I finally roused around nine, crept out of bed as quietly as possible so as not to disturb my bride, and called Room Service from the phone in the suite's living room.

By the time I'd finished showering and dressing, the food was at the door. I tipped the waiter handsomely for the breakfast tray and took it into the bedroom.

I bent over and kissed Wish soundly. When I could see straight again, I murmured, "Good morning, Mrs. Rain."

She smiled up at me. "Good morning, Mr. Wish. Sleep well?"

I laughed and sat down on the bed beside her. "Funny you should mention that, my love; your unconscious mind asked me to inform you that you were singing this morning at three twenty-one o'clock."

She giggled. "Oh, no! What did I sing? I hope I was on key, at least!"

I laughed and hugged her. "Well, first you asked if you were on key. I told you you'd been singing beautifully, and that I just wished you'd sing like that when you were awake; the guys in the band would probably want you singing with us if they knew."

Her expression clouded at that but she said nothing.

"But you shook your head and told me that if you sing while you're awake, you sound horrible, because your insecurities cause your vocal chords to tighten up too much for you to sing decently---that you can only sing well when you're asleep. So I asked if you could leave a message with your conscious mind to stop being so self-conscious about singing; I figured maybe if your unconscious mind was the one to leave the message with your conscious mind, it might do some good where me talking to your conscious mind probably wouldn't. You promised you'd try, then you asked if I had any questions. I didn't---so after that you asked me to be sure to tell you about all this when you woke up---which I've done, as promised."

Her expression unclouded and she beamed at me. "Thank you! What a wonderful, devoted husband you are!"

I grinned back and made patting-myself-on-the-back motions. "This is too true."

She broke into a giggle, and in a light, teasing tone, added, "And your modesty is absolutely underwhelming! We're going to have to work on your insecurities!"

Then her mood sobered a bit, and she ventured, "What did I sing? Was it anything recognizable?"

I smiled and assured her, "It was very recognizable; it was an absolutely gorgeous rendition of one of Styx's songs---'Renegade'. But it's an arrangement I've never heard Styx use; it's been re-worked a little. I've heard Tommy singing it on the bus, out on the road, from time to time; it starts out, 'Oh Mama, I'm in fear for my life from the long arm of the law'."

Her mood sobered even more. "That one? Really? Oooh---that sounds ominous."

I raised a finger and murmured, "Hold that thought. What say we check to see if the suggestion did any good? Try singing something, and let's see how you sound."

She thought for a moment, then brightened a bit and told me, "I have the perfect thing; I've always loved 'The Wind Beneath My Wings'. Okay---here goes..."

She cleared her throat uncertainly, took a deep breath and launched into the opening: "It must have been cold there in my shadow---to never have sunlight on your face..."

It was breathtaking---rich, full, perfectly pitched and on-key...and she knew it before she got to the sixth word. Her eyes widened in astonishment at the sheer beauty of the sound she was emitting, and for a moment I thought she might falter and give up out of sheer surprise at how well she was doing, but she rallied and pushed onward, her voice soaring as she worked her way through the song.

By the time she'd finished, I was in tears. I tried hard to fight them back, but I lost ground too rapidly to even have a chance. That song always brings me to the verge of tears, despite the overbearingly macho ethos of the American male; this time, listening to my beautiful bride sing it, and so gorgeously at that---well, it was just more than my self-control could handle.

She'd been singing with her eyes closed through most of the song, lost in the music; as the last notes trembled and died away, she opened her eyes---and saw the look on my face. Apprehension flickered across her own face, and I could feel her reaction; she feared she'd done such a horrible job of things that I was on the verge of tears from the pain of it. I gulped, struggled to get my voice to working again, and tried to reassure her, but I croaked like a frog, and all that got out was, "Beautiful, darling. I---"

I gulped, hard, and tried again; this time I sounded almost human: "You have nothing to worry about, love---except maybe Bette Midler putting out a contract on you if she ever hears you do that. You'd shame her into early retirement with that voice."

She threw herself on me, smothering me with kisses and thanking me for being so kind as to help her get over one of her flaws.

By the time she got through thanking me, breakfast was stone cold.

So far as I was concerned, a cold meal was a small price to pay for the time I spent with my Wish.

As we settled down to deal with cold, soggy bacon and other such slightly-less-than-appetizing fare, I remembered what she'd been saying just before she'd tried singing, and asked, "Uh---what did you mean by that Styx song you were singing being ominous?"

She put down a slice of hardened toast and shuddered a little. "I'm not sure; it's just the feeling the incident leaves me with. I hope I'm not starting to precognate."

I almost laughed at the odd sound of the word. "Not starting to what??"

