Sleight of Fantasy: Sasha Urban Series: Book 4 Read online

  When her hand-model-smooth fingers brush mine, I feel a strange sensation in my groin.

  Wait.

  What?

  Since when do I have that kind of plumbing?

  Did I develop some sort of narcissistic schizophrenia? Because this is beginning to remind me of that scene from Being John Malkovich when the titular John Malkovich gets inside his own head.

  Then it finally dawns on me.

  Somehow—and I have no idea how—I’m inside Darian’s memory of our meeting.

  It is his very masculine arousal I just felt.

  That makes sense—in as much as such a thing could make sense.

  This is why everything around us looks so odd. Memory isn’t a perfect recording of events, and so Darian must not remember all the nitty-gritty, like the colors of things or who else was eating at the nearby tables.

  For that matter, this is why the card selection was so much fairer than when I had actually performed this effect. He remembers what I wanted my spectators to recall later, not what really happened.

  This also explains why the me in his memory looks so perfect.

  It’s me but seen through Darian’s beer goggles—

  The scene around me swirls and disintegrates like a mirage, only to be replaced by a new one.

  Chapter Six

  I’m standing in front of a bathroom mirror, trying to wake up.

  Against my will, my eyes look at myself in the mirror and confirm my theory.

  A shirtless Darian stares back at me.

  Wow.

  Either Darian is rewriting history, or he was working out rather vigorously at this point in his life.

  “Something is wrong,” Darian thinks inside my—his own—head. “Where is she?”

  A wolf howl pierces the air.

  “She must be upset,” Darian thinks. “But why—”

  The door bursts open, and a naked woman rushes in.

  A pregnant naked woman.

  Darian looks her over and playfully whistles.

  His memory must be playing tricks again, as mere mortals do not look as perfect as this lady. Her flawless skin resembles white chocolate melted over silk. Even her small baby bump somehow looks like it was designed by Leonardo da Vinci.

  Darian smiles. “Great. Why bother with pesky clothing?” Then something about her face makes him stop talking.

  Despite the fury in her features, as well as their almost supernatural beauty, something about the woman’s face is distantly familiar to me.

  Darian clearly knows her intimately, but where have I seen her? On a cover of Maxim magazine, maybe?

  “How could you?” she shouts in a melodious voice.

  “What’s going on, love?” Darian clears his throat. “Did something happen?”

  She slaps him/me on the cheek.

  It stings.

  “Matilda!” He rubs his cheek. “What is this?”

  “So, this is the Matilda you compared me to in the restaurant?” I ask, knowing full well Darian isn’t going to answer. “Why did you say she was fiery?”

  “I know,” she says, packing a novel’s worth of meaning into just two words. “Stop the farce.”

  “She can’t know,” Darian thinks. “How could she know?”

  The fear that accompanies that thought is stronger than any I’ve experienced myself—and I thought I was an expert on this subject after everything that’s happened.

  Then again, memory-fear might get stored stronger than when you experience it firsthand. Especially if something horrific is about to happen to burn this episode into Darian’s memory.

  “I’m still not following,” he lies.

  “I can believe that,” Matilda says, her jaw tensing. “You’ve had trouble ‘following’ me for some time now, haven’t you?”

  The fear solidifies into an iceberg in the pit of Darian’s stomach. “You didn’t—”

  “I did,” she says. “I asked Chester to shield me from seer eyes.”

  “Insane woman,” Darian thinks. “Your husband isn’t stupid. He will guess—”

  The look on her face short-circuits Darian’s thoughts.

  “You wouldn’t tell me what was wrong,” she grits through her teeth. “So I shielded myself from your power, just long enough to hire a dream walker to find out what you’re hiding.”

  Darian’s negative emotions are hard to tell apart at this point.

  Distantly, I recall Felix mentioning a dream walker friend who works for the rehab facility where we left Ariel. He said they can enter other people’s dreams and manipulate their surroundings.

  Sounds like they can also steal secrets.

  “You’re going to trust some charlatan?” Darian says, forcing outrage into his voice, but he knows how desperate he sounds.

  “Don’t.” If looks could sever heads, Darian would’ve lost his.

  “Did the dream walker tell you why?” Panic creeps into his voice.

  “Why?” She spits out the word. “Why you didn’t tell me my baby will die, you mean?”

  He cringes as though she slapped him again.

  “I can guess,” she says. “You know this is his baby. No doubt you saw a future where I finally stopped our—whatever this was—for the sake of my baby. No doubt you—”

  With the speed of light, Darian concentrates in a manner I can’t quite understand, and finds himself instantly in Headspace.

  Wow. How did he do it so fast and without any meditation?

  He does something else too quickly for me to comprehend—and enters a vision.

  Which for me makes it a memory of a vision—which is kind of trippy.

  Darian is standing on the edge of a graveyard.

  “Lurking and hiding, like a coward,” he thinks to himself through the grief.

  Chester and a bunch of other black-clad people are standing near the freshly dug-up grave.

  Chester’s usually jolly, satyr-like face is furrowed with deep sorrow.

