In Too Deep (17 page)

“I wasn’t planning on explaining it. Seemed pretty straightforward to me. But I thought you might want to talk about it. Women always want to do that. Afterward, I mean.”

“And you know this, how?”

He frowned. “Everyone knows that.”

She almost laughed. “The one thing I know for sure about last night is that it does not involve a conspiracy.”

“Definitely no conspiracy,” he agreed.

“That’s good enough for me.”

“It is?”

She took his hand and tugged gently. “Come inside and have a drink with me, Fallon Jones.”

He moved into the room, closed the door and locked it with great care. When he turned back to her she could see the heat in his eyes.

“The most romantic night of your entire life?” he said very carefully.

“Definitely. Was it good for you, too?”

The energy in the room got a little hotter.

“Yes,” he said. “The best.”

“Then I don’t see that further discussion is necessary.”

“No,” he said. “No more talking.”

He swooped down upon her, scooped her up and started toward the bedroom.

Isabella put her arms around his neck.

“Guess we’ll skip the nightcap,” she said.

SOMETIME
LATER
She awoke to the knowledge that she was alone in the bed. She opened her eyes and sat up against the pillows. The clock on the night table read two-twenty.

A familiar otherworldly glow illuminated the bedroom doorway. Not psi fog, she thought. It was the light from a computer screen. Fallon had gone back to work.

She pushed the covers aside and got to her feet. She was nude and the room was chilly. She stepped into her slippers and pulled on her robe.

She tied the sash of the robe as she went down the short hallway, past the bathroom into the main room. Fallon was seated gazing into his laptop. In the glow from the screen, his face had the ruthless cast of a man obsessed. She could well believe that he was descended from a legendary alchemist.

“Fallon?”

He looked up. His hard expression relaxed at the sight of her. Energy swirled in the atmosphere. She knew that he was remembering the searing passion they had shared.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“What are you working on?” she asked. She moved to stand beside him. “The Nightshade case?”

“No.” He leaned back in his chair. “I was just doing some background research on Julian Garrett.”

“You should be in bed. You need sleep.”

“I don’t require a lot of sleep.”

“Well, you certainly need more than you got tonight.” She leaned over the desk and took his powerful hand. “It’s two-twenty in the morning. Come back to bed.”

“I work odd hours,” he said.

“No need for them to be this odd. Come with me.”

Somewhat to her surprise he got up out of the chair and let her lead him back into the bedroom. When they got there, he pulled her into his arms and down onto the bed.

This time he slept until dawn.

S
he’s the granddaughter of that wacko who operates the Iceberg conspiracy website?” Zack asked. He kept his voice pitched low, but the mix of amusement and amazement in his words was crystal clear. “Are you serious?”

Fallon stood at the window of his office and looked across the street at the Sunshine Café. Isabella and Zack’s wife, Raine, had just vanished inside to pick up some of Marge’s muffins for all of them to eat while they waited for Rafanelli and the lab techs.

Should have known better than to try to explain Isabella to Zack, he thought. Isabella was not easily explained. Isabella was unique, one of a kind.

“You know me,” he said. “I’m always serious.”

“Well, sure,” Zack said. “But when it comes to your kind of serious, there are nuances.”

Fallon looked at his cousin. Zack sat casually angled across the corner of Fallon’s desk, arms folded. There was certainly some family resemblance between them. Like most of the men in the Jones family line, they were both dark-haired and built along the lean lines typical of the clan which had, for generations, produced a lot of hunter-talents.

That was where the physical resemblance ended, though. Zack’s eyes were a glacial blue, and he was a couple of inches shorter than Fallon. But the biggest difference between them was the nature of their talents. Zack’s psychic ability gave him an edge when it came to anticipating the actions of others, a major plus given his new responsibilities as Master of the Society. His talent was actually a rare form of psychometry. Zack could pick up a knife or a gun that had been used to commit murder and sense what the killer had been feeling at the time the act of violence had been committed.

He had married a woman with a similar talent. When Raine came in contact with the psychic residue of violence, her clairaudient intuition translated the energy into the form of voices. Sometimes it was the killer’s voice she heard. Sometimes the victim’s.

