“Sounds interesting, but I wasn’t cut out for the corporate world,” Sierra said. “I learned that lesson when I worked for Ecclestone’s Auction House.”
Damned if she was going to make this easy for him, she thought.
“Ecclestone’s was an entirely different situation,” North said, very earnest now. “You were set up to take the fall for a scam the company was running.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I never believed you were guilty. Not for long, at any rate.”
“But for a little while?”
“The file Lucas gave me indicated that you had a somewhat unconventional background, so yes, I had a few questions at first,” North said.
“Because my father sells psychic poems online and my mother does song therapy and I was raised in an intentional community populated by a lot of people who prefer to live off the grid.”
“Like I said, your background looks a little unusual when it’s detailed in a Foundation file. But as soon as I got to know you, I realized you weren’t a fraud or a con artist.”
She gave him a bright little smile. “Thanks for that.”
“I’m not saying there might not be a few issues with management at the Foundation—office politics is a universal phenomenon—but it sure as hell isn’t a corrupt auction house.”
“I agree,” she said. “Nevertheless, I don’t think I would do well in any setting where I have to report to a boss or carry out corporate goals. I’ve got more of an entrepreneurial vibe. You’ve found your calling and that’s a wonderful thing. I’m still searching for mine.”
North looked wary. “Couldn’t you search for it here in Vegas?”
“Possibly. But somehow this town doesn’t strike me as the sort of place where I can hear the voice I’m trying to hear.”
“You’re talking about the voice in that poem?”
“Right,” she said. “There’s a lot of background noise in Vegas.”
“It’s quiet out in the desert where my house is located,” North said.
“That’s true,” she said. “Are you inviting me to move in with you?”
North hesitated and then exhaled slowly. “I have it on good authority that no woman would ever want to live in the Abyss.”
“Who is your authority?”
“My mother.”
“I see,” Sierra said. “Have you conducted any serious research to determine if she’s right?”
“What do you mean by ‘research’?”
“How many women have you invited to live at the Abyss?”
“None.”
“Why don’t you try asking one if she would be happy to move into the mansion?”
North went very still. “Where do you suggest I start this research?”
“How about with the woman who is closest at hand? Me.”
“Are you saying you wouldn’t mind living in the Abyss?”
“I find it rather . . . stimulating.”
“Really? Because of the mirrors? Shit.” North broke off and pulled his buzzing phone out of his pocket. He grimaced when he saw the screen. “It’s Victor. I’d better take the call.”
“Go ahead. Knowing Arganbright, it will either be very good news or very bad news. He doesn’t seem to have any in-between mode.” Sierra got to her feet. “I’m going to the women’s room while you two chat.”
North nodded and put the phone to his ear. “This better be important, Victor. I’m on a date tonight. My first in a very long time.”
Sierra slipped away from the table and threaded a path toward the discreet sign at the far end of the mezzanine.
She ended up in a long, shadowed hallway. At the end of it she opened a door and found herself in a gaudily decorated lounge lined with mirrors and dressing tables. Through an arched doorway she saw four gleaming white stalls and a couple of sinks. More mirrors were positioned behind the sinks.
The door of the stall at the far end opened. Kimberly Tolland emerged. She looked as if she was trying to conceal some strong emotions. She managed a polite smile as she walked across the space to one of the sinks.
“Hello again,” she said. “Enjoying the evening?”
“It’s been interesting,” Sierra said.
“I’ve heard some talk that you might be invited to join the museum staff.”
“Funny you should mention my career prospects,” Sierra said. “I was just telling North that I don’t do well in a corporate setting. How do you like working in a Foundation lab?”
Kimberly turned on the faucet and studied her own reflection in the mirror as she washed her hands. “I loved it, at least until tonight.”
“I don’t understand,” Sierra said.
“I just found out that bastard brought me here to dump me. I guess he thought it would be easier if he did it in a place where I was less likely to make a scene.”
“Are we talking about Grant Wallbrook?”
“We are talking about that lying, cheating creep, yes.” Kimberly turned off the faucet and yanked a paper towel out of the dispenser. She dried her hands and then she dabbed at her eyes. Her mouth trembled. “He used my research to get the promotion and now he no longer needs me. Oh, he didn’t phrase it that way tonight when he told me we had to stop seeing each other. He said it wouldn’t look right if we continued to date, but that was just an excuse. He used me, damn it.”
“I know this isn’t going to be much consolation, but I’m pretty good when it comes to assessing aura compatibility. Yours and Grant’s definitely did not sing.”
Kimberly crumpled the paper towel. “What?”
“It’s just a knack I have. If you want to know how it feels when two auras sing together, I suggest you ask Jake out on a date.”
“Jake?” Kimberly looked genuinely startled. “But he’s a cleaner. Everyone knows they go for flash and glamour. He wouldn’t be interested in someone like me.”
“Why not?”
Kimberly took a gold lipstick out of her purse and concentrated very hard on applying the color to her mouth.