She shrugged a little uncertainly. "Well, whatever the verb form of 'precognition' is!"

That caught my attention. "You mean, you have premonitory dreams?"

She cocked her head at me curiously. "You mean, 'premonitory' as in 'premonition'? Wouldn't the adjectival form of that be 'premonitive'?"

I sighed, feeling a touch of irritation building.

"Wish, sweetie, that's not important. I just want to know if you have dreams of the future, because I sure do!"

She smiled---part sly, part shy, part mischief. "I know you do. I may actually know more about your paranormal abilities than you do, just now...but that's changing rapidly. As for the word in question---no, I really think it's 'premonitive'. Could you please hand me the dictionary from the pocket in the lid of my suitcase? Now this is bugging me, and it won't give me any peace until I resolve it."

That feeling of irritation was building. "Wish---it's not important, so get off the grammar, will you?"

She was already lost in thought. Absently, she held a hand out to me and murmured, "Actually, it's more syntax than grammar. Dictionary, please?"

God! She can be so single-minded at times!

I fished the dictionary out of her suitcase and handed it to her; she thumbed through it, found the definition and began reading it aloud: "Hmm...'premonition: A presentiment of the future; foreboding.' And the adjectival form is 'premonitory'. Okay, you were right. Now, I wonder what the difference between 'precognition' and 'premonition' is?"

She started thumbing through the dictionary again.

I sighed in exasperation and growled, "I'm going to go take a shower now."

I closed the bathroom door behind me just a little too hard---not hard enough to classify as a slam, but firmly enough to make my displeasure known. I didn't want to be a complete butthead about things, but I was too irritated to maintain complete cool, either; I really needed that second shower to calm myself down. After all, it would hardly do to throw my wife of only four days out a third-story window...

God bless her, though; she's a beautiful, brainy lady---and she is very stuck on words. She'd told me that she'd majored in Linguistics back in college---and she'd been pretty disappointed when I'd had to ask her what Linguistics is. I suppose I should've looked the word up in the dictionary instead of displaying my ignorance, but the thought simply didn't occur to me at the time. I also suppose I could have tried a little mind-peek to get the meaning from her, but intruding on her private thoughts without her express permission just rubs me the wrong way---altogether the wrong way. I don't go snooping around in other people's minds without good reason---and I mean something important has to be up to make me break my personal protocol like that...something on the order of a dire emergency---sometime when she was unable to speak, or was comatose, maybe.

That thought really hurt; I found myself scrubbing harder and faster so that I could get back to her all the sooner.

When I emerged from the bathroom, I found her all decked out in a deep pink sun dress that did absolutely nothing to conceal the fact that she was a woman---and she was very busy making up the bed. Never mind that the maid would tear the whole thing apart as soon as we left the room for the day; she was a fascinating conundrum...part wild woman, part shrinking violet; part little girl, part grandmother; part dizzy kid, part shaman; part dedicated housekeeper. She was like one of those little symbol-marked polygons used as game-guide dice in those role-playing board games; she was always in motion, and I never knew which side of her was going to land face-up next.

As I stepped back out into the bedroom, still damp around the edges and the towel flapping around my knees, she abandoned her bed-making and hurried over to throw her arms around me. "I'm sorry I annoyed you, Rain; would you like me to throw my dictionary out the window?"

I buried my nose in her hair, reveling in the scent of it, and chuckled, "Naw, you keep it, Perfesser! Besides, the way things usually work, it'd probably brain some poor, unsuspecting passer-by down there on the sidewalk and get us sued into the poorhouse, or something equally unpleasant and inconvenient."

She snuggled up into a kiss, and I forgot all about any irritation I'd been experiencing toward her. When we could both see and think straight again, she murmured, "Rain, about those precognitive dreams you have; how often do you have them, and how accurate are they?"

So, she had heard me! "Um---not very often...and most of the time I don't understand what they're about until after the events they're referring to have already occurred; most of the time I don't even know they're precognitive dreams until whatever I see in them happens in the waking world, and I can put two and two together. The symbologies in the dreams are never straightforward---they almost always apply to the events in question in some oblique way that I just don't see until after the fact. It's frustrating, let me tell you!"

Then another thought trickled past, and I laughed a little and added, "In fact, the clearest precognitive dreams I've ever had were all about you and Tommy...and I keep getting the feeling that there was nothing random or coincidental about their happening."

She smiled faintly, a little shy, a little sly. "No, they weren't; we sent those dreams to you deliberately. We took a terrible risk in doing it, because we had to ally ourselves with Nicodemus to pull it off---but it was either that, to get you together with us, or risk never being able to get back together with you at all in this lifetime, and having him track you down on his own and go after you in his own way."