Like many in the Jones family, Zack had once worked as a J&J agent. But he was now the latest in a long line of Joneses to take the reins of the Arcane Society. In Fallon’s opinion, the career change was a good move for both of them. Zack had a natural flair for giving orders, but he had never been any good at taking them.

“You want to talk about my nuances or do you want to discuss the fact that we may have located a cache of Bridewell’s nasty little gadgets?” Fallon asked.

“Good to see you, too, cousin,” Zack said.

Fallon winced. “Sorry. Things have been a little busy around here lately. Getting your phone call this morning informing me that you were on the way to the Cove caught me off guard, that’s all. I wasn’t planning on visitors.”

“After we talked on the phone last night, I told Raine about what you had found. We both agreed this was a piece of Arcane history that we did not want to miss.”

“You didn’t come all the way from Seattle just to take a look at some old clockwork inventions.”

“Okay, there is another reason,” Zack said. “But I’m also interested in Bridewell’s curiosities. J&J was never able to recover all of the devices after the case was closed back in the late eighteen hundreds. Couldn’t even come up with an accurate estimate of how many had been made. The curiosities that were found were stored in the vault at Arcane House in England, but several vanished during the Second World War. How the hell did some of the gadgets end up here in Scargill Cove?”

“I’m still working on that problem,” Fallon said. “At this point all I can tell you is that twenty-two years ago three people managed to get hold of some of the curiosities. They brought them here, tuned them up, and tried to run some experiments on them. One man evidently died in the explosion.”

“They wanted to figure out how the damn things work,” Zack said.

“Evidently,” Fallon said. “I checked the property records. The Sea Breeze Motor Lodge was once owned by a family named Kelso. The last surviving member of the clan is a man named Jonathan Kelso. He had some kind of mental breakdown about twenty-two years ago. He’s been living in an institution ever since.”

“The result of the explosion?”

“That’s what my talent is telling me,” Fallon said. “I’m going to try to interview him when I have a chance. But right now I’ve got other priorities. The first item at the top of my to-do list is to get the curiosities safely out of the shelter and into the lab.”

“The secret of the weapons is in the glass Bridewell used and in her unique talent. To this day, no one understands the para-physics involved. But why did Kelso and his companions bring the gadgets here? Obviously they knew about the old bomb shelter, but they could have found equally good shielding in a hundred other locations.”

“I’m ninety-nine-point-three percent sure the deciding factor was that they knew that Scargill Cove is a natural para-nexus.”

“Yeah?” Zack glanced out the window. “I didn’t know that. I thought you moved the office back here because you liked the solitude.”

“That was part of it, but mostly I selected it because of the energy here. The nexus currents aren’t obvious at first, but they are very strong. After you’ve been here awhile, you can sense them. The atmosphere around here helps me to focus.”

“All right, I’ll buy that,” Zack said. “But let’s be honest: you were never what anyone would call the sociable type even before all the crap that went down three years ago. Afterward your loner tendencies got a whole lot more pronounced. Hell, you practically disappeared when you moved here.”

“I like it here.”

“I can see that,” Zack said.

He did not say anything else for a time. Fallon waited.

“I should probably mention the other reason I decided to pay you a visit today,” Zack said eventually.

“I knew it,” Fallon said.

“Well, you are psychic.”

“Let’s have it.”

“I want you to show up at the Society’s Winter Conference this week,” Zack said.

Fallon did not hesitate. “No.”

“You’ve skipped it for two years in a row.”

“You know why.”

“Yes, but things are different this year.”

“Give me one good reason I should make the trip to Sedona.”

“I’ll give you two. The first is that there’s a move afoot to encourage the Council to replace you as the head of J&J.”

Fallon felt as if he’d walked into a stone wall. It took an effort of will backed up by a little talent to pull his senses together.

“That’s not possible,” he said. “J&J is mine. I inherited the firm from Uncle Gresham. It’s always been a privately held business within the family. It’s not just another branch of Arcane like the labs or the museums. The Council can’t fire me.”

