by Jayne Castle
“How did you know about my band?” he asked sharply.
She was not about to drag Karen Price’s name into this, she thought. She would keep it vague. “According to your college yearbook you formed a band.” She angled her chin toward the collection of unmarked recordings. “That’s your music on those old tapes, isn’t it? You rented a studio to make them but you couldn’t afford to have fancy dust jackets created for them.”
Gannon looked startled. “You got that information out of a yearbook?”
She didn’t answer that question. “The clipping about your death mentioned that you were obsessed with Vincent Lee Vance. What was that about? The man was a wanna-be dictator, for heaven’s sake. Not exactly a great role model.”
“Vance was a brilliant, powerful man who came within a hairsbreadth of ruling all of the city-states.”
“And you really thought you could finish the job? Sheesh, talk about delusions of grandeur. What gave you the idea? Finding his secret headquarters under Old Frequency?”
“Yes.” Gannon hesitated and then shrugged. “He had left behind some of his early journals and a few battle maps. One of those maps appeared to show the location of the underground chamber that he intended to use as his headquarters when his forces took Cadence.”
“The library.”
Gannon’s mouth twisted. “Vance did not know what was inside at that point. The note in his journal says that the chamber was unusually well guarded by a very difficult trap. He said he hoped that Helen Chandler would be able to de-rez it. He was convinced that the Harmonics had used the trap to protect some great secret inside that room.”
“A secret that would be his when and if he got into the chamber.”
Gannon nodded. “I assumed he and Chandler had died somewhere in the catacombs, but I decided to try to find the chamber he mentioned in the journals.”
“You talked your three band buddies into disappearing with you so that you could all search for the tomb together.”
Gannon shook his head ruefully. “We had such dreams in those early days. We were sure that whatever we found in that chamber would make us all rich and powerful. But nothing went right.”
“What do you mean?”
“The maps were badly flawed. I suspect that Vance made the mistakes deliberately as a sort of code so that no one else could find the chamber. The result was that the four of us blundered around for over two years underground trying to find the chamber before we realized the enormity of the task.”
“How did you survive during that time?”
“We used to slip out of the catacombs at night to steal food and supplies. It was a miserable existence, I assure you.” Gannon grimaced. “Eventually I faced the fact that it would take a great deal of time and money to conduct a proper search.”
“So you came out from underground and started investing in real estate.”
“Yes.” Gannon was amused. “Imagine my surprise when I discovered I had a knack for it. The beauty of real estate was that it allowed me to buy up huge plots of land directly above the sector of the catacombs that the four of us were exploring. Owning that property enabled us to maintain a measure of control over the rat holes and hidden entrances.”
“Which meant you could keep out most of the ruin rats and treasure hunters.”
“Yes. It didn’t provide perfect security but it worked fairly well. But we soon realized that to clear an entire sector we needed a loyal workforce and we required security. Herbert, who used to be Norman Fairbanks, came up with the concept of the Order of the Acolytes of Amatheon. He established the various legal entities and took out the license to excavate. After we established the cult the money started to pour in so fast we could hardly count it.”
“That’s when your dreams really went over the top, isn’t it? You saw all that money and all those loyal servants and it occurred to you that you had the makings of your own personal army. All you needed were some high-tech weapons. So you started stockpiling guns.”
The intercom on the large desk chimed gently. The interruption rattled Gannon. He flinched and then punched the button.
“I thought I made it clear that I did not want to be disturbed, George.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but there are visitors at the gates.”
“Send them away.”
George cleared his throat. “The visitors are Mr. and Mrs. Mercer Wyatt, sir.”
“The Wyatts?” Gannon’s jaw jerked. “What the hell are they doing here?”
“They probably just stopped by to borrow a cup of sugar,” Lydia said sarcastically.
“Sir, Mr. Wyatt said that he and his wife were out for a drive and noticed a large plume of smoke coming from this house.” George sounded agitated. “They said they’ve summoned the fire department. But none of our sensors show a problem.”
