Midnight Crystal (25 page)

The old English was so heavily accented and so archaic Adam doubted that he would have been able to comprehend a word of it if he had not studied Nicholas’s journals. But even if his ancestor had been speaking an ancient, long-dead language instead of a six-hundred-year-old version of English, there could have been no misunderstanding the meaning and intent of what the old alchemist was saying. Dreams did not depend on language. They conveyed messages, warnings, and knowledge in a far more elemental way: through the psychic energy of dreamlight.

Marlowe reached out and grabbed his hand.

“Hurry,” she said, urging him toward the door.

Adam pulled hard on his talent and managed to take a single step forward.

Another blast of energy seared his senses. In the mirror quartz, the alchemist’s eyes blazed with the force of the hypnotic command he was delivering, but his voice was glacial.

The words were accompanied by another shock of energy. Adam felt a terrible fury well up inside him.
Marlowe carries the blood of Sylvester Jones in her veins.

“Can you hear him?” he asked. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded strange, thick and raspy.

She concentrated. “Yes, at least my intuition can translate the dream message. He’s wielding hypnotic energy, trying to force you into a trance. I can’t feel the power of it, though. I think only someone of his bloodline can do that.”

“I’m fighting it, but I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.”

He tried for the door again, but it was as if he had hit a wall. He knew then that he would never escape the chamber. Time to prioritize.

Marlowe
. She was the most important thing in the world. He could not hurt her. He would die before he allowed himself to harm her in any way. That made it easy. He had a plan now. To save Marlowe, he had to end things here.

He suppressed the rage with an act of will. The fury and the glittering shards of madness that accompanied the emotion belonged to Nicholas Winters, not to him. He was experiencing what Nicholas had felt countless generations earlier.

But it was rapidly becoming his nightmare. The dreamscape around him seemed increasingly real. The chamber was filling with the foggy, undefined atmosphere of dreams, a paranormal realm with no beginning or end, no top or bottom.

It would not be long before he was no longer aware that he was dreaming. Once that happened, he would not be able to control his actions. The psychic command would overwhelm him. He would destroy Marlowe. That must not happen.

The infinity of alchemists spoke again.

Adam had to concentrate fiercely to unknot the leather bond that linked him to Marlowe. When she was free, he methodically started to strip off every piece of tuned standard rez and full-spectrum amber that he carried: his watch, the ring, the stone in his bolo tie, the concealed chunks in the heels of his boots, his locator, and his belt buckle.

He dropped all of the amber and the spare chunk of tuned mirror quartz that he had brought with him into the heart of the Burning Lamp.

“Adam.” Marlowe stared at the stones. “What have you done? The forces inside that thing will probably destroy your amber.”

“Take Gibson and the lamp and go,” he said through his teeth.

“Are you crazy? You’ll never find your way out of here without your spectrum amber or the quartz.”

That’s the point,
he thought, but he did not say it aloud.

“Make sure J&J takes good care of the artifact this time,” he said. “It may be needed again in the future to fix another lightbulb in this place.”

“Once the hypnotic command is complete, you’re going to walk off into the maze, aren’t you?” Marlowe made no move to take hold of the lamp. “You’ll walk forever. It will be just as if you went into the tunnels without good amber. I won’t let you do that. We’re in this thing together, Adam Winters. We’re partners, remember?”

The trance energy was bounding and rebounding off the mirrored walls, intensifying in force with every oscillation. It was a thousand times stronger than Nicholas Winters could ever have dreamed, thanks to the multiplying effect of the mirrors. Adam knew that the hurricane of psi would soon overwhelm him with rage.

“I can’t take the risk of allowing you to stay with me,” he said to Marlowe. “I think the lamp will be reasonably safe for someone else in my bloodline to use again, if that ever becomes necessary. You heard what Nicholas said: the energy of the Midnight Crystal can be unleashed only once. What’s done is done. No putting that genie back into the bottle.”

“Damn it, Adam . . .”

He let go of the lamp, forcing her to grab it. She did so reflexively, catching it by the base. When it was secure in her hands, he gripped her shoulders, pulled her close, and kissed her. She returned the kiss with searing force.

He felt her strong, positive, healing energy sweeping over him, temporarily pushing back the storm of the command. For a few seconds he could think clearly again. He wanted to hold her forever, but doing so would be the equivalent of signing her death warrant. All he could allow himself was one last taste of her.

It took every scrap of willpower that Adam possessed to break off the kiss. He released Marlowe and stepped back. She watched him with psi-hot eyes. So did Gibson.

“I’m staying here,” Marlowe announced.

“When this nightmare ends, I’m going to be a true Cerberus. I will be a danger to you and everyone else in your family.”

“It’s just a dream, Adam.”

“I know that now. But it won’t be long before I don’t know it.”

“You’re stronger than Nicholas ever was,” she said.

“There’s no way you could possibly know that.”

She put her fingertips on the rim of the lamp. He saw the shiver that went through her, but she did not release the artifact. Instead, she tightened her grip.

