Fired Up

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “This is Fallon Jones we’re talking about. He’s going to be wondering how I took down all those hunters at the gym. If he hasn’t already figured out that the lamp was a factor, he will soon enough.”

  She studied him. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that it’s probably a good idea that everyone, including Fallon Jones, the Council and Nightshade, believe that the lamp is safely back in Arcane’s hands.”

  56

  “THE FORMULA MADE ME SO GHASTLY ILL,” DAMARIS KEMBLE said. She spoke in a monotone, as though just the act of talking was no longer worth the effort. “I thought anything would be better than feeling that sick. But after I recovered I began to realize what I had lost.”

  Fallon Jones had not wasted any time. Damaris had arrived at ten o’clock the following morning. She was not traveling alone. A J&J hunter accompanied her. Rose and Hector were presently entertaining him in the outer office.

  “I think I understand,” Chloe said gently. “It would be like waking up one day and discovering that you had lost one or more of your normal senses.”

  Damaris squeezed her eyes shut to stop the tears. “Sometimes I dream that I’ve recovered my sensitivity. But as soon as I open my eyes I realize that nothing has changed.”

  “You said that you didn’t just lose your para-senses. You also lost your father and your sister at the same time. That would be a terrible blow for anyone.”

  “I’m seeing one of the Society’s psychologists, but I don’t think it’s doing much good. I feel so overwhelmed. If I could just get back to feeling normal I think I could deal with the rest of it. Do you really feel you might be able to help me recover at least some of my talent?”

  Chloe looked at the floor. The faint oil-on-water sheen of the antidote radiated subtly in Damaris’s footprints.

  “Let me see what I can do,” Chloe said.

  She got to her feet, walked around the desk and took Damaris’s hand. Carefully, lightly, delicately, she went to work.

  57

  “I NEVER FOUND OUT WHY DAMARIS KEMBLE NEEDED A BODYGUARD,” Chloe said.

  It was five o’clock. She and Jack were accompanying Hector on his evening patrol. It was that mysterious time in a Seattle winter day, the hour when the city was enveloped in the strange half light of deep twilight. The streets glistened with rain, and the streetlights glowed like crystal balls in the mist.

  “Didn’t Fallon tell you?” Jack asked.

  “It’s remarkably difficult to get information out of Mr. Jones.”

  “He’s not much of a conversationalist,” Jack agreed. “The reason Damaris Kemble needs a bodyguard is that she’s the daughter of the founder of Nightshade.”

  “Good grief. She’s Craigmore’s daughter?”

  “He had her on the latest version of the drug. It was making her violently ill, probably killing her. After her father died Arcane offered her the antidote. She agreed to take it. In exchange she’s been telling J&J and the Council everything she knows about Nightshade.”

  “So the concern is that Nightshade might try to silence her.”

  “Right. Unfortunately, according to Fallon, she doesn’t really know all that much about the upper management of the organization.”

  “Because her father didn’t tell her much?”

  “William Craigmore was a secretive bastard. When he established Nightshade, he planned the organization so that no one individual or even a handful could bring down the entire operation. It’s damn brilliant when you think about it. Fallon says Arcane still knows next to nothing about the others at the top of the conspiracy.”

  She glanced at him. “But you said the money trail is a weak point.”

  “Money is always the weak point. It’s the blood of any organization. Cut it off, and things start to die.”

  “How are you doing tracking the cash flow from the gyms?”

  “Looks like the LLC that owns and operates them was, in turn, receiving funding from another privately held company located in Portland, Oregon. Cascadia Dawn. It’s a regional wholesaler that distributes nutritional supplements and health food products.”

  She smiled at the cool satisfaction in his words.

  “Sounds like a good cover for an organization that is making an illicit drug,” she said.

  “It’s a hell of a cover. Fallon isn’t rushing in this time. He’s going to put Cascadia Dawn under surveillance for a while. See if he can learn anything useful. But it’s probably just one more Nightshade lab like the others that J&J took down a couple of months ago. We might get some information, but I doubt that it will give us the guys at the top.”

  She smiled. “We? Us? As in you are now officially on J&J’s payroll?”

  “Are you kidding? J&J can’t afford my consulting fees. This is strictly pro bono work.”

  “But you like it.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a challenge.”

  “Which is just what you’ve been needing. Now what?”

  “Now we have to talk.”

  She froze in midstep, her fingers tightening around Hector’s leash. He halted and looked back politely to see why his routine had been interrupted.

  Jack stopped, too, and turned to look at her. She felt energy flare.

  “The other night when I carried you out of that Nightshade hellhole you told me that you loved me,” he said. “Did you mean it, or was that the fever talking?”

  And just like that, courage sparked inside her. Or maybe it was the realization that nothing mattered but the truth and the possibility of making a dream come true.

  She let go of the leash and put her arms around Jack’s neck. “With you, I always feel a little feverish. But, yes, I love you.”

  He framed her face with his hands. “Enough to think long term?” “You sound like you’re negotiating a business contract.”

  “I love you, Chloe. But I can’t do the short- term, serial monogamy thing with you. It’s all or nothing.”

