Running Hot

THIRTY-TWO

Crazy Ray seemed a little more agitated than usual. Luther sent a soothing pulse of energy his way before he urged him out the door along with the handful of remaining customers.

Ray went outside, trailing the others, but he stopped just beyond the entrance and looked back at Luther.

“You be careful tonight,” he said.

Ray rarely emerged from his paranoid world long enough to produce a coherent sentence. Luther nodded, letting him know that he had gotten the message and would take it seriously.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be careful.”

Ray vanished into the shadows.

Wayne appeared behind Luther’s shoulder. “What was that about?”

“Just Ray being Ray. He warned me to be careful.”

“Probably picked up on the vibes the rest of us are giving off. We’re all a little jacked tonight because we’re watching over Grace.”

Luther thought about the occasional icy tingles he’d been experiencing all evening.

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go get some of Milly’s soup. It’s been a long night.”

“Damn tourists.”

“This is Waikiki, Wayne. You’ve got to expect that occasionally a few tourists will find us.”

“Maybe we should put up a sign.”

“ ‘No Tourists Allowed’? Somehow I don’t think the Visitors and Convention Bureau would approve.”

By the time they had finished the bowls of udon, Grace was yawning.

“When this is over, I’m going to write a self-help book titled

How to Build Stamina and Lose Weight Washing Dishes and Frying Stuff Eight Hours a Day,” she announced.

“You’ve been living the soft life in the Bureau of Genealogy for a year,” Petra said. “You’re out of shape.”

“I know.” Grace stretched. “But it’s like riding a bicycle. It’s all coming back to me.” She sniffed the sleeve of her shirt and wrinkled her nose. “Including the smell. Funny how the scent of fried fish permeates your clothes.”

“You get used to it,” Wayne said.

“Time to go home,” Luther said. “I’ll get the Jeep and meet you out front.”

The routine had been established after consultation with Wayne and Petra. Under the circumstances, no one thought it was a good idea for Grace to be walking back to the Sunset Surf Apartments late at night even if she was accompanied by a bodyguard. The plan was simple. Luther parked the Jeep in a nearby garage. After the Rainbow closed for the evening, Wayne and Petra stayed with Grace at Milly’s place while he went to get the vehicle.

He walked toward the garage, cane tapping on the sidewalk, and thought about the rest of the new nightly routine. Within twenty minutes he would be back at the condo with Grace and they would both tumble into bed together. Maybe they would make love if she wasn’t too exhausted. Afterward she would press close to him and fall asleep in his arms. In the morning they would sleep late. When they woke up, they would make coffee and slice some fresh papaya.

He could definitely get used to this routine. Hell, he was already so deeply into it that he did not want it to end.

There were still a fair number of people on Kuhio. At the end of the block he turned up his senses, rounded the corner and went down the narrow street toward the old hotel garage. The hotel had been closed for a couple of years. It’s upper windows were boarded up and the pool was covered. A nightclub had recently opened on what had been the first floor. It was operating at full volume tonight. The hard rock pounded into the night, accompanied by the roar of a crowd fueled by alcohol and a day at the beach.

The garage was full, thanks to the club patrons. He walked toward the far end where he had parked the Jeep, automatically watching for the flash of an aura in the dark canyons between vehicles. The deep thunder of the music spilled through every opening in the concrete walls and cascaded down the stairwell.

His leg was aching again tonight. He would have to take some more anti-inflammatory tablets when he got back to the condo. The thought made him want to snap the cane in half and hurl the pieces into the nearest trash bin. The memory of the shooter coming out of the bedroom, surprising him, flashed in his head.

Get over it. Could have been a hell of a lot worse.

He went toward the Jeep, keys out, still on alert for movement in the shadows or anything else that didn’t seem right. The garage was empty, except for the hulking shapes of the vehicles. There was nothing out of the ordinary to disturb his cop intuition or his psychic senses. So why the whisper of unease?

Thanks for giving me the willies, Ray. After all I’ve done for you.

When he got close to the SUV he used the remote to unlock it. Automatically, he gave the garage another quick survey. The concrete stairwell that led upstairs to the old hotel lobby and the entrance to the nightclub was to his right. The light was off inside. It had been on earlier when he parked.

Adrenaline scalded his veins.

The narrow beam of a penlight appeared first, prowling around the stairwell landing, illuminating the concrete steps.

The person gripping the small light rounded the corner a second later and started down the steps. In the darkened stairwell he was only a tall, lean silhouette but his aura pulsed hot with the colors of violence and raw power.

