July 19, 2014
Strained Tea for Three

Early Monday morning there was an assault on a Protectorate safe house used as a training location for individuals still getting a handle on their gift. Two of the house occupants were injured. One of the attackers was burned severely and the other two kidnapped the trainee. That trainee was Susan D'Amico.

Mr. Peterson of the Wisconsin O.S.I.R. arrived in the city that afternoon and invited Sarah and I over to his hotel room. He showed us a video of Susan. She stood in some kind of industrial building's hallway with plain cinderblock walls. Her head was pointed directly at the camera but her gaze was somewhere short of it. She said that Domine wanted me to leave him alone and that she'd burn me slow if I didn't stay away. She would stay with Domine until it was safe. Then she got a far away look and said maybe it would be September.

Mr. Peterson was quiet, but Josh could tell he was restraining himself. Josh had seen that pent-up, focused rage before. He'd been on the receiving end of it. Sarah commented that something was different about Susan. None of the other people affected by a Domine showed any emotion. Sarah said she didn't need her gift to know that Susan had looked wistful at the end. Mr. Peterson suggested that maybe she'd been turned rather than puppeted.

I winced and it rippled through my back, the muscles seizing into a huge wicked cramp. Mr. Peterson looked at me sitting at the little hotel table with my teeth gritted tight. He waited until I relaxed and carefully sat back in the chair. He asked me to call Melvin.

I dialed and put the phone on speaker. I set it down. Somewhere a phone stuck in an air conditioning vent vibrated softly. Another phone taped to it with electrical tape dialed a different number. Melvin had set it up as an easier method to me blind dialing with my gift. Melvin answered immediately. Mr. Peterson gave Melvin an online address in a style I didn't recognize. He also gave Melvin a heads up on where the local O.S.I.R. office's case files on the Domine events would be loaded.

After, Sarah and I explained in detail everything we knew and suspected. Mr. Peterson thanked us and said he'd keep in touch if he got any leads on his niece. We said we'd do the same. Then we left.

I felt very relieved to be out of there. Even I didn't think all of his tension was due to the kidnapping. Sarah said that she had almost reached out to put a hand on his shoulder when he was watching the video, but she'd thought better of it. The last thing she needed to see would be him to flinch from her touch. It struck me suddenly that Mr. Peterson either had a glass eye now or a colour contact on the eye I blinded.

Tags: anger, Domine, hate, , Melvin Klein, mental domination, Mr. Peterson, OSIR, O.S.I.R., The Protectorate, Sarah Jayne, suffering, Susan D'Amico, tension, video, Wisconsin.