Chapter 30

Beep ... hiss ... beep ... hiss...

I gradually came to my senses.

There was light streaming through the window of the hospital room. It looked very much like the one I had woken up in ... a lifetime ago.

I didn't understand. The last thing I knew, I was hundreds of yards from shore and slipping under the waves. There was no way I wasn't drowned.

I heard a noise and turned my head to see Samantha, reading what looked like the history book we had used back in high school. She must have sensed the motion and looked up.

"You're awake!" She rushed over and gave me a quick hug then bolted to the door and stuck her head out, "He's awake!"

She came to my side. "We've been so worried about you."

The door opened and my mother rushed in.

"Jake, honey. Thank God."

She hugged me tightly.

I looked at the two women I loved more than life and my heart danced – but I was confused, I had seen both of these women die. Was this how one arrived in heaven and was greeted by previously departed loved ones? I certainly felt as though I were alive, and heaven was the last place I expected to end up.

"I don't ... I don't understand. How are you here?"

"I've taken a leave of absence from work, don't worry, we can afford it."

"I come here everyday after school." added Samantha.

"But how are you ... how did I..."

"Samantha called nine-one-one when you lost consciousness in her kitchen. Thank God you were there and not up your room all alone. We almost lost you. You've been in a comma for two months."

A doctor came in with a nurse on his heels.

Samantha and my mother stood back while he poked and prodded.

I tried to make sense of it all. A coma? So everything that had happened had been a dream? Samantha and my mother were alive! Kirsten wasn't paralyzed and Tiffany hadn't been brutalized into insanity. Mike was still my best friend. Lea was ... well, Lea was obviously a figment of my imagination, the Lady and the Tramp as well.

The only one who'd been hurt, was me.

I could live with that.

I looked over at Samantha and realized that we hadn't had a relationship, we hadn't made love and we hadn't gotten married. We would never do any of that. But she was alive, so I could live with that as well.

I looked at my mother, she smiled at me with that smile I thought I would never see again. Another thing I could live with. So what if I didn't have amazing mental powers.

Of course, I was back to being a loser geek in Tiffany and Kirsten's opinion. That sort of hurt, but since they were okay, it didn't bother me too much. I would miss them, but then, they weren't the girls I had come to love – those girls were the Tiffany and Kirsten my mind, and a certain part of my anatomy, had wanted them to become.

"Nurse, we can remove the catheter but keep him on the saline." Said the doctor, wrapping up his examination. "Clear fluid diet for the time being, but it looks like he'll be able to tolerate more substantial stuff very quickly."

He turned back to me.

"This may sound a little strange, considering you've been asleep for two months, but you need to get some rest. Your visitors can stay, but if you try to get out of this bed without a nurse helping you, I will make them leave. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

My mother held up her phone, "I'm going outside to call Mike, I made him a promise. I'll be right back."

She headed for the elevators and Samantha came to my side, taking my hand.

"In case you were wondering, Thad was sentenced to three years in prison for felony assault. Gary got a year in county for accessory but the other guys got off with probation."

Her hand in mine, her gorgeous face and the vivid memories I had caused my cock to swell.

Ever had an erection with a catheter in?

Ouch.

Then I remembered what had happened right before I passed out.

Great, I thought, now I had to go through that all over again.

Might as well get it over with.

"Sam?"

"Yeah, Jake?"

"About what happened in your kitchen, you know, right before I passed out."

"What are you ... Oh, that. I'd almost forgotten about it. Don't give it another thought. And don't worry, it's our little secret."

"I'm sorry, Sam."

"You have nothing to be sorry about. It wasn't your fault ... it was probably mine. I suppose I should be apologizing to you.

"You didn't do anything except be you. Beautiful, caring, wonderful you."

She was looking at me curiously, I decided, hell, in for a penny, in for a pound. I had tried not telling her how I felt, and needed mental powers to get her to love me. Maybe without those powers I should try the alternative route.

"I love you, Sam. I've loved you all my life."

She had a pained expression on her face.

"I love you too, Jake. I really do. As for what happened ... it's not that I don't want to ... but ... it's just that..."

Her expression said that she had something she desperately wanted to say, but couldn't bring herself to say it.

Was it possible?

How could my dream have known?

It looked like she was loosing the battle so I took a runner and said it for her.

"You're gay?"

The pained look was replaced by shock.

"You knew?"

"Not until now."

If my dream had that right, what else could be...

It would only take a second to check.

I was terrified to try it – at that moment I was so exhilarated by the possibility that I didn't want to risk finding out it wasn't real.

But I had to know. If Samantha's sexual preference and feelings toward me were real, what else from my dream was real?

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes as I let it out.

Then I did ... well ... what I remembered doing for, what seemed to me to be, the last two years.

The blackness exploded with Samantha's angelic auras.

