by Jayne Castle
There was another short pause. Davis looked back over his shoulder at Celinda with an unreadable expression. “Right. She’s a client now. But we’ll be billing the Guild for all expenses.”
He ended the call and dropped the phone into the pocket of his trousers.
“I assume this Trig person is going to be my bodyguard?” she asked warily.
“Just for tonight.” Davis yawned and rubbed the back of his neck. “Someone else will take over tomorrow and stay with you until the case is concluded.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
She was still dealing with that announcement when the doorbell rezzed a short time later. Davis answered it. When he opened the door she saw a short, stocky man with a shaved head. Elaborate tattoos decorated the thick arms exposed by a black T-shirt. He looked like he could juggle large vehicles without breaking a sweat.
“This is Trig McAndrews,” Davis said.
Trig nodded politely. “Miss Ingram.”
“Mr. McAndrews.”
He grinned. “Call me Trig.”
“All right.” She inclined her head. What did one say to a bodyguard? “Would you like some coffee?”
He gave her a smile that lit up the room. “That sounds like a truly splendid idea, ma’am.”
It also gave her something constructive to do. She slid off the stool and went around the counter into the small kitchen.
While she made the coffee, she listened to Davis give Trig a brief rundown on what had happened. The part that sent a little chill down her spine was the bit about how Davis had been forced to melt amber in order to deal with the twin ghosts. Everyone knew that amber didn’t actually melt when someone pushed too much para-resonating psi energy through it, but it did lose its delicate tuning if it was overused. The thing was, the vast majority of people couldn’t generate enough paranormal energy to melt amber. Only someone with a lot of power could do it.
Whatever else he was, Davis was a very strong psi talent. But, then, she already knew that, she reminded herself.
“Tomorrow I’m going to escort Miss Ingram to Frequency for a wedding,” Davis concluded. “While we’re gone, I want you to see what you can find out about a para-rez who can pull a dopp aboveground. Can’t be that many of them running around.”
“He shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Trig agreed. “Guy like that probably has some past connection to the Guild. Wyatt’s people will help. You know what they say: The Guild polices its own.”
“Hah.” Celinda did not look up from spooning coffee into a pot.
“Miss Ingram is not what you’d call pro-Guild,” Davis explained.
“Yeah, I got that impression.” Trig didn’t sound the least bit offended. “Not like she’s the only one who has a few doubts about the sterling qualities of the organizations.”
Celinda rezzed the coffeemaker and turned around. “But I’ll bet the Guilds make excellent clients, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Trig said cheerfully. “They pay right on time, and their checks always clear. We at Oakes Security take that sort of thing real seriously.”
“I guess a client is a client,” she admitted. “I can’t say that I haven’t had a few in my time whose chief redeeming quality was the fact that their checks cleared.” She surveyed her tiny living room. “Where’s everyone going to sleep?”
“Don’t know about the rest of you,” Davis said, dropping heavily onto the edge of the sofa. “But I’m sleeping right here.” He reached down to take off his shoes.
He looked as if he was holding himself together through sheer willpower, Celinda thought. But, then, he had a lot of that. Maybe more than was good for him.
On impulse, she went around the counter and down the short hall to the linen closet. “I’ll get you a pillow and a blanket.”
When she returned to the living room, pillow and blanket in her arms, Davis seemed vaguely surprised but not ungrateful.
“Thanks.” His voice was low and drowsy with the rush of oncoming sleep.
He took the pillow from her, turned on his side, and closed his eyes.
Celinda waited a couple of seconds. When she realized that he was already sound asleep, she unfolded the blanket and covered him with it.
She turned to find Trig watching her with a carefully veiled expression. The room seemed suddenly very quiet.
“Does he do this a lot?” she asked, for want of anything else to say.
“Run up against a doppelganger ghost and melt amber? Nope, can’t say that’s a real common occurrence for the boss.” Trig hesitated. “But he’s had his share of unusual cases. Guess you could say that’s our specialty at Oakes Security.”
“Unusual cases?”
Trig nodded. “That’s why Mercer Wyatt called us in on this one. He thinks there’s something weird about that relic that went missing, and Oakes Security does weird.”
She saw an opening and seized it.
“Davis said that he was from a Guild family and that he’s a hunter of sorts.” She kept her tone very casual.
“Right.”
“He told me that he doesn’t pull ghost light from the usual point on the spectrum.”
“He said that much, did he?” Trig looked impressed. “That’s more than he tells most people.”
“I didn’t realize that there were different kinds of ghost light.”
Trig lifted massive shoulders in a shrug. “Very few people realize that there’s a wide spectrum of dissonance energy leaking out of the catacombs. But most hunters can only work the green stuff.”
“He also told me that he was never employed as a regular ghost hunter.”
“Ghost hunters tend to be real traditional,” Trig said. “Hunters who don’t work standard ghost light make other hunters nervous underground.”
“So, Davis went into the PI business, instead.”
“Uh-huh.”
She got the feeling that pushing Trig wasn’t going to gain her any more information, so she reluctantly dropped the subject. “I have another extra blanket and pillow you can use.”
