The Hot Zone (A Rainshadow Novel Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

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