have to know what you did to her. It felt something like this."

His mouth opened, but not sounds came out. And then he fell to the floor and writhed.

"And then something like this."

He curled, fetal, and his hands clawed at the floor, he was trying to crawl towards me, trying to plead for mercy... I kicked his face with a pretty, shiny high heeled shoe, and then laughed a little.

"And then, this, for days and weeks and months... but I'll give you the condensed version."

Sobbing.

"She'll feel it for a lifetime. So will you, just... concentrated. I'll just make it more intense, and more intense, second by second...."

I went to his kitchen, grabbed a napkin, and used it to pick up a steak knife. I walked back, dropped in front of him, and waited.

He didn't quite last a minute. 

I got into his wallet and relieved him of cash – a girl has to make rent, after all.

"It's been a very special evening" I said. I made sure his semen and blood hadn't gotten on me, turned invisible, and walked out, leaving the door a little ajar.

I hated this dress. I was going to change as soon as I got to my apartment. I mean, ewww, so slutty...



AngelWatch Ch. 05



I wasn't around for this; I found out about it later, and I might not have all the details straight.

**

Windy sat on the table in an empty conference room, feet up on a chair. Behind her was a phone. To her left was a map of Great Britain, covering the entire wall.

She looked at a spot on the wall in front of her, where a window would have been, if this hadn't been a room used by an organization had a reason to avoid prying eyes.

She picked up her magnet for the third time, and turned it slowly in her hands. She already knew that I was nowhere nearby; that I knew where AngelWatch had offices and bolt-holes, and stayed well clear. But she could not help but look and hope.

She was aware of her fellow conspirators, around her in the building. Intermittently, some of them were aware of her. She was too tired to block their emotions, so she knew people were worried or sad. As a leader she'd have been walking the halls, encouraging people and offering whatever comfort she could. But Henry was leader now.

"Keiko, please..." she whispered to herself. "It's not your fault. It's my mistake. I'm not going to be angry. You're tearing my heart out. Please, Keiko..."

Someone was behind her, in the corridor. Susan. Windy poked at her, through the door, to let her know she'd been spotted and to invite her in. The door opened immediately.

"Windy, we really need to come up with some new signals. Poking at me to make me feel the sensation of eating ice cream, as a way of inviting me in... bad."

"You like ice cream. Everyone likes ice cream. And when I led, people sometimes have reasons to wish they weren't going to talk to me. I don't think I have to explain to you about positive reinforcement..."

Susan, a trained psychiatrist with years of study in psychology, chuckled. "No you don't, but I end up with ice cream cravings."

"Sorry."

Susan walked around the table, and settled next to Windy. "You're not blocking."

"Too tired."

"Then sleep. Or whatever you call that meditation thing you do."

"It's called hssss-clickclick-squeeee-takka in my native tongue. Except my current mouth can't make any of those sounds right. So sleep will do."

"There's a certain symbolism inherent, in being unable to express the word for sleep."

"I know."

"You're thinking of going home and sending in a replacement, aren't you."

"I can't. It's seven years to the next possible portal. Y'all are stuck with me."

"I'm glad. Windy... I don't have to tell you you're grieving. It's exactly the same in your species and mine."

"You know you're this planet's only alien psychiatrist, right?"

"It's something of an honor, really."

That got a small chuckle out of Windy. "Heh. Didn't people in your profession used to be called alienists? That's so fitting..."

"Please try to sleep," Susan smiled. "Sitting in an empty room, waiting for the phone to ring... this isn't healthy behavior for a female of any species."

"Mercy's sake, Susan, I'm not here for the phone. She's got my cell number."

"I'm speaking metaphorically. You're in an empty room with a silent phone, and you're waiting... such symbols have meaning. Take my advice... your bedroom is that way," Susan added, pointing.

"Not until the reports on Michael's death come in."

"They're in. They're ambiguous. It was a suicide, and there was semen involved. The police are puzzled by a few strange aspects; suicides usually seek solitude for the final act, but his door was open. To me that sounds like Keiko, but there's nothing like proof. He was seen with a pretty blond girl, mid twenties, an hour before. Nothing afterwards. Again, that could be Keiko. Or it could be anyone."

"Was he a rapist?"

"No evidence for it; but when something like seventeen in twenty rapes go unreported, it's hard to know who the rapists are."

"Any physical evidence at all? Fingerprints, anything?"

"The doorknob was wiped down, but badly. Probably, she used a tissue to open it on her way out, smudging any existing prints in the process. You know it's hopeless to pursue that line. Several of us have killed in plain sight of a dozen people, without a trace of evidence. She doesn't even have to be in plain sight. The police are going to see a rash of suicides. She'll never be caught unless she wants to be."

"I don't like the semen. She toyed with him before she killed him."

"Again, this could be awash with symbolism. Maybe she toyed with him. Maybe she forced him to feel a sort of re-enactment of a rape. Maybe it was a side effect of her control. Her sexual history is a mess, she might be using sexuality as her predominant path into people. It's what happened to her. Maybe she made out with him before killing him, sort of a condemned man's last meal. If she keeps at it, we'll know more, eventually. A pattern will emerge."

"True, I suppose. Well... I'm going for a walk-"

"Over my dead body," Susan said, pleasantly.

"As leader I -- oh, shit."

"Yup. Henry's already given orders. You're to get six hours of sleep a day at a minimum, and we'll use chains if we have to. Keiko is dangerous, and you aren't going to go looking for you if you can't even manage a decent block. You're coming with me."

"I could beat you up..."

"Damnit, girl, I'm a doctor, not a punching bag."

Ten minutes later, Windy was "asleep". No one was supposed to know that she cried herself into stillness, but in AngelWatch, emotions were hard secrets to keep.

**

The next morning, there was a knock on Windy's door, and she peered out, blearily. Henry peered back, equally blearily, and stepped in.

"Sit," he said, somewhat firmly. Windy sat.

"It's bad, whatever it is," Windy said.

"You're not going to like it, but you need to know. You remember Keiko hacked us a couple weeks ago. We found the guy she used to do it."

"And...?"

"He's dead, Windy. He died of dehydration. He was sitting in a chair, and apparently never got up to drink. The police don't know what to make of it."

"Oh, Maker... Oh Keiko, no, why? Why?"

"I think I know why. I don't think she meant to kill. I think she just needed him quiet, and messed him up so he wouldn't talk. Maybe she thought he'd be discovered in a day or so. But... he was an academic, a bit of a loner, mostly living online. After a week someone online alerted the police."

Windy stood, and quickly rummaged in her closet for street clothing. In AngelWatch, where minds were often unavoidably laid bare, modesty concerning the body wasn't deeply valued, but Henry did the polite thing and turned his back as she changed.  

"You'll never find her this way, you know. She'll feel you coming."

"I know. I'm not going out to find her. I'm going out to be found."

"If she wants you she knows where you live. And, don't go alone. She could harm you."

"She won't. She wouldn't. I don't care how broken she is, I'm the one person in the world that she'll talk to, and she needs to talk, even if she won't start the conversation herself. And she has to be out there, looking for rapists. There's only so much success you can have with searching, in a room with a computer, as we all know very well. So she's out there, reading guys, identifying targets. Clubs, bars, sporting events... I'll go where she's going. It's a matter of time."

"And if you provoke her? If you cause her to lash out in public in some visible way, or disappear from sight in front of a dozen people? How will we keep the secret then? Windy... I hate to say this, but we all might be safer if we just leave her be and let this run its course."

"Do you think I don't know that? Haven't thought about it? Let her take out the rapists. They are only rapists. They deserve to be punished. She'll give up eventually. You think we haven't all heard that in our heads? It's a whisper from Hell, Henry. Rape is bad, but a rapist can change his ways. Redemption is possible -- for the living. She's taking away the chance, however slim, that these people can be changed for the better. This is what I hate most about humans -- you're all way too prone to decide to pull the plug on someone who's gone off track. And anyway, what you propose is safer for us, yes, but it's bad for Keiko. The more she kills the more broken she becomes. It's not a damage that can always be healed."

"Not everyone can be helped. You know this."

"But Keiko will be. Excuse me, I'm going out."

**

You need to understand -- none of us are telepaths. We can't hold conversations mentally. Most of us can push emotions into other people, and almost all of us can read emotions. But reading words, coherent thoughts, out of someone's brain.... Well, Windy's managed it a few times, and I have once or twice. But in general, no. To talk, we have to talk.

So when I was sitting at a table in a bar, with a new girlfriend, I "heard" her come in -- people with our gifts tend to be very, very aware of each other -- but I didn't know what she was thinking. She'd picked a terrible moment to find me -- I couldn't just softly and silently vanish away, in front of Julie. I did the only thing I could... turned, stood, smiled big... "Wendy! Oh Julie, excuse me, I haven't seen Wendy in forever..."

"Wendy" and I got a table. We were both smiling.

"Wendy, I've missed you," I said. "I'm sorry I've been out of touch, but...well, I'm so busy right now."

"But, Kate... you know you're breaking hearts back home. Everyone misses you so badly."

"I know, I guess. But I have to do this. I'm making progress."

A flare of anger from her, her eyes nearly flickering in rage. She dropped her voice and leaned in, just another private tête-à-tête among girlfriends. "Just so you know. Doctor Amilheart is dead. We didn't find him in time."

I admit that got to me. "I'm... I'm sorry to hear it."

"Are you? You're broken, Kate. I can feel it. It gets worse over time."

"I'm fine."

"You think you can lie to me? The behavior you're following is addictive. You're wise enough to know it."

"This isn't up for debate. I have the gifts needed to do what I'm doing, and it has to be done. You're religious. What if I've been given these gifts to bring down justice on people who otherwise get away with it? Like Solomon Kane?"

"Kane was fiction. And on my world, claiming the right to murder in the Maker's name is punishable by death."

"It's not, here. It's been pretty common, actually."

"Your species' problem, not mine. And I'm not here to debate interspecies theology."

She paused, to stare down a guy that was approaching our table. I felt a flicker of something as she did something to him... he moved away, suddenly.

Outside, it started raining. It happened a lot in London, and I still hadn't learned to carry an umbrella.

"Good. Because I believe what I'm doing is right."

"If it was right, Doctor Amilheart would be alive. Look out the window, Kate."

I did. The rain turned red.

Blood.

"I'm a big believer in symbolism," she continued. "You can take what you're seeing a number of different ways. The simplest: you're raining blood on this city, scattering it everywhere. The blood you scatter falls everywhere and marks everyone, not just the people you have your vengeance on. Your victims will have family, work, friends... what you do affects more people than you want to think about. It could even fall on A-W, making us visible. Worst of all..." she picked up my drink, and it was blood. "It falls on you and gets into you. So drink this."

I smiled crookedly, took the drink from her and drank it down. She didn't get the flavor quite right, but it got the point across. She continued as I set the empty glass down.

"There's another way to look at red rain. The scattering of blood is a major symbol in one of your world's major religions. Two, actually. A sacrifice is killed and his blood poured out, and the blood represents healing and forgiveness for others. That blood can fall on anyone who wants it. Now, A-W can't claim to be in the business of saving mankind, but we follow the same business model. We put our lives on hold, sacrificing our time and maybe our sanity, to bring whatever healing we can to others. We do it poorly and imperfectly, but we do it because we can and because it needs to be done. Come on, we're going outside."

"I don't have an umbrella."

"You're missing the point, if you want one." She stood up. "It's only rain, Kate. It won't kill you."

She walked out. I followed her. We stood on an empty street in a cold, stinging rain of red blood that no one else could see. We were blood streaked in seconds.

"Which is it going to be, Keiko? Are you going to dedicate your life to raining down horror and pain, in some confused attempt to punish someone who is already dead? Or are you going to pour yourself out in an attempt to bring mercy and healing to a world that could use your help? You can be either; you can't be both."

"Maybe neither," I told her. "This isn't blood, it's water. Look, you're dragging in symbolism from Christianity and Judaism, but I'm not really into that, you know? I have to follow my heart. I felt what that girl felt, when the rape stated. It's what I should have felt when Ink was abusing me. But I was powerless even to feel that. I'm not powerless now. So let me show you my symbolism."

The rain turned clear, then a steaming greenish-yellowish.

"Acid," I whispered. Around us, the buildings hissed and were quickly streaked with unnatural whiteness, and Windy's flesh and mine were scorched and scarred. "I'm not about mercy and healing. I'm about cleaning. I'm going to destroy what needs to be destroyed, and what's left will be purified. My plans aren't a grand as yours. I'm only going after rapists. But when I'm done, men will be afraid to rape."

Windy held up her compact mirror, and in it she made me see my own face, ruined by the acid as well. I laughed.

"I know, Windy. I won't survive this. But no one gets out of life alive, and I'm going to go out enacting a vengeance that women have been crying for centuries uncounted. You like symbols? Let's try this one."

Clear, warm rain poured over our mouths, and it was salty.

"Tears. A city drowning in tears. I felt her cry, Windy. Her and thousands of others. I'm going to put an end to it."

"No," Windy said. "You won't. Tears are a natural fate of your species, just as laughter is. You've turned Iconoclast. And Iconoclasts always fail."

"But I'll go down trying. Let me show you my vision of things to come, Windy-"

I pushed to change her perceptions again, but her eyes flashed in rage and she blocked it. "No. I'm not going to look at that. It's evil and twisted and I've seen enough twisted things in my life."

"It's not. It's beautiful."

"Fantasy always looks beautiful, but it so rarely really is. Goodbye, Keiko. I'm going to walk home in this rain of tears you've given me, because it's as perfect a symbol of what I feel right now as there ever could be. We'll speak again. Once at least."

"Oh, don't put it off. Kill me now. I know you can." I said.

"I'll do anything to help you -- except become as you are now. I suffer enough, I don't need more misery in my life. I won't kill you."

"Then I win."

"You have no idea how wrong you are. Goodbye for now."

She walked away.

I didn't feel like explaining to my new friend in the bar why I'd spent time in the rain with Wendy, so once I was sure Windy was out of sight and sense, I walked home, fading from sight.