I opened my eyes, she was looking at me, still in shock.

I spoke before she could.

"Did you mean it, just now, when you said you'd like to, but couldn't?"

"Of course I did, Jake. I love you dearly, but I can't give you what you deserve. Not in that way."

"What if, just for sake of argument, you could?"

She took my hand again.

"Jake, if I could love you in that way, I would. It would be a dream come true."

"Sam ... we have to talk."

It was mid January.

I was sitting in a coffee shop, waiting, pretending to do homework.

Samantha had needed a demonstration before she believed me. Once she did, she gave me permission to alter her gender preference, by just that little bit. We'd missed our Christmas Eve together, I was a little sad about that, it had made that night very special to us. But we were on track for Valentines Day. That would be appropriate, and this time I wasn't going to cum in my pants.

The abilities I'd had in my dream were real, with one addition.

I was really, really good at thinking things through now.

Precognition, albeit difficult and teaming with all the various and convoluted probable outcomes, had not been part of my powers in that dream, but then, the whole dream had been precognitive.

That's right. I could see into the future and my coma dream had been one of a thousand paths that, at the moment of my powers awakening, had been open to me, my friends and the world in general. A path I did not want to travel again.

Well, not totally. Parts of it would repeat.

Lea was real. I was sure about that.

I'd driven by that house and the white van was there. I parked across the street just long enough to see the man come out of the house, and it was him.

I hadn't freed her at that point. I did feel some guilt about that. But, she would need Kirsten to help her regain her sense of self, and we didn't have her ... yet. I was still taking two years off her stay in hell and that had to be worth something. That, and two years worth of women that wouldn't end up missing, tortured and ultimately buried anonymously in the woods.

Janice Kent and the young lady murdered before her eyes would live on in blissful ignorance of the ghastly bullet they had dodged.

Samantha didn't yet know about her plans for Tiffany and Kirsten though she had said some things about using my abilities to make those 'elitist fucks' make up for the awful things they had said about me. She had those plans, they were there in the back of her mind, she just hadn't brought them out front yet.

And just in case you were wondering, they were her plans – I hadn't planted them.

I'd considered telling her the whole thing. My dream and what had happened to everyone – but after giving it some of my special brand of 'consideration', I knew the best outcomes came from letting her come to her own conclusions in her own time.

I'd sent my mother a clumsy command in the middle of December and she had immediately gone to the phone.

I was growing impatient. He should be here by now, but like I said, there were a lot of variables. I just had to wait, the primary event would happen, despite the diversity of the details.

Someone sat at my table and I looked up to see Phillip. The rat-bastard, son of a bitch fucking assassin himself. Anger welled up but I controlled myself, assuaging my emotions by remembering his head in the misshapen condition I had last seen it.

I needed him. I wanted to slide into obscurity as far as the talent community was concerned and to do that I needed him to remove what he had done to my mother. I could do it, but it would look suspicious the next time he checked on her and everything would go rapidly downhill from there. I would let him remove his controls, then I could free her from her self made mental prison.

"Can I help you?" I asked, innocently.

"I hope I can bother you for a moment of your time, young man."

"What do you want?"

He started talking, bullshitting me about being my father's son and all that. I half listened, giving appropriate answers when needed. I was concentrating on my aura. I'd practiced manipulating it with my eyes open. I could feel when I made contact.

Phillip was a Psychic and would see me trying to connect – if I did it the way I used to think it had to be done. Auras surrounded our whole body. I had been taught that head to head contact was the way it had to be done. That's where the auras were the strongest and that's where the mind was. Also, I had been taught by Psychics who didn't have telekinetic control of their auras. They simply willed their aura towards their target – how it got there was not up to them.

I didn't have such limitations.

While he talked, the bit of aura around my big toe stretched out along the floor until it hit his foot. I could feel it connect and looked him in the eye as I made my way into his mind.

He would accompany me to my house and remove the shit he'd done to my mother then return to train me. Just like before.

He would find that I wasn't a very good student and my telekinesis was very sub par. He would quickly lose interest in me and, in time, forget about me altogether.

A series of a dozen time bombs would see to it.

Alek would show up, I think he was already sniffing around. He would also get discouraged at my unimpressive ability and, since he would never find out about my differences, he would not involve us in his plans. Without my mother to temp him, Phillip wouldn't be able to turn him. The resistance wouldn't be crushed and he would continue with his grand scheme.

Good luck to him.

He was trying to remove what he saw as a threat to the world and I looked at him and his organization as the lesser of two evils – and believe me, it took quite a while until I could think of him without picturing him kneeling next to my mother's dead body.

I had my own grand scheme and it involved quietly – very quietly – removing threats to individuals. Evil mind fuckers and terrorist fuck wads beware. Your days of operating with impunity were about to end.

