Obsidian Prey (14 page)

Her physical senses were deadened, but perhaps her para-senses were not as badly affected. Desperately she concentrated on pushing energy through her amethyst charms, willing the world to snap back into focus around her.

The street scene rushed back, but because she was viewing it with only her other senses, it had a strange, surreal quality. The colors of objects were all in the paranormal range. The street sign glowed ultraviolet. The wet pavement gleamed ultragreen. The lights of an upstairs window across the street appeared as an aurora of ultra-yellow.

She had never before been forced to rely only on her para-senses. They usually worked naturally with a person’s normal senses. But in this strange state, all of the stimuli came to her from only the paranormal end of the spectrum.

She heard sound, but she perceived it differently. There was, however, no mistaking the thuds, grunts and—most unnerving of all—the shriek of a man crying out in shock and pain.

She turned her head and saw two shadowy figures. It was impossible to see their physical features, because each was surrounded by a spiking aura. One man staggered around in a circle, arms flailing. The other moved in on him, gliding forward in a frighteningly graceful dance that promised to end in violence. A third man was motionless on the ground.

She had no doubt as to the identity of the man who was closing in for what looked like the kill. She would know him anywhere.

“Cruz,” she whispered.

In this para-dimension, her voice echoed weirdly. She could not hear herself the way she did when she was using her regular senses. The lack of familiar auditory feedback added to the hallucinatory atmosphere.

A small creature, its aura glowing brightly, dashed out of the darkness and charged for the man Cruz was about to take down.

“Vincent,” Lyra said. “No, wait. Come here.”

Vincent, fur sleeked back, ignored her. He dashed in to nip at his target’s heels.

The thug screeched. “Get away from me.
Get away
.”

But Cruz was also moving in, lightning fast. He made a quick, chopping motion with one hand. The ghost hunter went down, crumpling on the pavement beside his partner.

The world jolted back. Lyra’s normal senses kicked in with jarring suddenness. Vincent leaped up into her arms, rumbling with concern. She gathered him close and watched Cruz scoop up the mag-rez guns.

“Are you all right?” she whispered. Her voice sounded tense but normal once again.

He came toward her, still moving with that disturbingly lethal grace. She sensed that he was startled to see her on her feet.

“I’m fine,” he said. “What about you?”

“I’m okay. I’m . . . a little shaken up, I guess.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not exactly your fault.”

“We’ll talk about it later. Right now we have to deal with this pair.”

“Okay.”

Vincent was once again fully fluffed, hunting eyes closed. He chortled his customary cheerful greeting to Lyra, as though nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred.

Cruz took a phone from his pocket. “I’ll have someone pick up these guys.”

“Someone?” She frowned. “You mean the police, right? Please tell me you’re calling the cops.”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“I’m calling the Guild’s security people.”

“Damn it, Cruz, the police are supposed to handle this sort of thing.”

“Those two are ghost hunters and, like they say, the Guild polices its own. Besides, I need answers, and I’m a lot more likely to get them faster out of my friends at Guild security than I am from the Frequency PD.”

There was no point arguing with him. She subsided, fuming. It was just one more example of the arrogance of both Amber Inc. and the local Guild. But she also knew that Cruz was right. When it came to rogue ghost hunters, the Frequency cops took the old-fashioned view. They, too, preferred to let the Guild take care of its own problems.

Cruz spoke briefly to someone on the phone and then cut the connection. He looked at Lyra again.

“Take Vincent upstairs,” he said. “I’ll wait here until Guild security collects these two, and then I’ll be up. We need to talk.”

“About what?” she asked.

“About what just happened here.”

She searched his face. “It was an attempted mugging. A street robbery.”

“Maybe.” He dropped the phone into his pocket and crossed to the nearest of the two unconscious men.

A fresh wave of alarm shot through her. “What do you mean?”

Crouching, he went swiftly, methodically, through the hunter’s pockets. “I don’t think that these two were just a pair of opportunists. They were waiting for us.”

“How do you know that?”

“Got a talent for this kind of thing.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER HE GOT INTO THE ELEVATOR and rode it to the fourth floor. The gunmen had been taken away in the back of a black-windowed Guild car, but he was still feeling the intense aftereffects that always followed the use of a lot of psi.

He was in control—he was
always
in control. With a talent like his, it was a necessity. But he knew from previous experience that willpower alone did not protect him from the afterburn. In some primitive part of his brain, he was the hunter returning from a successful kill. And tonight the sensation was a thousand times more charged, because his mate was waiting for him.

Except that Lyra did not yet get that part of things, he thought.

She must have heard him coming down the hall, because the door of the apartment opened just as he reached it. Lyra stood in the little entryway, her eyes dark with anxiety. A white robe and a pair of slippers had replaced the black dinner dress and sexy heels. Her hair was down and a little tousled. Vincent was on her shoulder, looking cheerful as usual. Of the three of them, he was the only one who was unconcerned, Cruz thought. Dust bunnies lived in the moment.

“Are they gone?” Lyra asked, peering out into the hall as though fearful that the thugs had followed him.

“They’re gone.” He just stood there on the threshold, looking at her, aware that everything inside him had just tightened up another notch. He should not go inside the apartment, not in his present condition. But he had to talk to her. He needed to take the edge off first, though.

“I could use a drink,” he said.

