Sizzle and Burn (16 page)

What had she done with the card? It was imperative that she find it. She tried to think. It wasn’t easy because the adrenaline was pounding through her now, filling her with a sense of frantic urgency.

Batman meowed loudly at her feet. Robin wrapped himself around her legs. The cats were channeling her anxiety.

This is crazy. Oops, wrong word. Not crazy. Just weird. Really, really weird. For Pete’s sake, slow down and focus.

She had dropped Zack’s card into her purse before getting behind the wheel. Her purse. Where else would one put a card with a phone number?

Okay, that made the next step simple.

She hurried into the foyer and opened the closet door. Her purse was right where it was supposed to be, on the shelf next to her keys, a pair of gloves and a stack of neatly folded scarves.

When she reached for the purse, the back of her hand brushed the side of her black raincoat hanging nearby. Dark psychic energy splashed through her, acid hot.

…
Let the witch know she’s being hunted. Make her afraid
…

“No.”

Instinctively she jerked back, promptly tripping over Batman, who had come up behind her. She staggered and fell against the wall. She grabbed for the door handle to keep her balance, missed and landed on the floor in a distinctly undignified position.

For a moment she just sat there, trying to get her nerves and her senses under control. Batman and Robin prowled around her, restless and agitated.

“Don’t look at me,” she whispered. “I don’t know what’s going on, either.”

Maybe the incident in Shelbyville followed by the revelations about the mystery of Vella’s death had been too much for her psychic nerves.

Don’t think that way. Zack told you you weren’t going to go crazy because of your psychic side. Pull yourself together. Find out what the hell just happened to you. You had that raincoat on earlier this evening and there were no psychic zingers from the freak.

“Some kind of fluky psychic echo effect,” she told the cats. “Maybe Zack can explain it. He has all the answers.”

Zack. She had to call him immediately. That was what had started this whole thing.

She gave Batman a pat and scrambled to her feet.

Gingerly she reached back into the closet and touched the raincoat.

…Punish her like the others. Burn, witch…

She snatched her hand away again. It
was
the freak. But what she was hearing in her head was not an echo of what she had heard earlier. This was something else, something new.

Clenching her teeth against the invasion of the voice, she took the coat out of the closet and examined it closely. There was something in the pocket that was giving off the bad vibes.

She opened the pocket cautiously and looked inside, afraid of what she might find.

A piece of broken china gleamed. She recognized the dainty green-and-yellow floral pattern. She was looking at a broken cup from the Shelbyville B and B.

Twenty-three

T
here was something wrong with the little old lady. She was blurry. And then, in mid-stride, she morphed into a man clad entirely in black. A black ski mask covered his face. Instead of an umbrella, he gripped a military-issue knife.

Zack’s eyes were confused by the abrupt transformation but his psychic senses were fully jacked and had no difficulty whatsoever interpreting the situation. Intuitively, as he always did when the chips were down, he went with his parasensitive instincts. His mirror-talent abilities recognized a would-be killer regardless and telegraphed the assailant’s next move in a nanosecond.

He slid to the right,
knowing
that the attacker expected him to shift to the left. The ski-masked man blurred again. In the next instant the elderly woman reappeared. She adjusted with dazzling speed, whipping around to run down her prey.

The old lady was a para-hunter.

That was not good news. He had spent a lot of time in the gym and the dojo, sparring with his hunter relatives. He was good but he lacked the preternatural speed and lightning-fast reflexes of a level-ten hunter. Ski Mask was definitely level ten.

He yanked the gun out of his holster. The elderly woman lashed out with a slashing kick. He managed, just barely, to evade the killing force of the blow but the toe of the woman’s shoe caught him in the ribs and sent him reeling back. A second strike numbed his shoulder. The gun flew out of his fingers. He heard it clatter on the concrete. There was no time to search for it. He could not take his eyes off the old woman.

