Ring! Ring! Ri—!
I pick Alicia's call, put my cellphone in handsfree, and fall back to bed.
'Claire? Are you up?' She asks.
'Maybe,' I say groggily, rolling so that I am facedown on the pillow; to hide my eyes from the sun's advance rays. I feel mentally sapped: like a psychic vampire has sucked me dry of all mental fortitude.
'Have you checked your messages?' She asks, an amused peal lurking in her voice. Something is going on she wants me to know about. I check my messages.
'I'm guessing you did all that, Claire,' she says, and laughs her head off.
Did what? Yeah, Sebastian and Seamus.
For a while there, I had forgotten my midnight escapades.
I scroll through multi-angled pictures of Seamus hanging from a tree—and a couple of videos—as free of clothing as a newborn babe. There is a certain kind of art in the way Perry's lipstick sparkles in the light, a befitting I am a pervert. Seamus still looks knocked out of it, all the way to Pluto.
'I hear Sebastian, very drunk, had to be stitched up after almost drowning in the pool. You wouldn't happen to know a little extra than the rest of us are saying, would you?' She asks.
'Why would I?' Then I laugh, 'I barely spent a quarter of an hour there.'
That is enough for Alicia as long as confessing goes. 'So you really were there,' she breathes. 'To a party Perry would have never invited you to.'
'Had to be the heroine who saves the day,' I say, explaining the night to her. My excitement tapers and fades when I remember my meeting with Lauren and her mysterious telepathic partner.
As serious as the dead, Alicia listens to my tale. The part about Lauren. I have to backtrack to Wilhelm's visit to my home, except it hadn't been him after all.
'Another telepathist is bad news, Claire. You are difficult enough with all of your mind reading and illusions; and you are on our side. I can't begin to imagine what damage an evil you could do.'
Though she does not mention it, Alicia is thinking of the fact that Lauren's telepathist had me talking with empty space and a product of my own mind. To someone who isn't a gifted telepathist like me, this friend of Lauren's, whom I suspect to be a lycan, could unhinge their minds, unground reality, unfound the very foundational laws that they know to be true.
She doesn't need to say it, because I have already come to the same conclusion: I have to put a period to Lauren's telepathist's story in my own story. Whichsoever way I can.
I climb into Alicia's car later to sit bewildered and short of words.
Her hand on the ignition but noticing my look, she asks, 'What?'
'Toby just called me wolf.'
'You mean your soon-to-be-three-year-old brother?' Alicia asks emotionlessly.
'Y-yeah,' I say, struggling for words.
Alicia nods as her mind spins. 'Odd,' she comments absently.
'Yeah? My dad toasted werewolves on the night of my mom's promotion, and—', it suddenly comes back to me, '—mom made a threat of sorts to me some days ago.'
'Let me get this straight: on the same night you had a fake vampire of vanishing appear to you, your dad makes a toast to werewolves?'
'Same night.' I stare at Alicia as we come to the same conclusion. 'I am going to find this telepathist soon!' I groan.
'You had better,' Alicia stresses.
We discuss the last few months in her car on the way to school. I feel a sharp, familiar stab in my chest when we are on the subject of my/Dr Simone's daughter.
Alicia's blond eyebrows perk in concern. 'Fine?'
I nod, for the pain is literally breathtaking as always, holding the air hostage in my lungs. My mind races to process the nostalgia.
Alicia continues talking, while in fact her voice is a mere breeze that blows past my ears.
The pain stabs my chest: lung to heart to other lung, arresting everything. 'Stop the car!' I scream.
Alicia slams on the brake powerfully enough to go through the floorboard. Her Cadillac lifts off the two back wheels; screeches some distance on its two front wheels, grinding its nose a little on the asphalt before righting itself.
'What now, Claire!' Alicia demands, appropriately angry.
'That was my false mate bond!' I shout back.
Puzzled, she follows the path of my eyes to the school parking lot just ahead.
Mason, in black shirt and trousers with a thunderstorm in his hard but sexy grimace, stares at us from the parking lot. The seriousness of his stare sets my skin afire.
***
Mason strikes quite the irresistible figure in the tight-fitting clothes. Even if he is oblivious to them, uninterested in the dozens of teenage female eyes scoping him out, they are rapt in their devotion. My dramatic entrance with Alicia was not even enough to break the spell of hush in the lot.
Seamus and Sebastian, sighted in a corner of my eyes, resent the attention Mason is receiving, notwithstanding that they can't themselves look away.
Joana, Perry; all of them look as though they have been turned to stone without having seen Medusa.
My hand opens the door of its own accord, as my feet carry me towards Mason. My mate instinct is holding the wheel.
I wrestle the urge to brush my lips against Mason's, to claim him before every eye in the lot. Mason himself reads the war in my eyes, and mercilessly steps closer. I squirm as I visibly shake.
'See what you have done,' Mason grates as his own body shakes too, albeit slightly where mine is nearly a full-blown seizure.
***
Is Mason even here? Last I checked, a lycan telepathist is loose in my town, and her primary target is me. She has shown me a fake Wilhelm twice. What stranger is showing me the one person I want to see most of all?
But Mason is real. I feel it in my guts, in the pool of my feminity where a flood is breaking its bounds, in the strumming of each layer of the mate bond that connects every fiber of my body to Mason's.
This, here, is my temptation.