Текст книги "Dream Eyes"

Автор книги: Jayne Krentz

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Twenty-five

“A gas explosion,” Gwen said. She smiled, coolly appreciative. “You know, that actually sounded like a very plausible explanation.”

“Thanks,” Judson said. For some reason—probably because he was still in the post-burn buzz—he liked that she was impressed with how smoothly he had pulled a rabbit out of a hat for Oxley. “Got to admit, I’ve had practice.”

She glanced at him, curiosity shadowing her eyes. “In your consulting work for that government agency you mentioned?”

“Government agencies are really good when it comes to cover-ups. It’s an art form. I learned a lot working for Joe Spalding.”

“The director of the agency?”

“Yes.”

“Abby mentioned that the agency—your client, I believe—was closed down due to funding cuts?” Gwen said.

“Funding is always a problem with government agencies.”

“Did Spalding become a lobbyist? That’s what usually happens, isn’t it? Those guys always land on their feet.”

“Spalding did not land on his feet. Spalding is dead.”

“Ah.” Gwen fell silent.

He drank some wine and lowered the glass, aware of the exhaustion that was settling into his bones. They were sitting in front of the fireplace in Gwen’s little parlor, their feet propped on the needlepoint hassock. There was a bottle of generic red from the Wilby General Store and the remains of a takeout pizza on the table between them.

The bio-cocktail of adrenaline and psi that always followed a heavy drain on the psychic senses was still washing through him. He was edgy and restless. What he really needed was some fast, overheated sex with Gwen, but it wouldn’t be chivalrous to suggest it, given what she had been through today. Instead, he was using alcohol to bring himself down harder and faster. Soon he would crash. Maybe tonight he would not dream.

Max was crouched on the windowsill, staring out into the night. Gwen said he looked depressed, but in Judson’s opinion the cat looked ready for revenge.

I’m with you, cat,Judson thought.

“I wonder if Nicole will remember anything about what happened,” Gwen said.

Judson rested his head against the back of the chair. Nicole had regained consciousness just as the first fire truck arrived. The medics had treated her and concluded that she did not need to go to the emergency room. One of Oxley’s officers had driven her home.

“Probably not much,” he said. “Loss of consciousness, regardless of the reason, usually results in some memory loss. I doubt if she’ll ever recall exactly what happened in the minutes leading up to that explosion. But she should be able to tell us why she went to see Louise today. We need that information.”

Gwen turned her head to look at him “What the heck did happen at Louise’s house today? She’s had those chimes hanging inside and out on the porch for years. Why did they go crazy this afternoon?”

“I’m no para-physicist like Sam, but I’ve got a hunch that the explosion was the final event in a chain reaction that started a few hours earlier when the killer used some kind of paranormal crystal to murder Louise Fuller. Hell, maybe it started decades ago.”

“What do you mean?” Gwen asked.

“The energy must have been building inside Louise Fuller’s house for years, thanks to those sculptures. The situation was probably already very unstable. When the killer used his weapon to murder Fuller, there would have been a lot of hot psi involved. That added to the instability. The whole place was a smoldering fire waiting to go up in flames. Then along came the storm. That could have been the spark that ignited the blaze.”

Gwen looked at him. “There was more than just a storm involved. There was you and me, and we were both running very hot while we were inside that house.”

“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice very neutral.

“Do you think that maybe we were the sparks that lit the fuse or whatever it was that set that house on fire?”

“Maybe.”

“Geez.”

“Like I said, there was a hell of a lot of energy buildup in that house before you and I arrived.”

Gwen nodded thoughtfully. “What, exactly, did you do with your ring?”

He looked down at the stone. It was no longer infused with power, but in the firelight it still glowed like liquid amber.

“Damned if I know,” he said.

“Good grief.” She stared at him. “Seriously? You don’t know how that stone does what it does?”

“I’ve only performed that particular trick on one other occasion.” He drank more of the wine. “Someone was trying to kill me at the time.”

“You’re talking about your last case again, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” He lowered the glass.

“How did you know that the three of us and Max needed to make physical contact in order to stay inside the safe zone you created?” Gwen asked.

“You want the truth? I wasn’t sure it would work. Just figured that the physics made sense. And there didn’t seem to be a lot of other options.”

