Thanks for the encouragement, votes, and suggestions. This chapter would not exist without your feedback.
Once again, I end this installment without a clear idea of what will come next so I thank you sincerely for coming along for the ride, however long or short it may be. I appreciate the company.
- JillieB
Chapter Two
He waited impatiently in the shadows, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets with a loud sigh. His sudden movement startled a neighborhood cat, and he watched as the feline quickly scurried across the pavement towards an amber streetlight before climbing a low fence and disappearing from sight.
He sighed again as he stared at the dark bedroom window across the street, thinking about his current assignment. He was grossly overqualified for this task and it irritated him that he was standing here, stuck with a routine imprinting. An imprinting of all things! Of all the low-risk missions he could have been given, it would have to be the task typically reserved for those that still had to learn sufficient control over their thoughts.
Naturally, he'd tried to reason his way out of it, but there had been no escape. It was standard procedure for those of his kind to end five years of increasingly complex missions with a low-risk task that their mentors would select for them after a careful review of their performance.
"An imprinting assignment is just what you need, Collin. It will refresh you, give you a moment to slow down and remember what it's like to love, to be human," his mentor's earlier words echoed in his mind.
His attempts to sway his mentor had fallen on deaf ears, so he'd acquiesced in the end, taking some small comfort in the knowledge that others before him had tried to escape similar fifth-year assignments and failed. The sooner he accepted the mission and completed the task, the sooner he could move on to assignments more worthy of his experience.
Not that he had anything against imprinting itself. It was a constant source of amusement to him that modern humans still held on to the notion of love at first sight, completely unaware that the elusive "spark" and "chemistry" they thought they'd found in another was nothing more than the result of a carefully applied imprint.
A mere century ago, imprinting tasks were rarely needed and even more rarely performed. But human life in the past few decades had become so busy and stressful that people routinely encountered their intended life partners without experiencing that flash of recognition. Imprinting had become a much needed form of intervention. Due to sheer volume and the low-risk nature of the task, it was often the first assignment given to one of his kind. Even Kismet, it seemed, needed the occasional helping hand.
So here he was, standing outside her house, waiting for enough time to pass from when her bedroom lights were turned off, until he could reasonably expect her to be asleep. His mental skills had improved so much over the past five years that he didn't even need to be in the same room with her. He had acquired enough expertise and focus that, even from this distance, he could manipulate her thoughts and feelings without breaking a sweat.
