The Hot Zone (A Rainshadow Novel Book 3) Read online

Still, power was power and control was control, and she had always possessed a lot of both.

  She could not halt the flood tide of dreamlight but she could force it to flow around her, just as she did when she controlled the psi-winds of a gate or an energy river. The terrifying images and the currents of eerie lights streamed around her on all sides. The voices faded. The dreamscape was no longer as disorienting as it had been a moment ago but the boundary between the normal and the surreal was murky, at best. It helped to keep one hand on the wall. The tactile sensations were easier for her fractured senses to interpret than the visual and audible kind.

  This wasn’t the first time she had waded through a sea of bad energy. She could do this.

  She concentrated fiercely on navigating out of the darkened hallway. She knew she was in the living room when she lost contact with the wall. The weak glow of the night-light beckoned from a great distance, illuminating the path to the front door. She could not maintain her balance so she went down to her hands and knees and crawled across the room, moving within the eye of the energy storm.

  Behind her the ghastly dreamlight subsided but she needed time to recover. The nasty little trap had caught her by surprise. She knew that her senses had taken a serious blow. She was stunned and disoriented. All she wanted to do was collapse on the front porch but the chimes warned her that she had to keep moving.

  In situations like this, you went with your intuition, she reminded herself.

  She used both hands to open the front door. When she finally succeeded she found herself looking out into a wall of moonlight-infused fog and a muffled stillness. Her senses were still flaring but at least she was no longer generating flames.

  Should have brought the flashlight. No, a flashlight would give away my position.

  She could not explain why it seemed so important to get out of the cottage. She just knew it had to be done. She fought back the last of the hallucinations as she inched her way across the porch. The front door squeaked as it swung slowly closed behind her. She found one of the wooden posts that marked the steps.

  She managed to haul herself upright and limp cautiously down the three steps. When she felt hard ground under her shoes she walked forward slowly, her hands outstretched in front of her face.

  She could not see a thing in the absolute darkness, but her senses were no longer disoriented. She knew approximately where she was. She veered left, counting the paces to the woodshed.

  When her outstretched fingers found the structure she breathed a ragged sigh of relief. She worked her way around the shed and stopped behind it, utterly exhausted from the effort it had taken to fend off the dreamlight.

  She put her back against the rear wall of the shed and slowly sank down until she was sitting on the ground. Her fingers brushed against a fist-sized rock. She gripped it tightly. She still clutched the flicker in her other hand but she was not sure she could count on anything more from her talent tonight. She might need a more traditional weapon.

  For a time she sat there, wondering why she had gone to such an effort to escape the cottage. Maybe the intuitive side of her nature had been badly scrambled by the psi-explosion.

  But eventually she heard muffled footsteps. She glimpsed the faint, thin beam of a small flashlight slicing like a needle through the mist. The light disappeared when the newcomer went up the front steps.

  From where she sat, shielded by the woodshed, she could not see anything. But she heard the footsteps crossing the front porch. The door squeaked again when it was opened.

  Someone had gone inside the cottage.

  For a moment or two, nothing happened. She held her breath and clutched the rock.

  And then the door slammed open. Footsteps sounded again, moving quickly back across the porch and down the front steps. Soft, muffled thuds. Athletic shoes, Sedona decided.

  She tightened her grip on the rock and the flicker. The way her luck was running lately, the intruder would probably come looking for her, and the woodshed was the obvious place to start.

  But the footsteps kept going, down the graveled driveway to the road. When Sedona risked a peek around the edge of the shed she could see the beam of a flashlight dancing wildly in the fog but it was impossible to make out the running figure. A moment later the bouncing light vanished, too.

  Chapter 7

  She sat there with her back against the shed wall, trying to calm her abused senses. She hadn’t been this rattled since the Disaster. But at least she wasn’t sliding into unconsciousness this time. She was pretty sure the psychic side of her nature hadn’t been shattered.

  Pretty sure. She just needed time to get her act together, she thought.

  The auroras started then, the brilliant green lights flooding the night sky, infusing the thick fog with an eerie green glow. It didn’t make it any easier to see things in the mist, but at least the world was no longer so oppressively dark.

  Maybe she was hallucinating again. No, she had seen the auroras last night and the night before that. Everyone else in Shadow Bay had seen them, too. The locals said they were a common atmospheric event around Halloween. The waves of light were real.

  A familiar rumble came out of the fog.

  “Lyle,” she said. “About time you showed up. Hope you had fun tonight. I had a blast.”

  Lyle appeared out of the glowing green mist. She wouldn’t have been able to see him at all if it were not for the fact that he had all four eyes open. He hopped up onto her knees and made urgent little noises.

  “It’s okay,” she said. She reached out to pat his head. “But I need a minute here.”

  Lyle rumbled again, jumped down off her knees, and disappeared into the green mist.

  “Just when you think you’ve found the right guy,” Sedona said, “he ups and disappears on you.”

