Jack froze. “What are you talking about?”
“I could buy the fact that you got lucky yesterday and took down one hunter, but I’m not buying that you were able to take down three people today, two of whom were hunters.”
“I only got the one hunter,” Jack said evenly. “And the woman. No big deal. Chloe handled the other hunter.”
“Whatever. Like I said, congratulations.”
“You don’t sound worried.”
“As long as you’re taking out Nightshade agents, I don’t have any problem with your new talent. I need all the help I can get. Call me after you talk to Stone.”
Fallon broke the connection.
PREDICTABLY, IT WAS CHLOE who insisted that they make the offer to the Nightshade agents. But Fallon Jones was right. They refused. The cops removed the duct tape and wire bindings and replaced them with standard-issue handcuffs. They stuffed both men into the back of a patrol car and drove away.
Chloe and Jack stood on the front steps and watched the vehicle disappear.
“I’m betting they both escape within twenty-four hours,” Chloe said. She shook her head. “They’re hunters. They’re not only preternaturally fast—they’ve also got para- hunting skills. The cops won’t even know they’re gone until it’s too late.”
“Fallon says they’re as good as dead,” Jack said. “He told me that Nightshade will drop them like live bombs now that they’ve been picked up by regular law enforcement. They won’t get any more of the drug. First they’ll go crazy. Give them twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours at most, and then they’ll commit suicide.”
Chloe shuddered. “The drug is a terrible creation. Jones is right. Nightshade must be stopped.”
“I’m not usually into conspiracy theories, but I’m starting to think Jones has a point about this one.”
37
CHLOE GRIPPED THE COFFEE MUG EMBLAZONED WITH THE Drake Stone logo in both hands and looked at Drake. She was seriously impressed by his resilience.
“I can’t believe you’re going to do your show tonight after what happened to you today,” she said. “A lot of folks would be gulping sedatives and worrying about post-traumatic shock.”
They were sitting outside by the pool. Overhead the patio heaters spread a pleasant warmth. Drake had fixed the coffee, himself, after sending his housekeeper home to her family to recover.
“You know that old showbiz saying?” Drake asked.
“The show must go on?” she quoted.
“No,” Drake said. “The any-publicity-is-good-publicity saying. Tonight my name is going to be all over the evening news here in town. I haven’t had press like this since I was outed a few years ago. If I don’t do the show tonight the rumors will really start flying.”
“What rumors?” Jack asked.
“The ones that claim I’m actually dead. They’ve been floating around for years.” Drake stretched out his legs. He studied Jack with a speculative expression. “How the hell did you get the drop on those two this afternoon and who were those guys from L.A. who took the lamp?”
“It’s complicated,” Jack said.
Drake nodded. “I thought it might be.”
“Would you believe me if I told you that the bikers who invaded your home today were working for a secret criminal organization that uses an illicit drug that gives their agents psychic powers?”
Drake raised his eyes to the awning. “I knew it. You’re with the government. What is this, really? Some kind of drug sting? Casino fraud?”
“No,” Chloe said quickly. “We aren’t government agents. Honest.”
“Forget it.” Drake held up a hand to silence her. “I don’t want to know anything more about the investigation. This is Vegas after all. Around here, ignorance is, if not exactly blissful, usually a hell of a lot safer.”
“Mind if I ask you a few questions?” Jack said.
Drake raised his brows. “You want to know about my visitor last night, don’t you?”
“You didn’t make up that story just to get us out here today, did you?” Jack asked.
“No. The irony here is that I really was planning to call you and tell you about the woman who came to see me. But I don’t have any more information than what I’ve already told you. I just can’t remember the details. Ever have a dream you can’t quite recall?”
“Yes,” Jack said. He looked at Chloe. “I have.”
She tried to ignore him. She knew that he had a lot of questions, and it was clear that he was not in a good mood. She couldn’t blame him. He had awakened thinking that he was no longer a double-talent only to discover the hard way that he could still project nightmares. As far as he was concerned he was still a psychic freak.
In addition his senses had to be close to exhausted after the way he had used them to take down Sandy and Ike. You couldn’t use that much psi without paying a price. Energy was energy. When you pulled a lot of it you had to give yourself time to recover. She was feeling drained, herself. She had drawn heavily on her own talent to put the hunter to sleep.
She still had some reserves left, however.
She concentrated on Drake and opened her senses. For the most part his dreamlight looked normal, or at least as normal as ultralight could look. But there was something wrong with the hues on a few of the wavelengths. The colors were murky, and the pattern was out of sync. She’d seen that kind of trouble before.
“I think there is a possibility that whoever came to see you last night gave you a hypnotic suggestion,” she said.
Drake raised his brows. “There’s more than one hypnotist in this town. I know all the headliners who are any good at that kind of thing. But they’re all men. And why would anyone want to put me under unless it was to rob me? Nothing was missing this morning.”
