“I don’t know how the first dose of poison was delivered, but I’m sure the crystals in those glasses are continuing to administer a low-level dose,” Sierra said quietly.
He stared at the mirrored glasses in his hands.
“Even if you’re right, there’s nothing I can do about it now. I’ve got a job to finish, and I can’t work with these hallucinations constantly clouding my vision. Hell, I can’t even drive this way, let alone try to control my talent. At least the glasses allow me to function.”
“Here’s the thing, North. There’s no way to know how much of that hypnotic radiation you can absorb before it destroys your talent and maybe does make you go insane. The more you wear those lenses, the worse things are going to get. I’ll do the driving from now on.”
“While I have visions and nightmares? I’ll be useless, maybe even dangerous.”
“You’ve been receiving a very low dose of the radiation through those glasses. Whoever infused the energy into the crystals was probably afraid to use too much heat, because it would have been detectable to a lot of people with talent. Sooner or later someone would have noticed and started asking questions.”
“So?”
“So the good news is that it is a low dose. It might not take long for the worst of the effects to wear off. In the meantime, you can practice trying to control the visions.”
“How do you control a vision?” North demanded.
“You know when you’re hallucinating, right? You’re aware that what you’re seeing and hearing is not real.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t make them any less disturbing. The voices . . . whisper.”
“Tell me about the hallucinations you’re having right now,” Sierra said. “What do you see?”
He concentrated on a foggy figure. Gradually it coalesced into a recognizable image.
“This one is different,” he said. “It’s Garraway, the director of Riverview.”
“Why is this vision different?”
North shrugged. “He’s not whispering.”
“Focus on him,” Sierra said.
“Why?”
“If my father were here, I think he would say that your intuition is trying to tell you something. Describe Garraway to me. Is he lying dead on the floor the way we found him?”
“No. He materialized out of the abyss. He’s sitting behind his desk. Just sort of floating there.”
“The abyss is probably a manifestation of your anxiety about the possibility of losing control of your talent,” Sierra said.
“No shit. I’m not a doctor, but even I could figure that out.”
“Sorry. Let’s keep going here. Why did Garraway appear?”
“How should I know? He’s a hallucination.”
“Think of him as a manifestation of your intuition,” Sierra said patiently. “We spent some time with him in his office. You found those financial papers in his cabin. We were in a hurry but you must have collected a lot of impressions at the scene of the murder. Maybe we missed something important? Try asking Garraway why you’re seeing him.”
North studied the dead man and tried to ignore the ghostly whispers telling him that he was risking his sanity by talking to a vision.
“Why am I seeing you?” he asked half under his breath.
Isn’t it obvious? I was just the money guy.
North stilled.
“What is it?” Sierra asked. “Did you get an answer?”
“He was the money guy. He financed Riverview. That was clear from the records we found in his house. But I figured that out already, so why would he repeat the information?”
“Keep going with questions,” Sierra said.
North made himself concentrate on the vision. “Why did the Puppets murder you?”
I knew too much about what went on in Loring’s lab. Things were coming apart because you showed up. Couldn’t take the risk that I’d talk.
“Now you’re dead, so you can’t talk,” North said, feeling his way through the crazy conversation.
True, but I’m the money guy, and money always talks.
“Damn, you’re right,” North said.
Garraway vanished back into the abyss.
North realized that Sierra was still watching him.
“Well?” she said.
North tried to blink away a few more ghostly images while he concentrated on what had just happened. “If we’re right about Garraway, he provided the financial backing for the whole Riverview setup, including Loring’s lab.”
“So?”
“So the ghost of Garraway reminded me of one of the most basic rules of crime solving. Follow the money.”
“Okay, that sounds like a great idea.”
“Victor is probably already tearing into the Riverview finances. He’s got a whole team of forensic accountants. But I’ll call him just to make sure he’s pushing in that direction. We need to know how and why Loring got involved with Garraway.”
“You and I should get a couple of hours’ sleep before we head for Fogg Lake.”
North scrubbed his face with the heels of his hands. “You get some sleep. I won’t be able to sleep, not unless I put on the glasses.”
“I honestly don’t think that would be a good idea. You need to let the poison wear off.”
“Assuming you’re right, that could take days.”
“No, I don’t think so. I think we’re talking hours, not days, for this stuff to wear off. We know you still have your talent, because you used it to douse that light grenade. You can try accessing it. Maybe that will help suppress the hallucinations.”
“It’s going to be a long night,” North said.
With no guarantee that, come morning, he would still be sane. But Sierra’s certainty gave him the first real shot of hope he’d had since the hallucinations had set in. If she turned out to be right, he would deal with the implications later.
“Forget sleep.” Sierra got to her feet. “I’ll make some coffee.”
“You’re going to stay awake with me?”
