Jayne Castle - Dark Light

Elvis hopped down from the windowsill. He drifted across the floor and vaulted up onto the back of the chair. Sierra held out her wrist to him. He leaped aboard and bounded up to perch on her shoulder.

"I'll meet you at the registrar's office at a quarter to five," Fontana said. "Did you drive?"

"No, I took a cab."

He opened the door and looked at the anxious young man seated at the smaller of the two desks. Dray Levine was the new second assistant to the new chief executive assistant, Harlan Ostendorf. A week ago Dray had been a clerk in the records department. He was still adjusting to the rarified atmosphere of the executive suite.

"Dray, please see my fiancee downstairs and into a Guild limo."

Dray stared, clearly dumbfounded. His throat worked.

"Fiancee, sir?" he finally managed.

"That's right." Fontana smiled. "Miss McIntyre and I are getting married today."

"Uh, congratulations, sir."

"Thank you," Fontana said.

"A limo isn't necessary, really," Sierra said.

Fontana smiled. "Sure it is. I'm not sending my future bride home in a taxi when there's a fleet of perfectly good limos sitting downstairs in the garage."

Dray's stunned expression finally smoothed out into his more customary anxious-to-please look. He jumped to his feet.

"I'll be happy to escort Miss McIntyre downstairs, sir," he said. "Will there be anything else?"

"Yes." Fontana looked at the empty desk. "When does Harlan get back?"

Dray glanced at the clock. "Mr. Ostendorf took an early lunch. He's due back in about ten minutes."

"Good. When he returns, please tell him I want to see him immediately."

"Yes, sir."

Fontana studied Dray's ill-concealed astonishment. Rumors and gossip flowed rapidly through the Guild. The news of his marriage would be common knowledge within the organization in less than an hour. He smiled, satisfied.

"My work here is done," he said.

He closed the door, went back to his desk, and sat down. Dray wasn't the only one who was still a little stunned.

He had never intended to suggest a marriage contract to Sierra. The original plan had been to offer her a full-time bodyguard and around-the-clock protection until he had cleaned up the mess.

But he had revised the strategy in a heartbeat when she walked through his door. The result was that at five o'clock today, he would have himself a bride.

He'd never had one of those before. There had never been time for anything other than brief affairs. He'd been too busy. Surviving his career at the Bureau and the lightning-fast climb up through the ranks of the Crystal Guild that had followed had required his full attention.

Tonight he would go to bed a married man. True, it was only a Marriage of Convenience, which was, admittedly, barely a step up from having an affair. He also knew that his new bride viewed the move as purely a business arrangement.

Nevertheless, it felt real.

"WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON, SIERRA?" IVOR RUNTLEY, better known to his staff, behind his back, as the Runt, flattened his big hands on Sierra's desk and loomed over her. "And don't try to tell me that you've been dating Fontana in secret for months, because I'm not buying it."

Sierra glanced quickly around. Fortunately, it was lunchtime. They had the newsroom to themselves.

Runtley was anything but a runt. Sixty-one years old and as bald as a golf ball, he was built like a two-ton boulder. His sheer mass often caused people to make the mistake of thinking that he was as dumb as a rock. It was a serious misconception.

Once upon a time Runtley had been an investigative journalist. He had worked for a mainstream paper, the Crystal Herald . But somewhere along the line he had become obsessed with the mysteries left behind by the aliens. Rumor had it that he had gotten badly fried by a ghost while investigating a story. He had blamed the Guild, claiming it had tried to silence him. Whatever the truth of the matter, the experience had left him with an illogical fixation that had led him to file increasingly bizarre and unsubstantiated stories at the Herald . He had eventually been fired.

His response had been to scrape together enough money to buy the Curtain , a nearly moribund little weekly that had been about to go out of business altogether. Within months he had transformed it into a sensational, moneymaking tabloid that now published daily. Sierra knew he didn't give a damn about the celebrity gossip or the scandals that were the lifeblood of the paper. All he cared about was having the opportunity to print what he considered the truth about alien and Guild secrets.

Like everyone else at the Curtain , Sierra was pretty sure Runtley was crazy when it came to the subject of the long-vanished aliens, but she liked him, anyway. He had given her a job, after all, even though she'd come to him with absolutely no journalism credentials whatsoever. All she'd had six months ago was a growing conviction that something was very wrong on the streets of the city's Old Quarter and that the Guild was involved. Runtley had hired her instantly. When it came to the subject of the Guild, they shared a mutual distrust that some felt bordered on paranoia.

Her boss wasn't the only person she liked here at the paper. After a depressingly checkered career in a variety of jobs, she was finally in a position that felt right; maybe not perfect but, then, what job was perfect? Perhaps she felt at home here because her colleagues in the newsroom, from Runtley on down, were also misfits in their own way. Certainly none of them had started out looking forward to careers as tabloid reporters. They had all landed at the Curtain after erratic and eccentric paths.

Together they faced the disdain of their colleagues in the mainstream media and shared stories about their perennially embarrassed families. Where does your daughter work? Oh, she's a journalist? What newspaper? The Curtain ? Isn't that one of those sleazy tabloids ?

She sat back in her chair. "I warned Fontana that I wouldn't be able to fool you, sir."

Runtley leaned farther over the desk. Even though there was no one around to hear him, he lowered his usually booming voice to a low rumble. "This sudden decision to sign an MC with Fontana is connected to your investigation of the Guild's cover-up of the alien lab, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir. He wants my help in the investigation. I'm asking you to trust me."

"Not a problem." Runtley's eyes guttered with the familiar feverish excitement that always came over him when the prospect of a real scoop involving the Guilds or alien relics arose. "Are you sure you can trust Fontana?"

She thought about that, checking in again with her intuition. "Not exactly. He's keeping secrets. But he agrees that there is some sort of conspiracy within the Guild and that it is linked to the juice dealing and maybe to the disappearances. I believe him when he says he wants to get to the bottom of whatever is going on."

"Huh." Runtley did not bother to conceal his skepticism.

She looked at Elvis. He was sitting on the corner of her desk, munching on the peanut butter and banana sandwich she had made him. The coffee mug the newsroom staff had presented to him a few weeks ago was nearby. It featured a photo of an ancient Earth singing icon. The name Elvis was spelled out in glow-in-the-dark letters.

"Elvis liked Fontana," she said. "He's a pretty good judge of character."

"Forget the bunny. I don't give diddly-squat about what he thinks. What about you? You're the one with the mega-rez intuition. What was your take on Fontana?"

She hesitated. Runtley was one of the very few people who knew about her odd talent and actually believed in it. Like the others in her family who possessed various unusual paranormal abilities that did not depend on amber, she had learned long ago not to confide in others. When she did try to talk about her intuition, she usually got one of two unpleasant reactions. Most people simply didn't believe her and laughed off the claim. Such cases could prove socially awkward but not particularly devastating.