Sirens blared outside on the street.
“What is going on here?” Gannon whispered hoarsely.
An interior alarm system screeched.
“Shit,” Gannon said. “That’s the perimeter security system. Someone is inside the gates.”
“Sir, the fire department is demanding entry,” George said urgently. “They insist that the house be evacuated immediately. They’re sending men and equipment over the walls.”
“Wyatt. That son of a bitch.” Gannon cut the intercom connection and crossed to the curio cabinet. “A pity I didn’t finish him off that night.”
Lydia sucked in her breath. “You’re the one who shot Mercer Wyatt.”
“Who would have thought a man his age would survive two shots from a mag-rez?”
Gannon raised a lamp shade to reveal a small lever. He turned it swiftly. The large cabinet moved away from the wall on hidden rollers. An opening in the wall appeared. Lydia saw the top of a long flight of steep stairs leading downward into darkness.
The winds of psi power wafted out of the tunnel.
“Although I anticipated success all these years,” Gannon said, “I made provisions for failure. When I discovered that this house had a rat hole that had gone undiscovered for nearly half a century, I bought it immediately.”
“You’re going to disappear again.”
“I have another identity ready and waiting as well as a healthy supply of cash. I would have liked to have invited you to run away with me, Lydia. As I told London, I do believe you and I would have made a good team under other circumstances. But I can see that you are committed to your hunter.”
“You got that right.” She gripped the purse very tightly.
Gannon raised the barrel of the gun. “The least I can do to repay you for all the trouble you have caused me is to kill you.”
This was it, Lydia thought. Her only chance. She prepared to hurl the purse toward Gannon, trying to brace herself for the mind-numbing horror of the nightmares that would envelope them both when she triggered the tiny trap anchored to the chunk of quartz.
The door slammed open an instant before she sent the pulse of energy to spring the trap.
Emmett exploded into the room, moving quickly.
Gannon jerked around to confront the new threat. The mag-rez gun roared just as Emmett dropped to the floor.
At the same time ghost light flashed and flared in the tunnel entrance directly behind Gannon. Lydia knew that Emmett was summoning an enormous amount of raw dissonance energy from the catacombs below.
Gannon convulsed and writhed wildly in the chaotic green fire that swept over him. The gun fell from his hand and clattered on the floor.
A few seconds later, he crumpled. Lydia knew that he had to be dead. No human mind could have withstood such a direct encounter from such a massive ghost.
The dissonance energy snapped and sizzled and then winked out almost as swiftly as it had appeared.
Emmett levered himself to a sitting position and looked at her. “Are you all right?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard above the screaming alarms that reverberated throughout the house.
“Yes. B
ut I’d better get rid of this thing before there’s an accident.” She reached carefully into the purse, picked up the quartz, and carefully de-rezzed it completely, destroying the vicious little snare.
He settled back against the nearest wall, watching her. “You were going to trigger an illusion trap?”
“Only if nothing better came along. Luckily you got here first.” She set the quartz down and turned toward him. “How did you—” Then she saw the blood. “Emmett. Oh, my God.”
She ran to his side and clamped a hand over the bloody, ragged crease that the mag-rez bullet had opened on his upper arm.
“It’s okay.” Emmett looked down at the blood leaking through her fingers and grimaced. “I think.”
“We need an ambulance.” She kept her hand tight over the wound and tried to reach the phone on Gannon’s desk.
Mercer Wyatt appeared in the doorway, leaning heavily on a cane. He fumbled with a small phone. “I’ll make the call.”
Tamara walked into the room followed by a number of firefighters and hunters. She took one look at Gannon and then, with quick, efficient moves, she unknotted the figured silk scarf at her throat and handed it to Lydia.
“Here, use this,” she said as Mercer barked orders into the phone.
Lydia took the scarf and secured it snugly around the wound. To her relief the flow of blood had diminished considerably.