AngelWatch Ch. 06



Windy had interrupted my talk with Julie, but two days later I found Amy, and her story came out quickly. She'd had a boyfriend of sorts, or at least a hookup partner she was kind of into. She'd also had a bi-curious moment with a hot blonde in the same dorm. Her boyfriend got wind of it, and the next day he decided to "straighten her out". In the ensuing rape, she'd had her elbow fractured.

She didn't report the rape. The guy had told her that if she did, her bi-curious moment would get back to her parents, her friends and the internet. That was all it took to silence her.

There are times I'm a little ashamed of my gender.

The thing that shocked me was that the rape had worked. She told me she'd never do a girl again. I found that bizarre; in her circumstance, it was guys I'd have given up on. But I was learning that rape had different effects on different people. Rape was still around and going strong, I was starting to realize, because it sometimes does accomplish a guy's aims. However vile.

She told me what dorm he lived in, and what kind of girl he liked -- Asians, as it turned out, which meant meeting him was going to be pretty simple. She told me not to go near him. He'd seem really nice at first, but... he got intense fast, and he was so persuasive.

I was going to show him what persuasive meant.

**

He was easy enough to find. And fuck was he cute.

I actually caught myself thinking maybe it wasn't rape. Maybe she just decided- and then I cut that thought short. I'd been in Amy's mind. I knew what he was. But as a shocking reminder of how much a good masculine face can screw with a woman's thoughts, it was disturbing. It didn't help that I was in the horny part of my cycle. I'd been noticing guys all day.

He was talking and laughing with friends. Not a care in the world. It must be good to be a hot male in the western world, I decided. Hookups on demand, all the companionship you wanted and hey, if a girl has to be pushed occasionally, so what? They like that, right?

This bastard had forced a girl with a broken elbow.

He glanced my way, and did a double take. I didn't blame him. I was sporting a short, tight qipao, black leggings and a careful makeup job, after all. I smiled at him nervously and looked down at my iPhone. He knew I was watching him anyway, even with averted eyes, and he winked at me. I licked my lips. He'd be back, I knew.

He was, in three minutes. Alone.

"Well now," he said. "I thought I knew all the beautiful girls on campus. How did I miss the best of all?"

"Shit that's cheesy," I said without looking up.

"I suppose. But true. You've got something good going, girl."

I read him. He was awash in sincerity. He meant it.

"Thanks. I can tell you appreciate it by the way you're staring at my legs." I recrossed them for him. "It makes me feel all valued."

"That just proves I'm male. I'm Peter."

"And I'm trying to read here."

He sat down next to me, enough inches away that it wasn't creepy, just pushy. "Hello, TryingTo ReadHere. Please look up, beautiful. The book or whatever will still be there in an hour, but who knows if I will be?"

"I know which way I'm betting. You're the sort that moves in pretty fast -- and moves on again even faster."

"Very true," he said, softly. "But that doesn't make me a bad person."

That got me to look up. "Unholy shit," I said. "You're not even pretending to be thinking ahead. Look, I don't do hookups with total strangers. Kay? Shove off."

He smiled. Shit, he was good at that. Really good smile. Really nice lips...

"I'm going, then," he said. "But I'll be looking for you from this day on. I'll find you when you aren't distracted by a good book. I'll even learn your name. Don't dream it's going to be any other way."

He got up and moved off. Fuck, nice ass, too.

"Yo. Flirt boy. Peter."

He stopped, glanced back, already looking like there were other things on his mind. He really had a good game, I decided. "Yeah?"

"Katelyn. I don't go to this school, so don't bother hunting the register."

He cocked his head at me. "Then I need more than a first name."

"You wouldn't even have gotten that if it wasn't for the nice ass. Look, I'll be in Predicament pub at nine this evening. I might be alone. If I am, you can buy me coffee. If I'm not, stay the fuck away. Can you handle that?"

He looked at me in disbelief. "I'm going to cancel my evening plans and head to a sleazy pub on the off chance you might show up alone. Really?"

"I like the Predicament. Good pizza. Which you might get to buy me."

"No deal. I'll counteroffer though. The Burnished Brass at 10. I'll buy. You'll come alone and so will I."

The Burnished Brass wasn't a posh high end place either, but it was a step up from the Predicament. Kind of flattering.

Then he looked me over, and not subtly. When he got to my eyes, he said. "And dress up. I will."

That sent a shiver down my back. "Of all the fucking arrogance."

"I know. But it's kind of hot, dressing up for someone you don't know, meeting for the first time. Usually everyone's in jeans, you know? Let's do it differently."

"You've got pretty fair odds of getting stood up, after that request."

He paused. "Maybe. I hope not. Very much. See you at ten."

He walked off.

Arrogance and confidence aren't the same thing. Exactly. Are they? Maybe the only difference is timing. Telling me to dress up -- when I already had a nice dress on -- and decent shoes, but not my best, and --

I was seething, and it took me a couple minutes to remember that I was going to kill this guy, shortly after he bought me drinks and maybe pizza. That calmed me down.

Broken elbow. I mean, what the fuck? So one of his harem had test-driven the girl model. He couldn't handle that? He didn't strike me as insecure. Oh, hell, it didn't matter why he'd done it.

Did it?

An image of red rain, falling, flashed into my head. I whirled, looking for Windy.

She wasn't here. She'd never have been able to hide if she was.

I moved off, back to my apartment. I had a date to get ready for.

**

I showed up fifteen minutes late, which was the least he deserved for asking me to dress up. I figured he'll bail if I was twenty minutes late, though you never quite know with guys. In fact when I came in he was putting away his phone and reaching for his coat, and it looked like it wasn't a planned performance. He wasn't a patient guy, and it wasn't flattering.

But I was in a gold sparkle bodycon cocktail dress, mid-thigh; and I'd spent an hour on my makeup. Yes, I know. I could have made him see me any way I wanted, so why bother with makeup? But in this case what I was aiming for wasn't too different than my actual features. He liked Asians. So I was mostly messing with his perception of minor details and using makeup to help the disguise along.

Besides, some days, putting on makeup just feels really, really good.

But the end result is that when I walked in, a lot of eyes turned my way, and a lot of girls got the "I'm going to have to hate you now" smile in place for me.

Peter dropped the coat when he saw me, but I pretended not to see him, and headed to the bar. Two guys closed in immediately, and I gave the nod to the pretty one. If Peter was going to tell me to dress it, he was going to watch how other men responded if I did.

He could have played that several ways. He could have left, or just smiled and waited it out, knowing we'd get together at some point. He might have texted me to point out that he was, in fact, here.

What he did instead surprised me. He walked straight in, getting between me and the guy who was asking me what I was having.

"Back off, lad, if you don't want to get hurt," said my new friend. Peter turned to him.

"You'll be the one backing off," Peter said. "It gets ugly fast if you don't. I invited her here."

"Seems to me she's looking for a change of scenery, pretty boy."

You didn't have to be a reader to feel the hostility going off the charts. It was enough to frighten me, and I was about to open my mouth and tell Peter it was ok, I just hadn't seen him, when Peter escalated.

There was a knife in his hand. I don't know how it got there.

"It's simple, leave or bleed."

"What the fuck, lad." My new friend backed up, and looked at me. "I guess you like them crazier than I am. Enjoy your evening." He moved off and went to talk to some friends. The knife vanished, in a smooth and practiced movement.

I moved off to get my coat. Never mind my evening plans; I couldn't cope with this. I mean, fuck, a knife in a pub? Game over. The police would be here soon; I couldn't be around when they got here.

"Yes, I think we need a change of venue," Peter said, appearing beside me.

"The hell? Get away from me, you fucked-up psycho!"

I hadn't meant to snap like that, but... a knife. The image of my last takedown returned to me, the knife cutting his throat, the blood pouring down like rain... I'd felt nothing at the time. But I remembered Windy's knifepoint in my arm, and knives were suddenly scary. My gut twisted; I'd been in complete control when I walked in here, and now I wasn't. I was a scared little girl and he had a knife in his pocket. Somehow that made him more powerful than I was, even though I could have reduced him to quivering fear in seconds.

A group of guys headed my way. The guy who had backed off, and his four friends.

"Step away from the girl," one said.

"Easy, lads," Peter said, but there was nothing easy about his voice. "Your boy threatened me, I sent him packing and now I'm leaving. No trouble needed."

"You're leaving without the girl."

"Better yet," said another. "The girl is leaving if she likes, but you're staying here. The police will be wanting a word on the topic of concealed blades."

The girl, in this case, liked the sound of that. I headed for the door, quickly. To my surprise, some girl and a guy I didn't know joined me on my way out, and they held the door for me.

"Thanks," I mumbled, stepping out. They followed me. Now what?

"Hold up a moment," my newest friend said, and he flipped open his cell. The girl smiled at me. "Cindy and Amos," she said. "You?"

"Um, rather not say, and I'd rather not be around when the police show."

"A little late for that," she said, pointing a thumb at Amos. "Off duty, but it doesn't have an off switch for him."

Amos glanced over from his call. "I'd like you to press charges. If you have reason not to, I'll understand, and we'll walk you to your car. But I didn't see the weapon and I'm guessing you did. And your testimony will be worth something, unlike the lads in there with your friend now."

"Look, I'm sorry, but I'm not local and I don't know your laws and I don't want trouble, I just met him this afternoon and I don't know anything."

Cindy eyed my dress, which in fairness did not scream "first date". I may have blushed.

Peter stepped out, and of course saw us. Shit. This was ruined now. I couldn't take Peter down as Katelyn now, or ever. Not with police having seen us together.

"Katelyn! Interesting start to the date, hey? I think I owe you a better pub."

"You," said Amos, in a You May As Well Come Quiet sort of voice. "You're going to be answering some questions downtown shortly, so I wouldn't be hoping for a date this evening. Not with her anyway." A badge got flashed.

Peter smiled calmly. "Officer, you've got nothing to hold me on. Some boys in there tried to horn in on my evening, and I just talked them out of a fight. End of story."

"And your knife?"

"Knife? Some drunk mentioned one but he was looking to start a fight, five on one. Who saw a knife?"

Amos turned his eyes to me. Right, to make an arrest stick he needed an accusation from a creditable witness. Peter hadn't self-incriminated and Amos needed more to go on.

"I- I didn't see a knife," I said. I couldn't get tangled with the police. I tried to pull myself together; all I had to do was get Amos and Cindy to leave, push Peter off in my own special way, and regroup.

Cindy gave me a pitying look. Amos gave me an unsympathetic one.

"Right, boy," he said to Peter. "Stay out of this place from now on. I drink here and I like my evenings quiet. You're within a whisker of reasonable grounds for search, but you walked out of the pub without a fight, which means I can get back to my evening if you keep walking."

"Thanks, officer," Peter said. "Katelyn, sorry for the fuss. Let's go."

Amos looked at me. I cursed, inwardly. If I broke off from Peter now, Amos would assume I was frightened, and maybe find grounds for pushing on Peter again, and if that knife got revealed now, I was complicit in a hidden weapons violation. Was that enough to get me in trouble? I didn't know. It wasn't worth the risk.

"Um...sure. Um, Thanks, officer. Thanks Cindy!"

Cindy's face was an open book. Just twitch an eyebrow, it said. Just a tiny nod. I'll step between you and this guy with Amos beside me. You don't have to go with him.

But I stepped next to Peter, and she pursed her lips and nodded. They moved off. I could hear the quiet conversation as they did:

"I guess it's ok. Some girls just like them like that."

"Well, you sure do..."

"Shut up."

I took a deep breath. Peter chuckled, softly.

"That was fun, eh? I think we can do better than a pub, after that. "

"Let me just repeat fucking psycho," I hissed. "You think I'm going to go all gooey girl because you pull a knife out? What the fuck kind of girls do you date anyway? Goodnight, don't ever talk to me again."

His eyes flared. Anger.

"I've seen those boys before, in the pub here. Your evening wouldn't have been improved by their company, and that's putting it politely. The knife was for your benefit, not mine. Walk if you want, I'll understand, but the knife had nothing to do with showing off. I thought you understood that when you covered for me with the officer."

Furiously, I read him. Again, total sincerity.

"You think you've earned the right to protect me after knowing me for two minutes. Fucking hell you're arrogant!"

He pulled the knife out of his pocket, and tossed it in the gutter. I blinked. I recognized the shape from Windy's training; it was UK Military, and expensive, not some twenty dollar knife. Not something you toss aside. He smiled.

"Very well."

"You're insane." I stared at the knife. "All I wanted was a drink and a pizza. Maybe twenty five dollars, whatever in pounds. How many cheap dates does that knife cost?"

"Um... eight, with shipping. Look, there's some chance it will still be there at the end of the evening. If it's not, I can afford another one. I'm trying to make a point here, ok?"

"The only point you're making is that you're insanely ... fuck, pick a word: arrogant, unpredictable, risk-taking-"

"Male. Male's the simple way to say it. Look, I'm running out of grand gestures here, so-"

"Do you have any idea how fucking frightening it was in there?!"

"I didn't like it much either, but I think you might be worth it!"

"Why? You know nothing about me, except this!" I tugged at the dress. "You risked a fight and a police record over a dress."

"Look, Katelyn, I'm not out here this evening for an argument. I canceled plans with a girl I like to spend time with because, well, because in the two minutes we talked this afternoon, you caught at my attention. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's something. I'd like to know which, and drinks and pizza were what you'd let me have to find out. Only now it's going to be drinks and dancing, because I don't like the pub scene in these parts when I'm not carrying. But anyway... the dress is hot, and what's inside it is hot, but I already had a date with a fuckbuddy lined up, so that's not what I'm out here for, ok? Let me tell you what I want, and you can be either in or out on the deal. I want to walk down this street with you, and hang a right, and get into the Galaxy with you. I want to see you dance in those sexy five inch heels, and then get a table and talk to you. Talk not argue. Ply you with alcohol to get you talking more. At the end of the evening, if I like what I heard I want to kiss your forehead and ask for your phone number. It's not complicated. So here I go."

He turned and started walking. I wasn't done arguing, but he was walking.

I cursed and caught up. Peter was one fucking arrogant guy, and the knife thing was sickening, but his flirt game was good. Kiss on the forehead and a phone number; if he hadn't been a rapist, and not long for this world, that line would have caught my attention. I mean, how old fashioned sweet, right? Back in the states I heard a lot of "hey, babe... wanna?" as opening lines. I kid you not.

