Midnight Crystal

by Jayne Castle

  “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.

  Bastard. This is your dream, not mine.

  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.

  “The psychical command I have locked in the Midnight Crystal can be accessed only once. You, who have unleashed the forces of the stone, are charged with carrying out my vengeance. You must not fail.”

  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.

  “All who descend from Sylvester must die. All that he created must be extinguished. This is the only fitting penalty for the crime that he committed against me. For he has surely destroyed me. It is only a matter of time now before I shall lose all my great powers. I am doomed because of the treachery of a man I once called friend and the rage of a jealous woman.”

  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.

  “Sylvester knew that he could not destroy me with his own powers. We are too evenly matched. But he crafted a plan whereby the dreamlight reader would use the lamp to strip me of my talents. He played to her jealous nature, promised that he would take care of her and the babe after I was gone. The truth is, he desired her for himself. He wished to mate with her, as he had with other women of power, in order to discover if his own talents would combine with hers to produce offspring possessed of surpassing psychical abilities . . .”

  “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.

  “Hear me, you who carry my talent in your veins. The heirs of Sylvester must all die. My bloodline must triumph.”

  “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.

  “I shall not live to see my vengeance, but I know that it will come to pass, for my powers are vastly greater than those of Sylvester, and I have locked them into my blood. My son carries the seeds of my great talents. He will bequeath them to his sons down through the generations . . .”

  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.”

  Chapter 31

  SHE AWOKE TO THE SOFT DRUMMING OF RAIN FALLING in the jungle. There was no other sound like it, she thought. Even here in the lush, bioengineered underworld, it conveyed its own kind of psychical meaning: nature’s gift of life and renewal.

  There was no other scent like that of rain in the rain forest, either. She lay quietly for a moment, breathing in the elemental fragrance.

  She stirred a little and realized that she was still dressed except for her boots, but she was securely enveloped in the silk sleeping sack she had brought with her in her pack. Someone had spread the sack out on the cot and stuffed her into it, someone who understood about her little eccentricity. Adam, she thought. She smiled.

  The rush of adrenaline and psi that had gotten them through the ordeal in the mirrored chamber had carried them to the exit of the maze. It had even gotten them partway up the long quartz staircase that led to the rim of the canyon. At that point, however, several people had come rushing down the steep flight of steps to assist them.

  By the time they had arrived at the top of the staircase, she had been on the verge of exhaustion. She had fallen into a heavy post-burn sleep while listening to Adam explain to the others what had transpired inside the maze.

  She stretched, opened her eyes, and looked out the plastic window of the tent into near-impenetrable darkness. Midnight in the jungle.

  She heightened her senses, testing the faint currents of maze energy that echoed up the canyon walls to the rim. The resonating patterns felt strong and stable. There was no longer even a hint of underlying disharmony.

  There was, however, another kind of dreamlight energy in the tent, a very familiar pattern. Startled, she turned her head.

  “Adam?” Conscious of the fact that there were half a dozen other tents filled with sleeping people in the vicinity, she kept her voice to a whisper.

  “Better not wake up expecting to find some other man sleeping next to you in this tent,” he said. He kept his voice pitched very low, as well.

  The darkness inside the tent was utter and complete. She could not see him, but when she put out her hand, she felt the edge of a second cot positioned alongside hers.

  “I don’t understand.” She levered herself up onto one elbow. She still could not see a thing with her normal vision, but when she heightened her talent, Adam’s prints became visible. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Let’s review and see if we can figure out the answer to that question.”

  There was a rustling sound. She saw energy shift in the depths of the night and concluded that Adam had rolled onto his side, facing her. His eyes glowed green in the dense shadows.

  “We both went through a really bad burn down there in the maze,” he said. “Depleted all our reserves. By the time we got back to the top of the canyon, we had almost exhausted our physical energy, as well. You conked out right in the middle of what was, I felt, a brilliantly coherent debriefing, considering the shape that I was in and how many details I had to leave out.”

  “Yes, well, I can see where you wouldn’t want to go into the whole Winters Family Curse thing with a lot of Bureau and Arcane staff.”

  “Not good for the Guild boss image. Anyhow, you went sound asleep on my shoulder in front of the entire lab crew just as I was getting to the good part.”

  “What was the good part?” she asked.

  “The punch line in the how many Guild bosses and J&J agents does it take to change a lightbulb joke.”

  She winced. “Oh, right.”

  “Figuring that under the circumstances, you might not want to have a dozen people staring at you while you slept—”

  “Lord, no.”

  “. . . I thought you might appreciate some gentlemanly consideration. I picked you up and carried you to this tent. I managed to get your boots off and get y
ou into your security blanket.”

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  “You’re welcome. However, that last bit of noble, manly exertion did me in. I told everyone to wake us in the morning, sealed the tent flap, and more or less collapsed on this cot. I remember nothing after that until Gibson woke me a few minutes ago.”

  “Gibson.” She searched the darkness for a pair of glowing baby blues and saw nothing. “Where is he?”

  “I heard him scratching at the tent flap, so I got up and let him out. I think he went hunting. I saw his second pair of eyes pop open just before he disappeared into the undergrowth. Got a hunch he joined his buddies for a little night sport.”

  The energy of Adam’s dreamlight was getting hotter. So were his eyes. She knew he was aroused. In response, an urgent warmth began to pulse through her veins.

  She cleared her throat. “I see. You, uh, couldn’t get back to sleep after you let him out?”

  “No.”

  “Thinking about what happened in the maze?”

  “Mostly I was thinking about you,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry, Marlowe.” He exhaled heavily. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep in here. I couldn’t go another step. Literally. I know you have this thing about not being able to sleep in the same space with someone else who is sleeping. But I was out of it at that point.”

  “It’s okay, you didn’t disturb me. That was a very heavy burn we went through, and the sleep state that followed was bound to be much heavier and deeper than normal. We both more or less passed out for a few hours.”

  “Yeah, felt like that. I’m sorry.”

  “I was so zonked that I probably could have slept through a tornado.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  She thought about it. She had awakened feeling amazingly normal, as if she had just surfaced from a deep, replenishing sleep. But now she was intensely aware of Adam.

  “I feel fine,” she assured him. “Really.”

  “Want me to leave?”

  “It’s raining, and it’s pitch-black out there.”