Bridal Jitters (11 page)

“True, but there is one explanation for the chamber that we overlooked. It fits with everything we experienced while we were in it, and it explains a lot.”

She propped herself on her elbow and looked down at him. “What’s that?”

“Maybe what we stumbled into was a Harmonic graveyard.”

For a moment she could not believe she had heard him correctly. And then the implications hit her. Her mouth went dry.

“You think it was a
cemetery
?”

“That would account for all the small chambers,” he said seriously.

“Graves and crypts.” She shuddered. “Good grief. Now that you mention it—”

“It would also account for the weird feeling you got from the traps that guarded the cubicles. Maybe they were set as warnings against disturbing the dead.”

“But that fountain room and the little antechamber off of it,” she interrupted quickly. “Why wasn’t it trapped?”

“Probably because it wasn’t an actual grave site. It may have been a meditation chamber or a viewing room. Or it could have been the place where the caskets were displayed for sale, for all we know.”

“Aaargh.” She flopped back on the pillow. “Do you think we really spent Halloween in an alien graveyard?”

“I think there’s a good chance that we did, yes.”

She stared at the ceiling. “Kind of boggles the mind.” Abruptly she sat up amid the sheets. “But what about that strange energy storm that Chaz triggered when he untangled one of the traps? And those things that we saw drifting past
the window. You don’t suppose they were—” She broke off, unable to put the thought into words.

Sam smiled slightly. “Real ghosts?”

“No.” She shook her head violently. “I absolutely refuse to believe that. The only ghosts are unstable dissonance energy manifestations. UDEMs. Composed of ambient psi energy. There is no such thing as real ghosts.”

“Whatever you say.” He threaded his fingers through her hair. “Who am I to argue with an expert such as yourself?”

“Definitely not real ghosts,” she reiterated very forcefully. Then she frowned. “But about that antechamber off the fountain room.”

“What about it?”

“If it was a funeral room or some sort of viewing chamber, then that big chest where we … where we—”

“Where we made love for the first time?”

“It must have been a—”

Sam grinned. “Yeah, I think it might have been a casket or a sarcophagus.”

She swallowed. “We did it on top of a casket? Our first time together took place in an alien funeral parlor? On top of a
coffin
?”

“I’m pretty sure it was empty,” Sam said. “There was no trap, remember?”

“That’s not the point. What am I supposed to tell our grandchildren when they ask us about our first real romantic date? That you took me to an alien cemetery and made wild, passionate love to me on top of a
sarcophagus
?”

Sam roared with laughter and eased her onto her back. He lowered himself until he covered her body with his own. Then he braced his arms on either side of her head and looked down at her with eyes that gleamed with sensual amusement.

“Maybe we ought to make it our own, private Halloween tradition,” he suggested. “We could hunt up a new alien graveyard every year.”

“Don’t even
think
about it.”

He smiled slowly. “Then what do you say we get busy on creating some children so that one day we’ll have those grandchildren you mentioned a minute ago.”

“At last, a truly brilliant idea.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and urged his mouth down to hers.

He kissed her until she stopped thinking about Halloween and graveyards and alien sarcophagi; until she could think of nothing else except their love and the future that they would build together.

Keep reading for a special excerpt from the Rainshadow Novel

DECEPTION COVE

by Jayne Ann Krentz writing as Jayne Castle.

Available September 2013 from Jove Books

The two low-rent thugs were waiting for Alice when she left the darkened theater through the stage door. She sensed their presence as soon as she started walking toward the street. They were hiding behind the large garbage bin in the middle of the alley. They were not the subtle type.

“I do not have time for this,” she said to the dust bunny perched on her shoulder.

Houdini chortled enthusiastically and bounced a little. At first glance he looked like a large wad of dryer lint that had been decorated with six paws and two baby blue eyes. He had a second set of eyes—they were a very feral shade of amber—but he only opened them for hunting or when he sensed danger. He was still wearing the elegant red satin bow tie that Alice had put on him for the night’s performance of the Alien Illusions Magic Show.

