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.”