Fired Up

knew what might happen to me if I got hit by the curse. And he made it clear what he would have to do if I turned rogue.”
    “He actually warned you that he would hunt you down?” She sniffed, disgusted. “Guess that’s what you get when you have a Jones for a friend.”
    “I knew where he was coming from. I told you at the start of this thing that if I were in his place, I’d do the same. The Society has a responsibility in situations like this. It can’t allow artificially enhanced psychic rogues to run free.”
    “Whoa.” She put both hands up, palms out. “Back up here. You are not a rogue. I can personally testify to that. I’ve read your dreamlight. I know the bad guys when I see them. You are not one of them.”
    “I agree that I haven’t gone rogue yet. But who knows how long I’ve got before some switch gets tripped at the paranormal end of my energy field? Now that I’ve got the lamp, I can’t waste any time. I told you, the damn thing has a habit of disappearing.”
    She was never going to get him on a plane. That was obvious.
    “Okay,” she said. “I’ll make a deal with you. We’ll get a room here in town. I’ll take a look at the lamp. If I feel comfortable trying to work it, I’ll go for it. But if I don’t think I can handle it—”
    “You have to work it, Chloe. I told you, the only other dream readers I identified in the Arcane files are employed by the Society. Even if I could take the risk of contacting one of them it wouldn’t do any good. None of them are as strong as you.”
    She exhaled slowly, out of arguments. “Aunt Phyllis always said that someday I’d find a man who didn’t have a problem with my talent.”

20
    THE NEED TO GET THE LAMP OUT OF THE CRATE, TO TOUCH it, to find out if it could save him from whatever was happening to him was a heavy, intensifying pressure. He felt as if he was trying to resist a strong gravitational field. But he would not be ruled by the demands of his senses. He was still in control of the demon inside him, and he was going to stay in control. Even if it killed him.
    When they got into the cab he instructed the driver to stop first at the nearest hardware store. He left Chloe sitting in the back, the meter running, while he went inside to pick up a crow bar and a screwdriver. He was back in the car within ten minutes.
    “Downtown,” he said.
    The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror. “Where, downtown?”
    “I’ll tell you when we get there.”
    The driver shrugged and headed for the old section of the city. When you drove a cab in Vegas, you didn’t ask a lot of questions.
    Chloe didn’t ask any questions, either. She said nothing when they bypassed the glittering high-rise resorts on the palm-studded Strip and headed for the grittier, seedier downtown. She had probably guessed that he would not give her any answers as long as they were sitting in the backseat of a cab where the driver could overhear.
    He was pretty sure he knew what she was thinking. She had concluded that he was now in full-blown paranoid mode. She was right. As the old saying went, even paranoids had enemies, and when one of those enemies might turn out to be J&J, it was only common sense to take precautions. If the agency did come looking for him they would start with the big hotels on the Strip because that was where someone with his kind of money would stay.
    Paranoid, for sure.
    The cab exited I-15 and plunged into the streets of faded, two-story motels, dingy gentlemen’s clubs, storefront casinos and gaudy, drive-through wedding chapels that cluttered what was known as Old Town.
    He told the driver to stop on a side street in front of an adult bookstore.
    Chloe got out and stood beside him on the sidewalk. She grasped the handle of her carry-on in one hand and her satchel in the other. Together they watched the vehicle speed away, and then Chloe turned to survey the nearby pawnshop and neighboring tattoo parlor.
    “The real Vegas,” she said drily.
    “Nothing’s real in Vegas.” He adjusted the crate under his arm and gripped the computer case in his other hand. The computer was not the only thing in the case. His overnight kit and a full set of IDs for a man named John Stewart Carter was also inside. He started walking. “Let’s go.”
    She hurried to keep up with him. “Where are we going?”
    He contemplated a sun-bleached sign halfway down the street. “What would you say to one hour in a private hot tub at the Tropical