Bridal Jitters

by Jayne Castle

  “Uh, Drake, I don’t like the looks of these traps.”

  “I don’t give a damn how they look to you. Start takin’ ‘em apart.”

  “There’s something real weird—”

  “Shut up and get to work, Chaz. Unless you wanna explain things to Fairbanks.”

  “Sure. Okay. I’m workin’ on it.”

  “Oh, damn,” Virginia whispered. “He’s going to do it.”

  Sam took his eyes off the lane long enough to look at her. The stark alarm in her voice worried him. She was scared, he thought. Genuinely, thoroughly, deep-down scared.

  “What is it with you and these traps?” he started to ask.

  “Sam.” Her eyes widened in sudden alarm. “Get down. Now.”

  “Take it easy, honey, I’ve got to keep watch—”

  “He’s got it. He’s undone the first trap. I can feel it.”

  “It’s okay—”

  “No, it’s not okay.” She flew toward him across the room and seized his arm. “Get away from the window.”

  Automatically, he started to resist the tug of her fingers. But the urgency in her was not to be ignored. He reminded himself that traps fell into her area of expertise. They were partners. He had to respect her instincts.

  He allowed himself to be drawn away from the window. She pulled him deeper into the room.

  “Down,” she whispered, dragging him down behind a large quartz chest. “Hurry.”

  He crouched beside her, the mag-rez gun in hand. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”

  Before she could respond, an inhuman shriek of mingled rage and despair rent the gloom of the alien zoo. It echoed endlessly off the walls. Sam froze, his hand tightening convulsively around the gun. Beside him, Virginia shuddered.

  “What in the name of Old Earth ... ?” Sam whispered.

  A very human shout went up, a high, keening cry of terror.

  “There’s something in there.”

  Chaz, the tangler, Sam thought.

  “... Get outa here ...”

  Another alien scream rose, joining the crescendoing wail of the first. And then a torrent of screeches, shrieks, howls, and dreadful cries arose. There was a hellishly mournful quality to the unnatural sounds, as though whatever had once inhabited the small cells had been aroused from their centuries-deep sleep to protest the disturbance. The cacophony of otherworldly cries drowned out the screams of Chaz and Drake.

  The vast zoo room began to darken. The green gloom seemed to thicken and grow dense. Sam followed Virginia’s gaze. They both looked out the narrow window. It was like looking into the depths of an alien sea.

  “Dear heaven.” Virginia said in amazement.

  He knew what was going through her mind. There was no such thing as night and day in the ruins. The glow of the quartz was always steady. True, there had been more than the usual number of shadows in the zoo chamber, but there had been light, and it had remained at a constant level.

  Until now.

  Only the chamber in which they crouched remained luminous.

  Jagged shards of green lightning flashed outside the narrow opening, shattering the heavy darkness that enveloped the zoo. The alien shrieks grew louder.

  More lightning sizzled. As Sam watched, an acid-hued bolt of energy illuminated some thing that floated in midair outside the window. He caught a glimpse of a green phantom so gossamer thin and transparent that he could see straight through it to the opposite wall. As he watched, another specter joined the first.

  “UDEMs,” Virginia whispered. “When Chaz untangled the trap he must have disturbed some.”

  “Whatever the hell those two things are, they aren’t standard-issue energy ghosts.” Sam probed cautiously, feeling for the telltale trace of psi energy emitted by normal unstable dissonance energy manifestations. What he picked up with his para senses felt wrong. He cut off the probe immediately. He did not want to draw the attention of the strange specters.

  “If they’re not UDEMs, what are they?” she asked very softly.

  “They’re energy ghosts of some kind but not like any I’ve ever dealt with. Look at the way they move.”

  “As if—” Virginia hesitated. “As if they’re headed somewhere.”

  “Yeah. Right toward Chaz and Drake.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She was right, of course. UDEMs were not sentient beings. They certainly weren’t the ghosts of long-dead aliens, although more than one or two hucksters and con men had tried to convince the gullible of that over the years.

  Technically speaking, UDEMS were nothing more than balls of residual psi energy left behind by whatever had once powered Harmonic technology. The only reason they were called ghosts was because they tended to drift through the ancient corridors like ghosts.

  Green lightning zigzagged through the misty darkness outside the window. More ghosts drifted past the opening, streaming toward the entrance of the zoo chamber.

  “Damn,” Sam said. “What the devil is going on out there?”

  “I don’t know, but I can tell you that this is Chaz’s fault,” Virginia said grimly. “He set them off. I knew there was something strange about those traps.”

  The hideous wails continued to rise and fall in the unnatural night.

  “Sounds like a reunion of lost souls,” Virginia whispered. “I can’t even hear Chaz and Drake now. Wonder what’s happened to them?”

  “Maybe we don’t want to know.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  Virginia huddled close, but Sam noticed that she was careful not to impede his gun hand. Not that the mag-rez would be effective against whatever was out there, he thought. If one of the things changed course and drifted through the window, their only hope would be his psi-talent.

  More lightning sparked violently. Again and again it shattered the night. But there was no accompanying roll of thunder, Sam noticed. For some reason that only made the energy flashes seem all the more bizarre.

