Voice of the Mind Ch. 10

He nodded. "He claims he was just checking. Didn't want to recruit you or bother you for that matter. Just investigating to see what you came to do here. Told him someone kidnapped my girlfriend. He said he'd help, bring some people in to avoid bloodshed."

"And you believed him?"

"I believedyou, didn't I?" he shot back. "And you had done more harm than he did. Looked like the right thing to do at the moment, since the only thing I want is for Jenny to be free. If he wants to kill me after that, we'll deal with that afterwards. First things first."

She didn't say anything after that and they took place in the car, abiding their time to strike.

Something's wrong, he thought after a while.This guy's a telepath -- and a trained one too. So why hasn't he taken notice of us sitting out here waiting?

"I'm shielding our thoughts and appearance." Talitha replied to the thought he wasn't sending out but which she still picked up."He's too tired to realize that we're here. In fact, he has been nodding off for a while now. Not too long until he's asleep."

"Why's Jenny not awake by now? She was only unconscious, wasn't she?" He realized he was talking out loud after her reply and his voice sounded hard and disruptive to the silence.

"His doing," she spoke and he was glad she wasn't replying with a thought after he was talking out loud. It felt like they had an actual conversation because of that. "He's keeping her in a sort of sleep so she won't make a racket. She will stay asleep when he sleeps, he made sure of that. But he's restless, doesn't know if he should stay awake or catch a few winks while waiting for you to show up. He hasn't been able to track down either you or me and that worries him. I hope he will decide to take a nap, but I can't really force him to. He'd notice me if I did."

They stayed silent for a while again, not conversing mentally or out loud. Until the moment Talitha opened the door suddenly.

"He's asleep. We better go now."

"But the reinforcements haven't arrived yet," he complained. "We'd stand a better chance with them."

"Against a sleeping assailant? I dare take my chances. We might even get her out of there before he realizes we've recovered her. I'll keep an eye on him, you make sure to rouse Jenny so she can get out herself. Don't want to have to be slowed down due to us having to drag her out."

He started to complain again, but she had already crossed the street and climbed a fence. He decided that he would keep up with her.

She found an opened window easily and they climbed in, making less noise than expected and more noise than he had wanted to. When he touched down on the ground, he realized that he had been holding his breath ever since he came through that window and exhaled slowly to avoid making more noise.

They waited. Listened. Then they moved.

They were next to Jenny within seconds. Her wrists were bound with ducttape, just the same for her legs and Vincent was glad that Talitha had a swiss knife on her to cut through the tape. In the meantime he was trying to wake her up, but that turned out to be more difficult than Talitha had said it would be.

"Hurry up," Talitha encouraged him."We can't stay here for long."

"I can't rouse her from this sleep! I don't know how!"

Talitha was irritated. She knew that he was a novice, but she couldn't do everything. She had to let him do stuff too, because she didn't want to divide her attention between Jenny and the guard. But she started to realize that Vincent was too much of a novice to understand how to wake her up from this telepathically induced sleep. She either had to wage the risk, or drag her out physically to get her out of harm's way. The odds for both weren't that great.

"I'll do it," she said finally."Make sure you stand over our guard and whack him if he wakes up. To the point that he doesn't wake up -- either for a while or permanently."

"Murder?" he asked anxiously."You want me to commit murder?"

"That's up to you. Just keep him out of my way."

She knelt down at Jenny's side and concentrated. Vincent found his gaze drifting back to her more often than he was watching the man he was supposed to watch. And after he snapped his gaze back for the fifth time or so, he realized that the man was staring at him.

"Oh, fuck." He muttered before he felt immense pain and doubled back to a bunch of crates.

Talitha swirled around and saw the man getting up. She concentrated and his head snapped back as if he had been punched. Her hand grabbed around her until she got hold of her baseball bat and raised herself quickly, charging at the man before he got up and could make a stand. She never got that far.

Her ankle snapped aside, making her fall down hard when she ended with her entire weight on that leg. The man scrambled up and pointed at her, making her tumble backwards when she had been falling forwards. She seemingly somersaulted and landed with her back against Jenny's side.

Vincent got up, holding himself steady against the crate he was leaning against and cursed himself in thought. His stomach burned and objected, like it had been slammed with a heavy object. But he knew he hadn't been hit with anything, so he clenched his teeth and charged forward.

He managed to grab the man from behind and tried to position his arms to cut off the oxygen from the mans throat. He succeeded, only to find himself on the end of another excruciating pain -- this time it was his chin getting mauled. He released the man and found himself flinging backwards to land on his back -- painfully.

"Kevin!" he yelled inwardly."We need you!"

Reinforcements seemed to arrive immediately. When Vincent was trying to get up, his vision swam, but he saw that the assailant was rocking back and forth as if he was standing on a boat in the middle of a storm.

Talitha had extended an arm as a gesture to focus her mindpowers and he saw him doubling over, as if she had stomped him in the stomach.

And if that feels the same as he did to me, good riddance, he thought.

But it didn't hold the man. He got up, shook everything off and his head swerved towards Talitha. Vincent heard something break -- a crate, possibly -- and she screamed. She was loud enough to wake up Jenny, who didn't have a clue what happened and since the hold of the man on her had loosened, she woke up.

Vincent stumbled forth, focusing on placing one foot in front of the other, gaining gradually on the man who had captured his girlfriend and he felt his anger rise. Anger for kidnapping his girlfriend, the friend he had cherished for years even before they had seen each other in life, anger for hurting Talitha, anger for making him angry. It boiled. It raged. And he found himself capable of rushing towards him once more.

He heard Jenny let out a yell, saw the man look towards him -- not Jenny -- and he felt as if his head was being slammed in a press. From every side it hurt, as if someone had taken out the top of his head and grabbed his brains with a hand, squeezing until there were veins springing, breaking from all over. His left eye stopped working, showed only a black screen; his feet felt like they were pincushions; his left arm shot out and hit a wooden crate, splintering the crate and probably splintering something in his arm as well. He realized that this was what the man had done with Talitha, making her fling her arm back towards a crate to damage the arm along with the crate.

With his right eye he thought he saw the baseball bat, the one he had dropped when he got hit the first time, was whacking the man on the back of his head. It toppled him, but it didn't stop him from increasing the pressure on Vincent. The pain was excruciating, unbearable, intolerable. Vincent lashed out with an arm himself and squeezed his fingers into a fist, a mere gesture of desperation, knowing that he couldn't possibly hit him from that distance, and lashed out. At that moment his right eye went all black as well -- and in that newly found darkness he started to lose consciousness. With only the feeling of failing Jenny lingering in that darkness.

The last thing he heard was Jenny's scream echoing in his ears.