Divine_Scream Read Free Page B

shyness and lack of confidence, however, ultimately masked his good looks. Women who got to know him interpreted his reluctance as weakness, rather than taking it as a good sign and accepting it as a challenge. The banshee didn’t understand females in this world. They mostly chose strength and protection in men when modern society had rendered such qualities superfluous. With so many good hearts out there going to waste, women should have been cultivating these flowers and watching them bloom to fullness. Instead, they chose the man with more confidence than he deserved and spent most of their lives chipping away at that confidence to reshape them into someone closer to Jared. That was working in reverse. Jared was a hunk of stone that hadn’t been worked into a statue yet. She loved all the possibilities lying within him.
    “I’ve never fainted before,” he said.
    “I won’t hold it against you,” she replied. “I thought you had a stronger stomach. My apologies, Jared. We won’t talk death right now.”
    He pinched between his eyes. “Who are you? Do you have a name?”
    “No. None of us do. Our own lives don’t matter. We aren’t people.”
    “You look like a person to me.”
    “We are mechanisms. We perform a required job. I’m like a spiritual air traffic controller. When I give the go-ahead, someone takes flight into the great unknown, and never before.”
    “I thought we weren’t talking about that right now.” Jared closed his eyes and took a quivering breath through his nose.
    “Oops. Yeah. Sorry about that.”
    His eyes flew open, vitally renewed. “I need to understand what’s happening. I mean, what was that back there? What the hell—what in the hell was all of that ? And that thing you did, that sound that came out of your throat—”
    “That was a Cosmos Scream,” the banshee explained. “It severs all realities at once to form a short-cut of sorts through time and space. It usually works more smoothly than that, and we could have covered a lot more miles, reached our ultimate destination, but unfortunately one reality rejected our presence and the conflict formed a Disturbance Paradigm .”
    “Come again?”
    She offered her hand and Jared carefully took it. She pulled him to his feet and grasped his shoulders for a moment to make sure he had balance. For a few seconds she massaged his muscles and stared deep into his eyes. This made him squirmy and she drew her hands away.
    “As I said before, it’s like a reality pretzel, but that paradigm back there was teeny-tiny. I’ve seen far greater DPs than that, so count us lucky. Anyway, let’s get moving, huh? We can talk as we walk.”
    Jared flinched. “You’re not going to do that cosmic thingy again, are you?”
    “Cosmos Scream? Not likely.”
    “What does that mean? ‘Not likely?’ That you are going to do it again? I—I can’t go through that another time.”
    “Oh, poor baby. Want me to hold you?” She put her arm around his waist as she guided him down the street. “I could sing you a soothing song. I know many.”
    “You’re making fun of me?”
    “Hell yes I am. Look, breathe in and breathe out. I won’t be doing another Cosmos Scream. No more bending reality. From here on in, reality stays rooted. I’ll use every other scream I have to help you. Everything within my limits, anyway.”
    “What are you actually helping me with, though?”
    “You ready to talk about that? Maybe sit down first,” she said, regarding him with a maternal concern.
    “I’m not there yet.”
    “Didn’t think so.”
    He sighed and blinked rapidly, trying to form another thought. “You have other screams then?”
    “Of course I do, dummy.” The banshee spotted a small eating establishment near a Korean bank. Her heart leapt. “Hey is that a pretzel place? Oh man, what a coincidence! I was just talking about those. Oh buy me one, Jared. I’ve never had food here before. And a soda. I want one of those, too. There’s no