The Girl With Pink Hair: Pt. 04

All in all she'd fucked things up mightily.

She could feel them not that far away. Elena was thinking, her aura much as it was when she had been working on her thesis. Alan was worried, not unreasonably so, seeing as he'd just allowed himself to be taken off the board by a lesser operator.

Jess dithered. She ought to inform Miriam of this development, but her concern over her girlfriend was pushing everything else aside. Unable to settle, she found a cardigan and hurried out. Reasonably certain that Elena would head to the park, Jess turned to go, but then had an idea, and scurried in the opposite direction.

Pushing open the door to the delicatessen, the bell tinkled gently, and the proprietor emerged from the back room.

"Hello, Jess! No Elena this morning?" he said cheerily. Then, seeing Jess' expression, he sobered. "Oh dear. Had a row, have we?"

Jess grimaced. "Kind of. She thinks I did something. I didn't but then I didn't stop it either. She's pretty mad."

"Let me guess. You want something to try and make up?"

She nodded.

"Well, I know one thing for certain. With your girlfriend you can't go wrong with a fresh croissant. I've got three left; shall I get you two?"

"Um, I'll have all three, if you don't mind." It wasn't much as a peace offering but it would have to do.

***

Seeing them sitting on the bench, Jess came up short. That was their special place! Feeling her shock, Alan turned his head and spotting her, nudged Elena who looked over and frowned. Jess hesitated for a moment and then squared her shoulders and trotted towards them.

She stood in front of her girlfriend and offered Elena the paper bag. She stared at it for a moment and then looked up at Jess.

"You're not forgiven. Sit down."

There wasn't enough room to sit beside Elena and Jess didn't dare ask them to move so she sat on the opposite end of the bench.

They sat in silence for minute looking out over the river.

"You used me, Jess."

Unexpectedly Alan intervened. "She's doing what she's trained to do, Elena, what I'd have done in her place. It's partially my own fault for putting myself in a position of vulnerability."

"She used me. Like a pawn. Without asking."

"I didn't have to do anything!" Jess protested. "You just naturally fit together."

"Seduction is one of the oldest tools in the spy playbook." Alan said wearily. "I should have been more on my guard. She's the pawn. One that's taken a knight."

Elena did not care for the chess analogy at all. It was all too close to what Monica Zedelsky had said to her in the cafe. Absently she retrieved a croissant from the paper bag and bit into it. Jess felt the tension ease minutely.

"Did you get these from Peter?"

Jess muttered agreement.

"Apology not accepted." Elena turned to look past Alan at Jess. Her grey eyes were intense. "Do you know the ingredients for an apology, Jess? A well-seasoned apology takes empathy and responsibility, and finally a good pinch of humble pie. I'm getting the humble pie, Jess, but not much else. Aren't the Folk supposed to be empaths?"

Alan winced and Jess started to cry. He moved to ease her distress and she buried her face in his chest. Her voice was muffled.

"I'm so bored doing surveillance work. I asked to be reassigned before I met you, love, but they said no, so when I saw an opportunity to impress my superiors, I didn't really think it through."

The little word bounced around inside Elena's head.

To her annoyance, analytical brain observed that in the grand scheme of things Jess hadn't done anything really dangerous or malicious and there were an awful lot of women who would view the attachment of an intelligent attractive man as a positive bonus. And she still loved the stupid pink haired bint.

Jess looked up, her eyes red and her cheeks blotchy.

Elena sighed. "You're a fucking idiot, Calamar, what are you?"

"A fucking idiot, love." Jess smiled, and Elena weakened a little further.

She huffed and looked at their companion. "What am I supposed to do with you? Will the entanglement, um, I don't know, wear off?"

"Yeah, if I stop seeing you then it will wane with time," he said wistfully.

Elena felt a pang in her breast. She didn't want to stop seeing Alan. He was clever and sexy and a lot of fun and she wanted more of that in her life. She thought then of the Unholy Trinity and Sanjay's firm sentiment with regard to Alison and Merry at the college ball.

"Bloody witchy politics," she muttered, "I don't know how I'm going to cope with the two of you at each other's throats the whole time."

Alan laughed and Jess sat up, her face radiant. Unalloyed joy spilled from her to encompass the three of them and with that, a strange feeling of completeness settled upon them, as if the last piece of a jigsaw had been fitted into place. Jess and Elena looked at each other with wide eyes.

