by Jayne Castle
No man could withstand such violent notes. All of Bellamy’s senses—normal and paranormal—foundered on the rocks of oblivion.
The pistol fell from his limp hand and clattered on the floor. He made a weak attempt to tighten his grip on Ella’s throat but she slipped effortlessly out of his grasp.
He stared at her with eyes that were glazed with the unnatural sleep that was swiftly dragging him under.
She thought she read belated comprehension and horror in his gaze. His mouth opened on a single word spoken so softly that only she could hear.
“Siren.”
In the next instant he crumpled to the floor in a deep coma.
She decided to play it safe and give him a small encore just to make sure that when he woke up—if he woke up—he would not have any clear memories of the bridesmaid he had attempted to use as a hostage.
She crouched beside him and touched his throat as though checking his pulse. The little bells on her bracelet shivered again.
She sang a few more bars, aiming the crushing waves of music at his aura.
Bellamy twitched a couple of times and then lay very still.
• • •
The dramatic ending to the wedding of the season got full media coverage and made the front pages of every newspaper in Crystal City. The police and the medical professionals concluded that Bellamy had suffered from a previously undiagnosed aneurism that had burst under the stress of the moment. The mainstream press focused on the story of the wealthy bride who had almost married a two-time wife-killer.
For the most part everyone forgot about the bridesmaid who had been held hostage for a short time at the altar. That turn of events was fine with the bridesmaid.
Bellamy eventually surfaced from the coma but his senses were severely scrambled. He was deemed incompetent to stand trial and was sent to an asylum for the criminally insane. The para-psych doctors noted in their reports that the patient was obsessed with painting. He worked on his pictures as though consumed by a fever.
All of the images featured the same subject—a woman sitting on rocks that jutted out of a wildly churning sea. In the paintings, the lady on the rocks played an ancient stringed instrument and sang to the drowning sailors who had been summoned to their deaths by her music.
Ella did not breathe a sigh of relief until the media frenzy died down. In the end only the Curtain—a notorious tabloid that catered to fans of conspiracy theories, scandals, and assorted exposés about women who claimed to be pregnant with Alien babies—came anywhere close to getting the story right.
WEDDING OF THE SEASON ENDS WITH ARREST OF GROOM
DID A SIREN SING KILLER INTO COMA?
Ella tossed the paper into the recycle bin. Fortunately, very few people took the Curtain seriously, and even fewer believed in the Sirens of myth and legend—women who could sing men to their deaths.
• • •
A month after the near-disaster, Karen took Ella out for drinks.
“I don’t know how to repay you, Ella.” Karen picked up her glass of white wine. “The matchmaking agency I used said he was a perfect match. If it hadn’t been for you I probably would have become Dead Wife Number Three. How did you figure out that Bellamy was a chameleon?”
“Jones and Jones came up with that information,” Ella said. “I just knew there was something off so I hired J and J to look into Bellamy’s past.”
“‘Something off’ is putting it mildly.” Karen shuddered. “Bellamy is one of the monsters—the kind of evil talent they write fairy tales about. And to think I nearly married him.”
“You didn’t marry Bellamy, that’s the important thing.”
Karen raised her glass. “Here’s to the next Mr. Right.”
“To Mr. Right.”
“It’s your turn, pal. When are you going to register with a matchmaking agency?”
“Someday.”
“I’m surprised your family isn’t pushing you hard to register.”
“They understand that I’m trying to get a career going first,” Ella said.
“Let’s face it, you’ll never get anywhere if you stay with the Wilson Parsons Talent Agency. Parsons won’t let you establish a name for yourself. No matter how good you are at dream counseling or how many clients you attract to his firm, he’ll always take all the credit.”
“Between you and me, I’ve been thinking about going out on my own. The problem is that the dream counseling business is very competitive, especially at the low end of the market. A lot of people, including a lot of frauds and con artists, think they can analyze dreams. The secret to success is to project an upmarket image and that’s expensive, what with rent and advertising costs.”
“You can do it,” Karen said. “You’re good. And as soon as you get established you’ll register with a matchmaking agency, right?”
“I’ll think about it,” Ella said.
And she would think about it—she would think about it a lot. But she would never register.
Registering with a matchmaking agency would mean having to lie on the questionnaires. It would mean lying to the marriage counselors. It would mean lying to a prospective husband. And if she ever did marry, it would mean that she would have to live a lie for the rest of her life.
The last thing she wanted was a marriage based on a lie. She wanted a real marriage, one founded on love and intimacy and passion and all the other things that she would probably never experience up close and personal.
“Thank goodness your intuition was better than mine,” Karen said. “More acute than the matchmaking agency’s programs, for that matter.”
“Just a lucky hunch on my part,” Ella said.
She could not tell Karen or anyone else outside her own family the truth—she had recognized the monster for what he was because he had touched her on a few occasions in an effort to charm her. The contact had been fleeting and casual—the light brush of his fingers when he handed her a glass of champagne; his hand under her arm when he assisted her out of a car. But that was all she needed.