“I might be able to use my locket to help you concentrate on suppressing some of the effects of the poison, especially the whispers. I think they are the real problem.”
“You’re going to use your talent the way you did to help me sleep last night and the way you used it to help Matt Harper recover his memories?”
“I’m pretty strong.” She paused, tilted her head slightly and gave him an unreadable look. “Some people would say that my talent makes me one of the monsters, the kind the Foundation cleaners hunt.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve met monsters. You’re not one of them. What you are is amazing.”
CHAPTER 25
North sat quietly while Sierra got the small coffeemaker going. He watched the whispering images come and go at the edges of his vision, first attempting to suppress the panic they inspired and then trying to banish them through sheer force of will. He discovered he could suppress them temporarily, but as soon as he stopped concentrating on one, it popped up again.
Sierra hit the switch to turn on the coffeemaker. Then she folded her arms and leaned against the counter.
“Any idea who might want you psi-blind?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Probably the same bastard who tried to murder my father—Loring. This all seems to have roots in the past. But I’ll figure it out later. Right now we need to stay focused on finding the artifact that partially destabilized Dad’s aura.”
“It strikes me that any way you look at this thing we’re dealing with paranormal weapons,” Sierra said. “I thought that, technically speaking, it was impossible to construct such a device. Something to do with tuning problems.”
He got to his feet and went to stand in front of the fire. “The Foundation experts say the problem with weaponizing paranormal ener
gy is that to be effective, each individual gun or pistol would have to be tuned to the aura of the user. In addition, only someone with a very powerful aura could operate such a device. The risk of blowback would be extremely high.”
“Blowback?”
“Similar to the recoil you get when you fire a conventional weapon. Except that in the case of a paranormal device, the energy recoil will tend to destabilize the aura of the user over time—unless the shooter is strong enough to handle the shock. It was a technical problem that supposedly was never solved while the Bluestone Project was in operation. But there have always been rumors that toward the end of the project, one lab might have made a breakthrough.”
“Vortex?”
He looked up suddenly. “What do you know about Vortex?”
“Very little. But it’s a legend in the underground market. There’s no limit on the price of any artifact that has a Vortex provenance. But to my knowledge, none has ever come on the market.”
North glanced at the machine sitting on the table. “Given what happened to my father and the fact that someone tried to kill us with that light grenade, we have to assume that there is some truth to the legends about paranormal weapons. But maybe they didn’t all come from Vortex.”
“You’re sure Griffin Chastain and Crocker Rancourt didn’t work in the Vortex lab?”
“There’s no record of their being connected to that lab. According to the Foundation files, they were doing research at the Fogg Lake facility. But who knows? Maybe that was just a cover. Everything about Vortex was top secret. The thing is—”
He broke off as a tidal wave of nightmares screamed silently out of the darkness. You must wear the glasses. You will go mad without them.
It took everything he had to suppress them.
He became aware of a frisson of gentle energy. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the mirrored crystal in Sierra’s locket spark.
The nightmares receded. He took a deep breath.
“I feel like a junkie trying to get through withdrawal,” he said.
“No, you’re recovering from a sickness induced by poison. What were you about to say?”
“What?” He had to concentrate to remember where he had been going with the conversation. “Right. Vortex. Everything connected to it was highly classified, so it’s not impossible that Griffin Chastain and Crocker Rancourt were involved with it. But I’ve been studying my grandfather’s private logbooks and the various experiments he performed in his lab at the Abyss—”
“His Vegas mansion?”
“Right. I moved in almost a year ago. I’ve had a chance to see what he was working on there. What I was about to tell you is that there is no indication that he was ever interested in creating paranormal weapons. His work was all aimed at gaining a greater understanding of the energy of light from the dark end of the spectrum.”
“I can tell you for certain that if someone has found a cache of paranormal weapons, the artifacts will be worth a fortune on the underground market.”
“That’s true,” North said. He blinked away a few more ghosts. “But using such a weapon would be extremely problematic.”
“The tuning issue?” Sierra said.
“Yes.”
Sierra poured coffee into two cups. “You said firing a weapon that was not properly tuned would destabilize the shooter’s aura.”
“That’s the theory,” North said.
A terrible restlessness was coming over him. He began to pace the small space. Sierra handed him one of the cups. The warmth felt good, because he was starting to shiver.
“We are definitely running into indications of aura instability in this case,” Sierra said. “Would the end result be insanity or death?”
“Probably. Assuming the experts are right.”
“If Delbridge Loring is Crocker Rancourt’s direct descendant, he would probably know the risks involved,” Sierra mused. “He would most likely be very cautious about firing any weapons he found.”
North tried to focus on that. “Yes, he would. He would be very careful.”
Sierra’s locket sparked again. North felt another whisper of calming energy. He stopped shivering and managed to drink some of the coffee.
