Illusion Town (3 page)

“Well, that sounds like good news. Sort of. I guess.”

“Yeah, that's my take on it. Assuming he wasn't lying, of course. But I'm inclined to believe him.”

“Why?”

“Because we're still here and there's no indication that anyone has tried to get into this room.” Elias angled his head toward Virgil. “Also, your dust bunny pal doesn't seem to be concerned.”

Hannah looked at Virgil. He was fully fluffed. You could hardly see his ears or his six paws, and only his baby blue eyes were showing. When things got serious, his second set of eyes—the ones he used for hunting—popped open. He was in full cute mode at the moment. That was reassuring.

“Good point,” she said. “But why are we dressed up? It looks like we went out on the town.”

“A date, I think.”

“I never date clients.”

“First time for everything.”

“Let's start with the basics,” she said. “Where, exactly, are we?”

“The Shadow Zone Motel.” Elias plucked an old brochure
off the nightstand and handed it to her. “‘A luxurious retreat and spa in the heart of the Shadow Zone. Every amenity designed with your privacy in mind. Honeymoons are our specialty.'”

“Honeymoons, hmm?” She surveyed the room, taking in the shabby furnishings, yellowed walls, and worn carpet. “Looks like a hot-sheet kind of place.”

“Yeah, that pretty much describes it. But it seems clean. Probably why we chose it.”

She started toward the bathroom. The room shifted on its axis and then settled back into place. She stopped abruptly and massaged her temples, trying desperately to recover some memories. The harder she tried, the more elusive the fleeting images became.

“Damn it, what happened to us?” she asked.

“I don't know.” Elias went to the window. He used the barrel of the strange weapon to ease the curtains aside. “Best guess is that we got psi-burned sometime last night. Somehow we found this place, checked in, and crashed.”

Psi-burned. That was not good. She tried to remember what she knew about getting burned. The effects were notoriously unpredictable and could vary from temporary amnesia to serious trauma or even complete destruction of the paranormal senses. A really bad psi-burn could kill.

“We're not dead,” she said.

“There's that,” he agreed.

She groped for memories and got only fleeting, meaningless flashes.
A dark street. The full-throated roar of a big motorcycle engine. A cupcake iced with white frosting.

A cupcake?

Another little rush of panic flickered through her, tightening her breathing. Maybe she was hallucinating. She told herself to process things slowly.

“I need to wash up,” she said. “Maybe some cold water will clear my head.”

“Good luck with that. Didn't do much for me. Just make it quick.”

“Who, exactly, do you think is after us?”

“I have no idea,” he said.

“Oh, hey, don't try to sugarcoat your answer.”

“Sorry. Figured you'd want the truth.”

“I do.” She paused. “I think.”

She started toward the bathroom again, automatically rezzing a little talent. Overwhelming relief snapped through her when she felt her para-senses stir in response. Between one breath and the next the room was suddenly illuminated in a range of colors that she had not been able to perceive using her normal vision.

Not that the place looked any more attractive when viewed in light from the paranormal end of the spectrum, she thought. It was still a hot-sheet motel.

“Yeah, I've still got my talent, too,” Elias said. “Whatever burned us didn't wipe out our para-senses, just our memories of last night.”

She stared at him. “You could feel me rez my senses?”

“Sure. Hard to not notice. You're strong.”

That was true. But it took a powerful talent to sense that sort of thing from across the room.

Well, she had known that he was a high-end talent, she reminded herself. She hurried toward the bathroom.

“I'll be out in a minute,” she said.

“By the way, one more thing you should know about our current situation.”

She paused in the doorway and looked back at him. “How bad is this
one more thing
?”

“Depends on your point of view. We're married.”

“What?”

Up until that moment she thought she had been coping quite well with the whole waking-up-in-a-low-rent-motel-room-with-a-man-who-was-virtually-a-stranger thing. But now she felt as if she had stepped off a very high cliff.

“Found the license in my wallet when I woke up,” Elias said. “I wasn't able to get online with my phone to access the official records.”

“They call this side of town the Shadow Zone for a reason,” Hannah said. “It's hard to get a connection.” She sounded oddly numb, she realized. It was the shock. She was having a very hard time trying to wrap her head around the word
marriage
.

“The desk clerk let me use his computer,” Elias said. “A Marriage of Convenience was recorded for Hannah West and Elias Judson Coppersmith forty-seven minutes
after midnight at the Enchanted Night Wedding Chapel here in the Shadow Zone. The desk clerk says it's just down the street.”

“I can't believe it.”

“I was a little surprised myself.” He did not smile. “Your first MC?”

“Well, yes. Yes, it is.”

“My first, too.”

“Good heavens.” She clenched her fingers around the doorjamb. “What happened to us last night?”

“That's what we're going to find out just as soon as you get moving.”