This time I would make no mistakes.

This time, I could think it through.

Epilogue:

Ten Years After: A Space In Time (with apologies to Ten Years After)

I sipped gingerly at the hot coffee while watching Kirsten apply cream cheese frosting to a fresh hot batch of cinnamon rolls. Tramp lay at my feet, he knew that once someone was sitting at the table, food wasn't far behind and with the new additions to the family the dogs had a good chance of getting scraps.

With no meddling from me, Kirsten had gone to culinary school this time around.

I know, there really wasn't a first time, but that's how I still looked at it – the memories were simply too vivid.

She had always been a good cook, but once she had some training on how to utilize various herbs and spices, along with all the other nuances and sciences of cooking, she became a spectacular cook.

My mother used a big chunk of her money to open a diner. Kirsten served up simple fare, but damned tasty simple fare. It did well and we had grown to three diners which were run by folks trained and overseen by the sexy gastronomical genius. They did well enough that we could launder a ton of cash through them fairly quickly.

I was watching Kirsten partly because I was anticipating the rolls, but mostly because she was wearing just the top piece of a set of pajamas and, with her apron tied tightly around her tiny waist, it highlighted, rather than concealed, her alluring curves, showed a nice expanse of her sexy legs and every so often a flash of her tight little ass.

Have I mentioned that I could watch that girl do just about anything for even an extended period of time?

'Almost-five-years-old' Jeremy wandered into the kitchen.

"Auntie Kirsten? Can I have my cinnamon roll before breakfast?"

She turned and bent to the little blonde haired boy.

"Well, Jeremy, let's talk about that. Have you considered how that might affect others in the house?"

"Yep! You always make enough, so no one would get left out."

"What about me? I am going to make you a very special omelette this morning and how do you think I'll feel if you don't eat it?"

"I'm extra hungry! I promise I'll eat every bite."

"Then I'll tell you what. When I break them up, I'll save the biggest roll for you and after you eat your omelette you can have it with a glass of chocolate milk."

As Jeremy was agreeing to these terms, Lea came in. I expected a steady stream of arrivals from this point on – the heavenly aroma of Kirsten's cinnamon rolls tended to have that effect.

"Good morning."

"Mommy!" Jeremy exclaimed running to her, "Auntie Kirsten is giving me the biggest cinnamon roll this morning."

"Is that so?" She hefted him into her arms, not difficult for her even though he was large for his age. Her training had her in top physical shape.

This time, she was sixteen when we saved her. The asshole was killed, of course. We walked in on him cutting up a corpse while forcing Lea to make his new girl watch. Interestingly enough, Mike snapped his neck this time too. He walked right up to the confused son of a bitch and ... you should have been there.

I've always felt badly about not saving Lea a few days earlier and sparing the life of that poor girl.

But there were things that had to be in place and acting too soon to save Lea would have had consequences that were unacceptable. Much further reaching than the life of one person. I know that sounds callous, but when one can see all the probable outcomes of any decision, one must make such gut wrenching choices.

'One' thinks it sucks.

The saddest part, was that the family of the murdered girl never knew, and never would know, what the sacrifice of their daughter and sister meant to the future of the world at large. Trust me, it would have been of some small consolation.

Yeah, it was that big.

After explaining my precognitive ability to my mother and friends, along with the energizing power of emotions, I had spent about month in extended periods of meditation, accompanied at all times by at least two loving women to give me strength. I had explored a plethora of possible futures and chosen a particular path.

We were starting a dynasty of those who watch the watchers, so to speak. Our next few generations would remain in the shadows, building numbers, investing in legitimate money making ventures and honing our abilities until our descendents would become the clandestine powers behind the powers behind the throne.

We had also discovered the talents behind terrorism and were working to make that particular pastime a historic footnote, at least on this continent. That venture would save many lives and be the stake that financed everything else. It would be about four generations before we could extend our reach overseas.

After her rescue, Lea'd had Kirsten to help her again, but she'd also had my mother. Since I happened to know where I could find quality phony papers, Lea, under her new identity was adopted into our family. She was smart, and after one year of home school, which consisted of intense tutoring to catch her up, she finished her last two years, at a public high school, as an 'A' student.

Since she'd never been required to do ... that thing ... she was well adjusted and still on our team. She still knew that trick, however we had altered and adapted it to be more of a tazer than an instrument of torture. Very handy – in many regards.

I had also taught her to manipulate auras sight unseen. She learned to concentrate on one emotion and could extend that aura at will, from any area of her body. In the future, quite a number of our Telekinetics would be able to connect to any other talent without their knowledge using this trick. Something our Psychics would never be able to do.

In the present, Lea looked at her son with amused affection, giving him a quick good morning kiss.

"I thought your daddy always gets the biggest piece." She said.

