Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) (44 page)

I gave him my most potent narrow-eyed glare.
“Nope. Never.”

And then I kissed him.

The End

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An excerpt from

Impulse Control

A Talent Chronicles Short

The natives were getting restless.

Natives?

Classmates?

Inmates.

My fellow inmates were getting restless. The
class we were waiting for should have started two minutes ago.
Doesn’t seem like much, two minutes, but classes were always on
time. Everything was always on time. And any deviation from routine
generally meant some kind of trouble.

It was unusual for them to leave us
unsupervised. Well, how unsupervised can you be with two cameras
mounted in the room? But it was unusual not to have any
NIAC—
National Institutes for Ability Control
—personnel
physically there to eyeball us. I’d heard stories from kids who
hadn’t been at State School #15 as long as I had, who’d come from
normal schools and normal lives on the outside. They said kids
acted up at school sometimes, caused trouble just for the sake of
causing trouble. Took the consequences just to get attention, or
for the thrill of breaking rules and the possibility of escaping
with no consequences at all.

It was hard to wrap my brain around that.
But then, Detention doesn’t mean the same thing to them. Out
there.

My pencil snapped in my hand.
Damn.

Ethan,
Karen’s voice soothed its way
into my brain,
you need to relax. It’s probably nothing.

I glanced over to throw her a smile,
reassure her that I was fine and not a danger to myself or
others…except for the pencil. She was fiddling with her long, black
hair, and while her mental voice was calm as ever, she couldn’t
hide the apprehension in her grey eyes.

Then those eyes flicked to Elle who, a
moment later, turned in her seat and reached across the aisle
toward me. I put the two pieces of the pencil in Elle’s hand. She
closed her fist around it, opened her hand, and I retrieved my
pencil, good as new, from her palm. My fingers brushed her skin and
I felt a tingle all the way up my arm. I had to clear my throat to
whisper “Thanks,” at her. I doubt she heard me. I barely heard me.
She was already facing front, and I was looking at her honey-brown
braid again.

You know what you learn when you can read
minds?
Karen “asked.”

I heaved a heavy mental sigh.
Lots of
things that aren’t your business, I’d imagine.

Boys are idiots.

Don’t you have anyone else to pick—?

They’re coming.

The door opened and three people entered the
room. One was the armed guard who would stand in the corner and
look bored the entire time our instructor was in the room. One was
the instructor for this class. The class was called Mental Defense,
but the instructor had never told us his name. Lots of NIAC
personnel didn’t give us their names. We called him Sir. The third
was a guy about the same age as Karen and me.

He was on the tall side, pale and really
skinny, and his hair was cropped so close to his scalp you could
hardly tell what color it was. Brown, I guessed. He walked kind of
strangely, one foot dragging a little with each step. The
instructor didn’t tell him to take a seat. As the kid stood at the
front of the room, it seemed he had a tick that caused his head to
tilt to the side a few times a minute.

“This,” the instructor said with a tone of
suppressed excitement in his voice that made me kind of nervous,
“is Anderson. He’ll be helping us test the telepathic blocking
techniques we’ve been working on.” I definitely didn’t like the
sound of that. “Anderson has come to us from Delta Facility.”

That announcement broke through even our
rigid discipline. There were a bunch of gasps, even whispers. The
instructor pounded his fist on his desk, looking really pissed off
at the outburst. What did he expect? Delta Facility was the proper
name for what the NIAC personnel more casually referred to as
Detention. It was the worst threat of punishment available to them,
the nightmare of every kid in State School. It was a place few kids
ever came back from, and no one ever left the way they went in. It
was a place of free experimentation where life had no value and
pain wasn’t a concern. Rumors of unending torment, yet a territory
vastly unknown. It was Talent Hell. We called it Everlast.

Across the room, an empath groaned loudly
and his chair scraped against the floor. From the corner of my eye
I could see him grab his head and twist in his seat.

“Use your blocking, Kenneth,” the instructor
snapped.

I tried to pull my emotions back, to calm
down, to put Everlast and the concern about what the Anderson kid
was here to do aside for the moment. I hoped the rest of the class
would do the same and give Kenneth a break, poor guy.

“Can you continue without disrupting
us?”

“Y-yes, Sir,” Kenneth gritted out. He folded
his hands on the desk in front of him, arms trembling, knuckles
going white. They told the public that they took us from our
families to train us to control our abilities, protect us as well
as them. Since we were never allowed to communicate with our
families, since no one ever went home, it’s hard to believe that
anyone on either side of the electrified fence believed that. We
were training to be government operatives and they didn’t like to
see weakness. If you couldn’t handle the strain, you weren’t going
to hack it as a soldier. And if you couldn’t hack it as a soldier,
the next best use was lab rat.

