Tragic Magic [boyxboy]

Chapter Thirteen

Shameful though it was to admit it, I’d been falling asleep very night to thoughts of Tristan swirling around in my head. They varied from platonic to mushy to romantic to plain erotic but as a result I was having some very pleasant nights’ sleep.

 To be honest at the beginning I was pretty scared to think much of anything, because I didn’t know the full extent of everyone’s powers. Often they seemed to tune into what I was thinking without actually verbalising it but that could just have been heightened intuition. After a while of sneakily practicing on Annabelle though, she eventually cracked and told me.

‘Stop that!’ she snapped one evening a few weeks later as we sat doing puzzles together.

‘Stop what?’ I asked innocently, even though I’d been staring at her intently and concentrating on trying to figure out what she was thinking.

‘Trying to read my mind,’ she said monotonously.

Rather than being embarrassed, I just squinted at her suspiciously. ‘How can you tell?’ I demanded.

‘I can hear you,’ she mumbled, already regretting bringing it up. ‘And it’s very rude, by the way.’

‘What does it sound like?’ I demanded.

She looked at me longsufferingly, and I put my hand over my heart. ‘He’ll never know,’ I swore.

Rolling her eyes, she turned her full attention to me, laying down the puzzle piece she’d been trying to fit. ‘Here, I’ll show you,’ she muttered grudgingly. Her eyes turned black and I heard a distinct knocking sound inside my head.

‘Knocking?’ I asked.

‘Well you can’t just barge into someone’s head,’ she admonished me. It was always strange getting scolded by a six year old but I was starting to get used to it. ‘You have to knock.’

‘So how do I let you in?’

She shrugged. ‘Just imagine yourself opening the door to your brain.’

I was about to comply but then I stopped myself, looking at her suspiciously again. ‘This isn’t like with vampires, is it? I invite you in and then you can come and go whenever you please?’

‘No Cody,’ she sighed, her little body slumping like she just couldn’t deal with my ignorance. ‘I have to knock every time.’

‘How do I know it’s you when you knock? Does everyone have a different knock? What if like Aldrich or someone wanted to read my mind and I let him in and then I was like “Oh crap, it’s you” but it was too late and he already knew like, where we were or whatever?’

Annabelle was staring at me. ‘How do you ever find out who’s at the door?’ she questioned eventually. ‘You just ask.’

‘Oh. Can we try again?’

Annabelle rolled her eyes. ‘Why not,’ she muttered, her eyes going black again. I heard the knocking sound and called out with my mind, Who’s there?

No need to shout, Annabelle grumbled, projecting her voice into my head.

Sorry. Come in, I imagined a door opening and suddenly my head felt too full, like I was at a high altitude with no oxygen.

Leaving, Annabelle warned me, and the pressure in my head returned to normal.

‘Is it always that uncomfortable?’

‘Not really, it always feels weird, but you get used to it.’

And so that was how I learned that even though they – we? – are a really intuitive bunch of freaks, the mind-reading thing is, like, voluntary. So now I happily fall asleep every night employing various Tristan-orientated fantasies, many of which, embarrassingly enough, involve nothing more than cuddling.