Midnight Crystal (13 page)

Marlowe touched him, feeling the sleek little predator beneath the ball-of-lint fur.

“Ready, pal?”

Gibson chattered softly. In these situations he always seemed to understand that they were on a mission.

Marlowe braced for the jolt she knew would come and put her fingertips on Vickie’s brow.

The psychic shock waves smashed into her senses. The intuitive elements of her talent interpreted the energy frantically, delivering a senses-disorienting dreamscape.

“Vickie, you’re in a dream, but I know you can hear me. I have suppressed the rogue waves in your dreamlight patterns. You are in control of the dreamscape now. Listen to my voice.”

“Stop running, Vickie. Panic is making you run. You are no longer afraid, because you are in control. Focus on the sound of my voice. You will see the exit from the maze. This is a lucid dream now. You control it.”

“Concentrate on the opening in the maze, Vickie. Use your talent to focus on it. Walk through it. Don’t try to run. Just walk. You are in control of this dreamscape now.”

Vickie opened her eyes. She looked around the shadowed room for a few seconds, confused. Gibson chortled and pushed close to one of her hands. Vickie touched him without seeming to be aware of it. Her fingers tightened in his fur. She grew visibly calmer.

“Welcome back,” Marlowe said gently.

Vickie turned her head on the pillow and looked at her.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“A friend of the family,” Marlowe said. Before she could explain, she heard rapid footsteps on the floor behind her.

Diana Winters rushed toward the bed.

“Vickie? Are you really awake?”

Vickie pushed herself up on her elbows.

“Hi, Mom.”

“VICKIE REALLY WILL BE OKAY?” ADAM SAID. “THE FIX is permanent?”

“She’ll be fine.” Marlowe unfastened the wire lock on the cookie jar, removed the lid, and waited for Gibson to select two perfect High-Rez Energy Bars. “There was no permanent damage done to her underlying field. When she got zapped by the bad energy in that maze, her senses were overloaded. A lot of people, certainly anyone who lacked a very strong parapsych profile, would have been driven insane or died on the spot.”

“But she’s a Winters,” Adam said, not bothering to conceal his pride. “She held the line until reinforcements arrived.”

Marlowe smiled. “Yep, she’s a Winters.”

Chortling gleefully, Gibson hopped down from the rim of the cookie jar and set about peeling off the wrappers of the two bars.

Marlowe locked the cookie jar and plucked two small glasses and a bottle of Amber Dew out of a cabinet.

She and Adam were alone. Adam’s parents had stayed behind at the hospital. Hers had returned home. Adam had driven her back to her condo in the Quarter, and she had invited him in for nightcap. After all, it had been a very long night. And they were partners.

There had been no outbreak of jubilation after Vickie Winters had awakened. The initial reaction was disbelief followed by a lot of tears. Not all of the tears had been spilled by Diana Winters. Marlowe had seen a suspicious glitter in Adam’s eyes. Sam Winters had choked up as well.

There had also been questions, mostly from a very confused and disoriented Vickie. She had awakened with no memory of her experience. She had also been utterly exhausted because the trancelike state had not allowed for any healing sleep.

Marlowe set the bottle aside, picked up the two glasses of Amber Dew, and carried them across the room. She put the glasses down on the coffee table and crossed to the wall to rez the flash-rock fireplace. When the flames leaped on the hearth, she went back to the sofa and sat down.

“The inside of that maze is a psi firestorm.” Adam lowered himself onto the sofa beside her. He looked at the glass on the table in front of him but made no move to pick it up.

“Vickie reacted to the assault on her senses instinctively.” Marlowe picked up her glass. “She shut down and retreated to the darkest end of the spectrum. That’s where her talent originates and where she has the most strength. In essence she took cover in a dreamscape. It was a self-imposed trance.”

“But she went so deep that she couldn’t find her way back out?”

“That pretty much describes what happened, yes.”

Gibson finished the energy bars. He carried the empty foil wrappers across the room to a basket that was already half-filled with identical wrappers. He made the additions to his collection and then fluttered across the floor to the dust-bunny-sized door that Marlowe had installed for him. The door was located in the wall next to the glass doors that opened onto the balcony. Gibson chortled once and disappeared outside into the night.

“Probably off to hang with his buddies,” Marlowe explained. “I think dust bunnies are quite sociable. Or maybe he’s got a girlfriend. I’m not sure what he does when he goes out at night. But he’ll be back in a few hours. He hops from balcony to balcony until he gets to the ground.”

“Helps to have six paws when you do that kind of mountaineering,” Adam said.

Out on the balcony Gibson bounced up onto the railing. He stood silhouetted against the green light of the ruins for a few seconds and then vanished over the side.

“You and Gibson have done this kind of psychic repair work before?” Adam asked.

She sipped some Amber Dew and lowered the glass. “You know how some people are on a special list of donors for rare blood types?”

“Sure.”

“Arcane operates a private clinic for members of the Society similar to the one your sister is in. I’m on a list of rare talents who can be called in to consult on special cases.”

