"In the general scheme of things, sure. At least until what happened on Sunday. To that point, all we really had in the way of violence were a couple of instances of arson, property damage; nobody got hurt, and that wasn't something Jake and his people needed my help to investigate. Why would I have stayed here knowing I was badly needed elsewhere? Unless…"
Ash was watching her intently. "Unless?"
"Unless I knew that, however unthreatening the situation looked on the surface, Gordon's instincts were right and there was something very dangerous going on here. You're sure everything I was telling you pointed to-"
"‘No big deal,' I think were your exact words." He frowned. "Although if your…performance…since Sunday is anything to go by, you could have been telling me that while believing the opposite, and I'd never have known. Apparently."
She sighed. "I knew we were going to have to have this conversation again."
"Riley-"
"Ash, I can't apologize for not confiding in you during those first weeks because I'm not sure there was anything to confide. Or if there was, why I decided to keep it to myself. And since waking up on Monday I've spent most of my time just trying to figure out if my mind and senses will ever get back to something I fondly call normal. I'm sorry if you're pissed. I'm sorry if you're hurt. But put yourself in my place for just a minute and think about it. If you had no idea why you had done something uncharacteristic-why you had done a lot of things that were uncharacteristic-how quick would you be to push aside all your doubts and confide everything to the woman unexpectedly sharing your bed?"
After a long moment, he sighed and nodded. "Okay, point taken."
"Thank you." Half to herself, she muttered, "I just wish I could be sure we won't be repeating all this tomorrow. The term ‘déjà vu' has taken on a whole new meaning for me."
"You think there'll be more blackouts?"
"I don't know what to think. Except that whatever I'm experiencing, it's like nothing I've ever heard of before. Blackouts and lost time aren't unknown among psychics. In fact, if anything they're fairly common. But they tend to present as either total unconsciousness or radically different behavior."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that if you and everybody else around here noticed nothing odd about how I was acting during the time I've lost, it can only mean I didn't actually lose those hours. I was functional. I was here, doing normal things. I was me. But then, for whatever reason, those memories and experiences…ceased to exist for me. I've lost the perception of their reality."
"Why does that sound a lot more scary to me?"
"Probably for the same reason it feels a lot more scary. Because how we perceive the world is our reality. And if I've lost that, even pieces of it, then…I can't trust anything I think, or feel…or believe. Especially now. It's not just holes now; my mind has apparently begun filling in the holes, the blank spots, supplying memories that aren't real at all."
"Assuming you can believe me," he noted.
"I have to believe you," she said flatly. "I have to have something solid to hold on to, to anchor me. And that's you. Because you're in my bed. Because before all this started, I trusted you that much. It's never casual for me, in case I didn't mention that. Sex. So you being my lover has to mean I trusted you absolutely within days of meeting you. I may not remember why, but I have to believe that. I have to hold on to it. You're my lifeline, Ash."
"I wish you sounded a little happier about that."
Riley made a determined effort to lighten her tone. "Well, what can I say? It's those control issues, remember? No matter how happy I am, I'll always want to steer my own boat."
"I am the captain of my soul," he murmured.
"Yeah. We're none of us master of our fates, but that doesn't stop us trying to be."
"You and I have debated that before."
"Have we?" Riley shook her head. "Then I imagine we will again. In the meantime, if you want to bail, better now than later."
"I don't bail, Riley."
"Didn't really think you would. Just thought I'd offer."
"Noted. And refused."
She found herself smiling. "I've got a hunch I picked a pretty good lifeline. And it doesn't take anything but common sense to know I'm going to need one. Things may get worse, Ash. A lot worse."
After a moment, he asked, "Is all this due to the Taser attack?"
"I don't know what else it could be."
"You said something once about-Riley, could it be the influence of another psychic?"
"Theoretically? Yeah. Energy to energy. Electromagnetic fields can be manipulated, electronic impulses cut off or redirected. Even created. It's how the brain works, and it can be affected by plenty of external factors. But as far as I know, we've never encountered a psychic with the ability to influence another psychic's mind even in small ways. Not without a very strong blood connection."
"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."
Chapter 16
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."