The Hot Zone (A Rainshadow Novel Book 3) (4 page)

“Yes, I do see your reservation here in the computer, Mr. Jones, but the only cottage that we have left is quite small.” Sedona put on her brightest innkeeper’s smile. “Number Thirteen, Graveyard Cottage. No view of the bay, I’m afraid. It looks out over the local cemetery.”

“Sounds like the place has a lot of atmosphere,” Cyrus Jones said.

She had overheard the hunters refer to him as Dead Zone Jones. She had no idea why they called him that, but she was very certain of one thing—there was nothing dead about him.

His voice—low, dark, and freighted with power that was both very masculine and very controlled—sent shivers through Sedona’s senses. She could have sworn that she heard wind chimes clashing softly in another dimension. She knew the eerie music was her intuition pinging her. It was a recently discovered and decidedly unsettling aspect of her new weirdness. She was still getting accustomed to the strange vibe. She didn’t always know how to interpret the chimes. But in this case she was pretty sure they signaled danger of a kind she had never before experienced.

Jones was the boss of the newly established Rainshadow Ghost-Hunters Guild. He had arrived, along with a gleaming black SUV and very little luggage, on a private charter ferry.

The October night had long since descended when the ferry docked in the Shadow Bay Marina, but Sedona had watched Jones’s arrival from the lobby window of Knox’s Resort & Tavern. She had not been alone. Most of the town had turned out to get a look at the island’s first Guild boss.

He’d received an unusually colorful welcome. Shadow Bay had never seen fit to invest in extensive streetlighting. But this was Halloween Week—a weeklong festival instituted by the new mayor as a way to promote tourism on Rainshadow. As a result, the town’s single shopping street was festooned with hundreds of orange and psi-green lanterns. The garish illumination extended from the Haunted Alien Catacombs attraction that had been set up in an old warehouse at the marina all the way to the town square. Most of the shops and eateries along the route were open and filled with visitors.

Jones had driven the SUV off the ferry and parked it in the marina lot. The shopkeepers and island residents who happened to be in town had watched him take a large black leather duffel bag out of the back of the vehicle. He had walked up the street, moving through the macabre glow of the Halloween lanterns with the ease of a man who owned the night.

In the course of his hike to the entrance of Knox’s Resort & Tavern he had stopped several times to speak with the people lined up on the sidewalks. He had shaken a great many hands before he came through the lobby door.

Now he was standing in front of Sedona and she didn’t need the chimes to warn her. Common sense was all it took to know that if she wasn’t very careful, Jones was going to screw up her carefully structured new life on Rainshadow Island.

Cyrus contemplated her across the width of the inn’s front desk. His gem-green eyes burned with a little heat. She was not an aura reader but a woman didn’t have to have that particular talent to register the heat in a man’s aura, not when the energy field was so strong.

“I don’t care about the view,” Cyrus said. “I won’t have a lot of time to admire it.” He glanced rather casually at her name tag. A faint smile edged his hard mouth. “I’m here to get a job done, Miss Snow.”

Chimes clashed softly, rattling her senses. She had no idea why he found her name amusing but the knowledge added to her unease. She did not doubt for a moment that the powerful members of the Guild Chamber—more formally known as the Joint Council of Dissonance Energy Para-Resonator Guilds—were well aware of what they were doing when they tasked Jones with establishing a new Guild territory on Rainshadow. If he set out to do a job, the job would get done.

It was just her luck that she was the new manager of Knox’s Resort & Tavern. Less than a month ago she had come to Rainshadow seeking a refuge; a place where misfits felt at home. The good people of Shadow Bay, long accustomed to dealing with the weird, had welcomed her, and Lyle, too, with open arms.

She had known, deep down, that it was probably all a little too good to be true. She was right. A week ago the town had been overrun with ghost hunters. Okay, maybe
overrun
was an exaggeration—the Rainshadow Guild was still a small operation, as Guilds went. But when you had a resort full of them, it certainly seemed as if they were on the island in vast numbers.