“There is talk to the effect that if replacing you is not an option, the Council should sever its ties with J&J and hire a new investigation firm.”

Fallon gripped the window ledge. “Someone thinks I’ve lost it?”

“It has been suggested,” Zack said neutrally. “But the politically correct argument being used is that you’re spending too many resources on Nightshade.”

Fallon closed his eyes. “They think Nightshade is finished because of the Hawaii case.”

“Yes,” Zack said.

“It’s not.” Fallon opened his eyes. “I can feel it, Zack. That damn organization is like a hydra. We cut off one of the snake’s heads, but a new one will soon take its place. Trust me. As long as they have Humphrey Hulsey and the recipe for the formula, we can’t let down our guard.”

“I believe you and I’ll back you all the way. But in the meantime, I need you to back me.”

“You want me to do that by showing up at the Sedona conference?”

Zack watched him very steadily, his startling blue eyes cold and determined. But there was understanding in his expression as well.

“Yes,” he said. “Face it, cousin, you can’t stay hidden away here in Scargill Cove forever. We both know that. Those who wield power within Arcane need to see you. If you remain out of sight, the rumors will only get worse.”

Fallon exhaled slowly. He had known this request was coming sooner or later, he reminded himself. His parents had dropped a few pointed hints some weeks back. Nevertheless, Zack was applying more pressure than the situation appeared to warrant. There was an underlying urgency to the demand that required a little study.

Fallon heightened his senses and watched the paranormal web light up.

“Well, hell,” he said softly. “It’s not just me or J&J they’re after, is it?”

“I don’t think so,” Zack said, very serious now. “Got a feeling that severing the connection with J&J and cutting off the resources you require to fight Nightshade is part of a long-term strategy.”

“You’re next,” Fallon said, comprehension hitting him in the gut. “With J&J out of the picture, the next logical step would be to convince the Council to remove you and put someone else in charge of the Society.”

“Someone other than a Jones, to be specific,” Zack said. “Someone who would be in a position to redirect not only the full resources of the Society but its goals and objectives, as well. My talent tells me we’re looking at what those in the business world call a hostile takeover.”

Fallon whistled softly. “More like a coup d’état.”

“I want to counter it with a show of force. Within Arcane, power and talent are everything, always have been. The Jones family has a lot of both of those commodities. I want to remind the members of that. Hell, we founded the organization. We aren’t going to give it up without a fight.”

More sectors of the paranormal spiderweb shivered with light. “Nightshade,” Fallon said softly. “Or what’s left of it. Got to be.”

“Maybe,” Zack cautioned. “Maybe not. I haven’t been able to identify the source of the recent wave of rumors, let alone whether or not the individual responsible is linked to Nightshade. This thing could be coming from an entirely different direction. There have always been those within the Society who resented everyone on our family tree.”

“Because we’re descended from the founder.” Fallon looked around the room, mentally cataloging the antiques scattered around the space: the desk and the old inkwell, the Victorian umbrella stand and the wrought iron coatrack on the wall. All of the offices of J&J across the U.S. and in London had some mementos that reflected the history of J&J and the Society. Both of which were inextricably bound to the history of the Jones family, he thought. “They fear us because we’ve always controlled Arcane.”

“Not just the organization,” Zack reminded him. “But a lot of its deepest secrets, as well. The family has always had enemies. You know the old saying.”

“Friends may come and go but enemies accumulate.”

“The Joneses have had more than four hundred years to acquire our enemies.”

Fallon smiled grimly. “And what’s more, we’re good at it.”

“Comes with the territory,” Zack said. “Like I told you, I don’t know yet if the person who started the rumors about you and J&J is in any way connected to Nightshade, but I think it’s clear that his ultimate goal is to make certain that the Joneses lose control of Arcane.”

“And its secrets. It’s actually a hell of a strategy, when you think about it. Why go to all the trouble and risk of resurrecting the currently broken version of Nightshade if you can take over Arcane from the inside and create a super-Nightshade? It’s brilliant.”