In the next instant she morphed back into Ski Mask. This time Zack’s mirror talent caught the cues just before the transition and telegraphed the information to his brain in a neuro-chemical way that was literally faster than the speed of thought. He suddenly understood something very important. The constant morphing came with a price. Switching from ski-masked killer to little old lady and back again slowed the guy down a little. So why was he wasting the psychic juice it obviously required to shift back and forth?

Even with the faint hesitations that occurred when he jumped from one identity to the other, the attacker was still hunter-fast. It was all Zack could do to avoid the slashing knife. There was no way to escape the assault. The wrought-iron gate was at his back. The assailant blocked the only exit out of the breezeway.

The old woman came at him again in another lethal charge. His mirror talent noted the way she was balanced and he knew without being able to explain how he knew that she expected him to dodge right. He waited until the last possible second and went left.

The old woman slammed into the iron bars. For a fraction of a second or so she seemed disoriented.

Zack seized the opening and ran toward the far end of the breezeway. If he could reach the parking lot, he could use the parked cars as shields.

Ski Mask was suddenly behind him, running him down the way a predator runs down prey.

Zack whipped around in a small, tight circle. When he came out of it, he had one foot extended.

Caught in mid-morph, Ski Mask stumbled over the foot and went down. But he rolled to his feet as the old lady with paranormal speed.

Zack grabbed the purple blanket that was lying on the concrete. He flung it at the woman’s face.

The blanket found its target, wrapping around the attacker’s eyes for a few critical seconds. The old woman leaped back, swiping wildly at the fabric with her free hand.

Lesson Number One from the gym and the dojo: luck and surprise beat even the best reflexes every time.

The woman switched back to the ski mask persona.

Zack made no attempt to close with him. There was no way he could win in hand-to-hand combat with a hunter. He had to stay out of reach. The gun was his only hope. He could see it out of the corner of his eye. It lay on the concrete about ten feet away.

He was edging toward it when headlights suddenly flared, illuminating Ski Mask and himself in a blinding glare. A car was pulling into a nearby parking slot.

The black-clad figure hesitated again. Then he whirled and raced out of the breezeway into the shadows of the parking lot. Zack scooped up the gun and went after him, but he knew that the fleeing man’s superior reflexes and speed were going to trump his mirror talent.

Ski Mask arrived at a dark SUV that had been sitting at the far side of the lot. The passenger door was already open and the vehicle was in motion when he leaped up into the passenger seat. The big engine roared as the driver stomped down on the accelerator.

The vehicle, running with the lights off, slammed forward, aiming straight at Zack. It didn’t take any high-grade mirror talent to figure out that if he stayed where he was he was going to get flattened.

He leaped into the safety of the narrow valley between two parked vehicles.

The SUV sped past him out of the lot and onto the street. It vanished around the next corner. He was not greatly surprised to note that there was no license plate.

He heard a familiar ring tone. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the phone and flipped it open.

“Jones,” he said automatically, his attention on the streetlights at the intersection where the SUV had disappeared.

“Zack?” Raine’s voice was tight and urgent. “Are you all right?”

The anxious edge in her voice distracted him immediately.

“What’s wrong?” he asked sharply.

“I’m not sure. I got a little panicky a few minutes ago. For some reason I thought you were in trouble.”

“Huh.”

“You’re breathing hard. Oh, good grief.” She sounded utterly chagrined. She cleared her throat. “Am I, uh, interrupting something?”

It took him a second to figure out what she meant. “No. What’s going on, Raine?”

“Don’t snap at me like that. Pisses me off.”

“Damn it, what the hell is wrong?”

“I went to the closet to get your number out of my purse and I found something weird. If I’m not hallucinating, then I may have a serious problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

She drew a deep, shaky-sounding breath.

“I think the Bonfire Killer may have followed me home,” she said quietly. “He was in my condo tonight. Left a little souvenir.”

Twenty-four

H
e was at her door in less than ten minutes, which meant he’d broken every speed limit in Oriana.

When Raine let him into the condo her eyes went straight to the duffel bag in his hand. It was a straightforward clue that he intended to spend the night. She did not raise any objections. That spoke volumes about her common sense, he thought.