"I gotta tell you, this whole date thing is hanging by a thread. I'm not into guys calling the shots and assuming I'm up for any random decision they make. Who says I even dance?"

"I've never met a pretty girl that didn't. Maybe girls from the states are different, but this is England and we dance. And... listen, maybe you're used to guys who take one look at you and get all smitten. You're pretty gorgeous, I could see it working that way for you. But I don't smit all that easily. If you expect me to change how I roll because the 'date is hanging by a thread' -- sorry. If you don't dance, propose something else, but let's not threaten to withhold social interaction, right?"

"'Withhold social interaction.' What planet are you from?"

"The planet of Gentlemanly Englishmen. What's yours?"

And he fucking had me there. I was being a bit of a bitch, and he was pointing it out rather nicely. I tried to shift gears.

"American Abroad. Sorry, we're not known for manners, I guess."

"I was starting to think you were French. Alright, no more sniping. Do you dance, by the way?"

"Yes, but not in five inch heels on a first date. That feels a little too much like Professional Paid Titillation to me."

He looked me over again, slowly and lingeringly, as we walked. "..and if I ask you to very nicely?"

"Um... that was an amazing balance of flattering and flat out creepy. And I'm not sniping, I meant it. Look, I know what the dress appears to be saying, but the dress is to punish you for asking for more than you should. I was going to let you take a good long look at what you can't have, and call it an early night."

"Women are always scheming, always planning it out. Everything always has a hidden message, it's all signals and implications. It gets old. I put it out there, straight and clear, and that's what I'd like back."

"Well, you won't get it. Women aren't about straight and clear, or whatever you call it. We keep ourselves secret to keep ourselves safe. Some guys are bastards."

"I suppose. I was a bastard, once or twice."

I shivered slightly. "Really? Tell me about that."

"Why? Are you into bastards? Some girls are. But I try not to be one anyway."

"And what happens when you are?"

We turned a corner.

"Sweetheart... first date. I'd like to focus on all the reasons why you should date me, not the occasional ones you shouldn't. I'm no angel, but let's discuss my past failings another time."

The Galaxy was up ahead. I'd never been inside. It was probably a good place to find rapists but it was pricey and my finances didn't allow a lot of extravagance. I looked at a few girls hanging outside, and decided my outfit held up against theirs. I checked out the guys they were with, and... yeah. This was in no way a first date place.

"Peter... I can't. It has nothing to do with you. That place is just too much with a guy I just met."

"Look, I know the reputation it has," he said, stopping and looking at me. "Hookup palace and worse. So let me spell it out right now. No drinks other than soda, if that's the way you want it. No drugs, no dirty dancing, no trading you around. You and me, sober, dancing and talking. It's all I'm asking for."




AngelWatch Ch. 06



Fuck, and once again, he meant it. He was the nicest rapist I'd ever known. And in there... I'd have to block all the time. A sexualized environment, a club that ran hot. In the mood I was in. With a cute guy that was doing his level best to be nice to me. I'd been a good girl -- mostly -- in the states, before Ink. Ink had been vile but there was no denying his manipulation had woken something in me, something sexual and dark... A club like the Galaxy would have been off my list before. Now it was wickedly appealing. Part of it was just my hormonal cycle talking, but part of it...

Girls, willingly doing some of what I'd been made to do. The touching, the... shit, that play Ink had forced on me in the subway. Handling cocks in secret, pressing up against guys, letting them look and want... that kind of thing, now that I could read, would be insanely intense. That would all be happening in there. Why is watching a girl slut out so hot? Girls know what I'm talking about. Is it because we're competing for the males, and the wilder they get, the wilder we need to be? Or is it because we all secretly want to run wild with our sexuality; we can't, that way pregnancy and disease and social failure lies; but we want to, and if she can, maybe I can...?

I shivered, thinking of the effect of a club like this on a guy like Peter. He said he only wanted to talk, and he believed it, but fifteen minutes in there and he'd be watching girls rub themselves against guys, and his eyes would turn to me in my "please notice how hot I am?" dress... and he'd be thinking with his cock. C'mon, this was Guy 101.

Guys, thinking with their cocks...

I shivered. What was that like? Having an erection, a lump of flesh gone hard, demanding attention? I mean, yes, I had nipples and a clit that could throb for attention too, but I had to be pretty ratcheted up to feel those sensations. Guys got an erection going after a brief look at a hot girl. And then it hung out there, stiff, whispering endlessly "we're supposed to be fucking now"... guys told me over and over they wished they had an off switch. Girls sometimes wished guys did too, but sometimes, weren't we just so secretly glad they didn't...? Peter, with a throbbing erection, and me leaning back in my formfitting gold dress, the cloth tight across my breasts, my hair poured down over one shoulder, feeling him burn, and knowing I could, at any time, switch it off for him... or on, so far on...

I looked at Peter.

"I... You swear that's your plan, and you won't deviate. Some no-touching dancing, tame drinks and conversation. That's all."

"I never said no-touching but... damnit, you're a tough one. Very well."

It was time to stop talking. We went in.

**

The place was wild. In some ways better than I'd feared and iin some ways much worse. Everyone was dressed hot. I was raised Asian, which means conservative, and places like this were outside my experience. Some of the girls were in little more than lingerie. The guys went to the other extreme, suits and ties. Things Ink had done to me, where I was naked or nearly so, and he was well dressed, instantly came to mind.

My outfit worked in here. Peter's didn't; he'd dressed too well for the pub scene but it didn't quite cut it in here. But it didn't matter. Girls looked at him and smiled. And for no reason that I can explain, that sent my jealousy off the charts. Guys checked me out, too, but mostly their eyes slid back to the girls in lingerie. Peter's eyes drifted too, and that was...

Infuriating.

We took a table. His eyes continued to drift. Mentally comparing me to what else was around.

Alright, so I was a bit naïve. I was used to being the girl guys noticed, what Peter and his English friends would call a Looker. But the girls who came here were past masters at getting the looks. Every one of them was Hotter Than Thou. Every one of them had spent heavily on the outfit and spent two hours on the makeup. It wasn't that they were better shaped than I was, some of them definitely weren't. But they were all practiced in the craft of physical attraction and I felt like Amateur Hour.

Peter's eyes raked a blond in a pushup bra, a thong, a bodystocking, and six inch heels. She was slightly tipsy and smiling. He smiled back, but then turned to me. I was his date, after all.

I slammed into his mind, ruthlessly.

"Hey, flirt boy," I whispered. "You haven't said anything about my dress."

I arched a bit, putting the shoulders back, and slowly licked my lips. And yanked his mental arousal switch, hard.

You know the look guys give you. It's when they stop seeing you as a person and look at you as a fucktoy. Every inch of you is suddenly about giving him pleasure and nothing is about you anymore. Depending on mood, this is either incredibly degrading or incredibly hot, sometimes a shamefully sexy mixture of both. His eyes raped me.

But I felt nothing. I smiled, coolly.

His erection was suddenly immense. Wow, did he have it where a girl likes to see it. This guy was a power tool for opening women.

The problem with arousing a guy is, once he's aroused, anyone will do. Hard cocks don't care who they hit. This is a topic I've given a lot of thought to. No matter how aroused a woman gets, she cares at least a little about which cock gets inside her. Evolutionary forces have made it this way. We all know, deep down, that sex can mean pregnancy and picking the right father matters. We can never be truly indiscriminate.

Guys live in a totally different world. If a pregnancy happens and they don't like the results, evolution has taught them to just pack up and move on, seeking a better outcome. If they leave a string of babies behind, that just means they have a larger genetic footprint, so in a way, they win. And if they find some ideal girl and baby to settle with, they also win. Guys are wired to try until they get what they want. And women are wired to try to be whatever ideal the man wants, so he'll stay.

This is why, very, very deep down, we girls all know that all guys are commitment-hating jerks. But we open our legs anyway to please them, which is why, very very deep down, guys know that all girls are sluts. All of gender politics arises from these two hardwired facts.

Peter was ready to fuck and in a target rich environment. His eyes wandered everywhere, and I could feel his visceral reaction to every curve, every smile, every hair toss around him. If you want to hate men, become a reader and find out how just utterly ingrained male prickishness is. They really are always reacting and responding to a hot female form. They really don't care about anything but the shape and the movement, as far as sexual desire is concerned. See girl, want fuck. That's ninety percent of male thought on the topic of relationships. We make do with the other ten percent, which is dedicated to affection, concern, caring, and a clumsy attempt at basic empathy. Unless there's a football or soccer match on, and then ten percent isn't available.

I slipped a foot out of my shoe, slid it up his leg and over his thigh, and proceeded to give him a cock massage where he sat. That got his eyes back to me.

There's nothing like being a reader and hooking into someone else's sexual arousal. It's more addictive than sex and chocolate combined. It's impossibly intense; and because everyone is wired just a little differently in this area, it's just alien enough to be fascinating. I can't decide if hooking into girl or a guy is hotter. Maybe guy. Thinking about sex is like watching a fireworks display. Having sex is like riding the firework up into the sky and being there when it explodes. But hooking in is like being the firework, over and over and over. I could feel every rush, every soaring burning need, as the arch of my foot worked his huge, rigid cock into a frenzy of hunger.

"What the fuck are you doing," he whispered. To his credit he didn't bother to look around to see who could see what I was doing -- and just about anyone could.

"I'm fucking with you, Peter," I murmured back, softly, staring into his eyes. "Strip away the makeup and the Alaïa dress designs and I'm as hot as anything in here. If you're going to want something it's going to be me."

"Now you're the psycho," he growled.

"Then take me by the ankle and make me stop," I purred. "C'mon, don't you like making girls do things? Make me behave."

The way I was pushing on his sexual response, there was no chance he was going to do that .I ramped it up a little, smiling. I could make him come -- but I wouldn't let it get quite that far. No one d oes edge play like a reader.

"Stop," he snarled.

I just smiled more, and licked my lips. "So you don't like making girls behave? Look at that brunette in the body stocking and miniskirt. She's very turned on -- any girl in here is, a place like this just makes us hot. Can't you imagine forcing her to the floor and ripping that bodystocking open and making her lift up her hips-"

And then something unexpected happened. From somewhere -- it felt like everywhere at once -- something arose in his mind. Anger and will, comingled.

His hand closed on my ankle and he moved my foot off his cock, effortlessly, and then twisted it, slowly and powerfully, making my joints ache. I yelped, and twisted to relieve the ache, but he kept my ankle turned, effectively pinning me sideways in my chair.

"Listen up, pretty." His voice was a hostile hiss. "I have an issue with being told what to think. I don't deny you're fucking good at that foot thing but you don't get to tell me who to look at and what to fantasize about. Let's be blunt, I like them submissive and that's what you are, at least I thought so until you pulled that shit. Now I fucking want to come and that's awkward for a first date, but it's your fault and I'm wondering what you plan to do about it."

"Didn't take long to get you there. Been awhile, has it?" I taunted. I was being brave here; I never figured he'd be able to push back on my influence like that, and I was feeling very little-girl inside all of a sudden. But he didn't have to know that.

He ignored the jibe. "I want a hand job."

"Sorry. First date."

"Didn't say I wanted it from you." He dropped the ankle, stood up, and walked towards the brunette.

I blinked. I mean holy fuck. That wasn't confidence, that was fucking arrogance, so far over the top that it went from sexy to ugly. Ok, I'd deserved to be dumped after what I'd pulled, and I'd just given myself the speech on how guys don't care which girl gets them off. But fuck! First of all he acted like he really thought he could walk over and get handled by some rando girl. Secondly he'd broken free from my manipulation, effortlessly. I was a bizarre mixture of fury, shock, a twisted curiosity, and bafflement.

I packed up to go but I did linger long enough to see how brunette dealt with him. So I got the freaking shock of my day -- and there had already been some good ones -- when she gave him a big smile and a warm hello; oh shit, they were friends. As he talked to her, her eyes moved to me and she smiled, and that was it, I'd had enough. She really would give him a hand job and I wasn't going to be around to see, hear or read any of that shit.

I was out the door before I stopped to wonder where they'd do it. It was a hot club but not a sex dungeon, and a hand job was not something the management would condone in the open in that place. Ok, yes, the guy's bathroom was traditional for the dirty hookup, but Peter didn't quite strike me as the type. He did have a little fucking class. Alleyway? Not much better than a bathroom. His car was blocks away, and he'd be wanting it Right Now. So how-

Hotel across the road. No. Fuck no. It was one thing for Peter to get a hand job and then go home, date ruined, haha, I'll kill you some other night. But if they walked across the street and got a room and spent time together...

I don't know where the jealousy came from. I had no fucking right. I was one hundred percent responsible for him hooking up with his slutty brunette friend and there was no way I should feel what I felt. But I was out of control with a storm of ugly emotions, and it even crossed my mind that if Peter died in the room with brunette-bitch nearby, she'd get the rap, which was ok with me. And this was all fucking Ink's fault, he'd done this to me, made me this dark person with impossible desires, and then fucking Windy had enabled my ability to put rage into practice, this was none of my fault.

Being in a shiny, sparkly gold dress didn't make me inconspicuous and there are limits to how many people I can hide myself from. I did my best to lean against a building and just not be too noticeable, and waited to see if Peter would come out.

He did, with brunette in tow, and they walked straight for the hotel. Shit! Peter obviously had money, the hotel tab wouldn't faze him. And she was too fucking pretty, the sort that looks too innocent to know what guys want, but really knows it very well. She was going to make him come, and...

Fuck this shit! I headed for the hotel, without a plan, just a desire to hurt.

++

I watched as they got a room, and then walked up to the clerk. For her I put blonde hair on, and an even more provocative dark blue dress. I've never known an Asian girl with blonde hair who wasn't a brainless sex toy -- look, it's true, ok? -- and she'd instantly categorize me as either whore or slut, and hence someone to get away from her desk as fast as possible.

"Hi!" I said in a slightly slurred and too happy voice. Alcohol and ecstasy, that was me. "My cell phone died. I'm supposed to be with the two that just- just left" -- giggle -- "and I'm, like, which room is it?"

"There's a courtesy phone over there," she pointed. She really didn't like me. I didn't blame her. "You can call them."

