Gift of Fire

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  Fire blossomed between her fingers.

  The green ribbons that had been coiling around Jonas’s neck began to loosen. Verity willed them back to the tangled mass that swarmed around her feet, and they reluctantly obeyed.

  The last of the green ribbons unwound itself from Jonas and joined the others.

  In real time something clattered on the floor of the stone cell. Verity looked down and saw that it was the broken sword hilt Jonas had used to access the vision.

  The psychic corridor faded abruptly and the last of the sickly green vision vanished with it. The fiery glow in Verity’s hands died out and Jonas’s fingers fell away from hers.

  Darkness descended on the small room, broken only by the beam of the flashlight, which still shone futilely inside the empty chest.

  Verity sighed in relief. She would never like the darkness that reigned inside this hidden room, but at least it seemed normal now.

  “It’s over, Jonas. We’re free.”

  There was no answer. Verity heard a heavy thud. She raced for the chest, shoved Yarwood’s body out of the way, and grabbed the flashlight.

  She aimed the beam at Jonas and saw that he was lying on the stone floor, unconscious.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Something was missing. Gone. Burned away in a flash of green poison.

  Jonas tried to ignore the distant voices that were clamoring for attention. He wanted to concentrate on whatever it was that was wrong, but the voices kept calling to him.

  One voice was male and gruffly reassuring. The other was female—demanding and insistent. He recognized the second voice and wanted to let the speaker know he’d be along in a minute. Right now he was busy.

  He stayed in the darkness awhile longer, struggling to think, trying to figure out what piece of himself was missing. But he couldn’t get a handle on it. He had a sense that something was gone, something that had been a part of him—something important.

  “Jonas? Can you hear me? Say something, damn you. Talk to me! Jonas, answer me this instant. Do you hear me? You can’t do this to me. I won’t allow it. Open your eyes and answer me. Answer me, you bastard.”

  Deep in the bottomless darkness, Jonas smiled to himself. Verity was chewing his ass, as usual. His redheaded tyrant was on her throne, and all was right with the world.

  He pushed the sense of wrongness to the back of his mind and made an effort to open his eyes. He wanted to see Verity’s face. She sounded angry.

  “I warned you about frown lines,” Jonas said as he managed to lift his lashes. He wondered why his voice sounded so thick, as if he were drunk. Then he saw Verity’s face, and he wanted to chuckle at the mix of emotions in her eyes. “You look like you don’t know whether to kiss me or strangle me. What’d I do this time?”

  “Oh, Jonas, I’ve been so scared.” Joyous relief flared in her beautiful eyes.

  “Hey, I’m here, sweetheart. Take it easy.”

  She threw herself across him, gathering him into her arms as best she could. “I was so worried. We’ve all been worried. You’ve been unconscious for hours. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing’s the matter, as far as I know.” Her cheeks were wet. She had been crying over him, he realized in wonder. He felt her soft breasts pleasantly pressed against his chest and realized for the first time that he was lying on a bed. He put an arm around Verity, twisting his fingers in her fiery curls. Then he found himself staring at her hair and remembering another source of fire. His hand clenched abruptly. “Verity?” he got out in a husky voice.

  She lifted her head, smiling her most dazzling smile of relief and welcome. She dashed a hand across her eyes to wipe away the tears. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  He stared into her anxious face. “I’m all right. But what about you?”

  “I’m fine if you forget the fact that you’ve just given me the biggest scare of my life.” She sat up on the edge of the bed. “Honestly, Jonas, how could you just pass out on me like that? Do you have any idea how hard it was to drag you down that corridor? I had to get a sheet and roll you onto it before I could even budge you. The sheet is ruined, naturally.”

  “Naturally.” He just kept staring at her, bemused but content for the moment.

  “Then, after I made sure you were alive, I had to go back to that awful room and drag Preston out on another sheet. He was unconscious too, and he weighed a ton. My arms are still sore. I feel like I’ve been doing pushups for days.”

