RS01 The Lost Night Read online

  Jayne Ann Krentz is the critically-acclaimed creator of the Arcane Society world. She also writes as Amanda Quick and Jayne Castle. Jayne has written more than fifty New York Times bestsellers under various pseudonyms and more than thirty-five million copies of her books are currently in print. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

  The futuristic novels she writes as Jayne Castle all feature her customary irresistible mix of passion and mystery, and also have a strong psychic/paranormal twist.

  Visit her website at www.jayneannkrentz.com.

  www.facebook.com/JayneAnnKrentz

  www.twitter.com/JayneAnnKrentz

  Rainshadow Island series:

  By Jayne Ann Krentz

  writing as Jayne Castle

  Canyons of Night

  Dark Legacy series:

  By Jayne Ann Krentz

  Copper Beach

  Ladies of the Lantern series:

  By Jayne Ann Krentz

  writing as Amanda Quick

  Crystal Gardens

  Arcane Society Novels:

  By Jayne Ann Krentz

  writing as Jayne Castle

  Dark Light

  Obsidian Prey

  Midnight Crystal

  By Jayne Ann Krentz

  writing as Amanda Quick

  Second Sight

  The Third Circle

  The Perfect Poison

  Burning Lamp

  Quicksilver

  By Jayne Ann Krentz

  White Lies

  Sizzle and Burn

  Running Hot

  Fired Up

  In Too Deep

  Other titles by Jayne Ann Krentz

  writing as Amanda Quick

  With This Ring

  I Thee Wed

  Wicked Widow

  Lie By Moonlight

  The Paid Companion

  Wait Until Midnight

  The River Knows

  Affair

  Mischief

  Other titles by Jayne Ann Krentz

  Light in Shadow

  Truth or Dare

  Falling Awake

  All Night Long

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-1-4055-1865-9

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Jayne Ann Krentz

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  By Jayne Ann Krentz

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note from Jayne

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  For Darwina, who knows a great role model

  when she sees one. Amberella rules!

  A Note from Jayne

  Welcome to Rainshadow Island on the world of Harmony.

  In the Rainshadow novels you will meet the passionate men and women who are drawn to this remote island in the Amber Sea. You will also get to know their friends and neighbors in the small town of Shadow Bay.

  Everyone on Rainshadow has a past; everyone has secrets. But none of those secrets is as dangerous as the ancient mystery concealed inside the paranormal fence that guards the forbidden portion of the island known as the Preserve.

  The secrets of the Preserve have been locked away for centuries. But now something dangerous is stirring.…

  I hope you will enjoy the Rainshadow novels.

  Sincerely,

  Jayne

  Chapter 1

  “You belong to me,” the vampire said. “Soon you will understand that you are meant to be my bride. No matter what happens to me in this place, I will escape and I will come for you.”

  Marcus Lancaster’s voice was rich, compelling, and resonant, the voice of an opera singer or the ultimate con man. He accompanied the words with a sly whisper of compelling energy that shivered with promise. I can fulfill your deepest desires.

  Rachel Blake did not doubt for a moment that he truly did want her, but she was certain it was not because he had fallen in love with her. Lancaster was one of the monsters. That crowd didn’t have the capacity to love. They were inclined, however, to be obsessive in their desires and, therefore, quite dangerous.

  “I knew this was a waste of time.” Rachel gathered up her notepad and pen and got to her feet. The silvery charms attached to her bracelet shivered and clashed lightly.

  “You cannot run from me, my beloved,” Lancaster said. He reached up with one well-manicured hand and touched the ear stud in his left ear. The small item of jewelry was made of black metal and set with a stone that was the color of rain.

  The gesture was casual; made in an absent manner, as if Lancaster was not aware of what he was doing. But the hair on the back of Rachel’s neck stirred. A chill of intuition raised goose bumps on her arms. Her palms went cold.

  Lancaster wore another piece of jewelry, too, a discreet signet ring engraved with the image of a mythical Old World beast, a griffin.

  She had shut down her senses so she wouldn’t have to view Lancaster’s aura, but there were traces of his energy on the table and everything else that he had touched in the room. She could not abide the way he was watching her. She had to get out of there.

  She looked at the one-way window set into the wall as she went toward the door and raised her voice a little to make sure her unseen audience could hear her.

  “That’s it, Dr. Oakford. I’m finished here. There’s nothing I can do with this one.”

  She did not have to see the faces of Dr. Ian Oakford and the other members of the clinic staff who were observing the therapy session to know that they were all reacting with shock and outrage. Ditching a patient the way she had just done was extremely unprofessional. But she no longer cared. She’d had enough of Oakford and his team, enough of their research, enough of trying to fit in to the mainstream world of clinical para-psychology.

