She had no choice now but to fight. She flailed wildly with the flashlight. A brief flicker of satisfaction swept through her when the metal barrel struck Derek on his upper arm. She hauled back for another blow.

“Who do you think you are?” Derek snarled. “I’ll teach you to hit me.”

His face twisted into a vicious mask. He shook her furiously. The flashlight fell from her hand. Her glasses went flying.

Garrett laughed nervously. “That’s enough, Derek. She’s just a kid.”

“Garrett’s right,” the man from the backseat said. “Come on, Derek, let’s get out of here. We’ve got a lot of drinking left to do tonight. I need my weed, man.”

“We’re not leaving yet,” Derek said. “We’re just starting to have some fun.”

He drew back a clenched fist, preparing to deliver a punch. Charlotte raised both arms in a desperate attempt to ward off the blow. At the same time she kicked Derek in the knee.

Derek howled.

“Are you crazy?” Garrett said.

“Bitch,” Derek screamed. He shook her again.

A shadowy figure materialized out of the woods. Charlotte did not need her glasses to see the obsidiandark hues of a familiar ultralight rainbow. Slade Attridge.

Slade moved toward the driver with the speed and lethal intent of an attacking specter-cat.

“What the hell?” Garrett yelped, startled.

“Shit,” the man from the backseat yelped. “I told you this was a bad idea.”

Derek was oblivious to the danger. In his rage, he was obsessed only with punishing Charlotte. He did not realize what was happening until a powerful hand locked on his shoulder.

“Let her go,” Slade said. He wrenched Derek away from Charlotte.

Derek screamed. He released Charlotte and frantically tried to scramble out of reach. Slade used one booted foot to swipe Derek’s legs out from under him. Derek landed hard on the pavement, shrieking with rage and pain.

“You can’t do this to me,” he screeched. “You don’t know who you’re messing with. My dad will have you arrested. He’ll sue your ass.”

“That should be interesting,” Slade said. He looked at the other two. “Get him in the Vibe and get out of here. Come anywhere near her again and you will all wake up in an ICU or maybe just plain dead, depending on my mood at the time. Is that understood?”

“Shit, this guy’s crazy,” the man from the backseat whispered. He ran for the vehicle. “You guys do what you want. I’m out of here.”

He hopped into the driver’s seat, rezzed the little engine, and put the Vibe in gear.

“Wait up, damn it.” Garrett raced toward the Vibe and jumped into the front seat.

Derek staggered to his feet. “Don’t leave me, you bastards. He’ll kill me.”

“It’s a thought,” Slade said, as if the idea held great appeal. “Better run.”

Derek fled toward the Vibe, which was now halfway through a U-turn.

He lunged forward and managed to dive into the back of the buggy.

The Vibe whined away into the night and vanished around a turn.

A hushed silence fell. The eerie quiet was broken only by the sound of labored breathing. Charlotte realized that she was the one trying to catch her breath. She was shivering but not because she was cold. It was all she could do to stand upright. Great. She was having another stupid panic attack. And in front of Slade Attridge of all people. Just her rotten luck.

“You okay?” Slade asked. He picked up the flashlight and put it in her hand.

“Y-yes. Thanks.” She struggled with the deep, square breathing exercise the parapsychologist had taught her and tried to compose herself. “My glasses.” She looked around but everything except Slade’s darkly luminous rainbow was indistinct. “They fell off.”

“I see them,” Slade said. He started across the pavement.

“You m-must have really g-good eyes,” she said. Geez. Now she was stuttering because of the panic attack. It was all so humiliating.

“Good night vision,” Slade said. “Side effect of my talent.”

“You’re a h-hunter, aren’t you? Not a g-ghost hunter but a true hunter-talent. I thought so. I’ve got a c-cousin who is a hunter. You move the same way he does. Like a b-big specter-cat. Arcane?”

“My mother was Arcane but she never registered me with the Society,” Slade said. “She died when I was twelve.”

“What about your father?”

“He was a ghost hunter. Died in the tunnels when I was two.”

“Geez.” She wrapped her arms around herself and forced herself to breathe in the slow, controlled rhythm she had been taught. “Wh-who raised you?”

“The system.”

She went blank for a moment. “What system?”

“Foster care.”

“Geez.”

She could not think of anything else to say. She had never actually met anyone who had been raised in the foster-care system. The stern legal measures set down by the First Generation colonists had been designed to secure the institutions of marriage and the family in stone and they had been very successful. During the two hundred years since the closing of the Curtain, the laws had eased somewhat but not much. The result was that it was rare for a child to be completely orphaned. There was almost always someone who had to take you in.

Slade seemed amused. “It wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t in the system long. I bailed four years ago when I turned fifteen. Figured I’d do better on the streets.”

“Geez.” No wonder he seemed so much older, she thought. She was fifteen and she could not imagine what it would be like trying to survive on her own.

At least her pulse was starting to slow down a little. The breathing exercises were finally kicking in.

“You’re Arcane, aren’t you?” Slade asked.

“Yeah, the whole family has been Arcane for generations.” She made a face. “Mostly high-end talents. I’m the underachiever in the clan. I’m just a rainbow-reader.”

“What’s that?”

“I see aura rainbows. Totally useless, trust me.” She tried to focus on Slade as he reached down to pick up her glasses. “They’re probably smashed, huh?”

“The frames are a little bent and the lenses are scratched up.”

“Figures.” She took the glasses from him and put them on.

The twisted frames sat askew on her nose. The scratched lenses made it difficult to see Slade’s face clearly. She knew exactly what he looked like, though, because she had seen him often in town and down at the marina where he worked. He was nineteen but there was something about his sharply etched features and unreadable gray-blue eyes that made him seem so much older and infinitely more experienced. Other boys his age were still boys. Slade was a man.

She and Rachel had speculated endlessly about where he had come from and, more important, whether he had a girlfriend. If he was dating anyone they were very sure that she was not a local girl. In a town as small as Shadow Bay everyone would know if the stranger who worked at the marina was seeing an island girl.

He had shown up in the Bay at the start of the tourist season that summer, looking for work. Ben Murphy at the marina had given him a job. Slade rented a room above a dockside shop by the week. He was polite and hardworking but he kept to himself. Occasionally he caught the Friday afternoon ferry and disappeared for the weekend. It was assumed that he went to a larger town on one of the other nearby islands—Thursday Harbor, maybe, or maybe he went all the way to Frequency City. No one knew for sure. But he was always back at work at the marina on Monday morning.

“Luckily I’ve got a backup pair of glasses at my aunt’s house,” Charlotte said.

She was immediately mortified. She felt like an idiot talking about her glasses to the man who currently featured so vividly in her fantasies. Not that Slade knew about his role in her dreams. She was pretty sure that to him she was just the weird girl who worked for her crazy old aunt in the antiques shop.

“What are you doing out here at this time of night?” Slade asked.