The two cats circled him a few times with interest and then allowed him to rub their ears. Satisfied, they trotted off into the living room.

That was when he realized that Raine was staring at him, her mouth open in shock.

“What happened to you?” she whispered, eyes widening.

He looked down and saw that his shirt was hanging loose beneath his jacket. His hair was probably mussed but, all in all, not too bad. He wondered why she looked so stricken. Then it dawned on him that she was picking up the energy created by adrenaline and violence.

“There was a fight,” he said. “The other guy got away.”

“You got into a
fight
?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll explain later.”

She glowered. “You told me you tried to avoid bar fights.”

“This fight wasn’t in a bar. Tell me about the cup fragment you found in your coat. Are you sure it’s a piece of the one you used in Shelbyville?”

For a moment he thought she was going to insist on pursuing the bar fight lecture but she reluctantly focused on the cup instead.

“I can’t be certain it’s the same cup that was on the tea tray,” she admitted. “But there was one just like it in my room. It was still there when I checked out.”

“I remember it.”

“He must have entered the room, found the cup, smashed it and left a piece here tonight.”

He looked at the locks. “How did he get into your condo?”

“I don’t know.” She hugged herself tightly. “There was no sign of forced entry. I didn’t pick up any bad vibes off the doorknob.”

“You wouldn’t,” he said absently, “not unless he was in a killing frenzy when he broke in. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wore gloves when he let himself in here. Psychic energy transmits most readily with direct skin-to-object contact. Gloves are fairly effective barriers.”

She shuddered and looked at the black-lacquered shelf positioned beneath a wall sconce. “He must have been in a rage when he smashed the teacup. That piece of china reeks of panic and fury.”

He followed her gaze and saw a fragment of broken china on the shelf. Steeling himself, he reached out and picked it up.

Dark energy crackled across his senses. A scene appeared and then disappeared in his mind like a film clip from a nightmare. It lasted only a couple of heartbeats. In that brief span of time he felt the cup in his hand, experienced the rush of rage and panic, abandoned himself to the sheer release of hurling the delicate china against a hard surface.

He set the china fragment back down on the shelf, trying to dampen the fresh surge of biochemicals shooting through his bloodstream. He’d already OD’d on that particular drug mix tonight.

“The freak was here, all right,” he said. “Or maybe I should say
a
freak was here. I never went into the basement of your aunt’s house in Shelbyville, so I don’t have a basis for comparison.”

“Trust me, it’s the same person.” She stared unhappily at the broken bit of china. “This is the first time one of them has followed me home.”

“Unnerving,” he agreed.

“Try scared out of my wits.”

He caught her by the shoulders and pulled her gently against him, wrapping her close. “Scared out of your wits is good. Scared people tend to be more careful.”

“No offense,” she said, pressing her face into the front of his shirt, “but that wasn’t quite the positive, upbeat approach to this situation that I was looking for.”

“Sorry. Probably a J&J thing. Fallon Jones holds with the everything-that-can-go-wrong-probably-will-go-wrong theory of psychic detecting. He becomes annoyed whenever his agents get too positive and upbeat.”

“Sounds like a real fun guy.”

“Look up the definition of
fun
in the dictionary and you’ll see Fallon’s picture right next to it.”

She made a strange, half-muffled little sound that could have been a choked laugh. Some of the tension went out of her. She raised her head.

“Tell me what you saw,” she said.

“I got a visual of what you heard. The bastard smashed the cup in a fit of red-hot rage and panic. He’s running scared. Blames you for ruining his plans.”

“He must have been watching me in Shelbyville, waiting for me to leave. But he took a risk going into my room. I wonder if anyone noticed him.”

“Good question. But there’s another possibility.”

“What’s that?”

“Maybe he wasn’t afraid of being seen. Maybe he had a right to be in the B and B.” He thought about it a little more. “Could have been one of the employees or a guest. The inn was crammed with news crews. It wouldn’t have been hard for someone to blend in with a crowd of strangers in town.”