Fired Up

advertised. Chloe says my dream-psi patterns are stable again. She’s right. I can sense it, too.”
    “So you’re not going to turn into a Cerberus on me. Great. That takes one problem off my to-do list.”
    “You never did sound all that worried.”
    “Probably because I wasn’t. Griffin Winters survived, so the lamp must have worked for him. Figured it would work for you, too.” Fallon paused. “I’m assuming, of course, that you haven’t been overcome by a compulsion to murder anyone with the last name of Jones?”
    “Well, now that you mention it—”
    “That was a joke, Winters.”
    “I knew that.”
    Fallon was silent for a few seconds.
    “Think there’s anything to the story about the Midnight Crystal that Old Nick claimed he inserted into the lamp there at the end?” he asked eventually.
    “One of the rocks in the lamp stayed dark. Figure that’s the one Nicholas called the Midnight Crystal. Chloe thinks it’s just a chunk of glass. She couldn’t sense any energy in it, and I sure as hell couldn’t fire it up.”
    “Good news for the Jones family tree,” Fallon said. “What’s got me worried now is that it looks like Nightshade wants the lamp, and I can’t figure out why.”
    “What makes you so sure that Nightshade is involved with what happened at the motel yesterday?”
    “My talent,” Fallon said flatly.
    “Hard to argue with that. But what would they want with the lamp?”
    “When I find out, you’ll be the first to know. I’ve got a feeling that as long as you and Chloe have the lamp in your possession, though, you’re both in danger.”
    “Why Chloe?” he asked, gut tightening.
    “Because she can work the lamp,” Fallon said. “If they want the lamp, they may want her, too.”
    “Shit.”
    “Harper’s doing a good job. Anyone trying to follow you probably believes that you’re in L.A., so I think we’ve got some breathing room. But we need to get the lamp into safekeeping in one of the museum vaults as quickly as possible.”
    “You have a plan?”
    “I had a plan,” Fallon said. “I’ve always got a plan. But you screwed things up when you decided to stay in Vegas. I had a couple people waiting in L.A., the kind of talents who can handle this type of work.”
    “Hunters?”
    “Cleared hunters. When it comes to dealing with Nightshade, I’m not using anyone who hasn’t been vetted by me, personally, unless there’s no other option.”
    “You think Arcane has been infiltrated?”
    “It’s a given now that we know that the bastard who founded the organization was sitting right there on the Governing Council for decades, listening to every single one of the Society’s secrets.”
    “Not that Arcane was ever particularly good at keeping secrets,” Jack pointed out.
    “The Society wasn’t set up to be an intelligence agency,” Fallon shot back. “We’re supposed to be a group of serious academics and researchers devoted to the study of the paranormal. We publish scholarly papers, damn it. We collect artifacts for our museums. And J&J is just a small-time private investigation agency, not the CIA.”
    “Take it easy, Fallon. You sound a little tense.”
    “So sue me. I’ve got about a dozen irons in the fire at the moment, and they’re all red-hot. Do you have any idea of how much data we collected when we took down those Nightshade labs a couple months back?”
    “No.”
    “Neither do I because it’s all locked in computers. Hard-core encryption. I don’t have nearly enough crypto-talents to get the job done.”
    “Must be tough,” Jack said, trying for soothing.
    But Fallon was on a roll. “I’ve had to put a lot of routine cases on the back burner because I just don’t have the time or the people to handle them. That means that an unknown number of sociopathic sensitives are out there right now using their talents to con little old ladies out of their life savings, picking pockets, stealing jewelry or running gangs. In some cases they’re getting away with murder. Literally.”
    “J&J was never intended to be a police force, either,” Jack reminded him.
    “Who the hell is going to catch those kinds of bad guys if we don’t? Regular law enforcement agencies don’t even acknowledge that there is such a thing as the paranormal, let alone that some of the people they’re chasing have psychic talents.”
    There was movement in the bedroom doorway. Jack glanced back and saw Chloe coming toward him. She looked fresh and