The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Inana

He was really going to save her. Since she left home, she could count the times someone had helped her out on one hand, and he was going to try and save her. Her entire body hummed with it as she slipped back into her dress.

“Stay close to me, do what I do,” Dean was telling her as he buttoned his shirt.

Luckily, she had extensive training in doing as told. “Alright,” she murmured, looking up into his eyes for the mandala.

“No.” He pretended to flick her on the nose. “I need to you be alert.”

She shook it off, focused on him with an attentive smile. “Right.”

“Things are going to get intense,” he warned, “but try not to let it spook you.” Curiously, he pressed a button on his watch.

“What’s that?”

The watch chirped twice. He raised his arm to show her. “A last resort. This tells Molly we’re in trouble. The beep means she’s on her way.”

She put a hand on her hip. “Who’s ‘Molly’?”

His raised eyebrows told her he thought she was hilarious. “She’s my A.I. Don’t worry about it, you’ll like her.” She filed this information away as he picked up his briefcase full of money and slid his arm around her waist. “Shall we?” he asked, as if they were about to tango. Inana bit her lip, smiled and nodded a little.

Quietly, they left the suite for the exit she’d described. They hadn’t taken two steps in the hallway before Dean froze and looked over his shoulder.

“Mister Poole. Might we have a word?” asked a low voice from down the hall. Inana gasped, turned to look where Dean was looking.

Seven guys and an angry Nikki were rapidly closing in on them. Two of the guys were the ones after Dean from before. One was the bouncer. “Stay close,” Dean reminded, as he shifted his briefcase to the hand near her hip, and produced an unsettlingly large gun from his jacket.

Before she could follow the action, he’d felled two of the men. The rest scattered in the hall as they drew weapons of their own. His arm slipped from her waist to find her hand, and he drew her along with him deftly. She found herself crouching and running with him. Now that Dean was in motion he seemed very sure of himself, like this was all instinctive for him. Kind of different from the guy between her legs a few minutes earlier. He wasn’t kidding about things getting intense.

Just as they were about to round the corner to an adjacent hall, Nikki said something. Inana wasn’t sure that she heard, because the blood-static in her ears was suddenly deafening. Her eyes closed and the mandala blazed behind her lids, flickering its numbing blues and reds at her.

All she remembered later was that she stopped. Dean was moving at a good clip, and it took him just long enough to realize what was going on to put him off balance. That’s when she felt her shoulder blade jerk and get very cold.

So that’s what it feels like to be shot, she mused.

Dean

Experience kept him from slowing when Inana got hit, but it didn’t silence him. “Fuck!” he yelled. That detestable Madam—Nikki—had triggered her. Taking care of himself wasn’t a problem, but with this hypnotized kid in the mix... Well, he had told her he worked best alone. Trouble was, she’d insisted on putting her life in his hands. And he was already screwing up.

As they rounded the corner, Inana slowed, her head drooping. He spotted a stairwell door, hefted her off her dragging feet, made for it. They’d never get there before their pursuers could get off more shots. So he spun around, put himself in front of her and fired a few rounds just as the first head popped around the corner. His foe jerked back as large sections of the wall splintered next to him. Dean continued to fire as he backed Inana down the hall.

Serendipitously, Nikki bought them some time. There was gunfire, and blood spattered on the carpet near the corner. “Get this straight,” he heard her snarl. “No one shoots at the priceless Xhian slave girl. Questions?”

There seemed to be none.

Dean kicked open a stairwell door as Nikki said, “Good. Now go kill Mister Poole and bring me back my girl.”

Footfalls echoing in the hall, he gripped Inana and made for higher ground. He wanted badly to check her wound, but getting them out of the building quickly was more important. Bleakly, he noted the little drops of blood that trailed behind them on the stairs. Her head wobbled like a baby’s against his shoulder.

Then he got an idea. “Listen,” he whispered, as they ascended. “You feel no pain. You must keep walking with me.”

She straightened and fell into step with him. He felt her mind focus unnaturally on his words, as her trance compelled her to link with him. The alarm bells that jangled in her head got quieter. “I feel no pain. I must walk with you,” she responded distantly.

That made things a little easier. When they reached the next floor, he wondered if they’d have to go all the way to the roof to catch up with Molly. He didn’t think they could take all those stairs in time. It sounded like Nikki’s men were catching up, but they were also being cautious about Dean’s firearm. He wavered in the stairwell doorway, judging his next move.