“Don’t worry about me, Miss Ingram. I won’t be sleeping tonight.” He held up a book. “Brought some reading material with me. With this and some coffee, I’ll be fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yep.”
She looked at the book. “What are you reading?”
“Espindoza’s History of the Era of Discord. I’m on the last volume. Almost finished.”
She tried not to show her surprise. “I see.”
He smiled benignly. “I know, heavy reading for a guy like me, but I’m managing to wade through it.”
She grinned. “You’re doing better than I did. I never got past volume one.” She looked at Davis. “He’ll be okay?”
“Sure. Just the normal burn-and-crash thing. He’ll wake up in a few hours feeling good as new.”
SHE TUMBLED INTO BED A SHORT TIME LATER AND GAZED out the window into the night. She hadn’t slept well in four months, but tonight she had a whole bunch of new anxieties to keep her awake. A Guild relic had gone missing and everyone involved held her more or less responsible. There were not one but two men spending the night in her apartment. She had a date for her sister’s wedding that was going to take some explaining, and Araminta was out there somewhere in the night running around with a stranger she had only just met.
Sleep was going to be even more elusive than usual tonight.
Chapter 10
ARAMINTA AND MAX RETURNED SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN. The sound of the sliding glass door being opened woke Davis. He watched Trig let the dust bunnies into the apartment.
“Any sign of the relic?” he asked.
“Afraid not,” Trig said.
“Damn. Guess that would have been too easy.”
Max tumbled across the floor to greet him. Araminta drifted down the hall in the direction of Celinda’s bedroom.
Trig stretched. “You need me any longer, boss?”
“No, I can take it from here.” Davis sa
t up and discovered that there was a blanket covering him.
“Miss Ingram put it over you after you conked out last night,” Trig said.
“Huh.” The thought of Celinda bending over him in what must have been a fairly solicitous manner, ensuring that he didn’t get cold during the night, made him feel much better than he had a moment ago.
He pushed the blanket aside and contemplated a shower. He needed one. Experimentally, he rubbed his jaw. He also needed a shave.
Before he could decide how to proceed, rapid footsteps sounded in the hall.
Celinda appeared. Her hair was a tangled cloud around her face. She wore a dark blue robe secured with a sash and a pair of matching slippers. Araminta was perched on her shoulder.
Davis looked at her and realized that he was getting aroused all over again. He liked Trig a lot, trusted him completely, but right now he wished his friend was anywhere else but here in Celinda’s living room. He didn’t like the idea of Trig or any other man seeing her like this, all warm and soft and flushed from sleep. The surge of possessiveness caught him by surprise.
“Araminta’s back,” Celinda announced excitedly.
“Yeah, they both rolled in a couple minutes ago,” Trig said, angling his head toward Max.
Celinda turned to Davis. She seemed oddly startled at the sight of him sitting there on her sofa. It dawned on him that, what with his crumpled black dress shirt and trousers and the morning beard, he probably looked as if he, too, had spent the night out on the tiles.
Celinda’s hopeful expression dimmed. “No one looks very cheerful. Can I assume that means they didn’t bring back the relic?”
“It’s still missing.” Davis got to his feet. “Mind if I use your shower?”
The request seemed to floor her. Her eyes widened. “Uh.” She recovered quickly, blushing a bright pink. “No, no, of course not. Go ahead. I’ll, uh, start breakfast. Or something. I think I’ve got some eggs.” She turned quickly to Trig. “Will you stay?”
“Appreciate the offer, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way,” Trig said. “I need to start working our contacts on the street and inside the Guild, see if we can find the guy who generated those twin ghosts last night.”
“Oh. Yes, of course.” Celinda paused, looking first at Trig and then at Davis. “What about the second man?”
“The getaway driver?” Davis nodded. “We’ll look for him, too. But we haven’t got much to go on there.”
“Well,” Celinda said, “if it helps, I can tell you that he’s got a rather twisted parapsych profile. I would advise extreme caution if either of you happen to run into him again.”
They both looked at her.
“Are you saying that because he’s involved in a criminal enterprise and, by definition, most outlaws probably have twisted profiles?” Davis asked evenly.
“No.” She seemed to hesitate, then come to a decision. She reached up to pat Araminta. “I’m saying that because I can read psi profiles if I get close enough to a person. Last night, for a few seconds, I was very close to the getaway driver.”
Davis looked at Trig and then turned back to her.
“Are you telling us that you can sense other people’s psi energy patterns?” he asked.
“At close range, yes.” She shrugged. “It’s one of the reasons why I’m so good at my job. I can match people psychically as well as in the usual ways.”
Trig whistled softly. “Whoa. Talk about a nonstandard talent. Ever been tested?”
“Yes. My parents suspected I was a little different. They took me to a private lab. The ability to read psi patterns is extremely rare, so I don’t advertise my talent for obvious reasons. But Davis is a strong and evidently rare para-rez himself, so I assume neither of you gets nervous around nonstandard talents.”
“How strong are you?” Davis asked.
She hesitated again. “Very.”
He raised his brows. “Are we talking off the charts?”
“Well, yes,” she admitted, “but I’m sure that’s only because the talent is so rare in the population the testing labs don’t have a good basis for comparison.”
