A spark of fire caught his eye. He managed to look down and saw that the stone in his ring was burning. Real energy. Not part of the dream.
“You will open the vault for me now,” Frye said.
Slowly, painfully, Sam began to unwind his arms. Each tiny movement required enormous effort. It was like moving through quicksand.
And then he heard the light footsteps in the outer hall. A woman.
Abby.
“That will very likely be Miss Radwell, come to see what’s keeping you,” Frye said. “I didn’t plan this, but it’s going to work out well. When your new girlfriend walks through that door, she will be silhouetted against the light, a very easy target. You will kill her, and then you will open the vault. Afterward, you will turn the gun on yourself. Given your recent history of depression, no one will be terribly surprised.”
The footsteps drew closer. Now he could hear a familiar clicking sound. Dog nails. Abby had Newton with her.
Sam tried to call Abby’s name, but he could not get the words out.
It was the damned recurring nightmare made real.
The footsteps and the clicking stopped. Frye moved out from behind the desk and aimed the gun at the door.
Sam pulled hard on his senses. This dream was going to have a different ending.
And suddenly he knew intuitively how to shatter the trance. He focused everything he had left through the Phoenix stone. It was all he had to work with, his only chance to save Abby.
He found the resonating frequency buried deep in the heart of the stone, the latent power that he had always known was there. In that moment, it was his to command.
The Phoenix crystal blazed with dark fire, swamping the energy that Frye was using to maintain the dreamstate. Sam came out of the paralysis on a wave of raw power.
Paranormal lightning arced from the ring, igniting Frye’s aura. Psi-fire blazed around him, enveloping him in flames. He opened his mouth in a silent scream. His body stiffened, as if electrified. The gun and the prism fell from his hands. Violent convulsions racked his body.
He crumpled and collapsed without making a sound. The paranormal fire winked out. So did Frye’s aura.
The door of the room slammed open. But it was not Abby who stood silhouetted in the doorway. Newton charged into the shadows, low to the ground, silent and dangerous. He locked his jaws around Frye’s right ankle.
“Abby,” Sam said. “Call off your dog.”
Abby appeared. “Newton. That’s enough.”
Newton released the ankle and trotted back to her.
“See?” Sam said. “He goes for the ankles every time.”
Abby ignored that. “Everything okay in here?”
Sam glanced down at his ring. The crystal was no longer burning.
He looked at her. “It is now.”
44
“WELL, OF COURSE YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT I WOULDN’T do something dumb like open the door and make a perfect target out of myself,” Abby said. She patted Newton’s head. “I watch TV like everyone else. You don’t charge into an unknown situation. But Newton is a lot shorter than me. I knew that no one would be expecting a dog to be the first one through the door.”
Newton licked her hand. She fed him another treat, his fourth or fifth, Sam thought. He had lost count.
Sam raised his glass. “Here’s to Newton.”
“To Newton,” Willow said.
“To Newton,” Elias repeated.
The four of them were sitting in the living room of the big house. A fire burned brightly on the wide stone hearth. The Coppersmith employees and their families had returned to their island lodgings, preparing to leave in the morning. The county sheriff and a deputy had come and gone, taking Gerald Frye’s body with them.
Everyone seemed to think that Frye had died of a heart attack. There was, Sam thought, nothing to indicate otherwise. He looked at his ring and thought about the raw power he had pulled from the small Phoenix crystal. So much energy from just a tiny stone.
“Not to take away anything from Newton’s act of derring–do,” Abby said, “but it’s obvious that Sam had the situation under control before Newton and I arrived.”
“Don’t be so sure of that.” Sam swallowed some of his whiskey and set the glass down on the arm of his chair. He gazed into the flames. “In a weird way, I think it was knowing that you were coming down the hall and that you would open the door that gave me the juice I needed to break through the trance.”
“You would have escaped from the dreamstate with or without me,” Abby said, with conviction.
Willow smiled. “You have a lot of confidence in my son.”
Abby raised her glass. “Another professional.”
Elias studied her with keen interest. “How did you know?”
“Know what?” Abby asked.
“That Sam was in danger?”
Abby rubbed Newton’s ears. “I just knew. And there was a huge sense of urgency about the knowing. I knew he had set a trap in the lab, so that was the logical place to go first.” She glared at Sam. “I thought you had set up cameras to photograph the killer when he went after the prism.”
Willow frowned. “Yes, that was the plan.”
“I changed the plan,” Sam said. He took his attention off the flames and looked at Abby. “Did you know that Frye was in the lab with me?”
“I wasn’t certain, but I had a feeling he might be there, because Jenny O’Connell was alone. Frye had been with her most of the day, but suddenly she was on her own. When I realized the door was unlocked, I flattened myself against the wall, just like they do on the cop shows, and sent Newton in.” She smiled, not bothering to conceal her pride. “And it worked great. Except that you had already taken out Frye, so in the end, it was something of a nonevent.”
“Trust me, it was not a nonevent from my perspective,” Sam said. He drank some more whiskey. He was still riding a post-burn buzz, but he was going to crash soon.
Elias scowled at him. “Why didn’t you tell us that you suspected Frye was the one who would walk into your trap?”
“He didn’t tell you because he didn’t want to get it wrong,” Abby said quietly. “Sam knows what it’s like to be falsely accused.”
Willow sighed. “I understand. So does Elias. It’s just that you took such a risk, Sam.”
“A calculated risk,” Sam said. He drank some more whiskey. “What I did not factor into the equation was the possibility that Frye might have another prism weapon. Also, I didn’t factor in Abby.”
“Or Newton,” Abby said.
“No,” Sam said. He smiled and rested his head against the back of the chair. The exhaustion was starting to seep through him. “I didn’t make allowances for Newton, either.”
Elias shook his head in disgust. “There were a few things that I failed to factor in, too. All these years I’ve been watching for a single lab book to surface. Knox and I were aware of only the one notebook containing the record of the experiments. It never dawned on us that Ray Willis had filled up a second notebook with the results of experiments that he ran in secret.”
“The question now,” Sam said, “is where did Gerald Frye stash the other notebook?”
“With luck, it will be among his personal possessions,” Elias said. “We need to get someone inside his house as fast as possible to search the place.”
“I can do it after I’ve had some sleep,” Sam said.
“Forget it,” Elias said. “I’ll handle the search first thing in the morning. According to Frye’s personnel records, he had no close family. No one will think it strange if his employer takes charge of his personal possessions until someone arrives who is authorized to claim them.”