He managed to take one step and then another, but the darkness bound him as securely as a prison cell. He knew he would not get to her in time.

At the end of the hall, she stopped and looked back at him, her hand on the doorknob.

He said her name one more time, but she did not respond.

Cassidy.

She opened the door and entered the lab. The killer was waiting for her.…

SAM CAME AWAKE AS HE ALWAYS DID AFTER THE DREAM, BREATHING hard and drenched in sweat. He wrenched the covers aside and sat up on the edge of the bed. He forced himself to take a few deep breaths.

After a while he got up, yanked off his damp T–shirt, pulled on a pair of pants and opened the bedroom door. For a moment, he stood in the shadowed hall and studied the door across the way. Abby was inside that room. She had not invited him to join her. He had not pushed. His intuition warned him that she not only needed sleep, she needed time to come to terms with whatever had happened between them last night.

One night of hot, psi-infused sex did not a relationship make, he thought. Well, it had for him, but he could tell that Abby was having trouble with the concept. It was probably hard to focus on your personal life when you were worried about people with guns trying to kidnap you. A woman had to set priorities. So did a man, and keeping Abby safe was his one and only priority now.

He started down the dimly lit hall toward the stairs but paused when he heard the click of dog nails on the other side of Abby’s bedroom door. Newton was awake and alert inside the room.

“It’s okay,” Sam said, keeping his voice to a whisper. “Go back to sleep.”

He went downstairs to the kitchen, turned on a light and took the whiskey out of the cupboard. He poured a medicinal shot and drank it, leaning against the granite counter. The heat of the liquor burned away the last fragments of the dream.

When the glass was empty, he thought about going back to bed, but that would be futile. He would not sleep again tonight. He never did after the dream. He would be awake until morning, so he might as well do something productive.

He turned off the light, left the kitchen and went down to the basement. He walked along the hall, the same hall that appeared in the damn dream. The ghostly images of Cassidy walking this path to her doom were not from his memories. He had not been in the house that night. But he had imagined how it must have happened so many times that his reconstructed version of events had become as detailed and as graphic as a photograph.

He opened the door and went into the chamber. The energy in the room stirred all of his senses. The lab was drenched in darkness, but the specimens in the glass cases were all hot. They burned most strongly at night.

He jacked up his talent and walked through the dazzling rainbow of paranormal light. The hues ranged across the spectrum, from icy ultrablack to hot ultrareds and on into the silvery ultrawhite energy that the old alchemists had called the Hermetic Stream, the water that did not wet the hands.

The raw-amber pieces were especially powerful to his heightened senses. He stopped in front of a glass case and studied the copper-and-gold radiation given off by the specimen inside. The same color as Abby’s hair, he realized. He smiled a little and reached out to open the case.

Soft footsteps and the click of dog nails sounded in the hall. He turned away from the case and saw Abby and Newton silhouetted in the doorway. Abby had a flashlight in her hand. The beam speared into the lab, illuminating one of the glass cases.

Newton trotted into the room and immediately began to investigate the space, his nose to the floor.

Sam looked at Abby. She had put on her robe and slippers. Her hair was a wild storm of curls around her face. His slightly jacked senses got hotter.

“Didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said.

She moved slowly into the room. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” He went to the desk and flipped the switch on the lamp.

“Not much in the way of lighting,” she said. She switched off the flashlight. “I think of labs as being sterile, brightly lit places, like the Coppersmith Black Box.”

“They often turn off the lights in the Box. Paranormal energy is more vivid to the senses in darkness.”

“Yes.”

She walked slowly toward him, gazing into the cases that she passed. He felt energy shimmer in the atmosphere and knew that she had heightened her talent. He would know her aura anywhere and in any light, he thought.

“What do you see when you look at these stones?” she asked.

He looked at her, not the gems and crystals that surrounded them. She dazzled his senses more than any of the rare stones in the room.

“Fireworks, rainbows and a thousand shades of lightning,” he said.

“I can sense that they’re hot. Anyone with a scrap of talent could figure that out.” She stopped a short distance away. “But I don’t see fireworks, rainbows and lightning.”

“That’s because you’re not looking at what I’m looking at.”

“What are you looking at?”

“You.”

She took a step closer, and then another, until she was only a foot away. She raised her hand and brushed her fingertips across the phoenix tattoo that covered his shoulder.

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” she asked.

“A dream woke me.”

“A bad one,” she said. It was not a question.

“A recurring one.”

“Was it about the woman you were dating? The one who was killed here in this room?”

“Cassidy Lawrence. Good guess.”

“Not a guess,” Abby said. “Intuition. What really happened that night?”

“Damned if I know.” He exhaled slowly. “I was on an assignment with that private contractor I told you about. I finished the job early and got the feeling that I needed to get back here to the Copper Beach house as soon as possible. I arrived sometime after midnight. Knew something was wrong immediately.”

“Bad energy?”

“There was definitely some of that, but the really big clue was that the alarm system had been turned off.”

“By Cassidy?”

“I don’t know. I never gave her the code. Maybe she had some good hacking skills. But my theory is that it was the killer who deactivated the system. I entered the house. Nothing appeared to be disturbed, but I could feel the psychic residue that murder always leaves. Same thing I sensed today at Webber’s house. Death leaves a calling card. I found Cassidy’s body in here. There was no obvious sign of violence. The authorities and everyone else concluded that she had taken an overdose of some exotic club drugs.”

“Suicide?”

“No. I’m sure of it. Trust me, Cassidy was not the type.”

“But you never found the killer.”

“No.”

“What do you think happened that night?” Abby asked.

“I’ve gone over and over all possible scenarios, and I keep coming back to the only one that works. It was a setup right from the beginning.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cassidy must have helped engineer the whole thing. I don’t want to believe it, because it makes me look so damned stupid, but there’s no other explanation that fits. Serves me right for breaking the rules.”

“What rules?”

“Never date the employees.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“At a gem-and-mineral show in Arizona. I hit most of the big events each year, because you never know what might show up. Once in a while, there’s a hot stone. At that show, one of the dealers had a very interesting chunk of psi-infused quartz. It was obvious that he didn’t realize what he had. In fact, the only other person in the vicinity who clearly recognized the nature of the quartz was the spectacular-looking woman standing next to me.”

“Cassidy.”

“Right. One thing led to another. She was smart, gorgeous and talented. And she was as obsessed with hot rocks as I am. She wanted a job with Coppersmith. I introduced her to the director of the Black Box. Frye hired her immediately. Talent like hers is hard to come by.”