Silver Master (18 page)

“THIS IS THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE,” RACHEL SAID.

Celinda smiled at her in the mirror. “You look so beautiful. When you walked down the aisle I could tell that Josh couldn't believe his eyes.”

They were alone in the mirrored dressing room. Rachel was still in her wedding gown. Yards of white satin and gossamer netting billowed and drifted around her. She was radiant.

The formal Covenant Marriage ceremony, replete with all the ancient vows and customs that the First Generation colonists had brought with them from Earth, had lasted nearly an hour. Now the reception was in full swing in the hotel ballroom. Celinda could hear the muffled strains of the music.

“You're the one who made it all possible.” Rachel turned and hugged her tightly. “I don't know how to thank you.”

“I'm sure that you and Josh would have found each other without me.” Celinda hugged her back. “I speeded up the process a little, that's all.”

“I don't believe that for one moment. You made it happen, and we will always be grateful.” Rachel stepped back. “We both owe you so much. Now, it's your turn. Mom says that things look serious between you and Davis Oakes. I'm so glad you've found someone at last.”

“Slight misunderstanding, I'm afraid.” Celinda made a face. “Davis and I got into an embarrassing little argument in the bar last night, and suddenly Mom decided we were meant for each other.”

“Don't discount her intuition. You know it's way above average.”

“Trust me when I tell you that Davis and I aren't going to be sending out wedding invitations any time in the near future.” She hesitated. “Davis is not keen on the institution of Covenant Marriage.”

“You could start with a Marriage of Convenience. Let him get used to the concept.”

“You know how I feel about MCs. Not interested.”

“I know,” Rachel said. “MCs are against your rules. But if Davis isn't ready for a full Covenant Marriage, you might want to consider one.”

“Why are we talking about Davis and me?” Celinda rezzed up a bright smile. “This is your day. We're supposed to be getting you changed into your traveling clothes. Got a feeling Josh has had enough of the formalities. He's ready to start the honeymoon.”

She put her hands on Rachel's shoulders and turned her firmly around to face the mirror. Then she reached up and carefully unpinned the wedding veil.

“You love him, don't you?” Rachel said, watching her in the mirror.

Rachel had inherited their mother's keen intuition. Everyone in the family knew it.

Celinda went still, the pearl-studded veil in her hands. She met her sister's eyes. “I've only known him for a couple of days.”

Rachel smiled. “I knew I wanted Josh the moment I met him. He says he felt the same way about me.”

“Wanting and loving are not always connected.”

Rachel wrinkled her nose. “You're quoting your own rules again. Know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you should burn your little book. It's one thing to exercise common sense and discretion. It's another thing to have so many rules that you end up missing out on life altogether.”

Celinda said nothing. Just looked at her in the mirror.

Rachel's eyes widened, first in comprehension and then with delight.

She started to grin. “You've already thrown out a few of those stupid rules, haven't you? Which ones?”

Celinda sighed. “I started with the No One-Night Stands rule.”

“Hmm. Has there been a second night?”

“No,” Celinda said. “There hasn't. Not yet.”

Rachel chuckled. “Something tells me there will be.”

 

HALF AN HOUR LATER CELINDA STOOD WITH DAVIS, HER
family, and the rest of the wedding guests at the front entrance of the hotel. They all watched Josh sweep Rachel through a hail of pink rose petals and tuck her into the front seat of a gleaming gray Coaster. He got behind the wheel, put the car in gear, and drove away.

There was a great deal of waving and cheering. Celinda realized that her eyes were damp with tears again. She was not alone. Both mothers, Great-Aunt Octavia, and most of the other women were dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs.

“I can't believe my little sister is actually married,” Celinda whispered to Davis. “It feels almost unreal.”

He smiled. “You're the one who matched them.”

“I know. But this is my sister we're talking about. I mean, I remember when she went out on her first date, for heaven's sake. I knew he was all wrong for her and told her she was wasting her time.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she knew he wasn't the guy she was going to marry, but she wanted to get in some practice so she'd be ready when the right man came along.” Celinda smiled fondly, thinking about the past. “Rachel was always the more adventurous of the two of us.”

“Could have fooled me.” Davis took her arm and drew her back into the lobby. “Plotting the cold-blooded execution of the next boss of the Frequency Guild strikes me as fairly adventurous.”

She looked around swiftly. “Good grief, Davis, keep your voice down.”

“It's okay,” he said, mouth curving faintly. “I like that in a woman.”

