Quentin glanced at him, then shrugged. "I've never been able to use my ability as an investigative tool. It's never been under my control in any sense."

"We'll teach you how to exert whatever control is possible. Teach you how to focus and channel your abilities. How to use them to aid an investigation."

"Will you? Can you do it?"

Bishop smiled faintly at the direct challenge, but rather than answering looked out over the valley and put all his concentration into opening up and strengthening his "normal" five senses. It was like having a blurry image snap suddenly into focus, while in the background faint sounds became louder, clearer, and he could smell the roses far below.

He wasn't about to admit to Quentin that the term coined for what he was doing was using his "spider sense," not after the other man's mocking reference to comic books.

"Bishop—"

"Wait." He reached out farther, and heard bits of conversation from the searching officers and hotel employees, words and phrases, disjointed and unimportant. Beneath the scents of roses and other flowers and freshly mown grass, he caught the savory odors of cooking from the hotel's kitchen, and someone's tangy perfume or aftershave, and the warm, dusty scents of horses and hay and leather. The razor-sharpness of what he saw blurred as though a zoom lens sought distant objects and struggled to bring them into focus.

Bishop pushed harder, reached farther.

The colors washed into one another, the scents blended unpleasantly into a thick miasma that caused his stomach to churn, and the sounds and voices he heard were a cacophony pounding inside his head—

" — or we could check down by the creek — "

" — of course I wasn't flirting with him — "

" — the guest in the Orchid Room needs — "