  A woman—at least one who had been raised in a Harmonic Enlightenment community—could take only so much. Her parents and her instructors at the Academy were right. She was not cut out for mainstream life.

  Most people would not have known Lancaster for what he was. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, and handsome in a slick, distinguished way, he was a natural-born predator that moved easily among his prey. But the dark side of her talent for aura healing was the ability to see the monsters and recognize them for what they were.

  Lancaster had made a tidy fortune in the financial world. But a
few days ago he had shocked his associates and his clients when he had voluntarily committed himself to the Chapman Clinic. He claimed to be plagued with severe para-psych trauma induced by the death of his wife several months earlier. His symptoms consisted of nightmares and dangerous delusions—precisely the severe symptoms required to be admitted to Dr. Oakford’s new research program at the clinic.

  She opened the door, stepped out into the hall, and signaled to the waiting orderly.

  “You can take Mr. Lancaster back to his room, Carl,” she said. “We’re finished.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Carl moved into the therapy room.

  “Time to go, Mr. Lancaster,” he said in the soothing, upbeat tone he used with all of the patients.

  Lancaster chuckled. “I think I make Miss Blake nervous, Carl.”

  He got to his feet with leisurely grace, as though he were still dressed in the elegant silver gray suit and white tie that he had been wearing when he had walked into the clinic. Credit where credit was due, Rachel thought. Lancaster managed to make the baggy shirt and trousers that were standard issue for all patients look like resort-casual attire.

  “Do you think she’s afraid of me, Carl?” Lancaster infused his mellifluous words with just the right tincture of regret. “The last thing I want to do is frighten her.”

  “No, Mr. Lancaster, I’m sure Rachel isn’t afraid of you,” Carl said. “She has no reason to be afraid of you, now does she?”

  “An excellent question, Carl. One that only Rachel can answer.”

  Rachel ignored both of them. The tiny stones set into her charms were starting to brighten. That was not a good sign because she was not consciously heating the crystals. They were reacting to her anxiety, a strong indication that her current state of psychical awareness and control was anything but harmonically tuned.

  This was it, she thought. Lancaster was the last straw. She was going to hand in her resignation. The money was good at the clinic and the work provided the illusion that, in spite of what everyone back home said, she could make a place for herself in the mainstream world. But she had not signed on to deal with monsters like Marcus Lancaster. Nor was he the only one enrolled in the research trial. There was a very good reason why the patients in Oakford’s project were housed in a locked ward.

  She was an aura healer. She needed to use her talents in a positive way.

  According to mainstream theories of para-psychology, energy-sucking psychic vampires were a myth; the stuff of horror novels and scary movies. But Rachel had met a few in her time and she knew the truth. The monsters were real. The good news was that most of them were relatively weak. They tended to pursue careers as con men, cult leaders, and politicians. They preyed on the emotionally vulnerable and the gullible.

  Nobody denied that such low-level human predators existed, but few thought of them as vampires or monsters. Psychology textbooks, therapists, and clinicians had invented more politically correct terms to describe them. The diagnostic descriptions often involved the phrase personality disorder or para-sociopath. But the ancients back on the Old World had gotten it right, Rachel thought. So had the philosophers who had founded the Harmonic Enlightenment movement and established the Principles of Harmonic Enlightenment. The correct description for the Marcus Lancasters of the world was evil. When that particular attribute was coupled with some paranormal talent, you got psychic vampire.

  The question that was worrying her the most was why Lancaster was attracted to her. She knew it was not love or even simple lust that had made him fixate on her out of all the members of the clinic staff. She had learned at the Academy that it was the prospect of controlling others that fascinated the monsters. By the nature of her own psychic ability and training she possessed a high degree of immunity to their talents. But she suspected her immunity was the very quality that had drawn Lancaster’s attention. She was a challenge to him. Seducing and controlling her would affirm his own power.

  The problem for the creeps was that they were incapable of achieving any degree of inner harmony. They spent their lives trying to fill the dead-zones on their spectrums. No ponzi scheme was ever lucrative enough, no cult was ever large enough, no business empire was ever sufficiently profitable, no position on the academic or political ladder was imbued with enough power to content a vampire.

  And for the subset of vicious monsters who were drawn to death and violence, no amount of torture and killing could satisfy the bloodlust.

  But monsters had dreams, too, Rachel thought. Evidently Marcus Lancaster had concluded that controlling her would fulfill some of his own dark fantasies.