He held his glass of Amber Dew up to the firelight and studied the golden liqueur. “The Guild clinics keep lists of parapsych specialists, too. We have some very rare and unusual talents on tap. But none of them could help Vickie.”

“Her condition was unique because it was related to dreamlight. Doubt if you have a lot of dream talents in the Guild.”

“No,” he agreed. “That’s more of an Arcane thing.”

“I expect you’ve got some talents on your clinic lists that the Arcane parapsych doctors could use from time to time.”

He drank some of the Amber Dew. “Might be useful in the future if the Guilds and the Society shared those lists.”

“Yes,” she said. “Might be very useful.”

She sank deeper into the sofa, letting the gentle heat of the potent liqueur take the edge off her overstimulated nerves. She had used a lot of energy at the hospital. Now she was in the edgy, high-rez state that always followed a major burn. Soon she would crash and fall into a heavy sleep.

But that wouldn’t happen for a while. Not that she was looking forward to sleep. There would be dreams tonight. Bad ones. But that was just the way the talent worked. She had a lot of natural resilience. That, too, was connected to her talent. After a couple of nights, the images from Vickie’s dreams would stop invading her own dreamscapes.

Meanwhile the Amber Dew was hitting her harder and faster than it would have otherwise. She knew from experience that she had a tendency to get chatty in this condition.

Adam looked at her. “You saved my sister tonight. I owe you. For the rest of my life, I owe you.”

“Stop right there.” Marlowe held up one hand. “What I did for your sister, I would have done for anyone.”

“I know that, too. Doesn’t change anything.”

She swallowed more Amber Dew. “If the situation had been reversed, you would have done the same thing.”

He watched her with a steady, unreadable expression. “Think so?”

She smiled, feeling a bit smug. “I’m a dreamlight talent, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And one hell of a profiler. For your information, I nailed your parapsych profile the first time I met you in the ruins.”

“Is that right?” He raised the glass to his mouth again, a little amused now. “And just what kind of profile do I have?”

She pondered that, vaguely aware that she was definitely buzzed on the Amber Dew. At times like this it was usually wise to cease verbal communication, she reminded herself. Especially when one was engaged in communication with a man. But for some reason she felt compelled to tell Adam what she sensed about him.

She held up one finger. “For starters, you are the kind of man who will always do what you feel is the right thing, even if doing the right thing requires you to be utterly ruthless. Which means that you are not, strictly speaking, always a nice guy.”

He winced. “Think that explains my own relationship problems?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t tell me a hotshot Guild boss like you has any trouble getting a date.”

“Getting a date isn’t the problem. It’s the long-term stuff.”

“Gee, you have trouble maintaining a relationship?” She wrinkled her nose. “Well, don’t look to me for advice. I suck in that department, remember?”

“You did say something about that.” He drank a little more of his Amber Dew.

“But I’m guessing that part of your problem is that women take a long look at you and decide that you aren’t good Covenant Marriage material,” she added.

His mouth twisted. “Thanks.”

“Not your fault,” she said. “It’s the genetic thing. I read those old notes of Nicholas’s. Something about a restless spirit being one of the symptoms of the onset of his talent.”

“ ‘ Each talent comes at a great price,’ ” Adam quoted softly. “‘It is ever thus with power. The first talent fills the mind with a rising tide of restlessness that cannot be assuaged by endless hours in the laboratory or soothed with strong drink or the milk of the poppy
.
’ ”

“Well?” she said. “Does that describe you?”

He exhaled slowly. “Probably. Never had a lot of time for relationships, I guess. Always felt like I had to keep searching for something.”

“You channeled that energy into your work.” She held up a second finger. “As I was saying, you are the kind of man other people will follow into the underworld, even if they don’t have amber. Translated, that also means you are not always a nice guy.”

“I sense a theme here.”

She held up a third finger. “You’re an off-the-charts talent, and you have the kind of off-the-charts willpower and self-control required to handle that kind of power. You finish what you start. You are incorruptible. No one could bribe you. Which means that you are—”

“Not always a nice guy.” He finished the last of his Amber Dew and contemplated the fire. “Definitely a theme.”

“What you are,” she said very steadily, “is a natural-born hero.”

He frowned. “No. I just do my job.”

“And you would do it even if you had to forge a river of ghost energy to get it done.”

“That’s your definition of a hero?”

“Certainly part of the definition.”

He turned back to the fire. “And my relationship problems?”

“Probably similar to my own.” She waved one hand. “With the exception of my sleep issues.”

“How’s that?”

She kicked off her shoes and stacked her ankles on the coffee table. “Look at it from our dates’ points of view. We’re fun or at least interesting for a while. But soon we become irritating.”

“Yeah?”

“We tend to take charge and take over. Before anyone realizes what has happened, we’re making all the decisions.”

“You make it sound like we’re a couple of control freaks.”

“Yep.” She polished off the Amber Dew and set the empty glass on the table with a small, decisive clink. “That’s us. Mega control freaks. Guess that’s why they gave us the corner offices with the big windows.”

“You’ve got a corner office?”

“Not exactly. There’s actually only one office at J&J, but I’ve got it.”