Mercer ended his call. “Medics will be here in a couple of minutes.” He scowled at the crowd gathering in the room. “Someone turn off those damned alarms. Verwood, take a couple of men and detain that butler.”
“Yes, sir,” Verwood said. He motioned to several hunters.
A short time later the clanging bells and whistles went silent.
The firefighters checked the charred flooring and wall panels around Gannon’s body but were soon satisfied that the ghost had not started a blaze. They left just as the medics pulled into the drive.
For a moment or two, Lydia, Emmett, Mercer, and Tamara were the only ones left in the room.
Emmett looked at Mercer, his mouth curving very slightly at one corner. “Thanks, Dad.”
Mercer blinked. Then his specter-cat eyes, eyes that were mirror images of Emmett’s, blazed with satisfaction. A slow, uncharacteristically warm smile transformed his face.
“Anytime, son.”
35
“MARTINEZ GOT THE rest of the story from Gannon’s faithful butler, George.” Emmett settled deeper into the big chair, his heels propped on the ottoman, and absently scratched Fuzz, who sat on his lap.
He had enjoyed the role of invalid for the first day and a half, he decided. Having Lydia hover attentively was a pleasant novelty. But now he was getting a little bored. Lydia was not merely fussing, she was giving orders—a lot of them. The instructions covered everything from the amount of sleep he needed to what he should eat and how often the bandage on his arm had to be changed.
Luckily the mag-rez gun had not done any permanent damage. The wound was healing quickly. He was profoundly grateful that he had arrived on the scene before Lydia had been forced to use the trapped quartz in a last-ditch bid to save herself. After the ghost burn she had endured during her Lost Weekend, the last thing she had needed now was the para-psych trauma that would have accompanied an immersion in a sea of alien nightmares.
This morning Mercer and Tamara had arrived to help piece together the entire tale. Lydia had prepared a large pot of tea and set out a plate of cookies.
It was only tea and cookies, he thought, watching her pour, but it was the first time they had had company over. This was the kind of thing that married couples did.
“After years of searching that sector and securing the property rights aboveground as well as exploration rights below,” Emmett said, “Hepscott and his followers finally found that massive wall of illusion shadow. They knew it had to be the gateway to Vance’s lost headquarters but they couldn’t get through it.”
“Hepscott was a good tangler but he didn’t want to take the risk of trying to de-rez such a vast, complex trap,” Lydia said. Her jaw hardened. “So he ran several experiments using some of Herb’s Greenies. Two of the Greenies died when they combined forces to untangle the trap. Later, two more Greenie tanglers wound up in para-psych wards. They never recovered.”
“Must have been a little tough on morale among the Greenies,” Tamara observed.
“It was,” Emmett said. “Hepscott knew he couldn’t afford to risk too many more followers. That’s when he decided to kidnap a first-rate ephemeral-energy para-rez, someone who would be expendable. After doing his research, he chose Lydia.”
“The two hunters I accused of abandoning me in the catacombs actually nabbed me. They used a knockout drug and stashed me in a hiding place. Then they pretended to search for me. Later, when the search was called off, they came and got me, intending to take me to Master Herb. I pretended to still be unconscious.” Lydia shrugged. “They got careless.”
“She escaped and fled into the antechamber,” Emmett said. “Once there she understood intuitively that the only hope was to carve out a small hole in the trap. She made it into what we now call the library and out through another passageway.”
“Which is where I ran into a huge ghost, got singed, and developed a case of amnesia that probably saved my life,” Lydia concluded.
Tamara’s elegant brows tightened quizzically. “Saved your life? Oh, I see what you mean. When Hepscott realized that you had no memory of what you had seen underground he decided not to take the risk of murdering you to ensure your silence.”
“He had another reason for not getting rid of her seven months ago,” Emmett said, adjusting the pillow Lydia had put under his injured arm. “She was, after all, the only person he knew who had ever made it through the illusion wall. If she had done it once, she might be able to do it again. So he decided to watch and wait to see if she recovered enough from the para-psych trauma to go back underground.”