She felt as if he'd picked her up and dropped her into a pool of glacier-melt water. Reality returned with an unpleasant jolt. Rachel's fairy-tale wedding was over. Now they had to go back to Cadence to face the problems of the missing relic and a sociopath Guild man.

“I didn't think of it as adventurous, you know,” she said.

“Yeah? How did you think of it?”

She considered the question closely. “More like a necessity. Just something that had to be done in order to keep my family safe.”

“Point taken,” Davis said quietly. There was a world of understanding and approval in his eyes.

In the lobby, the wedding guests mingled, exchanging good-byes and offering more congratulations to the parents of the bride and groom. Those who were not spending the night at the hotel prepared to collect their cars and drive home.

Davis checked his watch. “Eight o'clock. Time for us to hit the road. If we leave now, we'll be back in Cadence before midnight.”

Celinda saw her mother coming toward them. She had obviously overheard Davis's comment.

“Are you sure you want to make that long drive tonight?” she asked. “You're welcome to come back to the house with us. Or you can stay here at the hotel and go home tomorrow.”

“I have to go in to work tomorrow morning, Mom,” Celinda said quickly. “I'm still the new person at the agency, you know. I don't want my boss to think I'm unreliable.”

“I understand, dear. Well, at least take some of the leftover hors d'oeuvres with you to eat on the road.”

“Good idea,” Newell said, coming up to join them. “I think I saw a lot of those little cheese and cucumber sandwiches left on the buffet table. Plenty of cookies, too. Hate to think of them being thrown away, given what I paid for 'em.”

Walker sauntered over. “There are some crackers and chips left, too.” He surveyed Celinda's pink gown and grinned. “I'll bet you never wear that dress again. You look like a big slice of the wedding cake.”

Celinda raised her brows. “That might be amusing if it wasn't coming from a guy in a pink cummerbund.”

“Shows how much you know,” Walker said. “Pink is the new black for men this year.”

Davis smiled and tightened his grip on Celinda's arm. “Let's go see what's left on the buffet table.”

“I'll come with you,” Walker said. “I want some more of those little cheese twist thingys.”

“Help yourself to as much as you want,” Newell said. “It's all nonrefundable.”

They walked back through the lobby and along a wide, paneled hallway. The glittering ballroom was nearly empty. The only people inside were two uniformed members of the hotel staff, a man and a woman, who were starting to pick up the silver serving trays. The cleanup process had begun.

“We'd better hurry,” Walker said. “They're starting to take the food away.”

A scream rang out, so high and shrill, Celinda was amazed it didn't shatter the glass in the chandeliers. It emanated from the female member of the hotel staff.

“What are those
things
?” the woman shrieked. She dropped her tray and leaped back from the table. “There's one in the cake.
Oh my God
, there's another one in the champagne fountain.”

The other staff member stared first at the cake and then at the fountain. “What the hell? They look like dust bunnies.”

“I'll go get the manager,” the woman yelped. “I don't get paid enough to deal with stuff like this.”

She set out at a dead run, heading toward a set of swinging doors at the far end of the room.

Celinda got a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She looked at the buffet table. “Uh-oh.”

“Hang on,” Walker said, pulling out a small flash-rez camera. “I want to get a picture of this. Too bad Rachel and Josh missed it.”

On the buffet table Araminta was deep into what remained of the four-tiered pink and white wedding cake. She was nibbling on a pink icing rose. There was more pink and white icing matted on her fur.

Max was perched on the edge of the multilevel glass fountain that had been used to display and serve the pink champagne. He seemed to be wobbling a little. As Celinda watched in horror, he swayed back and forth and then went headfirst into the fountain bowl, splashing champagne everywhere. He started swimming.

“Little guy can't hold his liquor,” Davis explained.

“I GUESS ARAMINTA RAN OUT OF ROOM SERVICE FOOD,”
Celinda said. “I should have checked on her a couple of hours ago to see if she needed more.”

“Look on the bright side,” Davis said. He kept his eyes on the night-shrouded highway. “They didn't stage their surgical strike on the buffet table until after the bride and groom had left. No harm was done to the Great Pink Wedding. After a while you'll laugh about it.”

“Araminta ruined that beautiful cake.”

“It had already served its purpose.”

“But Rachel wanted to keep the top tier as a souvenir. The hotel staff was supposed to box it up and freeze it. That's the tier Araminta went after first.”

“Look, if you're that worried about it, we can pay to have another cake made,” he said soothingly. “Just that one tier. The baker can box it up and freeze it, and it will be waiting for your sister when she and Josh get back from their honeymoon.”

Celinda looked dubious. “It would be expensive.”

“So what? We'll put it on the Guild's tab.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her mouth twitch a little.

