by Jayne Castle
“Well, it’s the season. Not like you have a lot of options. There aren’t many excuses for ducking a Covenant Marriage if the people getting married are friends or family.”
Max and Araminta were sitting very close together on the back of the seat, chattering enthusiastically.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” Davis said, turning a corner.
“Who knows?” Celinda turned her head to look at the pair. “I’ve never watched dust bunnies interact with each other. In fact, until Araminta adopted me, I’d never seen one in person, just in pictures.”
“Same here. After Max moved in, I talked to a biologist friend of mine at the university. He told me that very little is known about dust bunnies. They’ve never been considered destructive pests, so there’s never been any funding to study them.”
“Thank heavens.” Celinda shuddered. “I don’t even want to think about what could happen if some scientists decided that dust bunnies should be studied in a laboratory.”
“Something tells me that bunnies are smart enough to avoid that fate.”
“They do seem to be able to disappear whenever they wish. Sometimes Araminta slips out at night and doesn’t come home until dawn. I have no idea where she goes or how she even gets out of the apartment.”
“Max does the same thing occasionally.” Davis slowed for a streetlight. “Just another dust bunny mystery.”
Conversation stopped. Celinda tried to think of a safe way to restart it.
“What’s it like being a security consultant?” she asked.
He shrugged, watching the light. “It suits me. Can’t think of anything else I’d be good at. What’s it like being a matchmaker?”
Her profession was something else she did not want to talk about tonight. When you were a matchmaker who specialized in Covenant Marriages, you were always focused on the long-term. This was her break-the-rules date with the most interesting man she had ever met, and she was pretty sure the relationship was doomed. On the other hand, she had already shut down one conversational topic tonight, and she had asked him about his job.
“It’s very satisfying when things go well,” she said. “Depressing and frustrating when they don’t.”
“You mean when you can’t find a match for someone?”
“Finding a match usually isn’t the problem.” She hesitated, thinking of the disaster in Frequency City. “True, there are cases where it is impossible to match a client, but those instances, thankfully, are rare. The real problems start when people don’t like the results I come up with and refuse to even meet a potential match.”
He threw her a quick look, brows raised. “Does that happen a lot?”
“More often than it should. Unfortunately, when it comes to Covenant Marriages, a lot of people have very fixed ideas of what they want in a mate. In many instances those notions are flat-out wrong. There are occasions when I can’t convince a really stubborn client to give one of my recommendations a try.”
“What do you do when that happens?”
“Terminate the client’s agency contract and refund the fees that have been paid. Marriage consultants try to avoid being responsible for bad matches at all costs. It’s not good for business in a field where referrals are everything.”
“I can see that. Until the marriage laws get loosened up a little more, getting stuck in a bad CM is the equivalent of a jail sentence.”
Spoken with great depth of feeling, she thought. It was going to be a very long time, if ever, before Davis was ready to trust a matchmaker again.
Chapter 6
SHE HAD TO KNOW THAT THE DRESS LOOKED SEXY AS hell on her, Davis thought. She must have chosen it deliberately to make an impact on him.
He decided that might or might not be a good thing. If Celinda had set out to tantalize him because she was attracted to him, that was excellent. But in all likelihood she was playing him in order to distract him from the missing relic. Either way, though, it made for an intriguing evening, just as he had anticipated. Frustrating as hell, though. He had been half-aroused ever since he’d picked her up at her door.
They managed to get through a couple of glasses of wine and dinner without discussing the artifact. In fact, three hours later, when the check arrived, Davis was a little stunned to realize how much they had talked about without even straying toward touchy subjects like relics and Guilds.
Either Celinda was an expert when it came to the feminine art of distraction, or else she really did feel some of the sizzle he was experiencing.
She looked up as the waiter came back with the plastic box that contained the uneaten portion of her grilled fish.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the box.
Davis got to his feet. “Is that for you or Araminta?”
“Araminta. I told you, she’s been eating like a very large farm animal lately. I’m a little worried, to be honest. Does Max eat a lot?”
Davis shrugged. “Seems like a reasonable amount for an animal that size.”
“What do you feed him?”
“He seems happy to eat whatever I’m eating.” He smiled a little. “Or drinking. Whenever I open a bottle of beer, he insists I give him some.”
“Wonder what they eat in the wild?”
“Probably better not to ask.”
Outside, the air was a warm, silken cloak. The night was luminous with the faint green glow of the nearby Dead City wall. Parking around restaurants and nightspots was always at a premium in the Quarter. He’d been forced to leave the Phantom a block and a half away in a narrow side lane.
“Why don’t you wait here,” he said to Celinda. “I’ll get the car and bring it around.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “I love the energy here in the Quarter, especially at night.”
She felt it, too, he thought. The energy of the night was all around them. Screw the damn relic. He’d worry about it later. Next year, maybe.
He looked at her. “You’re right. Great energy.”
She smiled.
He took her arm, savoring the feel of soft, bare, female skin under his fingers. In a heartbeat his senses opened wide to the night and the woman beside him. Take it easy; you don’t want to scare her off. But she didn’t look scared.