  “It’s like there’s a storm going on out there,” Virginia muttered.

  “Maybe that’s exactly what it is,” Sam said, thinking about it. “An energy storm triggered by the untangling of the first trap.”

  “But to what purpose?”

  “Who knows? We’re talking about the Harmonics here. No one has a clue about why they did anything. If the place was a zoo or a prison, it’s possible those in charge installed some unusual security measures. Maybe we’re witnessing some kind of system meant to round up the escapees.”

  “Sam.” Virginia touched his arm, her eyes fixed on the window. “Look.”

  “I see it.”

  One of the phantoms had halted in front of the opening. Sam told himself that it was just a mindless UDEM, but it was all too easy to imagine that it was peering into this room as if it sensed prey.

  He readied himself, not wanting to use psi energy unless there was no alternative, because he could not be sure that his talent would work against this stuff.

  The ghost hovered. The brightest portion of it was at least three feet in length, but its aura flared out in a much wider band of acid green.

  It drifted through the window.

  “Damn.”

  Beside him, Virginia sucked in a deep breath, but she said nothing.

  Decision time, Sam thought. He could either try to prod it back out the window or he could attempt to clobber it. He opted for the gentle nudge.

  He sent out a pulse of psi-talent, gently summoning energy from the quartz walls, ceiling, and floor. A small ball of glowing green fire took shape in the center of the room. He propelled it gently toward the intruder.

  The strange UDEM that had drifted through the window paused as though confused. Then, to Sam’s enormous relief, it retreated from the smaller ghost.

  It wafted back out through the window and disappeared in the wake of the school of phantoms roaming through the streets of the zoo.

  Virginia exhaled on
a long, soft sigh. “Nice. Very nice.”

  He could almost taste his own relief. For the first time, he realized that his shirt was stuck to his back. “Don’t ever say I don’t know how to show a lady a fun time on Halloween.”

  “A lot of hunters would have tried to blast it to smithereens,” she said very seriously. “For some reason, I don’t think that tactic would have worked.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t think it would have.”

  The storm crackled and blazed. An endless parade of desolate-sounding specters and phantoms flitted past the window.

  The tempest seemed to rage for hours, but when at last it began to abate, Sam looked at his watch. He was startled to see that only twenty-three minutes had passed.

  “I think it’s ending,” Virginia said.

  Gradually, the unholy wails receded. The flashes of lightning grew pale, then ceased altogether. As if some invisible hand had flipped a switch, the familiar green glow seeped back into the atmosphere. The strange darkness retreated into the pooling shadows from which it had come.

  “Must have seemed like an eternity to Chaz and Drake,” Virginia whispered.

  “It may have turned out to be just that.”

  “Are you saying you don’t think they survived it?”

  “I don’t know what was going on out there, but whatever it was, they were caught out in the open.” Sam smiled slightly. “Thanks to you, we were safe in this room.”

  He got cautiously to his feet and went to the window. When he looked out he saw that everything looked very much as it had just before the tempest had been triggered.

  Virginia stood slowly behind the chest. “Now what?”

  “Now we get the heck out of here before someone else sets off another storm.” He moved swiftly back toward her. “Ready?”

  “If you’re waiting for me, you’re backing up.”

  They found Chaz and Drake lying on the floor near the main gate into the zoo. It was obvious that the two desperate men had tried to flee back through it, but something had caused the illusion trap there to reset itself. The energy storm had caught up with the pair before Chaz could untangle the trap a second time.

  Virginia hesitated and then went down beside one of the men and checked for a pulse. She looked up in surprise. “He’s unconscious, but alive.”

  “Same here.” Sam rifled through the pockets of the man dressed in leather and khaki until he found a guild license and an amber-powered grid locator. “This is all we need. The locator shows three exits in this sector. We won’t have to go back through the waterfall, after all.”

  “What are you going to do with that man’s guild license?”

  “I’ll give it to Mercer Wyatt. He can take it from there.” Sam got to his feet. “The guild polices its own.”

  Virginia gave him an odd look. “You’re, uh, friends with the head of Hunter’s Guild?”

  “Let’s just say that Wyatt and I have a nodding acquaintance. He owes me a couple of favors.” Sam studied the illusion trap that guarded the exit. “Go ahead and de-rez it. I’ll drag these two out of here. We’ll leave them in the corridor. Wyatt can send one of his staff to clean up this mess.”

  Chapter 5

  “We were worried sick.” Adeline helped herself to a leftover black-and-orange cupcake from the plate on Virginia’s desk. “First we hear that you and Sam have gone missing in the corridors: a report which, I hasten to add, none of your buddies believed for one tiny minute, because we all know how good you and Sam are; and then we learn that the two of you got zapped by some sort of massive ghost called a waterfall.”

  “The waterfall part was for real.” Virginia rocked back in her chair and took a sip of hot, spiced cider. “But, as you can see, neither of us got zapped.”

