“No. It’s business.”
“If you’re going to leave town I don’t see why I can’t stay here for a couple of nights. It’s the least you can do under the circumstances.”
“No, Fletcher. I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
No man stayed overnight in her private space. Not even when she was not around. Dream energy stuck to sheets and bedding like darkness on night. You couldn’t wash out that kind of psi. If she allowed Fletcher to sleep in her bed she would have to buy a new mattress, a new set of sheets, a new mattress pad, new pillows and probably a new comforter as well. She could handle strange beds for a few nights if she took the proper precautions, but when it came to her own bed, she liked things pristine.
“What is it with you?” he grumbled. “I thought we were friends.”
Before she could answer she heard the muffled sound of the first-floor lobby door opening and closing. A tingle of awareness whispered through her, stirring things deep inside. She did not have to go out onto the landing to see who was coming up the stairs. Hector went past her to greet Jack.
“Sorry, Fletcher,” she said. “My client is here. I have to go now.”
“What client?” Fletcher turned to look back down the stairs.
“The one who helped me save your life,” she said.
Jack arrived on the third- floor landing. He looked at Fletcher with the same lack of interest that Hector displayed.
“Jack Winters,” he said.
“Fletcher Monroe.” Fletcher frowned. “You’re the guy who was at my house last night?”
“Right.”
“Why the hell did you save Madeline Gibson?”
Jack looked at Chloe.
She shrugged. “I told you, clients are never satisfied.”
16
VICTORIA KNIGHT PICKED UP HER DEEPLY ENCRYPTED PHONE and punched in a number. There were several rings before her new associate answered.
“What is it?” Humphrey Hulsey whispered. “Do you have some news?”
“The initial experiment is definitely a success. It’s been over a week now and Winters is alive. He’s showing no indications of insanity or deterioration.”
“Then your first theory is correct.” Hulsey was exultant.
“Looks like it.” She kept her voice cool, refusing to let her own elation show.
“That settles it. You must find the lamp and a dream talent who can work it as soon as possible so that we can move forward.”
“As it happens, we’ve caught a very lucky break.”
“What do you mean?” Hulsey said.
“Winters himself is now searching for the lamp,” she said. “In fact, it appears that he has dropped everything else, including his business, to go after it. There’s only one reason he would suddenly decide to make such an effort.”
“His second talent is emerging.”
“It seems that my grandfather was also right about age being a genetic trigger. Jack Winters turned thirty-six a couple of months ago. He is now the same age Griffin Winters was when his second talent emerged.”
“Interesting. It makes sense that the genetic change is tied to chronological age. You said Jack Winters is searching for the lamp?”
“He’s hired a dreamlight reader to help him find it. Evidently he believes the legends, too.”
“Where did he find a high-level dreamlight reader?” Hulsey asked. “It’s not a common talent.”
“He hired a low-rent private eye who just happens to have that particular ability. Looks like they’ve had some success already.”
“How do you know?” Hulsey demanded.
“They boarded a flight to Las Vegas about twenty minutes ago. I doubt very much that they’re going there to gamble.”
“Do you think it’s possible that they’ve actually found the lamp already?”
“We’ll know soon enough. I’ve got two people watching them.”
The upper echelons of Nightshade were in hushed but seething turmoil at the moment. That was a good thing. Nothing like a temporary power vacuum at the top of an organization to provide cover for a little maneuvering farther down the chain of command.
It had taken the members of the Inner Circle of Nightshade—known officially as the Board of Directors—some time to become convinced that the founder and Master was no longer alive. William Craigmore was a legend, a dangerous one, and such men did not die easily. But the board had finally concluded that he was dead. There was some question as to the cause of death. No one was sure if Arcane had discovered that Craigmore was the founder of Nightshade and terminated him or if he actually had dropped dead of a heart attack. He had been on the formula for decades. There was no knowing what the long-term effects had been on his cardiovascular system. Either way a new director had to be chosen as soon as possible.
Back at the beginning Craigmore had not referred to his organization as Nightshade. He had established it as a legitimate, very low-profile corporation. The melodramatic label had been coined by Fallon Jones as a code for what had become Arcane’s twenty-first-century nemesis.
Craigmore had been aware of the J&J code name because of his position on Arcane’s Governing Council. Evidently he’d liked the theatrical touch and had adopted it. Probably a legacy of his days as a government agent, Victoria thought. For some reason, spy agencies were very big on exotic code names. Whatever the case, the members of the shadowy conspiracy Craigmore had founded now routinely referred to their organization as Nightshade.
In addition to the recent loss of its founder, Nightshade was also reeling from the shock of J&J’s discovery and destruction of several clandestine formula labs. There was no doubt a lot of finger- pointing going on at the top. Victoria suspected that some of those at the highest levels would not survive. Nightshade was nothing if not an exercise in Darwinian theory. It wouldn’t be the first time that its corporate politics took a deadly turn.
She did not care what happened in the upper echelons. Not yet. There was little she could do to affect the outcome of the power struggles at this point, anyway. Someday she would control Nightshade, but that time had not yet come.
