Fired Up

past 110°F.
    Beyond the rooftops lay the big garages, parking lots and RV parks. Next came streets filled with shabby budget motels and cheap apartment buildings. And sprawling out to the distant circle of mountains lay vast stretches of desert punctuated by subdivisions, golf courses and acres of sagebrush.
    But when you were down on the ground, in the middle of the Strip, all you could see was the fantasy, Chloe thought.
    “I still think this is a really bad idea,” she said. “I never take clients along on a verification trip. They always get emotional, regardless of how things turn out.”
    “You’ve mentioned that several times,” Jack said. “Trust me; I’m not the emotional type.”
    She believed him. Control was clearly his middle name. The man probably lived on a steady diet of ice and glacial melt. But that did not make him any more predictable than the client who was at the mercy of his emotions.
    “Remember, I’ll do the talking,” she said.
    “You’ve already mentioned that at least twelve times.” He checked his watch. “How are you feeling?”
    “I told you, I’m fine.”
    “How much sleep did you get the past couple of nights?”
    “Enough,” she said.
    “How bad were they?”
    “What?” she asked. But she knew what he was talking about.
    “The dreams,” he said.
    “Don’t worry, I didn’t wake up screaming. The wine took the edge off. Besides, I’m a dream talent, remember? I can handle a few bad dreams.”
    “They were brutal, weren’t they?”
    “Well,” she said, “Madeline Gibson is a very disturbed young woman. Stands to reason that her dream energy is also pretty unstable.”
    He frowned. “What do you mean? Didn’t you get hit with my nightmares?”
    “No. I got a dose of her energy.” She turned in the seat, frowning a little. “What did you think happened?”
    “I’m not sure,” he said. “I told you, it’s not like I’ve been able to run any controlled experiments with this damn second talent. But I assumed that when I used it, I was generating energy and images from my own dreamscape and that it was those visions that struck the target.”
    She thought about that and then shook her head. “I admit I’ve only had the single close encounter, but I think what happens is that when you use your talent, you send out currents of very strong, intensely focused energy from the dark end of your dream spectrum. That energy, however, doesn’t carry the images from your dreams and nightmares. It’s just energy.”
    “How does it work, then?”
    “I got the impression that you use your talent to trigger the target’s own dark dream energy. When you hit Madeline Gibson with that shock of psi she was suddenly plunged into her own nightmares, not yours. It was the ultralight from her dream world that I brushed up against.” She shuddered. “Like I said, she’s one sick woman.”
    “So the way this works is, I can force another person into a really bad dream?”
    “Even regular, garden-variety nightmares produce strong physiological changes. Heart rate speeds up. Breathing becomes shallow. Blood pressure is elevated. People wake up in a cold sweat. It makes sense that the shock of being plunged into a nightmare while in the waking state would create extreme disorientation and panic or even cause a person to faint like Madeline did.”
    “Or the heart fails and someone dies,” Jack said grimly. “Like that guy in the alley the other night.”
    “There is that possibility,” she allowed.
    “Shit,” Jack whispered. He stared hard at the seat back in front of him. “My new talent is turning me into everyone’s worst nightmare.”
    She considered that for a few seconds, and then she started to grin. She couldn’t help herself. The next thing she knew, the laughter was bubbling up out of her like champagne.
    “What the hell is so damn funny?” he demanded.
    “I don’t know.” She managed to get control of her laughter, but she knew her lips were still twitching. “It’s just something about the way you said that. For what it’s worth, my advice is not to get too worked up about this new talent of yours.”
    “I’m a double-talent,” he said evenly. “That makes me a monster in Arcane’s eyes.”
    “Screw Arcane. According to my aunt Phyllis, they’re just a bunch of supercilious bastards who think they have the right to tell other sensitives what to do. Who put the Joneses in charge of making rules for the rest of us? That’s what