The weak light from the jelly-lamp above the door gleamed on the gun in Irene Dunley’s hand.
“Come back inside at once,” Irene said in the same tone of voice that she used to give instructions to student assistants. “Really, some people don’t know enough to come in out of the rain.”
“Lucas, she’s got a gun.”
“Stop right where you are, Mr. Trent, or I shall be forced to shoot.”
Lucas halted halfway down the walk. He turned slowly to face Irene. Amaryllis sensed that he was weighing the odds of getting her to safety before Irene could pull the trigger. She felt the precise instant when he accepted the fact that he could not outrun a bullet.
“Come here,” Irene said.
Lucas carried Amaryllis slowly back up the steps and into the house. Irene rewarded him with a smile of cold approval.
“That’s better. Now, kindly sit down.” Irene trained the nose of the gun on Amaryllis as she gave the order. “Over there on the sofa will do.”
Lucas said nothing. He carried Amaryllis into the living room and set her carefully on her feet. He searched her face.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
There was no trace of emotion in his voice, but the bleak chill in his eyes frightened Amaryllis almost as much as the assault on her sanity that was taking place on the psychic plane.
“No.” Amaryllis reached for the arm of the sofa to steady herself. “I’m not all right. I can’t get free.” She lowered herself gingerly down onto the cushions. “Lucas, I’m going crazy.”
Lucas looked at Irene. “Let her go.”
“I don’t think that would be wise.” Irene moved slowly toward them. “She would be free to link with you, then, Mr. Trent and I suspect that you are a very strong talent. As I am uncertain about the exact nature of your psychic abilities, however, I would prefer to keep them neutralized by restricting your access to a powerful prism.”
Lucas shrugged as if the matter were not all that important, but he never took his eyes off Irene’s face as he lowered himself to the arm of the sofa.
“Don’t worry,” Irene said pleasantly. “I expect she’ll burn out any second. No prism is strong enough to handle my full range of power. Even Jonathan burned out when I used the complete spectrum of my talent.”
Amaryllis sagged on the sofa cushion. She held her head in her hands and fought for her sanity. She’d never been trained for anything like this. What Irene was doing was supposed to be impossible.
Nothing she did seemed to alter the flow of talent that roared through the prism. As far as she could tell, Irene was not using the thundering flow of energy for any purpose other than to chain the focus so that Lucas could not seize it. She wondered fleetingly what sort of talent Irene possessed.
“You murdered Landreth, didn’t you?” Lucas said casually to Irene.
Amaryllis felt the whisper of a cold, motionless wind. She lifted her head, fighting back waves of psychic pain to stare at Lucas. Then she turned toward Irene. “You killed Professor Landreth?”
“I had to kill him.” Irene sounded vaguely regretful. “In the end, I realized that it had to be done. There was no choice.”
“Was it because Landreth had figured out that you were capable of doing this to a prism?” Lucas touched Amaryllis’s shoulder.
Pain exploded through her confused senses. Her seared nerve endings did not know how to interpret the feel of Lucas’s hand. He withdrew his fingers instantly when Amaryllis cried out. She huddled on the edge of the sofa.
“Oh, no, you don’t understand.” Irene’s expression was one of modest pride. “Jonathan was very respectful of my power. He worked with me for many years, teaching me to control it. We were always testing, training, and exploring the possibilities of my talent together. He said he’d never encountered anything like it. Those were glorious hours. I shall treasure them forever.”
“He served as your prism, didn’t he?” Amaryllis managed to ask.
“Yes, indeed. He was my only prism after my husband died. Jonathan did not want to use anyone else to provide a focus for me because he said it was too dangerous.”
“For the prism?” Lucas asked.
“No, no. For me.” Irene chuckled. “Jonathan felt that for my own safety, no one should know the extent of my talent. It was our little secret, he said. It bound us together more surely than any wedding license.”
“So why did you kill him?” Lucas asked. “Because you didn’t want him to know about your little secret any longer?”
