Page 59 of Sweetwater and the Witch

“I gave them a working demonstration of the dangers of messing with a fire witch.”

“Sweet.” Ethan smiled. “I’d like to have seen that.”

Energy shifted in the atmosphere. Ravenna’s eyes heated. Ethan felt the burn deep inside.

“You’re really not afraid of me, are you?” Ravenna asked. She sounded intrigued, curious, not quite believing but wanting to believe.

“I like fireworks,” Ethan said.

Chapter Twenty-Six

It was a trap and he had almost walked straight into it. Two more steps and he would have been dead or, worse, lost in an endless Alien nightmare. The faint shadows just inside the chamber were the only clue to the dangerous pool of paranormal energy that seethed near the entrance.

The only reason he was still alive and still sane was because of his powerful new para-psych profile. Thanks to the Vortex machine, his senses were more acute.

Taggert Spooner backed away from the arched doorway and stared into the glowing quartz chamber. The initial flash of panic was subsiding. In its place was a white-hot fury. The prospector had cheated him.

He turned away from the chamber and its deadly trap. He should have made certain the old bastard had given him the right coordinates before icing him. Now the one person who could tell him where the pyramid crystals had come from was dead.

The rage was playing havoc with his senses. Strong emotions were always enhanced by the powerful currents of energy in the Underworld. He flattened one hand against the quartz wall to steady himself. After a moment his head cleared. He tried to think, to plan. It was true he had a new high-rez talent—he was an icer who could kill—but he was still a strategy talent. That was the ability that had enabled him to build his business empire. He needed to use that skill set now.

It wasn’t easy to lower the temperature of the rage churning through him. He took his hand off the wall and clenched it into a tight fist. He wished he could kill the old bastard again, much more slowly this time.

The thought sent a shudder through him but his strategy talent was telling him he should have verified the discovery before getting rid of the one person who had the information he needed. Bowen had spent a lifetime in the Underworld. Mining was a business that fostered paranoia. It made sense that Bowen had hedged his bets. He hadn’t trusted computers or his phone. He had wanted to be certain the money was actually in his account before he turned over the real coordinates.

Or maybe Bowen had been foolish enough to try to sell the location twice. Maybe the other buyer was Amber, Inc.

That possibility sent another flash of rage across his senses. This time the churning fury threatened to spin out of control. Maybe the bastard had lied from the beginning.

Spooner reached into his jacket and took out the two pyramid stones. No question there was a lot of energy trapped inside each. He put them back into the pocket of his jacket and started toward the hole-in-the-wall he had used to enter the tunnels. One thing was certain—he wasn’t going to get the answers from a dead man. The trip to Illusion Town had been a waste of time. He’d been conned.

The only good news was that he had been smart enough to handle the entire project on his own. Melody Palantine did not know about the arrangement to meet Bowen. She would never know about the failedproject. It was very important that Palantine did not detect any weakness in him.

A part of him understood it was time to cut his losses. Yes, he had been played by the old prospector, but shit happened in business. Win some, lose some. As they said in Illusion Town, you had to know when to walk away from the table.

He had no option. He had to abandon Glass House. But that did not mean he had to forgo revenge. He knew exactly who to blame for the disaster—Ethan Sweetwater.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The call from Gabriel Jones came just as a foggy dawn illuminated the Shadow Zone. Ravenna was in the small bathroom, washing her face and trying to pin her hair into a knot. She had considered taking a shower, but one look at the grungy tile work and stained shower curtain had convinced her to wait until she got home. She cracked open the door so she could hear the conversation via the speaker on Ethan’s phone.

“I don’t know exactly what in green hell we’ve got,” Gabriel Jones said, “but it is now duly registered as the Glass House Antiquity and the legal owner is the Federation of City-States. Of interest to everyone involved, there was no sign of Spooner in the vicinity. All we know for sure is that he didn’t try to register the claim.”

“The prospector gave him the wrong coordinates,” Ethan said.

“Looks like it.”

“Where are you now?”

“Just got back to my office here at headquarters,” Gabriel said. “The team is securing Glass House until the Feds get their people here.”

“Tell me about Glass House.”

“Hard to describe. You’ll have to see it for yourself. There’s a wall of solid, transparent crystal, a gate of some kind, but we have no idea how to get through it, and no one wants to rush the job. Too risky. Looks like another maze of tunnels on the other side, but they’re made of glass or crystal, not the green quartz the Aliens used in most of the Underworld.”

“What do you think it is?”

“Best guess at this point is that it’s a lab of some sort or a power generator, but who knows?”

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