by Jayne Castle
“You opened your own gate. How did you manage that?”
She moved one hand slightly. “Turns out those of us who can work amethyst are good at opening jungle gates.” She paused a beat before adding, “Guess you could say it’s an aspect of our talent. Not quite as interesting as the Sweetwater instinct for sex, of course, nevertheless—”
“When did you find out that you could resonate with amethyst?” he asked.
“When I was fourteen. My grandfather had a small sample of it. He thought it was just a pretty specimen. But one day he let me hold it, and we both realized that I could work it the way other people work standard amber. Trouble was, there didn’t seem to be any practical application.”
“Until you found the chamber and the relics inside.”
“Yes.”
“What’s your theory about the artifacts that you found in the ruin?”
“Believe it or not, I already told you the truth. I really do think that those stones are nothing more than some kind of alien psi art. When I tune them to an individual, the way I did that one for you, the person can experience the art with his or her paranormal senses. But that’s it. There’s no big secret to discover in your lab.”
He was silent for a while.
“Okay,” he said. This time his voice was a little too neutral.
She stilled. “Okay?”
“You’re not ready to trust me. I can handle that. For now.”
Oh, damn. He knows. No, more likely he had made a calculated guess. Either way, he suspected her of holding out on him.
“Look, Cruz, I’m telling you—”
“Time to change the subject again.”
“We seem to be doing that a lot tonight.”
“Yes,” he said. “We do.”
He brought the car to a halt in front of her apartment building. This time she waited in her seat until he came around to the passenger side to open the door. She needed the few seconds alone to think about what had just gone down between them. There could no longer be any doubt. Cruz not only wanted her cooperation at the lab, he was certain that she had concealed some of the artifacts that she had found in the ruin. So much for Nancy’s romantic imaginings and all that talk about the Sweetwater instinct for true love.
Now what?
Before she could come up with an answer, Cruz opened the door. She got out and walked with him toward the entrance.
She was digging into her little handbag for her key when two balls of violent green ghost fire exploded on the sidewalk, trapping both her and Cruz against the wall of the building.
There was nothing supernatural about ghost energy. Technically, energy ghosts were known as UDEMs—unstable dissonance energy manifestations. They were essentially small storms of chaotic alien psi.
Even a brush with the flaring green fires could fry the victim’s para-senses, sometimes beyond recovery. A sustained encounter could kill.
Wild energy ghosts were a common problem in the catacombs, but they did not exist aboveground unless generated by someone who could work ghost energy: a ghost hunter. Two ghosts meant two Guild men were in the vicinity. Rogue hunters were known to use their talents to commit street crimes. Having a ghost shoved in your face was as intimidating as having a mag-rez gun pointed at you.
“Oh, geez, we’re going to get mugged,” Lyra said. “Talk about the perfect ending to the evening.”
Cruz did not respond. He was watching two men move out of the fog-bound shadows of an alley. The fierce glow of the raging green energy ghosts gleamed on the highly illegal mag-rez guns in their hands. The weapons were aimed at Cruz.
“Get him,” one of the men said. “But don’t hurt the woman.”
Lyra had only an instant to comprehend the fact that this was no routine street robbery, that the thugs intended to murder Cruz.
And then all the light went out of the night.
Between one panicky heartbeat and the next, she was plunged into a nightmare of absolute darkness and terrifying silence.
There should be gunshots, she thought. Why don’t I hear the gunshots?
They say you never hear the shot that gets you.
Maybe this state of utter oblivion was death.
Chapter 13
CRUZ SAW LYRA COLLAPSE TO THE PAVEMENT BESIDE him, but there was nothing he could do for her now. There would be time for explanations later, he thought. First things first. Priorities.
He continued to focus energy through the obsidian amber in his ring, trapping his prey in a disorienting no-man’s-land of featureless psi fog.
He could not shield Lyra. The talent did not work that way. It was linked to his aura. When he was generating this much power, everyone in a radius of twelve to fifteen feet around him was enveloped in the mist. Except for him.
In this eerie state he was the ultimate predator, because only he could use his senses. The others had gone night blind in the most extreme manner imaginable, all of their normal senses shut down.
The nasty energy ghosts the two thugs had generated guttered and went out like candles extinguished in the rain as the attackers lost their ability to hold a focus. The men yelled in panic and floundered. Their guns clattered on the pavement.
The dark thrill of impending violence swept through Cruz. He went swiftly toward the first man.
NOTHING MADE SENSE. THE DISORIENTATION WAS COMPLETE. The world as she knew it had vanished. It was as if she had been plucked from the street and dropped into the deepest ocean abyss. Even the eternal glow cast by the Dead City wall disappeared. The balls of ghost fire vanished. There were no headlights in the street. Nothing.
All of her normal senses were affected. In addition to not being able to see or hear, she could no longer orient herself physically. Up and down had no meaning. The only reason she knew she had fallen to the sidewalk was because of the pain that jolted through her.