"Oh, haha" (yes, I actually said ha-ha) "I don't know his number it's on the phone but the phone is like not working. Look, Peter is expecting me and I'm late and just like I want to find him and- and- yeah I just need the room number kay?"

But she wasn't supposed to give that out. "I will leave him a message for you. Name?"

"Susie." Giggle. "Hey, you're kind of cute."

That was enough to get her to look down at her phone and pretend I wasn't there. She punched in a call to his room, which of course involved dialing the room number.

And then she was suddenly very, very dizzy. I reached over and hung up the call and then slammed into her with more vertigo, and confusion, and an overload of nameless fear. She staggered and collapsed in a faint. Bad me.

I shrieked convincingly and bolted for the elevators in obvious terror. I tried to push blonde into the mind of the porter and doorman as they ran to the clerk; maybe it worked, I didn't stay to check. Room 328.

When I got into the elevator I realized to my horror that it had one of those fucking key card slots; but I calmed myself down and read the instructions; the card was only needed for the top ten floors, and Peter hadn't paid that much. Ten seconds later I was on the 3rd floor and searching for 28.

No one in the hallways. I found a food tray on the floor and a cleanish glass, and placed it carefully against the door to 328. Being a murderer, I wasn't exactly above eavesdropping.

"Oh, baby," Peter said. "I owe you one."

Laughter. "Oh Petey."

"No you don't. Peter."

"Didn't think that would slide by. Oh, Peter. You date girls you just find lying around and of course you're going to hit the occasional psychobitch. And isn't Maria good enough for you?"

"Still keeping track of my dating, babe? Maria's fine. This new girl just... I don't know, caught at my attention. She seemed special."

"Yeah, I caught that little massage she gave you. On the first date. I'd call that special."

"Heh. It was unbelievably hot, actually. It was hard to make her stop. But seriously, shit like that..."

"I could see how it pissed you off."

"Do you blame me? I mean, shit, manipulative as hell. Ok, so I picked a loser. Anyway, it was worth renting a room just to catch up with you, and I hope she saw us come in here. Let her think I'm getting a hand job. That should fuck up her evening."

I almost dropped the glass.

"Oh... so you don't think there's going to be an actual hand job?"

I almost dropped it again.

"Elena... babe... you know I didn't ask you for real."

I heard footsteps. She was walking towards him.

"Peter, babe... You and I have always... danced around the edges. But I like your game and this stunt you pulled to get back at your date... kinda hot, you know? Lean back. This isn't going to mean anything more than what it is, but I'm not going to tell Mark and I don't think you're going to tell Maria... Fuck, you're immense. And so hard. Now I'm not going to use my mouth, but... I know you're into that domination stuff and I'm curious, you know? If you can respect my limits and leave my panties on, I'm willing to... be a good girl for you. But are you going to be ok with limits?"

"You should have asked that before you put your hand there. You have no idea how fucking turned on I am, but... shit... ok. Your panties stay on and your mouth isn't going to taste cock."

"Or anything else. No kissing. I reserve kissing for my guys, and this is just... fuck you're BIG. I'd heard the rumors, but wow. I'm just going to unzip you-"

"No."

"No?"

"You want to know about submission. You're going to submit as of now. I'll tell you when it's ok to go further."

Rage. Unbelievable rage. All he had to do was ask girls to submit and they did. And he'd forced a girl? He'd fucking forced a girl.

An image of red rain, falling...

What had I just done? I'd forced him to feel things. But that wasn't rape. And he'd liked it, until his pride had gotten in the way. Not the same.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Are you going to obey, unconditionally, within your limits?"

A pause. And then a barely audible, shy "Yes."

"Stand up, hands at your sides."

"Ok. Um, what -- Peter, my skirt!"

"You look better without it." A pause. "You're shivering. Why?"

"I -- uh -- look, I'm not a prude, ok? You know that. But... but somehow a bodystocking and a skirt is very different than just a bodystocking..."

A few moments of silence, and then she moaned, softly. I read her. He was touching her and she was going wild inside, but that's all I knew. Where was he touching her? Was he pressing his cock against her? Fuck, she was suddenly burning.  

"This -- I- Peter, I'm ready you give you a hand job now, trust me. I want to."

"I know you do, but I want you to want more than that."

"Hey, our agreement!"

"I didn't say I was going to make you do more than that. But I'm going to make you want to. You're going to learn to want to please me. The hand job is only how the evening ends. You can please me in other ways. Mmm, Elena, such hard nipples. How rough do they like it?"

"Mmm... m'ahhh... ahh.. Peter, stop. Peter, I can't think, slow down, fuck, no, don't lick my ear! Fuck, let me move, I can't stand up when you do that!"

"You must."

"Fuck, stop, what was I thinking-"

A sudden slapping noise and a yelp. I could empathetically feel the sting of it, and I could read how she suddenly ached to yield to his demands. So hot! What is it about being spanked? It means the guy is serious and play time is over and now you have to be an obedient little girl or you'll be spanked again. When Ink was done with me it had just taken one good slap on the ass and I was trembling. And wet.

"Don't tell me to stop. You'll take what I give, within your limits."

"I -- I didn't - I didn't set enough limits-"

"You set the one that mattered. But I'm going to be ruthless with everything else... for example, you said you wouldn't kiss me; you didn't say I couldn't kiss you."




AngelWatch Ch. 06



She gasped and then, I think, he kissed her. Instantly I felt how she wanted and then needed to kiss back. The spank made her need to please him, and kissing is pleasing but she wasn't supposed to do it. Must, can't! I could feel her self-control shredding, and he broke the kiss at the very last second. Her moan was an animal thing.

"Ok.. I.. I get it now. I understand, thanks. You call this dominance and submission? I'll look it up when I get back to the apar- ahhhh! Fuck Peter stop that's..."

I didn't have to be in there to know what would happen next. The slap caused another animal moan.

"Say Stop again and you will be over my knee. Now kneel. I said kneel! Now!"

She did, so fast I heard the twin thumps.

"Now pull my pants down, no, I'll do the zipper, you aren't going to touch that yet... good girl. Now the boxers. Good girl! Just stare at it... did you know you just licked your lips? I want you to think about what cocks like, Elena. Maybe if that bitch I'd picked up had been a little less crazy I'd be forcing this into her right now -- oh, you find that hot? You'd like to watch her thrash as I pushed it in? You're a naughty one, Elena... so picture it. And touch yourself."

"W-What?!"

"You heard me. Unconditional obedience within your limits, you said. Rub your clit through the stockings and panties, and stare at my cock."

Her voice was very unsteady now. "Peter... I don't think... I can handle this."

"Do as I said. Now!"

I could feel shame and embarrassment and dark, hot need swirling in her. And then fear, more and more, as she put off obeying his demand. And then the explosion of need as her will collapsed and she began to touch. And then someone opened a door nearby and I had to make myself invisible to them, and I couldn't either listen or read while I did that. And the idiot was on a cell phone, and dawdled in the hallway taking about the hot girl he didn't really have in his room. Fuck, I hate men. When the elevator finally took him away I whirled back to the door and the eavesdropping.

"Wait, what? Vodka? Peter no, please. Please I'm not in the best control here and if you make me drink anything I'll never be able to stop you from-"

"From what? Crossing your limits? I told you I would not. But by getting you a little drunk you are going to understand that it's not your control that matters. It's mine. You're going to sip vodka and masturbate and pray I'm a man of my word."

"And what if... Peter what if I tell you no more limits."

"Say that now and I'll rip that lingerie off you and be inside you before you can whimper. But if you say it after I make you drink, I have to ignore it. There are rules to this, you know?"

"Two drunk, very horny people in a hotel room-"

"One tipsy, one stone cold sober. I never drink when I do this. If I did my demons would come out and you don't want that this evening."

"What if -- what if I did."

"Don't be a fool, Elena. Here is how this part goes. You take off the bodystocking and lie on your back with your legs wide apart, and I'll hand you the phone. Then I'll go down on you through the panties while you call room service and order us a half pint bottle of Absolut. If you stutter, I'll escalate."

"T-the bodystocking off. Bare boobs? You know when I came in here all I planned was to curl up against you and nibble your ear and rub your cock and I thought maybe if I was daring I'd open your zipper and rub you through your boxers, and I thought I was so, so fucking badass for doing that in a skirt and bodystocking. And this is just a tight bikini cut, you know I'm going to feel every single touch of your tongue-"

"You're talking too much."

"Please Peter! This is so fucking intense."

No it's not, I thought. It's hot, but you don't know what intense is, miss bad ass. But lie on that bed for him and I will make sure you know what intensity means.

"Now, or I rip it off, and that will hurt."

A few seconds of silence, in which Elena felt that pit-of-the-stomach quiver that comes with real nakedness.

"No, the shoes stay on. Now lie down."

I could feel the exact moment his tongue moved on her. He clearly knew what he was doing, though in her state skill barely mattered.

"Fuck! That's not just your tongue!"

"Right. This is my thumb, pushing against the panty right- hold still, Elena. I can be much more evil then this, I promise you. Now I'm going to shift... you're going to wrap your hand around my balls. You will NOT stroke or squeeze, no matter what you feel."

"They're the size of lemons, fuck... fuck I want to rub them!"

"I know. But you won't. And now, my tongue..."

A minute of the most perfect sexual agony passed for Elena. "Oh fuck," she gasped suddenly. "I didn't make orgasms a -- a limit. Peter it's not fair I know nothing about this-"

"But I like the way you learn. Here's the phone. 6-6-2."

I could feel her fighting to focus long enough to dial the three digits. Hot hot hot!

"Room service? I'd like a- a half pint bottle of ohhh, oh I'm s-sorry, a h-half pint of Absolut vodka brought up, I'm s-sory I d-din't h-hear that yes please on the room tab right away thank you bye! Oh fuck! Peter I know I can't say stop but I'm going to come, I never get turned on this hard and fast, I can't -- can't-"

Enough with this spectator sport stuff. I was dying to get inside Peter's head and understand what he got from dominance, but just right now I wanted to make Elena suffer for stealing my date. Or enjoying my date. Or whatever the fuck she was doing.

I reached in and pushed her arousal somewhere I could tell she'd never gone-

"Peter, Peter! I'm coming! No, don't stop, please, I was right there, finish me I'm going crazy I didn't know anything felt like this, Peter please!"

-and pinned it there with an orgasm just out of reach-

"OH fuck have mercy! I-c-can't th-think! Pet- fuck shit damnit-"

-and mixed in just a touch of oh-fuck-this-is-so-out-of-my-control fear, to make it extra hot-

Incoherent screaming. And fuck what an emotional jackpot that was! I suddenly understood what dominance was. Dominance was being so in command of another, in such total control, that you can do anything. It's total freedom. Not that you would choose do some things, and I know that good Dominants exercise vast self-control in their relationships. But the freedom is there - unrestrained, complete, total authority -- and it's a rush like nothing else. Without thinking I switched my focus from Elena to Peter and there it was, the blinding joy of ruthless control. I had to bite my lips to hold back a moan of sheer pleasure from what Peter felt. Oh fuck YES!

But I had a problem. Elena's cries were loud even through the door, and anyone walking by would find them fascinating. And while I can hide from people quite well, it's simply not possible to hide in front of a door with those way too interesting noises coming through it. Plus, they'd ordered vodka and the order could be coming along -- well, any hour, actually, this was a hotel's room service, after all. But it might also be here any minute.

Oh. Oh... it was too easy. I went to the service elevator and waited, sporting blonde hair again. Five minutes later a girl rolled a cart out with a small bottle of vodka on it, and started down the hall, gathering up trays and heading towards 328. I pretended to be on my phone, muttering "yes" and "of course, Mr. Sito" occasionally, until she got to the room; then I got behind her and with a single mental push, made her collapse.

Go fast go fast go fast -- find her key card, she almost had to have one that gave her access to the rooms. Got it! Check room 327, quick read through the door, no one in there, open the door, come on card, work, yes! Drag her in. Fuck, ok, she's not the same size, she's taller and plumper, damnit, I can do a lot with my appearance but I can't change everything at once... ok, the outfit is somewhat adjustable at least... throw it on over the dress? Yes, that will work. Brown hair color, wider face.., no, I can't hold an exact representation of her in my mind, it's just too many changes, but I didn't think Peter knew the staff here anyway. Mirror, fuckdamnit that looks awful, plus I hate being uglier than I am but I just needed to get Peter to open the door. Ok, drag the help onto the bed, shit, sister, I know you call it big-boned but let's just spend a little less time at the dessert tray ok? Ok I don't know what you'll think when you wake up half naked in bed, and you're probably screwed but oh well, ha, here's fifty dollars for your trouble, and won't it be funny if someone comes in and finds you half naked with money lying next to you, hahaha. Bye.

Out, lock, push the cart to 328, smile... knock. Focus. Smile. Read through the door furiously.

Shit, they were both heading this way! And that was a problem because Peter wouldn't give me a second glance but Elena was a woman and women are observant and check out other women and I can't really do an effective job of hiding from two people at once, I hadn't thought this part out too well-

The door opened. Elena in the lead, naked except for panties, heels, and an improvised leash on her throat, namely Peter's belt. Wow, Peter, I couldn't have been away for ten minutes and you've been a busy guy. Luckily, Elena's eyes were looking at the floor and staying there, her mind a cauldron of shame and arousal and shock at herself. And Peter was mostly focused on Elena, after one dismissive glance at me. I was inside his head when he looked at me, and based on what I felt in there I will never allow myself to gain weight in my life.

"Give her the tip, take the bottle, and hold it between your breasts, Elena," Peter rumbled.

"No tips," I said with my best Spanish accent. I handed over the bottle, which Elena dutifully placed between her breasts, and they were ample enough that she made that look interesting even without a bra. I really, really didn't like Elena, I decided.

Now or never. I pushed into Elena's mind and made her faint, and then slammed into Peter's mind and filled it with confusion and a natural concern for Elena, who was collapsing. And I stepped in through the door and closed it.

I found out later that Angelwatch thought I was a full blown puppetmaster (and that terrified them). In fact, I wasn't. I could push very strongly in a lot of areas and I could manipulate emotions, like, I think, no other; but literally taking control of limbs and directing motion was impossible. I always felt as if I could have done it if I could have focused more clearly and deeply, but I just couldn't get there.

