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Contact
Evelyn Vaughn
Mills & Boon Silhouette
Her anonymous tips to the New Orleans police had helped to crack some of their toughest cases. But the cops didn't know that this elusive contact worked in their own evidence department–or that Faith Corbett was psychic.Faith had no idea her gift was the result of genetic engineering and part of a twisted heritage her mother had kept from her–until a serial killer started hunting for psychics and chose Faith as his next target. To catch the killer, she'd have to reveal her identity to a skeptical detective whose faith in her could mean the difference between life and death….Athena Force: The adventure continues with three secret sisters, three unusual talents and one unthinkable legacy….
The ties that bind may be the ties that kill as these extraordinary women race against time to beat the genetic time bomb that is their birthright….
Lynn White:
With enhanced senses, and superspeed and strength, this retrieval specialist can breach any security—but has she been working for the wrong side?
DECEIVED by Carla Cassidy
Faith Corbett:
This powerful psychic’s secret talent could make her the target of a serial killer—and a prime suspect for murder.
CONTACT by Evelyn Vaughn
Dawn O’Shaughnessy:
Her superhealing abilities make her nearly invincible, but can she heal the internal wounds from years of deception?
PAYBACK by Harper Allen
ATHENA FORCE: The adventure continues with three secret sisters, three unusual talents and one unthinkable legacy….
Contact
Evelyn Vaughn
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
EVELYN VAUGHN
has written stories since she learned to make letters. But during the two years that she lived on a Navajo reservation in Arizona—while in second and third grade—she dreamed of becoming not a writer, but a barrel racer in the rodeo. Before she actually got her own horse, however, her family moved to Louisiana. There, to avoid the humidity, she channeled more of her adventures into stories instead.
Since then, Evelyn has canoed in the East Texas swamps, rafted a white-water river in the Austrian Alps, rappelled barefoot down a three-story building, talked her way onto a ship to Greece without her passport, sailed in the Mediterranean and spent several weeks in Europe with little more than a backpack and a train pass. While she enjoys channeling the more powerful “travel Vaughn” on a regular basis, she also loves the fact that she can write about adventures with far less physical discomfort. Since she now lives in Texas, where she teaches English at Tarrant County College SE, air-conditioning remains an important factor. Feel free to contact her through her Web site, www.evelynvaughn.com, or by writing to: P.O. Box 6, Euless TX, 76039.
For my sisters at Silhouette Bombshell.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 1
I t was sensory overload. Especially for her.
“You been here before?” shouted the bartender over the noise. He was a gruff old Vietnam-vet type with a long cowboy moustache and tattoos, but Faith didn’t sense any threat off him. Of course, in this chaos, he’d have to come at her with a switchblade before she sensed a threat.
Maybe noise created its own kind of pseudo-silence—a benefit to partying with her new roommates that she hadn’t expected.
“Here, New Orleans?” she shouted back from the sanctuary he’d allowed her on his side of the bar, out of the worst of the crowd. “Or here, DeLoup’s?”
With a bottle of tequila he pointed at her green crop top which read, Tulane University. Ah, proof of her previous life. He could see she’d been in New Orleans awhile now. He grinned. “DeLoup’s.”
Faith shook her head and grinned back while, ever in motion, the bartender set some tourists up with shot glasses, lemon and salt. She usually avoided places like DeLoup’s. She wouldn’t be here now except that she hated to back down from a challenge.
Like she’d told her mom in that last, ugly argument before she’d moved out, she was through hiding in the shadows. Faith wanted people in her life, even if only people on the margins of society could really accept her. And people—social people—went dancing. And drinking. And…
And other things she’d avoided.
On that determination, she said, “It’s fun!”
And despite her enhanced senses, inexplicably keen for as long as she could remember, it was. Fun. In a throw-you-in-a-blender-and-hit-puree kind of way.
Jazz music bounced off walls hung with crooked neon beer signs and dented license plates. It mixed with laughter and shouted conversation—and heartbeats, the vibration of dozens of thudding heartbeats. Bare, multicolored bulbs dangled from ceiling fixtures, not quite reaching some of the bar’s intense shadows, but Faith could see in the dark almost as clearly as she could in the light. Frigid air-conditioning fought a losing battle against the hot, humid Louisiana night that poured into the bar every time the doors opened, not to mention the heat rolling off of its gyrating patrons. The aromas of beer and rum, sweet fruit drinks and fried appetizers mingled with colognes, breath mints and sweating, pressing humanity.
Faith could also smell the emotions, almost like perfume, could hear them on intermingled heartbeats. Currents of attraction. Patches of jealousy. Pockets of lust. From more than one area she smelled the decay of unhappiness and uncertainty.
And a whiff of…fear?
Faith frowned. Surely she’d imagined that amidst all the confusion. But real fear had its own scent, cold and acrid like metal. She did a quick head count of the roommates who’d brought her here.
Absinthe, a kohl-eyed Goth, dirty-dancing with a frat boy.
Evan, the unassuming, sandy-haired boy-next-door type, dancing with the kind of wiry, sharp-eyed guy who never pledged a fraternity.
Innocent Moonsong, hair dyed far lighter than her brown skin, rings and necklaces and piercings glistening as she belly danced in solo circles, with at least three admirers looking on.
And Krystal…
Where was Krystal?
The bartender’s hand settling onto Faith’s bare shoulder might as well have been an exposed power line. But instead of electricity she got a hard shock of concern, curiosity, wary attraction. Now she sensed that he smoked more than cigarettes…took pain pills for old pains…had pins in his knees from that wreck, shrapnel from when he saw some buddy blown up—
She stumbled back, away from the uninvited information dump, away from her own freakishness. She caught herself with an elbow on the bar’s sticky wooden surface. Jazz music swirled back in around her.
