Silver Master Read Free Page A

energy was unlike anything that she had ever encountered: dark, controlled, fascinating.
    The hair rose on the nape of her neck. Beneath the fabric of her neatly tailored business jacket, goose bumps prickled her upper arms. A strange, unfamiliar sensation stirred within her. She felt as if she were about to leap off a very high diving board into a fathomless pool.
    Get a grip. Okay, so one of the visitors was a particularly strong psi talent. No, not one of the visitors; the man. This energy was indisputably male.
    The ability to resonate psychically with amber and use it to focus the brain’s natural paranormal energy waves had begun to appear among the colonists on Harmony shortly after they came through the Curtain to settle the new world. Something in the environment had begun to stimulate the latent ability in humans.
    At first the talent had seemed to be little more than an intriguing curiosity. But when the mysterious energy Curtain that had made interstellar travel possible had closed without warning, trapping the colonists, the ability to pulse psi through amber rapidly became critical to survival.
    Virtually everyone on Harmony gave off some degree of psychic energy. Most people generated low or medium levels of power, allowing them to use amber to operate a toaster or start a car engine. But there were some individuals—she was one of them—who could generate an unusually high degree of psychic energy.
    Being a strong para-resonator, as powerful psychics were called, was almost always a double-edged sword. Her particular talent was the ability to read the paranormal energy rhythms and patterns given off by others. To her, human psi waves were as distinctive as faces.
    Her para-rez ability was rare. She had never met anyone else who could do what she did. Then again, anyone who could read other people’s psi waves as accurately as she was able to read them no doubt kept quiet about the skill for the same reason that she did. Paranormal abilities were common in the population, but powerful and unusual talents were not, and very few people were comfortable around others who possessed such powers.
    She knew that most people would find her particular psychic ability especially unsettling. It wasn’t mind reading, of course. There was no such talent. But her ability did allow her sharp insights into one of the most personal and private realms of an individual’s personality. The truth was, if you could read a person’s psi waves, you could tell a great deal about that individual’s strengths and—far more disturbing to the person—his or her weaknesses. It was human nature to not want to reveal weakness, not even to a relative or a lover.
    Only the members of her family and her closest, most trusted friends knew about her talent. And even they did not know her deepest, darkest secret. She had understood intuitively, ever since her eighteenth year when she had unwittingly discovered exactly what she could do with her psychic ability, that she must never confide in anyone.
    There was another major downside to her ability. She had been forced to develop mental shields in order to cope with the relentless tide of psi energy that lapped at her whenever she was around other people. Had she not been able to do so, she knew she would have gone mad.
    But she had learned how to control her talent, and now it was informing her in no uncertain terms that the man waiting for her wasn’t just a powerful para-rez, himself; he was going to be the most intriguing, most exciting man she had ever met, the one who could rez all of her senses.
    So what was Mr. Perfect doing in the company of a police detective?
    Assuming a proper, professional smile, she pushed the door open the rest of the way and walked into the room.
    The man and the woman inside both rose from their chairs. The woman was establishing her authority. Celinda sensed that the man felt no need to do the same. He was just