it instead.'
'That must have tacked quite a bit onto the purchase price.'
'Yes.' He rested his hands on her shoulders. 'But it was worth it.'
A case full of artifacts that were not made of green quartz caught her eye. It was the one cabinet in the room that had artificial lighting.
'Good heavens,' she whispered. 'Is that real dream-stone?'
'Do you really think I'd have any fakes in here?'
She flushed. 'No. My father has a couple of pieces, but I've never seen that much of it outside a museum.'
No one knew why the aliens, who had used quartz for virtually everything else, had fashioned some items out of the mysterious dreamstone. The experts could not even decide if the exquisitely beautiful substance was native to Harmony. No naturally occurring deposits had ever been found.
Unlike quartz, dreamstone did not glow with its own natural illumination, but in the subdued case lighting, each item shimmered and shifted and swirled with fabulous colors that had no names. Dreamstone was solid to the touch, but to the eye it had the properties of a liquid, ever changing and endlessly, fascinatingly beautiful.
She looked at Fontana, a little awed in spite of herself.
'I take back what I said about you being a trifle paranoid. The dreamstone alone justifies all your security.'
Another kind of energy shimmered through the room.
'I protect what is mine,' Fontana said.
Chapter 10
HIS NAME WAS HANK, AND HE HAD BEEN LIVING ON THE streets in the old Quarter for nearly a year. Before that he had spent nearly two decades as a Guild man working underground until he'd been ghost-fried so bad he'd been forced to retire. He had seen a lot of weird things in his time but never anything like the four-foot-wide beam of ultraviolet energy sweeping slowly down the alley.
The beam appeared impenetrable at first, but as it got closer, he could see shadowy shapes moving about on the other side. It was impossible to make them out clearly, but he thought he caught glimpses of dark figures that resembled two-legged, fishlike beings with bulbous heads.
He crouched behind the large metal trash container, knowing it would provide no protection from the moving beam. Dissonance energy crackled invisibly in the atmosphere, a lot of it. His para-rez senses had been dulled by a steady diet of Green Ruin for a long time now, but the hunter in him could still recognize alien psi when it was this heavy. It was ghost energy but not like any he had ever encountered down in the tunnels. For one thing, it was the wrong color. For another, it was too well-controlled. No hunter could shape and focus ghost light that cleanly. The stuff usually flared and flashed in violent waves, no matter how good you were at handling it.
He should be on his feet, running for his life. Hunters had some natural immunity to green ghost light, but he was sure that no one could survive a brush with this ultraviolet monster. Nevertheless, some instinct warned him that his only chance was to remain concealed behind the trash container.
The beam halted a short distance away near the doorway where Jake Tanner had his crib. There was no sound from Jake. The guy was probably lost in a juice dream.
The fish-headed shadows on the other side of the wall of energy moved about with a purposeful air. He couldn't see what they were doing. But after a few seconds, the wide beam of ultraviolet shifted.
He figured there was some important stuff a man ought to think about at a time like this, but he couldn't seem to recall anything he really wanted to dwell on in his last moments. He'd said his good-byes to the real world and his life when he'd crawled into the endless bottles of Green Ruin.
But the energy beam was no longer moving toward him. Instead, it retreated swiftly back toward the opposite end of the alley. After a moment it suddenly vanished, as if someone had rezzed a switch to turn off a flashlight.
Hank realized his heart was pounding harder than it had the time he'd encountered his first big ghost down in the tunnels. He started to reach for another bottle of Green Ruin with shaking fingers and then hesitated.
After a moment he made himself get to his feet. He didn't want to do this, but Jake had been the closest thing he'd had to a friend since he'd discovered the magic of Green Ruin.
He picked up his flashlight, switched it on, and made his way toward Jake's crib. He wasn't surprised by what he found. Some part of him had known that the bedroll would be empty.
The bastards had taken Jake.
Chapter 11
FONTANA SAT ALONE IN THE DARKENED BEDROOM, A glass of brandy in one hand, and contemplated his wedding night. Sierra was asleep two doors down the hall. This was the first time since he had bought the mansion that anyone other than himself had slept here.
It felt good to know that she was in his house. He would have preferred that she slept in this room; nevertheless, she was under his roof, and that was enough for now.
The stunt with dark light at the party had been a dumb-ass move. Why the hell had he done it?
Because he had been unable to resist the hunters' traditional wedding night challenge, that's why. Damn it, for a while there tonight he'd actually let himself believe that he really was a newly married man.
Growing up a bastard, his mother dead in a car accident when he was fifteen, he'd had very little in the way of traditions. When he joined the Guild, it was as if he had finally found a family. He had embraced the organization and everything about it, including all the old traditions, with the fervor of a new convert.
Tonight Sierra had become his wife—a Guild wife—and he had been overcome with a fierce desire to prove himself to her in the traditional Guild way.
He should have known better than to expect an outsider to be impressed with such an archaic tradition, especially a woman like Sierra, who had been born into an upper-class family.
The social status of the Guilds had always been an uneasy one, at least as far as mainstream society was concerned. Sure, high-ranking Guild members and their wives got invited to celebrity parties and elegant charity fund-raisers. A lot of people found raw power of any kind fascinating. They enjoyed rubbing shoulders with members of their local Guild Councils in certain social circles. Politicians and CEOs courted the top people in any Guild because the organizations possessed the kind of cash that could bankroll a campaign or invest in a hedge fund.
But if you were a part of the elite of mainstream society, you didn't want your daughter to marry a Guild man, not even if the marriage was a short-term MC with no lasting status. A Covenant Marriage between a high- ranking member of a Guild and a woman with Sierra's social background was so rare as to be the stuff of legend. Such marriages did occur from time to time, but they were usually the result of financial considerations. A once- wealthy mainstream family seeking to recoup its fortunes might contemplate such an alliance, but only as a last resort.
He wondered what Sierra's classy parents would say when they discovered that she was in a Marriage of Convenience with a Guild boss who was also a bastard. One thing was certain: they would not be happy about the situation.
He drank some of the brandy and wondered how long his marriage would last.