"Well, Mike is just gonna have to settle for second biggest today," Kirsten said, finishing the icing, "because 'son of appetite' made a deal for the biggest one," she winked at Lea, "he's extra hungry this morning."

"Good morning, everyone." Greeted Samantha, cheerfully, heading straight to the coffee. The girl still bounced out of bed every morning looking every bit as beautiful as when she went to sleep.

Did I mention that she and Lea were wearing the same style night wear as Kirsten? Without the apron, of course. The kitchen was quickly becoming a forest of shapely legs and poorly hidden curves.

Good God those women were sexy.

Samantha leaned against the counter, sipping her coffee and regarded me with amusement.

"Down boy." she chuckled, feeling my ardor through our bond.

"Oh, he's been like that all morning." Said Kirsten, with a smile.

"Can you blame him?" Samantha asked, her eyes running up and down Kirsten, "look at you!"

"Kirz always gets him worked up," observed Lea as Kirsten blushed, "but there was a definite spike when Sam came in. There always is."

Samantha grinned at Lea, "After last night, I would have thought we had him sated until well past lunch."

"Thanks for reminding me of last night," I groaned, "now I've got it even worse."

They all giggled as they felt my lust increase.

"Did we miss a joke?" Asked Mike as he escorted a lovely and very pregnant Tiffany into the kitchen. Wearing a heavy terry cloth robe, she was much more covered than the other girls, but her radiant beauty and inherent sexiness shone through anyway.

Lea passed Jeremy to his father for a hug.

"Have you heard the one about the sex starved mind reader?" Quipped Samantha.

"Only every morning." joked Tiffany, easing her way into a chair with an amused groan. She looked at me as the bond worked it's magic and she too, felt my lust. "Jesus, Jake, horny much?"

I heard my mother in the living room, herding children.

Four year old Austin, my son with Samantha, bolted into the room with his 'sister', three year old, Amy, Mike and Kirsten's daughter. They were followed at a brisk waddle by two year old Jenny, my daughter by Lea. Jeremy was named after Lea's father and Jenny after her mother. She never forgot what that man had made her do to her parents. For future children she would start on the grandparents she'd had to abandon and who still thought their precious granddaughter had gone crazy and murdered her parents, their children. Fortunately, Lea had found a nurturing love with her new family.

Jeremy was a telekinetic. Well, not yet he wasn't and if nature ran it's course, he probably never would be, but I had figured out how to release the talent without massive trauma, so he would realize his talent. Austin would also be telekinetic as would Jenny.

My mother came in with one year old Alyssa in her arms. Alyssa was born to Kirsten and I and would be the only one of my offspring to bear my unique talents. As far as I could tell, there would never be more than one in each generation, but there would always be one. She would have her talent activated much earlier than the others as utilizing our unique gift in the proper manner required much more training. I would also gradually pass her the insight I had gained both in my dream and in the years since I had awakened. She, and the generations to follow, would control their precognition almost instinctively and carry an insight that would grow with each generation.

They, like me, wouldn't be in charge. Our clan would always operate with consensus and following the guidance of those members with the education, training or personal strengths most suited to the particular circumstance.

That system worked only because of the trust we had due to our bond. The primal Pack bond made it nearly impossible for a family member to act selfishly or betray the family trust. Not that we couldn't, it was simply unthinkable. The pack was vital to the survival of the individual, and the individual was vital to the survival of the pack.

Each child would undergo the bonding as they came of age, at the same time their talents would be activated. Those with gifts would know of them and be ready for their formal training once activated.

I had discovered a lot of things as I explored the human mind this time. I distinctly recalled Mike's mind after he'd gained his mind fuck immunity. After all, I had examined it so thoroughly afterward trying to figure it out.

Once I had his pre-immunity mind available to me I was able to figure out what was different and how to replicate it. This time, everyone was immune.

Everyone but the talents, that is.

Following the differences in Mike's mind had led me to the area of the mind that governed the talent. In a nutshell, I turned on the talent in those who did not have the genetic disposition for psychic or telekinetic ability, which gave them a 'different' talent.

I didn't know what would happen to a person who had the talent if I fucked with it. So I didn't, but we all had shells, even the non-talents. Anything can happen and they could find themselves in a situation where they would have to appear to be normal normies.

With that in mind, our talents retreating into a shell wouldn't happen at the slightest touch, they would be aware of it, as all talents were aware of a psychic connection, and could choose to do so – but if they were hit hard, heavy and unexpectedly, they would find themselves sucked in.

Having learned how to activate the talent in anyone without the genetic predisposition, it was just as easy to activate the talent in those who had the potential – which was anyone born of a talent parent. It was a very dominant genetic trait. However, since it generally required a head trauma to activate, it was a rare ability among those who hadn't learned my trick.