  Sorrow that’s nothing compared to what Darian feels—

  The vision is over, and we’re back in the bathroom, with the naked and furious Matilda saying, “—rather the baby died, so you could have me to yourself—”

  “The future is changed,” Darian thinks, ignoring her words. “She dies now, unless—”

  The scene around us swirls and disintegrates again, replaced by yet another one.

  Chapter Seven

  Darian is in Headspace.

  He reaches for a nearby shape, and a vision starts.

  And what a vision.

  Wow.

  This is definitely TMI.

  I feel the pleasure as Darian penetrates a woman from behind.

  If I had my own face, it would be the color of an overripe tomato right about now.

  Darian grabs onto the woman’s narrow waist.

  She moans.

  “So this is what it’s like for a guy?” I ask no one in particular. “Does it always feel this awesome?”

  No.

  Can’t be.

  This is no doubt another trick of memory.

  Yep. Let’s focus on that instead of his grunts and her moans.

  Best to focus on the metaphysical aspects of this—the trippy overtones and all that.

  I mean I’m currently inside a guy while he’s inside someone else—

  No. That way lies madness.

  Maybe I should busy myself with the mystery of the woman’s identity?

  She’s on all fours, looking forward, so I can’t tell who she is—just that she’s having a good time.

  Darian’s mind is completely overwhelmed by the pleasure, so he doesn’t think some useful thought, like her name.

  Though she looks too pale, I still hope it’s Matilda from the prior memory.

  Maybe he found a way to prevent that graveyard vision? Maybe she’s left her husband and worked out her differences with Darian—and her baby is alive?

  Then a realization hits me as strongly as an orgasm must hit Darian’s c
urrent partner. At least, I assume this is why she arches her back and makes sounds like a cat in heat.

  I already know what happened with Matilda.

  And why her face was slightly familiar.

  And who the baby is.

  Gaius told me a version of this story before the Rite—only his version was different from what seems to have been the truth.

  When explaining the feud between Chester and Darian, Gaius told me that Darian had delivered a prophecy to Chester’s wife, telling her she would be the cause of her daughter’s demise—and that it was that prophecy that drove the mom to kill herself.

  He called her “a werewolf wife”—which explains that howl I heard in Darian’s memory, and her nudity.

  I later learned that the child in question is Roxy, my bitchy classmate.

  This is why Matilda’s face looked so familiar. Roxy inherited a lot of her mom’s features.

  The full story is so very different from what Gaius had told me, though. It looks like it wasn’t a case of Darian having a vision and telling Chester’s wife about it.

  As far as I can tell, she—Matilda—and Darian had an affair, and then he had the vision about Roxy dying but didn’t tell Matilda. However, she sensed Darian keeping a secret and contrived a way to pull the truth out anyway—with disastrous results.

  If I had lungs, I’d sigh.

  Had Chester known about the affair?

  Given that Matilda asked him to shield her from a seer’s view—and taking into account the lingering animosity between the two men—I bet Chester had put some of it together.

  If I had a head, I’d shake it in frustration.

  No wonder Chester wanted to kill me.

  He must’ve thought Darian was romantically interested in me—and wanted to hit his nemesis where it would really hurt.

  His motivation wasn’t just about preventing a seer from getting recognized, as he claimed at Earth Club.

  This also explains why he’s left me alone since his initial strike. He must’ve decided that Darian wouldn’t be with me because of Nero and all that.

  Or maybe he’s left me alone because I’m Nero’s mentee?

  Does self-preservation overrule revenge?

  Of course, all that assumes that Chester has actually left me alone, which I don’t know for a—

  Ecstasy hits Darian’s brain, completely ruining my attempts to ignore what is happening.

  Whoa.

  Is it my prolonged abstinence, or was that better than anything I’ve ever felt?

  Darian leans in and hugs the woman, and she laughs and turns around.

  I stare at her face, wishing I had a mouth so it could gape.

  That’s my face.

  “I love you,” what-better-be-Kit says in my voice and grins at Darian stupidly.

  “I love you more,” Darian says to her/me.

  In his thoughts, he adds, “I love you almost as much as I loved Matilda—and I was able to save you when I couldn’t save her.”

  He saved me?

  What from?

  Hopefully, he’s thinking of the saves that have already happened. Like that time when he texted me on my way to work after the TV disaster—an action that he later claimed stalled me just enough to enable me to survive. Or he might be talking about yesterday’s warning, when he said, “Beware the red light.”

  More interestingly, he actually means the lovey-dovey sentiments.

  Now that he’s not in the middle of coitus, the rest of his thoughts turn saccharine toward the sexed-out Sasha in front of him.

  Which is when I finally put two and two together.

  When we danced at Earth Club, Darian told me he’d seen a future of us together.

  And this memory started in Headspace—so it must be a vision of some future.

  I want to smack my missing forehead, but instead, I stare at the naked me through Darian’s eyes.

  This Sasha looks sinfully happy to be in his arms.

  A part of me rejects what I’m seeing, but another part wonders if this future would be such a bad thing.

