After Glow Read online

  She was labeled extremely fragile, psychically speaking, and therefore unreliable on a professional excavation team. No one wanted to work with a tangler who had been badly fried.

  At the formal inquiry the two ghost-hunters who had been charged with responsibility for protecting the team had blamed Lydia for taking off on her own without due regard for the very strict safety rules. She, in turn, had accused them of failing to do their job properly.

  The findings of the investigation had been pretty much a foregone conclusion. Officially, the disaster was deemed to be a result of Lydia’s failure to follow established procedures. She had been dismissed from her position at the university.

  For her part, she had vowed never to trust a ghost-hunter again.

  Life had certainly changed a lot in the past few months, she reflected. Instead of working on an academic research team, she was now employed at a third-rate museum, Shrimpton’s House of Ancient Horrors, and she was dating a ghost-hunter.

  On the positive-rez side, her sex life had definitely improved.

  On the negative-rez side, she knew that she had fallen in love.

  She was aware of Emmett sprawled heavily on the bed beside her, one arm flung around her waist in a casually possessive grip.

  She stared up at the ceiling. “I can’t believe that I’m sleeping with a Guild boss.”

  “Temporary Guild boss,” he mumbled into the pillow. “Acting Guild boss. No, wait, let’s make that consulting Guild boss.”

  “I’m sleeping with a Guild boss.”

  “Former Guild boss?” he tried.

  “Guild boss.”

  He rolled over onto his back and folded his arms behind his head. “You can be a little too literal-minded at times, you know that?”

  She levered herself up on one elbow. “Probably a result of my academic training.”

  “Probably.”

  For a few seconds she allowed herself to savor the sight of him in her bed. He still wore his shirt but that was all. The shadow of his untrimmed beard enhanced the stark, uncompromising planes and angles of his hunter’s face.

  “You didn’t even get a chance to shave this morning, did you?” she said. “You must be exhausted.”

  “Like I said, the phone was ringing when I walked in the door around three A.M.” He took one hand out from behind his head and rubbed his jaw, grimacing. “The doctors didn’t know if Wyatt was going to make it so I just dropped the camping stuff and got back in the car.”

  “There’s something I don’t understand here. Why did the hospital call you? You’re not even a member of the Cadence Guild.”

  He exhaled heavily. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Wyatt was barely conscious when he dragged himself in to the emergency room. But he’s a Guild boss to his bones. He stayed awake long enough to call a couple of members of the Guild Council and issue some orders. Then he made the hospital call me. He was being wheeled into the operating room when I arrived.” Emmett shook his head. “And still giving orders.”

  “Wait a second.” Lydia sat up, pulling the sheet around her. “Wyatt got himself to the hospital? But I thought you said he was nearly killed with a mag-rez gun.”

  “He should have been dead. Someone put two rounds into him. Both shots were probably intended to hit him in the upper chest. But he evidently sensed something was wrong when he got out of his car and tried to dive for cover. The result was that both shots went low and to the side. Still there was a lot of damage, not to mention shock and blood loss.”

  “It’s a wonder he didn’t bleed to death.”

  “He was in the Old Quarter near the South Wall when it happened. He managed to summon a couple of small energy ghosts. Used them to partially cauterize the wounds and slow the bleeding. Then he got behind the wheel of that big Oscillator 600 of his and drove himself to the ER.”

  “He used ghost energy on bleeding wounds?”

  “No one ever said that Mercer Wyatt wasn’t as tough as they come.”

  She caught her breath, astonished. Most of the green radiation given off by unstable dissonance energy manifestations everyone called ghosts was psi in nature, and the effects produced were most pronounced on the paranormal plane. But some of the eerie glow took the form of thermal energy. Ghosts were frequently hot enough to scorch paper or wood or a bedroom wall, as she had discovered the hard way last month.

  Nevertheless, the thought of using one on an open wound was mind-boggling.

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she said. “Theoretically, I suppose, it could be done. But the hunter would have to be able to exert an amazing amount of control in order to manipulate a ghost with the kind of precision it would require to staunch bleeding and not get badly burned at the same time.”

  “Hunters have some built-in immunity to the effects of ghost fire,” he reminded her. “Comes with the psi talent required to handle them, I guess.”

  She shuddered. “Even so, I can only imagine how much pain it would cause on both the physical and the psychic planes.”

  He shrugged. “It hurts but not as much as you might think, not if you use some of the ghost’s psi energy to distance your mind from the pain.”

  She frowned. “You’ve heard about this technique?”

  “Sure. You get instruction and a little practice in basic training. It was an emergency medical procedure that was developed by Guild field medics during the Era of Discord.”

  Every child was taught the history of the Guilds in elementary school. They had been established a hundred years earlier as combat units to protect the cities against the threat of the charismatic fanatic, Vincent Lee Vance, and his followers.

  Vance was a powerful dissonance-energy para-resonator—a ghost-hunter—who had spent his early years prospecting for amber. He had always been considered psychically unstable by those who knew him best but his eccentricities had not been much of a problem because for the most part he had shunned society to follow the solitary career path associated with the prospecting business.