I picked up the bottle, which fortunately hadn't shattered, and continued to focus on Peter. I had to be here but not here. Not quite like invisible, but more like irrelevant. I kept him focused on Elena as I took off the service girl's outfit, and then, on a darkly erotic whim, my dress.

What I was doing was something like hypnosis, but from inside, not outside. I'm sorry I can't explain it better. Reading and Writing are indescribable. Effectively, though, I could manipulate Peter's perception of reality very deeply, and right now, to him, I was just a voice in his head. It's all a dream, Peter. A very dark, sexual dream in which I'm going to make you do exactly what you've always wanted to do. And then I will judge you and condemn you.

"Make her naked, Peter. She's a toy. You're going to play with her."

"No," he whispered back, slowly, almost incoherently. "Agreement. Panties on. Unless she asks."

I imitated her voice, begging to be naked, and made him believe it was her. At some level he knew something was wrong, and he resisted, but I knelt down behind him and reached under him and massaged his cock. Yes, I could have gotten the same effect from inside, but, well...

Fuck, his dick was something. And it's always hot hot hot to read what effect touching a cock has. I worked him, making him think it was Elena's hand. Suddenly he tore off her panties, and jerked at her shoes until they came free. She tried to wake up, but I slammed her back down into a semiconscious state.

"Bed," I whispered. I found staring at Elena's naked, helpless body oddly fascinating. No wonder men want us like this. It's so pretty. "Put her on the bed. Tie her up with..." I cast my eyes around -- "the cords from the window blinds."

"No knife. I gave it away for you."

Holy shit. Even through all this, at some level he knew who I was.

That was both horrifying and hot. I took off my bra, and shifted and pressed his mouth against my nipple. He sucked, frantically, and I moaned, and rubbed my clit against his hip.

"Good boy. Suck harder. Isn't Elena pretty? Isn't her helplessness sexy? And so wet for you. What' it going to feel like pushing into her bound body? She'll have no choice. Your huge, thick, hard cock forcing into her..."

I wet my hand on Elena's slit and stroked his cock, firmly. It throbbed, and the soft skin slid smoothly over the hardness inside. I ran a fingertip under his huge balls as I stroked, letting my fingernail tickle him. His need to fuck went off the charts and I wallowed in his ruthlessness and intensity. Nothing is hotter and make-me-shivery-scarier than a man in this state.

"What kind of noises will she make when you take her? Whimpers, sobs, gasps? Will she talk dirty, or beg you to stop? But it doesn't matter because she can't stop you. You're big and thick and hard and she'll be bound and helpless and wet, and maybe I'll put my hand over her mouth so she can't even scream; do you want to be rough with her, Pink? I mean Peter. Peter not Ink. Use her for your pleasure and watch how she responds."

His cock was a rigid bar now. I took my hand away. "No more fun until she's bound to the bed."

I got up and wheeled the cart in, and then picked up a knife from one of the collected trays. "Cut the cord."

He took the knife, and obeyed. He believed Elena wanted this and that made anything he did alright. That's how guys are. If they can get away with it, it's ok.

He walked back with the cords and that huge erection, swinging. I fought back an urge to kneel and suck it. I'd been trained to do that... but I was free now. Now men would do what I wanted.

He moved her to the bed and I arranged her limbs, and tied her for him, nice and tight. And then knelt on the bed between her and him, and licked his mouth while I rubbed his cock again. "Do you want her or me? Or both? Both would be so hot and even I don't know why. Make her cry and you'll have me. I never got to cry, you didn't -- he didn't let me. But she will. Do you like having your big, huge balls rubbed? Fuck you're so turned on, is that what you felt the first time you controlled me? You made me so helpless and taught me to find that hot, and I can't turn it off."

He wanted to come, and I edged him, shifting so I could tease the head of his cock with my thighs and pussy. His hands started to twitch. He was on the verge of grabbing me and raping me and that was so achingly hot I moaned. But no, it was Elena he was going to rape this time.

I laughed, softly, and moved aside. And with a quick mental poke, woke Elena up and then slammed her into the most aroused state I could contrive. Her hips rocked unconsciously, and Peter pounced like an animal.

Rape victims come from rape. I had when Ink raped me; he'd forced me to come over and over, violently, every time. Rape isn't a cock pushing inside you; that's just a physical sensation. Rape is being forced to like it and to want more. That's what happened to me and that was now happening to Elena.

I couldn't be in both their heads at once, and switching back and forth rapidly just doesn't work, though it's hard to describe why. Things blur. But I'd fucked with Peter's head pretty good and I didn't think he'd find his way back to reality quickly, so I settled into Elena's head and felt anew what it was like to have to take a cock you hadn't agreed to. I masturbated furiously and let Elena's and my feelings mingle, teaching her to love her rape even as I bathed in her fear. She was shattering internally, terrified and desperate to stop her skyrocketing arousal, but really we wanted more. We were going to come at the same time, because we were being raped together. I curled next to her and pulled Peter's head to my breast again. "Fuck one girl and toy with another, I know you can't resist that, no guy can. Suck it. Bite it," I whispered.

Elena sobbed and then cried out. His cock was a ruthless monster and I -- she -- we -- were masturbating as a form of worship to it. I was in her head so deep and every good feeling got amplified between us; so did the fear and horror, and then Peter sucked my nipple in slow and deep and then bit down in that perfect, painful way, and everything became brightness, and she twisted and arched in her bonds and we came, savagely. I put my hand over her mouth to silence her screams, and that only intensified the orgasm, and I screamed for her, and her hips bucked, trying to milk Pink's cock, oh fuck yes, deep down she wanted her rapist to come, that was how bad and broken she was; and I reached into Peter's mind and pushed as hard as I could and gave her our darkest desire. Cum gushed and she and I came again, sobbing for mercy we didn't truly want, but needed more than anything in the world...

I made Elena pass out again, savagely, and entered Peter's mind.

"Now we talk," I whispered in his ear. "You're a rapist."

He shuddered in fear. He didn't know what was happening but he knew everything was wrong.

"No," he whispered. "Once, it was a mistake. We had a fight, she said she wanted to prove herself to me, we started to have sex and then she said stop. I didn't stop, she tried to push me off and I pushed her back down. Found out later I'd hurt her, but she didn't tell me. It was wrong. Been more careful since."

"She never recovered."

"She wouldn't talk to me. I tried. All a mistake... who are you? What are you? You... did something..."

"I'm her. The girl you raped. I'm every girl that was ever raped and struggled with guilt and fear and desire and shame. I was just Elena as you raped her. I made her like it because that's your fantasy, that girls always like it. She loved it. She wants more. That was my gift to you, I destroyed her for you."

I climbed on top of Elena, lay down and opened my legs. "Lick me."

He resisted, but I pushed and with a moan he settled between my legs and used his tongue. He was good at it, and I wrapped my legs around his head, massaging his back and ass with my feet. I came again, and I could feel him starting to harden already. He was a perfect fuck machine, made to convince women to open their legs, and I squirmed and got my legs back under him, so I could catch his cock between the soles of my feet. Mmmm, so hot, and if I pushed him hard enough and deep enough I could force him to come again, but I wanted him more conscious and aware than that.

"Gift... why? I don't know you."

"But I know you. Kiss Elena good night now."

I squirmed out of the way, and reached between those muscular thighs and pet his cock more as he kissed her unmoving lips. It would be fun to make him come like this, watching it spurt into the sheets as he raped Elena's mouth with his tongue, but I didn't have unlimited time. And I couldn't focus indefinitely; I needed to save something for my getaway. This had to end now.

"I gave you a gift because I felt I owed you something. Because of what I have to do. I need to spill the ink now."

He shuddered, knowing what was coming, but I pushed hard, making him too frightened to move. I pushed harder and harder, watching fear crumble his mind, and then lifted his head and pushed the knife into his throat. He bled all over Elena and then his mind went dark.




AngelWatch Ch. 06



"Repentance isn't enough, you see. Nothing is enough. Even killing you isn't enough, but it's what I have to give. Acid raining down, making the world clean..."

I cleaned up, wiped my prints off of everything, got dressed, fucked with Elena's head more, scrambled the physical evidence, and took the knife for good measure. At the door I pushed into Elena's mind, waking her up, and then I closed the door behind me. I was at the elevator by the time the screams started.

She was probably never going to recover, but seriously, she'd horned in on my date and what did she expect?



AngelWatch Ch. 07



"Windy wake the hell up we have a lead!"

Windy groaned, loudly, and pulled a pillow over her head. I pretended not to notice the empty glass on the bed stand. Windy didn't drink often, and she lacked the precise biochemistry to make it a worthwhile and pleasant experience. But it put her to sleep, and other drugs hadn't worked out well.

But then she was up, cursing, and pulling clothing on. I -- Marcy, you haven't met me before -- felt the wash of pain and frustration pour out of her as she tried to focus through the leftover effects of her drinking.

"A lead?" she said, a bit harshly. "Tell me."

"She left a living victim and witness, a girl named Elena, and we have her Windy and you can come read her right now. Eric and James are with her and I've been in her head, she remembers things so come on you need to see her right away!"

I can't help how I talk. I have a number of issues, something like autism and something like nothing you can know anything about. I have trouble controlling my speech and slowing it down, I have trouble understanding when others talk. My brain is wired at the wrong speed, it runs much too fast and all my interactions suffer as a result. (I can write because I can go back and fix things.) I have no empathy at all, even when I read, so I just have rules I follow to keep myself out of trouble. What I do have is the ability to read like no one else. Unlike most of Angelwatch I can't write and sometimes people here pity me for that reason, and I once slapped Windy across the room for being condescending to me. We get along better now; I have a rule: I must not slap Windy even when she needs it.

Windy started to brush her hair. "Right away!" I said again. "She's very damaged and you will want to help her, we took her from the crime scene and that stressed her further-."

"Yes, Marcy, I will, but I need a few moments to clear my head, and-"

"Her heartbeat is unstable because the damage is so deep so it has to be now you don't want her to die."

The hairbrush dropped as Windy darted for the door. "Next time mention that first. Take me to her."

**

Windy likes to touch people she works on; I don't know why. It doesn't really help with the focusing, and given how creepy it is to be written -- I've had people write me several times, so I know -- the touch is not comforting. Windy finds the touching pleasant herself, but it doesn't make her any more effective, in fact I feel it distracts her. I've moved her hand off people she was reading a few times, but she hasn't taken the hint.

She immediately laid her hand on Elena's forehead. Elena was a mess, inside and out. There were bruises where she was tied, both her wrists and thighs, and along the underside of one breast, and for some reason on the side of her foot. But they did not look serious. The real problem was that the pathways of her conscious thought had gotten tangled in her autonomic functions and she was messing up her own heartbeat and breathing. I guessed that Keiko had somehow connected them up to make Elena pass out; it's easier, I'm told, to affect conscious thought than anything else, so if you want to affect physical aspects, many writers have to open pathways between the conscious and autonomic systems that in most people are closed. Right now they were wide open in Elena now, and she had no idea what to do with them, and accidents kept happening.

It was interesting being inside Elena's mind while Windy got to work. Windy is an excellent writer and a good reader, but she misses so much detail and sometimes she gets lost. I could see what she was changing, and so I knew when she was doing it wrong.

"No Windy more towards... happiness."

There's no good way to describe where things are in the brain. It's not about cerebellums and hypothalamuses. But there's a rough correspondence between emotions and he "touchable" places in the mind... it's an imprecise way to give directions but there isn't a better one.

"Alright, I see it now," Windy muttered. "Keiko likes to use pleasure to mess people up. Really evil technique. This is such a mess."

"She remembers everything, she's valuable."

"Yes. Shut up please."

Windy can't talk and read at the same time. I can.

Time passed. Elena was damaged in many places and one by one, Windy broke connections that shouldn't have existed. Elena's heartbeat stabilized, and then her breathing became normal. And then I realized what Windy was doing next.

"Wait why are you waking her up? I can see where she goes in her sleep, she doesn't have to be aware of us."

"There's no way to clean out the memories, Marcy. She's going to be permanently aware that Keiko had powers. So we're going to have to talk to her, real actual words, to calm her down and teach her not to be terrified and above all never to talk about it, especially not to the police. I candyminraind."

"Candywhat?" My mind scrambles audio input sometimes, especially if it's not a phrase I'm expecting to hear. Everyone is used to repeating things for me.

"I can't do it mind to mind."

"She's not a potential reader," I objected. "She can't know us or be one of us. That's the rule. She's only valuable for what she knows other than her intrinsic human worth."

I know everyone has intrinsic human worth, because God says so. But I have seen a lot of what is inside people and I wonder rather terribly, whether God can have made a mistake.

Windy looked at me, eyes flashing for a moment. She did not like my valuation of intrinsic human worth. She felt it was too low. Then Elena gave a half-sob and Windy got back to work.

"Elena, listen to me. You are ill and have been though a terrible experience, but you are going to be ok. Please just listen to my voice and try not to think too much, you need to remember things slowly and in pieces. You are safe. You're going to be ok."

"Peter!"

Elena was still being raped. That was how her mind saw it. She was in mental and physical pain and everything was disjoint and incoherent and her interpretation of all that what that the rape was still happening. Windy's words flowed inward but had no meaning; Elena was largely aphasiac, but I could feel her fighting to rearrange the chaos and get meaning back.

I took Windy's wrist and moved it from Elena's forehead. Windy tried to put it back but I held firm, and then Windy read better and understood. The touch was getting tangled in the rape memories, and Elena began to cohere better once the hand was gone. Once Elena got to a certain point, I spoke.

"Cohere, coherence, focus on the sounds there is meaning there you remember it Elena, focus on the sounds and find the words underneath you will remember it is all still within reach, find the word and then the qualia and then -- there! Hello Elena Windy is your friend and she will help you!"

Yes I'm crazy. I'm damaged in ways no one can reach but that damage makes me understand damage in others better. I could read Elena's reaction to every word I said, and I adjusted what I said, word by word, in response to what she felt. I started with an unusual word because we all have a mechanism in our brains to look up the meaning of obscure words, and we are very practiced at it. Using a lot of words Elena knew she should know was just adding more drops to a rainstorm of sounds she'd been drowning in, but making her fall back on an instinctive search for meaning focused her mind on something other than the overwhelming terrible raindrops. I used the word cohere to make her cohere, and I was very proud of that. Windy would not have thought of it. She should not have slapped me because I have my strengths and my uses. But I forgive her, because that is my rule for Windy.