No, she would not be registering with a matchmaking agency. There were no fairy-tale endings for women like her. When it came to identifying the monsters, the old saying held true. It takes one to know one.
Chapter 2
The Alien music locked in the green quartz walls sang to her senses. Gorgeous notes floated in the paranormal currents. Haunting bells chimed their ethereal harmonies at both ends of the spectrum. The dark thunder and lightning of crashing chords reverberated in the atmosphere.
Ella did her best to ignore the thrilling music in the tunnel walls so that she could concentrate on her driving.
“You know,” she said to the dust bunny clinging to the utility sled dashboard, “I’d assumed my first client would be human.”
The dust bunny responded with a low, rumbling growl. Not so much a warning or a threat, Ella concluded; more like an urgent plea for speed. Then again, what did she know about dust bunnies? The one perched on the sled’s dashboard like a hood ornament was the first one she had ever encountered outside of picture books and cartoons. Every kid on Harmony had read the tales of Little Amberina and the Dust Bunny.
Dust bunnies had a cute mode—hence their popularity in children’s literature. When fully fluffed they looked like oversized wads of dryer lint with six little paws and two big, innocent blue eyes. The one on the dashboard of the sled, however, was not even trying to look adorable. She was fully sleeked out and her second set of eyes—the fierce amber ones that were designed for night hunting—were open.
“I’m sorry,” Ella said. “I’ve got the sled rezzed to the max. I can’t drive any faster.”
They were whipping through the maze of ancient Alien tunnels at a speed that was only a little faster than the average person could run. The sled looked a lot like a golf cart and it moved like one, too. It was powered by a sturdy, but simple, old-fashioned amber-based engine. Low-tech was the only option in the heavy psi-environment that permeated the
catacombs and the great subterranean Rainforest. The Underworld had been engineered by the long-vanished Aliens, who had relied on as-yet little understood forms of paranormal energy. Sophisticated human technology such as high-powered engines, computers, and guns either exploded in your hands or simply flatlined in the eerie realms the vanished civilization had created below the surface.
“I really hope you know what we’re doing,” Ella said. “Because I’m going to owe Pete a big favor once he finds out that I borrowed his sled.”
Pete Grimshaw was the proprietor of Pete’s Underworld Artifacts, the shop next to her new office in the Old Quarter. A retired ghost hunter, he had closed early that afternoon in order to have a few beers with some old hunter pals.
Ella had opened her little one-person consulting firm—Morgan Dream Counseling—less than a week earlier, but she had already discovered that short workdays and long nights in the local bars was business as usual for Pete. There had been no time to find him and ask permission to take his prospecting sled. The dust bunny that had scampered through her doorway a short time ago had been frantic. You didn’t have to be psychic to know when an animal was anxious and desperate.
Ella drove the sled into a large circular chamber and stopped. There were more than half a dozen intersecting tunnels, each glowing with the acid-green energy infused in the quartz that the Aliens had used to construct their underground world. She looked at the dust bunny.
“Which way?” she asked.
She knew the small creature could not comprehend what she was saying, but under the circumstances, she figured her meaning was clear.
The dust bunny faced toward one of the vaulted entrances and bounced up and down, making urgent little noises.
“Got it.”
Ella rezzed the sled and drove into the indicated tunnel. The dust bunny did not protest, so she concluded she’d made the right choice.
It had been like this from the moment they had descended into the Underworld and commandeered the sled. Every time they reached an intersection in the maze, the dust bunny chose the tunnel.
Ella glanced at the handful of simple instruments on the dashboard. The signal from the tuned-amber locator was still strong. Her route was clearly charted so she could find her way back. The tunnels were impossible to navigate without good amber, and Pete, being an old Guild man, was obsessive about keeping the sled’s amber tuned. In addition, she had plenty of personal tuned amber on her. There were nuggets in her stud earrings and a nicely carved piece on the pendant that she wore around her neck. She also had another chunk stashed in the heel of her shoe.
Unlike Pete, who often searched for relics in the maze of the Underworld, her day job rarely took her into the catacombs. But the Alien music that sang in green quartz often proved irresistible.
She had learned that she could find a kind of peace in the strange harmonies. On the nights when she knew that she was dwelling too much on the lonely future that awaited her—a future in which she was fated to be always a bridesmaid and never a bride—she sometimes descended into the Underworld and gave herself over to the ethereal music until dawn.
Bright yellow warning lights flickered on one of the locator screens. The sled was nearing an uncharted sector. She wasn’t lost yet but she was in danger of driving out of the mapped zone. Even with good amber, that was a dangerous place to be. There were a lot of hazards in the uncleared regions of the underground, most of them fairly lethal.
Now that the initial rush of adrenaline had started to wear off, common sense was flooding back. What was she doing, allowing a dust bunny to lead her deeper and deeper into the tunnels?
Her first thought—the one she had leaned on to rationalize the daring escapade—was that someone was in trouble down below. Children’s books were replete with stories of heroic dust bunnies that saved little kids who had been foolish enough to go into the Underworld alone.
