A few weeks had passed. Alice was slowly getting used to college life, her new apartment, and the fact that she was once again sharing her life with someone who had died long ago.She was thinking about all this as she stood in a bookstore when the downpour began, lightning flashing across the sky again and again.

  She was browsing the parapsychology section, but nothing interesting caught her eye. World-renowned “authorities” spoke about the afterlife as if they’d personally toured the place. It made her laugh, those statements repeated so often they had turned into mantras, filled with images that had nothing to do with reality. At least not the part of it she’d managed to learn about. Books on telekinesis weren’t any better. Meditation? Cleansing? Affirmations? She didn’t spend half the day on that nonsense, yet somehow she still managed just fine. She felt tempted to collect the authors’ emails and send them a step-by-step guide on how this stuff actually worked, but gave up when she thought about the potential reaction from the Not-a-Doctor.

  Speaking of the Not-a-Doctor, books on demons were by far the most entertaining. Exorcisms. Satan. Lucifer. Lucifer? What would he be doing among humans? He, the most beautiful and intelligent of angels, playing at possessions and rape? The one who had left Heaven specifically to have nothing to do with humankind was now supposed to be rolling in the muck with them? What a joke. She’d love to see the Not-a-Doctor begging an exorcist to leave him alone.Dear God, she wouldn’t want to see the end of the exorcist dumb enough to get in her guardian’s way.

  “Some storm, huh?”

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a young guy with braces. She glanced at him, instinctively gave him a once-over, then briefly considered how rude it would be to just ignore him.On the other hand, he looked like a total pain in the ass, and she wasn’t in the mood for some budget pickup line.

  “Mhm,” she replied, turning back to the books.

  That was all she could muster, nothing warmer, nothing more polite.

  “Crazy lightning, right? Left and right. You scared of storms? I’m not.”

  Tiny flecks of spit landed on her face, and nausea rolled through her in waves.Fighting off the urge to hurl up her early dinner, she wiped her face—not discreetly at all—and said:

  “Good for you. As it happens, I’m not scared either.”

  “That’s too bad,” the guy said, laughing idiotically, as if his pimples had taken over part of his brain. “‘Cause if you were, I could totally hold you till you felt safe.”

  The image that popped into her head was somehow more disgusting than the spitting. There was no point in being polite anymore.

  “And here I was thinking we’d just fuck in the back room,” she said, with all the superiority and contempt she could summon. “You’re aiming way too high. Give it up.”

  “Cha-ha-ha. Well, if that’s what you want, why not? I’m alone today.”

  Good God, she was dealing with a complete moron. She’d forgotten that sarcasm was wasted on guys like him. You had to explain things, preferably with diagrams, three pages long.

  “Got any paper?” she asked before she could stop herself. “You wanna give me your number?”

  The guy practically pissed himself with joy. He whipped out a crumpled scrap and a pen.“I always carry one. The ladies love me.”

  “Yeah, somehow I fucking doubt that,” she replied, snatching the paper from his hand and tossing it behind her without a second thought.

  The clerk stared for a moment in disbelief, which quickly shifted into pure confusion, then turned into the kind of shrug you only see on people who’ve fully embraced their own ignorance. Once the problem had been carelessly booted out of his mental space, he went right back to testing out his pathetic pickup lines.

  “You're a fiery one,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

  That was his mistake. A very serious mistake. Alice had no intention of wasting another second on him. Without even really thinking about it, she grabbed his wrist and started draining his life energy. She did it fast. Greedily. She didn’t stop even when her inner battery was fully charged. Why should she stop? It was the perfect opportunity to run an experiment she’d never had the nerve to try before.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Energy flowed out of the young man’s body and into hers. Theoretically, her reserves had been topped off, but theory and practice rarely matched in these matters.After all, the stream hadn’t been cut off. Everything was proceeding as usual, just on a bigger scale. Until now, she had only drawn energy from others at a distance, and only from what they’d naturally lost. Never directly. Never from them. Back then, it worked only when she herself was running low. Now she was drawing it directly, forcefully, without resistance. And suddenly, she realized the energy was accumulating inside her. It was possible to store it for later, to build up an actual reserve. The thought fascinated her; for the first time, she felt like she had advanced to the next level of her development. That kind of power opened up a whole new range of possibilities, a new potential to explore and test. How far had she just pushed her limits? What was she capable of now? Her wonderful reverie was broken by the sound of a body hitting the floor. The guy had collapsed. His legs simply gave out beneath him.He was pale, with dark circles forming under his eyes, his whole body shivering slightly. Alice immediately stopped the dark little act she’d just committed, suddenly a little afraid of what she had done.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, though in truth, she couldn’t care less about the state of the young man.

