“Honey, I know you can take care of yourself. But your mother and I really don’t think this go-between business is your calling.”

“I know, Dad, but I’m good at it. Usually. And after what happened at Ecclestone’s, I agree with you—the normal business world isn’t a good fit for me, either.”

There was a short silence.

“Need a poem?” Byron asked.

“Yep. I could use one.”

Some kids were raised with bedtime stories. She had been brought up on bedtime songs from her mother and bedtime poems from her father.

“I think I know of one you might find helpful,” Byron said.

“One of yours?”

“No, the poem I’m thinking of was written by someone else. Give me a few minutes to find it. I’ll e-mail it to you.”

“Thanks, Dad. Love you. Love to Mom.”

“Love you, too, kiddo. See you soon when you come home for the Moontide celebration. Oh, and don’t forget your grandfather’s birthday.”

“I won’t. Looking forward to seeing everyone.”

Sierra ended the call and sat quietly, drinking the wine and trying to decompress.

The poem popped into her inbox a short time later. She read the first few lines and smiled. Her father had a gift for finding or crafting a poem that went straight to the heart of the problem.

“I don’t know who I am,” you say,

“Or why my hands deal dust,

As though the lot of cards I hold

Have crumbled as I play.”

She finished the poem and then she finished the wine.

“Message received, Dad,” she said to the empty room. “I’ll keep listening for my calling.”

CHAPTER 3

The Fogg Club was not the most exclusive nightclub in Las Vegas—far from it. Anyone willing to pay the reasonable cover charge was welcome. However, the location, a couple of blocks off the Strip in a dimly lit alley between two massive hotel and casino parking garages, guaranteed that very few tourists stumbled into the place.

From the outside the club looked like a typical low-end Vegas venue, complete with an acid-green LED sign that spelled out the name of the establishment and the slogan Get Lost in the Fogg. It was something of an inside joke. The owner, Hank Sheffield, was from Fogg Lake, Washington.

North Chastain pushed open the door, nodded a greeting to the beefy bouncer and went to stand at the railing, surveying the crowd on the lower level. He tried to make it appear that he was just checking out the scene, searching for friends and acquaintances on the dance floor. But the truth was he had to give his eyes a moment to adjust to the low light and the flashing strobes. The damned glasses he was forced to wear prevented him from accessing his preternatural night vision.

The glasses had been designed to look like mirrored, wraparound sunglasses, but the lenses were unique—high-tech crystals that had come out of a Foundation lab. According to the doctors, they were all that stood between him and the hellish hallucinations. The lenses might save his sanity but they could not halt the steady deterioration of his talent. The experts had warned him that eventually, probably within a month or so, he would be psi-blind.