The shock of the fall was oddly reassuring. If she could feel normal pain, she probably wasn’t dead.
Her first coherent thought was that two men were intending to gun down Cruz, and she was unable to do anything to help him because she had been struck by one of her waking nightmares. Panic and rage surged through her. Not now, damn it. He couldn’t die. He had just come back to her. She would not let him go again, even if he was trying to manipulate her.
Her physical senses were deadened, but perhaps her para-senses were not as badly affected. Desperately she concentrated on pushing energy through her amethyst charms, willing the world to snap back into focus around her.
The street scene rushed back, but because she was viewing it with only her other senses, it had a strange, surreal quality. The colors of objects were all in the paranormal range. The street sign glowed ultraviolet. The wet pavement gleamed ultragreen. The lights of an upstairs window across the street appeared as an aurora of ultra-yellow.
She had never before been forced to rely only on her para-senses. They usually worked naturally with a person’s normal senses. But in this strange state, all of the stimuli came to her from only the paranormal end of the spectrum.
She heard sound, but she perceived it differently. There was, however, no mistaking the thuds, grunts and—most unnerving of all—the shriek of a man crying out in shock and pain.
She turned her head and saw two shadowy figures. It was impossible to see their physical features, because each was surrounded by a spiking aura. One man staggered around in a circle, arms flailing. The other moved in on him, gliding forward in a frighteningly graceful dance that promised to end in violence. A third man was motionless on the ground.
She had no doubt as to the identity of the man who was closing in for what looked like the kill. She would know him anywhere.
“Cruz,” she whispered.
In this para-dimension, her voice echoed weirdly. She could not hear herself the way she did when she was using her regular senses. The lack of familiar auditory feedback added to the hallucinatory atmosphere.
A small creature, its aura glowi
ng brightly, dashed out of the darkness and charged for the man Cruz was about to take down.
“Vincent,” Lyra said. “No, wait. Come here.”
Vincent, fur sleeked back, ignored her. He dashed in to nip at his target’s heels.
The thug screeched. “Get away from me. Get away.”
But Cruz was also moving in, lightning fast. He made a quick, chopping motion with one hand. The ghost hunter went down, crumpling on the pavement beside his partner.
The world jolted back. Lyra’s normal senses kicked in with jarring suddenness. Vincent leaped up into her arms, rumbling with concern. She gathered him close and watched Cruz scoop up the mag-rez guns.
“Are you all right?” she whispered. Her voice sounded tense but normal once again.
He came toward her, still moving with that disturbingly lethal grace. She sensed that he was startled to see her on her feet.
“I’m fine,” he said. “What about you?”
“I’m okay. I’m . . . a little shaken up, I guess.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not exactly your fault.”
“We’ll talk about it later. Right now we have to deal with this pair.”
“Okay.”
Vincent was once again fully fluffed, hunting eyes closed. He chortled his customary cheerful greeting to Lyra, as though nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred.
Cruz took a phone from his pocket. “I’ll have someone pick up these guys.”
“Someone?” She frowned. “You mean the police, right? Please tell me you’re calling the cops.”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I’m calling the Guild’s security people.”
“Damn it, Cruz, the police are supposed to handle this sort of thing.”
“Those two are ghost hunters and, like they say, the Guild polices its own. Besides, I need answers, and I’m a lot more likely to get them faster out of my friends at Guild security than I am from the Frequency PD.”
There was no point arguing with him. She subsided, fuming. It was just one more example of the arrogance of both Amber Inc. and the local Guild. But she also knew that Cruz was right. When it came to rogue ghost hunters, the Frequency cops took the old-fashioned view. They, too, preferred to let the Guild take care of its own problems.
Cruz spoke briefly to someone on the phone and then cut the connection. He looked at Lyra again.
“Take Vincent upstairs,” he said. “I’ll wait here until Guild security collects these two, and then I’ll be up. We need to talk.”
“About what?” she asked.
“About what just happened here.”
She searched his face. “It was an attempted mugging. A street robbery.”
“Maybe.” He dropped the phone into his pocket and crossed to the nearest of the two unconscious men.
A fresh wave of alarm shot through her. “What do you mean?”
Crouching, he went swiftly, methodically, through the hunter’s pockets. “I don’t think that these two were just a pair of opportunists. They were waiting for us.”
“How do you know that?”
“Got a talent for this kind of thing.”
Chapter 14
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER HE GOT INTO THE ELEVATOR and rode it to the fourth floor. The gunmen had been taken away in the back of a black-windowed Guild car, but he was still feeling the intense aftereffects that always followed the use of a lot of psi.
He was in control—he was always in control. With a talent like his, it was a necessity. But he knew from previous experience that willpower alone did not protect him from the afterburn. In some primitive part of his brain, he was the hunter returning from a successful kill. And tonight the sensation was a thousand times more charged, because his mate was waiting for him.
Except that Lyra did not yet get that part of things, he thought.