Luckily, his ears tuned in a familiar whine from outside in the street: his orbital coupe. Molly was out there (very illegally, and damn, she was fast) tracking him inside the building. He needed her to be a few steps ahead of him, and she was pretty good at that. Judging from the engine noise, he guessed that they were near the back alley.

Inana’s knees chose that moment to buckle. Dean gripped her, tapped her cheek to rouse her. “You’re doing great, Inana. Hold on for me just a little longer,” he encouraged, but she was losing blood. He needed to make something happen.

Decisively, he kicked in the door to one of the suites. Inside, a pasty older guy gaped at him as he frantically withdrew from a slavegirl barely old enough to dismiss concerns about her mother’s view of the situation. Dean found he wasn’t surprised.

“Excuse me,” he said to the mortified man and confused girl, as he aimed his gun at the window. They scrambled out of the way as a searchlight flared up outside, and engines revved. Molly knew what he was up to.

He covered Inana’s ears and took out the window methodically, just as Nikki’s boys yelled to each other in the stairwell. A hot, humid breeze invaded the room. He shoved his gun into the nose of the prospective client, who cowered near a wardrobe. “This is where you vanish,” he told him. Then, to the freaked brunette scrambling for her dress: “There’s a fire escape outside. Get yourself out of here.”

He didn’t have time to worry over whether she had the will to run away. Inana was going into shock, despite the trance that kept her propped up against him. So he holstered his piece, gathered his would-be slavegirl up in his arms—the briefcase dangling from two fingers—and ran toward the gaping window frame. She wasn’t terribly heavy, but he almost lost his nerve when they reached the ledge, three stories up.

Molly had been through a lot with Dean, though. It was her job to know him well. She’d extended the boarding ramp and aligned herself precisely in his path. He noticed this before his feelings about the drop affected his feet, so he leapt across the slight gap with Inana, with the conviction he often got when pursued by guys who wanted to kill him.

They made it, and Molly immediately backed them off from the window as a hail of bullets pinged harmlessly off the coupe’s defense halo. The thugs yelled and shot at him from the fire escape. Before scrambling up the ramp, he happened to look down to the street and see a tall, rotund man gaping up at them. His suit was immaculate. Dean recognized him from Inana’s hazy dream-link as Mister Gund, the one who’d put her on the market. Evidently he’d just rolled up in his limo and was understandably shocked to see people leaping onto a loud spaceship in the alley outside his business. It didn’t take him long to figure it out. He hissed something to the henchmen surrounding him, and more shots bounced off the halo as Dean hefted Inana in his arms and clamored into the cockpit.

Inana

She felt just awful. Part of it was, she burned with the need to go back to Nikki and kneel, to tell her she’d been bad again. Only she’d been trained to obey anyone but the other girls, and Dean was telling her what to do now. It gave her a headache. The rest had to do with her arm. It was numb—because Dean had told her it was—but all kinds of other things were going on in her body that belied how bad things were. She couldn’t feel her fingers. She was cold. It was hard to stay awake.

Luckily, Dean had carried her to a nice, warm chair and strapped her in, told her to relax. Relax. That made things better, but they were moving, and that wasn’t so great. The way the cabin pitched around made her sick.

She wondered if she was going to die. She was aware of the bullet; how pieces of bone were sliding around it. But maybe she was over-reacting. Like Dean had said, the important thing was to relax.

She sighed, and her head cleared a little. “Hey,” she called.

“Kinda busy right now,” he managed, as bright lights whizzed by the cockpit window. “How you doing?”

She thought about it some more. “Not so good,” she decided.

“Hang on,” he told her. “Just until I can get us to my ship. Then I can look at your arm.”

The cabin lurched around some more, which made her feel worse. They were going really fast.

“I know you feel like shit,” Dean was saying as he worked the stick and pedals. “But you’ll pull through. The infirmary on my ship has gotten me through worse.”

That seemed to be meant to reassure him as much as her. She reached out and found his arm, sensed how tweaked he was, then suppressed her gag reflex as they seemed to do a complete revolution around her head. “Hey Dean?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for getting me out of there.”