“Glad to hear it,” the instructor said
curtly. “Anderson has been a successful part of an experimental
trial involving an important new technology that may someday aid
all Ability-Affected persons. What brings him to our Mental Defense
class, however, is his inborn ability: Compulsion.”

Even I could feel another shift in the
energy in the room. Compulsion and Influence Talents were pretty
rare. At least they were in the State Schools. NIAC didn’t trust
kids who could affect their thoughts. No wonder he’d ended up in
Everlast.

“As we have discussed on numerous occasions,
there may be a time when you will be faced with an Ability-Affected
opponent or even, at some point in the future, a technology that
may attempt to force you off-mission through some form of
mind-manipulation. Today we’re going to be getting real-world
practice in using the blocking techniques we’ve been learning. All
right, Anderson, let’s start with something simple. Choose your
subject and make that subject…walk to the front of the room.”

Anderson and the instructor went a few
rounds of trying to make us dance—literally in one case. The
instructor pointed out Rand and Karen and told Anderson to force
Rand to strike his older sister. The poor kid got a nose bleed and
almost passed out, but he held his own. No big surprise to me. Rand
and Karen were really tight and even at twelve, Rand was shaping up
to be a strong guy. Even Anderson broke out in a sweat on that one,
looking kind of embarrassed and pissed off, but the instructor was
pleased.

“All right, take your seat, Rand, and keep
your head back. We’ll do one more and then we’ll call it a day.
Your choice Anderson.”

Anderson’s head kept snapping that little
sideways jerk as his narrowed eyes looked us over. When he looked
down my row, I glanced away.
Nope, no challenge here.
The
last thing I wanted was to find out that I lacked the mental
fitness to stand up to him and end up giving Rand a busted lip to
match his bloody nose. Anderson’s expression looked mean and I
figured that’s what he’d go for. Better he pick on one of the
smaller guys.

Elle pushed her chair back and stood. She
grabbed the back of it and swayed on her feet, as though trying to
pull herself away from invisible hands. Her hand jerked away from
the back of the chair as one foot slid forward. Then another. She
was shaking her head as she moved haltingly forward, grabbing at
the sides of desks in an effort to hold herself back, sometimes
pulling them away from their owners.

Anderson waited for her at the front of the
classroom, lounging negligently against the instructor’s desk. He
was smiling now, a predatory smile that made my blood boil. I heard
the scrape of my own chair before I was even aware of what I was
doing.

Stop it!
Karen’s thought was
forceful, edged with urgency, and made me pause long enough to see
the instructor’s attention directed my way, his expression half
warning and half challenge.
Yes, he’d love an excuse to go after
you. Don’t give it to him, Ethan.

Help her,
I thought.

You know I can’t get involved any more than
you can. She’s gotta do this on her own.

Some best friend you are.
Unfair, but
I wasn’t feeling a lot of fairness just then.
Elle’s no match
for him.
She was already near the front of the classroom
now.

I know. Ethan, you need to calm down. Sir’s
watching you. The violence pouring off you is about to make Kenneth
sick, and there’s nothing to be done. It’s humiliating, yeah, but
she’ll live.

He won’t.

Cut the macho crap. You’re always going to
be on probation here. You can’t afford a show of temper, so just
cool it. Close your eyes and think of your happy place or
something.

But I couldn’t close my eyes. I had to watch
Elle being pulled and jerked by Anderson’s Talent until she seemed
to throw herself against his chest. He caught her lightly around
the waist and waited for her to raise herself on her toes and press
her mouth to his.

I think I growled.

Careful, you’re about to out yourself on the
whole secret crush thing.

If that was supposed to lighten my mood, it
was total fail.

Karen? Shut. Up.

I hoped you enjoyed reading this beginning of
Impulse Control.
If you would like to continue reading the
story of these State School Talents, please find it at the
following web address:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/48526
.

An excerpt from

Red

A novel by Kait Nolan

Elodie

I
was thirteen when I
found out why my mother left me.

It seems important to start my story there.
The moment when everything changed and my life became a nightmare.
The moment when my mother’s madness began to infect my father.
Infect me.

The letter that came on my birthday that
year was such a shock to my poor dad. So many times, I’ve wished
I’d thrown it away. That I’d never let him see it. But at thirteen,
I couldn’t wrap my brain around the enormity of what my mother was
imparting. I thought it was a joke at first. A cruel one.

Dad didn’t. Instead of believing that she
was mad, he took her words as the cold, hard truth. That I am a
monster, just waiting for the proper catalyst to be unleashed. That
I am cursed as she was.