“Oh, no, that wasn’t the reason.”
“Why?” Amaryllis got out hoarsely. “Why did you murder him?”
“Because he was not the man I had believed him to be.” Irene’s mouth tightened. “I thought he was made of the very stuff of our founders. Instead, I discovered that he was perverted and corrupt. He betrayed me.”
“Oh lord,” Amaryllis whispered. “This had nothing to do with politics or Gifford. You killed Professor Landreth because of those standing appointments with Vivien, didn’t you?”
“Jonathan proved to be just as weak as my husband had been. No moral fiber at all. It was very disappointing.”
Pain flared on the psychic plane. Amaryllis flinched and tried not to move. “He left that Friday to go to his mountain cabin. You met him there and pushed him off the cliff.”
“We often went to the mountains together,” Irene said. “No one else knew of our weekend rendezvous at his cabin, naturally.”
“Another one of your little secrets,” Lucas said.
Another eddy of cold wind moved in the room. Amaryllis took heart. She probed cautiously, trying to dampen the clarity of the prism. It stayed sharp and precise, providing a focus for Irene’s raging talent.
“Jonathan and I were always very discreet.” Irene sighed. “But on that last occasion, I was obliged to end our relationship. We took a walk along the cliff path after dinner as usual. Formed a last prism link. I took him to his psychic limits and then, just as he was about to burn out, pushed him over the edge. I don’t think he even knew what had happened.”
“Dear God.” Amaryllis sank deeper into the sofa.
“Afterward I tidied up and came home alone,” Irene said. “It was the saddest day of my life, but I felt good about it. I knew I had done the right thing.”
“And the authorities never questioned Landreth’s accident,” Lucas said.
“It all went very smoothly,” Irene assured him. “Most things do if one organizes them properly.”
“You mean it went smoothly until Amaryllis started asking questions,” Lucas said.
Irene glared at Amaryllis with accusing eyes. “A most unfortunate turn of events. A bit of bad luck that I could not have anticipated. Your encounter with Sheffield while he was focusing in what you considered an unethical manner led you back to the Department of Focus Studies.”
“You knew that questions about a Landreth-trained prism focusing in an unethical manner for a powerful politician could lead to questions and speculation,” Amaryllis whispered.
Irene sighed. “Eventually that speculation would have led to questions about the professor’s death. It was inevitable because you were bound to realize that you had uncovered a possible murder motive. It was the wrong motive and the wrong suspect, of course, but your persistence could have led you to me.”
“Why did you send me to Vivien?”
“I tried to nip the whole thing in the bud by demonstrating to you that Jonathan Landreth was not worthy of your loyalty. I thought perhaps you’d let the entire matter drop once you realized what he was.”
“You sent me to talk to Vivien of the Veils thinking that I would be shocked and disgusted when I learned about her relationship with Professor Landreth.” Amaryllis gritted her teeth as power spiked on the psychic plane. “You thought I’d drop my investigation into his death because he was seeing a syn-sex stripper?”
“If you had possessed a proper sense of values, you would have done so. Y
ou’d have understood that Jonathan’s death was nothing less than what he deserved. He had consorted with a creature of low morals. Justice had been done.”
Rage flashed through Amaryllis. “You have no right to condemn poor Vivien for her morals. Yours are a lot lower than hers ever were. You’re a murderer.”
The rush of talent energy dimmed. Hope sparked in Amaryllis. But as her own red-hot anger receded, Irene’s crude power surged once more.
Irene shook her head. “I thought you and I had a great deal in common, Miss Lark. I believed your standards to be as high as my own. You seemed like such a nice young lady. Obviously I was mistaken.”
Lucas shifted slightly on the sofa. “When you realized that Amaryllis intended to continue pushing for answers, you took another step. You tried to point the finger at Gifford Osterley. He had a motive, after all. Everyone knew that he and Landreth had quarreled.”