Elena abruptly curled into a ball and sobbed. Memory is a bitch and hers had just bitten her. Do not pet strange dogs, my mother had once said. Do not pet strange memories is a better rule.

Windy spoke again. "Elena, you are safe now. You are ill and have been through a terrible time, but we will help you, and I promise, you will be ok."

"I killed Peter-"

"No! False memory, you were bound and could not have killed Peter," I snapped. I don't like false memories. And there was a flowering of relief inside Elena's head, because she understood my words and they made sense to her. Keiko had pushed guilt into Elena, making it all her fault. That had to be broken down.

Windy glowered at me for speaking so harshly, but even she could see my words had helped. Everyone thinks that kindness is the right answer to everything, but it's not. It's only right half the time. I know I do not understand compassion directly, but I know what it looks like and sometimes it has teeth.

"No," Windy repeated. "Peter is dead but you had no part in that. You were forced to watch it happen, and that's part of why you're so frightened. But you are safe now."

"He- he-"

"Raped you," I said. "But not really!"

But that wasn't the right thing to say, I am not perfect through I do try, and the anger coming from Windy this time was enough to make me flinch and step back. Windy doesn't conceal emotion well. As sensitive as I am, that's a problem.

"Leave NOW," Windy mouthed at me. I didn't, but I did move across the room to a chair, and made it a rule I'd be silent here except for emergencies.

"Peter wasn't himself," Windy said. "He was also hurt by the same thing that hurt you. Nothing that happened was his fault."

"It wasn't his fault at all," Elena whispered. "I... wanted..."

"Elena, you know you didn't really want all that."

"I did. Oh God I did."

She wasn't crying yet. If I was a writer I'd have pushed in and found the tears and let them go. If you're a girl you have to either cry or scream or usually both. Until those happened she wouldn't get better.

"No," Windy said, softly. "I know what happened to you. Everything felt both good and terrifying and you didn't know how to cope with it. You wanted to fight, but the fear and the other sensations made you feel paralyzed. It wasn't your fault. Or Peter's. Do you remember... someone else?"

She started sobbing, but in fear, not from grief. Which doesn't count.

"No," she said, shaking in terror.

"Elena..."

"No! She wasn't there!"

"She?"

Terrified sobbing, and terror blazing through the room like the roar of a fire-breathing dragon.

Windy took a deep breath. "Elena, listen carefully. There are people in this world who can change the way others think and behave. It doesn't matter how. One of them found you and Peter, and made you both behave in ways you would not have. You saw her. She did evil, terrible things and we have to find her and stop her."

"I... she wasn't there. I could feel her but not see her. She was invisible- she was- I felt her. Hatred, snarling like a dog, claws and teeth. She-"

Suddenly she was aphasiac again. I could feel her decohere.

Windy put her back to sleep with a single, polished mental effort.

"Shite." Windy wasn't a common user of harsh language and she likes old English forms when she indulges. "I have no idea how she did that. Pushing fear is easy, and given a few weeks I could, if I were evil, train someone to loathe and fear a person, or even a thing. But Keiko can do it in a single evening. Do we know how long she was with them?"

"Yes," James said, from the corner he'd been quietly sitting and staying out of Windy's way. "Under an hour. Keiko impersonated a waitress and used a keycard to get into an adjacent room, before she got to Peter. People heard the screams afterwards. The police have it all timelined. Maybe less than forty minutes."

Windy didn't even ask how they knew all this. Angelwatch tries to avoid interfering with police investigations anywhere, because that just leads to deeper investigations and more risk of Angelwatch's discovery. But in this circumstance, rules were broken, not the least of which was screwing with police brains and snatching Elena from the crime scene, and that was a problem but it was a problem for another day.

Windy looked into Elena's mind again, but it's all different when someone is sleeping. She didn't get much. I looked in as well, and heard the baying of dogs. Interesting...

"Conditioned fear, this specific, this strong, this fast. Who cares if she can puppetmaster, if she can make people so terrified of her that they can't see her or speak of her? No legal charge against her will ever stand."

"A problem for another day. Can you fix this girl?"

"Sure," Windy said, bitterly. "She's a lot more impacted than Keiko was, but it's all repairable. A week or two and she'll be right as rain. By then Keiko can give us seven or fourteen more victims; she can permanently keep all of Angelwatch busy just repairing damage. We'll never keep up."

Windy sat, and lowered her head to her chest, and the misery washed over her. When it had spread to every corner of her mind, she looked up. Tears were running down her cheeks.

"James, I recommend a kill. Will you put it to a vote?"

"Yes," he said.

No. This was an emergency, so I was allowed to speak. "No, don't bother. Because I will not vote yes, this is not right, she has intrinsic human value and you are doing it wrong, you are not seeing Keiko as she is, and Windy you should because you are good at this but I am better and I will tell you what you missed, Keiko is horrified at herself and this is all because of self-loathing, just look at Elena and you really see Keiko. Trapped by cords she cannot break, made to crave what she hates, taught that it is her fault when it is someone else to blame, don't you understand, Keiko was raped and now she's reproducing, she is making the world to be like her, she is inventing a world in which there are no more rapists but everyone is already raped. She is a victim here."

James cleared his throat. "We've voted to kill before, Marcy, you included. Human value doesn't defend everything."

"I will not vote yes," I repeated, because they were not listening to me. "Keiko is only damaged. I am damaged and you do not kill me so you can't kill her! I will find her."

"Marcy," Windy said, "these are beautiful sentiments and I am so happy to hear you speak them. But you cannot go looking. You don't write. You don't block. Keiko would kill you without effort and you couldn't do anything to stop her. You are the worst choice in the world."

"No I'm not, I will find her because I can and you can't and it will be ok I'll show her the way back she doesn't want to be broken she wants to be found or she wouldn't have left Elena alive."

I was out of the chair and through the door before Windy or James could put me to sleep because they were both going to but I am very fast. But I could read-hear them talking as I fled.

"Can she do anything to help, really?"

"Marcy? She talks to the wind. She thinks it answers. No she can't help. She's only going to get herself killed."

I laughed as I ran. I do talk to the wind. The wind does not hear. The wind cannot hear. But the wind can sense, and it knows you as it flows around you. And it carries what you say to it anywhere it needs to go. I went outside, dancing, into the wind.

"Keiko," I called out, "I need to find and meet you."

My wish was a leaf on the wind now. It would soar. I would find Keiko. I would teach her the rules she was missing, and she would return to Angelwatch, and then I'd never have to see damage like Elena's again.

The wind does not hear, but Keiko would.

++

It took a few days.

"Keiko," I whispered. "I found you."

She woke up slowly. She knew who I was. We'd met a few times and to a reader I have a very very distinct mind.

"Marcy, isn't it? Hello, Marcy. How did you find me?"

She had a knife in her hand, but that didn't matter. I pretended I didn't see it.

"There was a bruise on the side of Elena's foot and it was not a rope mark and I wondered very much what it was because Elena was only marked where the cords had been, thighs and wrists and throat, except for a handprint on her breast where Peter had grabbed her too hard. But that didn't explain the foot but I realized it was that someone tried to pull her shoes off and didn't unstrap them right first, which meant Peter did that. You were usually barefoot when you were raped weren't you, that's why Peter took the shoes off, anyway so I pictured what you would have done after Peter died, I've been inside your head and I know you and I know what you feel and after killing Peter you were both scared and triumphant and you knew they'd never find you by themselves because you are so very smart and so very powerful. But you're afraid of dogs and I remembered that when I was with Elena because you somehow left a trace of that in her mind and it occurred to you that you might fool people who could see you but you couldn't do anything about police dogs who could be given your scent and track you that way and you were very proud of yourself for thinking of that and there were her shoes on the floor and it occurred to you to switch shoes with Elena. That doesn't actually work Keiko because the human scent is more than just the feet and I don't think you knew that but you walked out wearing her shoes which meant you had to do something with yours. They were your best shoes, weren't they? You wanted to keep them because you're a girl and girls keep nice shoes that fit, so you put them in one of those plastic bags the hotels offer for laundry service. There was nothing else you could do with them. Plastic would hide the scent you thought. You don't wear perfume, do you, that's interesting, and did you know that raped women worry about how they smell? How many times a day do you shower even now? You try to be scentless but dogs can track anything. And so can I. Not by scent, but by seeing things. Keiko you were walking down the streets in a pretty dress in shoes that didn't match and carrying a tacky plastic bag. You tried to hide but even you can't hide from everyone at once and the streets around the Galaxy are home to a lot of fashion conscious women and people noticed you in your pretty dress and wrong shoes and plastic bag and the police would never have thought to ask the questions that I did. The people who saw you lead me to this block and then I just waited. You can't change your appearance all the time from everyone and you can't hide your mind all the time and so I spotted you and we didn't expect you to be staying here because it's such a low class place but then you don't have to worry about rape and robbery and you don't have much money do you because you only kill but don't steal. And hello by the way."

"When do you actually breathe?"

"That's funny."

She stood up. "Marcy, leave."

"You're not very good at being authoritative. James and Windy are much better and I disobey them all the time. Anyway you need to come back to Angelwatch."

++

I looked at Marcy carefully. She was unnoticeably ugly, and socially odd, and Angelwatch had become her whole life, simply because there was nowhere else for her. She was also the easiest read on the planet, and for her this was all so simple. I'd made a mistake, but it was time for me to come home.

"That was a crazy, twisted chain of logic you used to find me."

"It was the fourth one I tried. The first three didn't work."

That was Marcy. She was inhumanly persistent. The odds didn't matter; she'd just keep trying until she ran out of ideas, however crazy.

"Leave," I said again. "...I can make you, you know that." But I quietly laid the knife I'd palmed aside, because it was obvious that Marcy was no physical threat. She ignored the knife.

"You can make many things happen. You could even kill me but don't do that, I'm not a rapist, I'm not even a writer as I'm sure you know. Read me Keiko."




AngelWatch Ch. 07



"I am, silly girl."

"No not that, you're just looking for intentions and evidence of traps. I'm here alone though, read me, Keiko, all of me."

"That takes forever and there's nothing in you I want to know about. And even if you came alone, Windy will have you tracked. So I have to knock you out and leave."

"I'm much harder to follow than you are." She held out her fingers. "See? I burned off my fingerprints for this. I sprayed my skin with a plastic clear spray to bind my scent better. People don't see me because I'm not pretty and don't talk to strangers and I don't carry anything electronic, and these are new clothes. And Angelwatch is too busy looking for you to spare anyone for me, so we have a few minutes to talk."

"Sorry, nothing to say."

"Read me."

"Why?"

"I'm what you are looking for."

"You're not a rapist, Marcy."

"Rapists are your excuse Keiko not your goal and I know that because I read very very well and you aren't even trying to block me. I'm what you're looking for, read me, Keiko, every corner and as deep as you can go and remember I don't know how to block so it isn't even hard."

Reading -- especially the kind of slow, deep reading Marcy was talking about -- is fascinating, even a bit addictive. It's as close to seeing the world through someone else's eyes as a human can get. I didn't get to do it anymore -- it requires lots of time and a subject whose willing to sit there and basically do nothing but daydream under your guidance, for hours. Windy had done it to me when she'd first met me, as she'd fixed me up. I'd done it a few times within Angelwatch as an exercise. I didn't have the kind of life which allowed for it anymore.

And there was no denying that Marcy, with her utterly contorted views of the world and of human contact, would have been a fascinating read.

But just because she believed she wasn't being traced, didn't mean she wasn't. In a world where tracking devices were about the size of a thick quarter, proving she wasn't wired would have involved shredding of her clothing and a body cavity search. And I had no idea how to search body cavities, other than sticking fingers places and hoping. I couldn't even be certain she hadn't been knocked out, and had one implanted somewhere.

So now I had to send her to sleep, pack up as quickly as possible and run. I was already mostly packed; I'd always known that a visit from Angelwatch was always a matter of when, not if.

But... she couldn't have been traced. If Angelwatch knew where she was, she'd never have made it here. Windy would rightly consider me a danger to Marcy and would have stopped her from actually meeting me. Unless that's what they wanted me to think? Everything is complicated when your adversary is a clever alien psionic do-gooder.

Screw it.

I knocked Marcy out and caught her as she fell. There was no need to get heavy-handed (heavy-brained?) with her; she herself was not malicious and didn't deserve my ire. I lowered her to the floor, and packed up my bathroom supplies and the three outfits in the closet -- I never kept more than that out at one time. Two large suitcases in hand, I headed for the door, spidey-sense tingling because everything is nervewracking when your adversary is a clever alien psionic do-gooder. But even with my brain turned up as far as it would go, I couldn't find a reader anywhere. Poor foolish Marcy really had come alone.

This is where you'd expect a twist in the story. Windy had some amazing high tech cloaking technology and could creep up on me undetected. Or the black helicopters drop out of the sky and net me. Or they'd diddled Marcy and now she was actually a powerful writer and was about to get up behind me and blast my brain. This is where the hidden strength of Angelwatch should be revealed and the evil bitch -- me -- gets taken down by the super sci-fi alien device or the truly cunning plan or the overwhelming might of Angelwatch's super-secret black ops HALO team.

But, no. Angelwatch is a very low technology operation. It had to be. Specialized high tech gadgets require big research teams, big budgets, and difficult-to-hide testing. Your comic book heroes might have secret underground labs, but out here in the real world, those labs have to be constructed and stocked and restocked and run up big electric bills and have wastes to dump and personnel who talk too much. It's hard to hide that kind of work. Even governments end up with secrets leaking out; Angelwatch can't ever take that risk. So no amazing technology; the fanciest hardware used is magnets. Ditto on the black helicopters and HALO teams and other do-you-have-any-idea-how-much-budget-and-personnel-it-would-take-to-maintain-it military strengths. And if Marcy could have been diddled to have more powers, it would have happened long ago.

