Allied
The PTB Alliance Book 3
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living, dead, undead, masked, or unmasked, events, places, or names is coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced or transferred in any form or by any means without the written permission of the author. Upload and/or distribution of this book without permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law.
Text © 2020 Katelyn Beckett
Cover by Enchanted Ink Studio
Hey, wait a minute! This is book 3 of a completed series. If you haven’t read the other two, go here to find them first. Or read them out of order. I do love a rebel. -Katelyn
This one’s all for the reviewers out there. We literally could not do this without you.
Chapter 1
I stood on a grassy hill, the oversized and underutilized mansion off in the distance. I threw the frisbee. The big, blue great Dane ran away to get it then returned to me, his gaze begging, his tail waving. Again, I threw the frisbee. Again, and again, and again.
I was 17.
And it wasn't real.
In my heart, I knew that I was stuck inside a Psychic's dying scream. She had created the Dream, as we'd all taken to calling it, a place where reality bent and broke. And after days or weeks or months inside of it, I was starting to be able to play with it myself.
Ever seen Inception? Yeah. I snapped the hill off from the rest of the land and sent the dog and I soaring out into the cosmos. When I tossed the fucking frisbee again, the dog shot into outer space. And then I folded the universe in on itself.
You get bored when you've been stuck in the same place for an incalculable amount of time, all of your loved ones split off from you. For a brief period, my boyfriends, former girlfriend, and I, had stayed together. We'd clung to each other like we were dying, drowning in whatever purgatory the Dream had created for us. At that point, it had just been an ever-changing mass that frustrated more than concerned.
But at one point, it had decided to get frisky with us.
One by one, we'd been disappeared until I was left sitting on this hill, throwing this frisbee until the apocalypse; or maybe afterward. I'd thought prison had been bad, but at least you knew what was going to happen when you were in there. You were fed lousy food, let out into the yard now and again and, if you kept your head down, you probably didn't get stabbed over a Snickers bar.
My cousin's wonderful nightmare of a Dream wasn't anything like that. There was no reference point, no way to interact or really do anything except twist it around. I reached out for my lovers and loved ones, finding only a vast, unending blankness.
When the Dream had taken us our mentor and boss, Scribe, had been in the hospital. I assumed he would find a way to set it to rights when he got out, but how long would that take? What if he never got out? Who knew what the brass at the top of the PTB Alliance would do for us? Superheroes, like most of us, were inevitably disposable.
And we knew it. It was something that was outlined the moment you signed the contract. The civilians always came first and that was fine; but the Dream wasn't affecting the civilian population, as far as I knew. It would have been nice to be the rescued, not the rescuer, for once.
That didn't seem to matter. No one had come for me. No one had come for me when I'd been in prison, either, at Scribe's command. It made me wonder if he was trying to get rid of us, but no. That line of thought led to bad places and I shooed it away, letting it die out in the untouchable vastness beyond me.
I threw the frisbee again.
And again.
...And again.
No one was coming for me. I was going to be alone in this place forever, trapped, and throwing a toy for a dog that had been sent to my grandparents' farm. That wasn't some terrible euphemism either; he'd wanted more room than we'd had so we'd taken him to the farm on his fifth birthday. Jarrett had spent the next ten years traumatizing the chickens and roughhousing with the horses before he'd passed away in his sleep one night.
Which made me a little jealous. It was likely that I'd be killed on some abandoned street corner, not snuggled down in a cozy bed all safe and warm. Hell, I'd nearly died fighting my boyfriend's sister to save the Alliance. And all I'd gotten for my trouble was shorting myself out and losing my powers.
It wasn't uncommon for a Blitzer like me to burn out, eventually. We're able to pack an enormous punch with overacting adrenal glands, but that takes its toll. Thanks to my psychotic cousin's torture, my powers had come back with a vengeance; I'd blown myself through a freaking brick wall on accident. But it still hung over my head that I, a Blitzer born to a massive lineage of Psychic superheroes, would one day be useless. That I would, again, burn out.
And when that happened, my body would take inventory of my host of injuries. Most Blitzers didn't last more than a decade after retirement. If I ever got out of the Dream, I could be dead in my 40s.
Of course, that meant that someone outside of the Dream had to throw me a fucking bone and help me get out.
Frisbee. Dog. You get the picture.
"I bet my parents could figure it out," I muttered. "If they'd bother. They