  “All,” she said. “Definitely all.”

  He pulled her close and kissed her there in the winter dreamlight.

  58

  FALLON JONES GAZED DEEPLY INTO THE COMPUTER, READING the report that Chloe Harper had just e-mailed to him.

  . . . The problem with the antidote is that it takes a sledgehammer to do what is essentially a job for a seamstress working with fine needles and silk thread. The hammer works, but in the process creates damage of a different kind. However, I’m sure that Damaris Kemble will recover most, although probably not all, of her natural para-senses.

  I’ll look forward to examining more cases for J&J. Please find my itemized bill attached . . .

  He filed the report and leaned back in his chair, thinking. Jack had given him some serious static about returning the lamp to Arcane, insisting that it remain in his custody in Seattle until an investigation had been conducted into the theft.

  It was a reasonable request. The investigation had begun, but it was probably going to take a while, possibly a couple of weeks or more, to find the Nightshade operative who had infiltrated the museum’s staff, assuming there was an infiltrator. The other possibility was that the para-hypnotist, Victoria Knight, who had drifted through the case like a ghost, had simply walked into the museum, turned a few heads with a couple of well-placed hypnotic suggestions, and walked out with the lamp.

  Just as a woman named Niki Plumer had walked out of Winter Cove Psychiatric hospital after the Oriana case. A few more things went click. He watched lines appear on the multidimensional construct that existed out on the paranormal plane, connecting dots.

  In two or three weeks Jack would no doubt give the L.A. museum a very interesting artifact. It would be safely locked away in the vault. Additional security measures would be put in place.

  But two or three weeks was a long time, certainly long enough for a family of psychically gifted forgers to create a very good copy of the original . . .

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs, interrupting his thoug
hts. An odd sense of anticipation whispered through him. He had not had any visitors since Grace and Luther left, and he wasn’t expecting anyone. Whoever was coming upstairs was probably bringing the new computer he had ordered online. It struck him that he was in a bad way if he was actually looking forward to a visit from the delivery guy. But the regular carrier was a man. The footsteps were feminine, not masculine.

  A sudden jolt of awareness snapped through him. He checked his watch. It was six o’clock. The Sunshine Café had closed half an hour ago. He had watched Isabella wave to him and walk away toward the inn, her umbrella raised against the steady rain. It couldn’t be her. She had gone home for the night. She had no reason to come here, anyway.

  There was something about the pattern of those footsteps on the stairs, though. He knew them.

  He sat very still, waiting for the knock. It came a few seconds later. He started to call out to her; to tell her to enter. The words got jumbled up in his throat. It dawned on him that a gentleman would open the door.

  Galvanized, he stood and started around the desk. The door opened before he got three steps. Isabella walked into the room, rain dripping from her coat and the folded umbrella. She smiled.

  “I’m here about the position,” she said.

  He finally found his tongue. “What position?”

  “The one that’s open here at Jones & Jones.”

  “I never advertised a job.”

  “No need to put an ad in the papers.” She looked around the cluttered room with great interest. “It’s obvious you need an assistant. You’re in luck. I’ve always wanted to work in a detective agency, and I’ve been looking for something that pays a little better than the Sunshine Café. People in this town are lousy tippers. Except for you.”

  He suddenly knew exactly what the expression deer in the headlights meant.

  “I hadn’t gotten as far as thinking about how much the position will pay,” he said, grasping at straws.

  “Not a problem.” She plopped her umbrella in the old Victorian umbrella stand, the one that had graced the original offices of J&J. “I’ll handle the accounting and financials from now on. Get you organized. No need for you to worry about pesky details. I’m sure you have much more important things to do.”

  “Miss Valdez, you don’t understand. This is not an ordinary investigation agency.”

  She took off her raincoat and hung it on the elaborately wrought cast-iron coatrack, another relic from J&J’s early years in London.

  “I know,” she said simply.

  Shock reverberated through him. “How do you know?”

  “Because you are not an ordinary man.” She gave him a brilliant smile. “It looks like we’ll need to order a second desk. I’ll get on that right away.”

  59

  PHYLLIS WAS SEATED IN THE GRAND WICKER CHAIR IN THE sunroom, her feet propped on the matching footstool. She had the morning paper in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. She looked up when Chloe entered the room. Then she glanced at the floor behind her.

  “Well, well, well,” she said. Quiet satisfaction hummed in the words. “You’ve fallen in love with him, haven’t you?”

  “I can sleep with him, Aunt Phyllis.”

  Phyllis laughed. “Under most circumstances that would not be much of a testimonial. But in your case I think that says it all. And when do I get to meet Mr. Winters?”

  Jack walked into the sunroom. “How about today?” He crossed the floor to the chair and offered his hand. “Jack Winters. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Harper.”

  Phyllis examined him from head to toe and then she glanced at the floor he had just crossed. She smiled and took his hand. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Jack. I hope you’ll stay for tea.”

  “Yes,” Jack said. “I’d like that.” He looked at Chloe and smiled.