  “Yarwood’s alive?” Jonas struggled to make sense of the running commentary.

  “Barely. Oliver says he thinks he’ll live. Yarwood and poor Maggie are both in the hospital. Doug took them over to the main island a couple of hours ago. He should be back soon and he’ll probably be bringing the police with him. It’s all a huge mess.”

  Jonas opened his mouth to ask another question but before he could get the words out a familiar face loomed into view.

  “Welcome back, Quarrel,” Oliver Crump said. “We weren’t sure where you’d gone. Doug thought we should send you to the hospital with the others, but Verity and I decided against that.”

  “We didn’t think a doctor would have any more idea of how to treat you than we did,” Verity said bluntly. “We couldn’t even figure out how to explain the situation to a doctor. So we kept you here while Doug took the others away. Oliver has been working the crystal.” She held up a shard of glittering lemon-colored crystal.

  “From what Verity told me, I figured that crystals had caused the problem in the first place,” Oliver explained. “Probably some complicated side effect of the tuning process. She couldn’t really explain what had happened in that room, but I figured that logically speaking, crystal could be used to undo the damage. But can you imagine trying to get that concept across to an emergency room physician?”

  “Suckers would have locked you and Verity in padded cells while they stuck needles into me.” Jonas groaned and tentatively massaged his temples. He had a headache, but that seemed a small price to pay, all things considered. “Thanks for making the executive decision to keep me here. I hate emergency rooms. Those places are full of germs. Take a risk every time you go in one.”

  Verity’s brows drew together in a firm line. “Are you sure you feel all right?”

  He gave her his most effective sympathy-getting smile, the one that implied he was suffering nobly. Verity usually fell for it. “Head hurts a little, but that’s about it.”

  “Oh, poor Jonas.” Verity leaned forward and began gently to massage his temples.

  She smelled good as she leaned over him—a little feminine sweat mixed with the wonderfully familiar fragrance that was hers, and hers alone. Jonas inhaled deeply. “How’s Maggie?”

  “She was coming around as we loaded her into the launch,” Crump said. “Elyssa is going to be all right, by the way. She woke up last night and remembered who had pushed her.”

  “You’ll never believe this, Jonas, but Maggie was the one who pushed Elyssa off that cliff,” Verity said.

  “Maggie pushed her?” Jonas was startled. Then it started to make sense. “Because of the plans to sell the villa?”

  Verity nodded. “She was very upset about Doug’s decision to sell. Maggie considered this place her home, and she thought she had a right to stay here. She followed Elyssa out to the cliffs yesterday to see if she could persuade Elyssa to talk Doug out of the deal, but Elyssa was not in a conversational mood, apparently. They got into an argument, and Maggie lost her temper and struck Elyssa. Elyssa lost her balance and went over the edge. Maggie panicked and ran back to the house.”

  “Did Maggie ever realize the significance of the green crystal necklace she wore all the time?” Jonas asked.

  “She knew it had been important to Hazelhurst, so from a sentimental point of view it was important to her. But she never knew it was the key to the tr
easure. She didn’t really believe there was a treasure,” Crump said. “She was tolerant of Hazelhurst’s search because she loved him. She considered the treasure hunt his hobby, that’s all.”

  “Hazelhurst probably thought the necklace would be safe with her. No one would think anything of an old necklace worn by his housekeeper,” Verity mused.

  Jonas nodded, then winced when his head began to throb. “Spencer was the grad student who weaseled his way into Hazelhurst’s life a couple of years ago. When Hazelhurst decided that Slade was nothing but a tacky treasure hunter, not a genuine scholar, he kicked him out on his ass. But Spencer was hooked on finding the treasure. He sneaked back several times. One night he discovered Hazelhurst going into the tunnel and he followed him to the treasure room. There was a fight, and Spencer must have chased Hazelhurst down the hall to the bedroom exit. He killed him with the stiletto that had been left behind in the chamber. Then he gathered up all that remained of the treasure, which consisted of a ruby ring, and fled. On the way out the door, he remembered the diary, I guess. He tore out the last few pages, the ones he figured might mention him or the hidden passageway.”