Her immediate goal was to take charge of one of the three surviving drug labs, specifically the one located in Portland, Oregon.
“Do you think the dream talent Winters found will be strong enough to work the lamp?” Hulsey asked anxiously.
“According to the J&J files she looks like a Level Seven.”
“I’m not at all sure that will be enough sensitivity. Most dreamlight readers can see only a limited portion of the dream spectrum. Very few can actually work that kind of energy.”
Victoria looked at her computer screen where her notes about the colorful Harper family were displayed. “The seven has a very big asterisk after it. J&J suspects she’s probably a lot stronger.”
“The agency isn’t sure?”
“She has never been officially registered with the Society or tested. No one in her family registers and gets tested. In fact, the Harpers have a long history of going out of their way to avoid Arcane. Probably another reason why Winters chose Chloe Harper. He wouldn’t want a dream talent who would pick up the phone and call J&J as soon as she heard his name.”
“We can’t proceed with the rest of the experiment until Winters locates that lamp,” Hulsey stated. “Keep me informed.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
She broke the connection and spent a few minutes going over the plan yet again. There were always risks involved in a scheme this daring, but she had done a good job of limiting them. She had also provided several escape routes and bolt holes for herself in the event everything went south.
If things went wrong it would not be the first time she’d pulled off a disappearing act. After the Oriana Bay disaster a few months ago she had been obliged to destroy her Niki Plumer identity in a way that had convinced both Nightshade and J&J that she was dead. Being a strong para-hypnotist had its advantages. All in all, however, the new venture wa
s coming together very nicely.
Unlike a lot of people, she took the legends and myths of the Arcane Society seriously. She was, after all, the product of one of those legends.
17
CHLOE LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW OF THE PLANE AND CONTEMPLATED the fantasy landscape that was the Las Vegas Strip. From the air the sharp divide between the real and the fake was clear. Like the movie sets on Hollywood’s back lots, the exotic, fanciful façades of the big casino-hotels were only skin deep.
Immediately behind the phony Renaissance palaces, medieval castles, Roman temples, Egyptian pyramids, waterfalls, rain forests, artificial islands and pirate ships lay acres of concrete. The massive rooftops of the resorts were laden with the huge HVAC equipment required to keep the gaming floors icy cool even when the outside temperatures soared past 110°F.
Beyond the rooftops lay the big garages, parking lots and RV parks. Next came streets filled with shabby budget motels and cheap apartment buildings. And sprawling out to the distant circle of mountains lay vast stretches of desert punctuated by subdivisions, golf courses and acres of sagebrush.
But when you were down on the ground, in the middle of the Strip, all you could see was the fantasy, Chloe thought.
“I still think this is a really bad idea,” she said. “I never take clients along on a verification trip. They always get emotional, regardless of how things turn out.”
“You’ve mentioned that several times,” Jack said. “Trust me; I’m not the emotional type.”
She believed him. Control was clearly his middle name. The man probably lived on a steady diet of ice and glacial melt. But that did not make him any more predictable than the client who was at the mercy of his emotions.
“Remember, I’ll do the talking,” she said.
“You’ve already mentioned that at least twelve times.” He checked his watch. “How are you feeling?”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
“How much sleep did you get the past couple of nights?”
“Enough,” she said.
“How bad were they?”
“What?” she asked. But she knew what he was talking about.
“The dreams,” he said.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t wake up screaming. The wine took the edge off. Besides, I’m a dream talent, remember? I can handle a few bad dreams.”
“They were brutal, weren’t they?”
“Well,” she said, “Madeline Gibson is a very disturbed young woman. Stands to reason that her dream energy is also pretty unstable.”
He frowned. “What do you mean? Didn’t you get hit with my nightmares?”
“No. I got a dose of her energy.” She turned in the seat, frowning a little. “What did you think happened?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I told you, it’s not like I’ve been able to run any controlled experiments with this damn second talent. But I assumed that when I used it, I was generating energy and images from my own dreamscape and that it was those visions that struck the target.”
She thought about that and then shook her head. “I admit I’ve only had the single close encounter, but I think what happens is that when you use your talent, you send out currents of very strong, intensely focused energy from the dark end of your dream spectrum. That energy, however, doesn’t carry the images from your dreams and nightmares. It’s just energy.”
“How does it work, then?”
“I got the impression that you use your talent to trigger the target’s own dark dream energy. When you hit Madeline Gibson with that shock of psi she was suddenly plunged into her own nightmares, not yours. It was the ultralight from her dream world that I brushed up against.” She shuddered. “Like I said, she’s one sick woman.”
“So the way this works is, I can force another person into a really bad dream?”
“Even regular, garden-variety nightmares produce strong physiological changes. Heart rate speeds up. Breathing becomes shallow. Blood pressure is elevated. People wake up in a cold sweat. It makes sense that the shock of being plunged into a nightmare while in the waking state would create extreme disorientation and panic or even cause a person to faint like Madeline did.”
