Tom held his head in trembling hands as a nauseating mix of adrenaline, shame and animalistic satisfaction rampaged through his body.

A large part of him had enjoyed killing that woman. The instant payback. Sweet as cotton candy and just as lacking in substance. The rest of him recoiled violently. His body shook while it decided which emotion would win out.

“Did…” Nema sat beside him, hesitating for a moment as she gathered her words. “Did you need to do that?”

Tom glanced past his trembling fingers and spotted Nema, her face displaying deep concern, and just a hint of fear. Fear for him or of him, Tom wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know. Probably.” Tom said, desperate to focus on something other than himself. “What would be the first thing you would do if you could mess around with someone’s mind?”

“I’d make them happier.”

Tom chuckled.

“Tell you what I would do. I’d install a backdoor so I could get back into their mind again anytime I wanted. One that had a signature I could recognize and had the password to.”

Tom sighed and looked at the ceiling.

“I don’t know that messing with someone’s head is anything like hacking into a computer, I don’t even know how to do that, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.”

“What does?”

“That she installed a backdoor into my head, or tried to. I’m not sure.” Tom muttered, glancing at Nema. “That was a really stupid move on my part.”

“That’s because you treated a Morkel like People.” Carol said.

Tom decided to ignore her.

“When she was talking to me, she didn’t reveal that she knew what family I was in, and she was perfectly compliant…until the carrot incident.”

Tom glanced at Carol.

“What’s the playbook for dealing with an En’hol? You mentioned it in a dream I had once.”

“Did I kill you in that dream?”

“Nope, answer the question.”

“Well, generally, if an En’hol approaches you acting all nosey and asking questions, it’s likely because you’re a figment of their power that they’re pumping for information. This is the current hypothesis.

“The playbook is to torture any nosey En’hols until they break, rending them useless as a seer when they snap back to their body. Records show it’s likely been done to a handful of unwary En’hol who went inexplicably mad or died of heart failure.”

“What do you think the Morkel playbook for a seer is?” Tom asked.

“Probably pretty similar. I wouldn’t doubt the backdoor hypothesis.”

“She knew she was in a dream. She knew I was an En’hol, and she knew what to do about it. She didn’t tip her hand until after she had enough control over me. It took about thirty seconds.”

“She knew she was in a dream?”

“You can’t just steal what you want from me and walk away, En’hol.” Tom said, repeating one of the last phrases she’d spoken to him in his dream.

“She used the word steal, rather than take or pry or some other more aggressive, forceful word. She used a word that implied stealth and subterfuge, and when she mentioned the En’hol name at the end, it revealed that she knew – at least a little – who I am and what my powers were. She knew she was in a dream.”

“You killed her because of her choice of words? That is awesome.”

Tom and Nema scowled at Carol.

“If she knew she was in a dream, and she knew I was an En’hol, then she would’ve done the Morkel version of ‘the En’hol Playbook’. For idiots like Carol, the playbook is straight up torture, but I’d bet Morkel women have a slightly different strategy. We know for a fact that a Morkel curse can control someone. Far better than eliminating an En’hol would be having one in your pocket.”

“Are you sure?” Nema asked.

“Nope. At least not until I saw her expression when she saw me in front of her. I’m pretty sure I was seconds away from becoming a puppet. The process wasn’t instantaneous, which is what I was banking on.”

“You could’ve sent someone else to do it.” Nema winced.

“Yeah,” Tom said, running his fingers through his hair. “Yeah, that probably would’ve been a lot safer, but I wanted to be sure, you know? As sure as I could be anyway.”

About sixty percent.

Tom felt a heavy impact on his back.

“AWWW, my little sperm-donor’s first pre-meditated murder!” Carol said with a grin.

“We killed those soldiers in front of the portals,” Tom said, frowning.

“Eh, that was more wartime murder. This was cold, and I love it. I’m gonna go buy you a drink. Right in the face!”

Carol gave a splattering raspberry and pantomimed a head exploding as she walked away, chuckling.

“Why does it feel wrong when Carol is happy with me for doing the right thing?”

“There, there,” Nema said, patting his back.

Tom took a deep breath and blew it out.

“There’s one more thing I gotta do.”

***DREAM***

***Aisha Morkel***

“Hello Kyle,” Aisha Morkel said, looking the handsome young man up and down as she idly kicked her heels. The Alakesh was obviously under duress to enter the room, and was unlikely to be the architect of her imprisonment.

“Madam Morkel.” Kyle Alakesh said with a terrified bow.

“Please, call me Aisha,” She said, beginning work on a handful of triggers in the athletic young man’s mind that would help her escape, or failing that, cause chaos in the extreme. Nobody subjected Aisha Morkel to this indignity and walked away from it.

“You’re old enough to my grandmum, ma’am.” Kyle said with a wince.

“Who told you that!?” Aisha said, leaping to her feet.

“Your corpse did. All the wrinkles that popped out after I put a bullet through your head. It was actually pretty impressive to hide all that.”

Aisha cocked her head to the side, pausing in her infiltration of the ox’s thought processes.

“Who’s talking through you? Is that cousin Rickly? A Kinzena whispering in your ear? Or are you just suicidally stupid?”

Kyle Alakesh paled, but continued speaking.

“Since I feel responsible for letting the interaction between us get out of control, which led to your death, I’d like to jot down your living will, if you don’t mind.”

“Do you have anything you wished you’d done before you died? Children who need protection now that you’re dead? Enemies?”

