Siren's Call (A Rainshadow Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page A

backward, but as long as his feet were in contact with the floor there was no escape. The thin leather soles of his designer shoes blunted some of the hot energy she was directing into his aura but they were not a significant barrier.
    Infuriated by the attack on the dust bunny, Ella hurled wave after wave of fierce energy at her target, drowning Vickary’s dreamlight in irresistible songs of oblivion.
    The results were devastating. Dreamlight was, after all, the conduit between the normal and the paranormal. Any assault on those currents had serious repercussions on all of the senses.
    Vickary tried to rez the flamer but he could not summon the energy. The weapon fell from his nerveless hand. He crumpled to his knees.
    “No,” he whispered. “What are you doing?”
    “Giving you a private concert,” Ella said.
    He managed to lift his head one last time. He stared at her, horror and comprehension sparking briefly in his dazed eyes.
    “Siren,” he whispered.
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “Impossible.” Vickary folded up and collapsed on the floor. His eyes closed. “You don’t exist.”
    He sprawled on the green stone, unconscious.
    Ella abruptly cut her talent. She stared at the stricken figure on the floor.
    “I get that a lot,” she said.
    That was not, strictly speaking, true. The exact nature of her talent was a deep, dark family secret, the kind of secret that could destroy her career as a dream consultant and put her on an FBPI watch list.
    But she had just sung a very powerful song and she was buzzed. Her voice was shivering and so was she. It wasn’t panic or fear that was causing the reaction now—her inner Siren was flying. Using her talent at full power had that effect. It unleashed a volatile cocktail of bio-psi chemicals. Later she would pay a price for such a heavy expenditure of psychic energy, but for now she was definitely in high-rez mode.
    The dust bunny reappeared in the doorway, still sleeked out. Ella laughed. “Are we a great team or what?”
    The dust bunny fluffed up and chortled.
    “Right.” Ella took a deep breath and pulled her dazzled senses together. “Okay, I need to act like a responsible citizen now.”
    She crouched beside Vickary to check for a pulse, more than a little afraid of what she would discover. She was not certain of her control when she was pulling the darker harmonies. The problem was that it was impossible to practicewithout putting someone at risk. She had nearly killed Leo Bellamy, and a few weeks ago she’d put a Wilson Parsons client into a deep sleep that had lasted nearly two days. The client had survived and recovered with no clear memory of the events leading up to his unexpectedly long nap, but if she accidentally murdered a leading antiquities dealer, her life might get very complicated, very fast.
    It occurred to her that this was the third time she had used her talent to such devastating effect in the past few months.
    “Getting to be a bad habit,” she said to the dust bunny.
    She breathed a small sigh of relief when she discovered Vickary’s pulse. It was slow, indicating a state of deep unconsciousness, but it was detectable. The depth of his dreamstate was a good thing, she told herself. The odds were excellent that he would not remember her, at least not with any clarity. She would become a fragment of a dream to him.
    She rose, stepped back quickly, and looked at the dust bunny.
    “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting out of here,” she said. “The last thing I need is to get caught in a room full of Alien tech with this guy.”
    “Too late.” The voice from the doorway was male and freighted with the kind of power and authority that usually was accompanied by a badge and a mag-rez gun. “It looks like you do have a room full of Alien tech and a body to explain.”

Chapter 4
     
    She stared at the man in the doorway, stunned. His collar-length, night-dark hair was brushed straight back from a sharp widow’s peak on his high forehead.