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Hopefully, Paxton has the sense to put the frozen stuff back in the cooler. We’re going to be here a while. More and more authorities show up as well as a pair of ambulances. The police aren’t letting anyone leave just yet until they’ve been interviewed. Luckily, I have my pseudo-badge in my purse… the one Sherbet got me for my consultant role. Upon seeing it, the cops’ attitude toward me shifts noticeably. It’s not exactly the same respect they’d give a fellow officer, but I’m no longer being looked at like a potential suspect.
I give them a slightly modified version of events, formatted to fit their reality. If I start talking about Paxton being a literal empath and sensing the guy’s emotional state, they might ask me to have a mental evaluation, too. The story they get is much more palatable to normal people. I simply explain that I saw this guy acting sketchy and upon closer inspection, noticed the form of a combat rifle protruding under his coat. Upon seeing that, I confronted the man and ushered him outside. He soon came unglued, went for his weapon, and a shot went off while we struggled for control of the rifle.
It’s not really a stretch. Chances are, if I noticed the guy by myself, I’d have been watching him anyway, expecting something to happen. No one wears a raincoat like that in such warm weather unless they’re either nuts or up to something. (Or in this guy’s case, both). In that case, I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence he was enough of a threat to act untilafterhe pulled out the gun inside the store. Paxton telling me about his extreme mental state got me moving much sooner and certainly prevented injury or tragedy.
One officer comments on my ‘form.’ Apparently, I pin suspects to the ground the ‘correct’ way, so he asks where I learned it. While I could tell them I trained at Quantico and used to be a federal agent, I find myself increasingly hesitant to mention that these days. Sure, it’s not a lie, but… if they look me up, they’re going to be all sorts of confused how a woman creeping up on fifty still looks so young. My luck, they’ll start thinking I killed Samantha Moon and stole her identity.
Another ten years and I might need to either move or come up with a fake name.
Heck, it’s not beyond reasonable for a woman to pull off looking ‘not quite thirty’ in her fifties. For crying out loud, Cher is like seventy something and looks amazing. It’s not quite time for me to panic but there’s no point opening a can of worms I can leave closed.
“Just stuff I picked up being around cops so much.” I smile and segue into talking about Detective Sherbet.
Eventually, a detective—not Sherbet—shows up to take over this investigation. Uniformed officers have interviewed most of the shoppers and sent them on their way by now, except for people who had the proverbial front-row seats to the incident. Shoppers in the back of the store who didn’t see anything don’t need to talk to the detective. Paxton hovers at my side, rattled but happy it all ended without anyone being seriously hurt. She’ll be in a somber mood for a while until the emotional ‘radiation’ wears off.
I give the detective the same story.
Any security cameras in the store will be at an elevated angle near the ceiling. It’s unlikely anyone watching the video could tell I had the suspect off the ground. If anyone does notice, it shouldn’t be too difficult to blame it on a weird graphical glitch. Who in their right mind would believe me capable of lifting a man off his feet so casually? Sure, a normal woman my size could probably lift a man, but it would lookmuchdifferent, far from effortless.
Is it bad of me to be more worried about potential supernatural exposure than what’s going to happen to the shooter? Nah. He wanted to get himself killed with no regard for other people’s lives. Wait, no. A drunk driver has ‘no regard’ for others. This guy actively wanted to kill others just to do it. So, yeah. Maybe he needs help but I’m not going to spend time worrying about what becomes of him.
…and we’re going to need to redo our shopping at a different store. This one’s closing for the rest of the day.
Once the detective is done interviewing me and has my contact info, I walk with Paxton to the Momvan.
“That was crazy,” whispers Paxton.
“Are you okay?” I glance over at her as she climbs into the passenger seat.
“Not really, but I’ll be fine.” She exhales. “Just need to flush other people’s emotions out of my head.”
I pat her hand. “Want to go home?”
She gives me a weird look. “Where else would we go?”
“We still need groceries, but I can wait for another day if you’re not up for it.”
“Oh. Umm.” Paxton rakes her hands up through her long, blonde hair, then shifts her mouth side to side for a few seconds in thought. “Shopping will let me think about something else. Let’s go now. I need the distraction.”
“Okay.” I start the engine.
She manages a weak smile. Yeah, she knows I’m fine. Tackling a would-be spree shooter might have once left my hands shaking for hours. Now? It kinda pales in comparison to diving down a freakin’ dragon’s throat or having all sorts of ancient evils trying to kill me. Bizarre as it sounds, dealing with a nicenormalpsychopath is kind of a refreshing change of pace.
Chapter Two
The Next Heir
Tammy sat cross-legged on her bed, staring at a small pile of textbooks.
With only a few months left in her senior year of high school, it annoyed her that the teachers continued to assign homework. Whether or not she did it seemed insignificant to the rest of her life. Incomplete homework might drop an A to a B or a B to a C, but they wouldn’t hold her diploma back over it.
It seemed like pointless tedium. Someone, somewhere, decided that kids needed to be ‘kept busy’ even outside of school. She huffed another sigh, then muttered, “Probably trying to get us used to working all day.”
The science teacher she had last year, Mr. Gerard, had opinions. Lots of them. One of his opinions held that schools continued to follow a design that no longer applied to the modern world. Like mass-production factories, they squeezed incoming students into a one-size-fits all machine that would prepare them to become faceless, nameless laborers in an industrialized economy. It suppressed gifted students, or oddball creatives, and it tended to let those with difficulties slip through the cracks. Mr. Gerard often said the education system didn’t teach kids how to think, because adults who think are much more difficult for the government to control.
Tammy didn’t feel gifted, nor like an oddball creative even though she did rather like art class and had considered writing as a viable option... but that was back when blogs were more popular. It was also back when she could read minds and had a perfect grasp of what went on around her.
She knew some of the kids who got labeled as dumb or failures were really smart… just bored. The academic work being given to them was so below what they could handle they had no interest in it. Others had personal problems at home they wouldn’t talk about. She’d left some anonymous notes with the school administrators that so-and-so was being mentally abused by their parents or neglected or so on. Other than one boy disappearing entirely—transferred to a different school—she didn’t know if anything happened thanks to her mental eavesdropping.