“You aren’t the only one.” She stepped back. “I got out the bottle of Amber Dew.”

“Works for me.”

When she turned away to walk toward the kitchen, it was all he could do not to reach out and catch hold of her. Everything in him was clamoring to pull her into his arms. He managed to keep his hands off her, but it was one of the hardest things he had ever done. He really should not have come up here. This was a mistake, a really big one.

He closed the door with a sense of doomed finality and followed Lyra. Halfway across the living room area, he dropped his jacket over the back of the reading chair.

Seemingly oblivious of his mood, Lyra went behind the counter and poured a stiff measure into each of the two glasses she had set out. Losing interest, Vincent hopped down from her shoulder and went to investigate the cookie jar.

Lyra lifted the lid off the jar. “Take your choice, pal. You deserve it.”

Vincent vibrated with anticipation. He jumped up onto the rim of the jar and surveyed the offerings with the air of a pirate savoring his loot. After a moment of dithering, he seized a cookie and hopped back down onto the counter.

Lyra replaced the lid and picked up her drink. She gulped some down and promptly started to cough.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Cruz asked.

“Oh, yeah, swell.” Gasping, she set the glass down with a crack. “Never better. You?”

He loved this about her. She was a real fighter, endowed with enough spirit, guts, and determination to power an army. Nothing got her down for long. No matter what you did to her—lie to her; steal her amber claim; crush her sleazy, ambulance-chasing lawyer with high-powered attorneys; terrify her by plunging her into psychic limbo—she always bounced back. His true mate, for sure.

“Never better,” he agreed. He drank some of the Amber Dew.

She leaned forward and braced her elbows on the counter. “Well? Did you learn anything about that pair?”

“The security guys who picked them up ID’d them for me.” He lowered himself onto one of the stools. “A couple of rank-and-file ghost hunters who were kicked out of the Guild a while back. They were caught stealing artifacts from an archaeological team they were hired to protect.”

Lyra made a face, unimpressed. “That’s all you know?”

“They’re both still unconscious. When they wake up, they’ll be questioned, but I doubt that we’ll learn much more. Whoever hired them wouldn’t have told them anything other than what was absolutely necessary.”

She tipped her head to one side, pondering that. “You’re still assuming someone hired them and that they weren’t just a couple of street thieves?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“What makes you so certain of that?”

“They didn’t just wander past your door tonight and happen to notice us getting out of the car. They were waiting for us, Lyra.”

“How can you know that?”

He took a breath and exhaled it slowly. “Because any other scenario would be just too much of a coincidence.”

“What? Where’s the coincidence? Random street crimes happen all the time in the Quarter.”

He met her eyes. “Not to me. Not a couple of weeks after I’ve discovered that one of the amethyst relics we removed from the ruin was stolen from the lab.”

“And not two weeks after a lab technician was found murdered. And not less than twenty-four hours after three of my people and two Guild men were trapped in that amethyst ruin.”

“Hold on here.” She held up a hand to stop him. “You’re going way too fast for me. There’s been a murder? Someone stole one of the amethyst relics? Why didn’t you bother to mention any of this before?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You keep saying that.”

He took another sip and lowered the glass. “Probably because it’s the truth.”

“I didn’t hear anything about a murder in the AI lab and, trust me, I’ve been paying extremely close attention to any and all news of Amber Inc.”

“I managed to keep it quiet. Hoped it would buy me a little time.”

She shook her head and clicked her tongue against her teeth, making a tut-tutting sound. “So you lost one of the stones already? Nice going, Sweetwater. So much for all that sophisticated security AI was supposed to provide for those
priceless
archaeological relics.”

“Doesn’t make us look good, does it? We think the killer escaped into the jungle. Opened his own gate. You know how it is down there. You can’t track anyone in the rain forest unless you have his locator frequency.”

“I will give you credit for being able to keep the murder and the theft out of the media. Very impressive.”

“Thanks.”

She frowned. “And now you’re telling me that you don’t think those five people got caught in that ruin by accident last night?”

“No.”

“But what was the point? Why would someone deliberately close that chamber on five people? For heaven’s sake, they could have died in there.”

“This is where the complications set in,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

“The really complicated part is that whoever is behind this is doing his or her best to make it look like there’s only one obvious suspect in the murder, the theft, and the accident at the ruin.”

“Who?”

He waited.

Comprehension finally struck. She straightened abruptly behind the counter, eyes huge with shock.

“Me?”
she squeaked.

“Look at it from the point of view of the killer. Everyone knows there’s been no luck rezzing those stones in the lab. Everyone thinks that you are the only talent around who can access the energy of those rocks, and everyone is aware that you have refused to cooperate in the research we’ve tried to conduct on them. Last but not least, everyone knows that you’ve been waging a one-woman vendetta against me and Amber Inc. That adds up to a lot of motive.”

She looked as if she had just been kicked in the stomach.

“
That’s
why you came back,” she whispered. “You think I stole that artifact and murdered the technician.”

“You know damn well that’s not true.” Fury and outrage twisted through him. He got up off the stool and circled the counter.

The sudden elevation of tension in the room must have alarmed Vincent. His fur sleeked back. His second set of eyes opened.

“Great,” Cruz said. “Now I’m going to have to deal with an irate dust bunny. So much for the Sweetwater luck.”

“Do you think I hired those two goons to kill you tonight, as well?” Lyra demanded.