  At one point in his life Vance disappeared underground into the catacombs beneath Old Frequency City. When he had failed to reappear after several months, he had been presumed dead.

  Eventually he had emerged, no longer a scruffy, half-daft amber man, but a visionary megalomaniac whose goal was nothing less than the conquest of all of the city-states. He claimed that he had discovered a great treasure house of ancient Harmonic secrets that would enable him to institute an ideal society. He promised that those who fought on his side would be rewarded with enormous power and wealth.

  Life had been hard in the colonial cities a hundred years ago. The appeal of a utopian world was strong.

  Vance had gathered an army of disaffected followers before anyone even started to take him seriously. He also acquired a lover named Helen Chandler, an extremely talented ephemeral-energy para-resonator who, it was said, could untangle any illusion trap that had ever been discovered.

  From his secret headquarters somewhere in the complex of tunnels beneath Old Frequency City, Vance had drawn up detailed plans of conquest. His strategy had worked well at first because the colonial cities had never established standing armies. There had been no need for a military on Harmony. All of the city-states had been closely connected and had cooperated from the start in the effort to survive.

  There were also no large arsenals on Harmony. The high-tech hunting rifles and handguns that had been brought from Earth by some of the colonists had ceased to function after the first few years because there had been no way to maintain them or reproduce the ammunition. In Vance’s era there were only a couple of small, privately owned munitions manufacturing firms turning out revolvers and some rifles for the use of the cities’ police departments and for farmers and hunters. The weapons were notoriously unreliable because the technique of making an amber-resonating trigger had not yet been perfected. In any event, none of those firms had possessed the capabi
lity of supplying arms in large numbers to Vance’s recruits, even if they could have been made to do so.

  But Harmony had provided its own weaponry: the dangerous and powerful energy ghosts in the catacombs.

  Vance had fought a guerilla war in the maze of tunnels beneath the city-states. His hunters had summoned and manipulated great numbers of powerful energy ghosts. His tanglers had cleared the traps out of miles of uncharted underground corridors, enabling Vance’s forces to strike swiftly and then disappear into the catacombs.

  In a series of fast strikes, Vance’s army produced early, devastating results. Old Frequency had fallen within days. Old Crystal had followed less than a month later. But the hunters in the two cities had put up more of a fight than Vance had expected and in doing so they had bought valuable time for Old Resonance and Old Cadence.

  Under the leadership of a powerful hunter named Jerrett Knox, whose arcane, scholarly hobby happened to be the study of the history of ancient warfare on Earth, Resonance and Cadence had quickly brought their hunters together. The Guilds had been established to organize the fighting forces.

  Knox had proved to be a gifted leader and a shrewd tactician. He also knew the catacombs extraordinarily well because he had spent years mapping them.

  It had taken nearly a year to defeat Vance and his followers but in the end his minions had been crushed. After the final battle of Old Cadence, Vincent Lee Vance and his tangler-lover, Helen Chandler, had fled into an uncharted sector underground. They had vanished somewhere in the miles of unmapped catacombs, never to be heard from again.

  “I’ve seen some accidents while working underground but I’ve never known a hunter to try to use a ghost to stop bleeding,” Lydia said.

  “It’s an old-fashioned, low-tech procedure that is almost never needed these days,” Emmett explained patiently. “Underground emergency teams carry modern medical kits that contain safer, more efficient equipment.”

  “But the Guilds still teach the old methods?”

  “They teach them,” Emmett said deliberately. “But not every hunter can make them work. Manipulating small ghosts that precisely is tricky.”

  “I’ll bet,” she muttered. “But Mercer Wyatt can no doubt do tricky.”

  “When called upon, yes,” Emmett said dryly.

  “Probably a Guild boss thing.” She wrinkled her nose. “All right, finish your story.”

  “That’s about it. Like I said, Wyatt made it to the ER, gave a few orders, and was rushed into surgery. Last time I checked, he was still unconscious.”

  “How critical is his condition? Do they really think he might die?”

  “I don’t know. The doctors are being very guarded at the moment.”

  “But in the meantime, you’re the new Guild boss.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She sighed. “Well, I suppose I can understand why you felt you had to take over for Wyatt when he asked you to help out. After all, you’ve been connected to the Guilds your whole life. You probably have a very ingrained sense of loyalty toward them.”

  “Let’s get something straight here,” Emmett said quietly. “It wasn’t some kind of knee-jerk sense of Guild loyalty that made me agree to take over until Wyatt recovers.”

  She scowled. “Then why in the world did you do it?”

  He exhaled deeply. “Another type of knee-jerk loyalty, I guess. I did it because Mercer Wyatt is my father.”

  4

  SHE JUST SAT there in the middle of the rumpled bed, speechless.

  Wry amusement flickered in Emmett’s eyes. “When I was growing up it was fairly common gossip back in Guild circles in Resonance.”

  She swallowed. “I see.”

  “Guess the stories didn’t circulate here in Cadence, huh?”