  Chloe sensed the dreamlight swirling in the sunroom. Waves of energy danced invisibly between the two of them. The light was strong and steady. She knew it would link them for the rest of their lives.

  “We would both like that,” she said.

  60

  THE OPERATION HAD NOT BEEN AN UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS. The lamp was back in an Arcane vault, and she knew that it would not be easy to steal it a second time. But there was no point taking that risk again, anyway. It was clear that the experiment had failed. Larry Brown had survived but only because of something that the dreamlight reader, Chloe Harper, had done to him. He certainly had not come out of the situation with a second talent or even an enhanced version of his original ability. He had no doubt lost all of what little talent he had possessed.

  Conclusion One: Her grandfather’s theory was wrong. The Burning Lamp could not take the place of the formula. It appeared to work only on someone with the Winters psychic DNA.

  Conclusion Two: The lamp could not be used to stabilize the effects of the enhancement formula.

  Conclusion Three: Judging by the fact that Jack Winters and Chloe Harper had escaped from the gym, it appeared that there was some truth to the legends and rumors that had always swirled around the lamp. It was some kind of psi weapon, but it appeared extremely likely that only a Winters could access the full power of the artifact.

  She’d had two major objectives when she conceived the plan. Although it was disappointing to discover that the lamp could not be used to enhance her own talent or to protect her from the effects of the formula, her second goal had been achieved. And in a spectacular fashion, if she did say so, herself.

  John Stilwell Nash had been destroyed.

  Her only regret was that Nash had died without ever having had a chance to appreciate the irony involved. He could not have known that the person who had set him up for the fall could trace her own family roots back to the same ancestor, John Stilwell.

  The alchemists Sylvester Jones and Nicholas Winters were not the only ones who had fathered offspring after subjecting themselves and their genes to dangerous experiments designed to enhance their psychic powers. Back in the Late Victorian era, her own ancestor John Stilwell, a powerful talent enthralled by the new theories put forward by Darwin, had run a few breeding experiments of his own. Generations later, she and Nash were both the result of two of the experiments.

  It was Stilwell who had stolen the secret of the enhancement drug from Arcane. Although he had never used Sylvester’s formula himself, fearing its dangerous side effects, he had managed to produce some highly talented offspring, using his intuitive understanding of the laws of psychical genetics. Stilwell had died at the hands of Gabriel Jones before seeing any of his children grow to adulthood. But his bloodline had survived. She was living proof.

  She walked to the window of her office and looked out over the rain-soaked city of Portland. This morning John Stilwell Nash’s superior had offered her the position that Nash had recently vacated. Tomorrow she would walk into Nash’s old office at Cascadia Dawn, the cover business for one of the organization’s few surviving drug labs.

  From there she would work her way into the Inner Circle. Her ultimate objective was now clearly in sight. In due course she would become the Mistress of Nightshade.

  The knock on the door made her turn around.

  “Come in,” she said.

  The door opened. Humphrey Hulsey skittered into the room. He removed his glasses and began polishing them furiously.

  “I know that you are disappointed with the outcome of the experiment, Miss Knight,” he said earnestly, “but I’m afraid that is the nature of cutting-edge science. There are always a number of failures before one makes the great breakthrough.”

  “I understand, Dr. Hulsey. It is unfortunate that the lamp did not work as we had hoped. However, unlike my predecessor at Cascadia Dawn, I do appreciate the nature of the scientific process, and I am prepared to accept some failures. We will now move forward together.”

  Hulsey stopped polishing his glasses. He blinked several times.

  “Together?” he said.

  “Of course.
You are now my director of research. At the start of the Burning Lamp project I promised you the fully equipped lab and funding that you require for your dream work. That is what you will receive.”

  Hulsey glowed. “Thank you, Miss Knight. You won’t be sorry.”

  “I’m sure I won’t. You see, unlike so many before me who have been obsessed with the formula, I do understand that the secrets to enhancing talent in a stable fashion are locked in dream-psi research.”

  “Yes, yes,” Hulsey said excitedly. “That is what I tried to explain to Mr. Nash, but he refused to listen. Both the formula and the lamp work by accessing the latent energy of the dreamstate. But dream psi is inherently unstable. That has always been the source of the problems with the drug. Until I can solve some of the riddles connected with the dreaming process I will never be able to deliver a stable, reliable version of the formula.”

  She smiled. “Then it is a good thing that neither you nor I have been foolish enough to take the formula ourselves, isn’t it?”

  He snorted derisively. “A very good thing, indeed, Miss Knight. Really, it astonishes me how otherwise seemingly intelligent people in this organization are so eager to dose themselves with such an unstable drug. Ridiculous.”

  The fact that neither of them was on the drug was a secret between herself and Hulsey. In an organization run by formula-dependent talents, being free of the drug gave them an edge. But it also made them vulnerable. If the higher-ups ever discovered that she and Hulsey were not using the drug, it would be a death sentence for both of them. The board of directors insisted that all members of Nightshade be on the drug. It was the ultimate form of personnel management, the ultimate form of control.

  “We are a team, Dr. Hulsey,” she said.

  “A team,” he agreed.