  Damn. Now she was talking to herself. This was not good. Maybe she had hallucinated Lyle. It was a deeply disturbing thought. Maybe the drugs they had given her in Blankenship’s lab had done more damage than she had realized. Maybe there had been no psi-trap in the bedroom tonight. Maybe she wasn’t seeing aurora light reflected in the fog. Maybe she was permanently lost in a dreamscape.

  More footsteps echoed in the mist. She listened closely. Boots, this time, and moving fast. She wondered if she was now having auditory hallucinations. Dreams were strange.

  She listened hard, wondering if the boots would go into the house. But they didn’t. They came directly toward the woodshed.

  Lyle materialized out of the bright fog. All four eyes still open. But this time he chortled reassuringly and bounced up onto her thigh.

  Relief flashed through her. She clutched him close.

  The boot steps came to a halt. She was suddenly pinned in the beam of a flashlight. When she looked up she saw a large dark shadow looming in the mist.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Cyrus said.

  “It’s sort of complicated,” Sedona said.

  She put down the rock and struggled to get to her feet.

  Cyrus reached down and helped her stand.

  The physical contact was a mistake. She knew it instantly but by then it was too late. She was in the midst of a post-burn buzz. The crash would come later, but for now all of her senses were at high-rez and not under full control.

  “Wait,” she gasped. “You don’t want to do this.”

  But Cyrus had already scooped her up into his arms. “Take the flashlight.”

  She took the flashlight in her right hand. She was still clutching the flicker in her other hand. She aimed the flashlight at the front porch.

  “I’m trying to explain something,” she said. “I’m a little jittery at the moment. I’m not in full control of my senses. I think I may have been psi-burned.”

  Cyrus carried her up the steps. “What are you worried about?”

  Small sparks and flames
leaped in the atmosphere. One of them nipped at the front of his shirt. She smelled charring fabric and realized that she had accidentally rezzed the flicker. She groaned.

  “Well, among other things, I might set your shirt on fire,” she said.

  He looked down and smiled. She felt a rush of energy—Cyrus’s talent, not her own, she realized. The tiny flames that threatened his shirt evaporated. So did the little sparks in the atmosphere. Her frazzled senses seemed to sigh in relief.

  “How did you do that?” she whispered.

  “Why do you think they call me Dead Zone Jones? I’m a cooler.”

  Chapter 8

  “I didn’t think that coolers really existed,” Sedona said. “Thought they were a myth.”

  She was pretty sure she had her senses back under full control. She didn’t think there was any danger that she might set fire to the curtains. But who knew?

  She sat on the sofa, feet slightly spread. She leaned forward, her elbows braced on her knees. She watched Cyrus pour hot water from the kettle into a cup. He was still dressed as he had been earlier when he had arrived on the island, but it looked like he had used his fingers to comb his dark hair straight back behind his ears.

  “For obvious reasons, it’s not the sort of talent you advertise,” Cyrus said. “As a general rule, most people tend to run in the opposite direction as fast as they can. No one wants to get close to someone who can dampen another person’s talent.”

  She gave that some thought. “Your men know about your talent. Doesn’t seem to worry them.”

  “That’s because in our world, power of any kind gets a lot of respect. Why do you think I joined the Guilds in the first place?”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Socially, however, I run into a few problems.”

  She nodded in understanding. “Probably not the kind of thing you mention on a first date.”

  “Or the third or fourth of fifth date. The matchmaking agency gave up on me.”

  “Geez. Talk about the ultimate rejection.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Coolers were so rare as to be relegated to the category of legend and myth—and not in a good way. It was impossible to measure a cooler-talent. What couldn’t be measured was hard to demonstrate in a scientific fashion. And there was no getting around the fear factor, Sedona thought.

  When it came to paranormal talents, coolers were considered bad news. Stand too close to a high-rez cooler when he was using his talent and your own psychic senses were temporarily frozen; useless. It was said that really strong talents could permanently ice another person’s aura and stop his heart.

  There were a lot of names for folks with Cyrus’s kind of talent—psi-zombies, flat-liners, and icers—but coolers was the most polite and also the oldest. It derived from Old World casino jargon. Got a player on a hot winning streak? Just send in the cooler. All he or she has to do is walk past the table, get a fix on the way-too-lucky player, and send out a little whisper of energy to neutralize any talent he was using to control the cards.

  Back on Earth a lot of successful gamblers had probably never realized they were using a little psi-energy to count cards or influence the dealer. Here on Harmony, where almost everyone had some natural paranormal ability, casino managers had to take precautions to protect the natural house edge. Sedona knew that any of them would have paid a fortune to get the services of a genuine cooler.

  Well, at least she wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally setting the cottage on fire.

  Flat-liner or not, Cyrus looked surprisingly good in her kitchen. What’s more, he was acting like he had every right to be there. She was not sure what to make of that, but she was still too frazzled to think about it.

  The bad news was that, although she was back under control, she was still in the midst of a serious post-burn buzz. It was a well-documented fact that using a lot of talent had some side effects, one of which was that the adrenaline rush spilled a lot of biochemicals, including some significant sex hormones, into the bloodstream. True, she hadn’t ever experienced a rush like the one that had her on edge at the moment. But, then, she’d never had an occasion to share the aftermath with a man as interesting as Cyrus Jones, either.