“What physics?” Gwen asked. “You must have some theory about how the stone works.”

He studied the ring. “I can focus psychic energy through it, but it feels like I’m trying to control summer lightning when I do it. There’s a lot of wild power in the crystal, but as far as I can tell, all it seems to do is dampen other paranormal currents in the vicinity.” He paused. “Including human auras.”

“You mean you can use it like a weapon?”

“Over a short distance, yes.”

“How do you tune it?”

“What?” It was getting hard to concentrate. The deep weariness was getting heavier.

“You said that paranormal crystals that are used in high-tech ways require frequent tuning,” Gwen reminded him. “How do you tune that stone?”

“I have no idea.”

“Hmm.”

He watched the firelight blaze in the ring. “I’ve only used it at full throttle twice—today and on my last case. I won’t know if there’s any juice left in it until I’ve had a chance to get some rest.”

“You’re exhausted,” Gwen said. “You pulled a lot of firepower today shielding all of us.”

“I just need sleep.”

She drank her wine in a speculative silence for a time. He felt energy shift in the space and knew she had slipped into a trance. Max meowed softly and jumped down from the windowsill. He trotted across the room, bounded up onto the chair beside Gwen and settled down. She stroked him absently.

Judson closed his eyes and savored the gently charged atmosphere.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Take a look. But I’ll warn you, it makes me hot.”

“You’re too tired to get hot.”

“Shows how much you know.” He opened his eyes. “What do you see?”

She blinked and slipped out of the trance. He felt the psi levels go back to what passed for normal between them. Nothing will ever be normal for us, Gwen Frazier,he thought.

“Okay, I’m no expert on the subject of crystal physics, but based on what I see in your aura and what I observed today when you used the ring, I think that you are actually tuning the ring automatically simply by wearing it,” she said.

He studied the ring. “Usually you have to use one crystal to tune another. And usually the process requires someone with a special talent for the work, the psychic equivalent of a person with perfect pitch.”

“Maybe it works in your case because your aura generates some wavelengths that resonate naturally with the stone. That would explain your affinity for it.”

“Huh.” He tried to think about the physics involved, but he was too far gone.

“Go to bed,” Gwen said gently.

“Good idea.” He set the unfinished wine aside. “I will do that right now. Keep the door between our rooms open. Security reasons.”

“Okay,” she said.

He could feel her watching him as he went through the doorway into his room.

“Stop worrying,” he said. “I’ve been here before. I’ll be fine after a little sleep.”

“Okay,” she said again.

But he could tell that she was worried. He knew she would not get any rest until she was certain that he was going to be okay. He wanted to tell her that there was no need for her to keep a vigil. He wasn’t ill. And he sure as hell didn’t need therapy. He just needed some sleep.

He fell onto the bed, closed his eyes and tumbled into the darkness before he could think of a way to reassure her.

Twenty-six

Really, he had been born for a life of crime.

Nick Sawyer stood in the darkened house and listened to the currents of emptiness that resonated from the shadows. The dead woman’s family had put the house on the market a couple of weeks back. The For Sale sign in the front yard read “Motivated Seller.”

The house was almost empty. There were a few odd pieces of furniture and some pictures left, but the heirs had sold off most of the contents shortly after the old lady’s death. There was probably nothing to discover in the way of clues to the mystery he had been sent to solve, but he had wanted to get a feel for the victim. Standing here, in her front room, somehow gave him a sense of her that he had not been able to obtain with his online research or his chats with the neighbors.

He moved through the heavily draped living room until the traces of seething energy on the floor brought him to a halt.

“Hello,” he said to the shadows. “This is where he whacked you, isn’t it? You were watching television. They said your body was found in a big easy chair. The guy next door said your son helped himself to your big-screen TV on the day of the funeral. Let’s see what else you can tell me.”

He went upstairs to the bedroom, noting the little elevator that had been installed at some point in the past.

“Too frail to make it up the stairs under your own steam,” he said. “You were an easy target, weren’t you? You couldn’t have run, even if you had tried. But you didn’t.”

At the top of the stairs, he went down the hall to the master bedroom, savoring the chill of intense awareness and the adrenaline rush.