  “They certainly didn’t circulate in my circles,” she said briskly. “But, then, I’ve never socialized much with the Guild crowd.”

  “And you couldn’t have cared less about gossip concerning any of its members, right?”

  She raised one shoulder in a small shrug. “I had other interests.”

  “Yeah, like getting into a prestigious graduate school so that you could become a highly respected professor of para-archaeology and get to publish impossible-to-read treatises on tiny, insignificant artifacts that no one else gave a damn about and then do your socializing at boring faculty sherry hours where you got to trade witty repartee with a bunch of pompous academics.”

  “Hey, it was my life and I was real happy with it until a couple of idiot hunters failed to do their job, nearly got me killed, and succeeded in getting me fired. Don’t start with me, London.”

  His jaw jerked slightly. But all he said was, “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

  There was a short, tense silence.

  “So tell me about your father,” she said eventually.

  “Not much to tell. The way I got the story from my mother was that before I was born she and her husband, John London, were on the point of ending a simple Marriage of Convenience. He’d had a fling with someone else.” He paused a beat. “She’d had one, too.”

  “Her affair was with Mercer Wyatt, I take it?”

  “Yes. But Wyatt was in a Covenant Marriage at the time and moving up fast through the Guild ranks here in Cadence. His wife was pregnant. There was no question of a divorce.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “John London was killed in an excavation accident underground. Mom had me a few months later and put London’s name on the birth certificate. It was the only thing she could do under the circumstances.”

  “Wyatt knows the truth, I assume?” she said.

  “I assume so. I never asked.”

  She widened her eyes. “You assume so?”

  “We don’t talk about it, okay?” Emmett sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Mom has always made it clear that as far as she and the law and the benefits office of the Resonance Guild are concerned, I’m John London’s son. Fine by me.”

  “I see. A real communicative family.”

  He stood and disappeared into the bathroom. “When I was growing up Wyatt came to Resonance City several times a year. Whenever he was in town to talk business with the leaders of the Guild, he would visit with me and Mom. He acted like he was some sort of honorary uncle. He always showed up with an armful of the latest toys and games. He gave me my first amber. Showed me how to summon a ghost. Kept track of how I was doing in school. Took my mother out to dinner.”

  “How long did that go on?”

  Water ran in the bathroom for a moment.

  “The dinners with Mom stopped when she married a member of the Resonance Guild Council a few years later,” Emmett said after a while. “She was the one who ended the relationship. I got the impression there was a major battle of wills when she told him. Wyatt was not happy about it but in the end, he had no choice. When my mother makes a decision, she makes it stick.”

  “What about your own relationship with Wyatt? Did he continue to visit you?”

  “We stayed in touch. When I started to move up in the hierarchy of the Resonance Guild he gave me some pointers, taught me the ropes of Guild politics. But we had a major parting of the ways when he realized that I had my own ideas about the future of the Resonance Guild.”

  “What happened?”

  “Wyatt was furious when he found out what I planned to do with the organization. He was still locked into Guild traditions in those days. He figured that if I managed to restructure the Resonance Guild as a modern business enterprise, the rest of the Guilds would eventually follow. We had several extremely colorful discussions on the subject. He finally gave up trying to change my mind.”

  “Then you proposed to Tamara and dear old dad showed up at your engagement ball and stole your fiancée?”

  “To be fair, Wyatt’s wife had died the year before. As for Tamara, she had already decided to end our engagement because I had told her that I planned to step down from my position with the Guild. S
he just didn’t tell me until the morning after the reception.”

  “Heck of a morning-after surprise.”

  “My own fault. I should have seen it coming.”

  The shower went on in the bathroom, effectively cutting off all communication to and from the bedroom.

  Annoyed, Lydia scrambled out of bed, pulled on a robe, and stalked into the steamy bath. She pushed the curtain aside.

  Emmett was sluicing himself off beneath a blast of hot water. She tried to ignore the fact that he looked awfully good naked and wet. Water gleamed on his broad shoulders.

  “It strikes me that Tamara’s position is in jeopardy again,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the rushing water. “Her husband is in intensive care. If Wyatt doesn’t make it, she will no longer be Mrs. Guild Boss. On top of that, you are the new Guild chief. She is not going to be a happy woman. Makes it look like she chose the wrong man, after all.”

  “Tamara will have to worry about her own problems.” He reached for the razor. “I’m going to be a little busy for a while.”

  “You never got around to telling me why you don’t think that you’re in the same danger as Mercer Wyatt.”

  “He was fading fast because of the stuff they were pumping into him to control the shock and prep him for surgery. But the last thing he said to me before they wheeled him away was, Don’t let the Guild tear itself apart because of this. It wasn’t politics, it was personal.”

  “You mean he knows who shot him?”

  “I think so, but he didn’t tell me. He said he’d take care of it when he got out of the hospital.”

  A shiver went through her. “Great. Just great. We’re in the middle of a Guild family soap opera.”

  Emmett turned off the shower and grabbed the towel she held out to him.

  “When it comes to dysfunctional families,” he said, “I’ll put mine up against anyone’s, anytime.”