“I’m sure that to him I’m just a boring nerd,” she said.
“You’re wrong. Take a risk. Ask him to dance and see what happens.”
“What if he turns me down? I’d be totally humiliated.”
“What are you now?”
“Totally humiliated.”
“Right,” Sierra said. “So you’ve got nothing to lose.”
She went into the nearest stall and locked the door.
“I hope things go well with you and North,” Kimberly called.
“We’re working on it.”
Kimberly walked past the row of stalls and moved into the carpeted lounge area. The outer door opened and closed.
Sierra stripped off her gloves and tucked them into her little evening bag. There were some things a woman could not do while wearing leather gloves. She was happy to see that the commode was a self-flushing model. No need to touch the handle.
The outer door opened again. A moment later stiletto heels tapped briskly on the white tiled floor and paused in front of a washbasin. Water splashed in the sink and then stopped. The towel dispenser rumbled.
The heels tapped back through the arched doorway into the lounge area.
Silence. The newcomer did not leave.
Probably freshening up her makeup, Sierra thought.
But a shiver of awareness iced her senses.
The outer door opened again. Another woman had arrived. Sierra relaxed. She was no longer alone with the stranger in the lounge. For some reason that was reassuring.
She used some tissues to open the stall door and crossed to the sink the newcomer had just used. Bracing herself for the inevitable jolt, she turned on the gleaming faucet.
Rage slammed across her senses.
It was a startlingly familiar fury. Frustration and psychic instability shivered through it. She recognized it because she had encountered it on two previous occasions. The first time was when she had touched the crystals in North’s poisoned sunglasses. She had sensed the same white-hot heat on the handle of the basement door in the house on Bainbridge Island.
The person who had murdered Loring and tried to blind North was a woman.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw something sparkle on the narrow steel shelf above the neighboring sink. Kimberly had left her lipstick.
Tentatively Sierra touched the gold lipstick case with her bare fingers. She got a little sizzle but nothing like the energy that had been left by the woman who had used the first sink.
Sierra took a deep breath and turned off the faucet. Another shock jolted her but this time she was prepared. She tried to come up with a strategy. There were two women in the outer lounge. One of them was a killer.
Or were they working together?
Kimberly appeared in the arched doorway that separated the stalls-and-sinks room from the makeup lounge. Behind the lenses of her glasses her eyes were wide with horror.
There was a good reason for the expression. Larissa Whittier was directly behind her, a small pistol pointed at Kimberly’s head.
“Hello, Larissa,” Sierra said.
“Get rid of the locket,” Larissa said. “I don’t know how it works but back in Fogg Lake I overheard Marge and the town librarian discussing it. They said you could use it to make a person faint. Take it off now or Kimberly dies.”
Sierra slipped the locket off over her head and set it down on the counter positioned above the two sinks.
“You can’t risk shooting Kimberly,” she said. “Someone will hear the shot.”
“Not with the music going full blast. It’s Kimberly’s bad luck that she came back.”
“My lipstick,” Kimberly said weakly. “Look, no one is dead yet. This can end here and now.”
“No,” Larissa said. “It’s not going to end until I get my inheritance. Those weapons that my grandfather invented belong to me.”
Sierra didn’t have to look at the reflection of Larissa’s aura to pick up the instability in her energy field. The signs were evident in the unsteady pitch of her voice and her feverish eyes. Her fury was so great it dominated common sense, reason, perhaps even the instinct for self-preservation. In that moment the only thing that mattered to her was revenge.
“Griffin Chastain and Crocker Rancourt invented those devices together,” Sierra said. “Chastain intended them to be used to heal.”
“Rancourt understood the true potential of the light machines,” Larissa said. “It’s all there in his logbook. It was my grandfather who comprehended the real power of those artifacts. When Rancourt realized Chastain would never agree to weaponize the devices, he did what he had to do.”
“Congratulations,” Sierra said. “You did a nice job of hiding in plain sight while you let Delbridge Loring take all the risks. He wasn’t running the Puppets—he was one of them. So was Garraway. You were the one pulling the strings.”
“Loring and Garraway were both obsessed with the paranormal. I offered them what they could not resist—the promise of serious psychic power. They recruited the orderlies because they needed some muscle to pick up the research subjects and keep them under control at Riverview.”
“You covered your tracks well,” Sierra said. “You even left a few clues indicating that Loring was Crocker Rancourt’s long-lost grandson, the one who supposedly died in an explosion.”
“The file of obituary notices?” Larissa smiled a chilling smile. “I knew it would send North and Victor Arganbright off in the wrong direction. It’s no secret that Arganbright never believed Harlan Rancourt died in that fire.”
“The master stroke was letting Loring hide in your grandfather’s old estate on Bainbridge Island,” Sierra said. “How did you get hold of it?”
“An heir hunter found me after Stenson Rancourt and his son died in the explosion that Arganbright and Lucas Pine caused. I was Stenson’s biological daughter, but he never acknowledged me. He never paid any attention to me at all. I was the product of a one-night stand. I doubt if he even remembered my mother’s name. I’m sure he never realized that I was the one who got the full measure of Crocker Rancourt’s talent.”