This business of poking around in the private affairs of other people was a lot more fun than the hot books business. He had gotten a kick out of chatting up the old woman’s neighbors earlier that day, too. He was almost as good a con as he was a burglar. Not that it had taken any real skill to get people to talk. Folks had been only too willing to tell him how the old lady’s son and daughter-in-law had ignored her for the most part, except when they had come around looking for money.

He studied the bedroom. There was an ancient chest of drawers standing against one wall, but everything else had been cleared out.

He crossed the room and started opening the drawers.

It was weird how a person’s entire future could get changed by a small twist of fate, he thought. If he hadn’t met Gwen and Abby in that hellhole of an institution that went by the name of the Summerlight Academy, he would have become a happy world-class jewel thief by now. His ability to see in the dark was superior to the latest and greatest in high-tech military night-vision goggles. And he was very, very good with locks and computers.

But Gwen and Abby had insisted that he make his living in a semi-legitimate manner. To avoid the endless nagging of his sisters, he had allowed Abby to teach him the ropes of the paranormal books business. It had been a good gig for the past few years. He had made a lot of money because he worked what Abby called the deep end of the market—the dangerous underworld of paranoid, obsessive collectors who would pay any amount of money to obtain the volumes they coveted.

Although he had an affinity for hot books—he figured that was no big deal because he had a natural sensitivity for just about anything that had serious value—he was not particularly interested in the rare volumes he brokered. When you got right down to it, he was just a go-between—a well-paid go-between, but a go-between nonetheless. The only part he actually enjoyed was the night work. So he craved the illicit thrill of sneaking around in the dark, learning other people’s secrets. So sue me. But first you have to catch me. Not gonna happen.

Gwen said he got his kicks from this kind of thing because it allowed him to use his senses to the max. She claimed he would have been just as happy if he had engaged his psychic talents as a cop. But he knew the truth. He liked rummaging around in other people’s secrets because his own past was concealed behind a locked door, one that he had never been able to open—and he was damn good at getting through locked doors. Thus far, every key he had tried had failed to open the door to his past.

The sperm donor bank his mother had used to conceive him had burned to the ground years ago. Half of his family history—the part pertaining to his father—had been destroyed in the fire. He had lost most of the other half of his past when his mother, a single woman who had been orphaned when she was an infant, died in a car accident the year he turned ten. There had followed a series of foster homes and, finally, the Summerlight Academy.

It was there that he had met his real family, his sisters, Gwen and Abby. They were the reason he had stayed at Summerlight. It would have been a simple matter to bail from the school using his rapidly developing talents, but he could not leave Gwen and Abby behind. They had needed him to protect them from the crazies and the bullies. It was the first time anyone had ever needed him. It was like he suddenly had a job to do. He had made sure the three of them had stuck together until graduation.

After leaving Summerlight, Gwen and Abby had reversed their roles, becoming the protectors. They had done their best to keep him from taking up a life of crime, even though he had assured them he would be brilliant at the business. He’d gone along with the more legit gig to keep peace in the family. But at times like this, when he was standing alone in the dark inside someone else’s house, he knew that he had missed his true calling.

He closed the last drawer and went to the closet. It was empty except for a pair of sturdy white walking shoes of the style that they sold to little old ladies who were unsteady on their feet.

He found the small safe concealed behind a wall panel. It was still locked, but it required less than forty seconds to get it open. The stack of bills inside told him everything he needed to know about the old lady.

“A little paranoid, weren’t you, Granny?” he said to the emptiness. “You didn’t trust anyone, not even your own son. Well, you knew him better than anyone else, didn’t you? After all, you were his mother.”

There was one other item in the safe, an old-fashioned checkbook register.

He shoved the cash and the checkbook into the small black backpack he wore and went downstairs. He exited the house the same way he had entered, through a rear window.

He found the car where he had left it several blocks away in a parking lot behind a grocery store. He drove the nondescript vehicle back to the airport and turned it in at the rental counter. He had used one of his spare sets of identification to rent the car. He liked to keep a lot of extras on hand, not only for himself, but also for Gwen and Abby. Just in case.