“No guarantees, but I might be able to help you recall some of the details of your visitor.”
“How?”
“Think of it as a relaxation technique,” she said. “I promise you’ll be wide awake and aware the whole time. You’ll remember everything I say and do and you’ll have full control of what you are telling me.”
Drake contemplated her for a long moment, and then he nodded once. “I’ll admit the blank spot in my memory is bothering me. If I can forget that I had a visitor last night, the next thing you know I’ll start forgetting the words to ‘Blue Champagne.’ That would be a career killer. Let’s do this.”
Jack said nothing. He drank his coffee and waited.
“Stop trying to pull up the memory,” Chloe said to Drake. “Let it go. You don’t care about it anymore. Find the calm place inside yourself and relax.”
She kept up the soothing patter while she pulsed a little dream energy at the static, murky waves. What she said was not important. The words had nothing to do with projecting energy, but she knew that if she remained silent, Drake would wonder what was happening.
She used the lightest of touches to tweak and clear the murky dream static. Within seconds the colors pulsed normally once more.
“Dark hair,” Drake said. He snapped his fingers, looking very pleased. “Good cut. Expensive cut. I remember thinking she was attractive but not in a flashy Vegas way. Good clothes, too. Very stylish but very conservative suit and heels. She could have been a CEO or a lawyer.”
Jack sat forward a little. “Any distinguishing features? Jewelry?”
Drake pondered the question briefly and then shook his head. “Sorry. She rang the doorbell. The guard hadn’t called ahead so I assumed it was someone I knew or one of the staff. I didn’t recognize her when I opened the door. Figured she was a fan who had somehow managed to get over the wall. I asked her who she was.”
“What did she say?” Chloe asked.
“She said that she had come to see me. Wanted to ask me a few questions about an old antique lamp she’d heard I owned. I told her that I’d given it to another collector who had an interest in it.”
“How did she respond?” Jack asked.
“She asked for your names.” Drake’s expression tightened. “I told her that information was confidential, and then, damn, in the next breath I told her your names and everything else I knew about the two of you. Why would I do that?”
“Because she hypnotized you,” Chloe said.
Drake whistled softly. “She must be good.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “She must be very, very good.”
38
CHLOE DROVE BACK TO THE HOTEL. JACK WATCHED THE ROAD ahead with a stoic expression and made another call to Fallon Jones. He told him what they had learned about Drake Stone’s mystery visitor. When he was finished he closed the phone and continued to watch the road, grim faced.
“Well?” Chloe glanced at him. “Did Fallon have a theory?”
“Sure. As you might expect, it’s one that fits neatly into this Nightshade conspiracy he’s working on. He suspects that the woman who went to see Stone is the operative in charge of finding the lamp. He said she probably lost us yesterday when we made it look like we were headed for L.A.”
“So she went back to Stone to see what she could find out?”
“She used him to locate us,” Jack said. “Got lucky when it turned out that we were still in town. She set a trap, and we took the bait.”
“But things went wrong. Her people not only wound up getting arrested, the lamp is now in Arcane hands.”
“She screwed up.” Jack leaned his head against the back of the seat. “According to Fallon that means she’ll probably be dead soon.”
“But she wasn’t taking the drug. No traces in her dreamprints, remember? Nightshade doesn’t have the option of just cutting her off.”
“There are other ways of getting rid of people.”
“Well, yes, but if she’s with Nightshade, why wasn’t she on the drug?”
“Good question. Fallon’s wondering if some of the Nightshade people have decided to wait until the formula is perfected before they risk taking it.”
“That would certainly be an intelligent decision. But it also means that the organization would lose its grip on its agents. The guys at the top wouldn’t be able to control them without the drug.”
“Well, it’s Fallon’s problem now,” Jack said. “I’ve got other things to worry about. What’s happening to me, Chloe?”
“I told you, you’re fine. Stable as a rock.”
“My second talent is back.”
“And it is as stable as your first talent,” she said calmly.
“That’s impossible. Two high- end talents cannot coexist in the same individual without creating an inherently unstable psychic balance.”
“I admit that has been a long-standing notion within Arcane.”
“Probably because every time a double-talent appears, said talent becomes a psycho freak.”
“You are not a freak,” she said sharply. “You told me, yourself, that you felt normal again, and I can see that your dream psi is nicely balanced and absolutely stable.”
“Did you know I still had my second talent?”
She sighed. “Not for sure. Not until you used it this afternoon.” She hesitated. “But I did sort of wonder.”
“Yeah? About what?”
“Last night when I got a good look at your dreamlight spectrum I realized that the channels between your dreamstate and your waking state are wide open and stable. That’s how you’re drawing the extra fire power.”
“That’s supposed to be impossible. If it were true I should be a full-blown Cerberus by now.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I’m guessing that it was the genetic twist in Nicholas’s DNA that you inherited that makes it possible for you to handle the open channels.”
“So what did you do with the lamp last night?”
