Magic in the Desert: Three Paranormal Romance Series Starters Set in the American Southwest

by Christine Pope

  After a few minutes, Badri returned, holding a plastic vial filled with golden liquid.

  “Here it is,” she said, and extended her hand. “Make sure you keep it very tightly sealed — Dita said it can stain clothing and upholstery quite badly if it is spilled.”

  Dita, I knew, was one of the assistants, but I’d never worked with her. Smiling, I took the vial from Badri. “Thank you so much. I’ve already talked to my dermatologist, and he’s going to see me first thing tomorrow morning. So I should know fairly soon if I can set up a tanning appointment.”

  “Excellent. And if there’s anything else — a wrap to firm up, an oxygen facial — ”

  “You’ll be the one I call,” I promised, as I tucked the vial into the inner pocket in my purse.

  “And possibly a credit on the show?”

  “If I can.” By that point, I was feeling horrible about all the lies I had told her, but what else was I supposed to do? I had to have that sample, and if the cost was a little false hope, well, I could live with that. Better that than the risk of other people getting infected.

  Or killed.

  I thanked Badri again and left her office, and nodded at Paz as I passed through the reception area and went outside. I speed-walked back toward the car, purse clutched tightly against me. It would be just my luck to get mugged at this point, although I had to admit the odds for that sort of thing at this time of day and in this neighborhood were pretty low.

  But I made it back to the car without incident and slid into my seat, then made a point of locking the door as soon as I could.

  Paul had been sending a text on his phone when I entered the car. He continued with the message, tapping away furiously, then closed the phone and turned to me. “Did you get it?”

  In answer, I reached into my purse and held up the vial. “Piece of cake.”

  “You are truly an amazing woman,” he said, and it didn’t sound as if he was teasing me.

  I shook my head, but he continued, even as he turned the key in the ignition and started up the car. “No, really. You’ve been through things in the last twenty-four hours that would be enough to put anyone off, and yet you seem completely unfazed by it all.”

  “Oh, I’m fazed,” I told him. “Trust me. But I couldn’t just walk away from this, could I?’

  “Definitely not after that shootout with the agent,” he replied, with what looked like an actual grin pulling at his mouth. “Even so, I want you to know I appreciate all the help you’ve given me.”

  Compliments had been few and far between as of late, and I really didn’t know how to respond to his praise. I just lifted my shoulders and said, “So what now? Meet with Jeff and hand over the loot?”

  “Something like that. He wants us to meet him.”

  “Let me guess. Dodger Stadium.”

  Paul laughed. “No, someplace a little less public this time. Apparently he has some contacts at a lab out in” — he squinted down at the phone, which was lying in his lap — “Fontana?”

  All the way back to where we’d started in Pomona, and then some. I hoped Paul had gotten unlimited mileage on the car. “Keep heading east on Santa Monica, then turn right on Fairfax. I guess we’ll have to take the 10 Freeway and hope for the best. Maybe the traffic hasn’t gotten too bad yet.”

  “You make an excellent GPS,” he remarked, and pulled over into the right lane.

  Maybe not the sort of praise most women would want, but I’d take it. My father always said I had a bump of direction. Might as well put it to good use. “More reliable than the one in your first rental car?”

  “Infinitely.” He turned the car down Fairfax, eyes fixed on the traffic, thick even at barely two in the afternoon. “But I suppose I should be grateful for that malfunctioning GPS.”

  “Oh?” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant.

  Then he did glance away from the road, just for a second, but that second was enough. The hazel eyes met mine and shifted away. He said, “If the GPS hadn’t stopped working, I wouldn’t have met you.”

  A rush of warmth moved through my midsection, and I found myself staring at the choked streets of Little Ethiopia passing by as if they were the most fascinating thing in the world. “Oh, I don’t know. Otto might’ve still found a way to get me over to the Sheraton Universal.”

  “Ah, Otto. Any advice from the world of the spirits?”