When the bartender reached for her again—“You okay, kid?”—Faith ducked quickly back, avoiding contact.
“I’m—” But what could she say? She was a freak, strange enough that even her mom couldn’t explain it, strange enough that the most accepting friends she’d found so far were French Quarter psychic readers, not exactly mainstreamers themselves. That wasn’t new. But tonight, she was a freak with a missing roommate. “I have to go find my friend. I haven’t seen her come back from the restroom.”
Which lay across a sea of dancing, mixing, pressing people.
Not that Faith had a choice. Something was wrong.
Like a swimmer taking one last breath before diving into freezing water, she braced herself, then stepped into the dancing crowd.
Every person who brushed or bumped her brought a static jolt, a blare of fragmented sound, a blast of intense scent. Like being in a pinball machine. She was the metal ball, drawn by a force as sure as gravity in one direction while too many uncaring obstacles knocked her everywhere else. Zap. Ring. In the confusion, she got only flashes of real or imagined information.
This one told her husband she was at a girlfriend’s house. That one lost out on a raise. Another just tried E for the first time.
Faith gritted her teeth as she waded through them all, finally pushing into the moderately quieter back hallway with the pay phone and the bathrooms. The door marked Filles was closed, so she knocked. “Krystal?”
Nothing. Certainly nothing good. If she concentrated, Faith could hear a heartbeat, but there was something strange about it. Something…off.
She tried the doorknob. If she wound up invading someone’s privacy, she could always claim to be drunk. The door opened barely half an inch before catching, latched with an old-fashioned hook-and-eye to go with the Old N’awlins flavor.
It was enough for Faith’s gaze to track three things.
The back of Krystal’s pale-blond head, where it lay still on the linoleum.
The faucet, pouring water into the pedestal sink.
And a booted foot seeming to levitate upward off of that sink to vanish, ghostlike, into the ceiling.
Faith jammed her hand into the crack and sliced upward, hard. The hook snapped free. Then she was in the room, skidding to her bare knees onto the gritty linoleum beside…
Beside a human shape that used to be her friend, one of her new roommates. No.
Faith didn’t have to feel for a pulse. She could hear Krystal’s lifelessness in her silence—no heartbeat, no breath. She could see the purpling stripe, like a gory scarf, around her friend’s throat, could smell death amidst the usual toilet smells, a stagnant scent, along with the remnants of that cold, metallic fear and…
And something that turned her stomach even more harshly than this violent death. That scent was also an emotion, but one she’d never caught before. And it came from—
She looked up at where the booted foot had vanished—presumably with a killer attached—and at a white ceiling panel that hadn’t been replaced quite straight in its channel.
No time to think. If she stalled on the enormity of what must have just happened in here, like a normal human would, any chance she had of identifying Krystal’s killer would vanish.
Good thing Faith wasn’t normal.
Springing to her feet, she kicked the door shut and jammed the hook back into place—protect the evidence, right? Then she scrambled onto the sink’s edge and rose, stretching upward for the metal runner that supported the drop ceiling. She had to go on tiptoe, precariously balanced on porcelain, to wedge her fingers around the metal bar. The I-shaped runner gouged cruelly into the flesh of her hands. Wishing she’d done more chin-ups at the gym, Faith had to make do with swinging herself once, twice.
On her third try, she kicked a second panel loose and caught that runner behind her knees. Now she hung like a scantily dressed U, shoulders straining, but it was enough. Stepping her feet closer to her hands with awkward lurches, glad she’d worn running shoes instead of heels, she edged her knees close enough to give her leverage.
She wedged her head and arms up past the wood-fiber panel into the narrow crawlspace of the drop ceiling.
She heard a slither of movement, rapidly retreating.
Crawl was the right word for this suspended space, Faith thought, wriggling quickly in after the fleeing suspect. The drop ceiling, a precarious collection of acoustical tiles balanced on an exposed framework of metal channels, lay barely a foot below the wooden joists of the upper roof. Her view up here was obstructed not just by the darkness, which she could handle, but by lengths of taut hanger wire and aluminum air-conditioning ducts swathed in paper-wrapped, pink fiberglass insulation. But she could hear him—statistics told her it would be a him, as surely as did instinct and smell. She twisted in the direction of the telltale scuffling and caught a glimpse of retreating boot soles, barely ten feet ahead of her.
Faith launched herself after them, not on hands and knees but on thighs and forearms, her bare tummy and legs rasping across years of accumulated dirt. Her neck ached with the strain of keeping an eye on her quarry as she wriggled after him. The ceiling panels felt horribly unstable beneath her. They probably were—those yard-by-yard squares—barely an inch thick, suspended from the joists by mere wire. From beneath her she caught wafts of jazz music, shouted conversation, blurred heartbeats and breaths and mingling emotions. But ahead of her…
She heard the distinct rhythm of her quarry’s pounding heart and breathed in his smell as it faded from that strange, stomach-turning scent to surprise and distress at her pursuit.
Not surprisingly, he was bigger than her. The crawlspace was even tighter for him. It was slowing him down.
Faith was maybe eight feet behind him now. She dragged herself closer, digging with her elbows, scrabbling with her arched feet.
One of his shoulders glanced off a metal duct.
Now she was barely six feet behind him, putting her hips into it.
He had to flatten onto his stomach to avoid a low-hanging swag of electric wiring that had pulled free of its staples.
Now she was barely four feet behind him. She caught her hand on an exposed nail and barely noticed the slice of pain. She kept crawling.
He stopped. Why? Three feet, two…
Faith reached out her hand, ready to grab the killer by the ankle if that’s what it took. She doubted she could capture him alone, but she’d come to know evidence. She could damn well tear some vital clue off him.