“The bill you plan to send to Mercer Wyatt when this is over is going to be very interesting,” she said. “I assume you itemize?”

“Sure.”

“I can see it now. One single-tier wedding cake decorated with pink roses and, oh, by the way, there's a para-sociopath member of the Frequency Guild Council after your relic.”

“Wyatt's been around awhile. He takes these things in stride.”

“You know him well enough to be sure of that?”

“I've worked for him before. He won't complain as long as I hand over the relic along with the bill.”

Her wry little smile faded. She leaned her head against the back of the seat and appeared to sink into a state of deeper gloom. “I wonder what the odds of that happening are?”

“We'll get it back.”

She turned her head to look at him, her face lit a pale gold by the amber lights of the dashboard. “You really think Wyatt will take care of Benson Landry?”

“Landry is ghost bait. He just doesn't know it yet.”

She seemed to brighten a little at that.

Night lay heavily on the vast swath of lonely desert between Frequency and Cadence. Silver moonlight gave the landscape an eerie luminescence that was as mysterious and exotic as the glow of alien quartz. He could see one other vehicle in the rearview mirror. Occasionally they passed cars coming from the opposite direction. But mostly they had the road to themselves.

He liked being out here in the desert at night, he thought; he liked being alone with Celinda. And the dust bunnies, of course.

The departure from the hotel had been somewhat delayed due to Celinda's insistence on taking both dust bunnies upstairs to rinse them off in the bathroom sink. By the time Araminta and Max were clean and fluff-dried and the overnight bags, together with the infamous pink bridesmaid's dress, had been packed into the trunk of the Phantom, it was close to nine o'clock. But he figured that if he pushed things a little, they would still be back in Cadence by midnight.

The two miscreants were napping. Araminta, stuffed with wedding cake, was stretched out on Celinda's lap, four eyes closed. Max was on his back on the narrow deck beneath the rear windshield. He was sound asleep, all six legs projecting straight up out of his fur. Whenever Davis checked the rearview mirror he could just make out the shapes of six small paws silhouetted against the headlights of the vehicle behind the Phantom.

Celinda looked back at Max, worried. “Do you think he'll suffer any ill effects from the champagne?”

“No. This isn't the first time he's gotten rezzed up on booze. He'll be fine. Dust bunny metabolism seems to be fairly efficient.”

Celinda made a face. “I guess it was sort of funny when you think about it.”

He laughed. “Glad your brother got the pictures. Twenty years from now, those are going to be everyone's favorite shots of the wedding.”

The headlights of the Phantom picked up a faded billboard advertising one of the old roadside attractions they had passed on the trip to Frequency: Only Ten Miles to the Haunted Alien Ruins.

“Dad used to stop there sometimes when we were kids,” Celinda said. “It broke up the long drive. Ever seen it?”

“No. I've explored some outpost ruins near Crystal City, though.”

“This one doesn't even qualify as an outpost. It was probably more like a restroom stop for the aliens. Whatever artifacts were there originally were carted off years ago by ruin rats. But it was fun to visit.”

She fell silent. Davis checked the rearview mirror again. The lights of the following car were closer now. He could make out the distinctive grill of a powerful Oscillator 600.

The more traditional Guild men favored Oscillators.

As he watched, another big vehicle appeared behind the Oscillator.

An icy tingle of awareness disturbed the intimacy that he had been savoring for the past hundred and forty miles. Experimentally, he rezzed the accelerator.

The two vehicles behind the Phantom fell back for a few seconds. But a moment later they regained the lost ground and then some.

He fed a little more power to the Phantom's finely tuned engine. The car picked up more speed. The two sets of lights in the rearview mirror kept pace.

“Looks like we may have a problem,” he said quietly.

“What's wrong?” Celinda said. She saw that he was watching the rearview mirror and turned in her seat to look back. “You're worried about that car behind us?”

“It's been following us since we left Frequency. Now there's a second car.”

“What's so strange about that? This is the main highway to Cadence.”

“I noticed the Oscillator a few miles outside of Frequency when the traffic thinned out. But it didn't close the distance between us until a few minutes ago. Now the second vehicle has and is moving in fast.”

She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You think it might be Landry, don't you?”

“More likely some of his men. I doubt that he'd want to risk being directly involved.”

“In what?”

“Getting rid of me and grabbing you.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.” She turned back around in her seat and watched the highway very steadily through the windshield. “But this snazzy car of yours can outrun them, right?”

“Sure. Problem is, I think this is probably going to be a pincer move. That's the way I'd set it up if I were Landry.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“See the two vehicles coming toward us?”