Angelwatch is what it is, individuals contributing time. There's computer expertise for a few members, and basic training in martial arts, spying, doctoring and disguise for everyone, and the rest is just reading and writing and keeping an eye out.

It was time for me to leave London. Angelwatch had a big presence here, also in Tokyo (of course), and a number of other major cities. But Africa, South America and Eastern Europe were poorly covered. Eastern Europe was probably my best option.

Then my spidey sense went off. Marcy was waking up.

I spun around and saw her struggling to sit up. She should have been out for hours. I cursed, fluently. I was going to have to do to her what I'd done to Elena, fuck her up pretty bad.

"Don't", Marcy said, thickly. "Don't hurt me. I'm not a threat. I wake up easily from being knocked out and I know you just want to hit me harder but that will damage me and you must not do that, it's wrong and I don't deserve it. That's how you justify lashing out in your pain, because the victims deserve it but I haven't done anything bad and so I am safe."

Fuck this shit. She was right, she didn't deserve what I could do to her. But I needed her to shut up, so I blasted her with the sensation of physical pain, and she screamed and curled up in a ball. This didn't do real damage, mental or physical, but she'd be incapable of moving, speaking or reading as long as I kept it up. If I balanced it right I could even get her to crawl away from me. But there was nowhere I could usefully make her crawl to. There were no rooms in this apartment I could lock her up in that would hold her for even five minutes.

Sobbing, she turned her eyes to me, and then began crawling. Towards me.

I turned the pain up as far as I knew how to make it go. She threw up, but she kept crawling towards me, spasmodically thrashing. I remembered from somewhere that some autistic people processed pain differently than normal.

She just kept coming, crawling like an agonized spider. All I was doing was torturing her pointlessly... cursing, I stopped writing, and she curled into a ball again, crying and throwing up repeatedly.

"Marcy stop," I said. "Leave me alone."

"No," she said. "You come with me or I follow you."

With her vast skill as a reader and her ability to wake up that quickly, I was screwed. I could knock her out again, and hold her unconscious, but when I left I'd have to let go of her brain, and she'd wake up. I could tie her up but she'd start screaming and these walls were thin. Tie and gag her. No, people can still scream through gags, unless you fill the mouth with so much cloth that you risk suffocating them. Hit her over the head. No. I didn't know how hard to do that, I might kill her.

Her range was obviously phenomenal even without a magnet, and it wasn't like there weren't magnets all over the apartment -- microwave, dishwasher, washing machine, speakers, phone. (Angelwatch gets special training on finding magnets, which I'm sure is no surprise.) If she got loose she'd find me quickly. I could wrap my head in foil but then I couldn't write people and hide from them, and I'd be easy for witnesses to remember.

Think Keiko think!

There was no other option. I had to kill her, or mess her up so badly she'd risk dying.

But she had to deserve it. She needed to have done something wrong, something worth killing her for...

Cursing again, I dropped the suitcases and went back to her, and took her head in my hands. And started to read, deep.

As I've probably mentioned, mind reading doesn't get memories. It gets... I suppose there will never be a word for it. Most reading is about finding the places to touch to write. It picks up surface emotions easily, and what I like to call unconscious emotions as well. I can sometimes pick out a person's deepest fears and hopes, and every once in a great while I can get a "picture" of what someone is thinking about. But what you can get, with a long, deep read, is an emotional map. I can tell if a person is kind or cruel, smart or foolish, wicked or pure, many such things... I can know what you are like.

Marcy just lay there and let me look. After a moment she raised her hands and took me by the wrists, and moved my hands off her head; I remembered she didn't like to be touched. So we sat on the floor, just two minds visiting places normal humans don't know exist, and moments passed.

She was, I thought, the strangest person I'd ever read. There were huge pieces of her emotional framework which were completely missing, and what had filled in the spaces looked entirely random to me. Her sense of time was warped. Her perceptions of the world were wildly skewed towards sight and taste and smell; hearing and touch were bizarrely scrambled. She was neither kind nor cruel; she had no reference for these things. In some ways she was more alien than Windy.

But what came boiling out of her, what was undeniable and overwhelming, was her innocence.

It was hypnotic to look at. There was so much she'd never understood or had no interest in understanding. There was no desire for personal gain. No sexual experience whatsoever outside of the very basics of self-pleasuring. No craving for affection and none of the evil things we do to ourselves or others to get it. The place in a soul where most people have vast, complex, twisted, intricate shapes, was in her a sphere. It was impossibly simple, entrancingly pure, beautifully harmless.

I was suddenly sobbing, and I did what no sane reader ever does, and turned my reading upon myself.

It's not something that truly works. The thing doing the reading moves, and in moving blurs what is being read. Windy had warned me not to even try; of course everyone tries it anyway but you never get what you are looking for. But even in the blur of self, I could see that I was no sphere of beauty. The contrast was horrific; too terrible to take in.

"No," said Marcy. "You are looking at yourself from the wrong place, you need to move more towards... sorrow and shame."

Sorrow is an easy place to visit but shame is a place no one can go; to survive you need to keep it away from you. Again, no words can describe this, but even as I tried to take her advice I struggled to hold myself steady against the impossible furious wind that sprang up in my mind, pushing me away.

"No," she said again, "Listen to me, you can't go straight against it hard you have to move at it non-aggressively, you have to be accepting of the wrong before you can see the wrong, this is easier for me than it is for you because I have accepted myself and I have so little shame and yours is so vast but if you let go of it you can get near."

"Never let go of your shame or it will destroy you," I gritted.

"False," she snapped. "Let the dog off the leash and it will bite you but it will not kill you. It only hurts and for you it will hurt very much but you can't have what I have until you let that happen, let it tear a hole in you and then you can enter that hole and from there you will see yourself clearly, as clearly as you ever can."

Her words made sense to me -- which I'm sure sounds bizarre to you -- but her advice was impossible. All irrational fear is really self-loathing in another form. I fear the vicious dog because I am like that myself, I am cruel and violent; deep down I always have been, even before Ink. Some fear spiders because they are afraid of being entangled by their own imaginations, becoming the weaver trapped in the web of their own desires. There's something awful in everyone. If we were perfect and sure of ourselves, we'd have no irrational fears at all. I was very imperfect and full of fears and terrors; and she was asking me to let the thing I was most afraid of in the world, attack me.

"I do it often," she said.

"I can't do it at all," I sobbed.

"If I could write I could help you. Windy can write."

"No! She'll chain me up! I have to be loose to destroy the evil!"

"You are the evil," she said, flatly. "You raped Elena. You're the thing you fear most in the world. Windy just did you wrong, she misses things sometimes. I know about Ink, he raped you and you became pregnant with him and now you are him and you swallowed Keiko and she's terrified and looking for the way out. But you have to get in to get out. You are cruel and you are frightened and they are the same thing. Odin had to stab himself with his own spear, his own power to gain knowledge, why do you think there is any other way?"

I didn't know how this had happened. Marcy was turning me inside out without anything but a few simple reads and some nearly incomprehensible babbling. She didn't have a single weapon, unless innocence is a weapon. Maybe it is. It's not one I know anything about.

In savage horror I blasted her as violently as I could, with self-loathing. And as she collapsed I leapt up and ran, grabbing my bags. I'd probably killed her, but she'd deserved it for being what I could never be, despite all my power and all her brokenness and weakness.

To a sinner, sinlessness is a sin. I judged her guilty of innocence and the sentence was death.

Sobbing and almost blind with shame, I ran outside for a taxi to Heathrow.

++

The journey to Heathrow was a nightmare. The traffic, and the unrelenting fear...

I hate roads. They take you past so many people so quickly, and sometimes powerful emotions come sailing out at you, claw through your mind and pass on. It's hard to block all the time.

I wasn't sure if I'd killed Marcy. I'd hit her so savagely. No. I needed to think about the airport, and buying a ticket with the limited cash I had.

Deep down I knew what my plan had to be. I didn't like it, but everything aligned. I would become a whore.

I would be the best whore ever, being pretty and very, very capable of giving pleasure. And I would meet men, so many men. The bad ones would die, the good ones I would make... pets out of. Men make sex toys of women all the time; I'd return the favor. I'd command top dollar, so money wouldn't be a problem again. And I wouldn't be raping anyone, because men wanted to give what I demanded of them; you can't rape the willing, and all men are willing. Or they are when you look like me.

I'd build up power and influence this way, I thought, as I struggled out of the cab. I decided I didn't want to pay the cabbie so I knocked him out. I wouldn't be coming back to London after all.

So where was I going? I stumbled into the sprawling lobby, wracking my brain for obscure places, which, because they were obscure, was hard to do. Um. Latvia. Was there really such a country or was that just a made up name? The price of being raised American is that you don't really know if Ubetchastan is a real country. Wait, no, there's a map of the world, what a cute thing to have in an airport. And Latvia existed! Capital... Riga. Ok, so let me find the departure board -- wow. Riga rated four flights a day from -- wait, was there really an airline that called itself Wizz Air? Seriously? Ok, forget Riga...

It was suddenly raining out. I'd thought it was clea-

Red rain, falling.

Oh... shit.

She was across the lobby and making her way to me. And waving. Of course she'd be waving. And smiling.

"Keeeeeeeiko!"

I'd kill her. Well, not literally. Ok maybe yes literally. But not in a crowded lobby. And hell, I didn't even know if I could.

"Wiiiiindy!" I mean what else was I going to do?

We ran towards each other and hugged.

"Nothing stupid," she whispered. "Video cameras everywhere."

"...said the girl who extracted a witness from a murder scene. You've gotten desperate."

"You've made us so."

We unhugged and stepped back. Smiling. We're girls, we're good at this. Well, I was a girl and Windy was a practiced actor.

"Coffee?" she said.

"Love some." We both hate the stuff.

We found some. We were both reading wildly, each other and everyone around us. "Awww," I said. "You came alone?"

"Everyone's so busy."

Right. At airports, ferries and boats, and major roadways. Angelwatch London, fully deployed.

We sat.

"Pity about the rain we've been having," I said. She hadn't let up on the image of red rain, falling.

"It's needed," she said. I shrugged; that conversation was a dead end.

"Clever," I said, dropping into sotto voice. "You dispatch Marcy to flush me out, and spread the net and wait."

"Marcy wasn't sent out. Hunting was her idea. There was no point in trying to stop her. But once she was out I realized she'd flush you out eventually, so yes, we spread the net."

"So you tricked her into looking for me."

"Don't be absurd. You can't easily trick someone like Marcy. The way she reads?"

"So I guess she lived?"

"You did her very little harm. You can't blast someone with self-loathing when they've already come to terms with themselves. You couldn't have chosen a worse attack. And I believe that was deliberate."

"Not consciously deliberate."

"It still makes you a better person than I feared."

"I can't be redeemed, Windy. I am coming to like what I am."

"You'll be the only one, then."

"You know that's false. I can coerce people into liking me, even loving me."

"But that won't count. And the Keiko I knew could do that without powers. Without coercion at all. But I think she's dead."

"Yes, she was the first one I killed. Let me leave, Windy. I'll go far away and do my work where it won't matter to you."

"I'm not human. And therefore I'm not tribal - I don't favor one kind of human over another. Anywhere you go you're a danger to people who cannot defend themselves. You must be stopped."

"Then put out a kill on me. You can't, you know."

"I tried. Marcy blocked the vote."

I sat there, stunned. Completely stunned. I had believed Windy would never give up on me. And Marcy, who I'd ineptly tried to kill, had been the one who saved me?

I couldn't take it in.

"I- I don't know what to-"

Windy chose that moment to attack.

I was terrified. Completely terrified. Windy is not human. Reading her is complex to say the least and she blocked with the best of them, making her a terrible and powerful opponent. She was also the girl who had once stuck a knife in my arm, and between the two she was perhaps the only person I was legitimately afraid of. I had, I knew, more raw strength than she did, but she had expertise, and she'd been deep in my mind and knew where everything was. Her attack looked like nothing I'd ever seen before and I panicked and stabbed back ruthlessly, with the deepest, darkest, cruelest despair I knew.

And then I was looking into her sad, unblinking dead eyes.

"W-Windy?"

She didn't react. The dead do not hear. The dead cannot hear.

++

I shrieked and ran in terror, out of there before anyone could notice her limp figure slowly sagging to the floor. Behind me, people would slowly -- oh, so slowly! -- see her collapse, and approach her, and find she was dead, and call for help. Maybe -- maybe the doctors could restart her heart. Maybe-




AngelWatch Ch. 07



I was outside, my luggage left behind, and somewhere with it my soul, and every hope I'd secretly cherished and never even knew I'd held. Deep, deep down I'd believed that the insanity I had embraced would be cured someday; that the woman who had rescued me from Ink would come and rescue me again, from myself. I'd killed my only hope of sanity, I had condemned myself and sentenced myself, and I fell to my knees in a red rain that no one else could see, the blood of Windy and everyone I'd ever killed, washing over me. I screamed to the sky, and it was a sky I'd gone too blind to see; and willed the blood to change to acid and kill me, but the rain stayed red, and I looked in myself to see why and I couldn't find it, and then I understood: that had been Windy's last act; she'd made it so it would always rain blood on me; and for that I'd killed her.

Oh God. I stared around in a blinding rain that to everyone else was a soft, clear mid-morning. I'd killed her. Oh God. Oh God.

++

I didn't know where I was; I'd been stumbling for a long time. And I didn't know how she'd found me, but then, it was Marcy, and I'll probably never know.

She looked at me with pitiless eyes. "Windy is dead. You killed her."

"Yes," I whispered. I'd been crying for, I think, hours, and I had no voice left. It was twilight, as far as I could tell in the rain. "Marcy, kill me."

"No I don't really know how but you do deserve it, did you know that Windy was the closest I've ever come to loving someone? Though she could be very annoying and I shouldn't have slapped her. I will miss her so very much, but Keiko you are dying inside and dying faster all the time, don't you want to live?"

"No!"

"Then stay here and grief will destroy you and I don't think it will take long, it is not hard for a strong writer to commit suicide I'm told but if you want my advice you will live."

"Live? I am a monster."

"Yes you are but you are a monster with work to do. There is Elena and we are not going to be able to fix her correctly now that Windy is gone, but you can I think."

"Marcy I'm not someone who helps people. I tried to kill you."

