by Jayne Castle
“Aura interference is not a subject that most talents consider a joking matter,” she said.
“Who’s joking?” Elias said. “For the record, it doesn’t feel like interference—it feels like your aura is sort of whispering to mine.”
“Whispering? Really?”
“Can’t think of any other way to describe it. Whatever is going on between us, I like it a lot. Are you okay with the connection?”
She wrapped her arms around her knees and opened herself to the touch of his aura. The strong currents of his energy field did, indeed, seem to be whispering to her. The silent communication—the sense of intimacy it created—stirred all of her senses. It was, she decided, the ultimate seduction.
I know this man as I have never known any other man, she thought. She reminded herself that what she was experiencing was probably only a temporary bond forged by circumstances and mutual attraction. But her doppelgänger had told her the truth. She was falling in love with Elias. And there was nothing in sight to break that fall before it was too late.
“I’m okay with your aura,” she said, her voice a little wobbly. “Fine, really.”
He put his hand very deliberately on her shoulder. She could feel the warmth and strength in his fingers through the light fabric of her nightgown.
The physical contact acted like a spark of energy transmitted through perfectly tuned amber—the sense of connection was immediately intensified and enhanced by orders of magnitude. She doubted that any para-physics instrument ever devised could measure the breathtaking intimacy of the sensation.
“Just okay?” he asked softly. “Just fine?”
“No,” she said, too transfixed by his touch to try to evade the question. “No, I like the feel of your aura a lot.”
He stroked his fingertips over her shoulder and down her arm to her elbow. His touch was tender, intimate, and irresistible. The wonder of the moment stole her breath.
She stopped hugging her knees, and leaned over him. She lowered her mouth to his until there was only an inch of space between them.
“In fact,” she said very deliberately, “I love the feel of your aura.”
“Good.”
He didn’t say anything else. Instead he gently wrapped one hand around the back of her head and brought her mouth to his.
The kiss turned fierce and desperate, setting fire to the energy that infused the atmosphere.
She tore her mouth free from Elias’s and kissed his throat, his ear, the curve of his muscled shoulder, indulging her senses in his scent and the exciting feel of his warm skin. She knew she was storing up memories for an uncertain future, but she didn’t care. At the very least, when she was an old woman she would have an interesting past to share with the aging showgirls, magicians, and card dealers in the Dark Zone.
Elias groaned and tightened his grip on her. She gloried in the knowledge that she could induce such an elemental response in him.
One of his hands slid slowly down her back and then lower still. His fingers closed around the curve of her hip, squeezing gently. He drew the hem of her nightgown up to her waist and touched her ever more intimately, touched her until she was wet and aching and consumed by the urgent need to join with him in the most elemental way of all.
His forehead and chest were damp with sweat and she knew it was because he was fighting to hold himself in check until she was ready. Another time she might be tempted to see how far she could push him. But not tonight. Tonight was for the past, present, and future.
She pushed herself up off of his chest and straddled him. He sank his fingers into her thighs and watched her with hot, half-closed eyes as she took him slowly, deeply.
The night burned.
Chapter 26
A long time later she felt a soft thump on the bed. Virgil was back. He bustled up the rumpled bed to greet her. His fur was cool with the chill of dawn and the wild Rainforest. She knew he had been hunting.
“About time you got back,” she mumbled, still half asleep. She patted him affectionately. “Hope you had fun. I sure did.”
“What?”
Elias’s voice was low, freighted with sleep and somewhat muffled by the pillow. Nevertheless, the sound of it jolted her into full wakefulness. She sat up quickly and stared at the large man beside her. Fortunately, he was on his side, facing the nightstand. He could not see her startled expression.
Old habits die hard, she realized. After a lifetime of sleeping alone, waking up in bed with a man took a little getting used to.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just chatting with Virgil. He’s back.”
“Good for Virgil.”
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, got to her feet, and grabbed her robe off the hook.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” she said. “It’s still early. I’ll just go start the coffee.”
Good grief. She was blathering.
Virgil fluttered across the bed and hopped onto the nightstand so that he was face-to-face with Elias. He chortled a cheery greeting.
Elias gave him a pat. “Morning, pal. Hope the hunting went well.”
Virgil chortled exuberantly. Then, evidently concluding he had fulfilled his social obligations to a houseguest, he jumped down from the nightstand, dashed across the bedroom, and disappeared out the door. Hannah knew he was headed for the kitchen.
Elias stretched, shoved the covers aside, and sat up on the side of the bed. He was wearing only his briefs and he seemed to take up a lot of space in the little bedroom.
She realized he was half aroused. Hurriedly she averted her gaze and concentrated hard on tying the sash of the robe.
“Are you okay?” Elias asked.
She tied the knot in the sash very, very tightly. “Yes, of course. Just dandy, thanks.”
“You sure there’s nothing wrong?”