“When Miss Lark inquired about the appointments Jonathan had made on the last day of his life, it occurred to me that it might be useful to bring that dreadful Gifford Osterley into the picture,” Irene agreed.
Fury erupted like a geyser inside Amaryllis. And again she thought she detected a slight weakening of Irene’s energy flow. “You set out to frame Gifford. You wrote down that three o’clock appointment in Professor Landreth’s calendar.”
“After all these years, it was a simple matter to imitate his handwriting,” Irene said.
Lucas watched her intently. “But you changed your mind about framing Osterley. You set Madison Sheffield up for the fall, instead. Why the switch? I thought you were a big fan of his.”
Irene’s eyes blazed. “I discovered that Madison Sheffield was no better than Jonathan.”
“How?” Lucas asked.
“Natalie Elwick,” Amaryllis said.
“Indeed.” Irene’s mouth tightened. “Gifford Osterley’s secretary is an old acquaintance of mine. We worked together for years before she left the department to manage Unique Prisms’ new office. She confided to me that Sheffield demanded only beautiful, young, female prisms who were willing to sleep with him as part of their services. He got some sort of perverted sexual thrill out of it, Natalie said.”
“No wonder Gifford was worried about having his firm dragged any deeper into the investigation,” Lucas said softly. “He’s running a full-spectrum call girl operation.”
“Can you believe it?” Irene’s voice rose. “Madison Sheffield was the Founders’ Values candidate. The next governor of this city-state. He would have been president if I hadn’t stopped him.”
“So you decided to destroy his career by framing him for Vivien’s death,” Lucas said.
“I had already planned to punish the syn-sex stripper. She was the one who led Jonathan astray, after all. I could not allow her to live. But I had not yet finished organizing the arrangements for her death when everything started to fall apart.”
“Because Amaryllis started asking questions,” Lucas said.
“She was a threat to all of my plans.” Irene tightened both hands on the grip of the gun.
“Professor Landreth had no file on Sheffield, did he?” Amaryllis managed tightly. “You created it as part of your plan to dispose of Vivien, me, and Sheffield in one neat package.”
Lucas looked at Irene. “You left that phony file, half-burned, in Vivien’s dressing room after you killed her.”
“I singed it just enough to make it appear that Sheffield had tried to destroy blackmail evidence,” Irene said. “I thought it was a nice touch.”
“What did you tell Sheffield to get him to Vivien’s dressing room that night?”
“I was with Vivien when she placed the calls to both you and Sheffield. I held a gun on her and forced her to read the script I had prepared before I killed her.”
“The guard,” Amaryllis said. “How did you get rid of the stage door guard?”
“I paid a street person to offer the man a bribe to leave his post for an hour. Really, one simply cannot get reliable help these days.”
“You planned to kill me after I discovered Vivien’s body. You waited for me in the hall outside her dressing room, didn’t you? You wanted it to appear that Madison Sheffield had shot both me and Vivien.”
“That was the way I had organized it, but you ruined that plan, too.”
“How dare you?” Amaryllis’s anger soared above the psychic pain. The energy gushing through the Prism slowed discernibly.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Lucas glance at her. She knew that he had sensed that Irene’s grip had wavered for a instant. He was a detector, after all. And he was very powerful. He had demonstrated before that he had enough control of his own talent to marshal it for brief flashes of energy.
Irene frowned. “Why did you go back into Vivien’s dressing room that night? Why didn’t you run for the stage door entrance after you discovered her body? I was sure you would dash for help. I had turned out the corridor lights so that you wouldn’t see me. I knew that you would be silhouetted against the light from the dressing room. A clear target. But you leaped back and slammed the door before I could pull the trigger. Why? Why?”
“I felt you.” Amaryllis sat very still on the edge of the sofa. “I sensed your talent sputtering like oil in a frying pan. You were not in full control of it.”
“That’s not true,” Irene hissed. “I am in full control of my talent at all times.”
“You must have been nervous that night,” Amaryllis whispered. “Not surprising, given the fact that you had just committed murder and intended to kill again.”
