Greasy-looking vines trailed across the entrance of the grotto. More vegetation floated on the surface of the dark pool. Zinnia glimpsed something large and tuberous inside the cave.
“Most unusual,” she said.
Newton glowed with an almost paternal pride. “Thank you, my dear. I have devoted years to my plants. They are all unique. So nice to be able to show them off once in a while.”
Zinnia was about to suggest once again, in a tactful manner, that she had to leave. She paused when a thought struck her. “Professor, you must have made some notes in the course of your research.”
“Indeed, indeed. A great many. Haven’t looked at them for years. They’re filed away in the special place where I store all of the mementos of my career in academia.”
“Where is that?”
“Beneath the house in the family crypt, of course.” Newton gave her a wistful smile. “The perfect place for that sort of thing. My career in academia, after all, is as dead as my relatives. And, frankly, between you and me, my dear, I much preferred my career to my family. Nasty lot.”
A vision of Aunt Willy popped into Zinnia’s mind. “I can sympathize with that feeling, Professor. I have one last question.”
“What’s that, Miss Spring?”
“You said that the University of New Portland officials were quite willing to believe that Bartholomew Chastain committed suicide.”
“They accepted the story without a qualm.”
“Why is that? Did Chastain have a history of psychological problems?”
“No. But he was rumored to be a matrix-talent. Everyone knows how odd they are.”
It was after ten when Zinnia stepped out of the elevator and started down the hall to her loft apartment. She was exhausted. The late focus assignment had gone on much too long, as was often the case with matrix-talents. They had a tendency to lose themselves in the patterns they generated on the metaphysical plane. When that happened they enjoyed themselves so much that Zinnia hated to interrupt them. Unfortunately for them, Psynergy, Inc. billed by the hour.
This evening the client, a matrix working in the field of biological synergism, had obsessed on an elaborate array of biosyn statistics. When Zinnia had gently reminded her of the passing time, the researcher had brushed the interruption aside. She had promised that the lab would cover the cost.
Clementine would be pleased at the high bill the matrix had run up, Zinnia thought as she let herself into her loft. But right now, bed sounded far more exciting than a bonus in her paycheck. It had been a very long day.
She yawned as she reached for the light switch.
A shadow shifted in the darkness near the fireplace. Zinnia stopped yawning and prepared to start screaming.
“Tell me,” Nick said from the heavy Later Expansion Period reading chair. “What in five hells made you think you would get away with it?”
“What?” She was so stunned, she could barely speak. Her hand fell away from the light switch, leaving the loft in darkness. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a very well-done forgery, I’ll give you that much.” Nick’s eyes gleamed in the shadows. “But it’s a fake from first page to last.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The journal, of course.” His voice was infinitely soft, infinitely dangerous. “The one you so generously arranged for me to buy from Polly and Omar last night. It’s a complete fraud.”
Zinnia took a step forward and paused. She was too dazed to think very clearly. “How do you know that?”
“How do I know? This is how I know.”
Power slammed across the metaphysical plane, a great raw surge of it.
Matrix-talent seeking a prism.
Demanding a prism.
Hunting a prism.
Summoning a prism.
Zinnia stopped breathing when she felt the questing presence of the psychic probe. There was something disturbingly familiar about it. Something that called to her as no other talent ever had. Instinctively she responded with a crystal-clear prism.
A torrent of dazzling power crashed through it, emerging in great waves of controlled psychic energy.
She knew this talent. She knew this man.
“It was you,” Zinnia whispered. “You’re the vampire.”
Chapter
11
* * * * * * * * * *
She switched off the focus. And then she turned on the lights.
For some reason the simple mundane action caught Nick off guard. Instinctively he suppressed the fiery storm of power that he had generated on the metaphysical plane. The prism Zinnia had created winked out of existence.
“Great. Just great.” Zinnia threw up her hands. “The end of a perfect day. I missed breakfast because I had to spend the morning with a loony professor and a bunch of blood-sucking plants. I missed dinner because I had to spend the evening boring myself silly holding the focus for a statistician. I walk in the front door, asking no more out of life than a glass of wine and a sandwich, and what do I find? A psychic vampire in the living room. It’s too much. I quit.”
She gave Nick a withering look as she stalked across the open loft into the kitchen. She yanked open the icerator and jerked out a bottle of green wine.
Nick rapidly reassessed matters as he watched her reach into a drawer and rummage around for a corkscrew. Things were not going as he had planned. He hated it when that happened.
Ever since he had realized that the journal was a forgery, he had been obsessing on this confrontation with Zinnia. His rage at having been played for a fool was bad enough. The frustration he felt at having once again failed in his quest was even worse. But it was the knowledge that Zinnia had betrayed him that was gnawing at his guts.
She had set him up. There was no other logical explanation.
He did not understand the anguish that had welled up inside when he had forced himself to face the truth earlier that afternoon. He had not allowed anything or anyone to affect him this strongly for a long, long time.
It infuriated him to know that he was reacting so intensely to what he should have foreseen as a possibility right from the start. He should never have trusted Zinnia.
