5
IF SHE HAD NOT BEEN WATCHING HIM CLOSELY, SHE WOULD never have noticed the small indications that told her just how much she had managed to stun him. The physical signs were minimal: a faint hardening of his jaw and some tightening around the mouth. For a second or two she could have sworn that his eyes heated up a little, and not with sexual interest this time. It seemed to her they actually became a darker, hotter shade of green, as if he was running a fever. She could have sworn she felt a soul-chilling whisper of energy at that moment. It raised the hair on the nape of her neck.
Hector whined softly. That made it official, she thought. They were both a little unnerved. Not frightened, not yet, at any rate, just tense and aware. Cautious, the way any sensible person and dog ought to be when they found themselves in the same room with a large beast of prey. Together she and Hector watched Jack.
The strange energy dissipated. Jack’s eyes were no longer feverish.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. His tone implied he had begun to suspect that he was conversing with someone who was out of the asylum on a day pass.
She braced herself for the jolt she knew was coming and brushed her fingertips across the desktop again. Hot, acid-hued ultralight splashed through her senses, the colors of violence. But there were other hues glowing fierce and bright, as well. And it was those shades of light and dark that reassured her. Jack could be scary, she knew, but he was in full control.
“You confronted something monstrous,” she said, working her way through it. “And you destroyed it.” She hesitated, processing a little more light. “I think you were protecting someone else. Is he or she okay?”
Jack did not move. “You’re making this up.”
“The remnants of the violence are still simmering inside you. That kind of energy takes a while to cool down. It never entirely dissipates. It just recedes into the dream wavelengths. Ten, twenty, fifty years from now someone with my kind of talent will be able to pick up your prints in this office. And you’ll still dream about whatever happened from time to time.”
“If you really believe what you’re saying, I’m surprised you aren’t running from this room, yelling for the cops.”
“I’m not running because I know that, whatever occurred, you were trying to defend someone else. What happened? Were you and your date attacked?”
“No.”
“You fought him off, didn’t you? And you killed him.” She touched the desktop again and watched the light show with her other senses, picking up more nuances. “You killed him with your talent.”
“I’m a strat,” he said without inflection.
She frowned. “Being a strat would make you very good at plotting someone’s death, if that was your goal. But you couldn’t actually kill with your kind of talent. At least, I’ve never heard of any strat-sensitive who could do that.”
Another couple of heartbeats passed. Then, to her surprise, Jack nodded once, as though he had made a decision.
“I did mention the Winters family curse,” he said. “I am a strat. A strong one. It was my talent that helped me find you. But thanks to Nicholas Winters and his damned alchemical experiments with dreamlight radiation, I’m becoming something else as well.”
She frowned. “Everyone knows that people can’t develop two equally powerful talents, at least not at the higher ranges. Something about the human mind’s inability to handle so much psi stimulation. It’s hard enough to control a single very high level talent.”
“Trust me; I’ve done the research on this. There have been a few cases of two strong talents occurring naturally in a single individual, but they show up together at an early age and invariably the result is insanity. In the handful of cases that I was able to find in J&J’s files the victims were all dead by their late teens or mid-twenties.”
“No offense, but I’m guessing you are not in your twenties.”
“I’m thirty-six.”
“And you’re telling me that this new talent of yours just started showing up?”
“The symptoms that something was going on started about a month ago.”
“What kind of symptoms?”
“Hallucinations. Nightmares.” He started to pace the office. “Serious nightmares. The kind that leave me shaking in a cold sweat. But they were starting to dissipate, or at least I was telling myself that they were getting less intense, less frequent. But then something else happened.”
“Stop.” She held up a hand, palm out. “Tell me about the hallucinations and the nightmares first.”
He shrugged. “Not much to tell. The nightmares were bad but nothing I couldn’t handle. It was the hallucinations that really worried me. They can hit at any time. I’ll be walking down the street or sitting in a bar, and suddenly I’ll see things that aren’t there.”
“Things you know aren’t there?” she asked.
“Right. Images in mirrors. Scenes from the nightmares sometimes.”
“But you’re always aware that you are hallucinating?” she clarified. “You don’t mistake those images and scenes for reality?”