A born ham, Houdini adored the limelight. He was always up for a performance. Somehow he sensed that they were about to give one here in the alley. True, it would be for an audience of two, and neither of the lowlifes had purchased a ticket, but he wasn’t particular about the size of the crowd and the concept of money was lost on him. He took a more pragmatic approach to finances. Pizza worked for him.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Alice said. “We’ve got an empty refrigerator waiting back at the apartment and a mean landlord who will be expecting the rent tomorrow, remember?”

She did not have the money for the rent. The Alien Illusions Magic Show had folded without notice tonight. That kind of thing happened in show business, but in this case she was pretty sure she knew why the owner of the theater had cancelled all future productions. He had been bribed to dump the act.

She was now towing a wheeled suitcase crammed with costumes, wigs, stage makeup, and everything else she had been able to salvage from her tiny dressing room. A large blue tote filled with props was slung over her shoulder.

It had not been a good day, and the night was turning out to be worse. Not only was she once
again unemployed, she’d been experiencing the all-too-familiar edgy sensation for the past several hours. During the past year she had learned the hard way that the icy little jolts of warning were coming from her intuition. Someone was watching her. Again.

And now a couple of street creeps were about to try to mug her.

“Really, how much can any woman be expected to take?” she said to Houdini.

Houdini chortled again, eager to go on stage.

One of the thugs emerged from behind the far end of the garbage bin. His head, which had been shaved to better display the tattoos on his skull, gleamed in the light cast by the fixture over the stage door. He had a knife in one hand.

The second man popped out of hiding and moved toward her along a parallel trajectory. He wore a stocking cap over his long, straggly hair. The blade of his knife glittered in the light.

“Now what’s a nice girl like you doing out here all alone at night?” Tattoo Head asked. “Didn’t anyone tell you this is a dangerous neighborhood?”

His voice was high-pitched and over-rezzed with the sort of unnatural excitement that indicated he had been doing some serious stimulants earlier in the evening.

“Get out of my way,” Alice said. She adjusted the weight of the tote on her shoulder, tightened her grip on the suitcase, and kept walking. “I’m not in a good mood.”

“Now why you wanna go and talk like that to a couple of guys who just want to party?” the man with the stocking cap crooned. “We’re gonna show you a real good time.”

“A real good time.” Tattoo Head leered. “What’s that thing on your shoulder? Some kinda fluffy rat?”

Alice ignored him, closing the distance between the three of them as she trudged toward the alley entrance. No doubt about it, a really bad day was turning into a really bad night.

“Listen up, bitch,” Stocking Cap snarled. “Stop right there. First, put that big purse down on the ground. You hear me? You’re gonna take out all the money you got inside, and if my friend and I like what we see, we’ll all have some fun. If we don’t like what we see, why then, you’re
gonna have to give us a reason not to cut you up a bit.”

Alice ignored the threat.

“Hey, my buddy told you to stop,” Tattoo Head hissed.

Alice continued walking. She felt Houdini’s little claws grip her shoulder. He was no longer chortling. He growled a warning and sleeked out, his scruffy gray fur flattened against his small frame. He opened his second set of eyes and watched the knife-wielding pair closely. He was ready to rumble.

“There’s an old saying about dust bunnies,” Alice said to the thugs. “
By
the time you see the teeth, it’s too late
. Turns out Houdini and I have our own little twist on that bit of wisdom.
If you can’t see the teeth or anything else, you’re in trouble.
”

“What do you think you’re doing, you stupid woman?” Stocking Cap said. He skipped and danced across the pavement, closing in on her. “You asked for it. I’m gonna have to cut up that face of yours to teach you a lesson.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Alice said. “I’ve got some real issues at the moment. You shouldn’t mess with a woman who has issues. Never say you weren’t warned.”

She jacked up her senses and pulled hard on her talent. She had never met anyone else with the same kind of psychic ability that she possessed—light-talents of any kind were rare. Those strong enough to do what she could do were considered the stuff of fairy tales.

