Fired Up

aware that we are dreaming and even if we forget our dreams the energy is nevertheless produced. We leave traces of it wherever we go and on whatever we touch.”
    “And you can perceive that energy?”
    “I see it in the form of psi prints, sort of like fingerprints and handprints. They give off various hues of ultralight.”
    He looked at the place on the desk where he had flattened his hand earlier. “Learn anything interesting about me?”
    “Yes, Mr. Winters, I did.” She took her fingertip off the desk and regarded him with bright curiosity. “Who or what did you kill recently?”

5
    IF SHE HAD NOT BEEN WATCHING HIM CLOSELY, SHE WOULD never have noticed the small indications that told her just how much she had managed to stun him. The physical signs were minimal: a faint hardening of his jaw and some tightening around the mouth. For a second or two she could have sworn that his eyes heated up a little, and not with sexual interest this time. It seemed to her they actually became a darker, hotter shade of green, as if he was running a fever. She could have sworn she felt a soul-chilling whisper of energy at that moment. It raised the hair on the nape of her neck.
    Hector whined softly. That made it official, she thought. They were both a little unnerved. Not frightened, not yet, at any rate, just tense and aware. Cautious, the way any sensible person and dog ought to be when they found themselves in the same room with a large beast of prey. Together she and Hector watched Jack.
    The strange energy dissipated. Jack’s eyes were no longer feverish.
    “What are you talking about?” he asked. His tone implied he had begun to suspect that he was conversing with someone who was out of the asylum on a day pass.
    She braced herself for the jolt she knew was coming and brushed her fingertips across the desktop again. Hot, acid-hued ultralight splashed through her senses, the colors of violence. But there were other hues glowing fierce and bright, as well. And it was those shades of light and dark that reassured her. Jack could be scary, she knew, but he was in full control.
    “You confronted something monstrous,” she said, working her way through it. “And you destroyed it.” She hesitated, processing a little more light. “I think you were protecting someone else. Is he or she okay?”
    Jack did not move. “You’re making this up.”
    “The remnants of the violence are still simmering inside you. That kind of energy takes a while to cool down. It never entirely dissipates. It just recedes into the dream wavelengths. Ten, twenty, fifty years from now someone with my kind of talent will be able to pick up your prints in this office. And you’ll still dream about whatever happened from time to time.”
    “If you really believe what you’re saying, I’m surprised you aren’t running from this room, yelling for the cops.”
    “I’m not running because I know that, whatever occurred, you were trying to defend someone else. What happened? Were you and your date attacked?”
    “No.”
    “You fought him off, didn’t you? And you killed him.” She touched the desktop again and watched the light show with her other senses, picking up more nuances. “You killed him with your talent.”
    “I’m a strat,” he said without inflection.
    She frowned. “Being a strat would make you very good at plotting someone’s death, if that was your goal. But you couldn’t actually kill with your kind of talent. At least, I’ve never heard of any strat-sensitive who could do that.”
    Another couple of heartbeats passed. Then, to her surprise, Jack nodded once, as though he had made a decision.
    “I did mention the Winters family curse,” he said. “I am a strat. A strong one. It was my talent that helped me find you. But thanks to Nicholas Winters and his damned alchemical experiments with dreamlight radiation, I’m becoming something else as well.”
    She frowned. “Everyone knows that people can’t develop two equally powerful talents, at least not at the higher ranges. Something about the human mind’s inability to handle so much psi stimulation. It’s hard enough to control a single very high level talent.”
    “Trust me; I’ve done the research on this. There have been a few cases of two strong talents occurring naturally in a single individual, but they show up together at an early age and invariably the result is insanity. In the handful of cases that I was able to find in J&J’s files the