The Hot Zone (A Rainshadow Novel Book 3) (7 page)

Sedona watched through the window until Cyrus disappeared into the fog and the trees. It didn’t take long. She caught glimpses of the beam of his flashlight for another moment or two and then he was gone.

She turned away from the window and went to the small kitchenette. Opening a cupboard, she took down the bottle of brandy that she kept there. For medicinal purposes only. Tonight she definitely needed a little medication.

She splashed some of the brandy into a glass and de-rezzed the living room lamp. The little night-light that she had installed the day she moved into the cottage automatically came on, casting a pale glow that illuminated the entrance to the hallway. She sank down into the big, overstuffed reading chair and propped her feet on the hassock.

Nights were very dark on Rainshadow. The heavy presence of the densely forested Preserve, which occupied most of the island, cast a long shadow. That shadow was most intense after dark. It was a fact of paranormal physics that psi-energy of all types was strongest in the absence of sunlight. It wasn’t a supernatural thing, simply one of the immutable laws of nature. Sunlight and other forms of normal light interfered with the energy from the paranormal end of the spectrum.

She sat in the deep shadows of the living room for a while, thinking about Cyrus Jones. Mostly she wondered if he was telling her the truth when he said he didn’t think that she was a whacko. There was no reason to trust a Guild boss—every reason not to trust one—but she had the sense that he believed that she was stable.

Then again, it would be really dumb to try to second-guess a Guild boss’s strategy. They were by nature inclined to be extremely secretive. In her experience, the powerful men who ran the Guilds were also dangerous. Traditionally, they controlled their various territories with a degree of ruthlessness that would have done credit to the leaders of organized crime syndicates.

Some of the Guild CEOs were more notorious than others. It was true that the Chamber was under new management. It claimed to be determined to clean up the reputations of the organizations it oversaw. But old habits die hard. Most of the high-ranking Guild men she had met protected their privileges, perks, and powers with all the money and manpower at their command. There were a few women in the Guilds but they tended to be in the rank and file. They were rarely promoted into the higher echelons.

The vast majority of ghost hunters at every level of the organizations were male. The reason was simple. One of the greatest hazards down in the tunnels were the so-called ghosts—unpredictable manifestations of highly unstable dissonance energy. The talent required to control that kind of energy was linked to testosterone. Ergo, most ghost hunters were male.

But other sorts of talents were needed on the tunnel teams, as well—her kind of talent, for example. Maybe Cyrus Jones really did want to get on her good side because of the possibility that he might require her services in the Rainshadow catacombs. Still, there were other high-rez gatekeepers. He could have brought one of them along with him to the island. But he hadn’t brought one because he had known that she was here and presumably available.

Coincidence? I think not.

Never trust a Guild boss, she reminded herself. Nevertheless, the thought of working underground again stirred her senses. It also raised some unsettling questions. Why would Jones be so willing to risk the safety of a team by employing a gatekeeper who might be unstable?

Even as she asked herself the question, the answer whispered through her thoughts. Jones knew something about the Disaster—maybe something that she did not know. Maybe she was the real reason he was on the island.

Watch it,
she thought.
You’re becoming as paranoid as the other residents of Rainshadow
. Then again, paranoia had some definite survival value. She had taken a risk telling Jones about the file that she had set to release to the media in the event anything happened to her. But it was all she had in the way of a threat.

She drank some more of the brandy and forced herself to confront the very real possibility that Jones was on the island because he wanted to use her in ways she could not yet fathom.

If that was the case, it probably made sense to play along, at least for a while. Maybe Jones had answers to some of the questions that had haunted her since the Disaster. But what would be the price she would have to pay to get them? Guild bosses were not known for their compassionate and understanding natures. One thing you could depend on when it came to a Guild exec—he had his own agenda.

She had to hand it to him; he had certainly known what he was doing when he had offered her the prospect of going back down into the tunnels. Everyone who worked the Underworld knew how addictive the catacombs could be. The stronger the talent, regardless of the nature of that talent, the stronger the rush. There was nothing else like it—except going into the Preserve. But the forbidden area of the island inside the high-tech security fence was off-limits unless you were lucky enough to accompany one of the Foundation-sanctioned research teams.

