Power Mage 3 Page 9

  The only other downside to all this Carnal vigor was a pervasive physical restlessness. His body wanted to move; wanted to sprint and leap, fight and fuck; wanted to push its limits; wanted to assert its dominance, rip out the throat of the world, and chug the stream of hot blood.

  Instead, he cracked a beer.

  Slow things down, he told himself. Still your mind, master your body.

  Carnal juice was more intuitive than that of other strands. Healing was autonomic. Bursts of strength and speed, from what little he had tested them, seemed just as natural as normal effort and exertion.

  He also sensed that many body modifications would be as simple as concentrating on a notion and releasing power. Erasing scars, for example, or growing big muscles.

  Not that he gave a shit about any of that. His body had served him just fine for twenty-three years, scars and all. Erasing those scars now would dishonor days gone by. For scars record the history of our bodies, the whole history, not only damage to our flesh but also the internal fortitude necessary to endure suffering and rise again.

  Brawley could follow his scars like a road map as they told the story of the long and painful path he had traveled to win the world championship, and he would no sooner eliminate them than he would toss his golden buckle in the trash.

  Bella had wanted him to blow himself up like a bodybuilder. Brawley called bullshit on that. Why would he want to do something like that? He’d just end up having to buy a whole new set of clothes.

  He would, however, have Remi show him other stuff. How to punch like a post driver and how to harden parts of his body, stuff like that. And if he could manage a mod like Colton Finn had pulled with his skull, that would be all right. Having a bulletproof noggin would come in downright handy, what with so many people trying to blow his brains out.

  From Nina, he wanted to learn to employ his telekinetic force more flexibly and precisely. He also wanted to work on the speed of his draw and the accuracy of his telekinetic projectiles. Ideally, he would learn to divvy out energy into smaller, more economical rounds and fire them with the range and accuracy he’d come to expect from his old Model 700.

  From Sage, he wanted to learn to create psi sensors and wanted to get better at the things she had already taught him, from cloaking himself and others to querying the ether to manipulating truth.

  For now, however, it was time to catch his breath and get back to basics. So he poured a bowl of Fruit Loops, turned on the TV, and climbed onto the medicine ball.

  There he stood, keeping a bend in his legs and using his hips to balance as he ate the cereal.

  Then he put down the bowl and flipped through the channels until he came to a boxing match. It was a good fight, the rerun of a recent title match between two welterweights, both guys strong and fast, going for it.

  He enjoyed watching boxing, and he used to have a set of old eight-ounce gloves in the barn. Growing up, he’d pull them on from time to time and knock it with friends and farmhands from a neighboring ranch, though some of the caballeros knocked the hell out of him. Mexicans are tough as nails, have real heart, and love boxing. And some of the old boys on the farm had boxed before crossing the border.

  Brawley could usually whip his friends, even crazy-ass Tanner, who had him by a couple of inches and forty or fifty pounds.

  But the boxers kicked the shit out of him. No two ways about it. He couldn’t hit them. And they seemed to hit him with everything they threw. He kept coming, but his dogged persistence did no good other than earning him the nickname “El Toro.”

  But as he watched the match on TV, something funny started happening.

  He started picking up on what the fighters were doing. Their technique, their footwork, their patterns. The way they jockeyed and feinted, trying to get into position, looking for angles.

  He’d never noticed this stuff before. Not really.

  Now it was rushing over him, rushing through him, so that he not only saw what they were doing but also understood it.

  He doubled down on his focus wanting to learn.

  He sensed the fight within the fight. The battle for small advantages. The constant strategic battle wherein each fighter attempted to exert his will upon the other, not just trying to land punches but shifting the overarching patterns of the conflict toward a dynamic that favored his strengths and negated his opponent’s advantages.

  Brawley hopped down from his medicine ball, swiveled into a fighting stance, and started shuffling around in front of the TV, first mimicking one fighter, then the next.

  What happened then was nothing short of amazing. He didn’t need a coach yelling at him, telling him what he was doing wrong or how to correct it.