Nevertheless, in spite of the facts, more than anything else at that moment he wanted her to defend herself.
Earlier, as he had brooded in his hidden office, he had envisioned a dozen different scenarios for this meeting. All of them had involved Zinnia desperately struggling to convince him that she had been duped by Polly and Omar. He wanted her to plead, to declare her innocence even though logic told him that she must have been in on the scam up to her elegant ears.
“Where is the real journal?” he asked very softly. “Did you sell it to someone else? Or did you keep it for yourself? Did you buy into that old tabloid legend about my father’s team discovering a fortune in fire crystal? Do you think the journal can lead you to it? If so, you’re not nearly as intelligent as I had assumed.”
“Gosh, I’d hate to sink any lower in your opinion than I already have.”
“No one betrays me and gets away with it, Zinnia.”
“Don’t waste your time trying to intimidate me tonight, Chastain.” She came around the end of the counter with a long-stemmed glass of wine in her hand, walked to the antique sofa near the window, and sank down on it with a heartfelt sigh. Propping herself in one corner, she stretched out her legs on the cushions. “I’m too tired to be scared.”
“Better work up the energy for it because I’m not playing games.”
She took a slow meditative sip of wine and regarded him over the rim of the glass. “If that journal you bought off Polly and Omar last night is a fake, then I’m as much in the dark as you are.”
“You made all the arrangements for the transaction.” The steady clarity of her gaze made him seethe. “You had to be in on it. The only thing I don’t understand is why in five hells you thought you’d get away with it.”
She folded one hand behind her head. “Do you
really believe this nonsense or is it just matrix paranoia talking?”
“I am not paranoid,” Nick said through his teeth. “But I am very good at detecting patterns, even without the aid of a prism. Not that it takes a matrix-talent to see the connections in this situation. A small child with a pencil could connect the dots.”
“Then I suggest you go find a small child with a pencil because you’re not doing a very good job on your own.” She took another sip of wine, leaned her head back against her folded arm, and closed her eyes. “Lord, am I tired. I hate statistics.”
Fury swept through Nick. He shoved himself up out of the chair and crossed the room to the sofa. “Look at me, damn it.”
She opened her eyes. “I’m not in the mood for this, Mr. Chastain.”
He reached down and snatched the wine glass out of her hand. “Did you really think I’d be blinded by a few kisses and the promise of good sex?”
“What promise? The only thing I agreed to was dinner.” She raised her brows in mocking inquiry. “Speaking of which, I assume this performance means that the invitation for tomorrow night has been canceled?”
Nick heard a sharp crack. Liquid flowed over his hand. He glanced down and was stunned to see that he’d snapped the fragile stem of the wine glass. He stared, shocked by the evidence of his loss of control. Blood and green wine dripped from his fingers onto the wooden floor.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Now look what you’ve done.” Zinnia got to her feet and started back toward the kitchen. “Come over to the sink. I’ll get you cleaned up and then you can go back to your cave.”
Anger and despair washed through him. “Zinnia.”
He reached for her with his mind the way a drowning man lunges for a lifeline. He felt the familiar floating sense of disorientation as he sent out a psychic probe. Relief rushed through him when he sensed her response. He wished he was sitting down. The overwhelming impact of intense intimacy nearly drove him to his knees.
Zinnia said nothing as she turned on the water faucet, but she offered him a prism on the metaphysical plane. It was crystal clear, very powerful. This time he took a few seconds to study it. He sensed that it could focus the full range of his talent. Never in his life had he ever been able to use his psychic gifts to the maximum.
He could not resist. He sent talent crashing eagerly through the prism. The metaphysical construct did not waver. It channeled the full thrust of raw psychic power and converted it into finely tuned waves of energy. It was energy that could be used the way he used his hands or his ears or his eyes. Energy that was as natural and controllable as any of his other senses.
He no longer had to grope for or deduce the patterns in the world around him. From the slightly irregular edges of the mosaic tiles on the kitchen walls to the myriad tiny sparkles on the surface of the water that poured from the faucet, the intricate designs of the surrounding matrix took on a whole new dimension on the metaphysical plane. Several dimensions, in fact. He could have studied them for hours, analyzing the connections, extrapolating the possibilities, assessing probabilities.
But he made no attempt to use the energy waves. He simply watched the great, glittering cascade of psychic power with his inner eye and marveled. He was drunk with the beauty and excitement of his own fully focused talent.
“You’re dripping all over my hardwood floors,” Zinnia said.
The normal nature of a good focus link was such that both prism and talent could indulge in a casual conversation or perform a routine task while they worked their combined psychic energy. It came under the heading of being able to chew gum and walk at the same time.
But tonight Nick had a hard time concentrating on Zinnia’s words. In addition to the wonder of indulging his own psychic senses to the hilt, he was in the grip of sexual desire so strong that he literally ached with it. He doubted if he could have chewed gum at that moment, let alone walk.
After a brief struggle, however, he managed to subdue the heady sensation long enough to get himself as far as Zinnia’s kitchen sink.
