North sat quietly while Sierra got the small coffeemaker going. He watched the whispering images come and go at the edges of his vision, first attempting to suppress the panic they inspired and then trying to banish them through sheer force of will. He discovered he could suppress them temporarily, but as soon as he stopped concentrating on one, it popped up again.
Sierra hit the switch to turn on the coffeemaker. Then she folded her arms and leaned against the counter.
“Any idea who might want you psi-blind?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Probably the same bastard who tried to murder my father—Loring. This all seems to have roots in the past. But I’ll figure it out later. Right now we need to stay focused on finding the artifact that partially destabilized Dad’s aura.”
“It strikes me that any way you look at this thing we’re dealing with paranormal weapons,” Sierra said. “I thought that, technically speaking, it was impossible to construct such a device. Something to do with tuning problems.”
He got to his feet and went to stand in front of the fire. “The Foundation experts say the problem with weaponizing paranormal energy is that to be effective, each individual gun or pistol would have to be tuned to the aura of the user. In addition, only someone with a very powerful aura could operate such a device. The risk of blowback would be extremely high.”
“Blowback?”
“Similar to the recoil you get when you fire a conventional weapon. Except that in the case of a paranormal device, the energy recoil will tend to destabilize the aura of the user over time—unless the shooter is strong enough to handle the shock. It was a technical problem that supposedly was never solved while the Bluestone Project was in operation. But there have always been rumors that toward the end of the project, one lab might have made a breakthrough.”
“Vortex?”
He looked up suddenly. “What do you know about Vortex?”
“Very little. But it’s a legend in the underground market. There’s no limit on the price of any artifact that has a Vortex provenance. But to my knowledge, none has ever come on the market.”
North glanced at the machine sitting on the table. “Given what happened to my father and the fact that someone tried to kill us with that light grenade, we have to assume that there is some truth to the legends about paranormal weapons. But maybe they didn’t all come from Vortex.”
“You’re sure Griffin Chastain and Crocker Rancourt didn’t work in the Vortex lab?”
“There’s no record of their being connected to that lab. According to the Foundation files, they were doing research at the Fogg Lake facility. But who knows? Maybe that was just a cover. Everything about Vortex was top secret. The thing is—”
He broke off as a tidal wave of nightmares screamed silently out of the darkness. You must wear the glasses. You will go mad without them.
It took everything he had to suppress them.
He became aware of a frisson of gentle energy. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the mirrored crystal in Sierra’s locket spark.
The nightmares receded. He took a deep breath.
“I feel like a junkie trying to get through withdrawal,” he said.
“No, you’re recovering from a sickness induced by poison. What were you about to say?”
“What?” He had to concentrate to remember where he had been going with the conversation. “Right. Vortex. Everything connected to it was highly classified, so it’s not impossible that Griffin Chastain and Crocker Rancourt were involved with it. But I’ve been studying my grandfather’s private logbooks and the various experiments he performed in his lab at the Abyss—”
“His Vegas mansion?”
“Right. I moved in almost a year ago. I’ve had a chance to see what he was working on there. What I was about to tell you is that there is no indication that he was ever interested in creating paranormal weapons. His work was all aimed at gaining a greater understanding of the energy of light from the dark end of the spectrum.”
“I can tell you for certain that if someone has found a cache of paranormal weapons, the artifacts will be worth a fortune on the underground market.”
“That’s true,” North said. He blinked away a few more ghosts. “But using such a weapon would be extremely problematic.”
“The tuning issue?” Sierra said.
“Yes.”
Sierra poured coffee into two cups. “You said firing a weapon that was not properly tuned would destabilize the shooter’s aura.”
“That’s the theory,” North said.
A terrible restlessness was coming over him. He began to pace the small space. Sierra handed him one of the cups. The warmth felt good, because he was starting to shiver.
“We are definitely running into indications of aura instability in this case,” Sierra said. “Would the end result be insanity or death?”
“Probably. Assuming the experts are right.”
“If Delbridge Loring is Crocker Rancourt’s direct descendant, he would probably know the risks involved,” Sierra mused. “He would most likely be very cautious about firing any weapons he found.”
North tried to focus on that. “Yes, he would. He would be very careful.”
Sierra’s locket sparked again. North felt another whisper of calming energy. He stopped shivering and managed to drink some of the coffee.
“That might explain the Puppets,” he said.
“The orderlies?”
“Yes. Hell, it could explain the existence of Riverview. If Loring has found some paranormal weapons and if he is descended from Crocker Rancourt, he would know better than to take the risk of trying to fire the devices himself. But the promise of a psychic gun would be a lure that could be used to attract some useful test subjects.”
“Puppets who would then become his dedicated bodyguards because they believed he would endow them with the perfect weapons—guns that leave no trace.”
“Right.”
Another wave of hallucinations danced at the edges of his vision. He stopped talking and concentrated on suppressing the ghosts.
It was going to be a very long night.