  By focusing his Seeker mind on the action, he understood each motion instantly; and what’s more, his body, thanks to the Carnal energy coursing through it, felt each move, analyzing every aspect of the punch or feint or dip. This analysis occurred purely, registering on a level beneath language or even thought.

  And this pleased Brawley, because he had learned long ago that thinking was slow. To rise above, a man needs to learn to trust his body.

  He was certainly trusting his body now. He mirrored the fighters’ motions, jabbing his way in and dipping invisible punches, avoiding the blow by a fraction of an inch in order to counterpunch effectively.

  He swiveled away from sudden aggression, pivoted into a favorable position, and fired back with thundering combinations, ripping five, six, seven hard shots that attacked his imaginary opponent from different angles, mixing it up, left, right, body head, straight shots, hooking shots, on and on and on, clenching his jaw and breathing through his nose with every punch.

  His body felt everything. The speed and power of each punch. The proper degree of extension. The way each punch loaded the next strike, twisting his shoulder into position like a cocked hammer, ready to fire the next cross or hook or uppercut. The position of his non-punching hand, his chin, his elbows.

  Everything, all at once.

  Carnal force crackled through him like laughter, fueling his muscles and optimizing coordination, a process that was greatly enhanced when he released a trickle of Seeker juice, which allowed him to feel not just the nuances of his own actions but also the things his opponent was doing.

  In this way, the fight came to life within him wholesale, all at once. Even as the fighter he was mimicking ate a counter hook, he felt it coming, parted ways with the champ, tucked his chin, and raised his right hand.

  Brawley descended into the fight, grooving on the secret beauty of this brutal dance. And there was beauty here, he realized, a terrible beauty hinged on primal significance. The world stretched razor thin with everything on the line.

  Not just belts and money and the adoration of a bloodthirsty crowd but each man’s measure of himself, an estimate that would be changed forever in the wake of this tenuous moment. And there is no prize so cherished, no currency so coveted, no wealth so valued as self-worth tempered by combat.

  Bull riding is the most dangerous sport and the most glorious. But there is no reckoning of self equal to a fight. Boxing, with its strange pairing of unbridled savagery and civilized rules, optimizes this reckoning then magnifies its impact by inviting spectators and ritualizing the aftermath.

  There is no prouder creature than a man with a gloved fist held aloft by a referee, and no creature more miserable than a fighter unmanned before supporters and detractors alike, his shattered pre-fight boasting echoing in his ears like a pronouncement of eternal damnation.

  This emotional truth flooded Brawley like a part of the fight because it was part of the fight. The lion’s share, actually, the living, beating heart of conflict that pushed men to their physical limits and beyond.

  After a few rounds, Brawley’s mind, having managed to hold both fighters’ perspectives simultaneously, added a third point of view, giving him an awareness of how and where he could, as a Carnal, improve upon what the combatants were doing.

&nb
sp; Not in terms of speed or power. Even without Remi’s instruction, he knew he was already faster than Floyd Mayweather and more powerful than Mike Tyson.

  The improvements occurring to him now were adjustments he could make midstream, independent of speed and power. Places where he could dip punches rather than blocking them. Dip them and roll straight into a counter.

  This lightning analysis led to another Seeker-fueled revelation.

  Few Carnals would ever bother to unravel these nuances. They didn’t need to. With their speed and strength, power and durability, reflexes and regeneration, even half-trained Carnals could kick the shit out of top-ranked pros.

  So they didn’t need to learn nuances. Even those who fought each other, if the fights he’d witnessed in Heaven and Hell were representative of Carnal matches, relied more heavily on rage and power than anything resembling intelligent strategy or nuanced tactics.

  He suspected that this was due in part to the restlessness he had felt since cracking his strand. Carnals were like a bunch of sixteen-year-old boys drunk on testosterone, tempted always in the face of adversity to simply say fuck it, throw caution and common sense to the wind, and swing for the damn fences.