  “Absolutely nothing. Dear Otto, it seems, has taken a powder.”

  “Does he do that often?”

  “Occasionally, but usually not as long as this.” Again I tried to tell myself that it was just Otto being difficult — something he excelled at — but I was beginning to wonder. He’d always made the spirit world sound as if it were a serene place, for the most part. Not a world where you could be detained or held captive or any of the other awful things that might happen to those who were still corporeal. Most likely, my worries were for nothing, and I was being neglected because one of his other gigs was allowing Otto to hold forth, which would be much more interesting to a being with his sort of ego.

  “And you’re worried.”

  “A little. It’s probably nothing. I’m not his only psychic.”

  “Really?” Now Paul sounded almost amused. “I didn’t know it worked that way.”

  We had just approached the on-ramp to the eastbound freeway, so I waited until he had safely maneuvered the car up the ramp and into the traffic. As I’d feared, it was already starting to stack up. L.A. freeways were almost always a nightmare, but Friday afternoons were the worst.

  “Some spirit guides speak to only one person, but some have other…clients…for lack of a better word. It’s always been like that with Otto and me.”

  “Do you know who these other ‘clients’ are?”

  “No. Otto won’t talk about them, except to make excuses as to why he wasn’t around for a particularly important session.”

  “Do your own clients mind?”

  “They usually can’t tell.” Thank God, or I wouldn’t have been able to build my business to its current levels. Dead sessions, like the one I’d had with Alex Hathaway, were few and far between. “If Otto’s not around, I use the cards. And sometimes I can get information through psychometry, or what I refer to as my spider sense, although of course I don’t call it that in front of my clients.”

  “Fascinating,” Paul said, sounding positively Spock-like.

  I tried not to chuckle. “What about you?” I asked. “How long have you been chasing UFOs?”

  Something about him seemed to tense, his fingers clasping the steering wheel a little more tightly than they had only a few seconds earlier. “About six years.”

  “Is that all?” Somehow, it had seemed to me he’d been doing this for much longer than that. “What, no boyhood dreams of riding around in a spaceship?”

  “No more than usual, I suppose.” He paused, then said, “I’d always been fascinated by the stars, got my first telescope for my eleventh birthday, but I never saw anything out of the ordinary, even with all the hours I spent watching the skies. Like most members of the scientific community, I thought UFOs were the realm of crackpots talking about abductions and little aliens with big heads. But then — ” And he broke off. “Which way am I supposed to go, anyway?”

  “Stay to the left. Follow the signs that say ‘10 Freeway, San Bernardino.’”

  He did as I had instructed but didn’t seem inclined to continue the conversation. Since the freeway was choked with early commuters, and it was tricky navigating the odd little jump you had to take in East L.A. to continue on the eastbound 10, I thought it better to remain silent until we were safely where we needed to be and headed due east. From that point, all we had to do was keep going straight until we hit Fontana.

  “Then what?” I prompted. I hadn’t forgotten where he’d left off the conversation.

  “Then I was out in the desert. I just gotten a new 200mm telescope, so I wanted to test it out. It was a clear night in March.” Again
he hesitated.

  “And?”

  “And I saw it. A huge wedge-shaped ship, with lines of lights shifting through the colors of the spectrum. At first I thought it had to be a new experimental craft — but no manmade object could move like that. It hovered over the desert, then shot straight upward at a speed that should have been impossible.”

  A little shiver worked its way down my spine. “Were you frightened?”

  “I didn’t have time to be frightened. By the time I figured out what had happened, it was gone.”

  “So that turned you into a believer.”

  He shook his head. “Not right away. But then I saw it again. Twice. And I started doing some research, discovered there were many, many people who’d had similar experiences. I talked to some of them online, met a few in person. And everything I learned, everything I saw, seemed to tell me that something had been hidden for years, something the government really didn’t want us to know about. Then I made the mistake of stating some of my views openly.”