“I did recover,” Lydia said. “But I didn’t get a chance to prove that I could handle working in the catacombs until Emmett showed up at Shrimpton’s looking for a P-A consultant a few weeks ago.”
Mercer nodded slowly. “The next thing Hepscott knew, you and Emmett were seeing a lot of each other. He was aware of Emmett’s Guild connections and he probably realized it would be extremely dangerous to grab you again. This time he’d have the entire Cadence Guild on his trail.”
“Hepscott was aware of the risks involved,” Emmett said. “But he was also growing desperate. Getting through that illusion wall was vitally important to him. He was convinced the secrets on the other side were worth any risk. But he had another problem, namely the Cadence Guild. He knew that it was the one organization that could stand in his way when he began to organize his forces into an underground army.”
Mercer snorted. “So he made plans to take control of the Guild.”
“What a manipulative bastard Hepscott was.” Tamara was quietly furious. “First he sent Sandra Thornton to seduce Mercer, hoping to learn as much as possible about the inside workings of the Guild. Not that he got anything, of course,” she added proudly. “Mercer wouldn’t be so stupid as to give away his secrets during pillow talk.”
Mercer’s eyes glinted with rueful amusement. He patted her hand. “I appreciate your confidence in me, my love.”
To Emmett’s surprise, Tamara seemed to relax a little at Mercer’s touch. The two of them exchanged a glance in one of those moments of silent, personal communication that could only take place between a couple that had formed a genuine bond.
Emmett looked at Lydia and saw that she, too, had picked up on the small flash of intimacy between Mercer and Tamara. She raised one shoulder in a tiny “who knew” shrug.
Hell, he thought, maybe that marriage was going to work, after all.
Lydia shuddered. “Hepscott used poor Sandra Thornton to lure you to that rendezvous site that night, Mr. Wyatt. He was the one who shot you. Later, when he wa
nted the investigation halted, he killed Sandra and wrote the suicide note himself. Can you believe it? After all those years together, he calmly set his lover up and killed her without a second thought just to further his plans.”
“Meanwhile Hepscott had been using his money and influence to help Dorning move up quickly through the ranks of the Guild,” Tamara said. “Dorning was a powerful hunter and thanks to Hepscott, he had the cash to grant a lot of favors. He made it all the way to the Council Chamber. From there it was only a step into the offices of the Guild boss.”
“But no one had counted on Emmett taking charge of the Guild immediately after you were shot, Mr. Wyatt,” Lydia said. “The transition in leadership went so smoothly that there was barely a ripple in the organization. Suddenly there was no power vacuum and Hepscott’s plans for Dorning were in a muddle.”
Mercer straightened his legs, wincing a little as he changed position in the chair. He looked at Emmett thoughtfully. “Dorning, I assume, was the one who sent that ghost to attack you on your wedding night?”
Emmett munched a cookie. “It was a test to see if he could take me. An old-fashioned formal challenge was the last option he had for grabbing control of the Guild in a legal way. Evidently Hepscott was reluctant to murder two Guild bosses in a row. Probably worried that the cops would notice a pattern.”
Tamara frowned. “You de-rezzed his ghost that night when he tried to get a feel for your psi abilities, but he was obviously ready to go ahead with the challenge anyway.”
Emmett shrugged. “Dorning was good but he knew he probably couldn’t take me so he and Hepscott came up with Plan B. The scheme was to proceed with the formal challenge and then slip me a small dose of knockout drugs just before the match. The idea was to slow me down, not put me to sleep. I would have felt a little off, but I probably wouldn’t be aware that I’d been drugged. Even if I did figure it out, it would have been difficult to stop the match just because I didn’t feel in great shape.”
Tamara picked up her cup. “In the end, when he realized that his entire scheme had unraveled, Hepscott tried to get rid of all the loose ends before he pulled another disappearing act. Sandra Thornton was already out of the way so he killed Dorning and Master Herbert.”
