running very hot while we were inside that house.”
“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice very neutral.
“Do you think that maybe we were the sparks that lit the fuse or whatever it was that set that house on fire?”
“Maybe.”
“Geez.”
“Like I said, there was a hell of a lot of energy buildup in that house before you and I arrived.”
Gwen nodded thoughtfully. “What, exactly, did you do with your ring?”
He looked down at the stone. It was no longer infused with power, but in the firelight it still glowed like liquid amber.
“Damned if I know,” he said.
“Good grief.” She stared at him. “Seriously? You don’t know how that stone does what it does?”
“I’ve only performed that particular trick on one other occasion.” He drank more of the wine. “Someone was trying to kill me at the time.”
“You’re talking about your last case again, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” He lowered the glass.
“How did you know that the three of us and Max needed to make physical contact in order to stay inside the safe zone you created?” Gwen asked.
“You want the truth? I wasn’t sure it would work. Just figured that the physics made sense. And there didn’t seem to be a lot of other options.”
“What physics?” Gwen asked. “You must have some theory about how the stone works.”
He studied the ring. “I can focus psychic energy through it, but it feels like I’m trying to control summer lightning when I do it. There’s a lot of wild power in the crystal, but as far as I can tell, all it seems to do is dampen other paranormal currents in the vicinity.” He paused. “Including human auras.”
“You mean you can use it like a weapon?”
“Over a short distance, yes.”
“How do you tune it?”
“What?” It was getting hard to concentrate. The deep weariness was getting heavier.
“You said that paranormal crystals that are used in high-tech ways require frequent tuning,” Gwen reminded him. “How do you tune that stone?”
“I have no idea.”
“Hmm.”
He watched the firelight blaze in the ring. “I’ve only used it at full throttle twice—today and on my last case. I won’t know if there’s any juice left in it until I’ve had a chance to get some rest.”
“You’re exhausted,” Gwen said. “You pulled a lot of firepower today shielding all of us.”
“I just need sleep.”
She drank her wine in a speculative silence for a time. He felt energy shift in the space and knew she had slipped into a trance. Max meowed softly and jumped down from the windowsill. He trotted across the room, bounded up onto the chair beside Gwen and settled down. She stroked him absently.
Judson closed his eyes and savored the gently charged atmosphere.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Take a look. But I’ll warn you, it makes me hot.”
“You’re too tired to get hot.”
“Shows how much you know.” He opened his eyes. “What do you see?”
She blinked and slipped out of the trance. He felt the psi levels go back to what passed for normal between them.
“Okay, I’m no expert on the subject of crystal physics, but based on what I see in your aura and what I observed today when you used the ring, I think that you are actually tuning the ring automatically simply by wearing it,” she said.
He studied the ring. “Usually you have to use one crystal to tune another. And usually the process requires someone with a special talent for the work, the psychic equivalent of a person with perfect pitch.”
“Maybe it works in your case because your aura generates some wavelengths that resonate naturally with the stone. That would explain your affinity for it.”
“Huh.” He tried to think about the physics involved, but he was too far gone.
“Go to bed,” Gwen said gently.
“Good idea.” He set the unfinished wine aside. “I will do that right now. Keep the door between our rooms open. Security reasons.”
“Okay,” she said.
He could feel her watching him as he went through the doorway into his room.
“Stop worrying,” he said. “I’ve been here before. I’ll be fine after a little sleep.”
“Okay,” she said again.
But he could tell that she was worried. He knew she would not get any rest until she was certain that he was going to be okay. He wanted to tell her that there was no need for her to keep a vigil. He wasn’t ill. And he sure as hell didn’t need therapy. He just needed some sleep.
He fell onto the bed, closed his eyes and tumbled into the darkness before he could think of a way to reassure her.
Twenty-six
Really, he had been born for a life of crime.
Nick Sawyer stood in the darkened house and listened to the currents of emptiness that resonated from the shadows. The dead woman’s family had put the house on the market a couple of weeks back. The For Sale sign in the front yard read “Motivated Seller.”
The house was almost empty. There were a few odd pieces of furniture and some pictures left, but the heirs had sold off most of the contents shortly after the old lady’s death. There was probably nothing to discover in the way of clues to the mystery he had been sent to solve, but he had wanted to get a feel for the victim. Standing here, in her front room, somehow gave him a sense of her that he had not been able to obtain with his online research or his chats with the neighbors.
He moved through the heavily draped living room until the traces of seething energy on the floor brought him to a halt.
“Hello,” he said to the shadows. “This is where he whacked you, isn’t it? You were watching television. They said your body was found in a big easy chair. The guy next door said your son helped himself to your big-screen TV on the day of the funeral. Let’s see what else you can tell me.”
He went upstairs to the bedroom, noting the little elevator that had been installed at some point in the past.
“Too frail to make it up the stairs under your own steam,” he said. “You were an easy target, weren’t you? You couldn’t have run, even if you had tried. But you didn’t.”
At the top of the stairs, he went down the hall to the master bedroom, savoring the chill of intense awareness and the adrenaline rush.
This business of poking around in the private affairs of other people was a lot more fun than the hot books business. He had gotten a kick out of chatting up the old woman’s neighbors earlier that day, too. He was almost as good a con as he was a burglar. Not that it had taken any real skill to get people to talk. Folks had been only too willing to tell him how the old lady’s son and daughter-in-law had ignored her for the most part, except when they had come around looking for money.
He studied the bedroom. There was an ancient chest of drawers standing against one wall, but everything else had been cleared out.
He crossed the room and started opening the drawers.
It was weird how a person’s entire future could get changed by a small twist of fate, he thought. If he hadn’t