He frowned. “No. But the fact that I know I’m seeing things doesn’t make it any better, believe me.”
“Maybe not, but it’s an important detail. Okay, go on.”
“Like I said, I had convinced myself that the visions and the dreams were starting to become less intense or, at least less frequent. But then I had the first blackout. It lasted a full twenty-four hours, although I’ll admit that my memory is a little fuzzy on both sides of that time frame.”
She folded her arms, thinking. “Sounds like some sort of short- term amnesia. There is a technical name for it: transient global amnesia. It’s rare, but it’s well documented.”
He stopped and turned back to look at her. “All I know is that about a week ago I lost about twenty-four hours of my life. I have no idea where I went or what I did during that time.”
“What’s your last memory before the episode?”
“I was walking home after having a couple of beers with a friend. I blanked out at First and Blanchard, not far from my condo.”
“And where were you when you came out of it?”
“In my condo.” He walked back to the window and stood looking out at the gray skies. “I was in a raging fever. Thought I had the flu.”
She relaxed a little. “If you were ill, that explains a lot. A high fever can play all sorts of tricks. Among other things, it can trigger hallucinations and nightmares.”
“No.” He shook his head once. “I was somewhere else during that twenty-four-hour period but I don’t know where.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
He looked back at her. “I know it. What’s more, I’ve had three more blackouts since then. All at night. The first two times I went to bed as usual. When I woke up I was back in bed, but I was fully dressed. My clothes were wet from the rain, and my shoes had fresh dirt on them.”
“Sleepwalking. It’s not that uncommon.”
“The last time I came to after one of the episodes, I was standing in an alley on Capitol Hill,” he said evenly. “There was a dead man at my feet and a woman was running for her life.” He paused a beat to let the meaning sink in. “Her name is Susan Billings. The dead man’s name was Aaron Paul Hanney.”
A strange sensation twisted through her, as if she were looking into a very, very deep well. “The guy they think killed those two women? The one they found dead in . . . Oh, geez.” She took a deep breath in an attempt to settle her rattled senses. “The one they found dead of a heart attack in an alley on Capitol Hill.”
“Evidently I went out for a late-night walk and killed a man.”
She frowned. “He was going to murder that nurse.”
“I’m not saying I have a problem with the fact that he’s dead. The problem is that I don’t know what the hell I was doing in that alley in the first place. The problem is that I killed him with my talent, my new, second talent.”
“What makes you think that you killed him? The papers said he died of a heart attack. Maybe you just happened on the scene.”
“Trust me,” he said. “I killed him. Without a trace.”
“But how? You’re a strat.”
“I’m not absolutely sure.” He rubbed the back of his neck in a weary gesture. “But I think I scared him to death. Literally. I think that is my new talent.”
She went back behind her desk and more or less collapsed into her chair. She said nothing for a moment, trying to wrap her brain around what he had just told her. He watched her intently.
“You think I’m crazy,” he said at last.
“No.” She drummed her fingers on the desk blotter. “I know what crazy looks like because it shows up very clearly in dream psi. Whatever else you are, Mr. Winters, you are not crazy.”
Some of the hard tension in him eased a little. “I guess that’s a start.”
“I think,” she said slowly, “that you had better tell me a little more about what you call the family curse.”
“The short version is that Nicholas Winters’s DNA evidently got fried the first time he used what he called his Burning Lamp. The genetic change was locked into the male bloodline of my family. The mutation doesn’t show up very often. According to family legend and Arcane rumors, it has only appeared one other time. That was in the late eighteen hundreds.”
“What, exactly, happens to those who get this so-called curse?”
“I don’t know.” He gave her a chilling smile. “No one does because there’s just not enough hard information to go on. But the theory is that I’ll become a psycho and start trying to murder anyone with the last name of Jones along with anyone else who gets in my way.”
She exhaled slowly. “I see. Is that what happened to your ancestor? The one who lived in the eighteen hundreds?”
“No. Evidently Griffin Winters managed to find the Burning Lamp and a woman who could work it. Family legend holds that Adelaide Pyne was able to reverse the process. She kept Griffin Winters from becoming a triple-talent. The Arcane records agree with that version of history.”
“Hmm.”