“That might explain the Puppets,” he said.
“The orderlies?”
“Yes. Hell, it could explain the existence of Riverview. If Loring has found some paranormal weapons and if he is descended from Crocker Rancourt, he would know better than to take the risk of trying to fire the devices himself. But the promise of a psychic gun would be a lure that could be used to attract some useful test subjects.”
“Puppets who would then become his dedicated bodyguards because they believed he would endow them with the perfect weapons—guns that leave no trace.”
“Right.”
Another wave of hallucinations danced at the edges of his vision. He stopped talking and concentrated on suppressing the ghosts.
It was going to be a very long night.
CHAPTER 26
Ralph sat behind the wheel of the SUV. Joe was next to him in the passenger’s seat. Seth and Walt were in the rear seat. They all watched the windows on the second floor of the inn. The blinds were pulled shut, but firelight flickered on the shades.
Chastain and Raines were inside, but Ralph had concluded there was no way to get at them without setting off the inn’s security alarms. There was also the problem of the psychic gadget the woman had used on Joe earlier that evening. Ralph knew enough about paranormal weapons now to be wary of someone who seemed to be able to use one.
But the real issue was that he and the others could not hang around long enough to try to take out Chastain and Raines. They were now suspects in the murder of Garraway. They all had to keep moving. The project was in serious jeopardy.
“We’ll get another shot at them tomorrow when they leave town,” Seth muttered.
Ralph gripped the steering wheel with both hands, fighting a toxic mix of frustration and fury. “What went wrong at the hospital?”
“I dunno.” Walt massaged his temples. “I told you. The woman did something to me with her necklace.”
“Loring is going to be pissed when he finds out that Chastain has the machine,” Joe observed.
Ralph scowled. “Dr. Loring said there was a second machine, remember? That’s what we’re after.”
“Let’s get out of here.” Walt slumped against the door. “I’m beat. That bitch really did a number on me. I need to sleep.”
“I’m not feeling so good, either,” Joe muttered.
Seth banged one fist against the back of the seat. “Fuck. It was all going so well. Now the whole plan is falling apart.”
Back at the start Loring had made it sound so simple, Ralph reflected. The night gun was the perfect weapon. It left no forensic evidence. All that was required was proper tuning. He and the others had fired the gun on several occasions. They were adjusting to the powerful psychic recoil, growing stronger. And once they had mastered the gun, Loring promised there were plenty more from the cache of paranormal weapons.
Ralph was the one who had used it on Chandler Chastain. Loring had been sure the authorities would assume Chastain had suffered a stroke and died.
Ralph had felt weird afterward but Loring had explained that the crystal that powered the gun sent out some major psychic shock waves. It took time to adjust to the device. It was a little more complicated than the explosive they had set in the abandoned apartment building.
But Chandler Chastain had not died and the Foundation had not bought the stroke story. Within hours North Chastain had arrived on the scene. Then Loring had disappeared and he had taken the night gun with him. Now North Chastain had the special machine. Loring was not going to be happy about that.
Ralph watched the upstairs windows of the inn for a couple more minutes and th
en he fired up the SUV’s heavy engine.
“If Chastain found the right artifact we’ll know soon enough,” he said.
“How?” Joe asked.
“He’ll head straight for Fogg Lake.”
CHAPTER 27
The whispering hallucinations finally began to retreat shortly after dawn.
“They’re becoming faint,” North said. “Just shadows now. I can’t believe it. All these weeks I’ve been convinced I would go mad if I took off the damned glasses.”
Sierra opened her senses and studied his aura in the mirror that hung over the fireplace. “The unstable vibe I noticed in your aura has diminished considerably. Got a feeling you’ll still see a few hallucinations once in a while until the last of the effects of the poison are gone, but you are definitely recovering. If I were you I would destroy those glasses.”
He looked at the mirrored sunglasses sitting on the coffee table next to the machine. “I’d like nothing better, but at the moment they are evidence. I should be able to use them to find out who poisoned the crystals.”
“Good point.” She glanced at the glasses. “Best keep them in lead or steel. You don’t want any of that radiation leaking out. I’ve got a lockbox in the back of my vehicle that I use for transporting small artifacts. The glasses will be secure in there.”
“Right.”
He looked at her, his eyes heating. She knew that look. Gratitude. It was not what she wanted from him.
She jumped to her feet. “We should get on the road. Long drive ahead of us. Neither of us got any sleep last night, but you’re the one who went through hell detoxing your senses, so I’ll take the wheel.”
He crossed the room in two strides. His hands closed over her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing her leather jacket, just a long-sleeved pullover. It wasn’t the first time he had touched her, but on the previous occasion in the abandoned building there had been a lot of energy flying around.