“This is the weirdest interrogation I’ve ever been a part of.” Aisha scoffed, her mind wandering to her oldest granddaughter, who would no doubt suffer if her matriarch wasn’t around to dissuade her uncle from trying to marry her.

Disgusting pervert. Should castrate him.

Aisha refocused her mind. If another Morkel was behind this; and it was totally possible, then she would have to maintain her discipline.

“I guess if there was one thing I regret, it’s never having sex with Raze Kinzena. That boy is huge.”

“Please, be serious.”

“What do you want me to say?” Aisha spread her hands wide. “I’m not telling you shit about me, and I don’t believe your little ‘you’re already dead’ song and dance. I’ve had more creative mindfucks from my sister.”

Kyle went silent for a moment.

“Pull me out in five seconds.” Kyle said.

Aisha’s eyes narrowed. Was someone coming to pull Kyle out or was it –

Her eyes widened when an En’hol shooed Kyle out of the way and sat down in front of her. Not only was she within spitting distance of one of the precious seers, she’d already put her mark on him. She’d already touched his mind.

Greed flooded her mind, but she gave no physical reaction. A godsdamned gold mine! I’ll be running the family yet!

Aisha resolved to pretend to listen attentively while she strengthened her control over him.

It was this non-attentive attentiveness that caused her to almost miss his words.

“I give you my word.” The En’hol said, fingers laced together. “I Killed you already. Nothing that you do now can possibly benefit you. You are dead.”

Aisha tugged on the strands of honor and the notion of truth floating through his mind, and they hummed golden and pure in his mind.

He was telling the truth.

No, he’s probably been made to think he killed me.

Except she hadn’t seen anyone else’s prints on his mind other than her own, and even those were faint and simple, gradually unravelling even as she watched.

A cold fear began to build in the pit of her stomach.

A moment later a woman covered in tattoos marched into the room, grabbed the foolish En’hol by the scruff of his neck and bodily dragged him out.

“…how?” Aisha breathed.

Kyle cocked his head as if listening.

“I am a very unusual En’hol, in that I can look at the past rather than the future.” Kyle said. “This is largely less useful than a typical seer, but sometimes…my condition gives me the opportunity to speak with the dead, as long as it’s within a day.”

“Do you have any family that needs looking after?”

Aisha’s long fingernail began tapping against the table rapidly as she gradually lost the battle for mastery of her emotions.

The silence hung in the air between them for a good half hour as her desires warred against her fear and pride.

“Let me write a letter to my granddaughter.”

“I’ll transcribe it for you.”

“I want to write it myself.”

“Ma’am, I’m not letting you touch a piece of paper, because I have no idea what kind of curse you could put on it. You made me eat my own fingers with a plate of carrots.”

Aisha chuckled.

“Yeah, that sounds like something I would do.”

“Besides, I can’t take the letter back to the present with me. I’ll have to memorize and transcribe it anyway. It’ll be easier for me to memorize if I write it.”

“…Fine.”

Well, there goes the idea of hitting him with a simple Cursemark, Aisha sighed inwardly.

***AWAKE***

Tom pulled the paper with him back into the real world with the usual ripping sensation. No memorization required.

Just because he felt bad about his naïve bungling of the situation leading to her death, he wasn’t above lying to her.

When Tom’s eyes opened, the paper was in his hand, surrounded by turbulent eddies in the viscous substance he’d come to perceive as spacetime.

The normally relatively still and smooth substance whirled and spun away from the letter like a gust of wind introduced to a room full of dust motes.

Tom’s gaze followed a coin-sized whorl of spacetime that rolled off the letter, till it intersected with a pencil on his desk, which trembled in place for a moment.

Normally Tom would attribute that to a jostled elbow, or floating gunk in his eye making him see minor movements. Hell, he wouldn’t even have seen it if his eyes weren’t tracking the whorl of spacetime.

Spacetime turbulence from moving things between then and now. Tom hadn’t been perceptive enough to notice it before his near-death experience, and he hadn’t duped anything until this very moment, so it was the first time he’d seen it.

Interesting. Very interesting.

That explains a lot. But not everything.

Tom jotted down a quick reminder, then underlined it.

Buy physics books

Tom heaved a sigh, the adrenaline/shame cocktail of being face-to-face with someone he’d murdered slowly fading as he glanced down at the letter in his hand, transcribed into English, because Tom only knew a few words in Deraan, with Carol as the translator.

Dear Mari,

Your mother was a crushing disappointment, and you are shaping up to be just as much of a waste of my time, but alas, I can’t fight against my maternal instincts.

If your uncle puts his pecker anywhere near your mouth, I give you full permission to bite it off.

If the moron En’hol transcribing this letter actually did kill me, I want you to have Fable. She hasn’t been let out of her cage in too long and will look after you…

Probably. Make sure you feed her some commoners before you let her out.

The key to open her lock is Rain on a Sunny day. This will only work if I’m dead and she’s unbonded. If I’m not dead, she’ll probably kill you.

The letter went on to instruct Mari to enact elaborate petty revenge against no less than fifteen people, all of whom were other Morkels, including defecating on the doorstep of ‘The Schoolhouse’, whatever that was.

Tom actually had to swap Carol out with Gunn, to make sure the letter was actually as vile as Carol was telling him.

Aside from a few minor embellishments, it really was that bad.

“The fuck is wrong with these people?” Tom said, holding the letter between thumb and forefinger as if it was something dirty.

He’d have to get it transcribed back to Deraan. Maybe when he learned the language himself. He had a responsibility, after all.

In the meantime. I need to get myself another Morkel.

Attempt #2 is going to go a lot differently.