“Did Harlan die in that blaze?”
Larissa shrugged. “I assume so. If he didn’t, he has certainly managed to keep a low profile all these years. It was obvious he never went after the cache of weapons my grandfather hid at the estate.”
“Maybe he never knew about them,” Sierra said.
“It’s possible. Who cares? What matters is that I’m the one who found them.”
“You found your inheritance, but the devices were of no use to you because they were all tuned to Griffin Chastain’s signature, and the tuning crystal that your grandfather stole was engineered to respond only to that signature.”
“At first I thought it might be possible to retune the crystal. I couldn’t risk it myself, but I knew someone in one of the Foundation labs who was an expert on crystals.”
“Delbridge Loring.”
“He had a different name when he was employed here,” Larissa said. “I invented the Loring identity for him. He was good, I’ll give him that much. He’s the one who created the crystals the doctors insisted North wear after he began to go psi-blind.”
“But you are the one who infused them with the poison you hoped would make North psi-blind. That’s why your energy is all over these lenses.”
“I found the formula in my grandfather’s logbook. He had planned to use it on Griffin Chastain but he never got the opportunity.”
“Because Griffin confronted him about the theft of the artifacts. Your grandfather ended up shooting Griffin instead of poisoning him.”
“Initially I put the poison into North’s drink here at the Fogg Club. Like the radiation in the crystals, it has hypnotic properties. All I had to do was provide the right suggestion. Sure enough, he started losing control of his talent within hours. The doctors at Halcyon had no explanation.”
“You had proof of concept,” Sierra said. “The poison worked. The problem was that you had to keep dosing North with the stuff until it had completely destroyed his talent. It wasn’t practical to keep poisoning his drinks, so you infused the radiation into the crystals Loring made for North’s glasses.”
“It was easy enough to slip into the crystal lab and take the special eyeglasses out for a couple of hours one night. That’s all the time I needed to irradiate the lenses. The techs never missed them. I put them back before the lab opened that morning. Every time North wore those sunglasses he was exposed to a small but steady dose of radiation.”
“Were you going to try to poison his father next?”
“Yes, but suddenly Loring sent word about the rumors of a collection of artifacts that had been sold at auction in the Seattle area,” Larissa said. “According to the chatter, a device that belonged to Griffin Chastain was among the relics. We knew it had to be important. Swan Antiques had bought the entire collection, but it was a large number of objects. Unfortunately, there was no description of the Chastain relic. It could have been any one of a hundred objects.”
“You realized you needed a Chastain to identify the artifact,” Sierra said. “You made sure Chandler got the rumor. But he knew he was being followed that day. He tricked Loring and the Puppets. They were left with a useless vintage radio.”
“The next thing I knew, North Chastain was in Seattle.” Larissa’s voice rose to an even higher, edgier pitch. “He hired you and everything started to fall apart. All because of you.”
She aimed the gun at Sierra.
“Why kill me?” Sierra said. “I’m just the go-between.”
“You destroyed everything I
worked for years to achieve. That tuning crystal Loring traded for the night gun was sabotaged. I almost died trying to use it.”
“The sabotage was carried out decades ago by Griffin Chastain. He knew that as long as that crystal existed there was a chance Rancourt or one of his descendants would get hold of it.”
“You cheated me.”
“You’re losing it, Larissa,” Sierra said. “Don’t do this.”
“It’s all your fault, you stupid, interfering bitch.” Larissa’s hand tightened on the pistol.
“You have to know you can’t get away with murdering us,” Kimberly said. Her voice was astonishingly calm and controlled. The voice of reason.
“Oh, yes I can,” Larissa said.
“Nope,” Sierra said. “You can’t.”
She flattened her palm against the mirror over the sink and slammed energy into the sparkling glass.
The move had the intended effect of shocking the already unstable Larissa. She tried to regain her balance and aim the gun at Sierra again.
But the mirror was exploding. A storm of dazzling paranormal fire blazed in the room, igniting the other mirrors. The currents of energy became a wildfire that flowed into the lounge. Dressing table mirrors cracked and shattered. Some of the light fixtures popped.
“Kimberly, down!” Sierra shouted.
Kimberly dove to the floor.
Larissa screamed and pulled the trigger but she was blinded and disoriented by the violent, chaotic energy. The gun roared. Somewhere tiles cracked. Sierra grabbed her locket, got it open and sent a fierce pulse of heat through it.
The mirror crystal sent the currents of Larissa’s aura rebounding back into her energy field, briefly destabilizing them. She jerked violently, froze for an instant and then collapsed on the white tile floor, unconscious.
Kimberly got to her feet and surveyed the destruction. “That was . . . amazing.”
The restroom door crashed open. North was suddenly in the room, gun in hand, his hot aura blazing in the shards of broken mirrors. Jake was right behind him.