Olivia considered briefly and then made a decision. “I agree. You should get something to eat.”

He waited a beat. She just stood there looking at him.

“Excuse me,” he said. “This is your neighborhood. How about offering a helpful suggestion?”

“Well, I could say something snarky about how your appointment with Lark and LeClair is for tomorrow morning, not tonight, and mention that I had other plans for this evening, but—”

“But?”

She sighed. “I know how important this Vortex business is to Victor and Lucas. The Foundation is a good client and it always pays its bills so, hey, my time is yours. Not like you interrupted anything that was trending in a positive direction.”

“You are not in a good mood, are you?”

“Nope.” She gave him an overly bright smile. “How about you?”

“I’m not in a good mood, either.”

“Luckily for you, I can multitask.” She started walking. “That means I can conduct business when I’m in a lousy mood. There’s a good restaurant at the end of this block. When did you last eat?”

He fell into step beside her and reflected on the past forty-eight hours. He remembered a cup of coffee and an egg sandwich at the airport in DC.

“Breakfast,” he said. “In another time zone.”

“And before that?”

“Dinner. A sandwich at my desk. What’s with the sudden concern about my food history?”

“I suppose the fact that you haven’t had a good meal during the past twenty-four hours explains part of the problem.”

“What problem?”

“Your aura is twitchy.”

Alarm and disbelief shot through him. Just how much could she read in his energy field?

“ ‘Twitchy’?” he repeated, careful to keep his voice level. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It indicates the obvious. You’re a strong talent who has been running hot for too long. You’ve almost exhausted your psychic energy reserves. You need food and sleep.”

“I told you I was hungry,” he muttered.

He was officially worried now. Something was off here. His talent made him very, very good at looking like a low-grade, below-average psychic. Just a subnormal member of the paranormal community. Nothing special. Nothing scary. How much could she see?

“I’m impressed that Victor let you use the Foundation jet,” Olivia said. “I’m told he always complains about how much it costs to put it in the air. It’s for emergencies only.”

“Vortex is an emergency.”

“It certainly is to Victor and Lucas—and, evidently, to you. But no one seems to know why that lab, assuming it really exists, is suddenly a problem. If it was part of the Bluestone Project, it’s been buried since the middle of the last century. People in the antiquities trade tell me there have always been rumors, but no one claims to have seen an actual artifact with a connection to that lab. Why is the Foundation so worried about Vortex now?”