She must have heard him coming down the hall, because the door of the apartment opened just as he reached it. Lyra stood in the little entryway, her eyes dark with anxiety. A white robe and a pair of slippers had replaced the black dinner dress and sexy heels. Her hair was down and a little tousled. Vincent was on her shoulder, looking cheerful as usual. Of the three of them, he was the only one who was unconcerned, Cruz thought. Dust bunnies lived in the moment.
“Are they gone?” Lyra asked, peering out into the hall as though fearful that the thugs had followed him.
“They’re gone.” He just stood there on the threshold, looking at her, aware that everything inside him had just tightened up another notch. He should not go inside the apartment, not in his present condition. But he had to talk to her. He needed to take the edge off first, though.
“I could use a drink,” he said.
“You aren’t the only one.” She stepped back. “I got out the bottle of Amber Dew.”
“Works for me.”
When she turned away to walk toward the kitchen, it was all he could do not to reach out and catch hold of her. Everything in him was clamoring to pull her into his arms. He managed to keep his hands off her, but it was one of the hardest things he had ever done. He really should not have come up here. This was a mistake, a really big one.
He closed the door with a sense of doomed finality and followed Lyra. Halfway across the living room area, he dropped his jacket over the back of the reading chair.
Seemingly oblivious of his mood, Lyra went behind the counter and poured a stiff measure into each of the two glasses she had set out. Losing interest, Vincent hopped down from her shoulder and went to investigate the cookie jar.
Lyra lifted the lid off the jar. “Take your choice, pal. You deserve it.”
Vincent vibrated with anticipation. He jumped up onto the rim of the jar and surveyed the offerings with the air of a pirate savoring his loot. After a moment of dithering, he seized a cookie and hopped back down onto the counter.
Lyra replaced the lid and picked up her drink. She gulped some down and promptly started to cough.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Cruz asked.
“Oh, yeah, swell.” Gasping, she set the glass down with a crack. “Never better. You?”
He loved this about her. She was a real fighter, endowed with enough spirit, guts, and determination to power an army. Nothing got her down for long. No matter what you did to her—lie to her; steal her amber claim; crush her sleazy, ambulance-chasing lawyer with high-powered attorneys; terrify her by plunging her into psychic limbo—she always bounced back. His true mate, for sure.
“Never better,” he agreed. He drank some of the Amber Dew.
She leaned forward and braced her elbows on the counter. “Well? Did you learn anything about that pair?”
“The security guys who picked them up ID’d them for me.” He lowered himself onto one of the stools. “A couple of rank-and-file ghost hunters who were kicked out of the Guild a while back. They were caught stealing artifacts from an archaeological team they were hired to protect.”
Lyra made a face, unimpressed. “That’s all you know?”
“They’re both still unconscious. When they wake up, they’ll be questioned, but I doubt that we’ll learn much more. Whoever hired them wouldn’t have told them anything other than what was absolutely necessary.”
She tipped her head to one side, pondering that. “You’re still assuming someone hired them and that they weren’t just a couple of street thieves?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“What makes you so certain of that?”
“They didn’t just wander past your door tonight and happen to notice us getting out of the car. They were waiting for us, Lyra.”
“How can you know that?”
He took a breath and exhaled it slowly. “Because any other scenario would be just too much of a coincidence.”
“What? Where’s the coincidence? Random street crimes happen all the time in the Quarter.”
He met her eyes. “Not to me. Not a couple of weeks a
fter I’ve discovered that one of the amethyst relics we removed from the ruin was stolen from the lab.”
“What?”
“And not two weeks after a lab technician was found murdered. And not less than twenty-four hours after three of my people and two Guild men were trapped in that amethyst ruin.”
“Hold on here.” She held up a hand to stop him. “You’re going way too fast for me. There’s been a murder? Someone stole one of the amethyst relics? Why didn’t you bother to mention any of this before?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You keep saying that.”
He took another sip and lowered the glass. “Probably because it’s the truth.”
“I didn’t hear anything about a murder in the AI lab and, trust me, I’ve been paying extremely close attention to any and all news of Amber Inc.”
“I managed to keep it quiet. Hoped it would buy me a little time.”
She shook her head and clicked her tongue against her teeth, making a tut-tutting sound. “So you lost one of the stones already? Nice going, Sweetwater. So much for all that sophisticated security AI was supposed to provide for those priceless archaeological relics.”
“Doesn’t make us look good, does it? We think the killer escaped into the jungle. Opened his own gate. You know how it is down there. You can’t track anyone in the rain forest unless you have his locator frequency.”
“I will give you credit for being able to keep the murder and the theft out of the media. Very impressive.”
“Thanks.”
She frowned. “And now you’re telling me that you don’t think those five people got caught in that ruin by accident last night?”
“No.”
“But what was the point? Why would someone deliberately close that chamber on five people? For heaven’s sake, they could have died in there.”
“This is where the complications set in,” he said.
“I’m listening.”
“The really complicated part is that whoever is behind this is doing his or her best to make it look like there’s only one obvious suspect in the murder, the theft, and the accident at the ruin.”