Housing a bunch of rowdy hunters was not her worst nightmare. She experienced more hellacious dreams on a nightly basis, thanks to Blankenship and his two assistants. And it was undeniably true that the Chamber was paying the outrageous prices she had demanded for the room-and-board arrangements for the men. Her boss, Knox—he only used his surname—was thrilled at the way the money was rolling in.
The Guilds always pay their bills,
he’d explained on several occasions.

At the moment Knox was behind the bar in the adjoining tavern, doing his best to lighten the wallets of half the hunters in town. Hot Rocks beer and Green Ruin whiskey were flowing freely.

It was bad enough having to house a lot of hunters for an indefinite period of time, Sedona thought. She really did not want to have to deal with the new boss of the Rainshadow Guild.

It was no secret that this was Jones’s first job as the CEO of a Guild. It was not entirely clear what his previous position had been, but she would have bet good amber that he had been promoted out of the ranks of the Chamber’s mysterious security division. They had fancy titles for the hunters who conducted Guild-sanctioned investigations—security specialists or something along those lines. But an enforcer was an enforcer, regardless of whether he worked for a mob boss or the Chamber.

Chamber enforcer to Guild boss was not a common path of advancement through the Guild hierarchy, but she had heard of other such instances. Adam Winters, the new Guild boss of Frequency City, was rumored to be a former enforcer. The Chamber probably assumed that if a man was tough enough to hunt the human monsters who possessed lethal amounts of paranormal talent, he was tough enough to control his own territory. She hadn’t met a lot of enforcers in the course of her work with the Guilds—they were a rare breed and they tended to keep low profiles. But those she had known all had an ice-cold edge.

Cyrus Jones had that edge and a lot more going on. Dark secrets whispered in the atmosphere around him. It wasn’t just raw power that she sensed. She was pretty sure she was picking up the vibes of the kind of mag-steel will that was required to handle a high-rez talent.

The edge was there, too, in the ruthless planes and angles of his hard face and his lean, rangy, broad-shouldered build. He was wearing the classic ghost-hunter uniform—khaki trousers and shirt, leather boots, leather jacket, and heavy leather belt. All of it looked well-worn. All of it sent the message that he had seen a lot of action in the Underworld.

Like every self-respecting hunter he wore amber. There were chunks of it set in his buckle, his watch, and the hilt of the knife he wore on his belt. And that was just the visible amber, she thought.

Sedona knew that it had come as a shock to the hunters who had recently arrived on the island to discover that here on Rainshadow, even well-tuned amber wasn’t strong enough to steer a person safely into and out of the forbidden territory known as the Preserve. Only those with unique talents could handle the paranormal forces inside the psi-fence.

But the Guild wasn’t on the island to deal with the problems inside the Preserve. That was the job of the Rainshadow Foundation. The Foundation had brought in the Guild to do the one thing ghost hunters did best—neutralize the chaotic forces and assorted hazards that were always waiting down below in the catacombs.

The maze of ancient tunnels on the island had only recently been discovered in the aftermath of some very powerful storms. Researchers and explorers from the corporate and academic worlds were eager to go into the Rainshadow Underworld to start collecting data. But that kind of expensive and dangerous—and potentially quite lucrative—fieldwork required security. For as long as anyone could remember, the Guilds had had a monopoly when it came to providing escort and protection services for those going underground.

“I’m sure you’ll want space to set up a temporary office, Mr. Jones,” she said. “This morning when I saw your name in our files I called Anna Fuentes down at the Bay View Inn. She said she’s got a lovely two-room suite with a connecting door. It will be perfect for a field office. Very conveniently located to the center of Shadow Bay, I might add.”

“I don’t need the extra room,” Cyrus said. “The Guild will be renting space from the owners of the Kane Gallery.”

“I see.”

She gave him her patented, no-room-at-this-inn smile and drummed her fingers on the counter. Fletcher Kane and Jasper Gilbert, both retired ghost hunters, owned the gallery. They would be only too happy to accommodate the new boss. Once a Guild man, always a Guild man.

“Would you mind giving me my key?” Cyrus asked. “I’d like to unpack and get settled.”

The amusement in his arresting green eyes told her that he was well aware he had won the battle of wills.

She was saved from having to surrender the key by the roar of masculine shouts that erupted from the adjoining tavern.

“I’ve got a hundred says you can’t toss him more than ten feet.
”

“
You’re on. Make room, people, make room. We need some space here
.”