  “Mistake?”

  A grim laugh. “I was on the faculty of the astrophysics department at the university. Junior professor, but still. Had a good reception for the papers I’d published, seemed to be on the fast track to tenure.”

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened next. “I’m guessing the powers that be didn’t appreciate your new hobby.”

  “That’s putting it mildly.” He didn’t quite sigh, but he let out a breath, gaze still fixed on the road ahead of him. “My department head took me aside and informed me that he didn’t think I was a good fit for the department after all, that I’d be better off somewhere else. That it would save everyone some trouble if I’d just resign instead of being publicly sacked.”

  “Jesus.” I didn’t bother with any expressions of disbelief; my father was on the faculty of a prestigious private college, and I knew just how cutthroat academia could be. “What did you do?”

  He shrugged. “I left Albuquerque, then went home and licked my wounds. By then my father was my dead and my mother at the retirement community in Santa Fe. I had some money saved up and had the house free and clear, so my expenses weren’t that high. And then someone in the local MUFON chapter asked me to talk at a conference they were hosting, and people seemed to be impressed and asked if I was planning to write a book. I really hadn’t thought about it, but I certainly had enough time on my hands, so I did. It met with some success in certain circles, and I was invited to more speaking engagements, and then came the next book, and…here we are.”

  “On our way to Fontana, with a vial that may or may not have some sort of alien virus in it.”

  “Exactly.” Although his expression had been somber up to that point, I thought I saw a trace of a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. “Which, believe it or not, appeals to me more than facing the prospect of grading a stack of midterms. So I’ve learned to be Zen about the situation. Or at least as close as I can be.”

  Having done my share of paper-grading during my stint as a T.A. while I was getting my master’s degree, I could sympathize completely. “You’re not the only one who did a total career change,” I told him, hoping to let him know I understood at least a little of what he’d gone through.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m a certified MFCC — marriage and family counselor,” I added, just in case there had been a shortage of those in the astrophysics department at the University of New Mexico. “I tried it for a few years, but Otto kept pestering me about not following my true vocation.”

  “So Otto gives career advice, too?”

  “Yes, especially if it’s unwanted.” I gave a rueful little shake of my head, then went on, “But I realized he was right. I thought my…abilities…could help me as a counselor, but I found myself tripping over them more often than not. You’re bound by a lot of rules when you’re working under a state license. So I closed that business and started another.”

  “But you’re still helping people.”

  “I’d like to think so.” Of course, that “help” varied widely, from finally convincing Susan Yamamoto to leave her abusive boyfriend to convincing Josh Epstein that investing in the latest hot script making the rounds wasn’t actually that good an idea after all. One might think such a thing was trivial…except the script in question had turned into the previous summer’s worst bomb, with the studio that bought it losing millions. Josh came out looking like a hero, and couldn’t praise me enough — and also brought me a whole slew of high-paying entertainment industry clients. Everyone wanted a line to the psychic who could help them avoid the fate of the studio exec who’d backed the losing script. Current word on the street was that he was living out of the back of his BMW.

  All during this conversation, traffic had been crawling along, but once we were out of the city limits and moving into the San Gabriel Valley, things seemed to pick up, and we began cruising at almost-normal speeds. We were both silent for awhile, Paul keeping a careful watch on the cars around us. Now that we were actually moving, people were taking advantage of the situation by zipping in and out of traffic, trying to score that extra car length. I wondered what he thought of the immense crush of people here in Southern California. It had to be some kind of adjustment for a man who lived alone out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico.

  “Do you have an address in Fontana?” I asked, a little while after we had crossed the border between Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. “Because it’s not that far from here, and I don’t know if we need to jump on the 15 or keep going east on the 10.”

  “It’s on my phone.” He lifted it from its resting place on his lap and handed it to me.

