The Adept by Katherine Kurtz, Deborah Turner Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

hand. “I wouldn’t want to have to pick glass out of your very talented hands, if that shatters. If the whiskey isn’t to your liking,” he added more gently, “I can give you a sedative.”
    Peregrine blanched and shook his head, alarmed, but he did loosen his death-grip on the glass.
    “N-no, please. No sedative. That only makes matters worse. If I take pills, I lose what little control I have left over this vision of mine.”
    “Then you do have some control.”
    Peregrine gave an unsteady, mirthless laugh.
    “You’re humoring me, aren’t you? You think I really have gone mad.”
    “No, I am genuinely interested to hear what you have to say,” Adam said truthfully. “But if I’m to help you, you must make up your mind, here and now, to be absolutely candid with me—however outrageous you may think you sound! I promise not to judge—but I have to know. It’s a leap of faith, I realize—you hardly know me—but I can’t help you unless you do your part.”
    Adam waited. Peregrine stared at him for a long, taut moment, totally motionless, then breathed out a long sigh, running a hand over his face and through his drying hair, dislodging his glasses.
    “I’m sorry. I—there’s really never been anyone I could talk to, about this. Where shall I start?”
    “The beginning is usually best,” Adam replied, “When do you first remember—seeing?”
    Peregrine swallowed painfully, removing his glasses for a moment to rub the back of his hand across his eyes. Then he put the glasses back on, to stare down at the whiskey in his tumbler.
    “I—can hardly remember a time when I couldn’t,” he murmured. “When I was a child, I used to see all kinds of things—things that weren’t really there. I used to see pictures on walls that afterward turned out to be blank. I used to see other faces in mirrors, besides my own. Sometimes I would see things happening around me that seemed to belong to other times . . .” His voice trailed off.
    “Were you frightened by what you were seeing?” Adam asked.
    The question seemed to take Peregrine, off guard. He frowned, remembering.
    “No, now that you mention it, I wasn’t,” he said. “But it scared the hell out of my father, when he found out about it. He thought there was something seriously wrong with me.”
    He took a breath before continuing. “When I was really small, I had a whole host of friends who used to come and talk to me all the time—tell me stories, play games with me. I know that lots of kids have imaginary friends, but eventually they outgrow them. Mine seemed very real. When I first went away to school, some of them used to help me with my studies. Sometimes they even gave me clues during exams—though they would never actually tell me the answer.”
    He shot an oblique glance at Adam, encouraged when Adam remained attentively silent.
    “It—seemed so natural that I never thought much about it,” he went on, “—until I started talking to some of the other boys. That was when I realized that—no one else was aware of my friends’ existence. Eventually I made the mistake of asking my father about it.”
    “Why was that a mistake?”
    Peregrine hunched his shoulders and grimaced. “If you had known my father, you wouldn’t have to ask. He was very much the hard-nosed realist. He was appalled to think that any son of his should be so fanciful.”
    “Then, you discussed the matter in some detail?”
    “I wouldn’t say that we discussed it,” Peregrine said, with a bitter curl of his lip. “Let’s say that we had words. It was made quite clear to me that my overactive imagination was not to be indulged. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much help. In fact, it only made the problem worse. It seemed like the more confused and upset I got, the more prone I became to seeing things . . .” He glared down into the liquor in his glass.
    “How old were you?” Adam asked.
    “About eleven,” Peregrine replied tonelessly.
    “And do you