TITLES BY JAYNE ANN KRENTZ
THE FOGG LAKE TRILOGY
All the Colors of Night
The Vanishing
Untouchable
Promise Not to Tell
When All the Girls Have Gone
Secret Sisters
Trust No One
River Road
Dream Eyes
Copper Beach
In Too Deep
Fired Up
Running Hot
Sizzle and Burn
White Lies
All Night Long
Falling Awake
Truth or Dare
Light in Shadow
Summer in Eclipse Bay
Together in Eclipse Bay
Smoke in Mirrors
Lost & Found
Dawn in Eclipse Bay
Soft Focus
Eclipse Bay
Eye of the Beholder
Flash
Sharp Edges
Deep Waters
Absolutely, Positively
Trust Me
Grand Passion
Hidden Talents
Wildest Hearts
Family Man
Perfect Partners
Sweet Fortune
Silver Linings
The Golden Chance
TITLES BY JAYNE ANN KRENTZ WRITING AS AMANDA QUICK
Close Up
Tightrope
The Other Lady Vanishes
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
’Til Death Do Us Part
Garden of Lies
Otherwise Engaged
The Mystery Woman
Crystal Gardens
Quicksilver
Burning Lamp
The Perfect Poison
The Third Circle
The River Knows
Second Sight
Lie by Moonlight
The Paid Companion
Wait Until Midnight
Late for the Wedding
Don’t Look Back
Slightly Shady
Wicked Widow
I Thee Wed
With This Ring
Affair
Mischief
Mystique
Mistress
Deception
Desire
Dangerous
Reckless
Ravished
Rendezvous
Scandal
Surrender
Seduction
TITLES BY JAYNE ANN KRENTZ WRITING AS JAYNE CASTLE
Illusion Town
Siren’s Call
The Hot Zone
Deception Cove
The Lost Night
Canyons of Night
Midnight Crystal
Obsidian Prey
Dark Light
Silver Master
Ghost Hunter
After Glow
Harmony
After Dark
Amaryllis
Zinnia
Orchid
THE GUINEVERE JONES SERIES
Desperate and Deceptive
The Guinevere Jones Collection, Volume 1
The Desperate Game
The Chilling Deception
Sinister and Fatal
The Guinevere Jones Collection, Volume 2
The Sinister Touch
The Fatal Fortune
SPECIALS
The Scargill Cove Case Files
Bridal Jitters
(writing as Jayne Castle)
ANTHOLOGIES
Charmed
(with Julie Beard, Lori Foster, and Eileen Wilks)
TITLES WRITTEN BY JAYNE ANN KRENTZ AND JAYNE CASTLE
No Going Back
BERKLEY
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2021 by Jayne Ann Krentz
“Hope and Love” copyright © 2019 by Jared Curtis
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krentz, Jayne Ann, author.
Title: All the colors of night / Jayne Ann Krentz.
Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley, [2021] | Series: Fogg Lake
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017787 (print) | LCCN 2020017788 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781984806819 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984806833 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Romantic suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3561.R44 A79 2021 (print) |
LCC PS3561.R44 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017787
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017788
Jacket image by Miguel Sobreira / Arcangel Images
Jacket design by Rita Frangie
Interior art: Northern Lights © Debbie Center / Shutterstock.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Cover
Titles by Jayne Ann Krentz
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
“Hope and Love”
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Author’s Note
About the Author
For Frank, as always, with love
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hope and Love
“I don’t know who I am,” you say,
“Or why my hands deal dust,
As though the lot of cards I hold
Have crumbled as I play.”
“As if my sense of self,” you claim,
“Has drifted into air,
And nothing that I try to do
Brings credit to my name.”
Name and Game are not the way
To find the solid ground;
Hope and Love are better paths
For what ahead may lay.
Attend and listen deep within.
Though hard to hear the voice
Calling out to you alone
In such a world of din,
The voice is patient, and will sing
The notes that help you close the ring.