“I think that when those channels suddenly opened a few weeks ago the abrupt change created some areas of disturbance in your dream psi. The patterns appeared to be repairing naturally. I used the energy of the lamp to speed up the process, that’s all. I was going to try to clear out some of the damage done by the medication, but things got sort of complicated and I didn’t have a chance to finish.”
“You’re telling me that you didn’t try to close my dreamlight channels?”
“No,” she said. “I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it might have killed you,” she said simply. “Or, at the very least driven you insane.”
He looked at her. “Why?”
“Because what you are now is what you were genetically meant to be. This is normal for you. If I messed around with your dream-psi channels I would make you very abnormal. Do you understand?”
“So I’m a normal double-talent? There is no such thing.”
“Well, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that.”
“No kidding.”
She told herself she was big enough to ignore the sarcasm. Jack was under a lot of stress, after all.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I’m not so sure that you actually are a double-talent.”
He turned his attention back to the road. “Last month I was a strat. This month I can generate nightmares. If that isn’t two different talents, what is?”
“Think about it, Winters. There are a gazillion different kinds of strats, but they all have one thing in common: They possess a preternatural ability to assess and analyze a situation and then figure out how to exploit it. At its core, that is simply a survival mechanism. Probably a psychic adaptation of the primitive hunting instincts in our earliest ancestors.”
“Where are you going with this?” he asked.
“I’m building my case. Stick with me. Your form of strat-talent just happens to make you very, very good at detecting people’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, right?”
“So?”
“Okay, it’s a stretch from being able to assess and manipulate a person’s weaknesses to being able to scare the living daylights out of that person with a blast of psi but not a big one. Once you know an individual’s vulnerabilities, you have a certain amount of power and control over that person. In your case you’re able to take it a step further. You can actually generate energy that zeros in on the wavelengths of a person’s most elemental fears.”
“I couldn’t do that for the first thirty-five years of my life.”
“Maybe not, but the fact that you can do it now doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a whole new talent. What you’ve got now is just an enhanced version of your old talent.”
“Enhanced as in formula enhanced?” His mouth hardened. “Fallon Jones might find me useful, but something tells me that the rest of the Jones family, including Zack Jones, won’t be so easygoing about my new level of talent.”
“Oh, yeah?” She made a rude noise. “Like anyone in the Jones family has the right to judge what’s normal and what’s not when it comes to talent.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Give me a break,” she said. “It’s no secret that Sylvester Jones began experimenting early on in his life with various versions of his enhancement formula. Who knows what he did to his own DNA before he fathered all those little Jones boys by those three different women?”
There was a short, startled silence.
“Damn,” Jack whistled softly. “I never thought of that. It might explain why that family line has always produced so many unusual and off-the-charts talents.”
“Yes, it would,” she said crisply.
“If my talents are normal, why the hallucinations and the blackouts? Why the disturbance to my dream psi?”
“I understand the hallucinations,” she said. “That is a common problem when dream energy spills over into the other senses. As I told you, the sudden emergence of your enhanced level of talent temporarily disrupted the patterns of some of the currents of your dream psi.”
“What about the blackouts and the sleepwalking?”
She tightened her hands on the steering wheel. “I suppose they could have been ca
used by the frayed dream channels, but, as I told you, there are still traces of what looks like heavy medication at one point on the spectrum.”
“I started taking the meds after the blackouts and the sleepwalking episodes began.”
“Were you on any other kind of medication prior to that?” she asked. “Even some over-the-counter stuff can have unpredictable effects on sensitives, especially high-level ones like you.”
“Some anti-inflammatories occasionally. That’s it.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, the murky stuff is definitely fading,” she said.
“I lost an entire day of my life, not to mention the nights when I went walkabout.”
“I realize it’s very unsettling,” she said gently. “But things are stable now. I can sense it. Last night it felt as if we turned a key in a psychic lock. You’re fine, Jack.”
“I sense a but.”
She took a deep breath. “But I’m still wondering why there is so much power locked up in that lamp.”
39
THAT EVENING THEY HAD DRINKS IN ONE OF THE HOTEL BARS. Jack swallowed some of his whiskey and thought about how good it felt to be sitting there with Chloe. Like a real date, except that he could not imagine any of the other women he knew sitting there so casually across the table from a man who could plunge them into a waking nightmare in a heartbeat. Then, again, Chloe wasn’t like any of the other women he knew.
“Where does J&J go from here?” she asked.
“Fallon’s frustrated.” He shrugged. “That is not an unusual condition for him, however.”
“No luck finding the mystery woman who knocked on Stone’s door?”
“No. But he seems pretty sure that’s a dead end, anyway. He’s convinced that now that Arcane has recovered the lamp and stashed it in one of the Society’s vaults, Nightshade will terminate the project. Those responsible for the failure will be given notice in the organization’s customary fashion.”
“They’ll be cut off the drug.”
“Apparently.”