Fired Up

looked at the crate. Then he raised the lid, slowly, deliberately. As if it were a coffin lid, she thought.
    More energy from the dark end of the spectrum swirled into the room. Her senses were still wide open. She could see icy ultrablues, strange purples, eerie greens and countless shades of black. A midnight rainbow from a very dark dream.
    The object inside the crate was encased in a sack made of worn black velvet. Jack picked it up, stood and carried it to the small table. Slowly he untied the cord that secured the sack. The psi radiation got stronger, the hues more intense. Fascinated, she moved closer to the lamp.
    The velvet bag fell away, revealing the artifact.
    “Drake Stone was right,” she said. “It’s not what anyone would call attractive, but there is something fascinating about it.”
    The lamp stood about eighteen inches high. It looked very much as Jack had described it. Narrow at the base, it flared out toward the rim. It was fashioned of a strange, gold- toned metal that looked oddly modern, as Drake Stone had said, but ancient alchemical designs were worked into it. Large, murky gray crystals were positioned in a circle just below the rim.
    She looked at Jack. He was studying the lamp with rapt attention, an alchemist gazing into his fires. Currents of psi pulsed strongly in the room. The energy was as dark as that of the lamp, but there was a thrilling, disturbingly sensual quality to it. She recognized it immediately: Jack was in the zone. She realized something else as well: Her own senses were responding to his energy, starting to resonate a little.
    She folded her arms tightly around herself and concentrated on the lamp. She felt a sudden need to break the crystalline atmosphere that had settled on the room.
    “How does it work?” she asked.
    Jack did not answer for a few seconds. When he did, she got the impression that he’d had to summon the will to look away from the lamp.
    “Damned if I know,” he said. “Adelaide Pyne’s journal supposedly contained some advice and directions, but it vanished. Without it, all I’ve got is you. If you can’t fix the damage, my options are nonexistent.”
    She eyed the lamp, uncertainty tingling through her.
    “You’re absolutely sure you’ve been damaged?” she asked.
    His jaw hardened, and his eyes heated. “We’ve been over this. I’m a double-talent and my second talent is lethal. That is not a good thing. Who knows how long I’ve got before I start going crazy?”
    “Okay, okay,” she said soothingly. “It’s just that, well, you seem so stable. In control.”
    “For now.”
    The grim, haunted look in his eyes told her that he was braced for the worst-case scenario. He was not in a mood to listen to a glass-half-full view of the situation. What did she know about the lamp, anyway? It was his lamp and his curse. He was the expert here, not her.
    She walked around the table, studying the lamp from every angle.
    “What happened to Adelaide Pyne’s journal?” she said.
    “The story is that a rare books dealer came to see my grandmother one day while my grandfather was out of town on a business trip. The dealer claimed to be in the market for personal diaries and journals from the Victorian era. She told him that she didn’t have any to sell, but she showed him Adelaide’s journal. A few weeks later she noticed that it was missing.”
    “The dealer stole it?”
    “That’s what Grandmother always believed.”
    “If the rare books dealer knew about the journal, I wonder why he didn’t want to see the lamp, too?”
    “She said he asked about old lamps, but at that point she started to feel uneasy. She told him that she didn’t have any antique lamps. That much was true. My father was married by then, and she had already given him the lamp. She didn’t give him the journal at the same time because she had forgotten about it. In any event my parents moved to California shortly after that. The lamp disappeared along the way.”
    “Did you ever try to find the rare books dealer?”
    “Sure. I spent months trying to locate him. But the trail was completely cold from the start. It’s like he never existed.”
    Chloe took a deep breath and put her fingertips on the rim of the lamp. Dream energy shivered through her. She drew her hand back very quickly.
    “I need some time with this thing,” she said. “I’ve got to analyze the latent energy that I’m sensing in it. I’ve never experienced anything like it.