  Don’t I want to be that happy one day?

  No, wait. What am I thinking?

  Is this a side effect of literally f-ing myself?

  You can’t develop feelings for someone based on what happens in their memory of a vision of a future that may or may not come to pass.

  That would be a paradoxical self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Also, even in this rosy future, Darian seems to be comparing me to his Matilda.

  Do I want to always compete with a ghost?

  More importantly, might I be happier with someone else? Someone like, say—

  The scene around me disintegrates again, and I find myself outside Darian’s memories—in a place unlike any I’ve seen.

  Chapter Eight

  This must not be regular Headspace because I seem to have normal vision. All around me is vacuum-like blackness, and in the middle of it is a hologram, for lack of a better term.

  A hologram of Darian.

  If those green brain synapses from my biology class were to make up a ghostly person, this is what that would look like.

  Darian’s translucent form seems to be attached to the uncanny shape-entity that dragged me into this Headspace misadventure. However, I don’t see that connection with my eyes.

  I sense it with that special Headspace awareness.

  The same awareness tells me that the entity seems to have grown.

  No, that’s not right. It got entangled with another entity.

  This is when I look down and realize that I’m a spindly synapse-hologram myself, only attached to the second shape-entity thingy.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Darian says.

  Did he say those words in the traditional sense?

  His ghostly lips did move, but I have a strong suspicion there’s no air here to vibrate. And his translucent ears look like they lack eardrums—so I assume mine do too.

  “What is this?” I ask him.

  Cool. I can hear myself in my head as though I spoke in the real world.

  “You thought of me inside Headspace.” His ghostly figure floats up. “I was also in Headspace at the same time, so here we are.” He points his finger at where the intertwined entities are.

  “Sure,” I say sarcastically. “That explains it all. Thanks.”

  He floats in my direction, but I instinctively float backward.

  Neat. I can float too.

  He hovers down so our eyes are parallel. “Allow me to explain. Did you think that Headspace is a space inside your own head, like the rather unfortunate title suggests?”

  I shrug. I actually thought it might be some other dimension, but I haven’t dwelled on it much after the initial conversation with Felix.

  “Well, this encounter clearly disproves that common misconception.” He nods in the direction of the otherworldly entities. “In actuality, it is the ‘space’ part of the term that’s key. Headspace is a type of, well, space, that seers can all visit.” He spreads his arms. “One is shared for all. And, in case it’s not clear”—he again points at the two thingies we’re hooked up to—“those are the manifestations of you and me as we appear in Headspace. Our current translucent bodies are but figments of our imaginations, used to facilitate conversation.”

  My head spins pretty well for being merely imaginary.

  First, there were the Otherlands—which are essentially parallel universes. Now a confirmation that Headspace is another realm altogether—one completely alien to our usual three-dimensional one.

  “It shouldn’t be that huge of a surprise,” Darian says, misunderstanding my silence. “You’d have to be outside time to see the future.”

  “I guess,” I mutter, still processing the whole thing. “I just find the idea of ‘outside time’ difficult to wrap this translucent brain around.”

  “I can’t blame you for that.” He winks. “Seers more powerful than I failed to fully grasp Headspace. They simply learned
to use it—for visions and to secretly communicate as we are doing now. Only it can be dangerous to communicate this way—which is why I accepted your summons today. I wanted to warn you.”

  “Dangerous?” I try to cross my arms across my chest, but they simply go through each other, like those of a ghost.

  “It can be bad for one’s sanity, for starters,” Darian says, his face the very definition of earnestness. “Seers sometimes experience hallucinations when first connecting this way. The more powerful the seer, the stronger these hallucinations can be—and the greater the danger. You should’ve been okay today, being new to your power and all that, but still, with that TV-powered raw talent, the risk was there.” He looks at me intently, and as offhandedly as possible, he asks, “You didn’t experience any strangeness, did you?”

  “No,” I lie—hopefully as seamlessly as he just did.

  And lie he must have—with a skill rivaling that of a magician.

  Unless… could it be that those memories I just saw were indeed hallucinations?

  If so, why was I Darian in them, and more importantly, how come they fit my prior knowledge so well?

  The memory/hallucination from the restaurant was exactly as I myself recall the events, and the one about Matilda fits the feud between Chester and Darian. Even the one of Darian and me in bed was something he once claimed to have seen in a vision.

  In any case, if I were going to hallucinate about sleeping with someone, it would be with a partner even less suitable than Darian. Like, say, my boss…

  Darian hovers an inch closer and with suspicious relief says, “I’m glad to hear you were spared the unpleasantness.”

  “Lucky, I guess,” I lie. “How about you?”

  He looks like he’s trying to suppress a smile. “I was not as immune to the dreadful things as you.”

  Oh no.

  Did he see one or more of my memories?

  Is that why he looks on the verge of a smirk?

  Please let it not be that time my period started in the middle of geometry class, or the time I slipped and fell down wet subway stairs. In a skirt. In front of the whole lacrosse team.

  Then I realize there are worse things Darian could’ve witnessed, like anything involving Copperfield—my “massager.”