Dean

“You realize this is your last night on Pasharu?” Molly informed over the cockpit speakers, in her usual deadpan. She wasn’t physically there. Well, she wasn’t physically anywhere, being a synthesized entity and all, but her infrastructure was in orbit on the Starless. She’d remote-piloted his coupe from a garage at the edge of town to pick him up, drawing the ire of the local authorities.

“Yes,” he hissed, not without affection. “I wouldn’t have called unless it was serious.”

“You said you were going down to collect your money. Now I see you’ve picked up a call girl, and do I detect a fire three blocks from where I extracted you?” She sounded accusatory, but entertained.

“Not picked up,” he corrected, “and not a call girl. She was kidnapped, and she asked for my help.”

“Is that so? And naturally you sprang to her aid,” Molly hypothesized. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with her being Xhian, would it?”

Dean banked to avoid a taxi row. “How’d you know that?”

“Your shuttle’s environment monitors are teeming with her pheromones.”

Dean was too wrapped up in his piloting to notice what had almost knocked him down when he’d first met Inana. “Well, she’s worth a fortune, hence our pursuers.” He wished he could continue the rewarding repartee, but at the moment there were at least four civilian airships (piloted by Gund’s men) and eight police cruisers nipping at his vapor trail, because traffic was too heavy to open up the throttle. While he was at least trying to be courteous to the smaller surface-to-surface ships, the mob guys behind him weren’t, giving them a distinct tactical advantage that they used to strafe him. His ship had taken some damage from their potshots, and Inana was unsettlingly quiet. Molly was of course perceptive enough to leave him to it.

Ordinarily during times like these, he didn’t give much thought to safety levels. Tonight though, he had a bleeding girl in his passenger seat, which managed to surprise him every time he looked at her. He risked another glance and it happened again. “Molly, can you tell me how bad it is?”

“I can’t do what I’d like from your shuttle,” she complained. “But working with what I have...” she fell silent as she scrutinized Inana with the sensors available. “I think she’ll be fine, if you can just get to the Starless. I can’t be sure, but it looks like she’s been injected with a toxic compound. I can neutralize it, when you get in.”

“Be sure we’re ready to make for the gate when I get there.”

“Already on it.”

Inana

She heard herself groan, far away, and realized she was sleeping. Then the lucidness melted away, and she sank back into her trance-flavored dream.

Jebin—the little asshole who’d captured her on Fremantle—had done as promised and sold her to Mister Gund. Sure, he’d waffled on the trip to Pasharu, and debated aloud whether to keep her for himself, but in the end greed won out, and he consoled himself by fucking her silly all the way there.

The old Aseh Vesheng ritual that Jebin had used to enslave her mind was effective, but not usually permanent. Gund knew this because he was an experienced slave trader who’d sampled the occasional Xhian. His methods were more thorough, and since he traded in all flavors of women, they were uniform as well. He used a rare, semi-intelligent plant to subjugate his inventory.

She groaned again, and almost succeeded in rousing herself. She was having the dream that always made her try to bolt when she awoke.

The dream plant was from Ro’thea, and no one knew why it did what it did. It liked sex with just about anything, and it had the peculiar ability to open the mind of anything it fucked to any other member of the same species. So Gund would strap her down, naked, in a dark room and sit behind her. The plant would wrap its tendrils around her thighs, pry them open, and penetrate her with what felt like barbed, molten steel. Only the pleasure was as good as the pain. Gund would lean in close behind her, palming her breast in one hand, stroking himself off with the other, as he used his thoughts to rewrite hers.

While she tried in vain to scream.

Without the plant, Inana couldn’t read him, which was just fine with her. When the plant took her, his thoughts reeked like his breath, which imbued itself into her hair as he jerked off. The third or fourth time he did it to her, she realized that her revulsion kept her from losing herself altogether. She learned to nurture it, to hide it where Gund couldn’t see it, as the thick tentacle throbbed inside her, prodding her to orgasm as it prickled and burned.

“No!” she cried, waking herself up finally.

But she was still with Dean, on the small shuttle, and she could tell they were in space, because when she’d fallen asleep it had been night, and now Pasharu’s blue sun blazed into the cockpit starkly, even through the velvet sheet of space that seemed to cover the windows. The deep trance Nikki had put her in was but a bad taste in her mouth, and her racing heart began to slow.

“What’s wrong?” Dean wanted to know. He’d jumped out of the pilot’s seat and was floating over her in the cabin. His curls threatened to spill into his eyes, now that they were free of gravity, which made her smile.