She cranked up her aura and used the energy to bend the wavelengths of normal-spectrum light around herself and Houdini. The process was similar to the way a rock diverts water in a stream. For all intents and purposes, she had just gone invisible to the human eye.

She pushed a little harder and extended the shield to her tote and suitcase. It took a lot of power to bend light around not only herself and Houdini but the objects she was touching as well. She figured she wouldn’t have to do it for long. She had learned over the years that people tended to freak out when they realized that, in her case, going invisible was not merely a magic trick.

As paranormal talents went, the ability to vanish for a short period of time was not nearly as
useful as one might think. Career options were limited. Having concluded that she was not cut out for a life of crime, she had tried various other professional endeavors ranging from the food-and-beverage business to a job as a clerk in a museum gift shop. The last one had nearly gotten her killed.

This past year she had tried her hand at the magic business. It seemed like the perfect career for a woman with her skill set. As it happened, however, any halfway-experienced magician could routinely make objects disappear on stage. The fact that she used psychic energy to achieve the effect did not impress anyone in show business. She was a one-trick wonder.

Still, the ability to disappear at will, along with whatever she happened to have physical contact with at the time, did have its benefits.

“Shit,” Tattoo Head yelped. He halted abruptly and stared at the place where Alice had been seconds earlier. “Where’d she go?”

“I don’t know,” Stocking Cap said. He was clearly jittery. “This is too weird. Maybe that last dose of green dust was bad, man. Gotta find a new dealer.”

“It’s not the dust,” Tattoo Head said, edging back toward the entrance of the alley. Fear shivered in the atmosphere around him. “Maybe that magic act of hers is for real. Maybe she’s a witch or something.”

“No way. Are you crazy? No such thing as a witch.”

Alice hurried toward the alley entrance. She could not remain invisible for long, not now. She had used a lot of energy on stage. Psychic energy was subject to the laws of physics, just like any other kind of energy. Use a lot of it and you needed time to recover. But she was sure she would only have to bend light for another minute or two. Stocking Cap and Tattoo Head were starting to panic.

On her shoulder Houdini chortled gleefully. The sound echoed eerily in the night. So did her footsteps and the rattle of the suitcase wheels on the pavement.

“Shit, I can hear her,” Tattoo Head said. “It’s like she’s a ghost.”

That proved too much for Stocking Cap.

“I’m getting out of here,” he said.

He whirled and fled toward the alley entrance. Tattoo Head was hard on his heels. They nearly trampled Alice in their haste. She got out of the way, hauling the suitcase to one side, and she stood with her back to the brick wall as the pair thudded past.

They did not get far. A man materialized in the shadows at the front of the narrow passage. Moving with the swift, efficient speed and agility of a specter-cat, he did something fast and ruthless to Tattoo Head and Stocking Cap. Alice could have sworn that she saw a spark of dark paranormal lightning flash in the night, but it winked out before she could be certain.

She blinked and saw Tattoo Head and Stocking Cap were on the ground. Neither moved.

The newcomer walked to where his victims lay and collected their knives. Then he crouched and went swiftly through the pockets of the unconscious men.

Just when you were convinced that a day could not get any worse,
Alice thought. She stood frozen, her back to the alley wall, suddenly afraid to make any noise. She held her breath and struggled to keep the invisibility shield wrapped around herself, Houdini, and her burdens.

For his part, Houdini no longer appeared concerned. He was alert and watchful but he was back in dryer-lint mode. She was not sure what to make of that. On the one hand, it was reassuring to know that he did not sense another threat. Then again, maybe he was simply relishing the extended performance.

Evidently satisfied with his search, the man who had taken down Tattoo Head and Stocking Cap rose easily to his feet and started walking toward her.

As he came into the full glare of the alley door light, she saw that he was wearing wraparound, mirrored sunglasses.

Mirrored sunglasses
.
At midnight
.

She just had time to realize that the stranger looked somewhat familiar before it dawned on her that he was looking directly at her.

“You must be Alice North,” he said. “Your great-grandfather and mine were partners in a seafaring business a long time ago. My name is Drake Sebastian.”