memories of their night together in Frequency flooded back, igniting his senses.
Forget it. Whatever you could have had with her is probably finished.
As though she had been awakened by his thoughts, she stirred, opened her eyes, and turned her head to look at him.
“Hi,” she said in a voice softened and warmed by sleep.
“Hi,” he said. He couldn’t think of any other intelligent conversation. Do you still want me? was what he really wanted to ask.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
“Normal. Thanks to you.” Again the unspoken question went through his thoughts: Do you want to go to bed with a freak?
She looked around the rumpled bedding. “Where are Max and Araminta? Don’t tell me they took off again?”
“No.” He inclined his head toward the small balcony. “They’re dining alfresco at the moment.”
She followed his gaze. The sliding glass door was open a few inches. Araminta and Max were perched on the railing, munching cookies while they watched the sun come up over the Dead City.
“They were both pretty cool last night, weren’t they?” Celinda said proudly. “I couldn’t believe how they went after those thugs.”
“You were pretty cool, yourself.”
“Mmm. Well, you did most of the work. All I had to do was drive us all home.”
He groped for words. “Sorry I didn’t have a chance to tell you about what I can do with silver light.”
“Trig explained it.” She contemplated him for a long moment. “It’s a little disconcerting to watch someone disappear, especially when you don’t know there’s a rational explanation.”
“It’s more than disconcerting.” He remembered the dream about Janet. “Even when people do know there’s an explanation, they can’t deal with it. It’s just too damn weird.”
She searched his face with sudden understanding. “That’s what happened to your engagement, isn’t it? Your fiancée found out that you can go invisible, and she couldn’t handle it.”
“I told Janet the truth. I even went invisible in front of her once to let her see what it was like. I could tell it bothered her, but she insisted she could deal with it. I don’t do it very often because it’s such a huge psi drain. But once in a while it comes in handy in the course of my work. As long as I don’t push it for more than a couple of minutes, I’m okay.” He paused. “Until a few months ago I was always in complete control.”
“What happened?”
“I think all those drugs they gave me while I was in a coma had some kind of long-term side effects. Occasionally now, when I dream, I pull a little silver light without realizing it.”
“Without amber?”
He nodded. “Janet and I were together one night when it happened. I woke up to the sound of her screams. Looked down and saw that a chunk of my leg was missing.”
She gave him an understanding look. “An awkward moment in a relationship.”
“Yes,” he said. “It was definitely that.”
“That was when the two of you decided you weren’t a good match?”
“Things hadn’t been going well for a while,” he admitted. “We got engaged before I wound up in the hospital. After I got out, we both pretended that everything was back to normal. But it wasn’t. We started having problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“I lost most of my clients, for one thing. No one wanted to risk hiring a known burnout case. Business was bad. The rumor went around that I would never recover from the psi trauma. Some of our friends started avoiding us.”
“I see.”
“At any rate, the night I accidentally pulled the silver in bed was the last straw. Janet grabbed her keys, ran out of the apartment in her nightgown, and drove to her parents’ house. The next day her father phoned to say that they were all very sorry, but everyone hoped I would understand that no one wanted my genes in the family.”
“Well,” she said briskly, “that certainly explains why you like to sleep alone.”
“Beats waking up to a screaming woman in the middle of the night.”
She arched her brows. “I would just like to point out that you really can’t blame the matchmaker for what happened. I’ll bet you never mentioned your unusual talent when you filled out the questionnaire, did you?”
“No. I told you, it’s not the kind of thing you advertise.”
“How did you expect your marriage consultant to find you a good match when you didn’t provide her with your full parapsych profile?”
“What the hell was I supposed to do? List ‘invisibility’ in the Description of Psychic Talents section? Give me a break. She’d have figured me for some kind of nutcase. And if I had proven that I could do it, she would have told me I was unmatchable. Right after she stopped screaming, that is.”
“That’s always the way it is.” Celinda made a tut-tutting sound. “The client is less than forthcoming on the questionnaires and then complains when the match isn’t perfect.”
Was she teasing him? He couldn’t believe it.
“Damn it, Celinda.”
She drew her knees up under the bedclothes and wrapped her arms around them. “I did some thinking on the way home last night while you were sleeping. It’s not like there isn’t a long tradition of myths and legends about people who can make themselves invisible or appear to do so. Some of the stories go back to Old Earth tales.”
“I know. Trust me, I’ve done the research. A lot of the tales are linked to military or combat traditions.”
“Ninja warriors?”
“Among others. I found a couple of legends involving invisibility when I studied records of an Old Earth group called the Arcane Society, too.”
She frowned. “I remember running across a mention of the Society in a History of the Paranormal class I took in college. It was an organization devoted to psychic research, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. There are also plenty of stories about Old World magicians who could pull off invisibility.”
She watched him very steadily. “What do you think?”
He shrugged. “We’re human. Something here on Harmony is pushing the evolution of psychic talents in the population, but that probably wouldn’t happen if we didn’t already carry some innate genetic ability to access the paranormal plane. I think it’s possible that there may have been a few humans back on Old Earth who could do what I do.”
She thought about that. “The talent is obviously rare. It’s likely to stay rare, too. Judging from what I saw last night, it exacts a huge price in terms of physical and paranormal energy.”
“Yes.”
She searched his face. “Trig told me how you wound up in the hospital for a long period of time after you rescued a little girl who had been kidnapped. To avoid the kidnappers you had to keep yourself and the child invisible for over five minutes. He said the resulting coma lasted for weeks.”
“The real problem,” he said quietly, “was that I wasn’t unconscious that whole time.”
She stared at him, eyes widening with sympathetic horror. “Dear heaven. You mean you were aware of what was going on around you, but you couldn’t communicate?”
“For the first three days or so after I collapsed I was completely under. But after they got me into the hospital, they started experimenting with their damn drugs in an effort to bring me out of the coma. They succeeded, but only partway. I could walk if someone steered me. I could eat if someone fed me. But I couldn’t initiate any action. I couldn’t speak.”
She tightened her arms around her knees, hugging herself. “I was in a similar kind of limbo after Landry shot me full of that heavy-duty tranquilizer drug. But at least I was only trapped for a few hours. I can’t even imagine how bad days and weeks in that condition would have been.”
“The orderlies used to take me outside to sit on the veranda.” He grimaced. “They probably figured that looking at the gardens would be soothing. But I hated those gardens. Every time they sat me down on that damn
