Starblood

muscle.
    The night was cool; he left it.
    He dematerialized on that Iowa lawn…
    … And materialized in the study of the New England house where he had so recently been a captive. The four men were still in the room, much the same as he had left them, though Leopold had awakened and was sitting on the couch with his head propped between his hands, trying—it seemed—to press the fog out of his brain in order to get his thoughts clicking properly once more. Margle was groaning and tossing his head restlessly from side to side, though he was still unconscious. The two apemen, Baker and Siccoli, were as contented as babes newly fallen into slumber.
    Timothy slipped into the minds of the two henchmen and erased their knowledge of the existence of PBT. He did the same with Jon Margle, then pinched the nerves in the base of the man's neck again, sending him down into perfectly still sleep.
    Next he entered Leopold's mind, as cautiously as possible, fearing that the bloated, roachlike insects that had poured out of the walls of the conscious mind might still be running free. But the things had either been driven back into the walls of the conscious mind or had returned of their own free will. The subconscious must fear and detest the conscious, he thought, as much as the aware portion refuses to have anything to do with the seamier concerns of the subconscious. In this manner, all of us may be schizophrenics in a private way, and thus cope with life far better than if we had to face it straight on, without compromises.
    He listened at the wall.
    He could hear them in there, and the sound was not reassuring. Buzzing, churning, squirming over one another in mindless, chitinous, slick brown-black fury.
    Quickly he went up through the many floors of the data bank, searching out those things he wished removed from the man's store of knowledge. He worked quickly within the analogue, then reviewed his work to make certain that he had not missed anything crucial. At last, satisfied with the job, he departed Leopold's mind.
    The room was quiet. Outside the window, some species of songbird was plying its trade. He pinched Leopold's nerves in the base of his neck and sent the man into slumber again.
    Three to go.
    He tensed. He teleported…
    … And arrived.
    Ludwig Stutman, a member of the Inner Council of the Brethren, lived in an impressive estate near Baltimore, Maryland. The grounds were very extensive, every foot of them well cared for. The trees that formed a forest near the south end of the grounds seemed well pruned and surgically shaped to present the most aesthetically pleasing picture possible. There were no weeds and ground brush within the trees, only some crawling ivy and a few spots of tended flowers sprouting colorfully in black earth. Out of the forest, the lawn was as close-trimmed as the head of a Marine general, yet spongy like a thick carpet Some special sort of grass, he imagined. Not native to this part of the country. More like the stuff that grows in Florida. The house, on the smooth top of a small knoll, was three-storied, made of dark stone. It had white pillars and a veranda, all the architectural touches of genteel living.
    Crime, Timothy thought rather sourly, does pay, no matter what the FBI and associated branches might have to say.
    He came up the long, twisted stone pathway from the wood, the night a bit cooler here than it had been in Iowa, his hair fluffing in the breeze and his eye watering a bit as the night air stung it. Three hundred yards from the house, he encountered the first guard.
    He had not been expecting it, which was foolish. Stutman, like any of the Brethren hierarchy, would be well protected from authorities and from the renegades of the old-time Mafia who had refused to conform after their organization had been crushed and who might have a grudge to settle with one of the new crime bosses. When the tall, darkly dressed man approached him from a line of shrubs and shadows, he was startled.
    He felt a warm wetness in his stomach, then heard the sharp snap of a pistol shot. The world seemed to tilt suddenly, and then the pain came, hard and rough-edged, tearing upward through his chest from his ruined belly.
    There was a second, terrifying crack, the whine of a near miss, before he gathered his senses together fast enough to flush out with his psionic power a heavy wave of destructive force. He felt the insubstantial ESP crash over the guard, felt the millions of bright fingers