The Hot Zone (A Rainshadow Novel Book 3) (17 page)

“Soon,” he said against her throat. “I swear it. Very, very soon.”

He did something with his fingers, something that took her to another level. The all-consuming tension inside her broke free in small, pulsing waves. It was too much. She wanted to scream with the wonder of it all but she could not find the breath to do so. She closed her eyes against the shattering sensations and clutched at him, her nails digging into the muscles of his shoulders.

“Sedona,” Cyrus whispered in a tight, ragged voice. “My sweet, hot Sedona.”

He shifted onto his back and pulled her down astride him. Gripping her hips, he fit himself to her and drove deep, filling her and stretching her in ways that she had never before experienced. Too much. She was too sensitive down there now.
Too much
.

Without warning a second climax rippled through her. This time she was left gasping in disbelief.

Cyrus thrust upward one last time. He roared with the force of his own release.

Blue lightning danced in the shadows.

He returned from the pool room, buttoning his shirt.

“Your turn,” he said. “Still don’t see any monsters in the water, but don’t try to take a real bath.”

“Don’t worry.” Sedona brushed past him, clutching her clothes. “I won’t.”

He turned to watch her backside as she hurried into the inner chamber. She had a very nice backside, he decided. He was a man who appreciated nice backsides.

He finished fastening his shirt and stuffed the tails into the waistband of his trousers. He buckled the belt around his waist and checked the flamer to make sure it still worked.

It occurred to him that he was feeling remarkably good for a man who still had a serious to-do list—a list that started with Avoid Singing Monsters While Getting Sedona Safely Out of Wonderland.

“Sex is weird that way,” he said.

He didn’t realize he had spoken aloud until Sedona appeared. She was back in her jeans and in the process of pulling on the black pullover.

Her head popped out of the neck opening of the garment.

“What did you say?” she asked.

Masculine intuition kicked in fast.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not important.”

She did not appear convinced but she let it go. She glanced around, studying the interior of the cave with a thoughtful frown. “It’s a lot quieter in here now.”

“No kidding.”

She contemplated the blue walls and shook her head. “Hard to believe that you and I generated all that energy.”

Irritation crackled through him. He reached down to open the pack.

“Not really,” he said. “You interested in coffee? I’ve got some in the pack. We can use water from the thermal pool to make it.”

“Sounds good.” She watched him take the instant coffee out of the pack. “What makes you so sure that the para-radiation in here wasn’t responsible for what just happened between us?”

A man could only be expected to take just so much. He dropped the coffee and moved to stand directly in front of her.

“Trust me,” he said, spacing each word with great care. “It was the other way around. You and me, we’re good together. Very, very good.” He brushed his mouth across hers. “We’re hot together. We were the source of the lightning, not the damn cave.”

She flushed and quickly turned away to study the nearest glowing boulder, as if she had never noticed it. “Well, it certainly was an unusual . . . experience.”

“Unusual? Is that the best you can do? Damn, woman, you don’t leave a man with much pride, do you?”

She turned back quickly, eyes widening in horror. “I didn’t mean that there was anything unpleasant about the experience.”

“Wonderful.” He started toward the thermal-pool room, the packet of coffee and two collapsible cups in one hand. “Now we’ve moved from unusual to unpleasant.”

She hurried after him. “Stop twisting my words.”

“I’ll try but it’s hard not to twist them. Could you at least tell me that it was all right or maybe even
nice
for you?”

“I’m not complaining.”

“Damn.” He turned the corner into the pool room. “That’s something I can hold close to comfort my bruised ego.”

“Stop teasing me.” She followed him around the twist in the cave. “I’m merely trying to explain that what just happened between us was definitely out of the ordinary, at least for me, and I can’t help but wonder how much the energy in here affected things, that’s all.”

He swung around so quickly she bumped into him. He wrapped one arm around her shoulders, pulled her close, and kissed her—hard—to silence her. When she finally stopped trying to talk, he released her.

“Don’t go there,” he said. “Please. You’ll ruin the glow.”

“What glow?” She frowned. “You mean, the paranormal glow?”

“No, the damned afterglow. I was enjoying it until you started analyzing the whole thing.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

She cleared her throat.