I felt a chill crawl down my back. Tommy and Wish risked working with Castevet in order to reach me? The very thought of that scared me spitless; what kind of courage had it taken for them to walk into that monstrosity's clutches, just to reach me? And why had they put themselves at such risk for me?

Wish shuddered as she picked up my thought. "Tommy had no idea who or what Nicodemus was, while it was happening; it was necessary to keep him in the dark, or we couldn't have pulled it off. When he finally found out, he was upset with us for deceiving him about it, but he at least understood the necessity for the subterfuge. As for me---"

She broke off and shuddered again. "Well, let's just say that courage isn't a lack of fear; it's doing what has to be done in spite of your fear. And---"

She looked straight into my eyes and her grip on me tightened desperately; her eyes went bleak, and almost frantic. "---I had to find you again! Love may not truly conquer all, but it can drive people to extremes they'd otherwise never believe themselves capable of!"

She stopped for a moment to regain her composure, lowering her eyes and hugging me fiercely. When she looked back up again, she was her old self once more. "Sorry, sweetheart; I didn't mean to get all melodramatic on you. But believe me, you wouldn't want to cross swords with Nicodemus Castevet without the proper training, defenses---and backup! If he ever gets his claws into you, dying will be the nicest thing you can hope for!!"

I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling of being a pawn in some vast, incomprehensible chess game. She picked up the thought and shook her head grimly. "No, love...not a pawn. It would be more accurate to say that we risked a queen and a knight to rescue a bishop. Now we have to hope that Nicodemus doesn't launch some retaliatory gambit that we haven't been able to foresee and make provisions against."

This was getting a little too grim for my taste. I ventured a smile and a change of subject. "So, this singing and talking in your sleep; this isn't a new thing, with you?"

She shook her head, expression distant. "No. It's been going on since about age twelve. Dad tells me it's fairly normal for things like that to begin manifesting themselves around the onset of puberty."

I thought that over for a bit. "Hm. Puberty, huh? My psychic experiences started when I was barely out of diapers. What's the take on that?"

She nodded knowingly. "Most people who develop psychic abilities first notice them around the onset of puberty; it seems there's something about all those hormones hitting the brain that jars loose latent psychic abilities. But when someone begins experiencing psychic phenomena at a very early age, it's usually a sign of a very powerful psychic in the making; that's the way it was with Dad...when he was less than a year old, his mother discovered that she could always tell when something really bad was coming because he'd go completely ballistic and try to climb out of his crib, as if he were trying to get away from something. He almost broke an arm once, doing that; the next day a storm blew a tree down in their back yard, and almost crushed the south side of the house, where the nursery was located. Dad had refused to sleep in his crib all that night---and it was just as well, because the tree brought the ceiling down on the entire nursery, and destroyed his crib. If he'd stayed there, or his mother had forced him to sleep there, no matter what - which was fairly common behavior for mothers of that time - he would have been killed."

She shuddered at the thought, and got back to the original subject quickly; it was a lot less grim. "Of course, early displays of psychic ability isn't an infallible sign of a powerful Psi in the making; if the person's raised in an environment that's severely restrictive or suppressive about psychic matters, it's possible to develop psychological blocks against psychic abilities that can effectively kill off any Gifts a person's born with."

I sighed. "My parents were dead set against anything that smacked of the paranormal; the subject was never allowed in the house. I didn't even realize what was happening to me until I hit my teens, and stumbled across a book on the subject in the library."

Her sigh was sad. "It happens that way to so many people. I was lucky; Dad recognized it in me as soon as it began happening, and encouraged me in it. Too bad you weren't so fortunate."

I was getting grunged out again. Time for another change of subject. "How about sleepwalking? Any of that?"

She shook her head. "No---but plenty of floating."

That brought me tp a dead halt. "Floating? You mean, like in levitation?"

She sighed, and even though her expression didn't change detectably, I could feel tension creeping into her. "No, I mean as in astral projection...O.O.B.E.s."

That one stopped me dead. "Huh? What's an 'oobee'?"

She frowned faintly. "There's some debate about that. Some maintain that it's simply a temporary separation of the soul from the body; others maintain that it's a part of the N.D.E.."

"Oobee"? "Indy"? What in the world is she talking about?

"Wish, honey---do me a favor and can the jargon, will you? Just tell me what you're talking about in plain English."

She sighed unhappily. "If you'd already been through the books Tommy gave you to read, you'd be familiar with the terms by now---but I can understand why you balked at carrying out his orders; he doesn't have any right to give orders---this isn't the military, after all. He can be a real Nimrod at times; in some respects, his social skills are only slightly better developed than Razor's...and there are times when I'm absolutely amazed that Razor's allowed to claim membership in the human race."