  “But he’d left a body behind in that hidden passage,” Crump said. “I talked to him a while ago. He was never mentally stable, but after Hazelhurst’s murder he really started to come apart. He’s been quietly going crazy during the past two years, sinking deeper into drugs and paranoia. He was terrified his crime would eventually be discovered. It was all he could think about—it obsessed him.”

  Verity spoke up. “Slade kept tabs on what was happening to the villa. He even got involved in Preston Yarwood’s psychic-development seminars so he could watch Elyssa. When he found out the Warwick’s were going to hire someone to look the place over, he decided he had to come along and make certain no one found out about poor Digby. He was the prowler I surprised that night in Sequence Springs. He was trying to find out information about you.”

  “He’s been a mental wreck for nearly two years,” Crump volunteered. “He was scared to death you’d figure out who he was. He even followed you and Verity to the other island two nights ago to see what you were up to. He was watching your room at the inn when Verity happened to go down the hall to the bathroom.”

  “That bastard,” Jonas muttered. “What was he going to do with her?”

  “I’m not sure he had a plan,” Crump said slowly. “He just seized what he saw as an opportunity to frighten her. He thought that if he scared her badly enough, the two of you might decide to give up the treasure hunt and leave.”

  “And that, incidentally, is what Maggie Frampton had in mind the first night here when she closed the corridor door on us,” Verity put in cheerfully. “She hoped to scare us off. She planned to reopen it the next day. That’s why she was so surprised to see us bright and early in the kitchen the following morning. She hadn’t yet reopened the door.”

  Jonas stared at her. “Maggie closed that door on us? She knew about the hidden passageway?”

  “Oh, yes, she knew about it, but she had never gone into it. She was frightened of it.”

  “So she never found Digby’s bones,” Jonas concluded.

  “The only entrance to the tunnel that Slade knew about, on the other hand, was the one in the torture chamber,” Verity continued. “He didn’t realize the night he killed Hazelhurst that Digby had been trying to escape through a second entrance. That’s why, when he broke the lock on the torture-chamber entrance door, he thought he’d sealed Maggie and me away for good.”

  “What a mess,” Jonas said.

  “One you seem to have cleaned up,” Crump observed. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get something for that headache.” He vanished through the bathroom door.

  Jonas wanted to lie quietly and enjoy the feel of Verity’s fingers easing the tension in his head, but the questions wouldn’t let him relax. “What did they do with Spencer?”

  “Doug took him away with the others.”

  Jonas sucked in a deep breath and caught her wrist. “I almost got you killed.”

  “That’s a debatable point,” she said with a hint of mischief in her smile. “An unbiased soul might say that I almost got you killed. I was the one who nagged you into taking this job in the first place, remember?”

  He ignored that. “If anything had happened to you, I wouldn’t have wanted to wake up. My God, Verity, when I think of how dangerous the whole thing was for you I get cold all over.” He shook his head in awe. “You shouldn’t have stayed after I told you to get out of the room. You shouldn’t have taken the risk.”

  She framed his head between her delicate hands. “You big idiot. There’s no way I could have left you behind in that room. No more than you could have left me. You should know that by now.”

  Jonas closed his eyes briefly. She was right. Neither one of them could have abandoned the other. There was no point in yelling at her now for the risks she had taken. “Those red crystal earrings of yours worked somehow, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. Don’t ask me how, though. I don’t really understand it.”

  “There was fire. I followed it out of the cold.” Jonas moved his head restlessly on the pillow, unable to remember exactly how he had used the fire to hang on to his sanity. “He almost got us, you know.”

  “Who? That awful man in the vision?” Verity shuddered. “His name was Giovanni Marino. I learned at least that, but not much else about him when I grabbed the ribbons.”

