Venom's Taste - Lisa Smedman [31]
He hadn’t been able to manifest that power again until he reached puberty. He’d charmed people in the years since then, but his talent was unreliable. Sometimes it worked… sometimes it didn’t. But that time with his mother, it had arisen spontaneously.
Why?
Suddenly, Arvin realized the answer. Strong emotion. Like a rising tide, it had forced his psionic talent to bubble to the surface.
Standing over his captive, Arvin tried to summon up an emotion equally as strong as the one he’d felt that day. Then, he’d been motivated by fear; this time, he let frustration carry him almost to the edge. He embraced the emotion and combined its rawness with the urge to get the man to talk to him. Why couldn’t he get the cultist to speak? The fellow was his friend. He should trust Arvin. The prickling began at the base of his scalp, encouraging him.
Arvin squatted on the floor next to the man. Deliberately he let his frown smooth and his voice soften. “Listen, friend,” he told the cultist. “You can trust me. I drank from the flask and survived. Like you, I am blessed by the goddess. But I don’t know how to find the others. I need to find them, to talk to them, to understand. I yearn to feel Talona’s…” He nearly lost his concentration as he spoke the goddess’s name then found his calm center again. “I need to feel Talona’s embrace again. Help me. Tell me where I can find the others. Please?”
When Arvin began his plea, the cultist’s eyes had been filled with scorn and derision. As his expression softened, a thrill of excitement rushed through Arvin. Untrained he might be, but he was doing it! He was using psionics to mold this man to his will!
The excitement was his undoing; it broke his concentration. The cultist jerked his head aside and broke away from Arvin’s gaze then began blinking rapidly. He heaved himself into a sitting position, fingers straining between the coils of rope as he reached for Arvin, who jumped back just in time. Then the cultist’s eyes rolled back in his head.
“Talona take me!” he cried. “Enfold me in your sweet embrace. Consume my flesh, my breath, my very soul!”
Though Arvin was certain the cultist was not crying, three amber tears suddenly trickled down the man’s pockmarked cheek. With each wheezing exhalation, the cultist’s lungs pumped out a terrible smell, worse than that of a charnel house stacked with decaying corpses. Arvin staggered back, afraid to breathe but unable to run. He stared in terrified fascination as the sores on the cultist’s body suddenly burst open and began to weep. Violent trembling shook the cultist and his robe was suddenly drenched in sweat. Even from two paces away, Arvin could feel the heat radiating off the man’s body. With horrid certainty, he realized what the cultist had just done-called down a magical contagion upon himself. Had Arvin been crouched just a little closer, and had the man succeeded in touching him, it would have been Arvin lying on the floor, dying.
The cultist’s body was swelling like a corpse left in the sun. In another moment his stomach would expand past the breaking point; already Arvin could hear the creak of flesh preparing to rupture…
And he was just standing there, staring.
Arvin flung open the warehouse door. As he slammed it behind him, he heard a sound like wet cloth tearing and the splatter of something against the inside of the door. He breathed a sigh of relief at yet another narrow escape,