“Gotta tell you that our experience during the psi-storm certainly answers one question,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I’ve been wondering why the Chamber sent you to handle the monsters here on Rainshadow.”

A sense of grim despair settled on him like a dark fog of psi. He turned away and crouched to fill the cups with warm water.

“Send a monster to hunt the monsters?” he said. “Yeah, that was pretty much how I got this cool assignment.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not a monster. You’re an off-the-charts talent. Which, when you think about it, is precisely the skill-set required to figure out what is going on here.”

Cyrus decided that he felt a little better. Not as great as he had been feeling a few minutes ago but better.

“I’ll see what we have to eat,” Sedona said.

She turned around and went back into the outer chamber.

He filled the cups with warm water from the pool, ripped open the individual serving packets of coffee, and dumped the contents into the cups. Then he unclipped the flamer and gave the coffee a couple of short blasts.

He carried the cups into the outer chamber and found Sedona sitting on the emergency blanket. She had a couple of energy bars that she must have taken from her own pack. She was contemplating the stormy psi at the cave entrance.

It was time to have the conversation, he decided. Maybe past time.

He gave her one of the cups and lowered himself onto the blanket beside her. She did not shrink away. Baby steps, he told himself. Think positive.

She handed him one of the energy bars. They munched on the bars and drank some of the coffee in silence.

“Field coffee is lousy coffee but it’s better than no coffee,” he offered.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had coffee in the Underworld,” she reminded him. “It tastes fine to me.”

She swallowed some more.

He watched the psi-snow. “There is something you should know about me. About us.”

“Is this the part where you tell me that, although you’re okay with an affair or an MC, you can’t make any long-term commitments because you’re a Jones and you’re a Guild boss and you’re rich and you’re a member of a powerful, well-connected family? If so, don’t bother. I already know all that.”

“That was not what I was going to say.”

“Oh.” She eyed him warily. “What, then?”

“It’s not a total coincidence that I took the Rainshadow job. It came up at a very convenient moment but I pulled a lot of strings to get it.”

“Why?”

“Because you were here. Because of what happened to you when you disappeared.”

She stilled. “I don’t understand. Are you telling me you’re working with Blankenship? I don’t believe it.”

“I’m not working with Blankenship. I’m hunting him.”

Her eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

“My family—the Joneses—have been searching for him for months. That private investigation firm I told you about—”

“Jones and Jones?”

He nodded. “It’s run by my cousin Marlowe. She’s been overseeing the search. You’re the first real lead we’ve had.”

Sedona did not say anything. She just stared at him.

“I should have told you sooner what I’m going to tell you now,” he said. “But there hasn’t been an opportunity. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. Our biggest concern at the start was that you were one of Blankenship’s success stories.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Marlowe and others in the family were afraid you might be a very dangerous multi-talent.”

“I
am
a dangerous multi-talent.”

“You’re a multi-talent but you’re not unstable. The next shock was discovering that you were alive and sane.”

Sedona tipped her head back against the wall. “I feel like I’m falling down the dust bunny hole here.”

“I’m starting to piece it together. I’ll tell you everything I know. But first, I need to give you a short history lesson.”

“About?”

“Arcane.”

“Which, I have been told, is more or less the Jones family firm,” she said.

“That’s one way of looking at it. Arcane was founded by an Old World alchemist named Sylvester Jones.”

“I think Rachel mentioned him.”

“He was an ancestor of mine, a powerful talent who wanted even more power. Back in the 1600s, Old World Time, he came up with a drug designed to stimulate and enhance the paranormal senses. The idea was that it would not only make him stronger but it would give him additional talents.”

“He wanted to become a multi-talent?” Sedona asked.

“Yes, and he was sure his wonder drug would have a lot of additional terrific side effects. He believed it would make him healthier and maybe add a decade or two on to the natural life-span. In short, he was the poster boy for the Mad Scientist in those old horror flicks.”

She shuddered. “I think I know where this is going.”

“Stay with me here. It gets a little complicated. Sylvester Jones died in his hidden laboratory, which wasn’t discovered and excavated until the late 1800s by a couple of his descendants.”

“More Joneses?”

“Right. When they found Sylvester’s body, they also discovered the formula. Soon afterward it was stolen. The damned drug has been causing trouble ever since.”