  “What in the world was going on in there, Jonas? He came alive, didn’t he?”

  Jonas started to shake his head but discovered that it hurt more when he did. “No. We were dealing with a corridor image, not a real person. But the image had been created by a genius who happened to have the same kind of psychic ability I’ve got. Christ, Verity, it was spooky. That Marino bastard was light-years ahead of me. He understood so much more about that corridor than I do.”

  “Maybe because he was a lot older than you,” Verity pointed out. “He’d had more time to study his power. You’re probably going to understand your talent much better by the time you’re his age.”

  Jonas smiled faintly. He could always count on Verity to say something bracing and reassuring when he needed it. “I’m not so sure. Marino had the key to understanding exactly how the images get caught in that tunnel. He understood the science behind it.”

  “We saw those books of mathematics and astrology on his desk. Maybe he had discovered the physical laws that govern the way it all works.”

  “I may have made a mistake majoring in Renaissance history,” Jonas confessed wryly. “Should have stuck to the hard sciences. People always warned me about the dangers of getting a degree in a liberal-arts subject.”

  Verity waved that aside. “Okay, so this Marino creep knew something about the logistics of the thing. What’s the rest of the story?”

  “It’s simple. I figured out most of what was going on when the vision finally started to cycle. He had found a way to freeze an image of impending violence and store it in the time corridor. He picked a vision he wanted to preserve, and deliberately anchored it.”

  Verity’s eyes widened in awe. “That is pretty impressive when you think about it.”

  “Impressive is right. Apparently when Marino recorded the image we saw he also managed to leave behind a subtle sense of threat, a kind of warning. He wanted to scare off any other time tunnel adventurer who might happen along in search of his treasure.”

  “You told me that the first time you saw the image you felt you were being warned off.”

  “That was exactly what was happening. But, being the fearless, macho guy I am, I ignored the warning.” Jonas grimaced with self-disgust. He had been obsessed with unlocking the image from the first moment he’d seen it.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Jonas. Stop blaming yourself.” Verity gave his head a slight, admonishing shake. />
  Jonas inhaled sharply as pain stabbed through his temples.

  “Oh, dear,” Verity said, instantly contrite. “Did I hurt you?”

  He managed a weak grin. “I deserved it.”

  “I’m so sorry.” She went back to her gentle massage. “So Marino left the image as a warning to other psychics who might happen to have his talent. How does the rest of it fit together?”

  “He planned to access the vision himself at a later date. He wanted to be able to get at his treasure, you see. The green crystal is the key. He programmed it to unfreeze the image.”

  “Why leave the vision and the key behind?”

  “He knew he was going to have to leave town for a while. He’d offended an important member of the local aristocracy, and the only safe course of action was to flee for a time. He planned to return later to retrieve his treasure.”

  “You mean the treasure was somehow locked in the corridor along with the image?”

  “It’s been there all along. We saw it when the image started rolling.”

  “What do you mean? We saw the heaps of gold and jewels in the chest,” Verity reminded him, “but the chest is empty now.”

  “That wasn’t the treasure Marino was protecting. The gold wasn’t nearly as important to him as the secrets he had discovered about the psychic corridor. He wrote out his notes and left them locked in the image.”

  “That piece of paper he picked up and showed us when the action started!” Verity exclaimed.

  “Exactly. The formulas and notations on that sheet of paper are his real treasure. He was probably afraid to leave the paper itself lying around. And he didn’t know if he would be stopped and searched or robbed on the way out of town.”

  “So he left behind the equivalent of a photographic image of his work.” Verity’s eyes widened in amazement. “What a brilliant idea. He could access the image with the crystal.”

  “Not quite.” Jonas frowned, thinking of all he had learned when he’d tangled with the ribbons. “The crystal does activate the image. It starts the film running, so to speak. But to actually access the vision itself, he had to have the usual sort of key. The same kind of key I always use.”