Amalgamate

Chapter 15

"There's no crying in baseball!" She remembered one of her favorite feel good quotes from Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. She wouldn't lament over something that just wasn't in the cards. Carrying around these feelings for Ian was useless, dead weight. Taking a deep breath she sighed and then wiped her tears, refusing to let anymore fall. Gathering her wits she refocused on her mission to find Dermid. But, right now her only resource was Greer.

Her mind was racing, looking for any and all angles. Greer was a demon and according to him his kind were the ones who had been entrusted to protect Dermid all those years ago. He had to know something. She wondered if she could probe his mind even though he was unconscious? Did proximity matter? Could she probe more efficiently if she was touching him? At this point anything was worth a try.

As she kneeled over him, straddling his torso, she gripped his head in her hands and placed her forehead to his. Closing her eyes she mentally pushed, searching for anything..any piece of information that would help her decide where to go next. Depite her efforts it looked as though Greer actually had no knowledge of Dermid's location. However, there was something suspicious about his mind. It was hazy in some areas. Either she'd really walloped him good, or it had been tampered with?

His mind appeared vacant when she probed for Dermid's whereabouts. If he did know Dermid, he had no memories of it, or he was extremely proficient at hiding it from her.

Rowan decided to go another route, use Greer to locate his demon factions. Pictures of different places rushed through her mind like a movie. Rowan's newly developing telepathy kicked in to high gear when she hit invisible walls in his memory that acted like fortresses... attempting to block someone from seeing this information. She pushed harder to probe these fortresses because if something was fighting her, she knew she was looking in the right place.

Fury building like a quiet storm within her as she went after the images, dismantling the walls a piece at a time. It took a while. Suddenly she couldn't feel her legs anymore, she was getting tired and she felt weak. A warm ooze spilled from her nostrils, down her philtrum and over her lips.

But soon enough her persistent, laborious searching paid off. Several establishments surfaced in Dallas, Texas. Only one stood out to her because it was the hardest location to retrieve. He clearly didn't want her to know about it. A bar called "HEAT".

Before he could wake up she probed one more item of interest, sifting. She might be able to go anywhere, without any help, in the blink of an eye if she could just figure this out. If she had the regeneration powers of a demon, she could only hope she had their sifting abilities, too. She needed this badly.

Sifting was innate like breathing, so it wasn't hard to find in the confines of his mind. There really was no skill involved. You either had the ability, or you didn't. Now that the dampening spell had been lifted, all she had to do was try.

Focusing in on the bar, the location, the details...she knew what she had to do. The realization was almost innate within her like it'd been there all along just under the surface. Rowan was eager to try it for herself, and she couldn't help but think that her father, Riat, owed her a hell of a lot more than regeneration and sifting abilities. But, for now, she'd take what she could get.

She wandered the room, finding her purse under a pile of debris. Dusting it off all she could think about was getting this right because it didn't seem like there was a lot of room for error with these folks. However, she'd always been a quick, self study kind of learner. She hadn't been given a choice. People didn't give orphans a second shot at anything.

She stood beside Greer, he didn't look so tough now. "Looks like I passed your training course. So long Red..." She said her good byes before she sifted to a place she had only seen in Greer's memory...the parking lot in front of HEAT.