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.”