Midnight Crystal (30 page)

“Something about the prints I tracked in and out of the chamber where the lamp was stored bothered me from the start,” she said.

“Because they had been left by a trusted employee?” Adam asked. “You couldn’t believe that Lewis would steal from the museum?”

“Not just that,” Marlowe said. “It was the fact that the prints weren’t hot. Dr. Lewis is a quiet academic who has dedicated his entire professional life to preserving artifacts in the museum. He suddenly decides to do something totally out of character and steal one of the artifacts, but there’s no strong emotion in his prints at the scene? It didn’t make sense.”

“Right.” Adam nodded, comprehending immediately. “At the very least, he should have been nervous as hell. Scared.”

“I know Dr. Lewis,” Marlowe said. “He would have been terrified. There would have been plenty of energy burning in his prints.”

Tucker’s jaw tightened. “I can imitate the basic resonance patterns of someone else’s prints, but I can’t generate the individual’s emotions when I do it.”

“What about your own emotions?” she asked, her professional interest aroused. “Why aren’t they visible in the prints that you imitate? You must have been hyped on adrenaline at the very least, when you went into the vault.”

“Are you kidding? I was freaked. Hell, I was stealing from Arcane. The energy is probably there in the prints, according to my sister. But it’s masked by the chameleon effect. Even a strong dreamlight reader can’t see it.”

Marlowe nodded. “Which is how you got close to me.”

“Damn it, Marlowe—”

“Like I said, a very useful talent.”

Adam’s jaw was set at an unforgiving angle. “Don’t even think about hiring him as an agent. You can’t trust him, remember?”

“Yes, but now that I know that, I might be able to work around that issue,” she said, thinking about the possibilities.

“Forget it,” Adam said in very low, very dangerous tones.

Tucker glared at him over Marlowe’s head. “You know, there are a lot of folks here in Frequency who would strongly advise her not to trust anyone connected to the Guild, especially the guy at the top.”

Marlowe felt Adam’s hand tighten a little around her arm. She looked at Tucker.

“You don’t need to worry about my relationship with Adam,” she said. “I would trust him with my life. Actually, I’ve already done that a couple of times, come to think of it.”

Adam smiled. “That works both ways.”

Tucker’s face tightened, but he said nothing. He halted on the top step and knocked twice.

The door opened so quickly Marlowe knew the woman who appeared in the entryway had been watching from behind the closed curtains.

“You must be Charlotte,” Marlowe said.

Charlotte stared at her uncertainly and then turned to her brother.

“Tucker?” Charlotte looked past him to Adam. “What’s going on? Why is he here?”

“It’s a long story, Charlotte,” Tucker said, his voice surprisingly gentle. “It’s okay, I swear it. Just open the door.”

Charlotte did not take her eyes off Adam. “You’re the new Guild boss.”

Adam smiled his humorless, Guild boss smile.

“Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m here to make sure no one gets hurt.”

Charlotte flinched. Marlowe opened her talent and looked at the dreamprints on the floor beneath her feet. They seethed with an emotion that bordered on panic.

“It’s all right,” Marlowe said. “You and your brothers are Arcane. That means you’re entitled to J&J’s services. In hindsight, perhaps you should have come directly to my office and asked for help, instead of sending your brother to spy on me and the museum.”

Charlotte was stunned. “How can you even suggest that we could have approached J&J as legitimate members of the Society? By now you must know what we are, how we’ve survived.”

“Yes,” Marlowe said. “But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have helped you. You’re a dreamlight reader. That means you can work up a fairly accurate profile of another person, assuming he isn’t a chameleon, of course.”

Tucker closed his eyes and looked sad. Marlowe ignored him.

“Your brothers probably rely on your talent to profile a mark and set up the scam, right?” Marlowe continued.

Charlotte’s lips thinned, but she did not say anything.

“Take a look at my prints,” Marlowe said. “See for yourself if I’m here with the intention of doing any of you harm.”

Energy flared. Marlowe sensed that Charlotte had heightened her own talent. Whatever she saw must have convinced her that it was safe to open the door. With a sigh, she stepped back into the hall.

“Keith is in the living room,” she said. “Follow me.”

She led the way down the short entry hall and into a room furnished in warm, neutral hues. The drapes were pulled across the windows, creating deep shadows.

Keith Deene was curled into a fetal position on the sofa. There was a pitcher of ice water and a half-filled glass on the end table. The room was uncomfortably warm, but Marlowe could tell that he was shivering beneath the heavy quilt. When she got closer, she saw that he was soaked with perspiration.

Gibson mumbled a little.

“Hello, Keith,” Marlowe said very softly. She crouched beside the sofa. “What have you done to yourself?”

Gibson hopped out of her arms onto the sofa and chattered softly, ready to go to work.

Keith opened psi-fevered eyes. He seemed bewildered by the sight of Gibson. He switched his attention to Marlowe.

“Who are you?” he rasped.

“Marlowe Jones. I hear you’ve been fooling around with a very old alchemical recipe for crystals.”

“I’m a crystal talent. Thought I could handle any kind of hot stone.” He clutched the edge of the blanket with a hand knotted into a fist. “Hell, I forged the damned crystals, myself, using my own energy. I should have been able to control them.”

Adam looked at him from across the room. “Your brother said that you were working from a copy of some instructions from one of Nicholas Winters’s early notebooks. The old bastard was still perfecting his theory of crystals in those days. He forged a couple of them and ran some experiments, but he realized immediately that they were flawed and potentially dangerous. He eventually abandoned that first engineering design altogether.”

Keith stared at him. “Your name is Winters. Guess that’s not exactly a coincidence under the circumstances, is it?”

“No,” Adam said.