“Don’t you feel it?” he asked.
“What? The focus link? Sure.” She reached for his hand and held it under the running water. “You’re very strong, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” He had meant the feeling of intense intimacy, not the power of the link. Perhaps she didn’t experience the connection the way he did. The possibility that the shattering sense of closeness was only happening on his side triggered a wave of melancholy. “I don’t know what class. The official paranormal spectrum scale isn’t accurate for matrix-talents.”
“Speaking as a full-spectrum prism who’s had a fair amount of experience with matrix-talents, I can tell you that you’re way over a ten.” She met his eyes. “As I’m sure you’re well aware.”
There was no point trying to pretend that he was normal. “I guess so.” He leaned back against the counter and savored the flow of his own power on the metaphysical plane while Zinnia rinsed his hand.
He watched, enthralled, as she cradled his fingers in hers. Her hand was beautiful. A model of exquisite evolutionary forces. He could trace the whole history of human development in the pattern of the delicate bones beneath her incredibly soft skin.
“I assume you’ve never been tested?” Zinnia asked crisply.
“No.” He was fascinated by the pattern of the pooling water in the bottom of the sink. “Some researcher probably would have leaked the results. Wouldn’t have been good for business.”
She smiled wryly. “I don’t doubt that. Being a matrix is questionable enough in the eyes of most people. Being an off-the-chart matrix is the stuff of psychic vampire novels.”
“Yes.” He pushed more power through the prism and deliberately used it to study the intricate design of the drops of water that splashed onto the tile around the sink. He could see an entire mathematical universe in them.
“Speaking of which,” Zinnia continued. “I’ve read every psychic vampire romance Orchid Adams has ever written but you’re the first genuine PV I’ve ever worked with. If Clementine finds out about this, she’ll want me to charge extra.”
He jerked his eyes up to meet hers. She couldn’t possibly be joking. “Reading novels about mythical monster matrix-talents and rolling dice at a casino run by one are two entirely different things,” he said.
“True. Most people would be extremely wary of gambling in a place where the owner was capable of tampering with the laws of chance.”
“Don’t have to tamper with them,” he muttered. “They naturally favor the house. Just ask any synergistic probability theorist.”
He took a deep breath and was able to reassert some of his normal control. Thankfully, the slightly inebriated sensation was fading. He was still moving power through the prism at full charge, but he was no longer quite so enthralled with himself. The disturbing sense of intimacy persisted, however. He had a fierce erection.
“I believe you.” She turned off the faucet and handed him a paper towel. “I’m sorry the journal was a fraud, Nick. But I had nothing to do with it. I was only trying to help. I don’t appreciate your attitude tonight. I don’t like people trying to intimidate me.”
The prism began to fade. Nick realized that she was cutting the flow of her own power. “No, wait.” Instinctively he tried to surround the prism with chaotic waves of unfocused talent.
“Don’t you dare try to jump me the way you did the other night in the casino.” Zinnia glowered. “I don’t know which one of us is the stronger but I’m in no mood to find out tonight.”
“And you say I’m intimidating.” He wrapped the paper towel around his hand and reluctantly stopped projecting his talent. He watched wistfully as the beautiful prism winked out on the metaphysical plane. “I’m sorry about what happened the other night. You took me by surprise.”
“I took you by surprise? How do you think I felt?”
“It won’t happen again,” he promised.
“It better not.”
He looked at her. “What was it you did to the prism when you tried to get free?”
She hesitated. “To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure. It was instinctive. I didn’t think about it.”
“You twisted the focus somehow.”
She shrugged. “Maybe it’s the flipside of being able to focus for matrix-talents in the first place. A built-in defense mechanism.”
“Why aren’t you afraid of me?”
She smiled as she turned away to pour more wine. “Because I know you aren’t crazy.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“Probably has something to do with the fact that my own type of psychic energy is weird. I told you, I’m not a normal prism. I can only work comfortably with matrix-talents, so out of necessity, I’ve become something of an expert on them. Maybe the only real expert in the world. Thanks to Psynergy, Inc., I’ve had an opportunity to work with more matrix-talents in the past year or so than most researchers see in a lifetime.”
“You didn’t answer my question. What makes you think I’m not crazy?”
She handed him a glass of wine. “It’s hard to explain. I can feel things when I work with a matrix. Things most prisms aren’t able to detect when they work with one. I once tried to hold a focus for a matrix who was certifiably bonkers. Believe me, I can tell the difference. He was only about a class-three but he scared the living daylights out of me.”
“How? Did he try to take control of the prism?”
“Yes, but he was much too weak to do it. That wasn’t the scary part. The frightening stuff was the talent, itself. It was—” She frowned. “Not normal. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
He held her eyes. “You think I’m normal?”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far. There is nothing real normal about you, Nick. But you certainly aren’t a wacko.”
He took a sip of the weak green wine. “You’d know, huh?”
“Oh, yes. I’d know.” She watched him intently. “Your father was a matrix, wasn’t he?”