Page 86 of It takes a Psychic

Insane, yes, but in his own twisted fashion, he had been clever. The lock was dangerous. She had no way of knowing what kind of trap Vance had created, but she knew it would probably be lethal.

She set her back teeth and eased her way into the currents of energy, searching for the pattern. There was always a pattern.

Energy—a lot of it—shifted in the atmosphere. She heard the crowd in the doorway start to murmur uneasily. Maybe they were finally starting to wonder if the whole Vincent Lee Vance return cult thing was a good idea after all.

“Too late,” she said under her breath.

She got the crystal-clear ping that told her she had flatlined the lock. There was a metallic crack that seemed as loud as thunder. It was followed by a grinding groan as the heavy lid of the coffin-like machine slowly opened.

A glary, hellish yellow light spilled out.

The crowd in the doorway froze. Their excitement and obsessive anticipation was now infused with something close to panic. It was one thing to buy into the expectation of the return of Vincent Lee Vance—it was another thing altogether to be in the chamber where a man who was supposed to have died a hundred years ago might actually sit up in his coffin.

The townsfolk clogging the doorway weren’t the only ones who were unnerved, Leona thought. She did not like the feel of the radiation streaming out of Vortex. It was intense and unstable.

She took several hasty steps back and came up against Oliver’s solid frame. He put a hand on her shoulder, sending a silent message that she interpreted asget ready.

About time,she thought.

Roxy, fascinator ribbons streaming behind her, darted out from under the machine, vaulted lightly up onto Oliver’s shoulder, and hunkered down. The team was once again ready for action, Leona thought.

The glare from the interior of Vortex was senses-dazzling, almost blinding. She could just make out that the light emanated from dozens of pyramid-shaped crystals that lined the interior of the machine.

Old gears rumbled to life. A transparent crystal platform rose. There was a figure clad in tattered clothing on top of it. Leona’s throat tightened in horror. Oliver’s hand abruptly tightened on her shoulder. She knew he had not seen this coming, either.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The body on the crystalplatform did not move. For a moment no one moved. It was as if the room had been locked in ice.

“Well, this is interesting,” Oliver said, shattering the silence. He was in his Museum Guy mode, but Leona could feel his battle-ready tension. Keeping his grip on her, he guided her calmly across the room to study the motionless figure on the platform. “If this individual thought he was climbing into a paranormal enhancement or preservation chamber, I’d say that what we have here is a case of failed expectations.”

An agitated murmur swept over the crowd. Roxy rumbled.

Oliver reached up to touch her lightly with his free hand. “Not yet,” he said very softly.

Roxy stilled but she kept all four eyes on the crowd at the entrance.

Leona used one hand to partially shield her eyes against the blazing crystals and tried to examine the corpse inside the chamber with a detached, academic eye. Because it was definitely a corpse.

The body was that of a man who appeared to have been in early middle age when he died. There was no obvious injury. For whatever reason he had apparently lain down in the chamber, sealed the lid—and died.

The most disturbing thing about the dead man was that he was chillingly well-preserved—a testimony to the power of the crystals, perhaps. But the effect had been a form of mummification, not hibernation or cold storage.

There was no mistaking death, she thought. The dead were truly silent in every sense. A corpse had no energy field, because the life force was gone. But theactof dying left traces behind—a forensic psychic stain that provided evidence of the manner and time of death. In this case, the interior of the chamber was saturated with a dark energy. The man inside Vortex had not died quickly.

His eyes were wide open, as if he had gazed at some unseen horror in his final moments. His face was a true death mask, the mouth drawn back in a terrible grin. Leona shuddered. Her intuition told her she was looking at a man who had realized too late that he had locked himself inside a coffin and that there was no escape.

She turned away from the grisly sight. Roxy took no interest in the body at all. She was still keeping watch on the crowd.

Oliver switched his attention to the audience. Leona sensed another shift in his energy field. Between one heartbeat and the next, he was in command of the room. In some indescribable way he had metamorphosed from glasses-polishing Museum Guy to the Guy in Charge.

The crowd stared at him, riveted, and awaited his verdict.

“I’ve got good news or bad news, depending on your point of view,” he said. “I can assure you of two facts. The first is that this man is very dead. The second is that it is not Vincent Lee Vance.”

That news produced gasps of disbelief, followed by confusion. Leona thought that at least a few people looked relieved.

Harp recovered first. She fixed Oliver with a suspicious glare. “What makes you so sure it’s not Vance?”

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