Dark Light

power.

Brock Jenner had been a big, thick man, both physically and, in Sierra's opinion, intellectually. There was no question that he'd wielded power. Self-control, however, had certainly not been his forte. He'd been a heartless womanizer, and his temper had been explosive. Although he had officially died of natural causes, Sierra suspected that the reason he was no longer around was directly related to his habit of stabbing his fellow associates in the back. She wondered if the last back he had taken aim at had been Fontana's. If so, he had miscalculated badly.

If Jenner had been a bull of a man, Fontana was a specter-cat. You wouldn't know he was hunting you until you saw the fangs, and by then it would be too late.

He was a couple of inches above average height; not so tall as to tower over everyone in the room, yet somehow you would always know that he was the man in charge. No one would ever call him handsome, Sierra thought, but that did not matter; not to her at any rate. What he was, was fascinating. As in, the most intriguing man she had ever met. No wonder the hair on the back of her neck refused to settle down. Her pulse had been skipping along at high speed from the moment she had walked into the room. She was intensely, intimately aware of him in a way she could not explain.

There was nothing nervous or fidgety about Fontana. You got the feeling that it would require, at the very minimum, a volcanic eruption right here in his office to catch him by surprise. Even then, you would probably discover that he had contingency plans for such an event.

Rank-and-file ghost hunters were very big on tradition, right down to their wardrobes. They favored a lot of khaki and leather, probably because it went with the swagger. But those who made it to the top of the Guild preferred to dress like the CEOs they pretended to be. Today Fontana wore black, a lot of it. His black trousers, black shirt, black tie, and black jacket would have looked perfectly appropriate in her father's boardroom or any of her brothers' clubs. Each item screamed expensive fabric and brilliant tailoring; discreetly, of course.

The sartorial difference lay in the details. Unlike the silver or gold accessories that her male relatives favored, Fontana wore amber. Even the buttons of his shirt and his cuff links were set with amber. So was his belt buckle, the face of his watch, and, of course, the seal ring.

She was sure that every bit of the amber she could see was tuned. What's more, she suspected that he had amber elsewhere on his person, perhaps embedded in a shoe or on a key chain. Guild men carried backup amber in the same spirit that cops carried concealed guns. They knew that someday their lives might depend on the extra firepower.

But ghost hunters worked underground in the catacombs and the mysterious alien rain forest where the unpredictable currents of psi energy made high-tech weaponry and most machinery useless. Down below in the tunnels and in the jungle, survival depended on the ability to work tuned amber.

The paranormal ability to psychically resonate with amber and use it to focus the brain's natural energy had begun to appear among the colonists shortly after they had settled on Harmony. At first it had been viewed as a kind of biological quirk or curiosity. Scientists had concluded that something in the planet's environment stimulated the latent power in the human mind.

But the true value of the para-resonating talent had soon become evident. Now, two hundred years after the energy Curtain had closed, isolating the colonies, amber was the chief source of energy. It was used to power everything from washing machines to computers.

For most people, the ability to generate and direct currents of psychic energy was a low-level, generalized talent. There were those, however, who exhibited much higher levels of para-resonating ability. In such cases the talent always took a highly specialized form and was directly linked to objects and artifacts left behind by the first colonists on Harmony, the long-vanished alien empire. All of the relics of the lost civilization radiated heavy psi energy.

The aliens had disappeared eons before the arrival of the settlers from Earth, but they had left behind a vast network of catacombs that crisscrossed the planet beneath its surface. Recently a massive underground rain forest had also been discovered. Like the tunnels, the jungle was filled with strong currents of psi. Some of it took dangerous forms. That was where ghost hunters came in.

Hunters were prime examples of para-resonators with strong but extremely limited talents. Their psychic abilities, while admittedly impressive, were not exactly multifunctional skill sets. As far as anyone had been able to discover, the only use for a hunter's talent was to manipulate and control the highly volatile, potentially lethal balls of fiery, acid-green alien energy known technically as unstable dissonance energy manifestations—UDEMs.

Everyone called the miniature storms ghosts, because they seemed to drift like lost specters through the underground world, creating major hazards for those who ventured beneath the surface.

Getting singed by a ghost was no small disaster. A close encounter with the wild energy fields could destroy a person's psychic senses. It could also put the unlucky victim into a coma from which he might never recover. The only people who could control the ghosts were those who could resonate with the chaotic dissonance energy that fueled them: ghost hunters.

Exploration and excavation of the mysterious tunnels and, more recently, the rain forest was big business. Corporations, university research teams, and private individuals all competed to discover and recover the secrets that the aliens had left behind. Only hunters could offer protection underground in the heavy psi environment. If you wanted to hire a few as security for your research or exploration team, you had to go through the Guilds.

The result was that the Guilds exerted enormous control over who got to conduct business underground. The law of supply and demand being what it was, the organizations had become extremely powerful over the years. Their tentacles reached down into the underworld and throughout society as well. A man in Fontana's position could exert enormous pressure on politicians, CEOs, and influential people at every level.

In Sierra's opinion, the situation had gotten considerably worse in the past year with the opening up of the rain forest to explorers, researchers, and old-fashioned treasure hunters. The Guilds, never slow to recognize a business opportunity when they saw it, had moved swiftly to exert their authority over the eerie buried jungle, just as they did over the catacombs.

There was no question but that jungle exploration was hazardous. In addition to a host of strange new plant and animal species, treacherous currents of energy flowed through the rain forest. It turned out that certain types of hunters could navigate the so-called ghost rivers. The Guilds had found a new and extremely profitable market niche.

Power was power, and whether he admitted it or not, Fontana wielded a lot of the stuff.

He looked up from the piece she had written on him, his expression politely neutral. 'You seem to think that, on their good days, ghost hunters are just a bunch of overpaid bodyguards. On our off days we're flat-out criminals.'

'I never wrote that you were all criminals,' she said quickly. Ivor Runtley, publisher and editor of the Curtain, had made it clear that, while he was willing to allow her a lot of leeway, he definitely did not want her bringing the full wrath of the new Guild boss down on his beloved paper.

Fontana tossed the paper aside. 'Okay, I'll concede that you did not actually use the word criminal. But it's obvious that you don't think highly of those in my profession.'

'I believe that the Guilds have far too much power when it comes to what goes on underground. A great deal of power in the hands of any one organization is always dangerous.'

'Do you really think it would be a good idea to strip the Guilds of their authority underground?' he asked.

'I'm not saying that some control and organization isn't necessary. Everyone knows that people with your sort of talents are necessary for safe exploration.'

'My sort of talents?' he asked softly. 'What do you know about my talents?'

'You're obviously a hunter, a powerful one, I'm sure. You wouldn't have made it to the top of the Guild unless you were a very strong dissonance energy para-rez talent.' She paused. 'Of some kind.'

She tacked on that last line very deliberately. Historically, the Guilds had always maintained that there was only one sort of hunter talent: the ability to work green ghost light. But in the course of her new career as an investigative reporter, she had picked up some very interesting rumors hinting that some hunters could work other kinds of alien psi, specifically silver and blue light. If it was true that there were some exotic hunter talents, it was yet another secret that the Guilds were keeping. She doubted very much that she could trick Fontana into admitting