It occurred to him that Abby probably wouldn’t need that kind of security backup anymore now that she was marrying into the Coppersmith family. That clan took care of its own. And something about the energy between Gwen and Judson Coppersmith told him that she might not need her brother much longer, either.

The thought of losing his sisters to the Coppersmiths threatened to stir up the dark waters deep inside. Since their days at Summerlight, Abby and Gwen had been there for him. Abby had taught him the ropes of the hot books business. Gwen had always been around to drive the nightmare monsters back into the depths. The bad dreams hadn’t surfaced in a while, but he knew they were still swimming around down there in the bottomless pit.

Okay, so Gwen and Judson were sleeping together. No problem. At this point it probably didn’t amount to anything more than a one-night stand. Maybe two or three nights. Whatever. It didn’t mean he would lose her, too. What was happening between the pair was just the natural result of a lot of adrenaline, excitement, danger and mutual physical attraction mixed up together. He’d been there often enough to know how the chemistry worked.

But a chill went through him. Gwen didn’t do casual sex, and while the relationship between her and Judson had ignited quickly, it did not look like it would burn out fast. Even Wyatt Earp had noticed the heat between those two.

He did not want to think about what his nights would be like if the dream monsters returned. He did not want to think about what his world would be like if he lost both of his sisters to the Coppersmith family. So he got some coffee and found a private space in which to suck up the caffeine while he went through the bankbook that he had found in the wall safe. Numbers were always interesting, especially when they were linked to money.

After a while he took the small computer out of the backpack and went online. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for. He was as good at finding interesting stuff hidden in cyberspace as he was opening concealed wall safes.

Really, he had been born for a life of crime.

Twenty-seven

She sensed the dark energy of Judson’s psi-charged dreamscape just as she was about to slip into a lucid dream of her own.

She was in her robe, nightgown and slippers, curled up in the chair in front of the fire with her feet tucked under her. She was orchestrating the delicate trance-like state, summoning images from the scene of Louise’s murder, when the currents whispered to her from the other room.

Her first thought was that the unfamiliar tendrils of dreamlight had been generated by her own self-induced hallucination. As often as she had gone into the waking dreamstate, she could never be sure of what she would experience. Trances were, by their very nature, unpredictable.

But when she heard Judson utter an urgent, half-choked shout, she was jolted out of the trance.

She stood quickly. Max was awake, too. He sat up on the bed and gazed fixedly toward the doorway into the other room.

Judson groaned.

Gwen hurried to the doorway. In the faint light from the fireplace behind her, she could see Judson sprawled on the bed. His ring was infused with sun-hot light.

Max jumped down from the bed and joined her in the doorway, meowing in a low, uneasy manner.

Gwen heightened her talent and slid into a waking trance to get a sense of what was going on in Judson’s dreamscape. She was not surprised by the explosion of amber lightning that crackled in the atmosphere, but she was stunned by the dark, seething energy of violence that pooled around the bed. With her dreamer’s intuition, she knew that Judson was living through whatever had caused the nightmare. His unnaturally deep sleep had intensified the effects.

“Good grief,” she whispered. “How long have you been dealing with this dream, Judson?”

She walked slowly toward the bed. She had never dealt with a sleeper so profoundly asleep. Normally she worked with clients who were awake. The therapeutic process involved putting clients into a light trance and then summoning their dreamscapes to a level just below that of conscious awareness. But her intuition warned her that it would not be a good idea to try to shake Judson awake. In his present condition, it would take him some time to distinguish between his dreamscape and the waking world. In effect, he would wake up in the midst of a vivid hallucination. It might take him a few seconds—as long as a minute, perhaps—to sort things out. In those circumstances, a strong psychic wearing a ring infused with unknown paranormal energy could do a lot of damage in even a short period of time.

Although she dared not bring him out of the dreamscape too abruptly, she had to make physical contact in order to help him. She was not sure how he would respond to even the lightest touch. He was trapped deep in the underworld. That was never a good thing.

“Really, Max, the first lesson everyone with psychic abilities should be taught is how to control their own dreams,” she said softly.

Max meowed again. It was an aren’t-you-going-to-do-something-about-this-situation sort of meow. He twitched his tail a few times, expressing his growing impatience, and came to sit very close to her feet, pressing his big body against her leg.