Marlowe looked at Keith. “Unfortunately for you and a few other people over the years who found copies of those early notes, Nicholas never went back and put a warning in his early journals. It was only in his later notebooks that he mentioned the failed experiments of his youth and how they had set him on a different path.”

“So, I’m going to die?” Keith asked. “Sort of figured that.”

Marlowe braced herself and touched his hot forehead. The shock of hot nightmare energy rattled her senses. It was bad but not nearly as bad as what she and Adam had gone through together in the maze. It wasn’t even as jarring as what she had experienced with Vickie Winters.

“How long have you been using the crystals?” she asked.

It was Charlotte who answered. “He made the first one a few months ago. I noticed the changes in his prints about six weeks later. But he didn’t believe me at first when I told him that I thought the crystals were responsible.”

“Thought the changes meant that I was getting stronger,” Keith said, teeth chattering.

“No,” Marlowe said gently. “That’s not what the distortions in your dreamlight patterns meant.”

Keith’s nightmare images were coming at her on a storm of chaos. She caught fleeting glimpses of tsunami waves that threatened to drown the dreamer. Scalding flashes of dreamlight burned her. But, as always, it was the sense of helplessness, the realization that the outcome could not be altered or evaded that was the most devastating aspect. In nightmares there was no hope, only desperation, fear, and panic.

The question was not whether she could endure Keith’s dreamscape. She had dealt with worse. The issue was the nature of the damage that had been done to his para-senses. As she had explained to Adam, not every kind of dreamlight trauma could be healed.

“You can pet Gibson,” she said to Keith.

“Huh?” Keith frowned. “Why?”

“It helps sometimes,” she explained. “He has a very calming effect.”

Keith eyed Gibson warily. “I heard they bite.”

Gibson fluffed up his fur a little more and chattered encouragingly.

“Gibson won’t bite you,” Marlowe said. “I promise. He’s a therapy dust bunny.”

“Never heard of a therapy dust bunny.”

“Gibson is one of a kind.”

She picked up Keith’s too-hot hand and placed it lightly on top of Gibson. Gibson mumbled reassuringly and crowded closer to the fevered man. Reflexively, Keith shut his eyes and exhaled heavily. His fingers sank into Gibson’s fur.

Marlowe studied the dissonance in Keith’s pattern. When she tracked the distorted waves back to their source on the spectrum, she saw that the originating pulses were still strong. The chaos that was gnawing on his aura had not yet reached the point of origin.

“You’re in luck,” she said. “There’s still time to adjust the bad vibes. Your talent for crystals provided you with some natural resistance to the damage. Anyone else who had warped his own patterns this badly would have been either dead or in an institution by now.”

Behind her Charlotte gave a soft, half-swallowed cry of relief.

Marlowe pulsed energy into the distorted patterns, urging them gently back into a stable rhythm. Gradually Keith’s breathing grew less labored. His fevered body cooled to a more normal temperature. The hand he had clenched in Gibson’s fur loosened and relaxed.

Marlowe finished correcting the warped oscillations. She waited quietly for a moment to make sure the patterns were steady and strong once again.

Keith looked at her, his eyes no longer hot. “Thank you.”

He went to sleep, exhausted.

Satisfied that his dreamlight currents had been restored to their normal rhythms, Marlowe got to her feet and turned to look at Charlotte and Tucker.

“He’ll be all right,” she said. “But he’s going to sleep for a while, probably several hours. That’s normal. When he wakes up, he should be fine.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Charlotte whispered. Tears welled up in her eyes. She crossed the room and threw her arms around Marlowe. “I’m sorry for what we did. All I can say is that we were absolutely desperate.”

Marlowe patted her shoulder. “Next time try walking in the front door of J&J and asking politely for help. You’d be surprised how that tactic works. Besides, I need the business.”

Tucker looked at her. “We owe you, Marlowe. If there’s ever anything this family can do for you, all you have to do is ask. We always pay our debts.”

“Anything,” Charlotte said. She raised her head, released Marlowe, and stepped back, smiling a little through her tears. “Like Tucker said, all you have to do is ask.”

“I appreciate that,” Marlowe said briskly. “How about returning the fake lamp? I know it’s not the real artifact, but it’s a pretty good reproduction. The museum staff will be glad to get it back.”

“I’ll get it,” Charlotte said.

She rushed away down a hall. A short time later, she returned with a canvas bag in her hand.

“Here.”

“Thanks.” Marlowe unzipped the bag and peeked inside. Dull gold-colored metal and the fake crystals gleamed in the darkness. “Yes, this matches the description I was given by the staff.” She zipped the bag.

Adam checked his watch. “Time’s getting short. Are we done here?”

“We’re done,” Marlowe said. She tucked Gibson under her arm.

Charlotte’s eyes widened. “I forgot. This is the night of the big reception for the new Guild boss. That’s you, Mr. Winters.”

“So they tell me.” Adam’s cell phone rang. He checked the number and took the call. “Winters.” There was a short silence while he listened to the person on the other end of the connection. “Keep looking.”

He closed the phone.

“What?” Marlowe asked.

“Joey the broker has disappeared,” Adam said. “He’s either gone to ground or else someone got to him.”

Tucker snorted softly. “Joey is a survivor. Trust me, his instincts are excellent. He’s gone into hiding.”

“In that case, we’ll find him,” Adam said.

Charlotte glanced at him and then looked at Marlowe. “The opening ceremonies will be starting any time now. You’ll be late.”

“It’s called making a fashionable entrance,” Marlowe said.

AT EIGHT THIRTY-SIX THAT EVENING, ADAM STOPPED with Marlowe at the top of the amber and green carpeted staircase that led down into the glittering ballroom of the Grand Hotel.

As if some mass psychic announcement had been made, a wave of murmurs swept over the crowd. A hush fell. Everyone turned toward the staircase.