Mind Magic by Eileen Wilks Read Free Book Online Page A

stop suppressing it, I’ll start hallucinating?” Panic hit. If Sam’s suppression was the only thing keeping her from hallucinating now that her mindspeech was awake, and her “period of adjustment” went on for months—
    Stop. Think instead of reacting. I told you that “waking” was an imperfect metaphor. Your ability was not truly asleep before, nor is it now awake. At the risk of providing you with another mechanism for drawing incorrect conclusions, I will offer a different metaphor. Mind is a product of consciousness which interacts with matter and with magic in detectable ways. Your Gift has always sensed magic. It has now developed a channel—attempt to remember that this is metaphor—through which it senses minds due to the way they interact with magic. There are millions of frequencies available on this channel. Many of them will remain inaccessible to you; you will not acquire the ability to truly read minds. It is quite possible that you will never do more than sense them. It is also possible that, depending on what form this sensing takes, you will eventually be able to initiate mindspeech with a few, many, or even most of the minds you encounter. During the period of acclimatization, your Gift will be constantly, randomly sampling nearby minds. Most of the time you will be unaware of this, but occasionally your Gift will encounter another mind that resonates with yours in a way which stimulates it. When this happens, you will hallucinate until your Gift stops sampling that mind. This process cannot be placed under your conscious control until your brain has acclimated.
    Okay, that didn’t sound as bad as she’d feared. Not great, but not overwhelmingly awful. She rubbed her temples with both hands. “When I ‘found’ you, then . . . metaphorically speaking, that means I found the frequency your mind is on?”
    My mind is present on all of the frequencies.
    Oh. Wow. Shit.
    This is why my presence was able to stimulate your Gift sufficiently for it to claim this new channel. It is also why you cannot be in my presence during your acclimatization period. You are currently unable to stop sampling my mind, which causes a degree of stimulation your mind is unable to sustain without damage.
    “But what am I supposed to do? I—”
    Leave. I have contacted Rule Turner. He was upset at the sudden distortion of his sense of you, but—
    “His what? What do you . . . hell!” Automatically she’d checked for Rule, using the nameless sense the mate bond provided that let her know where he was and roughly how far away. She found him, too, only it didn’t make sense. The mate sense said he was fifteen feet away, which would put him in solid rock. Then that he was a hundred miles to the east. “The mate bond’s messed up, and it can’t be!”
    Strive for calm. Your bond is not damaged. The part of your brain which processes your directional sense has, until now, only been used to locate Rule Turner. It is now being employed to process additional input. This creates what you might think of as static. The condition should resolve when your brain completes its adjustment.
    “But that’s happening in my brain, not Rule’s, and you said he was affected, too.”
    I do not claim to understand the processes of the bond, but there appears to be something similar to a feedback loop. I would appreciate a chance to study it, but at the moment Rule Turner is not inclined to indulge my curiosity. He will arrive in approximately seven minutes to take you home. It would be unwise to drive while you are unpredictably subject to sensory distortion.
    She’d left. What else could she do?
    That was two weeks and two days ago. Much to her relief—and Rule’s—they’d found that the mate sense continued to work normally when they were near each other. Distortion crept in as the distance between them increased. At a hundred feet, no problem. At two hundred feet, the directional sense became less certain. By the