He sounded as if he was losing patience. She reminded herself that he couldn't be any more thrilled by the situation in which they found themselves than she was.

She made it into the bathroom and closed the door. One glance at her image in the mirror was enough to make her wonder if she was still asleep—maybe trapped in one of her own dream-walking dreams.

Grady Barnett's words slammed through her. “
Your profile is extremely unusual, so unusual that I'm afraid it's borderline unstable. You must be careful to avoid stress.”

Grady had said something else about her, as well, but not to her face. He had made the comment to his research assistant.
“It's no wonder she's single and lives alone. Her dreamlight patterns would give any normal man the creeps. Thinks she's having out-of-body experiences on a regular basis.”

“Go to hell, Grady Barnett,” she whispered to the mirror.

She pushed thoughts of Grady aside. He was old history, and bad history at that. She had walked out of his lab and she had no intention of ever returning. There were other para-psych profilers in Illusion Town.

She focused on her image in the mirror and concluded that she looked like she'd been caught outside in a thunderstorm and zapped by lightning. She had a vague memory of her hair being done up in a flirty little twist the last time she had checked a mirror. But now it was down around her shoulders in a tangled mane.

She was sure she had not been wearing a lot of makeup yesterday morning—she never put on much for daytime. But at some point she must have spent some time with a mascara wand and an eyeliner pencil. The results were now badly smudged.

She looked like she had spent the night in a low-rent nightclub before letting a really bad boy take her back to the kind of hotel that rented rooms by the hour.

Scratch the bad-boy thing. Elias Coppersmith might be bad—the jury was still out—but he was definitely not a boy.

For the past two months he had remained simply
E. Coppersmith
in her files. That, in itself, was rather unusual. It was not uncommon for serious collectors to go to great lengths to protect their identities. Those who traded at the deep end of the hot rocks market—crystals, quartz, and amber—usually preferred to keep a very low profile. But Elias had been up front about his identity right from the beginning. Then again, he hadn't had much choice. He had asked her to find a long-lost family heirloom—his ring—so
it had made sense to tell her as much as possible about the family that had lost it.

But until very recently he had known her only by her online name—Finder. She owned a storefront shop, Visions, but for the most part, the relics, rocks, and small-time antiquities and collectibles she stocked there were unremarkable. Her real business was conducted anonymously in the murky underground market. It was a market that attracted eccentrics and, occasionally, dangerous people. It was only common sense to protect her identity.

Her online business was built on confidentiality and anonymity. She worked by referral only. By the time a would-be client got to her online, she was reasonably certain that he or she had been thoroughly vetted.

But not long ago she had taken the rare step of identifying herself to an online client. Elias had asked her out to dinner. She had a long-standing policy of not dating clients but she remembered breaking her own rules for Elias. The email correspondence of the past two months had evolved from a business relationship into something much more intimate—at least on her end. She had accepted his invitation.

And given the way she was dressed now, it looked as if they had gone out on a date. But the invitation had been for dinner. How had she ended up in a Marriage of Convenience? Not only that, but the two of them had evidently spent their wedding night passed out in a cheap motel in the Shadow Zone. That was definitely intimate, but not in a good way.

What happened to us?

She grabbed the thin rag of a washcloth and got busy scrubbing the smeared makeup off her face.

She felt somewhat better when she emerged from the bathroom a short time later, but the thought of facing the unknown in a pair of stilettos and the very short, very battered dress was daunting.

Virgil raced toward her across the floor. She scooped him up and tucked him under one arm.

She looked at Elias, who was buttoning his white shirt.

“I'm as ready as I'll ever be,” she said. “Where, exactly, are we going?”

He held up his copy of the Marriage of Convenience license. “We'll start by retracing our steps. We need to find out why we got married last night. There must have been a logical reason.”

She wasn't sure how to take that, but he was right about one thing: There had to be a reason for their tacky Marriage of Convenience.

“Of course,” she said coolly. “It's not like either one of us is the type to get swept away by the kind of passion that makes two people run off to the nearest wedding mill.”

She could be logical, too, damn it.

Elias gave her an odd look. She could have sworn that he was irritated by her perfectly
logical
observation.

“Right,” he said.

He yanked open the door and moved out into the hall.

“Stairs are at the end,” he said.

They went quickly along the dimly lit corridor, heading toward a burned-out sign that read
EXIT
.

“The Shadow Zone is quite a ways from the Dark
Zone,” she said. “I don't own a car so did we drive here in your car or come in a taxi?”

“The guy at the front desk said we didn't arrive in a car or a taxi. Apparently we walked here from the wedding chapel. He also said we looked like we were ready to collapse. Figured we had been flying high on some illicit substance and were about to crash.”

“If your car isn't in the motel parking lot, it must still be sitting in the street out in front of my shop. Or maybe you drove us to dinner in it?”