“You’re wrong. My talent is always under my complete control.” Irene’s voice rose. “But you upset all my plans when you didn’t come out into the hall. I was trying to decide what to do next when Madison Sheffield arrived. He was the one who was nervous. It was his talent you felt leaping about out like … like hot oil.”
“Later, yes, when I was hiding from him in the backstage tunnels. But not at first.” Amaryllis forced a derisive smile. “At first, it was you, and you were definitely out of control.”
“No, it was Sheffield,” Irene shouted. “It must have been him. He’s weak.”
The energy pouring through the prism shimmered and slowed. A human being had only so much power of any kind on which to draw, Amaryllis reminded herself. Irene’s rage had briefly siphoned off energy from her psychic efforts. Not enough to allow Amaryllis to break free, but enough to give her hope.
Somewhere in the distance, at the very edge of her awareness, she sensed Lucas’s talent stirring. It prowled there in the shadows, a psychic beast of prey watching for an opening.
“Sheffield never even noticed me in the darkness.” Irene calmed herself with a visible effort. “For a terrible moment I thought everything had gone wrong. I was afraid that when he was unable to find the hall lights, he would turn and run back out into the alley. Instead, he used the glow of that ridiculous star on Vivien’s door to guide him. Foolish man. He was too scared to turn back. Vivien had told him on the phone that she had information that could damage his campaign, you see.”
“When he went into the dressing room and turned on the light, you went out through the stage door entrance,” Lucas concluded. “And then you locked the alley door so that Sheffield would be forced to wander blindly around the backstage tunnels looking for another way out.”
“I knew that sooner or later he would blunder into someone who would recognize him,” Irene said. “And then the body and the file would be found, and everything would be neat and orderly again. It was true that Amaryllis would not be dead as I had intended, but I thought that surely she would stop asking questions once Sheffield was arrested for murder. Surely that would satisfy her.”
Amaryllis stared at Irene while she fought the psychic pain. “But the day before I left the city to visit my family, I told you I wasn’t satisfied and I had a few more questions.”
“You had become obsessive,” Irene raged. “It was obvious that
you were never going to quit. I understood then that nothing would stop you. You would continue to poke and pry until eventually you stumbled onto the truth. It has become clear to me that both you and Mr. Trent must die. Then things will be tidied up at last. Everything will be back under control.”
“It’s too late for everything to be made neat and orderly.” Amaryllis summoned every ounce of emotion she could find: righteous anger at the grave injustices that Irene had perpetrated; fear for Lucas’s life and her own; and love. The love she had for Lucas was more powerful than the other emotions combined. She would not let him die. She had to save him.
For some reason, she suddenly recalled the visit to Elizabeth Bailey. Some walls were too high to climb. But there were other ways around them.
Irene must be distracted so that Lucas could act. The easiest way to divert the attention of a high-class talent was to force her to use more power. Extreme power required extreme concentration.
Amaryllis consciously tore down the civilized barriers of self-control that had been built up over a lifetime. A flood of emotion and passion poured through her. She fed the fierce feelings of the moment with all the stored anger, righteous indignation, and sheer determination she had ever known. And then she threw in the will to survive and to save Lucas.
A witch’s brew boiled through her bloodstream, a heady, intoxicating drug that affected everything, even events on the psychic plane.
The focus shifted and dimmed.
Irene fought back, using more energy to hold the link. Amaryllis screamed silently as the bands of talent brightened visibly. Then she forced Irene to use more power.
“Stop it.” The gun trembled in Irene’s hands. “Stop it this instant, do you hear me? You’ll only burn yourself out if you keep it up.”
Burning out would be a blessing, but Amaryllis sensed that might not happen, at least not in time. She braced herself against the mounting fear of being driven insane and concentrated on what she had to do.
“What’s the matter, Irene?” she said. “Afraid you’ll be the one to burn out first? Professor Landreth had a theory that it was possible to actually destroy a talent this way. Did he ever tell you about it?”