"Ah," Alan said and then, "Oh, Jesus Christ, no."

"What just ..." Elena's voice trailed off as the air grew very bright and her companions shone like stars fallen to Earth. She looked round at the park, where brilliant colour surged and flowed among the people, as if van Gogh was dreaming it into existence.

Jess was thunderstruck, suddenly all the weird little things that had been happening to the two of them joined up. When Elena had said that they weren't living the great romantic novel she'd been quite correct. Instead they were slap bang in the middle of a fairy tale.

Alan turned to Elena, light streaming from his head like some hallucinogenic vision. He took her hands. "Elena, listen to me. A complicated situation just became an awful lot worse. We are going to be noticed by a great many people, some of whom most certainly do not wish us well. You're going to have to do exactly as we say, can you do that?"

Elena struggled to take his words in, he seemed at the one moment too close and too far away. She nodded, a movement that happened slowly, as if her head was underwater.

He turned to Jess, who looked at him with frightened eyes. "We're going to have to give her a crash course in control. Ready?"

Jess nodded jerkily, and they joined hands. As Jess's hand grasped hers, a circuit was made, and Elena was no longer quite sure who she was. She was Jess and Alan, and they were her, like their lovemaking, dissolving into one another.

They moved to calm and damp her down. For a moment she was on the verge of fighting them. How dare they try to limit Her! Terrifyingly, she half-suspected She would win. Then she found a tiny amount of self-control and seized it, fearing that she would simply flare like powdered magnesium if she didn't.

Slowly the radiance faded until she could almost see normally, except her companions had rich haloes of gold, like medieval paintings of saintly figures.

Alan let go of her hand and fell back against the seat. Jess slumped, her elbows on her knees and her head hanging. Dimly Elena realised that Alan's hair was its true colour.

"We're going to have to move, and quickly," he said.

"Will they know who we are?" Jess asked.

"Not likely. Anyone in range will have whited out."

Elena turned around slowly. Everyone she could see had an aura. Blue and green and yellow and all the myriad colours. A crow lolloped by and stopped to inspect them. It too had a tiny green and yellow aura of bright inquisitiveness and cunning. Elena laughed with delight and the world flared.

"My Queen, please," Alan begged.

"What did you call me?" Elena was tugged back to reality, analytical brain sticking its boot firmly into the fairy tale.

He shook his head violently. "The compulsion to obey the trope is very strong. We must get to a place of safety so that you can learn to control yourself."

She stared at him. "I'm doing this?"

"Yes," Jess gasped. "It might help if you close your eyes for a minute."

Elena did as she was bid and felt things immediately calm down. Beside her, her companions panted, then drew her to her feet. Jess took her hat and jammed it on Elena's head.

"Look down."

Slowly they made their way back to the loft, where Elena sat on the sofa while Jess and Alan conferred in whispers. She could feel them behind her, two radiant presences in the most perfect colour imaginable. Further away she could feel two more and suddenly reality snapped into focus. She turned to look at Alan and Jess and was rewarded with hopeful smiles.

"I have Talent, don't I?"

"To put it mildly," Alan said.

Jess retrieved three beers from the fridge. Popping the caps, she offered one to each of them. The cold effervescence in her throat anchored Elena a little more firmly to the present.

"What just happened?" Elena asked.

"You're a latent," Alan said. "The probability was very low but here we are. Something about the events of the last 24 hours have lifted you into operancy. And you're extremely powerful. Me and Jess aren't slouches but we could barely contain you, and you weren't even actively resisting us. Thank goodness we're in Sympathy."

"Sympathy?"

"We're more than entangled now," Jess said. "The next state is called Sympathy. That's what we have, love. Have had almost since first we met. Sympathy is love-of-my-life, soulmate stuff for the Folk. I couldn't believe it when we matched so completely."

Jess smiled, and their auras reached out playfully to one another, love promising love. Elena chuckled giddily, and then saw with a strange, satisfied amazement that the glow reached to Alan and vice versa. Now it was his turn to smile in delight.

Elena gasped. "We're all in Sympathy?"

"Yes, my Queen," he said, then paused and frowned.

"Why do you keep calling me 'my Queen'?"

"It's what I told you in the park just now. Our auguries have spoken of a woman like you. You couldn't be the avatar because you didn't have Talent. But now you do. Now the narrative will try to compel us. The story wants me to make you my Queen. And it's hard to resist."