“Or the heart fails and someone dies,” Jack said grimly. “Like that guy in the alley the other night.”
“There is that possibility,” she allowed.
“Shit,” Jack whispered. He stared hard at the seat back in front of him. “My new talent is turning me into everyone’s worst nightmare.”
She considered that for a few seconds, and then she started to grin. She couldn’t help herself. The next thing she knew, the laughter was bubbling up out of her like champagne.
“What the hell is so damn funny?” he demanded.
“I don’t know.” She managed to get control of her laughter, but she knew her lips were still twitching. “It’s just something about the way you said that. For what it’s worth, my advice is not to get too worked up about this new talent of yours.”
“I’m a double-talent,” he said evenly. “That makes me a monster in Arcane’s eyes.”
“Screw Arcane. According to my aunt Phyllis, they’re just a bunch of supercilious bastards who think they have the right to tell other sensitives what to do. Who put the Joneses in charge of making rules for the rest of us? That’s what I’d like to know.”
A glint of humor came and went in his eyes. “Good question,” he agreed judiciously.
“I’ll bet the real problem Arcane has with double- or multi-talents is that they haven’t had much experience with them. They’ve made assumptions based on a few anecdotal records of a handful of individuals who exhibited more than one strong talent. But those people were obviously too weak psychically to handle that much power. They self-destructed, so to speak.”
“They’ve also got Nicholas Winters,” Jack reminded her.
“Yeah, well, according to the legend, Old Nick tried to murder Sylvester. Stands to reason that the Joneses might have taken a somewhat less than fair and balanced view of the entire situation. Anyhow, the bottom line here is that you are not weak. You’ve obviously got all the wattage you need to control your second talent.”
“For now,” he said grimly.
“Mr. Positive Thinker. As far as what happened the night before last, you can stop apologizing. Heck, the sight of Madeline Gibson holding that gun was more than enough to trigger some nasty dreams. Now you know why I hate those kinds of cases.”
He looked at her. “I love it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Play the tough PI.” His mouth kicked up a little at the corner.
“What makes it so interesting is that you really are tough. How did you end up in a legitimate line of work?”
She went still in the seat. “What are you implying, Mr. Winters?”
He was even more amused by her sudden bristling. “Don’t take offense. I’m making no moral or ethical judgments here. I’m just curious. The Harper family has a long history with Arcane and a lot of that history could be considered thorny, to put it mildly.”
“Most of my relatives have a talent for art of one sort or another,” she said stiffly. “I lacked that kind of ability, so I had to find another way to make a living.”
“I’m not buying that, not for a minute.”
“I assure you, I have absolutely no artistic talent. I’m good at finding things, that’s all.”
“But that’s not why you went legit.”
“It isn’t?”
She infused her voice with all the icy reserve she could summon. It didn’t seem to faze him.
“No,” he said. “You became a PI because you’re one of the good guys. You’re a natural-born fixer. You want to find answers and fix things for people.”
“And just what makes you so sure you know so much about me?”
He shrugged. “Part of my strat talent. I’m good at scoping out weaknesses and vulnerabilities in people. That’s why I’ve been able to make so much mon
ey.”
“How nice for you.”
“The talent has its uses,” he agreed neutrally.
The flight attendant’s voice came over the PA system, instructing the passengers to prepare for the landing. Chloe straightened in her seat and checked the belt.
“One more thing before we meet with Drake Stone,” she said.
“What?”
“Whatever you do, don’t try to coerce him into selling you the lamp. Take it from me, that never works.”
“I’m a strategy- talent who has made a lot of money putting deals together.”
“I know, but—”
“Trust me, everyone really does have a price, Chloe. I’ll know Stone’s within five minutes of meeting him.”
She did not like the sound of that.
“I want your word that you will let me handle this situation,” she insisted. “Collectors are an odd bunch.”
“I doubt that they are any more weird than some of the folks I’ve backed.”
“Just remember, I’m in charge.”
“You’re the expert.”
Not quite what she had wanted to hear.
18
“THERE ARE DAYS, MISS HARPER, WHEN I THINK THAT IF I HAVE to sing “Blue Champagne” one more time I’m going to lose it completely and go bonkers right there on stage.”
Chloe smiled. “So this probably isn’t the time to tell you that my assistant informed me that you were her mother’s favorite singer.”
They were sitting on a patio overlooking a sparkling turquoise pool framed by stone columns and twin rows of classical statues. The day was bright and sunny, but it was, in Chloe’s opinion, a tad cool to be sitting outdoors, even if this was the desert. It was still December, after all, and sixty-two degrees was still sixty-two degrees; not true patio weather even if you were from Seattle. They were all quite comfortable, however, because two towering propane patio heaters cast a warm glow over the scene.
Here in Vegas, you didn’t let a little thing like the weather get in the way of the ambience. Come high summer, when the temps were routinely in the low one hundreds, Drake Stone’s patio would be just as comfortable as it was now. The row of misters installed at the edge of the awning would cool the atmosphere with an airy spray of water.