  They had evolved into a culture of hyped-up, superhuman hotheads who never had to learn from their mistakes. Because even if a stronger, faster Carnal kicked their ass, they simply regenerated, laughed it off, and turned their attention to crushing someone else or getting laid. Having those options did not cultivate a culture of nuance or reflection.

  But Brawley was a man who respected training and technique, and half of this experience was governed by an extra strand, all that Seeker juice getting in on the game, delivering a fullness of understanding that an aspiring boxer couldn’t hope to gain in years of training.

  Seekers had photographic memories. And having united his strands on this task, he would remember not only the facts but also the feeling of everything he was witnessing and doing.

  In quiet moments during coming days, he would be able to replay it all in his head, seeing and feeling and understanding everything with the clarity of this first experience.

  Then he would improve upon it, experimenting with adjustments, toggling between perspectives, extrapolating responses and counters in trees of possibilities like a grandmaster analyzing middlegame chess tactics by calculating responses to candidate moves and following a game out to its various and inevitable conclusions.

  Checkmate, Brawley thought with a grin, keeping his lead foot outside the lead foot of the imaginary southpaw before him.

  A shocking knockout ended the fight in the closing minute of the twelfth and final round. Brawley laughed aloud, turned off the TV, and cracked another beer.

  His body felt great.

  Hell, his mind felt great, too. Alive.

  Not just because his body was charged up and pumping away with maximum efficiency but also because he had, by utilizing two strands, synched body and mind. It was beautiful, the flip side to the half-sickness he’d felt the night he’d fired a careless blast of Seeker juice into the mud and taken a mental dive into the history of an everyday monster named Teddy Driscoll.

  It wasn’t splicing, but today’s double-strand application left him feeling euphoric.

  Also, he was pleased to know that, while he had so far failed to splice strands, he had managed a kind of synthesis that could prove as valuable as splicing, synchronizing two energies with an end result that was more than a sum of its parts.

  Then the girls came home, riding their own feminine brand of euphoria, and did something that made Brawley forget all about boxing and strands and pretty much everything else in the world.

  9

  The girls chatted giddily, everyone jazzed up, full of laughter, and heavily laden with purchases, bulging shopping bags thrown over their shoulders like fresh-killed game over the shoulders of men returning home after a successful hunt.

  Seeing Brawley, they exploded in a fresh wave of excitement, everyone talking at the same time, telling him about their shopping trip, the clothes they’d found, and funny things that had happened.

  “Oh,” Nina shouted, “just wait until you see how cute Callie looks in her new dress!”

  Brawley smiled and nodded, happy that they were happy.

  Currently, Callie was wearing not a dress but sandals, khaki shorts, and a lightweight blouse the deep blue of Texas spring, when they stop mowing along the highway and God dresses the world for a time in bluebonnets.

  Callie was wriggling with happiness but nervous, too. She kept sneaking glances at Brawley and straightening her new clothes. A couple of times, he noticed her opening her mouth to speak, but then another girl would burst out with something, and Callie would close her mouth again.

  Finally, Callie threw herself against Brawley, hugging him fiercely. “Thank you so, so much.”

  Brawley patted the girl’s back as she squeezed him. Her ribs felt like chopsticks beneath his big calloused hand. “For what, darlin?”

  “I never went shopping like that before,” she said, nuzzling into his chest. “I’ll pay you back. I swear.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Brawley said. “You saved Remi’s life. A couple sacks of clothes is nothing.”

  Remi peeled the cat girl away and took Brawley by the arm. She had managed to replace her leather pants and black tank top and seemed pretty happy about it. Leading Brawley to the couch, she said, “Sit down, handsome.”

  “What for?”

  “We want to show you what your hard-earned money bought.”

  “What, like a fashion show?”

  “That’s right,” Remi said. “And lucky you. We look hot!”

  He was too restless to sit there for a makeshift fashion show. Besides, he had to work on splicing. “That’s all right, darlin. I’m glad you girls got some clothes. I’ll see them as you wear them.”