  Ian Oakford was waiting for her at the end of the hall. Last month when she had met him she had done a little fantasizing of her own. Ian was an intelligent, good-looking man with a very buff build and a lot of stylishly cut brown hair. He was endowed with the strong-jawed, trust-me-I’m-a-doctor presence that the patients and most of his female staff found appealing. Rachel was convinced that he could have had a lucrative second career as an actor playing a doctor in pharmaceutical commercials.

  Not that Ian wasn’t already doing very well for himself. He was still young by the standards of the profession, but his talent for para-psychology, combined with a lot of drive and ambition, had taken him far. Six months ago he had been appointed director of the new research wing of the Chapman Clinic. The funding from drug companies had quickly followed. He had several clinical trials in various stages of progress.

  At that moment, however, Ian did not exhibit the kind, reassuring air that people liked in those engaged in the healing profession. Behind the lenses of his designer glasses his gray eyes glittered with anger. His square jaw was rigid.

  “What do you think you’re doing, walking out of a therapy session like that?” he demanded.

  His voice was tight but controlled. Ian prided himself on never expressing extremes of emotions of any kind. He viewed such displays as a symptom of instability in the aura. He was right, of course, at least according to the Principles, and she had admired him for his self-mastery. But she did not need her talent to tell her that he was furious. She didn’t blame him. He had taken a huge risk bringing her onto his research team. Her professional failings reflected badly on his judgment.

  She braced herself for the inevitable. This was it, the end of her first really good job in the mainstream world. Her parents would breathe a sigh of relief. They had warned her about the difficulties she would encounter when she left the Academy and the Community.

  “Marcus Lancaster is not experiencing severe para-trauma, Dr. Oakford,” she said quietly. “He’s faking it. He’s incapable of feeling any sense of loss unless it affects his bottom line or threatens his personal safety. A dead wife wouldn’t cut it, trust me, not unless her death cost him financially, which, according to what I found online, was not the case. Just the opposite. He inherited a lot of money when she died.”

  “You’re wrong. No one could fake those night sweats and hallucinations.”

  “He is,” she said simply. “And you and the others here at the clinic are buying his act.”

  “Why would a man in Lancaster’s position pretend to have such a severe mental illness? It could destroy him financially and socially. No one in his right mind would voluntarily commit himself for treatment in a para-psych hospital the way Lancaster did unless he truly feared for his sanity.”

  “I have no idea why he committed himself voluntarily,” Rachel said. “You could ask him, but I can tell you right now he’ll lie through his fangs.”

  “Fangs?”

  “Sorry, teeth. As I was saying, I don’t have any idea why he went to so much trouble to get into your research project, but if I were you, I’d watch out for a lawsuit somewhere down the road.”

  “Lawsuit?”

  “I suspect that Lancaster has a long history of financial cons and schemes,” she said. “Maybe he’s got a plan for proving that he was a victim of unethical research practices. Who knows? I
can’t begin to guess his objectives but I can promise you that there is nothing you or I or modern para-pharmaceuticals can do for him. We can’t fix the monsters.”

  “I have warned you before that we do not use terms like monsters and vampires in this clinic. I realize you’re not a professional, Miss Blake, but that is no excuse for unprofessional language.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “There are no such things as human monsters. How many times do I have to explain to you that Lancaster suffers from para-psych trauma complicated by an underlying instability of his para-senses?” Ian must have realized that his voice was rising. He regained control immediately. “I did not hire you to diagnose my patients. Your sole responsibility is to identify the erratic currents in their auras so that their disorders can be treated by a qualified therapist and appropriate prescriptions can be written.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  Behind Ian, Helen Nelson and Adrian Evans, the two members of the staff who had been observing the session with Oakford, walked quietly away in the opposite direction. They knew what was going to happen next, Rachel thought. They were on their way to spread the gossip.

  Just before the pair turned the corner, Helen glanced back and gave Rachel a sympathetic look. Rachel managed a wan smile in return. She was keenly aware that most of the professional staff at the clinic viewed her with disapproval and, in some cases, outright hostility. Helen had been one of the kinder people on the research team. She had gone so far as to invite Rachel to join her for lunch in the company cafeteria a few times. In return Rachel had done free aura readings at a birthday party for one of Helen’s friends. There had been a lot of white wine and canapés that night. Rachel had known full well that she was there as the entertainment for the evening, but she had hoped that it was the first step in building a circle of friends outside the Community, another step toward mainstreaming.

  She knew now that she was never going to be accepted at the clinic. She had done her best to blend in, but pinning her hair into a tight bun and donning dark-framed, serious glasses and a white lab coat couldn’t hide the truth. Everyone at Chapman was well aware that she was not a real para-psychologist. She wasn’t even a licensed therapist. In addition, she qualified as a curiosity, especially among the men on the staff, because she had been raised in a Harmonic Enlightenment community.