She caught her breath, found his hand with hers. “Crappy dream,” she explained. Then she doubled over with pain from the bullet in her shoulder.

“Easy,” he cautioned. “Sorry, I don’t have anything for that, but we’re almost home.”

“Home?” she asked against clenched teeth as she squeezed his fingers. It was a strange idea she hadn’t considered in years.

Dean let her strangle his hand, took his seat again and flicked off the autopilot with his other. “Well, it’s home to me. And it’s our ticket out of here.”

She’d never learned to fly, so she didn’t know the instruments, but she was pretty sure what all the dots on the blue screen were. “Are they going to catch us?”

“I doubt it,” he smiled. “I used to work for Central Government. They kind of owe me big time. I consult for them on occasion, and they give me some very secret, expensive hardware.”

Her wound throbbed as she marveled at him geeking out on her. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

He laughed. “I mean that this bird is an experimental prototype that’s about five years beyond anything chasing us. And my starship probably outclasses anything in the Pasharu navy.”

“Oh...” she said, suddenly feeling geekier. Since she was apparently in good hands—and the pain was excruciating—she decided to pass out again.

Dean

He’d put on a brave face for her, but the truth was, his advanced prototype was leaking fuel from damage, and he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to dock with his ship. There were about twenty other ships on intercept vectors, beginning to close as his thrusters sputtered. The rendezvous point was still a few minutes away: somewhere out there, Molly was literally gunning the engines in anticipation of the authorities. She kept the Starless on a knife-edge trajectory, flirting with incineration in Pasharu’s atmosphere. So she couldn’t come down to get them.

It was up to him to pull something out of his ass. He rubbed his eyes furiously, and was surprised by the distant memory of an earlier exploit. He swiveled to a terminal and started to type.

“Writing your last will and testament?” asked Inana. She sounded giddy; clearly in shock. She’d been fading in and out of consciousness every few minutes.

Dean frowned, continued typing. “I said we’re going to be fine.”

“You know, you can’t bullshit me.”

He knew. Luckily, his little program was finished. With a final keystroke, he let Molly compile and disseminate it, so it could do its worst. “Okay,” he admitted. “Things aren’t ideal. But don’t give up on me yet.”

She got quiet again. An orb of blood broke away from her wound, glistened in the sunlight as it floated away in the cabin. It seemed that all she could manage was to meet his gaze.

He held up a begging finger. “One second...”

Molly spoke up. “That was clever. Why aren’t I surprised?”

Dean risked a glance at the proximity scope. The local navy fighters were converging on a semi-random point a few kilometers behind them. He took in a big breath of recycled air, let it out slow with relief. “Doesn’t anyone fly by sight anymore?”

It was a rhetorical question.

“Better still,” Molly qualified, “when will that old hack of yours be added to the Central Law Enforcement database?”

His artificial assistant was razzing him because he’d succeeded in tricking the navigation arrays of everything that had tracked him into orbit. But he couldn’t take the bait, because they were running on fumes, and he was busy doing the math for a move he hoped would put them in his docking bay. With the last squirt of fuel, he cashed out his thrusters, as the Starless heaved obligingly into view.

Inana

The first thing she saw when she woke up again was a trio of spidery little mechanical arms, way too close to her person. Still clothed, she relaxed on a table in a small, round, white room. Something stung her hip, and her head promptly buzzed its new dizziness.

“No more...” she heard herself plead.

“It’s OK, squirt.” Dean’s voice modulated weirdly from across the room. Her eyelids drooped from the weight of the tingly fog descending on her. “You’re safe. We’re going to fix you up.”

“Squirt?” she bristled quietly, licking her lips with a numb tongue. “I’m half a head taller than anyone in my family.”

“Cuter, too, I’m sure.” Warm fingers brushed her forehead, causing her pheromones to discharge helpfully. Even when she was on the verge of death, her body was looking for action. The fingers withdrew. “Tell you what,” he offered. “I’ll let Molly fetch that slug out of your arm. I want to make sure we get through the gate before anyone can stop us.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I can’t go far. Ship’s only so big. I’ll check on you in a bit.”

“You better...” she threatened, as everything went dark.