“Absolutely. Like I said, just off to start the coffee. You can have the shower first if you like.”
“You seem to be in a rush,” he said. “Trying to find a diplomatic way to kick me out of your apartment?”
She stared at him, appalled. It dawned on her that she might have hurt his feelings.
“No, really,” she said. “Seriously. I mean, I’m just not used to this kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“This.” She waved a hand in a rather vague gesture that included the bedroom and everything that had happened in it during the night. “A man. In bed. In the morning.”
“Ah, so that’s it.” He smiled a rather smug, distinctly masculine smile. The crystal in his ring flashed with a little fire. He crossed the room and kissed her nose. “Look on the bright side. I know how to make a bed.”
The affectionate little kiss on the nose eased the morning-after awkwardness. She relaxed and smiled.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m still new at this sleeping-together thing.”
“I know. If it makes you feel any better, so am I.”
She raised her brows. “I find that a little hard to believe.”
He threaded his fingers into her sleep-tumbled hair. “As a rule, I prefer to sleep alone.”
She tried—and failed—to read his eyes. “Why?”
“If I don’t spend the night, it feels like a date. But if I spend the night—” He broke off, shrugging.
“If you spend the night, it feels like a relationship.”
“Exactly.” He nodded once, evidently satisfied. “So that makes this a relationship. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take you up on that offer of a shower.”
“Okay.”
“We can talk about your dream at breakfast.”
“My dream. Good heavens, I almost forgot about it.”
He looked pleased. “You were probably distracted.”
“Probably.” She turned toward the dressing table.
“The message I got was clear enough. I’m just not sure how to interpret it yet. That’s always the problem, you know, interpretation.”
“What was the message?”
Hannah crossed to the dressing table and opened the top drawer. She took out the evening clutch and opened it. The paper fortune was still inside. She removed it, aware of a faint tingle of energy, and held it up so that Elias could see it.
“My doppelgänger walked over here to the dressing table, looked in the mirror, and then reminded me that the fortune from the Midnight Carnival was still in my purse. I got the impression that it was important.”
“The fortune?”
“No, I don’t think she was referring directly to the fortune. I think she was trying to tell me that the Midnight Carnival is the answer to all the questions we’ve been asking.”
Elias contemplated the fortune for a long moment.
“Which questions?” he asked finally.
“That’s the problem with dream-walking,” Hannah said. “The literal message usually comes through loud and clear. But I don’t always know the right questions to ask.”
“I’m going to need that shower and some coffee before we start trying to interpret your new dream.”
Chapter 27
“Last night, just before I fell asleep, I rezzed my talent and focused on a single question,” Hannah said. “I really, really want to know who trashed my shop and apartment.”
Elias had been concentrating on the mountain of fluffy scrambled eggs on his plate. He paused his fork briefly in midair, the engineer in him curious as usual.
“That’s how you work when you set out to find something?” he said. “You ask a specific question?”
“I ask it just before I go to sleep. I don’t have a great deal of control over the dream-walking process. I can’t tell myself not to dream, for example. If I could, my personal life would probably be a lot different.”
Elias looked around the small, cozy kitchen and beyond into the tiny living room. Everything about the apartment, from the single reading chair in front of the amber fireplace to the minimal number of dishes and glasses in the cupboards, had clearly been designed for a woman who lived alone. Okay, make that a single woman who shared space with a dust bunny.
It dawned on him that, as much as he treasured his privacy, he always knew that he had options. He had grown up in a warm, close-knit family. Sure, there were arguments, emotional scenes, and pressure from the older generation to get one’s act together. But for the most part he got along well with his brother and sister and most of his cousins. He went home to Copper Beach Island several times a year for holidays and family celebrations of one kind or another. In addition, he had always known that he would someday have a wife and children of his own.
Sure, there was a downside to family life. As his mother liked to say, it wouldn’t be a family if there were not a lot of drama and a few secrets. But there was also a sense of connection that went bone deep. The members of the Coppersmith clan were forever bound by a shared past and the knowledge that, when crunch time came, they always stood shoulder to shoulder against the threat from outside.
He could only imagine a life that was not founded on the bedrock of a strong family.
On the other side of the table, Hannah gave him an oddly reassuring smile.
“It’s okay,” she said gently. “I do have a family. It just doesn’t look like your family.”
“How did you know what I was thinking?” he asked.
“Call me psychic.”
He smiled. “Okay, Madam Psychic, tell me about your dream-walking experience.”
She drank some coffee and set the cup down with great precision. “Like I said, I can’t not dream whenever I like but I do have the ability to dream to order, at least to a degree. The trick is to ask the right question just before I go to sleep and really focus on it with a little talent.”
“Last night you asked who trashed your apartment?”
“Something like that. I asked who would want to trash my apartment.”
“Ah, looking at motive first.” He ate some of his eggs. “Good idea.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve asked the question but there has been so much going on lately and we’ve had so little sleep, I guess my doppelgänger has had to prioritize.”