“Explain,” she ordered.

“Historically speaking, every once in a while some fool stumbles across a version of the formula and tries to re-create it. The problem is that nobody has been able to do that without also re-creating some very nasty side effects.”

“Such as?”

“Addiction is the biggest drawback—and not just psychological addiction. The drug must be taken on a regular and frequent basis. Miss even a dose or two and you start to deteriorate rapidly. According to the old files, users who are deprived of the drug go insane within a couple of days. They are almost always dead within forty-eight hours. Suicide is the usual cause of death.”

Sedona took a deep breath. “You think Blankenship is fooling around with a version of the formula, don’t you? That he used it on me?”

“My cousin Marlowe started picking up rumors of hunters who were using some kind of new drug to enhance their talents. Rumors of that sort circulate all the time, of course, but these rumors were different. They implied a connection to Arcane.”

“So Jones and Jones opened an investigation?”

“Yes, but it went nowhere. Until you showed up after having disappeared for three weeks with stories about having been held captive in a secret Guild lab.”

“Well, I didn’t tell a lot of people,” Sedona pointed out. “Mostly because it became clear that everyone thought I was crazy.”

“You’re not crazy.” He looked at her. “You’re stable and you’re not using the drug.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“Marlowe sent an aura reader to Rainshadow disguised as a tourist to take a close look at you a few weeks ago. She reported that your aura was rock steady. An unstable aura is a telltale indicator of the formula.”

Sedona’s eyes tightened at the outer corners. “Jones and Jones spied on me?”

“I knew you weren’t going to like this part. But I’m hoping you’ll understand our position—my position.”

She exhaled deeply. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. You were worried that I was using the drug and that your aura reader hadn’t been able to detect it.”

“Yes.” He picked up a glowing blue pebble and sent it flashing and skittering across the floor. “But I’ve spent enough time with you now to be very certain that you aren’t using the drug. The really interesting part is that you are still alive.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Theoretically, if you were on the formula for any length of time at all and then deprived of it, you should either be insane or dead by now. We—the Jones family—needed an explanation for that.”

Understanding dawned in her eyes. “You ruled out the possibility that I was still on the drug so you’re left with only one other answer. You’re afraid that Blankenship has finally perfected the formula—that his version works without the bad side effects.”

“It may have worked on you,” Cyrus said. “That would account for your new talent. But I don’t think that it has worked for anyone else, at least not without producing the terrible side effects.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

“Because all indications are that Blankenship is desperate to get you back to his lab.”

“I told you, I locked up his lab and the strongbox with the crystal inside.”

“He needs access to both, evidently.”

Sedona drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. “I think the crystal is the important thing. Blankenship was trying to tune it so that it would stabilize the serum.”

Cyrus sent another little blue pebble skipping across the floor into the deep sapphire shadows. “So his version of the drug has the same side effects as all the previous versions.”

Sedona frowned. “But why would the drug work on me without problems and not on other people?”

Cyrus smiled slowly. “We can’t prove it yet, but we have a theory. Marlowe and I are convinced that the reason you were able to tolerate the drug without any problems and developed a second talent with no sign of instability is simple—you’re a descendant of Arizona Snow.”

“Yes, I know. The Snows consider her an example of the crazy gene that shows up every so often in the bloodline. Why does my connection to her matter?”

“Here’s another little bit of Arcane history. A few centuries ago, back on Earth, the directors of Jones and Jones—Fallon Jones and his wife, Isabella—decided to take on a cold case at the request of their friend Arizona Snow.”

Sedona looked at him, eyes wide. “They really did know her?”

He smiled. “I told you to think of me as an old friend of the family. To continue, Fallon and Isabella learned that in her younger days Arizona Snow worked for a clandestine government agency.”

“Wow. She was some kind of secret agent?”

“Evidently.”

“That’s . . . exciting. I mean, to think that I’m related to a woman who was a genuine secret agent. Who did she work for?”

“The good guys, of course.”

“Excellent.” Sedona nodded, satisfied.

“Anyhow, after Snow retired she became something of a conspiracy theorist and a full-blown eccentric but she and Fallon Jones got along well. Some say it’s because they understood each other. She actually consulted with Fallon on a few cases.”