Dean

He relaxed as he headed for the cockpit. Because he was home, they’d broken orbit, and Inana was going to be okay. He wasn’t even worried about the two Navy cruisers that labored to keep up with the Starless as it streaked toward Subspace Node Number Fifty-Two. It may have had something to do with the huge erection that bulged in his trousers; the result of his trying to comfort Inana. Her body seemed to use sexual attraction as a defense mechanism.

Node 52 was the gate to Spiral Strand Theta, which was exactly the opposite of this rough frontier he usually roamed. He figured it was the best place to run with his current passenger.

“How’s she doing?” he asked Molly as he eased himself into the piloting station and turned off the display full of angry warnings from traffic control to heave to. Also, he called up some info on Xhians from the database.

“I’ve already extracted the slug,” she reported. “It fractured some bone, so I’ve got some mending to do. Her vitals are unsteady from the shock, and from a very dangerous compound with which someone unwisely decided to saturate her bloodstream.”

That would be Nikki, Dean figured. “When I found this kid, she was in such a mess. If I’d left her...”

“I’ll have her all fixed up in about two hours. Then she’ll need to sleep,” Molly said. “I’m sure that when she wakes up, she’ll tell you she preferred being shot to being enslaved.”

Dean rubbed his eyes as he read the file and checked their course. Yawned. “Fuck. I need to sleep. It’s been a long day.”

“Just so you know,” Molly said, her simulated voice becoming effortlessly conspiratorial. “While I prepped her, she kept asking for you. I believe she has a crush.”

“Listen to you, getting all girly on me,” he enthused. Then an octave lower: “I think I like her, too.”

She was incredulous, or at least synthetically incredulous. “So after all this time going it alone, Dean Poole becomes smitten in the course of playing Good Samaritan? How many things are wrong with this picture?”

You’re not going to let me live this down, are you?” Dean realized.

“Teasing you is my favorite.”

The incoming message beacon chirped then, and Dean prepared himself for what would certainly be an angry admonishment to surrender from some navy captain. He opened up a channel. “Go ahead.”

“I’ll give you this,” a low voice growled charitably. “You’ve got a great big pair, Mister Poole.”

He checked for the transmission source, found none. That would mean that this wasn’t from anyone official. “Thanks,” he said cautiously. “Is that all?”

There was a chuckle. “No, Mister Poole. Do you really think you can waltz off with my merchandise and live?”

Dean had a pretty good idea where this was going, now that he knew whom he was talking to. “Well, she’s a person, for a start. Apparently she’s protected as an endangered life form under federal law,” he said, paging through the file on his monitor. “And I’d say I’m doing pretty good at the waltzing off thing, so far.”

The voice lost all traces of amusement. In fact, it got pretty nasty. “Let me assure you, Mister Poole, that very soon I’ll slice those big balls of yours out of the sack and show them to you, just before I slit your throat and watch you die.”

Dean yawned for Mister Gund. He’d heard things like this before. “Uh-huh. Look, I’m pretty tired. So if you’re done dramatically threatening me from several thousand miles away...”

“Until our next meeting, you insolent fuck.”

Inana

She yawned and stretched in her chilly room. It hadn’t been occupied in some time, and the ambient temp hadn’t quite reached a comfortable level. Molly had protested when she hobbled out of the infirmary, but there was no way she was sleeping on that creepy table, after all she’d been through. Dean had sweetly offered her the cabin adjacent his, insisting that she get some sleep, and turned down the bed for her. The Starless was meant to have a crew of a dozen or so, but with Dean’s A.I. wired to run everything, he had the whole ship to himself. So there was no shortage of accommodations.

Still, he was crazy if he thought she was going to sleep alone. She wandered into the strange, ovular hallway, knocked once on his door. “Yep?” he called, startled. Apparently he wasn’t used to having guests.

She slipped through the door, hugging her elbows, and placed herself at the foot of his bed. Most of his suit was on the floor, and he was brushing his teeth. He watched her expectantly.

“Sorry to bother you,” she demurred, trying to feel him out. She was too tired to try and read him.

He snapped the toothbrush out of his mouth and swallowed. “Not a problem. Everything okay?”

“I’m scared,” she admitted.

He exhaled, smiling and frowning at her with an underplayed concern that was quickly growing on her. “I’ll bet you are. Well, we’re through the gate, and we’re three days from the other side, so nothing can get at us.” He was talking about how everything between gates traveled at the same speed, through a long, artificial wormhole. Even the ship that carried Gund, which Dean had told her was distantly shadowing them.