  “Oh yeah?” Nina said. Grinning mischievously, she dipped a hand into one of the bags and came back out with a thin strip of lacy red fabric dangling from one finger. “That’s too bad. We were so excited to show you what we got.”

  “Oh,” Brawley said, and leaned back. “I guess I could sit for a spell.”

  Nina grinned, dropped the lingerie back into the sack, and handed the bag to Callie, speaking to the girl without looking at her. Instead, Nina eyed Brawley, grinning wickedly. “Here’s your stuff, Callie.”

  “Thanks,” Callie said, blushing.

  Brawley shook his head at Nina, letting her know he’d picked up on her little trick.

  Remi tapped Callie’s shoulder and pointed toward the fridge. “Get Brawley a beer.”

  “Sure,” Callie said, electrified with excitement. She fetched Brawley a beer. Then the women whisked her to the back of the cabin, tittering giddily.

  Brawley had never been a big fan of excited girls in packs. Usually it meant showing off and fake laughter and bullshit.

  But this was different. He loved his women and cared about Callie, and there was nothing phony about their levity.

  He loved seeing them happy together. And seeing these deadly beauties giggle like schoolgirls was a curious pleasure, like gentling a wild mare.

  Brawley sipped his beer and stretched out his legs and waited.

  Down the hall, feminine laughter blended with the sound of crinkling bags.

  The sound of the bags took him back to crazy-ass Loretta, who had been sitting, sans bag, at the table when he and Maypole had gone back inside. She barely seemed to notice them. She stared blankly, her face slack, like a wet chicken. She didn’t even smile when he peeled off a dozen hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Maypole as thanks.

  Poor old girl, he thought, then he forgot all about Loretta.

  Nina strutted into the room, playing it up like a model on the catwalk. She wore a billowy short-sleeve blouse of white linen knotted beneath her breasts, knee-length camouflage cargo shorts, and black Converse high-tops.

  Nina gave a little spin. The lowrid
er shorts slid down, exposing the curves of her upper ass and the arousing T of a black G-string.

  “Do you approve, cowboy?”

  “I sure do, darlin. You look sweeter than peach cobbler.”

  “Aw, thanks, babe,” Nina said, and kissed him deeply before heading back down the hall.

  Sage came next, swishing her hips and wearing a tight denim one piece cinched with a thick leather belt. With her long limbs, lithe frame, and luxurious hair flowing behind her like a golden cape, she really did look like a fashion model.

  Her new dress was very short, stretching only an inch or two beneath her slim yet shapely ass. A row of large buttons ran all the way up the front. She had left these buttons unfastened from beltline to throat, exposing a V of pale, smooth flesh that woke the sleeping giant in Brawley’s jeans.

  Sage spun, cocked a hip, and spun back around, hands on her waist. “Thank you, husband. This purchase was frivolous, considering that I, unlike the other women, was able to bring most of my wardrobe from Key West, but I do hope that you approve.”

  “You look like a million bucks in brand new bills, darlin.”

  “That is very kind,” she said, leaning down to kiss him almost chastely on the cheek. “To thank you, I will never wear anything underneath this garment.”

  Sage’s tiny fingers closed around his big hand, raised it under the hem of her new dress, and pressed it briefly to wet heat between her legs. “Whenever you see this dress, you will know that I am ready to thank you.”

  Brawley slid a thick finger inside her, but Sage wriggled free, stepped back, and straightened her clothing, eyeing him momentarily with a playful smile before retreating into the rear of the cabin.

  Next, Remi pranced barefoot into the room. She had erased her tats again and wore a simple white sundress of thin fabric that clung to her curves like a silk pillowcase. The fabric lifted weightlessly into the air when she gave a little spin, revealing the simple white cotton panties beneath.

  She turned her back and grinned at him over one shoulder. Then she flopped down into his lap and pulled his head to her neck, filling his nostrils with an intoxicating perfume.