—Jared Curtis
CHAPTER 1
Why kill me?” Sierra Raines said. “I’m just the go-between.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Raines,” Parker Keegan said. He aimed the pistol at her. The weapon shook a little in his hand. Keegan’s eyes were wild with lust—not the sexual kind; a different sort of madness, but just as dangerous. “I’m afraid this is the end of our business association.”
Another crazy, obsessive, paranoid collector, Sierra thought. Should have seen this coming. The problem was that most of her clients qualified as crazy, obsessive, or paranoid—usually some creepy combination of all three. If she avoided all the collectors and dealers in the hot artifacts trade who fit one or more of the three categories, she would be out of business in a day.
Keegan, however, was proving to be more of a problem than the majority of her clients. There was the gun, for one thing. Thankfully, very few of the collectors and dealers she did business with had gone so far as to pull out a pistol, although one or two had produced large knives, and there was the scary dude who had tried to lock her up in the trunk of a car that he intended to push off a pier on Lake Washington. Most collectors were thrilled to conclude a successful transaction and were eager to do more business with her. She was slowly but surely establishing a reputation as reliable and discreet.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that there were a few drawbacks in her new business. There had been glitches and major disasters in all of her previous attempts to discover her calling. She was starting to think of herself as a serial career killer.
They were standing in Keegan’s private gallery. Like the galleries of most collectors who were obsessed with artifacts that had an association with the paranormal, the room was a converted basement. There was no one else in the big house and the nearest neighbors were a mile down the road. If Keegan shot her, no one would hear the crack of the pistol.
“Don’t misunderstand, Ms. Raines,” Keegan said. “I am very grateful to you for locating the artifact and delivering it so promptly and so discreetly. The problem is that you now know far too much about my collection and my business affairs.”
Keegan was not particularly dangerous looking. Thin, short and middle-aged, he had the vibe of a fussy academic. But if there was one thing Sierra had discovered in the past few months, it was that when it came to collectors and dealers, looks were invariably deceiving.
Mirrors, however, never lied, not to someone with her talent. And there happened to be one—a large, elaborately framed nineteenth-century looking glass—hanging on the wall directly behind Keegan. When she jacked up her talent she could see the reflection of his energy field. Unstable was the only way to describe it.
Not that she had needed a mirror to arrive at that diagnosis, she thought.
“I’m a Vault agent, Mr. Keegan,” she said, keeping her tone polite but firm. “You know as well as I do that Mr. Jones is not going to be happy if one of his go-betweens gets murdered on this job.”
“I have considered the problem of Mr. Jones. Don’t worry, Ms. Raines, your body will never be found. I intend to tell Jones you failed to deliver the artifact. He will be convinced you stole it and disappeared with it.”
“No,” Sierra said. “He won’t believe it. You do not want to cross Mr. Jones.”
“I’m not afraid of Jones,” Keegan snapped.
But he sounded as if he were trying to convince himself rather than her.
“There is no reason to kill me,” she said gently. “You’ve got the artifact. Mr. Jones has built a reputation for confidentiality. As long as his clients don’t try to cheat him, he keeps their secrets. So do his agents.”
“Unfortunately, I have trust issues,” Keegan said.
“No kidding. As it happens, I have a few myself.” She gave him her flashiest smile and casually stripped off one of her sleek black leather gloves. “That is, of course, why I take precautions at every stage of the delivery.”
Keegan frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sierra raised her ungloved hand to the small locket she wore. She flipped it open to reveal the mirror inside. It was not a standard mirror, but rather a flat circle of highly reflective crystal.
“I won’t bore you with a lengthy explanation of how this works,” she said. “That would involve some complicated physics. All you really need to know is that you’re about to faint.”
“Faint? You’re crazy. Why would I faint? I’m in excellent health. I’m a vegan.”
She focused quickly and channeled a little heat through the mirror crystal, reflecting the currents of Keegan’s energy field straight back at him. The rebounding waves sent the equivalent of an electrical shock through his aura, effectively short-circuiting it.
