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strap of her black leather bag over one shoulder and made for the door. “Be sure to mention my name to Mercer Wyatt the next time you see him. Tell him that we at the Cadence City PD just live to assist the Guild in every possible way.”
    Celinda froze. Mercer Wyatt was the CEO of the Cadence Guild.
    â€œOh, damn,” she whispered. “Please don’t tell me this is Guild business.”

Chapter 2
    ALICE PAUSED AT THE DOOR. “GUESS I FORGOT TO MEN tion that Mr. Oakes’s client is Mercer Wyatt, the boss of the Cadence Guild.”
    Celinda stifled a heavy sigh of regret. So much for Mr. Perfect. There was a saying in her business: Any match-maker who tries to match herself has a fool for a client. She should have remembered that bit of wisdom. But, oh, the vibes had been so good. Correction: the vibes were still terrific. What was wrong with this picture?
    â€œGuess you did forget to mention that little fact,” she said to Alice. She drew herself up and gave Davis an accusing look. “I assumed you were probably working for some high-end collector.”
    â€œThe Cadence Guild is what you would call a corporate collector,” he said, unfazed by her glare. “It has a very fine museum.”
    â€œWhich, of course, is not open to the public.” She gave him a steely smile. “Like everything else the Guilds do, their museums are operated in an extremely secretive manner.”
    Alice was starting to look amused again. “I’ll leave you and Mr. Oakes to discuss this in private.” She turned back to Davis. “Don’t forget our agreement. If you turn up anything in your investigation that I should know about, I expect to hear from you immediately.”
    Davis inclined his head. “Understood, Detective.”
    Alice looked skeptical, but she said nothing more. She went out into the hall, closing the door behind her.
    Davis studied Celinda, eyes cool and enigmatic. “I apologize for any confusion here.”
    â€œMy fault,” she said crisply. “I obviously didn’t ask the right questions.”
    Sensing her tension, Araminta muttered into her ear.
    â€œI take it you are not a fan of the Cadence Guild?” Davis said.
    â€œI am not a fan of any of the Guilds. I consider them antiquated, outmoded institutions. Not to mention arrogant, heavy-handed, and corrupt.” She gave him another chilly smile. “Just my opinion, of course.”
    â€œSure.” He gave her an equally wintry smile. “You’re not the only person who has some reservations about the way the Guilds are run.”
    â€œThey certainly have had some bad public relations problems in the past,” she agreed with alacrity.
    â€œWhich they are working hard to overcome.”
    She thinned her smile out a little more. “Got a long way to go.”
    The Guilds had been established during the Era of Discord when the colonies had faced the threat of tyranny from a megalomaniac named Vincent Lee Vance. Until that turning point, there had been no necessity for the four struggling city-states that had grown up around the original colonies to establish militias. Regular police departments had been all that was necessary to maintain law and order in the new world.
    When Vance and his fanatical minions had begun to terrorize the city-states, they had staged their assaults via the network of underground alien catacombs that crisscrossed the planet. The strange alien psi energy that radiated throughout the maze of tunnels rendered conventional weaponry unreliable at best and, at worst, extremely hazardous to those who used it.
    But the underworld labyrinth provided its own natural artillery in the form of highly volatile, potentially lethal balls of fiery, acid-green energy technically known as UDEMs. The acronym stood for unstable dissonance energy manifestation. The balls of eerie green fire were called ghosts, because they drifted erratically and