“You’re wondering what I see when I view your aura.” She munched the tomato and swallowed. “I was just warning you that it’s better not to go there.”
He had known he would have to deal with this sooner or later. She was not the type to let go.
“You do realize that you’ve left me no option,” he said. “Now I have to ask.”
“I was afraid of that. Promise you won’t get spooked?”
“I’m a talent. I take the paranormal as normal.” He forked up a mouthful of fish. “Why would I get spooked?”
“My aura readings sometimes have that effect on people, even those who accept the reality of the paranormal,” she said.
“What do you see in my aura?”
She hesitated. He could see the uncertainty in her eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “But remember that my visions involve all sorts of misleading symbols and metaphors. When I go into my talent, I essentially slip into a trance, a waking dream. Those kinds of dreams can be just as hard to interpret as regular dreams unless I have context.”
She paused to give him an encouraging smile.
“No context,” he said. “Let’s see what you can do without any hints or clues.”
She stopped smiling.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” she said. “You don’t believe that I can actually see anything useful, do you?”
“I don’t doubt that you can see auras, and I’m convinced you’re sensitive to heavy energy like the kind laid down at crime scenes. But read my dreams? No. I don’t think anyone can do that.”
She sat quietly for a moment, her incredible eyes luminous with a little psi. Energy shivered in the atmosphere. Two men at the nearby table glanced around uneasily and then went back to their meal.
Gwen lowered her talent. Her mouth tightened at the corners. “Your aura looks the same as it did a month ago when I met you in Seattle. You’re stable. But I can tell that the dreams are getting more powerful. They aren’t nightmares—not exactly—but there is a rising sense of urgency linked to them. You’re not sleeping well, either. But there’s something else going on, too, something I can’t figure out without more context.”
He made himself put his fork down with no outward show of emotion. “Is that the best you can do? Because any storefront fortune-teller could pull that kind of analysis out of a crystal ball. Everyone has a few bad dreams from time to time.”
“I know,” she said.
Her voice had gone flat and cold. He felt like he had just stomped on a butterfly.
“I apologize,” he said. “I shouldn’t have implied that you were a storefront fortune-teller.”
“I’m aware of what the general public thinks about psychic counselors. Most people assume that we are entertainers at best and scam artists at worst.”
“I know that your talent is genuine, Gwen. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I’m sorry.”
She relaxed. “Apology accepted. Do you want me to finish telling you what I saw in your aura?”
“Sure.”
“There’s not a whole lot more to tell. It’s all that hot radiation in your dream currents that I find difficult to interpret. I’m sure it’s psi. But the ultra-light is the same color as the energy I see from time to time in your ring. Did something happen to you that involved that amber crystal? Were you caught in an explosion? A fire, maybe?”
He thought that he was prepared for whatever vague analysis she came up with—prepared for anything except the possibility that she might actually be able to see into his dreams. There was only one way she could strike that close to the truth.
“I told Sam something of what went down on that last case,” he said. “He told Abby and Abby told you. So much for keeping some things private within the family.”
“You mustn’t blame Sam or Abby. Neither of them told me anything about your dreams. As for what happened on your last case, it’s no secret that you nearly got killed and that you had to swim out of an underwater cave—which does explain some of the urgency in your dream, of course. But there’s something else going on. You’re revisiting the same dreamscape again and again. My reading tells me that you’re searching for something.”
A dark chill whispered through him. “And you can help me find it?”
She smiled, her eyes filling with a wistful regret, as if she had just acknowledged to herself the loss of something she had longed to possess.
“I fix bad dreams, remember?” she said gently.
“I’m not interested in therapy. I can handle my own damn dreams.”
“Right.” She took a breath and pulled her cloak of cool, polite reserve around herself. “Now you see why I lead a very limited social life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re thinking that it’s as if I had caught a glimpse of one of your dreams, aren’t you? It felt like an invasion of privacy.”
He started to deny it but decided there wasn’t much point. “Thought crossed my mind, yeah.”
“If it’s any comfort, I can’t actually see your dreams.”
He was starting to get pissed—with himself, not with her. He was the one who had challenged her to do a fast reading on his aura. The fact that he didn’t like the results was his own fault.
“Good to know,” he said.
“There’s no need to growl at me.”
“I am not growling.”
“I know growling when I hear it,” she said. “The thing is, heavy dreams affect the aura, especially if they recur frequently and especially if the dreamer has a lot of psychic talent. What I pick up is the dreamlight energy in a person’s aura. My intuition then interprets that energy. I don’t always get it right, and it’s impossible to do an accurate analysis when I don’t have any context. But I can usually see enough to start asking the right questions. That’s where I’m at with your case.”
“I’m not your case, and I’m not here to get psychic dream counseling,” he said. “I’m here to solve a murder. You’re the client, not me.”
Anger flashed, quicksilver bright, in her eyes. In the next instant the shadows were back, veiling her secrets.
“No,” she said much too politely. “You are not my client.”
He felt as if she had just slammed a door in his face. And it was his own damn fault.
Nine
She had nobody but herself to blame for the glacial chill in the atmosphere between them, Gwen thought. She should have known better than to tell Judson the truth. She had been aware that she was rolling the dice when she described what she saw in his dreamlight energy. She had hoped that his own psychic abilities, combined with his understanding of the paranormal, would allow him to accept her talent. But she had placed a losing bet. Then she’d made the stupid mistake of doubling down on a very bad wager by trying to convince him to let her help him.
It wasn’t the first time she had miscalculated with a man, but this time it seemed to matter a lot more than it usually did. She told herself it was better to get the truth out in the open before the relationship progressed any farther.
Then again, the only relationship she had with Judson Coppersmith was that of client and hired investigator. She needed to keep that in mind at all times.
She and Judson finished dinner in a brittle, tension-laced silence and walked outside. The night air was crisp. Stars and a half moon glittered in an obsidian dark sky, but they did little to illuminate Wilby.