He managed to wait, just barely, until they left the main street and walked a short distance into the shadowy lane where the Phantom was parked. He stopped in front of the vestibule of a darkened doorway, turned Celinda toward him, and pulled her into his arms. She did not resist. Her hands went to his shoulders.
In the faint, green glow that emanated from the towering quartz wall at the far end of the lane, he could see that her eyes were deep and mysterious, and her lips were slightly parted. Definitely not scared.
He wrapped her close and kissed her hard, letting her feel the rush that was heating his blood.
She made a soft, urgent little sound. Her hands slid from his shoulders, moving up around his neck. She opened her lips just a little and gave him a taste of the sultry heat that awaited him.
Kissing her was a little like going down into the catacombs and getting a dose of alien psi, only better. This high swept through him with the force of an oncoming summer storm. It was sexual and highly physical, but it was something more, something that caught him by surprise. There was a sense of mind-bending rightness about kissing Celinda. She was just what he’d been needing for longer than he could remember.
She whispered something he did not quite catch against his mouth. Her fingers tightened in his hair. He could feel her soft breasts crushed against his chest.
He felt his control start to slip. That hadn’t happened in longer than he could remember either. Instead of making him uneasy, he suddenly felt free in a way he hadn’t for years.
The hunger inside him grew more intense. He dragged Celinda deeper into the vestibule and pushed her up against the stone wall, bracing her. She nibbled on his left earlobe. He almost climaxed then and there. He couldn’t believe she was u
sing her teeth on him.
He moved his hands downward on either side of her body, savoring the contours of breast, waist, and thigh. She did not try to stop him. In fact, he could feel one of her elegantly curved calves gliding up the side of his trousers. She shuddered a little in his arms.
He found the hem of her dress and shoved it up to her waist. Then he gripped her buttocks and started to lift her off her feet so that she would have no choice but to wrap her legs around him and squeeze tightly just to hold on.
She gasped and pulled her mouth away from his.
“Wait,” she managed breathlessly. “Hold on a minute. I think things are getting a little out of control here.”
He groaned. “Celinda—”
“We should both cool down a bit,” she said, taking several deep breaths. “I mean, this isn’t even a real date, is it? More like a business dinner.”
He came back to his senses with a disorienting jolt.
What the hell was he doing? He’d only met her this afternoon, and he’d been about to take her up against a grimy wall. He’d never taken a woman against a wall in his life. He caught her face between his hands and rested his forehead against hers.
“Don’t know how it is in your line,” he said, “but I gotta tell you my business dinners don’t usually end like this.”
She gave him a tremulous smile. “Neither do mine.”
He opened his mouth to apologize. The sound of footsteps stopped him cold. There were plenty of other people out on the streets of the Old Quarter enjoying the warm summer night, but until now he and Celinda had been alone in the tiny lane. He listened closely.
“What’s wrong?” Celinda whispered, going very still.
“Probably nothing.” He spoke directly into her ear.
“Oh, jeez. First date I’ve been on in four months, and I’m going to get mugged, right?”
Very gently he put his hand over her mouth to silence her. He turned her slightly so that he could watch the mouth of the lane from the cover of the shadowed vestibule.
A figure stood silhouetted against the brighter lights of the main thoroughfare behind him. He was tall and spindly, a scarecrow of a man. The outline of a loose-fitting wind-breaker was visible. He had a cap pulled down low over his eyes.
The figure hesitated a few seconds longer, as though seeking his quarry. After a while he moved warily forward, heading toward the Phantom.
Davis put his mouth close to Celinda’s ear again.
“Stay here.”
He made it an order, not a suggestion. He could tell that she didn’t like it, but he was pretty sure she was too smart to sabotage him at this critical juncture by making a scene.
He released her and moved quietly out of the doorway.
The figure in the cap had reached the Phantom. He leaned down to peer through the window into the darkened interior.
“Looking for something?” Davis asked behind him.
The scarecrow froze for an instant. Then he jerked upright and whirled around. Davis got a brief glimpse of haggard, death’s head features, and then the lane exploded in a raging inferno of green ghost light.
Not one but two wild, acid-colored balls of alien psi energy flared and pulsed on other either side of him, trapping him.
Doppelganger light, Davis thought. There weren’t many hunters who could generate a dopp, especially outside the tunnels. He had some immunity—he was descended from a long line of hunters, and almost all ghost hunters could sustain a brush with ghost light—but no one, hunter or not, could survive a close encounter with this much raw energy.
Chapter 7
CELINDA WATCHED THE EVENTS IN THE LANE FROM THE doorway, horrified. Some of her brother’s friends were ghost hunters. She had seen them generate small UDEMs on occasion but nothing of this size and certainly not two at a time. In the blazing green energy given off by the twin ghosts she could see Davis pinned against the brick wall.