“Yes.”

“They just appeared a few minutes ago. Got a hunch they've been sitting out here in the desert, waiting for us.”

She looked at the advancing headlights. “You mean they're trying to ambush us right here on a public highway?”

“I think that's the plan. It's not a bad one, either. Got to give Landry credit for strategy.”

“I hate to ask this, but have we got one?”

“A plan?” He watched another faded billboard come up in the headlights: Last Chance to See the Haunted Alien Ruins. “We do now.”

“What are we going to do?”

“What everyone does on a long road trip. We're going to visit a roadside attraction. Hang on.”

He rezzed the brakes, cranked the wheel, and sent the Phantom into a screaming, smoking turn. They shot down a pitted and pocked dirt road toward the ruin site. The Phantom bounced and jolted violently. Celinda clutched Araminta with one hand and used her other hand to brace herself against the dash.

Max awoke with a start when he was jolted down off the rear deck. He disappeared from view for a few seconds. The next thing Davis knew, he had scrambled up onto the back of the driver's seat to take in the action.

Araminta wriggled free of Celinda's restraining hand and fluttered up behind her. Both dust bunnies suddenly looked very excited. Born hunters, he thought.

“We've got a couple of little adrenaline junkies with us,” Celinda said, glancing at the bunnies.

“When you get right down to it, they're predators.” Davis maneuvered to avoid a particularly deep crack in the pavement. “Goes with the territory.”

The road was bad. The Phantom was catching a little air at the top of some of the higher ruts. He had no choice but to decrease his speed somewhat.

Up ahead, maybe a couple of miles or more, he could just make out a faint green glow in the night.

“Looks like someone left the lights on for us,” he said.

Celinda twisted around in her seat to look through the back window again. “Those four cars are all stopped on the highway. Maybe they won't try to follow us. No, wait, one of them is making the turn. Damn, they're all coming after us.”

“Those vehicles are a lot heavier than the Phantom. With luck they'll have to slow down more than we will in order to deal with this road.”

“We're headed for the old ruins?”

“Yes. Got a feeling the folks behind us are going to be armed with those illegal mag-rezes that evidently anyone with enough cash can buy on the streets these days. We've only got one between us. Bad odds.”

“I should have brought mine.”

“In hindsight that would have been a good idea, yes. Next time we go to a wedding, we'll have to remember to pack it.”

She ignored that. “We're headed for the ruins so that we can use the quartz wall as a barricade, right?”

“No.” Forced to slow down a little more, he reluctantly put the Phantom into a lower gear. “We're heading for the ruins because we need to get underground before the shooting starts.”

“What good will that do?”

“Mag-rezes, like most high-tech gadgets that use magnetic resonating technology don't work very well underground. The heavy psi down below screws up their mechanisms. It makes the guns just as dangerous to whoever is rezzing the trigger as they are to the target. That's why ghost hunters don't carry them.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “Come to think of it, I believe the little guy who sold me my gun did say something about not trying to use it underground. He told me it might explode in my hand.”

“Any chance that once we get inside the wall at the site you'll remember where the entrance to the catacombs is?”

“Yes.” She kept her attention on the lethal parade of headlights behind the Phantom. “It's inside the tower. There's a staircase that seems to go down forever, and there are a lot of twists and turns in it. When you stand at the top, you can't see the bottom. Really spooky. I think that's why the attraction never made a lot of money for the two men who ran it.”

“Too spooky?”

“No. Too many steps. Customers realized that once you got down to the bottom, you had to climb all the way back up in order to get out. It was a very long climb. I remember a lot of people taking one look at that staircase and then demanding their money back.”

“Maybe we'll get lucky, and that's just what those guys back there will do,” he said, going for a little positive thinking.

“We probably shouldn't count on that.”

“No,” he agreed, “probably shouldn't. I'm assuming that because it was once a tourist attraction, the stairwell and the adjacent tunnels are clear of illusion traps?”

“They certainly were when it was operating as an attraction,” she said. “I can't see any reason why anyone would have reset a trap.”

He thought about that. Only someone who possessed a special kind of psi talent—an ephemeral-energy para-resonator, otherwise known as a tangler—could de-rez or reset a trap. Neither he nor Celinda could deal with one.

“We'll have to take our chances,” he said. “Not like we have a lot of choice here.”

“I couldn't de-rez a trap,” she said. “But I can detect them, which means we should be able to avoid any that we come across.”

He thought about the night he had taken Mary Beth from the kidnappers. “I've got some ability to sense them, too. Between the two of us, we can do this.”