  “So you think that whatever happened to you when you were kidnapped is responsible for this new fire-starting talent you’ve got now?” Cyrus asked.

  “I suspect my new ability is a result of those experiments that damned Blankenship conducted on me. All I know is that when I went on that last contract job I was a gatekeeper. A really strong gatekeeper, but, still, just a gatekeeper.” She thought about it. “Now I’m something else, as well.”

  “Multi-talents are very . . . rare,” Cyrus said quietly.

  The soft, masculine timbre of his voice sent another frisson of sensual arousal across all of her senses. This was not going well. She made another effort to pull herself together.

  “You don’t have to tiptoe around it,” she said. “I did my research. I’m aware that most multi-talents go crazy while they’re still young and end up dead or permanently hospitalized.”

  “But you feel okay,” Cyrus said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “Well, yes.” She wiggled her fingers. “Except for this little fire-starting talent I seem to have developed.”

  “Interesting.”

  He took a pretzel out of a jar and walked toward her across the hardwood floors, the mug of tea gripped easily in one strong hand. There was a very focused gleam of curiosity in his eyes but he did not sound concerned. Most strong talents would have been running for cover about now, she thought.

  Then again, there probably wasn’t much that could make Cyrus run. Besides, given the nature of his own talent, he didn’t have much to fear from someone like her.

  She was probably the one who ought to be running for cover.

  She realized that Cyrus was still watching her closely. She could almost feel him weighing and judging; making decisions that could affect her new life here on Rainshadow. It occurred to her somewhat belatedly that she should have kept her mouth shut.

  “Forget your new talent,” Cyrus said. “We’ll get to that later.”

  That sounded ominous.

  “We’ve got other priorities right now,” he continued. “Drink some tea and tell me what happened here tonight.”

  When she took the mug from him she got another little lightning jolt of awareness. She had known from the start that she was attracted to him and that the attraction was dangerous, but she had been in full control until now. Going to bed with a Guild boss was definitely not on her agenda. She had taken care to avoid that sort of complication from the start of her career.

  “Before we get to whatever happened here tonight, I’d like to ask a favor,” she said. “I would really, really appreciate it if you would not mention the possibility of me having a second talent to anyone.”

  “No problem,” he said easily. “You have my word on it.”

  She raised her brows. “Just like that?”

  Amusement flickered in his eyes. “Is there more to the business of making a promise?”

  She thought about that.

  “No, I guess not,” she said. “I’m not sure why, but I think I believe you.” Or maybe she just desperately wanted to believe him.

  “Guild bosses are good at keeping secrets,” Cyrus said.

  “Right.”

  What they were really good at doing was keeping secrets that they figured would give them an edge. For all she knew, her secret might very well fit into that category as far as Cyrus was concerned. She must not forget that.

  There was some hopeful chortling from the back of the sofa.

  Cyrus handed the pretzel to Lyle who took it in one paw and fell to crunching with typical enthusiasm.

  Cyrus lowered himself onto the sofa and sat a short dist
ance away, not quite touching Sedona. He probably knew that she was still in the grip of the aftermath thing, she thought. He had no doubt been there on a number of occasions himself.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re holding that blackmail material over my head, remember?”

  She drank her tea and did not respond. As threats went, her vow to release the file on Blankenship’s lab was puny and they both knew it.

  “Let’s get back to what happened in here tonight,” Cyrus said.

  “Okay,” she said. “How did you know I was in trouble?”

  “Lyle showed up at my window. He made a lot of noise. I got the impression he wanted me to follow him.”

  “Sadly, this is not the first time Lyle has had to rescue me. If this keeps up, he may start looking for someone else to bond with, someone who doesn’t need so much help getting out of trouble.”

  Cyrus gave Lyle a considering look. “Got a feeling that Lyle isn’t the kind who would leave a buddy behind.”

  She smiled and inhaled the aroma of the tea. Something inside her started to relax. The tisane was a special blend of herbs that Rachel Blake, the owner of Shadow Bay Books, had mixed for her the day she had arrived on the island. Rachel was an aura reader with a talent for creating just the right individual blend for each client.

  She drank some tea, savoring the warmth, and lowered the mug.

  “I walked right into a small psi-trap tonight,” she said.

  “Here?” Cyrus asked. “Inside the cottage?”

  She could not tell if he believed her or not. It would be perfectly reasonable for him to conclude that she had hallucinated the whole thing. It took a special kind of talent to work trap energy. People who could do it were usually referred to as tanglers. Most respectable, reputable tanglers pursued careers in para-archaeology. But there were those who took different paths.

  “Someone set it in the hallway.” She glanced across the room. “Whoever it was loosened the bulb in the fixture there and in the bedroom as well. I suppose the tangler wanted to make sure I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary before I blundered into the device. It was under the carpet. I stepped right on it.”