Luther concentrated, getting the pattern in focus, just in case. The man halted at the foot of the stairs. Although his aura was running red-hot, he made no move that could be interpreted as violent. There was no gun or knife in his free hand. He just stood there, aiming the flashlight at Luther’s chest.

Rogue waves spiked across the stranger’s aura. Luther sent a crushing tide of energy at him.

Nothing happened.

In the next instant he realized that his parasenses were fading fast, going blind. It was suddenly hard to make out the stranger’s pattern. That wasn’t right. He should have been able to see it clearly.

“I’m afraid you have become a problem, Mr. Malone,” the man said. “But I’m an old hand at fixing problems like you.”

The words sounded as if they came from the bottom of an abyss. They were laced with the promise of death. Luther could barely hear them. The garage was filling with a rising tide of shadows. The gathering darkness rapidly blotted up what little light came from the overhead fixtures. Now his vision was fading. A great weakness settled on him, saturating his bones.

He knew with absolute certainty that he was dying. There was pain where the pencil-slim flashlight beam struck his chest. He realized that it had to be the light that was swiftly neutralizing his aura. When your energy field went out, you went out with it.

He tried to summon the strength to move but his muscles would not obey. His will to live was a weak and flimsy weapon against the numbing power of the penlight.

“Who are you?” he croaked.

“William Craigmore. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

“Council.” He could barely get the word out. Fallon and Zack Jones were right. They had a spy in the highest of high places within the Society. “Nightshade.”

“Very good,” Craigmore said approvingly. “I am most certainly Nightshade, and I’ve been a member of the Governing Council for fifteen years. Sadly, I’ll be disappearing soon. I’d have preferred to stay on for a couple more years but that’s not possible now that Zack Jones is in charge. He’s simply too good, much better than his predecessor. It’s a damn shame, you know. I was almost able to prevent him from taking over the Master’s Chair but, unfortunately, things went wrong.”

Luther said nothing. He could no longer speak. He started to shake uncontrollably. His breathing was getting tight. The pain grew worse, searing his senses.

“You’re stronger than I expected,” Craigmore said. “Most men would be unconscious by now. Fallon Jones did a good job of covering up your true talent level in the files. But after all these years on the Council, I know most of the Society’s secrets, including how to bypass the J&J encryption codes. I am aware that Miss Renquist is something more than what she appears, as well. When I’ve finished with you, I will remove her. That should take care of all the dangling threads.”

Grace. He had to survive to protect her.

Grace. Somehow just thinking her name clarified his fevered mind for a few seconds.

It occurred to him that the only thing keeping him on his feet was willpower and the cane. He had a death grip on the handle, knowing that if he went down, he would not get up.

If he went down.

He allowed himself to stop fighting the effects of the beam. The last of the strength went out of his fingers. The cane clattered on the concrete. Predictably, he, too, fell hard and fast onto the unforgiving floor. Pain jolted through his bad leg but for a precious few seconds, the penlight lost its focus on his chest.

His senses slammed back with jolting force. The lights came up in the garage. The thunder of the rock music and the noise of the crowd grew loud. He could

breathe again.

He rolled under the Jeep, instinctively seeking the darkness like some night creature scurrying from the sun. Craigmore swung the penlight back and forth in an arc, trying to track and pin him again with the beam.

He sensed the slender ray slicing like a surgeon’s scalpel, striking his legs and, briefly, his shoulders and back as he scrambled under the Jeep. When the killing light hit his lower body, it did not have nearly as much impact as when it glanced across his core. It hurt like hell but he could keep moving.

In the two seconds it took to get under the Jeep, all his senses sparked on and off like faulty electrical wiring, a dizzying, nerve-rattling whirl of sound and silence, sight and blindness.

Once in the narrow space under the vehicle, he kept going, wriggling beneath the undercarriage and out on the far side.

“Give it up,” Craigmore ordered.

There was a new note in his voice now. Anger, maybe. Or maybe sheer outraged amazement. That was the thing about being an aura talent. No one took you seriously.

Craigmore walked closer to the Jeep but paused several feet away, keeping a wary distance. Maybe it had occurred to him that an ex-cop might carry a hold-out gun.

If only, Luther thought.

“I watched you come down the street a short while ago,” Craigmore said. “We both know you can’t run. Not with that bad leg. Even if you were in good shape, you’re not fast enough to evade my little flashlight. You might as well come on out from behind the Jeep. It will all be over very quickly, I promise.”