She reached up to twist some of her hair between her fingers. “I know. I just don’t want to be alone.”

“Oh,” Dean clued. He waved at his bed. “Then climb right in. I’ll be back.” He wandered off to the bathroom. She liked his butt.

Relieved, she warmed herself by rubbing her arms with shaking fingers. Then she reached around to gingerly touch the gauze on her back. Unsurprisingly, Dean’s posh starship had a state-of-the-art, miniature hospital. Molly had done some surgery, detoxed her blood of Nikki’s dangerous chemicals, then cleaned her up, excising the physical manifestations of her capture. Now, she just had to worry about what they’d done to her head. The whole ordeal seemed kind of unreal, just then, now that she was warm and safe. She shrugged out of her black, bloodstained dress. Dean emerged from the bathroom just as it landed noiselessly on the floor.

“I don’t ever want to wear that again,” she proclaimed, as he tried in vain to look somewhere other than at her nakedness.

He cocked an eyebrow at her and asked, “Do you need something to sleep in?” Which made her laugh. But the itch that was being Xhian needed scratching.

“I need you,” she said, perching on the bed.

He sat down next to her and took her elbow with two fingers. He shook his head at the pheromones that swarmed him. “Inana. You are so fucking beautiful that it gives me a headache,” he told her. She smiled shyly, expectantly. “But you just had a bullet dug out of you...”

She kissed him, predatory with purpose. “I know,” she apologized. “But I can’t sleep until you...” she grabbed his hands and put them on her chest. “I need to have you.”

His hands slipped around to her waist and gripped her tightly, as he fought a losing battle against her physiology. “Inana, you were shot tonight, for crying out loud,” he said. “Can we agree that’s pretty serious?”

“I wanna sleep, too,” she told him, shrugging. “So hurry up and do me.” And with that, she pinned him down on the sheets and kissed him long and deep. The warmth of her insistence melted away his reservations.

Dean

She trembled underneath him, from—he was sure—a lot of things. There was the fact that she’d almost died, of course. But as he cradled her thigh and plunged into her slick, feverish sex, something started to worry him. She’d been rigorously programmed to serve a master, and was probably imprinting on him at that very moment. No, that wasn’t right. She’d probably done that the first time they’d fucked, what seemed like days ago in that tacky suite back on Pasharu. His eyes rolled back in his head against the onslaught of chemical encouragement that streamed out of her little body.

“That’s right,” she whispered dreamily. “Yes...”

He tried to be slow and gentle, which was apparently what she wanted. It was hard to make sense of the exhausted, loopy trails of thought she sent his way. So he propped himself up on his elbows, refusing to put any weight on her that would aggravate her stitches. What his body really wanted to do was grab her hips and bang her with purpose. Her full breasts teased with swollen, plum nipples, and he leaned down to take one between his teeth, causing her back to arch suddenly.

“Oh?” she begged.

His hand found the nape of her neck as he pumped away helplessly. They slid together sublimely, every peak and valley yielding its rewards. But they were exhausted, so she didn’t bother to try and pace him. Instead, she let him spur her on to her crest.

“Please let me be yours,” she breathed, but he was too busy losing himself in her to notice. She shuddered, broke out in a sweat. Her shoulders met her neck as her lips parted. He couldn’t hold back anymore; he had to go for it.

So they came together.

He heard himself grunt explosively, as she melted in his arms in the most divine, female way. A few minutes went by while he touched his forehead to her collarbone and caught his breath. Finally, he regained his faculty for speech. “How’s that bandage holding up?”

She was snoring softly.

So, with reluctance, he slipped away from her, padded to the bathroom and cleaned up. He returned with a hot cloth and wiped her sticky thighs carefully, so as not to wake her.

Once he checked her stitches, he crept back into bed. She purred quietly in her sleep, rolling onto her side as he enveloped her.

It took him a while to drift off. It had been a hell of a day, but he had a guest on his ship. In his bed, and how long had it been since that had happened? Molly was right. For the first time in years, he had other concerns besides his next job, and he wasn’t exactly sure what had brought about the change.

He had to deliver Inana to safety, and more immediately, figure out what to do when they came out the other side of the gate, if Gund caught up with them. But first, he told himself, some sleep.