Jayne Castle - Bridal Jitters

"Heads." He moved toward her.

She flipped the coin into the air. He caught it before it struck the polished surface of her desk.

"Heads," he said without bothering to look at it.

She wrinkled her nose. "You're in luck. I'm too tired to argue."

At the door of the office, she paused to switch off the lights. He followed her out into the front hall and locked up. Together, they climbed the elaborately carved central staircase to the second floor and went down the corridor to the small suite of rooms she used as an apartment.

She opened her door, stepped inside, and swung around to face him through the narrow opening. Her green-and-gold eyes were big and deep in the shadows. He could feel the tingle of awareness in his paranormal senses and knew that he was responding to her on the psychic plane as well as on the physical level. Sensual psi energy shimmered disturbingly in the small space that separated them. Couldn't she sense it? He wondered. Was she really oblivious to the attraction between them?

The wariness in her eyes made him uneasy. With each passing day, she appeared to be growing more restless. His fears of being driven crazy by sexual frustration were submerged beneath a new concern: What if she changed her mind? What if she canceled the MC?

Stay focused, he told himself. This will work. It had to work.

"Good night," he said as casually as he could manage. He forced himself to take a step back. What he really wanted to do was pick her up and carry her through the small living room, straight into her bedroom. "I'll see you in the morning."

She hesitated. "Sam?"

"Yeah?" He realized that he had stopped breathing.

She sighed. "Never mind. It's not important. Good night."

Very gently, she closed the door in his face.

He reminded himself to breathe.

He did not sleep well that night. It was not the noise from the crowds in the street or the whispers of Dead City psi energy that kept him awake. It was the realization that Virginia was getting ready to tell him that she did not want to go through with the marriage. He knew it as surely as he knew that when she called off the engagement, his world was going to become as bleak and gray as the tide of fog that had boiled up out of the river.

He rolled out of bed at dawn, shaved, showered, and dressed for the meeting with Ewert. He was still mulling over various means of convincing Virginia that the MC was a terrific idea when he went downstairs to collect the morning edition of the Cadence Star. He opened the front door and was greeted by a wall of gray mist. The fog was so thick that it had blotted out the early-morning sun, creating an artificial twilight that looked as if it would last all day.

Perfect Halloween weather.

He shrugged off the fog. It would not affect today's job. He and Virginia would be working underground in the catacombs. Down below in the endless miles of glowing green corridors, there was no day or night.

He saw the small package on the step just as he started to reach for the newspaper. A faint hiss of all-too-familiar psi energy whispered through his para senses in silent warning.

"Damn." Hell of a way to start the day.

He crouched on his heels to get a closer look at the square object wrapped in brown paper. It was addressed to Gage & Burch Consulting. There was no return address. He did not pick it up.

"Something wrong, Sam?" Virginia called out from halfway down the stairs.

"An unscheduled delivery." He did not take his eyes off the package.

"What is it?"

"I think you'd better take a look at this. If I'm right, it falls into your area of expertise, not mine."

She descended the rest of the stairs quickly and hurried across the wide front hall to the door. She came to a halt beside him and looked at the package.

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Uh-oh."

"I hate it when you use that professional jargon." He glanced at her. "What do you think?

"The same thing you're thinking, I imagine. It's an illusion trap. I can feel the energy pattern. Someone left us a nasty little trick. I'll bet it was some idiot who had one too many bottles of Green Ruin to drink last night. Probably thought it would be a great Halloween prank."

"I think he'll change his mind when I find him," Sam said softly.

Virginia glanced at him, frowning slightly. "Don't worry, it's just a small trap."

"Can you de-rez it?"

"Does amber resonate? Of course I can de-rez it. But I'm not going to do it out here on the front step. Let's take it into the kitchen."

She reached down and scooped up the box with a nonchalance that made Sam wince. He followed her into the big kitchen at the back of the house and watched her set the box down on the scarred counter.

"You might want to stand back a little," she said as she clipped the string. "Just in case."

"We're partners, remember?" He moved closer to the counter.

She smiled as she began to unwrap the package. "Yes, but you've never seen me work. I wouldn't blame you for being a tad cautious. Even small, simple illusion traps can be very unpleasant if they aren't untangled properly."

"I've spent a lot of time underground and I've worked with some clumsy tanglers. I've caught the flashback from an accidentally sprung trap more than once."

"Well, there won't be any flashback this time. You have my personal guarantee."

Her cool, professional arrogance amused him. He watched her peel away the brown paper. A small cardboard box was revealed. With a good deal more caution than she had exercised a moment ago, she raised the lid and gazed inside.

"Well, well, well," she murmured. She sounded as cheerful as if she had just received a bouquet of flowers.

Personally, he could think of a number of other things he would rather find on his doorstep first thing in the morning besides an illusion trap. But if the challenge of de-rezzing it lifted Virginia's spirits and gave her something else to think about besides calling off their marriage, he might be willing to overlook the prank.

"What is it?" he asked.

"A very nice piece." She angled the box to allow him a closer look at the object inside. "A little unguent jar. Museum quality. Not spectacular, but quite excellent. It would bring a good price in a gallery. I can't imagine anyone in his right mind wasting it just to play a vicious Halloween trick."

Sam eyed the small green quartz jar. It was elegantly rounded in a shape that was not quite comfortable for a human hand. The top was carved in an airy, fanciful design similar to many he had seen in the course of his career. The art and sculpture left behind by the long-vanished Harmonics always reminded him of the Old Earth poet Goethe's description of architecture: frozen music.

"You're right," he said. "It's not unique, but it's definitely valuable. Whoever our prankster is, he must be a wealthy collector if he could afford to use an artifact worth a couple of grand just to pull off a Halloween stunt."

An illusion trap had to be anchored to an artifact or to old green quartz from the ruins.

"Probably too drunk to realize what he was doing." Virginia carefully lifted the top of the jar and peered into the dark interior. "Okay, here we go. It's a simple pattern. This won't take long."

"Easy for you to say." He looked down into the shadows inside the little unguent jar. The darkness there was not normal. There was a dense quality to it, the only visible warning of the tiny trap. In the eerie glow of the green catacombs of the Dead City it was all too easy for a member of an excavation team to mistake illusion dark for ordinary shadow, but here in the brightly lit kitchen, the difference was obvious to the trained eye.

Obvious, but no less dangerous.

He had seen other tanglers work, but this was the first time he had watched Virginia in action. She'd only had a handful of clients during the time she had been renting office space from him, and she had dealt with them on her own.