Adrenaline was an excellent temporary painkiller. Ignoring the stabbing pain in his thigh, Luther yanked open the passenger-side door and hauled himself up into the front seat. He made it into the driver’s side and hit the button to lock all four doors, sealing himself inside.

He was about to put the laws of paraphysics to a severe test. If he was wrong, he was a dead man.

He was banking on the fact that the beam of the penlight had to be paranormal in nature. There was no other explanation for its effect on his aura. Most solid materials such as steel or concrete effectively stopped paranormal energy waves. Liquids, on the other hand, did not. Crystals and certain reflective surfaces, although solid, fell into a third category. They could be used to focus energy if you knew what you were doing.

Glass, however, was a fourth category of matter as far as paraphysics was concerned. It was neither a crystalline substance nor a liquid but it had properties of both states of matter. As a rule, a barrier made of glass dramatically slowed or even distorted waves of energy passing through it.

Unfortunately, when it came to glass, there were a lot of exceptions to the rules. The substance was still little understood by the Arcane Society researchers. The bottom line was that the material was damned unpredictable.

He cranked the engine. Craigmore aimed the flashlight at him through the driver’s-side window. He started to shiver. The laser was having some effect, even through the glass, but he wasn’t completely frozen. He ducked low to evade the ray, snapped the gearshift into reverse and hit the accelerator, driving blind.

The Jeep lurched backward, tires screeching. The rear seat windows exploded. Shit. The bastard had a real gun, too. What’s more, the bullets seemed to be obeying the laws of regular physics. No sound, though. Silencer.

He whipped the wheel hard left and shot forward, heading straight toward Craigmore.

Evidently having concluded that the beam was no longer effective, Craigmore took aim with his pistol again. Luther ducked as the front windshield disintegrated. Glass shards littered the front seat. His shield against the light beam was gone.

But the Jeep was still in motion and Craigmore was too busy leaping out of the way to aim the flashlight.

Luther hit the brake and got a fix on Craigmore’s aura. He sent a squelching current of energy at it even as Craigmore tried to line up twin shots using both the beam and the silenced gun.

Head shots were notoriously difficult. They were made even harder when you suddenly wanted nothing more than to go to sleep.

Craigmore sagged, stumbled and went down. The laser device fell from his hand and rolled away across the concrete. It winked out instantly.

Luther threw the Jeep into park, got the front door open and stumbled out. He limped toward Craigmore, using the fender of a nearby car for support.

Craigmore was on his belly on the oil-stained concrete, facing Luther. Amazingly, he still gripped the gun and was using both hands to try to aim it. His lips were pulled back in a savage grin. He managed to get off another shot. The bullet went wide but Luther jerked aside reflexively. The sudden movement caused his leg to collapse again.

He landed hard on one knee and his elbow. His concentration wavered for a few seconds. Freed, Craigmore tried to line up another shot, but the sudden relief of the compelling pressure on his aura left him disoriented.

Luther heightened his aura to full power, lurched partway to his feet and fell on top of Craigmore. He caught hold of one arm and twisted hard. At the same time he threw everything he had at Craigmore’s wildly pulsing energy field.

There was a stunning flash of energy on the paranormal plane. Luther felt his parasenses go blind for an instant.

He saw Craigmore’s mouth open on what was probably intended to be a shout. But what emerged was an eerie groan, the kind you expected to hear in graveyards at midnight. His eyes widened in shock. He jerked, flopped around and then went unnaturally still. His aura winked out just as the psychic laser had a few minutes earlier. The gun thunked on the garage floor.

An eternity passed.

Luther’s senses came crashing back. It occurred to him that he was still gripping the dead man’s arm. He released it and rolled clear of the body. For a moment he lay on the cold concrete, trying to catch his breath and steady his senses.

He heard only the merest whisper of sound on the concrete steps before he saw the flash of an aura. He did not move.

“Wayne, it’s me,” he said urgently.

Wayne emerged from the stairwell. He had his gun in his hand. Everything about him was preternaturally focused. He was in the kill zone.

“You okay?” he asked in a very flat voice.

“Yeah.” Luther relaxed a little. “He was waiting for me. An ambush. What are you doing here? Wait, don’t tell me. Petra had a feeling, right?”

Wayne came out of the zone. He shrugged and tucked the gun into the holster beneath his trouser leg.

“Both of ’em had a feeling,” he said.

“Both?”

“Grace and Petra. They both got a bad vibe. Grace wanted to come with me. Petra had to damn near tie her down.”

“Guess I should have paid more attention to Ray’s warning tonight.”

“Now, why in hell would you want to do that? Ray’s crazy.”