Keegan stiffened. His eyes fluttered and closed. The gun fell from his hand and he sank to the floor without so much as a groan.
There was a sharp crack as the handsome nineteenth-century mirror on the wall fractured into a spiderweb of fissures.
Control was everything, Sierra reminded herself. She was pretty good when it came to channeling energy through the crystal, but when she got nervous, stuff sometimes happened. It was a pity in this case because the old mirror had definitely had a paranormal vibe. In good condition it would have been worth a lot of money on the underground market.
She had bigger problems, however. Her fingers burned. She flicked her hand several times in an instinctive but utterly futile attempt to cool the singed sensation. Hastily she pulled on the leather glove.
“Shit,” she muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.”
She took a few deep breaths and gritted her teeth until the burn began to fade. Using her talent at full throttle always gave her an unpleasant psychic jolt, but lately the experience was more painful than usual because she had not yet recovered from the severe burn she had received on the last job. Her senses tended to overreact to anything with a disturbing psychic vibe. She had never been comfortable coming into physical contact with strangers because she never knew what to expect from their energy fields, but these days the simple act of touch had become an extremely fraught experience.
Her mother had suggested the leather gloves. They had been made for her by a family friend who knew a lot about the physics of the paranormal. Leather was a reasonably good insulator. Not as good as steel or glass, of course, but definitely more fashionable. Walking around with chain-mail gloves or a pair made of glass would have drawn a lot of unwanted attention.
Sierra closed the locket and hurried across the gallery. She crouched beside Keegan, unwilling to take off a glove to touch his throat to check for a pulse. Luckily his chest was rising and falling in a normal fashion. He was alive but unconscious. There was no way to know how long he would remain in that state or what he would remem
ber when he woke up.
It didn’t matter. The deal was off as far as she was concerned. She had done her job. The buyer had failed to hold up his end of the bargain. It was bad enough that he had tried to murder her. The bastard hadn’t paid his bill. Jones would not be happy about that. Keegan would not be able to purchase the services of a Vault agent in the future.
In addition, she would make sure the news that Keegan was both dangerous and a deadbeat went out on the rumor network that linked the freelance go-betweens who worked the Pacific Northwest market. Keegan would find it difficult if not impossible to hire another reliable transporter. He would be forced to deal with the raiders, who were far more dangerous than he was.
She moved to the display stand and winced when she picked up the vintage desk calendar she had just delivered. She could feel the vibe even through the leather glove. The thing was really hot. Definitely a lost lab artifact. It had absorbed some serious paranormal radiation from the office in which it had been used decades earlier. She detected a whisper of panic, too. Whoever had left the calendar behind had been terrified. It was not an uncommon kind of heat in the lost lab artifacts she transported. She had come to think of the residual emotions as a psychic signature of relics connected with the government’s secret Bluestone Project.
She inserted the desk calendar back into the leather bag she had used to transport it and headed for the door.
“I’ll see myself out,” she said to the unconscious Keegan. “And just to be clear, you and I will not be doing any more business in the future.”
She went up the basement steps to the ground floor of the big house and hurried along the darkened hall to the back door. When she had arrived she had deliberately parked behind the mansion to reduce the possibility of her car being noticed by a passerby. She had covered her license plates as an added precaution.
She had also driven a complicated, circuitous route to Keegan’s house, making certain she had not been followed. Raider crews sometimes tailed go-betweens like vultures, hoping to swoop in to grab the relic before it could be delivered to a client.
Outside she hurried through the light rain to her black SUV. The vehicle looked like a gazillion other SUVs on the road in the Pacific Northwest, but she was proud of it. The car represented her biggest investment to date in her new career. She would be making payments on it for a long time. It wasn’t as if she’d had a choice. A go-between couldn’t operate without a sturdy, reliable vehicle. The SUV was specially equipped with a steel lockbox in the cargo compartment. Steel was an effective insulator. It blocked most paranormal energy.