“I have developed a second talent. As far as J&J is concerned, I’ve already become a Cerberus.”
“Cerberus had three heads, not two,” she said absently.
“Unfortunately, the distinction isn’t going to matter much to J&J. The agency will hunt me down and take me out.”
“You’re sure of that?”
He smiled a very cold smile. “If I were Fallon Jones, it’s what I’d do.”
He was telling the truth, she realized. In Fallon Jones’s shoes, he would do what he thought had to be done.
She exhaled deeply while she pondered that.
“All right, assuming that you actually are turning into a multi-talent—and for the record, I am not convinced that is what is happening—do you really think the lamp can help you?”
“It’s a long shot but it’s all I’ve got,” he said simply. “Will you take my case?”
She had made her decision the moment he walked into her office. But there was no need to tell him that.
“Yes,” she said.
“Thank you.” He sounded like he meant it.
She cleared her throat. “There are a couple of things we need to go over. Have you considered the possibility that the Winters lamp has been destroyed?”
The cold fire leaped in his eyes and just as quickly faded. “It would take a hell of a lot to do that. According to the legend, Old Nick forged the metal and the crystals of what he called his Burning Lamp using his own alchemical secrets. Even Sylvester Jones admitted that when it came to furnace work, Nicholas Winters had no equal.”
“Few things are indestructible. It could have wound up in an auto-wrecking yard.”
“I’m not sure that even a car compactor could destroy an object created by Old Nick. In any event, the legend says that the lamp reeks of energy. You know how it is with paranormal artifacts. They tend to survive.”
“That’s true,” she admitted. “People, even folks with no real talent, are usually fascinated by them. Para- energy is always intriguing to the senses, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not.” She reached for a pad of paper.
“What else?” he asked.
“Hmm?” She did not look up from the notes she was making.
“You said there were a couple of things you wanted to talk about.”
“Oh, right.” She glanced again at the glowing palm print on her desk. “What kind of medication are you taking?”
He did not respond immediately. She put the pen down and waited.
“What makes you think I’m taking medication?” he asked finally.
“I can see the effects in your dream psi. Whatever it is, it’s heavy-duty stuff, and it’s disturbing the energy at that end of the spectrum.” She paused delicately. “Are you by any chance taking some kind of sleeping medication?”
His ascetic features hardened. “I started using the meds after I woke up in that alley. Got them from my doctor. I told him I was having some problems sleeping. They seem to work. They knock me out. I haven’t had any sleepwalking episodes since I began taking them.”
She clicked her tongue against her teeth, making a tut-tutting sound.
“You must realize that any kind of strong psychotropic medication can be problematic for a strong talent like you.”
“It’s not like I had a lot of choice, Chloe.”
“The meds may knock you out, as you say, but it’s obvious that you are not sleeping properly. You aren’t getting the deep rest that you need and that your psychic senses require. The result is that you’re walking around on the verge of exhaustion.”
Cold amusement flickered in his expression. “Do I look like I’m about to fall asleep?”
“No, but that’s because you’re using a low level of psi to overcome the effects of sleep deprivation. That trick will work for a while, but eventually it’s all going to catch up with you. Sooner or later you’re going to crash, and when you do, you’ll crash hard.”
“I’ll worry about getting some sleep after you find my lamp.”
She sighed. “Why is it that no one ever takes my good advice when I have so much of it to give? That’s why I became a private investigator instead of a dream therapist, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“When I was younger I planned to get a degree in psychology and go into dream therapy work. But I found out soon enough that it would be terribly frustrating. Oh, sure, people are willing to pay for good advice, but they won’t follow it.”
“I hope you’re a better PI than you are a therapist.”
That hurt, but she refused to let it show. She straightened a little and picked up the pen again. “I told you, I’m good at what I do. Give me your contact information. I’ve got another case that I’ll be winding up tonight, but I’ll start the search for your lamp immediately. I’ll be in touch within a couple of days.”
“You sound very confident.”
“Are you kidding?” She gave what she hoped was a ladylike sniff. “A paranormal artifact created by the alchemist Nicholas Winters? If I can’t locate it within forty- eight hours or find out what happened to it, I’ll go back to school and get that degree in psychology.”