Free The Chamber of Ten by Christopher Golden Page A

of his mind did not feel like his. Sensitive to the thoughts and emotions of others, able to touch their minds with his own, he had spent his entire life learning to sort out the difference between his own internal voice and those of others, and he knew that this voice did not belong to him. Nico was afraid, and yet fascinated as well.
    The stone jar
, he thought.
The urn
. And he knew it had begun with that. Down in the strange subchamber beneath Petrarch’s library, he had tapped into some enormous psychic repository from Venice’s past. He could see and taste and smell things as they had been in centuries past. These sensations came in flashes and visions and in whispers in his mind.
    As a boy, whenever he had changed schools and been surrounded by new people—even when he had first attended university—he had needed to take time to adjust to the tidal wave of new minds around him, to build up fresh walls. A day or two would be all he needed to sort himself out, to quiet the voices in his head and reassert his own thoughts. To be himself.
    This would be the same, he felt certain. Somehow he had tapped into some kind of psychic reserve and now it echoed around inside of him, making him feel as though his thoughts were not his own. For now, that meant trying to shut out the rest of the world—even Geena—and focus on this opportunity. He could see the past as thoughhis own eyes had witnessed it, feel the power of the man whose memories had seeped into his own … for certainly he had been powerful. And a psychic as well. He must have been, for Nico to pick up such powerful emotional residue from that chamber.
    What are you thinking? You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about
.
    He mocked his own presumptions. True, he had never experienced anything like this, nor even heard of anything remotely resembling this turn of events in the research he had done about his own abilities. But what else could it be? It made a bizarre kind of sense. He thought about scientific theories concerning haunted houses, in which “ghosts” were explained as the resonance left behind by traumatic or otherwise emotional events. He wasn’t sure how much of that he believed, but he knew what he felt right now, and “haunted” was as good a word as any.
    A day or two and he’d be just fine. The blackout moments would go away, the compulsions would vanish, the voice and its memories would be gone. But while they were with him, he knew he had to use them, to glean what he could about the history of Venice from the information and the feelings suffusing his every thought. Most people would find it terrifying—and the compulsion to act did frighten him a little, as did the blackouts—but now as his thoughts regained some semblance of order, Nico realized that for an archaeologist, this was the opportunity of a lifetime.
    When he and Geena made love, and sometimes even just in quiet moments they spent together, he felt as though her thoughts were a part of him instead of some external thing he could tap into. This made that seemlike nothing. He felt the presence of this “other” inside his every thought, there with him, and he even knew the name of the man whose psychic echoes were reverberating through his mind and had drawn him here.
    Zanco Volpe
.
    Nico knew Geena had sensed some of this, though how much he could not be sure. He ought to have talked to her about it. She would have been fascinated, wanting to know every detail, and it would have been natural for him to share that with her. Yet he had found himself attempting to hide his thoughts from her, trying to put up barriers between them. It hurt and confused him to shut her out, and he could not really have said why he did it.
    But some of the wild tumult of his mind had spilled out to her, he knew. Geena herself was not a sensitive, but over the course of their relationship they had built up a rapport so intimate, their minds so open to each other, that he could not