On the bed Judson uttered another low, guttural sound. The energy whipping around him grew darker and more dangerous. The sunlight stirring in his ring got hotter.

There was no option, Gwen thought. She could not let him slide deeper into the dreamscape.

She gathered herself and pulled hard on her talent. At her feet, Max pressed more firmly against her leg as if to offer support.

Cautiously, she reached out and touched two fingertips to the palm of one of Judson’s out-flung hands.

Although she thought she was braced for the physical connection, it was all she could do not to scream aloud when the electrifying shock zapped across her senses.

She walked straight into the heart of his nightmare.

Amber lightning arced and flashed in the darkness that enveloped her. She sensed the ghastly fog that was the hallmark of violence and death. A dreadful miasma infused with a terrible violet-hued light seethed around her feet. She thought she heard a cat meow.

“Judson,” she said quietly. “Where are you?”

“Welcome to my world,” he said. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

She turned, searching for him in the lightning-streaked darkness.

. . . And saw him watching her from the shadows, a churning pool of ultraviolet energy at his feet. His eyes burned with a heat that matched the molten fires that flared in his ring.

He did not look like a man trapped in hell—in this dark underworld, he reigned.

“You should not be here, either,” she said. “It’s just a bad dreamscape. Come with me.”

Conversations conducted in other people’s dreamscapes were no different than those she had with ghosts in her own trances. The dialogue came to her as feedback from her dreamer’s intuition based on what she sensed in the client’s aura.

“I can’t leave,” Judson said.

“Why not?”

“I lost something here. I have to find it.”

“What did you lose?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet, but I’ll recognize it when I find it.”

“I understand. This is a recurring dream for you, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah. I come here often.”

“You come here to search for whatever it is you lost, but tonight you’ve gone down too deep,” she said. “I was afraid of this. You’re here now because of what happened at Louise Fuller’s house today. You need to return to the surface with me. You must let your senses recover before you dream this dream again.”

That seemed to amuse him. “You don’t get it, do you? This is my world. It’s where I belong.”

“No, it’s your dreamscape, and you can change it. I can show you how.”

“It may be a dreamscape, but it’s also my past,” he said. “No changing that, is there, Miss Psychic Counselor?”

“You can’t change the past, but you can find a better way to deal with it.”

“Damn. You sound like a real therapist,” he said. “The expensive kind. But you’re not a real one, are you?”

“No, I’m just a psychic counselor, but I do know something about how to find things that are lost in dreamscapes. You’re going about it the wrong way.”

“Yeah?” He was starting to sound bored.

She was losing him.

“Come back to the surface with me,” she said. “Later, when you’re fully rested, I’ll help you search this dreamscape.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ve come down too far this time. Never been this deep before. But I can see things here that I’ve never seen before. Maybe tonight I’ll find what I’m looking for.”

“It won’t do you any good if you can’t get back to the surface. I was afraid of this. Listen up, Coppersmith. You went too deep into your dreamscape tonight because of that psi-burn at Louise’s house today.”

“You were there, too. Why didn’t you crash and burn the way I did? Have you got some special psychic superpower?”

“No, I’m okay tonight because you protected me from the worst effects of the storm in Louise’s house,” she said. “But you were also shielding Nicole and Max and yourself, as well. Heaven only knows how much energy you had to focus through your ring to save us all. But you temporarily exhausted your senses in the process. You need to be sleeping soundly now, not visiting this dreamscape.”

“You should leave before you get trapped here with me.”

“I’m not leaving without you,” she said. “Come back with me, Judson.”

“I don’t think that’s possible. Too late.”

There was no emotion in the words—neither regret nor despair. Judson sounded as if he was making an observation about the weather, detached. Like one of the ghosts,she thought. Another chill shivered through her. This was not going well. She had never dealt with anyone who had fallen this far down the rabbit hole of a dreamscape. She was out of her depth, as well, but she was very sure of one thing. She had to get Judson back to the surface before he went any deeper.

“No, it is not too late,” she said. “We can get out of here, but we have to do this together. You’re not the only one who went too deep tonight. I had to come this far down to find you. I am trapped with you.”

“I told you that you should not have come here.”