She hesitated, a chagrined look spread across her face, and she ducked her head a little ashamedly. "I'm sorry, sweetheart; it's just that when I get nervous, I tend to beat around the bush."

I chuckled and tickled her a little. "I didn't notice you beating aroung the bush on our wedding night!"

She smiled impishly, hugged me fiercely and murmured, "Who said I was nervous that night?"

I sighed and hugged her; there went the irritation, whiffing away into the ionosphere again. "Well, try to get back to what we were talking about, love; I'd really like to know what these 'oobees' and 'indys' are."

She sighed, and I felt the tension creeping back in her again. I hugged her tight to reassure her and murmured, "C'mon, sweetie---don't tense up over this, now."

She took a deep breath, set her jaw determinedly and said, "Okay. 'Oobee' is an abbreviation for 'Out-Of-Body Experience'. It's spelled O.O.B.E.. And 'indy' is an abbreviation for 'Near Death Experience'; it's spelled N.D.E.. O.O.B.E.s and astral projection are generally considered to be the same things, and the reports are that when a person dies, he essentially goes through an O.O.B.E., with the notable exception that his silver cord snaps, and leaves him with no way to get back to his body."

I sighed; more jargon to plow through. "'Silver cord'?"

She nodded firmly. "Yes. When you undergo an O.O.B.E., there's a direct connection between your physical body and your astral body; it appears to astral travelers as a pearlescent silver umbilical cord, stretching between the physical body's navel and the astral body's navel. It serves as a guide back to the physical body, and it seems to be infinitely elastic; no matter where you go during astral travel, it stretches to whatever length is necessary, and almost never shows any signs of straining or of being in any danger of breaking. But when a person dies, the astral body/soul complex disconnects from the physical body completely; the silver cord snaps---and there's no longer a guideline back to the body for the soul."

A faint memory of something of that sort flickered past---a fragment of a dream recollection. "Is this in one of those books?"

She nodded. "Uh-huh---The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal. You really need to read up on these things."

I had a strong feeling that she was dead right. "I will. So, you go through these O.O.B.E.s?"

She really tensed up at that. I could feel tears welling up in her. "Are you afraid, sweetie?"

She shuddered a little and nodded. "It's just that all this is leading up to something I'm afraid you might not understand. You see, I keep having dreams about a place I've never been to. I can't be sure just what it is: It might be some form of astral projection; then again, it might be precognitive dreaming---or it might be related to a past life, or it might be something from a parallel life---or it might just be some dream theme that's gotten stuck in my head and keeps repeating itself for no good reason. I don't know. But in these dreams I always end up driving down the same highway, through the same intersection, past the same traffic light, past the same on-ramp, past the same road construction to my right---all of it! And it's happened so often that I've gotten to where I recognize these landmarks from past dreams while I'm dreaming, and I start getting scared and upset. I mean, being consciously aware of what's going on in a dream and reating to it intelligently is all a part of lucid dreaming---and I've never had any success in achieving lucid dreams...at least, not with my deliberate efforts."

Oboy---more jargon. "Uh---what's a 'lucid dream'?"

She was almost too upset to answer me; about the time I'd decided it would be better to just go look the matter up in The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, she took a deep breath and explained, "Lucid dreams are an altered dream state wherein you're consciously aware of the fact that you're dreaming while you're dreaming---and you're able to deliberately change the course of the dreams by means of the actions you choose to take while in the dream."

That one brought me to another halt. "Whoa, there---I've never had a dream where I was anything but a helpless slob along for a ride I had absolutely no control over! When did they invent this 'lucid dreaming' stuff, anyway?"

She shrugged. "As I understand it, it's a fairly recent development. It started off as an experiment in possible psychic development, and worked out to be something a little more powerful. People who master the art are literally able to program their minds to dream about any problem they have, and have their subconscious minds find the necessary solutions for them. The problem is, the people who can actually master the art of lucid dreaming seem to be even greater rarities than well-developed psychics. As well-developed as I am in some of the psychic arts, I've never been able to voluntarily induce lucid dreams...so these dreams of that town and the construction site have been really stressing me out, because I can almost take voluntary action in the dreams, but I never quite seem to be able to achieve it!"

She was shaking, sweating, and clammy; I decided to put an end to the discussion: "Okay, sweetie, we won't talk about this now---maybe not for a long time, if you don't want. Now, why don't you put on that cardiac-arrest swimsuit of yours, and let's go down to the beach?"

I hugged her, willing to take on the whole world, if I had to, to protect her---and kissed her, hard. When she was able to see straight again, she smiled a little wanly and nodded agreement. She got up wordlessly and went to dig out her killer swimsuit.