“Nicholas Winters left his prints all over this thing.” She waved one hand to indicate the myriad images that surrounded them. “What’s more, the energy emanating from the Midnight Crystal and bouncing all over this chamber is his. I can read it as surely as I can read yours. Trust me, while you are descended from him, the two of you are not the same person. You are the stronger talent. It makes sense when you think about it.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s true you carry his psychic genetics, but the blood of the powerful dreamlight reader who bore Nicholas’s son also runs in your veins along with that of generations of other strong talents. You are Nicholas’s direct descendant, but you are also the descendant of Griffin Winters and Jack Winters and Adelaide Pyne and Chloe Harper. You are not a clone of Nicholas Winters.”

Adam looked at her, wanting to believe what she was saying. But the storm was growing hotter around him.

“Chatty, isn’t he?” Marlowe asked. “Trying to justify himself, I suppose.”

Adam looked at her. “Marlowe, if I’m stronger than he was, why can’t I escape this room?”

“You can. But first you must break out of the trance.”

“How do I do that?”

“You said it, yourself; you’re trapped in a dreamscape. But this is still a lucid dream. That means you can control it. You can end it by shutting down the lamp and the Midnight Crystal.”

“I tried to do that.”

“You tried to do it alone. The energy of the lamp can only be controlled when we work it together, remember? Touch the lamp, Adam, and take my hand.”

He stared at the lamp, half afraid that physical contact would draw her into the dreamscape with him. Then he looked at the hand she held out to him. When he met her eyes, he saw absolute certainty and power. She smiled.

“You’re the boss of the Frequency Guild, and I’m the head of J&J,” she said. “We just saved the underworld. We can do this.”

And suddenly he believed her. He could accomplish anything with Marlowe at his side.

“No wonder they put you in charge of Jones & Jones,” he said.

He gripped the rim of the lamp and wrapped his other hand around hers.

Psi fire seared his senses.

“Ignore him,” Marlowe said. “He’s been dead for a few hundred years. Okay, I’ve got the center. Remember, this lamp is basically a force multiplier designed to enhance your own talent. The mirrored quartz around us is having a similar enhancing effect. All you have to do is destabilize a few of the trance currents. Once the process starts, I’m betting the energy pattern of the Midnight Crystal will fall apart very quickly.”

“You’re betting?”

“Just do it, Winters.”

He did not try to swamp the fierce energy pounding at him the way he had earlier when he rebooted the unstable energy emanating from the quartz. Intuitively, he edged in carefully, found a single, oscillating current in the trance pattern, and sent out a counterpoint wave. Almost at once, the current fell apart, fracturing and weakening.

The process felt oddly familiar.

“Just like old times in the tunnels,” he said. It wasn’t easy to get the words out because his jaw was rigid with the effort he was making to focus so much energy. “Like de-rezzing hot ghosts.”

“That makes sense. Energy ghosts are inherently unstable at the core. I’m told the trick is to disrupt a few of the currents that hold one together.”

“When you get it right, the whole thing disintegrates and vanishes.”

“Like a ghost,” Marlowe said.

He went to work on another current and got a similar effect. The process accelerated as he methodically isolated individual pulses and dampened them.

Gibson chortled, excited now.

Nicholas Winters was still speaking, but the energy that laced the command was weakening rapidly.

Adam zapped a few more currents. The mirrored quartz was working for him now. The dreamscape became murky, dissolving like morning mist in the sunlight. The myriad ghostly images of Nicholas grew fainter.

With one last sparking pulse of energy, the Midnight Crystal winked out, taking the fragments of the nightmare trance with it. He was free.

He shut down the Burning Lamp. All of the crystals went dark. The transparent artifact grew translucent, then opaque, and finally became solid once more.

He reached into the lamp and grabbed his amber. He still had a grip on Marlowe’s hand. He urged her toward the chamber entrance.

“Now we leave,” he said.

“Good idea.”

They went deliberately but with some speed through the doorway. Adam checked his watch.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Still good.”

“Probably because it’s full-spectrum. Standard rez amber would never have survived the forces in that lamp. One thing I don’t understand, though.”

“Only one thing? Consider yourself lucky.”

“I realize that Nicholas somehow found a way to trap the energy of a hypnotic command in the Midnight Crystal, but how did he capture an image of himself?”

“Why does that strike you as strange? You’re the dreamlight talent. You’ve told me that when you touch someone, your intuition translates some of the energy into images.”

“Yes, but that’s the whole point. Back in that chamber we were viewing images from Nicholas’s own dreamscape that he somehow managed to trap in that crystal. Yet we saw Nicholas, himself, in that dream world.”

“So?”

“Think about it. You never see yourself in a dream.”

“He put himself into a kind of trance, a lucid dream, in order to generate the images that we perceived, right?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“He saw himself in the trance, so we saw him, too.”

“But how did he see himself in his own dream?” she asked.

“I’m no dreamlight expert, but I can think of one way he could have done it.”

“What way is that?”

“He stared into a mirror when he went into the dream state,” Adam said. “He saw his own reflection while he was in that trance, so we saw it, too.”