Davis rubbed his jaw again. Something in common, he thought. “How much can you tell about a person based on what you pick up from his or her psi energy patterns?”
She gave him a very somber look. “Often a lot more than I really want to know. There are some very strange people out there.”
“I’ve always heard that psi patterns are unique to individuals,” Trig said.
Celinda nodded. “In my experience that’s true. No two people produce precisely identical psi wave patterns, not even twins.”
“Could you recognize the driver of that car if you got close to him again?” Davis asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “But I would have to be fairly close. No more than a few feet away at most.”
“Oh, man,” Trig said. He looked eagerly at Davis. “That kind of talent would sure be useful in our business, boss.”
“Sort of like having one of those dogs they use to detect drugs in suitcases,” Celinda said dryly.
Trig turned red. “No way, ma’am. I never meant to imply that you’re a dog.” He went almost purple, clearly mortified. “Or anything like that,” he finished weakly.
Celinda gave him a wry smile. “It’s okay, I understand.”
“Your talent,” Davis said, diplomatically emphasizing the word talent, “for picking up another individual’s psi patterns would certainly be useful when it comes to identifying the driver, but it won’t help us locate him. Unfortunately, that’s going to take old-fashioned detective work.”
Trig grimaced. “Which means I’d better get moving.” He looked at Celinda. “Would you mind if I borrowed a book?”
She looked taken aback by the request. “What book?”
“That one.” Trig indicated a volume on the table beside a chair. “I started it after I finished Espindoza’s History last night. Found it on your bookshelf. Hope you don’t mind.”
She looked at the book on the table. So did Davis. From where he sat he could just make out the title. Ten Steps to a Covenant Marriage: Secrets of a Professional Matchmaker.
“Oh, that one.” Celinda suddenly rezzed a dazzling smile for Trig. “Certainly. Help yourself.”
“Thanks,” Trig said. “I only got through chapter one.” He walked back to the table, picked up the volume, tucked it under his arm, and returned to the door. “Nice to meet you, Miss Ingram. Have a good time at the wedding.”
“Thanks,” Celinda said. Her smile faded.
Trig let himself out into the hall and went downstairs, making very little noise for such a solidly built man. Davis listened closely, but he did not hear Betty Furnell’s door open.
He got to his feet. “That book that Trig took with him.”
Celinda raised her brows. “What about it?”
“I assume you’ve read it?”
“I wrote it.”
HE WAITED UNTIL HE HEARD THE SHOWER RUNNING BE fore he went into her bedroom. He stood there for a couple of seconds, inhaling the scent of her space and thinking of how she had made a great fuss about checking to be sure the bridesmaid’s dress was safe. But she had not even glanced into the closet. She had looked under the bed.
He crouched beside the bed. There were no telltale lines indicating a hidden floor safe beneath the wall-to-wall carpet. He ran his fingertips along the baseboard. A section felt loose. He tugged gently.
A ten-inch length of the baseboard popped free. Behind it was a dark opening in the wall.
He reached inside and pulled out a gray sack. The object it contained felt heavy in his hand. It also felt familiar.
He untied the sack. The missing relic was not inside. Something else was, though.
He retied the sack, tucked it into the wall, and replaced the baseboard.
He went back down the hall wondering why a professional matchmaker would have an illegal mag-rez gun hidden under her bed.
The mag-rez had been concealed for some serious purpose. Evidence of a crime committed in the past? Or evidence of one that had not yet been committed?
Chapter 11
HE WAS STILL FEELING UNNERVED THE NEXT MORNING when he walked into his office. Everything had gone wrong again last night. First, they had been unable to find the relic in the woman’s apartment, and then Brinker had nearly been caught when he tried to search Oakes’s car. It had been a very close call.
Ella Allonby, seated behind the reception desk, looked up from some papers.
“Good morning, Dr. Kennington,” she said in her crisp, well-modulated, businesslike way.
Everything about her was crisp, well-modulated, and businesslike. She was forty-three years old and astonishingly good at her job. But he hadn’t hired her for her office management skills. He had chosen her because she was secretly enamored of him. That made her extremely easy to manipulate.
He paused in front of her desk and gave her a warm smile. “How does my schedule look today, Miss Allonby?”
The impact of the smile brought color to her cheeks just as he had known it would. As always, the wielding of power over another human being, even in such a small way, gave him a pleasant little rush.
“Busy, as usual, sir,” she said. “You have three patients this morning and two this afternoon.”
“Excellent. Thank you, Miss Allonby.”
He went into the inner office, closing the door behind him, and set his briefcase on the desk. He hung the hand-tailored gray silk jacket on the coat rack and then sat down behind the desk.
He looked around the office and felt the old anger rise inside. How had it come to this? He should have been president of the Society of Para-Psychiatrists by now, with a lucrative private practice on the side. He should be publishing papers in the most esteemed journals. He should be giving lectures at the university.
Instead, he had been reduced to changing his identity and starting over as a so-called dream therapist. It was humiliating for a man of his power and brilliance. He might as well hang out a shingle advertising himself as a meditation guru or offering to read astrological charts and tea leaves.