"Yes, very rude, I asked you not to. I have never loathed myself like that before for slapping Windy; is that how you feel about yourself all the time? I think so."

She was impossible to reason with, and I curled in a ball, shivering in a warm rain. No more words.

"Keiko, are you strong enough to cure my damage?"

I shook my head No. I wondered if I could make myself aphasic. In the distance I heard dogs, baying.

"Can you at least cure Elena?"

I nodded Yes. I wondered if I could actually destroy my own will. Leave my unresponsive body to be raped and then murdered; that was the only fitting punishment for me. The dogs howled, closer now. I thought I could do it, if I tried. I started to read myself, to find the places I'd need to break.

Marcy slapped me, hard. "Bitch get up, get up bitch."

I shook my head No. She slapped me again, much harder, making me sprawl sideways. I went limp; if she wanted me up she'd have to lift me as deadweight.

She kicked me where it hurt like hell. "Keiko you have work to do."

She was attracting a crowd. That wouldn't stop her; she'd keep kicking me and end up getting herself arrested; and a woman like her in prison would be abused... I sobbed and sat up.

"Leave me," I whispered, brokenly.

"You can die after you heal Elena, do you really want to leave this life with nothing but blood on your hands?"

"I killed Windy." I didn't know how to explain to her that what I had done was unforgivable. I'd killed the one person who could save me.

But then I thought... Unforgiveness? Salvation? I opened my eyes slowly, watching drops of blood fall from my eyelashes.

In Windy's religion, falling blood was a symbol of forgiveness.

Had she known I'd kill her, and had she preemptively forgiven me?

Innocence is a weapon, and so are mercy and love. They fell on me suddenly, like hammers, and they were stronger than I could ever be. I shattered inside, sobbing in self-loathing.

"Marcy, help!"

"Stand up."

"I'm afraid!" And I was; I was terrified. I was surrounded by innocence and love and mercy and they were far, far stronger than I was. I was tiny, infinitesimal, and they were vast, and somehow aware of me. I shattered further.

But the baying of the dogs had stopped.

"Stand up anyway."

"I'm too small!"

She probably had no idea what I meant, or more likely didn't care. Her hand gathered my hair and she pulled me up.

Some guy's voice broke in. "Here now miss, I don't know what's going on but I think this is a matter for the poli-"

The crowd that was forming around us was not good news for Marcy. No police! I curled my shaking hands into fists and blasted fear into the crowd around me, and they scattered like leaves on the wind.

"Walk," Marcy said.

"The rain... I can't see." I fumbled for her hand and after a moment, she took it and pulled. She wasn't too pleased to be holding my hand, but she walked and I followed.

We walked under a bridge, and the rain stopped beating down on me; even though it was an illusion, it operated like real rain. I wiped my eyes and looked around, able to see again. "Do you see the rain?" I whispered.

"No, but I know you do, now keep walking, you have work to do."

I looked out into the red downpour, covering London in a rich, dark red haze. "So much forgiveness," I whispered, shaking.

"Not more than you need. Now walk."

++

The people of Angelwatch were not happy to see me, and the loathing and fury beat on me. I wondered if I'd be put to another vote. But it didn't matter. I was here to fix Elena and then they could do as they pleased.

Marcy pointed to a door. I went through.

++

"Elena, wake up."

I had been with her for six hours. I was exhausted. Healing is so, so much harder than doing damage.

And I could not take away her memories, so healing her was only part of what was needed. I was not done here.

I realized I was hungry. That didn't matter. Outside this room were the members of Angelwatch, from London and two other cities.

Windy had taught me that someone like myself could defend against one person, or possibly three, or in theory even up to seven. Outside the room there were twenty-two angry people, and under the circumstance I didn't think even Marcy had voted to spare me.

But that, again, did not matter.

Elena opened her eyes, slowly, and looked at me. And gasped.

"Yes, you can see me now; and I'm the one who hurt you. But I won't hurt you anymore. I've fixed what I can and all that's left are the memories, but you will learn to deal with them in time. You'll do it better than I did, anyway. I am so, so desperately sorry for hurting you."

"Who -- what- "

"Never mind what I am. I'm human, or almost. I have an ability to affect others, but I promise I will never hurt you again and neither will anyone else."

She sat up, and shivered violently. "You were there when Peter r-rap-"

"He didn't. That was me. Whatever you saw or felt... it was all me. You'll just have to believe me. I was raped by someone, repeatedly, and... well, it's complicated. I became a very horrible person and I hurt others, so now I'm trying to fix what I can and you don't need to fear me; I'm going to be executed soon for my crimes."

"Executed...oh. You are American, you don't understand, England has no death penalty..."

"England doesn't have one, but ... my crimes will not be punished by England. Never mind about me. Listen to me, Elena. What I did to you is horrible and wrong but the worst of it is that evil wants to spread. Even though you were hurt, you must never hurt others, and you must never allow yourself to be hurt again. There are temptations both ways, after rape. Avoid them both, with all your strength. Don't let it spread. And something else... the way I hurt you, the way I affected your mind... you can't ever talk about it. To anyone. Ever. It is a secret you must keep. There are very few people with my ability --and they are not evil, as I am. But if this were known about, they'd be hunted and killed, because everyone would fear that they were all like me. And they aren't. When the police find you, and that will happen as soon as you are ready, tell them you wandered off in shock and stayed with a friend; tell them you were raped and then saw a suicide. I know that's unfair to Peter's memory, but you have to let it be that way."

She was still shivering in shock. "Why- why did you kill Peter?"

"I thought he was a rapist. And he was, once. And I thought that made it ok to kill him. But I was wrong. I was unfit to deal out punishment and so punishment will be dealt out to me. Elena, this is not about me. I'm just a horrible accident that happened to you. Do not forgive me, I don't ask for it, but simply forget me. Just remember that Peter was fond of you and you wanted to do a nice thing for him. It's not your fault or his, that you were raped, or he was killed. And as long as you accept that, you will recover. I swear to you that's true. Don't make the mistake I made, don't assume you are permanently broken, just accept that a terrible tragedy occurred and it was in no way your fault, and then you will be able to move on."

"You... killed Peter. You put a knife in his throat. I remember it now! And you're in here with me!" She screamed. The terror had finally broken through.

I could dimly feel the attentions of twenty-two people, focusing intently on Elena.

"Yes, but -- no, Elena, it's not worth screaming again -- I am leaving. I also just lost a friend, the way you did. You will recover from your loss. I'll never recover from mine. Someone will be with you in a moment and they will get you back to your life. Good luck, and I'm so very sorry."

I stood up and walked out.

++

I crossed paths with Jane, someone I'd only once met before, as she was going in. Jane was in effect a counselor. She'd do more for Elena than I ever could. She didn't look at me and she didn't let me in her head.

I kept walking, into the room with twenty-one people. It was a modest living room, and consequently a bit crowded. I moved to the middle of the room and knelt down, and because I was not equal to these people and had no right to speak or look at them, I was silent and my eyes were closed. There was a window in the room and outside it was, of course, raining a rich red. But I was inside and no forgiveness would fall on me, not in here.

I dropped anything that looked like a defense, and waited.

And waited.

"We've never voted on someone twice ," James said, coldly. "And so we've never seen anyone survive two votes before."

"Oh." I said. "...Marcy?"

"No," Marcy said. "Windy voted in absentia, she left instructions in case she died, and we discussed it and decided that to honor her memory we would count her vote."

The final, shattering blow came down, from a hammer made of solid love. Tears poured out, and then I sobbed as I never had before. I tried to be silent, for I had no right to make noise here; I had no right to grieve, not among these people. But the sobs would not stop. I would kill myself quietly, later.

"In fact," James said, "Windy's instructions were detailed and specific. You're to stay here. We're to put you on a suicide watch, and we are to forgive you. Forgive you, of all people. So I have to ask you not to destroy yourself."

++

I was taken to another room, with a window. I was brought food and someone stayed with me, in four hour shifts, around the clock.

I tried suicide once, trying to write myself to death. The guy that was with me instantly did something to intervene, and that put an end to my effort. I didn't try again.

The hammers were still at work. I was being beaten fine, by a love that I had sometimes doubted and always hoped in and never understood. It was a love that did not stop reaching out to me, even from the grave I'd sent it to.

++

"I miss Windy," Marcy said, the next day. "She was in some ways the only person who was really a person to me and she wasn't even human but maybe that's what made it easier, but she's gone and I have never lost anyone before and it hurts in a way I didn't know I could hurt."

Silently, I read her, and as always, silently, she let me. The sphere of her innocence was there, but now there was a crack in it. I had done that.

++

"I'm sorry," I told them all, three days later. "All I can tell you is that I was insane, and I didn't know it until I saw Windy dead in a chair in front of me. I know now I was only lashing out in pain and only wanted to hurt others the way I was hurt. People who are raped don't often get to take retribution on the world, and suddenly, I could. And did. And it was the worst thing that could have happened.

"I don't know if I'm really sane now." I looked out the window. "I still see it raining blood. I'm never going to see a normal sky again, and so I will never spend a day without being reminded of how I killed a woman who would have given anything to help me. Maybe all that happened is that I've replaced Anger with Sorrow.

"I know I can't go to the police and confess. I know you don't want me to die, or at least Windy didn't. So I'm sitting here, alive. I'm out of tears, and as broken as a human being can be.

"I can't cry anymore, I can't even feel anymore. If I'm to be kept alive, as something other than punishment... I need something to do. I don't trust myself to know what. So I'm going to put myself in your hands. I submit completely. Tell me what you want me to do, and I will do it."

They started me on dishes and taking out the trash. Then vacuuming. I did it silently and well. Then I was told to tend garden. I lived like a monk, under vows of silence and celibacy, growing food for Angelwatch. As autumn ended I was set to work volunteering for charities, bringing meals to the ill, helping with soup kitchens. I wrote no one and read very little.

On New Year's day, Susan called me to her study.

"Keiko... what have you learned?"

"That serving makes a difference."

She nodded. "Our powers are vast, Keiko -- until you compare them with the problems in the world. Then we look meaningless and weak. You do more good handing out a cup of soup to someone than avenging wrong. Our strengths have a place but not in social justice, is what I'm saying."

"I know."

"Do you want to continue to serve?"

"I'll do whatever Angelwatch asks."

"That was a fine answer in August. But this is January. What do you want?"

"I want to help people. In any way I can."

"With your powers?"

"If needed. As you said, it doesn't take a mental power to cook and serve soup."

She looked at me, assessing.

"Will you help rape victims?"

I smiled mirthlessly. "Yes. Believe me, the temptation to go after rapists is long dead. It's not the dangerous topic it once was, for me."

"How is the rain going?"

"It's snow now, on cold nights. Dark red snow. Please... I'd like for this hallucination to be lifted. I haven't seen the sky in months."

"It will end when it is supposed to."

"Am I still a danger to people?"

"Everyone is a potential danger to people, Keiko. We all choose what we do. You are not a danger to people if you choose not to be."

"I choose not to be."

"Very well. This is being a quiet winter; Angelwatch is not so busy in London. For now, I think we've gotten rid of all the rogues in England. But there is patrolling to do, always. Looking for trouble is most of our work. Will you do it?"

"Yes."

I walked the streets of a dozen cities and towns, and winter turned to spring. On Easter Sunday I woke up and found the rain had stopped and the clouds were parting. It was Windy's last little commentary -- she wanted to make sure I understood about the forgiveness. The reminder was not needed, but I knelt down and wept.

Sorrow is an easy place to visit, and a necessary one, if you want to be a decent human being. And shame is necessary as well, however hard. I'd learned about both.

Susan met me outside my room, as I went downstairs to cook breakfast for everyone. She was blocking very carefully; not a good sign.

"Good morning, Keiko. Have you looked outside?"

"Yes. It's going to be a beautiful day," I said, smiling a little crookedly, and wiping away the last tears.

"I'm glad you've earned back the sky and the sun. But, Keiko... you need to know. Angelwatch has voted again-"

I was instantly numb.

"and the vote was a clear majority, so-"

Wait, what? Kills were not based on majorities-

"-I have been asked to request that you accept the leadership role of Angelwatch West."

"Wait... what?"

"You will do Windy's work until her replacement arrives."

"Susan, I'm a murderer and a rapist and even ignoring that I am in no way qualified, I deserve to be punished, not honored-"

"It is no honor you're being offered. It's more penance. Leadership here is hard and inhumanly exhausting. We're not a fun bunch to manage and you haven't even met the Tel Aviv crowd yet. Be thankful you won't have Tokyo to deal with."

"I- I can't- Susan I can't-"

"You better. And let me be clear you'd better do a good job. In a few years some sort of portal opens and Windy's replacement arrives. They won't like hearing she's dead - and they will have things to say to you. You'll want a few years of good behavior and sterling work to fall back on. So. The title is effective immediately, but you can cook breakfast first."

She left.

++

Why have I written all this?

In part as penance.

In part because stories about these powers have started to leak out, though, thankfully, only on the kind of websites that no one will ever take seriously. If Angelwatch is ever truly discovered, I want documents out there that tell the story from our side -- that we are here to solve a problem and contain a disaster, and nothing else. People like Ink -- and the girl once known as Keiko - are a rarity, and they are dealt with. (I have taken Windy's advice, and changed my name, to Alila).

In part because I miss Windy, and reliving some experiences with her as I wrote this... it's as close as I can come to seeing her again.

And most of all to remind people, including myself, that redemption is a real thing, and so is forgiveness. We all do wrong, and sometimes we do wrong we can't fix. But we can also do what's right, and we must. Hope is based on people doing the right thing, and without hope, the human race would never have survived a minute outside the Garden of Eden.

For those that have been raped -- report your rapes. Do it as soon as you can. Don't assume you'll just shake it off -- some do, many don't. Cling to hope and ask for justice. You won't always get what you want, but if you ask you'll get what you need.

Rapists, repent. Confess what you did and take the punishment coming to you. You think you're above it all, but you are the lowest of the low, and down deep you know it. Change your ways, because justice has a way of catching up, and if it does it won't go well for you.

Windy... I miss you, so, so much. Your forgiveness is what healed me and you left me with a debt I have no way to repay, and that hurts. But thank you. Oh, dearest Windy, I miss you...