  She peered at her watch, wondering what was keeping Sam. After talking to the police, he had gone to meet with Mercer Wyatt. She had not liked that. It was no secret in Cadence City that Wyatt ran the guild as though it was his own, private fiefdom. A lot of folks, including an editorial writer on the Cadence Star considered him no more than one or two steps removed from being a gangster. But she could not argue with the fact that if you were a ghost-hunter, you had to form some sort of business relationship with the guild. She had not asked Sam just what kind of terms he had worked out with Wyatt. She was not sure she wanted to know.

  “So what, exactly, was going on down there in the tunnels?” Adeline asked around a mouthful of cupcake.

  “A band of ruin rats headed by a recently fired employee of the University Museum named Fairbanks uncovered a hole-in-the-wall just beneath the museum’s basement. They were using it to siphon off some of the museum’s holdings. Stuff that had been in storage for years, which might not have been missed for years. If Mac Ewert hadn’t accidentally stumbled onto that waterfall and asked us to help him de-rez it, the rats probably would never have been caught.”

  Holes-in-the-wall were not uncommon. They usually took the form of tiny cracks and fissures through which little more than ambient psi energy could squeeze. But some of the openings in the thick quartz walls and underground corridors were large enough for a man to crawl through. A few were even bigger: eons-old stairwells and empty shafts that no longer ascended anywhere. It was one of those that Fairbanks, a powerful tangler, had discovered while laboring in the basement of the huge museum.

  Adeline gazed at her with the look of a professional inquisitor. “What now?”

  Virginia shrugged. “The cops take it from here. Last I heard, they’d picked up everyone involved except Leon Drummond. But I doubt if he’ll escape. Not with the guild looking for him as well as the police.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your big case. I know the firm of Gage & Burch has closed it. Probably be all over the evening news.” Adeline selected a black-and-orange petit four. “I meant what happens now with you and Sam?”

  Virginia took another sip of hot cider and contemplated the heavy mist that drifted in the street outside the office window.

  She thought about the passion that had exploded between them in the little fountain chamber.

  “Good question,” she said quietly.

  The narrow streets and twisted lanes of the Old Quarter were thick with fog, but that did not deter the throngs of hobgoblins, ghosts, witches, and assorted monsters who had come to the district to celebrate Halloween.

  Virginia walked out of the little corner restaurant with Sam at her side shortly after ten. She could feel the stray pulses of psi energy that leaked from the ruins. They seemed stronger than usual tonight. Maybe it was true that the Dead City was more alive at Halloween than at other times. She was aware of constant little frissons across her para senses. Some just tickled; some were more disturbing. But she could not be sure that all of them were caused by ambient Harmonic energy. She knew that some of the ripples were attributable to Sam, who seemed blithely oblivious to the new level of awareness that pulsed between them.

  When he had suggested dinner together earlier, she had been sure that he wanted to talk about their future. But the only thing that had been discussed over a bottle of wine and a leisurely meal of tapenade-tossed cheese ravioli and good bread had been their case.

  She did not want to hear another word about their case. She was heartily sick and tired of discussing their case.

  Sam paused on the restaurant step and eyed the tide of costumed celebrants that flooded the street.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of ghosts and goblins for a while,” he said. “What do you say we take a shortcut home and drink a private toast to the successful finale of Gage & Burch’s first case?”

  Home. To talk some more about their stupid case. Virginia steeled herself. “Sam, we need to talk about us.”

  “I know,” he said.

  She was so surprised by his casual agreement that she was momentarily speechless. His mouth curved slightly as he took her arm and steered her along a side street, away from the crowds of revelers.

/>   She shoved her gloved hands into the pockets of her coat and slanted him a sidelong glance. His expression was as enigmatic as ever, but she sensed something going on beneath the surface.

  She had come to know him better than she had realized during these past few weeks. And much of what she now knew for certain verified her initial impression. Her instincts had been right that first day. The cool, self-contained veneer was a cover for the deep passions, the unyielding determination, and the rock-solid strength that was at the core of this man. If Sam Gage gave you his word of honor, you could take it to the bank.

  If Sam Gage ever said he loved you, you could depend on that love forever.

  Commitments like that were dangerous things. Sam probably knew that better than anyone else, she thought. Maybe that was why he was so cautious about making them in the first place.

  She decided to take the plunge.

  “Sam, about our marriage—”

  “I don’t want an MC,” he said bluntly.

  That brought her to an abrupt halt in the middle of the sidewalk. She stopped and swung around to face him. “You’ve changed your mind?”

  “Yes.” He watched her with unreadable eyes. “It won’t work. I can’t handle it.”

  Despair jolted through her. “You can’t handle it? But you’re the one who suggested it in the first place.”

  “It was a mistake. I think I knew it all along, but after what happened in the ruins, I’m sure of it.”

  “I see.” She did not know what to say. This was not how she had anticipated the conversation would end. “I thought that after what had happened, you might feel differently, but I didn’t realize—”

  “A marriage-of-convenience will drive me crazy,” he interrupted. “I don’t want—”

  He broke off suddenly as a goblin-masked figure in a long black coat stepped out of the shadows. Light gleamed wickedly on a mag-rez gun.