Right, she thought. That would be children’s books, as in pure fantasy. Get real.
But the dust bunny on the dashboard was real.
The yellow lights on the locator screen turned red. That was not good. Ella was on the brink of making the decision to turn around and go back when the hood ornament froze and uttered a forbidding growl.
Ella brought the sled to a halt and looked down a seemingly endless hallway. Vaulted entrances to rooms and chambers loomed on either side of the corridor.
“Okay,” she said. “Now what, pal?”
The dust bunny leaped from the dashboard to her shoulder, startling her. The creatures were predators, she reminded herself. There was a saying about dust bunnies: By the time you see the teeth, it’s too late. Panic flickered through her. If the thing went for her throat she was doomed. . . .
But the dust bunny didn’t attack. It made more anxious noises, bounded down off her shoulder, and dashed through the entrance of the nearest chamber.
Ella double-checked her personal amber. Satisfied that she could retreat if necessary, she followed the dust bunny. At the doorway she paused to glance back over her shoulder, making certain that she could still see the sled. The invisible rivers of paranormal energy that flowed through the Underworld played tricks on human senses. Losing visual contact with your transport was not smart.
She went through the opening and stopped short. She was not certain what she had expected to find at the end of the frantic race through the tunnels—an injured prospector or a lost child, perhaps.
The reality was a long workbench, two strange crystal devices that did not look as though they had been designed for human hands, and a row of small steel-and-glass cages. The locks on the cages were old-fashioned padlocks that required keys. High-tech security devices would not function in the paranormal environment.
Each cage contained a sleeked-out, mad-as-green-hell dust bunny. There were six in all. Rage and fear radiated from the trapped creatures. They watched her with suspicious eyes, not certain if she was friend or tormentor.
She took in the situation at once. Outrage flashed through her. The crystal relics on the workbench were the telling clues. Someone had discovered a couple of Alien weapons and was planning to run a few field tests using the dust bunnies as targets.
“Bastard,” she whispered.
The dust bunny that had come to her for help dashed frantically back and forth across the room, chattering anxiously.
“I’ll do my best,” Ella said. “There’s probably a hammer in the sled’s tool kit but I don’t think it will work. That glass looks like the kind they use in banks and shark tanks. But lucky for your buddies, it’s still just glass. People like me are good with glass.”
The dust bunny chittered and dashed around her ankles.
“Okay, okay, give me a minute.”
She went to the first cage in the row and flattened one hand on the front panel. Gently she rezzed her talent, searching for the right frequency. The tiny bells on her bracelet shivered.
“Got it,” she said to the dust bunny.
She focused on the cage.
You had to be careful working with glass. It was a unique substance in terms of para-physics because it possessed the properties of both a solid and a liquid.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. I broke a lot of Mom’s best crystal stemware when I first came into my talent.”
The dust bunny stood on its hind paws and quivered. All four eyes were open very wide.
“And just how did you know that I could help?” Ella asked softly. “What are you? Psychic?”
The faint tinkling of the bracelet’s bells grew louder and more resonant.
For a moment there was no visual evidence of the effects of the destabilizing energy, but Ella sensed that the internal structure of the glass panel was weakening.
A couple of seconds later the entire front of the cage dissolved into a pool of liquid crystals.
“Just like melting a Popsicle,” Ella said. “Easy-peasy. But I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home.”
Great. Now she was talking to animals.
The freed dust bunny chittered madly and bounded down to the floor. Ella moved on to the next cage. Now that she had the frequency it was easy to melt the glass. The process went smoothly and swiftly.
A couple of minutes later the last of the dust bunnies was free. They chortled at each other and at Ella. She got the impression they were grateful, but they did not show any inclination to hang around. All but one dashed to the doorway and promptly vanished out into the tunnels.
Ella recognized the one remaining dust bunny as her client.
“Don’t worry about my fee,” she said. “It’s probably good karma to open a new business with a little pro-bono work. Now, you’ll have to excuse me. I need to get back to the surface to make a phone call. The Guild and the FBPI will be interested in whatever is going on here. Looks like you and your pals got caught up in some black market Alien-tech dealing. The authorities frown on that sort of thing.”
The dust bunny chortled cheerfully and dashed away through the door. Ella crossed to the workbench and considered her next move. The question that confronted her was whether she should collect the two crystal weapons and take them back to the surface or leave them where they were.
The relics constituted evidence, but if she left them at the scene there was a real risk that the arms dealer would return before either the Guild or the Federal Bureau of Psi Investigation arrived. As soon as the dealer spotted the melted cages he would know his lair had been discovered. He would grab the artifacts and run.
On the other hand, if she showed up on the surface with two Alien weapons worth a fortune in the illicit underground market, there would be a lot of questions to answer. Somehow, she did not think either the Guild or the FBPI would buy a story involving a bunch of imprisoned dust bunnies. She could easily come off looking delusional at best. If things really went down the dust bunny hole, she might get arrested for possession of illegal Alien tech.