  The cell phone was still slightly warm from sitting on his leg, and I had to force myself not to hold it more tightly, to feel his body warmth radiating from the plastic. A few compliments and one admiring gaze aside, he hadn’t given me any indication that he saw me as anything other than his current partner in crime. Fondling his cell phone would just make me look like an idiot.

  So I pressed a button to get it out of “sleep” mode and found the address, then plugged it into my own iPhone so I could use its far more sophisticated map application. It turned out we were headed to an industrial park that would be easier to access off the 15 Freeway, so I told Paul to turn north and then get off almost immediately at Fourth Street. From there, we headed east for a little bit, until I saw the side street that led to this Lampson Labs, whatever that was.

  “Turn here,” I instructed, and we pulled into the park, following the signs that pointed us to number 162, which was the lab’s address.

  For a Friday afternoon, the lot for 162 looked pretty empty, in contrast to the other businesses in the industrial park. I saw a silver Prius, so new it still had its paper dealer plates, and then a disreputable-looking older white van. We parked and got out.

  The door to the lab facility was unlocked, but no cheery receptionist awaited us. Fact was, the place seemed deserted, cars parked outside or no. A door to the left and behind what should have been the receptionist’s desk stood partway open. I could see some lights on, and a stretch of long hallway with bare beige walls — not even any hackneyed motivational posters or improbable beach scenes.

  A little chill ran down my spine, and I glanced up at Paul, who frowned.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  Nothing.

  “Are you sure this is the right address?” he asked me, then pulled out his phone and appeared to inspect the text Jeff had sent earlier.

  “Yes, it’s the right address,” I replied. Tension made my tone a little more waspish than I had intended it to be. “Besides, it says ‘Lampson Labs’ right on the window. Maybe they’re all in the back of the building or something.”

  With more courage than I was feeling at the moment, I moved past him and down the hallway, which was a real corridor and not just a passageway through a cube farm. Closed doors ranged past on either side of us. I had a feeling all those doo
rs were locked.

  The one directly to my right swung open, and I jumped. Jeff’s Makowski’s unruly head stuck out into the corridor. “You took your time.”

  My heart must have been going about a hundred beats a minute. “You know what the eastbound 10 is like on a Friday afternoon?” I retorted.

  He opened his mouth, but Paul cut in smoothly, “We’re here now. Are you ready to look at the sample?”

  “Yeah, we’re ready.” And he stepped aside so we could enter the room.

  It was a cavernous space, much bigger than it had seemed from its modest little door. Computers and microscopes and equipment I couldn’t begin to recognize covered the built-in lab tables on each wall, and more tables crowded the middle of the room. The place looked as if it could have supported a complement of at least twenty or thirty scientists, but all I saw was one man, who pushed his chair away from a computer with a display almost as big as my new TV. He was short, probably only a couple of inches taller than I, and maybe a few years older, with dark hair already beginning to thin at the temples. Unlike Jeff, he wore a button-down shirt and a dark tie, and a white lab coat over all that.

  This stranger glanced from Paul to me and then grinned. “Who’s the hottie?”

  Well, he might have been older than Jeff, but obviously he’d gone to the same geek school of manners and deportment. “I’m the person with the inside line on a possible alien infestation,” I replied, and crossed my arms in the vain hope that it would keep him from looking at my chest. “Who are you?”

  He didn’t appear offended. “I’m Raymond Lampson. This is my lab.”

  “We’re hoping you can tell us if there’s anything strange about the sample,” Paul said, in an obvious attempt to guide the conversation back into more productive channels. “Persephone?”

  It wasn’t worth it to protest that I didn’t like this Raymond Lampson and that I had my doubts as to whether he’d be able to find anything in the sample. Sure, Jeff had vouched for him, but what did that mean? It seemed as if Paul had put a lot of trust in someone he’d only just met in person today. Still, since I certainly didn’t have any of my own resources, I dug in my purse and pulled out the vial, then handed it over to Raymond. He held it up to the fluorescent lights overhead, squinting a little.