She had always heard that the only thing that could stop a ghost was another ghost. Davis had told her that he came from a hunter family. Why wasn’t he fighting back with a ghost of his own? Then she remembered something else he had told her: “I turned out a little different.”
Maybe he couldn’t generate a ghost. If that was the case, he was in mortal danger. She knew enough about ghost-hunting to be aware that the person who generated a UDEM had to concentrate hard to keep it going. The only thing she could think of to do was to try to distract the man in the cap.
She rushed out of the vestibule, heading toward the fiery spectacle. But before she had gone more than a few steps, the twin ghosts suddenly began to spin chaotically. In the next second they winked out of sight.
The man in the cap appeared to panic. He ran back toward her. Davis pounded after him.
A car engine roared nearby. A split second later, a dark vehicle shot out of an alley, nearly running her down. She scrambled back barely in time. The very high heel of her evening sandal twisted out from under her. She went down, landing hard on her rear.
The car slammed to a halt less than two feet away from where she sat on the ground. The window on the driver’s side was down. She could just make out a dark profile. Instinctively, she opened her senses. She was close enough to pick up the highly agitated psi energy patterns emitted by the man behind the wheel.
She heard the door on the passenger side open. The man in the cap tumbled headfirst into the front seat. The driver floored the accelerator, aiming straight for Davis.
As Celinda watched, Davis leaped out of the way with only inches to spare.
The vehicle turned down another alley and disappeared, tires shrieking.
Chapter 8
HIGH HEELS CLATTERED ON THE PAVEMENT.
“Davis. Davis, are you all right?”
He turned to see Celinda hurrying toward him. How did women run in high heels? One of the great mysteries of nature.
“I’m okay.”
That was a flat-out lie. She had nearly been run down before his eyes, the bastards had gotten away, and he had generated enough silver light to melt amber, which meant that he was headed for the usual burn and crash. He was not okay with any of that. But given that the situation could have been a hell of a lot worse, he figured he was entitled to a little prevarication.
“Thank heavens.” She halted in front of him, surveying him anxiously. “I was terrified that you’d been singed, at the very least. I’ve never seen so much ghost light. It looked like a scene out of a horror movie.”
“They’re called doppelgangers. Twin ghosts. Not many hunters can generate them, especially such big ones and aboveground at that. The guy is good.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” he said through set teeth. “What about you?”
“I’m fine.” She brushed at her shapely rear with one hand. “But this dress is ruined.”
She was safe. He was suddenly, overwhelmingly pissed. “What the hell did you think you were doing? That son of a bitch nearly flattened you. I told you to stay in the doorway.”
She blinked, startled at his tone, and then angled her chin, clearly annoyed. “From where I was standing, it looked like you needed some help. I thought maybe I could distract the hunter. I’ve always heard that the ghosts break up if the person generating them loses focus.”
“Next time you do what I tell you, understood?”
There was a beat of silence.
She cleared her throat very delicately. “Does this sort of thing happen a lot when you go out on a date?”
“You know, a question like that is a real conversation stopper. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
“You’re angry.”
He started walking back toward the car. “You scared the hell out of me back there when you came flying out of the doorway and nearly got clobbered by that guy’s getaway driver.”
“Do you think that man in the cap wanted to mug us or steal your car?”
“Doubt if there are many garden-vari
ety muggers or car thieves around who can pull that kind of heat. Any thug that strong should be running a whole damn criminal empire.”
“Davis? What’s wrong? You’re not just mad at me because I didn’t stay put. There’s something else going on here. Are you sure you aren’t hurt? And what happened to those two ghosts, anyway? I didn’t see you generate any counter-ghosts. Did the guy just get scared and run off?”
“No.” He reached the car and gripped the door handle on the passenger side very tightly. He debated how much to tell her and then decided to go with a sanitized version of the truth. “I told you I’m from a family of hunters.”
“Yes, I know.” She searched his face. “But you said you turned out different.”
“I did. But I’m still a hunter. Sort of.”
She stared at him. “Are you telling me that those ghosts disappeared because you de-rezzed them?”
“Yes.”
“With what? I didn’t see any ghost light.”
“I work ghost energy from a different end of the spectrum. It’s almost invisible to the naked eye. They call it silver light.”
“I didn’t know that ghost energy could be generated from more than one point on the spectrum.”
“It’s a rare talent, and the Guilds tend to keep it quiet.”
“Why?”
“Tradition, mostly,” he said, deliberately vague. He was not up to any more explanations. He studied the interior of the Phantom. “Looks like Max and Araminta are gone.”
“What?” Distracted, Celinda whirled around and peered into the shadowy front seat of the vehicle. “Oh my gosh, they are gone. What happened to them?”
“Must have squeezed out through the window I cracked for them.”
“Maybe they got scared when they saw the twin ghosts and ran off.” She straightened and looked anxiously toward the nearest dark alley.
“Araminta?” she called.
There was no response.
“Have you got a flashlight?” she said to Davis.
He glanced at the midnight-dark mouth of the alley. The faint acid-green glow of the Dead City wall did not even begin to penetrate its ominous depths.