“Wherever it is, I'm not worried about the car. It can take care of itself.”

“Good locking mechanism, huh?”

“Straight out of a Coppersmith lab.”

“Like that gadget you had in your hand when I woke up?”

He touched his jacket pocket, as if reassuring himself that the odd piece of tech was still inside. “It's called a silencer. Temporarily neutralizes the frequencies used in most small firearms like handguns and flamers, but only at very close range.”

“Cool. Can it neutralize a mag-rez pistol?”

“Yes, if it's within a radius of less than twenty feet. The technology is still in the testing phase. Got a few bugs to work out. Ultimately, we plan to market it to law enforcement agencies.”

She smiled.

He glanced at her. “What's so funny?”

“Nothing. You just sounded, well, proud, I guess is the right word.”

“The company's labs are good.”

A faint memory pinged like a tiny ray of light into the darkness of her missing memories.

“You're a para-crystal engineer,” she said. “I remember you told me that your official title was director of the Coppersmith Research and Development Labs.”

His eyes tightened a little at the corners. “I told you a little about my work over dinner, didn't I?”

A few more memories trickled back. Her spirits sank deeper as she pulled up some scattered details.

“You invited me out for dinner,” she said. “That's why I'm dressed the way I am. But I remember cancelling my reservation at the Glass House restaurant in the Amber Zone. We went to the Green Ruin Café, instead. At least I think we did.”

“That fits. I've got a receipt from the Green Ruin in my wallet.”

“It's just a fast-food place a few blocks from my shop,” she said. “We would have walked.”

He glanced back over his shoulder, eyeing her stilettos. “With you in those shoes?”

“I'm an Illusion Town girl. I can walk for miles in high heels.”

Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but still. In Illusion Town, dressing up for an evening out was a competitive sport for women. And it was not about looking demure and refined. The dress code in Illusion Town was all about showcasing one's assets, and that generally called for very high heels. It was, after all, a city that prided itself on being the number one destination for those seeking the excitement
of casino gambling, spectacular shows, and shadowy nightclubs. Visitors came from all over the four sprawling city-states with one goal—to take a walk on the wild side. As the signs said:
Welcome to Illusion Town. The thrills are real
.

She snapped her fingers. “That's right. You said you wanted to hire me for a job at the new Coppersmith operation outside of town—the Ghost City project. Some kind of emergency, you said.”

“Yes.” He rubbed the back of his neck, frowning in concentration. “On the drive to Illusion Town to pick you up for our date, I got a call from headquarters. Several members of the advance exploration team are trapped inside the ruins at the portal site. A dreamlight gate closed without any warning. Nine people got caught inside a cavern. They've got enough supplies to last for a few days but there's a lot of unknown radiation in that cave. We need to get the people out as soon as possible.”

Yep, that was when the hot date had started to go downhill, she thought. Hard to forget that magic moment. That was when cold reality had finally struck and she had realized that the fantasies she had been indulging about E. Coppersmith were probably just smoke and mirrors.

Really, she should have known better, she thought. After all, she had been raised by two magicians. She knew all about smoke and mirrors.
The audience sees what it expects to see
might as well have been the family motto.

“I agreed to take the contract,” she said. “But we couldn't do anything last night because the portal is in the underground Rainforest.”

“Can't travel in the jungle at night. We decided to have
a quick meal at the Green Ruin and then you were going to go back to your place and pack your field gear. We planned to drive back to headquarters last night so that we would be ready to descend into the Rainforest at dawn.”

She looked down at her red dress. The delicate fabric was crushed and ripped in various places. What a waste.

“So much for Plan A,” she said.

“I remember working on logistics at the restaurant while you finished your sandwich and coffee,” Elias said.

“Logistics. Of course.”

He seemed blithely unaware of the sarcasm in her voice. He went quickly down the stairwell steps.

She tried to string a few facts together, hoping something would jar loose another memory.

“I suppose we could have come here by cab,” she ventured. “But I don't remember a cab ride.”

“Neither do I.” He paused. “I remember guys on motorcycles.”

“So do I. At least I think I do.”

“There was also some very hot psi at some point,” Elias said. “I'm sure of it. I think we got burned. We knew we were going to crash.”

Something in his tone prompted another little ping in the shadows of her lost memories.

“Do you think that whatever happened to us, it's connected to the problem at your company's jobsite? Maybe someone doesn't want you to get that gate open.”

“Given what facts we've got, that explanation has the highest probability of being correct,” he said.

“So why is my necklace missing? And what's up with the fortune in my purse?”

“I don't know. We need more data.”

She cleared her throat. “Okay, let's say someone is after us and somehow we got psi-fried last night and decided that we had to go into hiding before we blacked out. That doesn't explain why we got married. It makes no sense. After all, it's obvious now that our relationship was—is—strictly business.”