Kay Hooper - Sleeping With Fear

"Which isn't possible in this case."

Riley shook her head. "My brothers are scattered around the world and my parents are in Australia. And none of them is psychic anyway."

"There's no way a psychic unrelated to you could be doing this?"

"No way I know of. To alter my memories? To create new ones? Even in theory, the sheer amount of energy anything like that would require is…almost unimaginable."

Burning buildings. A blood sacrifice. No…not just a blood sacrifice…a human sacrifice. How much dark energy would that create?

For a moment, Riley thought there was something on the edge of her mind, but then it slipped off.

"Would you know if your mind was being influenced?"

"Maybe. Probably." Surely she would. Surely. It made her skin crawl to think otherwise, to consider the possibility that her actions weren't her own, her memories and even her very thoughts shaped for her by someone else.

It was far less scary to believe a simple electrical discharge had scrambled all the circuits in her brain.

Still…

Could that be why I'm using up energy so quickly? Because my mind is working to fight off a kind of attack I'm not even consciously aware of? Is that even possible?

"Is that why you're so sure it was the Taser attack?"

"I think that's more likely." I hope it is, anyway. She reached up to rub her forehead. "Not that my thinking is all that clear. But I do know that memory is a tricky thing at the best of times; add in an electrical blast of unknown strength and duration, and the brain is very likely to go haywire. Especially a psychic's brain, which tends to have a higher-than-normal amount of electrical activity going on at any given time anyway."

Ash shook his head. "This is beyond me."

"It's beyond me too," Riley admitted. She hesitated, then added, "I have to report in. Because it's the right thing to do and because if there's anyone who might understand what's going on in my head, it'll be Bishop."

"You sound doubtful."

"Not of that. I'm just wondering how much even he can juggle before one of the plates crashes to the floor."

And you have absolutely no memory of anything you said or did during the two blackouts?" From Bishop's calm tone, no one would have guessed either that he found anything unusual in the situation or that he was in the middle of an incredibly intense investigation of his own. For the moment, at least, he appeared to be perfectly capable of juggling multiple tasks.

"No," Riley answered. "It's like I passed out and then woke up hours later."

"Which," he pointed out, "is different from the first memory loss, immediately after the Taser attack."

It took a moment, but then Riley realized. "When I woke up Monday afternoon, there were bits and pieces of memory. Uncertain, even wispy, but they were there."

"Yes. A reasonable physical result of a temporary disruption of the brain's own electrical activity. Like an explosion of energy that caused a scattering, a…fragmentation of memories. You lacked the ability to stitch them together, but all the pieces, all the experiences, were still there."

"Just memories?"

"You tell me."

Riley stood there with the beach house's phone to her ear and gazed absently through the ocean-side windows. Ash was out there on the deck, waiting patiently, his own brooding gaze fixed on the water. She wondered what he was thinking, feeling.

She didn't have a clue.

Drawing a breath, she answered Bishop. "No, not just memories. More. Senses. Emotions. Even the normal ability to read other people, to have some idea of what they're thinking and feeling. It's all scattered, distant."

"But not knowledge. Not training. That you can still access."

"I think so," she said cautiously.

"Then I'm betting it's all still there, Riley."

"In pieces."

"You can reconnect the pieces."

"Yeah? How?" She was afraid her voice sounded as shaky as she felt.

"You made a start. You were able to use your clairvoyance at the murder scene."

"Not like I've ever used it before."

"There's at least a chance the electrical jolt may have changed that for good."

She realized her short nails were biting into her palm and forced herself to unclench her right fist. Staring down at the reddened crescents as they faded, she said slowly, "There's a precedent?"

"Of sorts. Electrical fields affect us, Riley. Virtually all of us. But how depends on the individual. It can have unpredictable side effects ranging from very mild disorientation to a radical change in our abilities. But a direct jolt to the brain…The only similar case I know of involved a second-degree medium who was accidentally electrocuted. His heart stopped, but they brought him back."

"And? He still sees dead people?"

"He couldn't see them before, just barely hear them. Now he sees them in Technicolor and hears them as clearly as you're hearing me. All the time, if he drops the shield it took us more than a year to teach him how to build."

"Like living in the middle of a noisy crowd only you can see and hear."

"Yes. Not pleasant."

"He's not with the team."

"No. Maybe someday, but not yet. Right now it's all he can do to have some semblance of a normal life."

Riley would have preferred to go on talking about someone else's troubles but reluctantly focused on her own. "So…the shock of that Taser might have strengthened or altered my clairvoyance to the point that I can actually experience visions."

"It's possible."

"You didn't mention that possibility before. Did you? Jesus, I don't even remember if I reported in yesterday."

"You did, briefly. And I noticed absolutely nothing unusual in the conversation, so you obviously were functional during those missing hours. As for whether we discussed the possibility that your abilities may have been altered, no, not specifically."

"Did you think this might happen?"

"Honestly?" For the first time a hint of weariness crept into his voice. "There's been so much going on here that I haven't had a great deal of time to consider possibilities elsewhere."

"Yeah, I saw you on the news. Looks like a tough one."

"It is. But all the teams are currently involved in tough cases. Including you. Riley-"

"I know. I should return to Quantico. But the answers are here, Bishop. Besides, at least one man has died and there's a strong possibility of another victim. And I'm involved. Somehow, I'm involved. I can't just walk away from that."

"An unknown assailant managed to blindside a trained agent and put you down hard on Sunday night."

"Don't rub it in," she murmured.

Bishop ignored that. "You don't know if it was meant to be a lethal attack, though all signs point that way. Your memories and instincts are, to say the very least, unreliable, and you've been burning energy at a rate far greater than normal for you. You've had two blackouts in the last forty-eight hours, losing well over half that time. You're experiencing dreams and visions of what appear to be extreme black-occult rites, which we both know are as rare as hen's teeth. And you have no backup."

"What's your point?" she asked, deliberately flip and not at all sure he'd let her get away with it. He usually didn't.

"Riley."

"Okay, it's insane. I'm insane. Probably. I'm also scared, in case you're not picking up on that."

"I'm picking up on it," he said. "Even without telepathy. The worse a situation gets, the more flippant you get."

Riley frowned. "I'm that predictable?"

"It's a defense mechanism. In your case, a survival tool."

"As in ‘Don't bother to kill the poor little lunatic blonde, she's obviously out of her mind and, so, harmless'?"