“But last night she told you the answer was the Midnight Carnival.”
“What she said—and this is always the murky part—is that it started with the Midnight Carnival.”
A small shock of comprehension arced through him. He put down his fork and looked at the string of clear crystal beads that circled Hannah’s throat.
“The Midnight Carnival is linked to your necklace, isn’t it?” he said.
She reached up to touch the crystals with her fingertips. The small stones sparked briefly with a little color.
“It was just a broken necklace until I found the missing crystal. But when I found that at an online estate auction, I knew it was important. I got it very cheap because there was no competition. As soon as I had the stone set in place in the necklace, I knew I had the key I’d been looking for all these years.”
“The key to one of the most valuable finds ever made in the Underworld,” Elias said softly. “You’re thinking that someone else is looking for the Midnight Carnival and that individual knows that you have the key. That’s why he searched your apartment.”
“I can’t be positive, but the timing of events fits that scenario. I think that’s what my doppelgänger was trying to tell me.”
“Lay out the timeline for me, right from the beginning.”
She pushed her plate aside and folded her arms on the table. “I didn’t set out to search for the Midnight Carnival. I didn’t even know it existed. I was just trying to find the missing crystal. The necklace is all I have of my mother’s. I wanted to repair it. I located the crystal a couple of weeks before you showed up at my door. I paid to have it hand-delivered by courier. When it arrived I immediately took it to a jeweler I know and trust. As soon as the stone was in place I realized that I had a psychic map of some kind.”
“Did the jeweler understand what you had?”
“No, I’m sure he didn’t,” Hannah said. “He realized that the crystals were a little hot but that’s not unusual in his line. Anyhow, that night I wore the necklace to bed, fired up my talent, and went into a dream-walking trance.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“Sometimes it is. I woke up with an intuitive understanding of how to use the map.”
He drank some coffee and lowered the cup. “It’s a psi-code map. You figured it out because your para-psych profile is similar to that of the person who created the map.”
“Yes. After the first dream, I knew I needed to know more about the map itself. When I consulted Miss Le Fay she said she was sure that the map could only be fired up by someone with my para-genetic profile.”
“Who is Miss Le Fay?” he asked. “Is that her real name, by the way?”
“I’m sure it’s a stage name that she adopted years ago. Morgana Le Fay is a retired stage psychic. Used to be a big headliner at the Glass Palace. She still uses the name and in this town it’s considered rude to ask about other names.”
“And she told you that you probably had a genetic connection to whoever had crafted the dreamlight gate?”
“Exactly.”
“Son of a ghost,” he said very softly. “When you found the missing crystal you found the clue to your family history.”
Excitement sparked in Hannah’s eyes. “Miss Le Fay said that I almost certainly have to be a direct descendant of whoever encoded the map into the crystals in my necklace.”
“All right, does Le Fay know that the necklace is the map to a hugely valuable discovery in the Underworld?”
“She knows it leads to somet
hing, of course, but I’m sure she assumes it’s just some old First Generation family heirloom. A lot of families try to collect First Gen antiques and memorabilia that have a connection to their bloodline. She wished me luck finding what I was looking for and that was the end of it.”
“Still, she is aware that you’ve acquired a psi-code map.”
“Yes, but I’ve known her all my life. She’s a friend of my aunts. I trust her. Besides, she realizes that I’m the only one who can decipher the map. If she wanted a piece of the action she would have tried to cut a deal—not steal the necklace.”
“All right, who else knows about the necklace?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve worn it ever since my aunts gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday. People here in the DZ are used to seeing it on me.”
“You wore it before you found the missing crystal?”
“Yes. I doubt if most people noticed the missing stone. Would you be aware of one missing bead on a woman’s necklace?”
He thought about it. “I might, if I realized the stones in the necklace were hot.”
“Well, you’re a crystal engineer. You aren’t most people.”
“All right, sounds like we’ve got a town, or at least a neighborhood, full of suspects.”
“I can guarantee you that whoever stomped all over my bed was not a neighbor and definitely not a friend. I told you, I would have recognized the psi-prints.”
“That still leaves a lot of people who live here and a few thousand more who come and go as tourists. I don’t see how your dream gets us any closer to identifying the intruder.”
“I think what my doppelgänger was trying to tell me is that we should take another look at the timeline and try sorting out events in a different pattern,” Hannah said. “We’ve been assuming that the intruder was connected to the pirates. But what if that isn’t the case?”
He thought about that. “You think we’re dealing with two different problems?”
“Exactly. It’s not like things didn’t get very confusing for a while. We’ve been assuming that the pirates are linked to that motorcycle gang that tried to stop you from hiring me to open the gate at your jobsite. But what if the bikers are connected to the guy who broke into my place? What if my doppelgänger—my intuition—is right? Maybe the intruder is after the Midnight Carnival?”