"But why me? I haven't," she stopped and corrected herself, "didn't have Talent. Where did it come from?"

He looked guilty.

"Tell me. I command-"

"STOP!" Jess shouted, and Elena was stunned. She put her hand to her mouth. The Queen persona hovered nearby, waiting for an opportunity, a weakness, and Elena came out in goose bumps.

The others eyed her warily.

"Elena?" Jess asked gently, "is it you?"

Elena looked frightened and very scared. "Shh, shh, there, there, love," Jess consoled her, as Elena buried her face in her shoulder. The transitions from yesterday to now were coming too fast.

Alan came to sit on the other side and put his arm around her. "You came to our attention as Jess's girlfriend," he said, quietly. "We looked into your family history and found nothing of any interest."

"I researched her too! There's nothing as far back as records go!" Jess said.

Alan grinned. "We tried something else too."

Elena suppressed her sniffles and sat up. Alan thought that her power seemed to be under control and relaxed a little.

"What did you find?" Elena asked.

"You probably didn't notice during the kerfuffle at the bar, but I pocketed your glass."

Jess looked puzzled, but Elena made the connection immediately. "You got my DNA."

Alan inclined his head. "You're related to the Finns. They're a prominent family of the Folk in Connaught."

Elena's eyebrows rose. "How?"

"In the time of the Famines in Ireland, a great many people emigrated. Many went to the Americas, but some went to Europe and ended up in what eventually became Poland. Do you see where all this is going?"

"Hmph." However, gathering data helped to calm her.

He smiled wryly. "Unfortunately, when you encountered Jess - and I don't mean the first time you started talking to one another - the moment your auras touched, you started to feature in auguries."

"There's that word again, you keep using it. Like just before ... before ..." She stumbled over recent events.

"Some of the Folk think they can tell the future," he said, in response to her confusion.

Her head came up and her expression was openly sceptical. "Seriously?"

He snorted. "Ach, what do weather forecasters do? Sure, they use supercomputers, but do you know how they work? You take the results at face value. It might as well be magic. Anyway, they could see you might be important, but they had no idea who you were, so they had to wait for you and Jess to actually connect. Once that happened you shot up the rankings and all sorts of people started to take an interest."

"Then, in the bar, it wasn't Jess you were interested in, it was me!"

He inclined his head. "Quite so."

"And all those insults?" Elena was on her feet and had her fists on her hips.

Alan was defensive, "Doesn't hurt to stir things up a bit."

'No wonder the Queen chose to settle on her!' he thought. 'She just bounces right back.'

"It got results, you've got to admit. Just not quite the ones I was expecting," he said with a half-smile on his face.

"But then, us?"

"That is when it all gets very dangerous. Now that I am in Sympathy with you," he paused, and an oddly pleased, shy smile broke out.

Elena and Jess returned it to him, and Elena felt their auras stretch out to one another again. Physical coupling was one thing, but the psychic intimacy was profound.

"I'm going to have to check in with my superiors, of course. This wasn't a mission objective - not that I'm ungrateful! However, me and Jess are going to have to try the mother of all bindings if you're going to have any chance of keeping the Queen from swamping you!"

In spite of her apprehension, Elena laughed. "We are going to have to have even more mind-blowing sex?"

Jess grinned and Alan's mouth quirked. "That had occurred to me!"

He sobered, "The sting in the tail is that we are going to have to align ourselves more closely with the narrative. We do have one advantage. The popular myth is MMF, but we've shaped up as FFM. We're at odds with the narrative and that ought to offer a little protection, but we'll still have to fight to avoid possession by the avatars. But I don't see what else to do. Jess isn't going to leave you to twist in the wind."

He smiled at Jess' fierce confirmation, then looked away.

"But she can't save you on her own. And I don't think I could live with myself if I abandoned you. Even without Sympathy."

After this little speech he closed his eyes and his shoulders slumped. He looked small and vulnerable in the face of the apparent peril they faced. In moments they came to sit either side of him and he was enveloped and embraced, their bond subtly reinforced by his honesty.

His phone pinged and he reached into his pocket. As he studied the display his face and his aura were abruptly grim. He handed the phone to Elena and leapt to his feet.

On the display was one word.

'Run'

***

To be continued