The Underworld was the undisputed territory of the Guilds, however, and they took their right to police the Alien tunnels very seriously. Not that they actually had any legal rights to the vast network of glowing green tunnels. But tradition was a powerful thing on Harmony—probably because humans had only been on the planet for a couple of centuries. Two hundred years ago traditions of all kinds had taken on new meaning to a bunch of stranded colonists who had found themselves cut off from their home world. The First Generation had established a lot of traditions and their descendants were stuck with them.

Take marriage and family, for instance, Sedona thought glumly. She rolled the brandy glass between her palms. Now, there the colonists had outdone themselves with traditions—traditions they had locked down with mag-steel laws that were only now starting to loosen ever so slightly.

Why in the world was she thinking about the marriage laws tonight? Marriage was the last subject she wanted to contemplate. Her track record in the romance department had been deplorable even before she had metamorphosed into some kind of weird multi-talent. In a culture where family was everything, a person who could not claim strong clan relationships was something of an outcast. In theory, those born of an illicit union were not supposed to pay for the sins of their parents, but the reality was that a bastard faced a very difficult time socially, and that went double when it came to finding a lifetime marriage partner.

And now, of course, she wouldn’t dare register with a matchmaker. If being a bastard was a problem when it came to finding a match, being an unstable multi-talent bastard made for impossible odds. She would likely find herself hauled off to a para-rez psych hospital as soon as she completed the questionnaire.

Her phone rang. She picked it up and glanced at the screen.
FENWICK NASH REED
. She’d lost count of the calls she’d had from the law firm. Her grandfather’s lawyers did not give up easily, she reflected. Then again, they were well-paid to follow Robert Snow’s orders. She disconnected the call without answering and put the phone down on the end table.

She finished the brandy, got to her feet, and went back into the tiny kitchen where she rinsed out the glass and set it on the counter.

When she crossed the living room and looked out the windows she saw that the mist had blanketed the entire town of Shadow Bay now. Even the lights of the Halloween lanterns and the Haunted Alien Catacombs attraction near the marina had been swallowed up by the dense fog.

She walked into the short hallway that led to her bedroom, reaching out to rez the light switch.

The light did not come on. She made a note to install a new bulb in the fixture first thing in the morning.

She felt her way into the bedroom doorway and groped around the edge of the door for the light switch. She found it and rezzed it. Nothing happened.

Just her luck that both bulbs had failed at the same time. What were the odds?

The damned wind chimes clashed, loud and discordant.

She felt a small object under the carpet.

“What in the world?”

Her first thought was that Lyle had hidden one of his toys under the small rug. She bent down, intending to lift one corner to retrieve the object.

Dark energy feathered her senses.

“Crap.”

Instinctively she backed away toward the living room, her talent flaring wildly. But by then it was too late. Currents of cold, heavy dreamlight energy exploded in the atmosphere, plunging her into a nightmare.

Terrible images of formless horrors materialized around her. Ghostly, nerve-shattering voices called to her.

She tried to retreat but she was off-balance and already badly disoriented. Strange images from a landscape lit with a freakish, psi-green radiance swirled around her, trapping her.

The dangerous dreamlight worked rapidly. Hallucinations seethed in the shadows. She tripped, staggered, and nearly went down. At the last instant she managed to flatten one hand on the wall to steady herself.

She knew that the only reason she was not already unconscious was because of her powerful talent. But it could not protect her for long. At least, she thought, her old talent could not hold out against the trap energy.

Frantically she groped for the flicker. It took a huge amount of concentration just to get it out of her shirt pocket. But at last she had it clutched in one hand. She rezzed it with a desperation she had not experienced since the night she escaped from the lab.

A paranormal firestorm erupted in the hallway, forming a protective circle of energy around her. The dream images receded. Then she smelled smoke and realized that some of the fire energy in the atmosphere was coming from the normal end of the spectrum. In another second or two she would set fire to the cottage.

She pulled hard on her talent, dampening the flames from the normal end while the paranormal circle of fire continued to burn around her. She did not know what to expect. Most people discovered the nature of their paranormal senses more or less by accident when they first came into them. Until you knew what you could do, you couldn’t do it very well.

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.