Chairs and tables scraped on the old wooden floor. There was some excited chortling.

Alarm arced through Sedona. She stared across the lobby at the door that connected the tavern to the inn.

“Good grief, they’ve got Lyle,” she said. “Damn it, I knew your hunters were going to be nothing but trouble.”

She dashed out from behind the counter and raced across the lobby to the tavern entrance. She was aware of Cyrus following behind her but she ignored him.

The shadowy tavern was crammed with hunters. Knox was behind the bar, polishing glassware with a white cloth. He was grizzled and rotund with the weathered face of a retired commercial fisherman. He peered over the rims of his reading glasses, clearly pleased with his customers’ revelry. Sedona knew exactly what he was thinking—the more the hunters drank, the more money they spent.

The Guild men had pushed the tables and chairs aside to make room for two hunters who stood opposite each other. There was a distance of about ten feet separating the pair. One of the hunters was holding Lyle in both hands. Lyle was fully fluffed and chortling with excitement.

As Sedona watched in horror, the hunter tossed Lyle toward the second man.

“Stop that!” Sedona shouted.

No one paid any attention. The second hunter deftly caught Lyle in both hands. Lyle chortled wildly, buzzed on dust bunny adrenaline.

“One pace back,” the first hunter said.

Both hunters stepped back, lengthening the distance between them.

Sedona heard side bets going down around the room.

“
Five says Duke can’t catch the dust bunny.”

“
I’ve got twenty says Tanaka won’t be able to control the trajectory, not with the dust bunny wriggling like that
.”

“
You’re on
.”

Tanaka, a lean, dark-haired hunter who wore his hair tied back with a strip of leather, prepared to launch Lyle into the air.

“No, don’t you dare throw him,” Sedona shouted. She lunged toward Tanaka. “Give him to me.”

But she was too late. Tanaka had already completed the toss. Lyle was airborne. He chittered exultantly as he sailed across the room.

Moving with an unnerving quickness and, as far as Sedona could tell, almost no sound whatsoever, Cyrus was suddenly there in the flight path. Deftly he snagged Lyle out of midair and plopped him down on one shoulder.

Lyle whooped with delight. The crowd of hunters, however, fell abruptly silent. Those who weren’t already on their feet slid off their bar stools and stood respectfully. No one actually saluted. The Guilds were technically not military organizations. But they operated in a quasi-military fashion in the Underworld, and they were subject to a strict chain of command. The new boss was in the room and everyone knew it.

“Sorry to interrupt the game, gentlemen,” Cyrus said. “But the lady would rather you didn’t toss the dust bunny around like a beanbag.”

“Understood, sir,” Duke said. “No dust bunny tossing. Welcome to Rainshadow, Mr. Jones. I’m Sergeant Duke Donovan, Special Underground Operations, sir.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Cyrus said. “As I’m sure you are all well aware, I’m here to establish the Rainshadow Guild, and you are going to help me do that. Each of you has been handpicked to participate in this project because of your high levels of talent and your experience. I look forward to working with you.”

There was a chorus of
“Yes, sir.”

“Tomorrow morning I will be meeting with the local authorities to get a full briefing on what I understand are some unusual conditions here on the island,” Cyrus continued.

“Yes, sir,” Duke said again. Excitement lit his eyes. “They’ve got monsters here on Rainshadow, boss. Real ones. Attridge, the local police chief, found the remains of a second carcass just inside the Preserve this morning. Word is, it looked like a giant snake covered in weird scales. No one has seen anything like it on the island, and they say that there’s nothing big enough inside the psi-fence that could take down a huge snake. But something took it down.”

“The theory is that freaks of nature are coming out of the catacombs at night,” Tanaka added.

“I read the initial reports,” Cyrus said. “We will deal with the problem. Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to finish checking in to my room. After my meeting with the authorities in the morning, I want to see the entire team in my office, which, I understand, is next door to the Kane Gallery.”

“Right, boss,” Duke said. “I’ll make sure the team is notified.”

“Thank you,” Cyrus said. “Now I would advise you gentlemen to get some sleep. We have a lot to do here on Rainshadow and we will start doing that work tomorrow.”