  “I think so...” he managed to reply, and then slumped to the floor, unconscious.

  “Well, could’ve been worse,” she thought.

  She took out her phone and called an ambulance. Then she looked out the window; the rain had just stopped, and it seemed like the storm had passed too. Someone walked into the store. She called out to him, putting on a look of concern. The unsuspecting stranger rushed to revive the clerk, and she slipped away unnoticed, her mind buzzing with excitement over how to make use of this new skill.

  She went back home and made herself a cup of tea. She didn’t have an umbrella, so she was soaked through. But nothing could dampen her mood; she had discovered something incredible.

  “You're different,” Marcel said, studying her closely.

  “Really?” she asked, beaming with joy.

  “No denying it,” he replied with a wicked grin.

  Alice didn’t even glance at him. She was far too absorbed in basking in her own brilliance.

  “Let’s just say I’ve mastered a new way to use energy. You can feel it, can’t you? How much stronger I’ve become?”

  “I meant the zits on your face. When you left, your skin was practically porcelain. Now it’s basically gone. Not sure if that’s what you were aiming for, but in my opinion, you look a hell of a lot worse.”

  Alice stared at the ghost in disbelief. The smile still lingered on her face until it vanished, replaced by a look of genuine horror as she raised her left hand and touched her cheek.She could feel them—a cluster of new breakouts, clearly and unmistakably there. The teacup slipped from her hand and shattered on the floor. Without a second thought, she bolted for the bathroom.

  Marcel sat back, his face full of blissful satisfaction, listening to her screams as if they were the sweetest music in the world. She spent hours in front of the mirror, staring at herself in disbelief.How the hell had this happened?

  “They’ll clear up eventually,” the ghost said, silently praying it wouldn’t be too soon.

  “Shut the hell up, Marcel,” Alice snapped.

  “My name is Thomas. Not that you’d ever show the slightest respect for that, right?”

  This was his revenge. He could feel it in every fiber of his ghostly being. Another chance like this might never come, and he had no intention of wasting it.

  “It’s not that bad. You might end up with a few scars, tops...” He trailed off.

  Alice wasn’t listening. She sat with her eyes closed, breathing evenly, and the energy swirling around her shifted from a raging tornado to something calmer, more contained. At first, he thought she’d fallen asleep, but no, it wasn’t that. It was something else. As if her mind had retreated inward. The ghost had no idea what was happening, but he knew one thing for certain: the opportunity had slipped away, lost forever.

  Alice silently counted to ten, descended the spiral staircase that led into her own mind, and summoned her subconscious.

  The little girl appeared out of nowhere.“What’s happening to me?” Alice asked right away.

  The toddler smiled at her but didn’t say a word for a long moment. Alice waited patiently; after all, she couldn’t very well yell at herself.

  “Want me to explain it, or would you rather He did it?” the little girl finally asked.

  “You. I have zero interest in asking Him for help.”

  The child giggled brightly and then began: “It’s a side effect of energy vampirism.You absorbed everything, not just his life force, but also the imprint of his ailments.Your body took them on, even though it didn’t really want to.”

  Alice listened intently, absorbing every word.

  “So what do I do now?” she asked.

  “Fix the pattern.”

  The girl shrugged, as if it were the simplest, most obvious thing in the world.

  “Restore the proper energetic blueprint, and everything should go back to normal by morning.”

  Alice sighed deeply, thanked her subconscious, and then launched into the grueling meditation she had, luckily, learned a few years ago. The process of restoring the full pattern took until dawn. But when it was finally done, her face had, indeed, returned to normal. She looked at herself in the mirror with immense relief. Only as she lay down to sleep did it occur to her that she could’ve just asked her subconscious to do the reset in the first place.But by then, she was too exhausted to dwell on the thought. All the energy she had absorbed, and all of her own reserves, had been completely depleted.