This time she thought she heard a flicker of emotional intensity in Judson’s dreamscape voice. He sounded angry. She told herself that was a good sign.

“Well, I did come here and now I’m stuck,” she said. “If you don’t come with me, I won’t be able to leave this place.”

“You’re the psychic dreamer. Get out of this hell while you still can.”

“Not without you. Stop arguing with me. This isn’t just an ordinary dream. This could become a coma. We have to leave. Now.”

It was weird, but she was starting to lose her temper, too. That wasn’t supposed to happen to her in a dreamscape. She had trained herself to be the clinical observer and guide. It was her job to gently lead the client out of the closed loop of a recurring nightmare. Any strong emotion on her part caused distortions and confusion in the world of dreams—a world that was constructed of distorted and confusing images.

“You don’t give up easily, do you?” Judson asked. He sounded intrigued by her stubbornness.

“No,” she said. “Not when it comes to my clients.”

“Is that what I am? A client?”

“That’s what you are tonight. Take my hand, Judson.” She made it a command.

For a harrowing eternity in dreamtime, she thought that he would not respond. Then, to her overwhelming relief, he reached for her hand. She knew the action was just her mind’s way of interpreting what was happening. In a very real sense she was dreaming, too. Judson was resurfacing. He wasn’t really reaching for her hand. She knew that. The hand-holding was a dream metaphor.

Which was why it came as a physical as well as a psychic jolt when she felt his powerful fingers lock fiercely around her wrist in the waking world. The shock brought her instantly out of the dreamscape. Judson came with her.

He opened his eyes. Simultaneously he tightened his hand around her wrist.

“It’s okay, Judson, you’re awake.” She gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile, assuming that, with his preternatural night vision he could see it. Delicately, she wriggled her fingers, trying to free her manacled wrist. He did not release her. Instead, he continued to shackle her while he watched her with eyes that burned.

“I’m not one of your clients,” he rasped.

“You’re awake. It was just a bad dream. I was afraid you might be sleeping a little too deeply, you see.”

“I’m not one of your damned clients.”

“What?”

“I said I’m not your client.”

She reminded herself that after awakening from a deep dream, the dreamer often continued to be confused by images from the underworld for a time. The goal was to soothe and reassure and guide the dreamer all the way back to the shore of the normal.

“You’re not a client,” she said soothingly.

“Damn right.”

He used his hold on her wrist to pull her off her feet and down onto the bed. The maneuver was conducted with the precision of a judo throw. One instant she was upright, the next she was flat on her back. The shadowy bedroom spun around her.

Okay, this was a new experience in the uncharted waters of psychic dream counseling, she thought. She had lost control of the session. That was not supposed to happen.

Before she could reorient herself and come up with a game plan for dealing with the situation, Judson was on top of her, one muscled thigh pinning her leg to the quilt. He captured her other wrist, anchored it beside her head, and took her mouth with a ruthlessness that stunned her senses.

The kiss was incendiary, literally. Hot energy burned in the atmosphere. She was mildly astonished that they did not set fire to the drapes. But unlike the terrible energy of the dream, this was the fiercely exhilarating fire of turbocharged passion.

Judson was running hot. She was still fully jacked from the dream therapy work. That made for a lot of heat. But it was the return of the breathtaking sensation of psychic intimacy that shocked and thrilled her. Something very strange had happened between them last night and it was happening again tonight. Her intuition warned her that the more time that she and Judson spent together—not just having superheated sex but within range of each other’s auras—the more powerful the bond would become—at least on her end.

Judson freed one of her wrists so he could untie the sash of her robe. His palm closed over her breast. He moved his mouth down to her throat.

She slid her hand up under his T-shirt and clawed at his muscled back. He was burning up with a psi-fever.

“Judson,” she whispered.

“Not a client,” he growled. “Say it. Not a client.”

“Not a client,” she gasped. “You can’t be a client, because I never sleep with clients.”

“That’s right. You don’t sleep with clients. You sleep with me now. Only me.”

He yanked opened the top of her nightgown and kissed her breasts with a hungry, desperate reverence. At the touch of his tongue on her sensitive nipples, she cried out. He released her other wrist to unzip his trousers. He fumbled the hem of her nightgown up to her waist. Then his hand was between her thighs.