After Glow

Chapter 3

LYDIA RELUCTANTLY SWAM up out of the delightfully vague state that had followed in the wake of the over-the-top climax. She was getting used to great sex, she thought. Maybe that was not such a good thing. Life would probably be a whole lot simpler had she never discovered what she had found in Emmett's arms.

Granted, her previous sexual experience had not been what anyone would call extensive. In fact, her friend Melanie, who was something of an expert on the subject, had warned her on several occasions about the dangers of her excessively dull sex life.

But the truth was that passion had never been a particularly high priority for her, Lydia thought. For as long as she could remember, her single great, shining goal had been to become a para-archaeologist. After the loss of her parents when she was in her late teens, she had found herself alone in the world. The dream of exploring the underground catacombs of the Dead City and cataloging the secrets of the ancient Harmonics had helped to fill up many of the empty places in her life.

The vision of herself as a brilliant, highly respected member of the faculty of para-archaeology at the university had consumed her. She had planned to achieve a sterling academic reputation, write brilliant papers and books, and announce stunning new discoveries in the Journal of Para-archaeology.

Her ambition, drive, and strong psi talent had carried her far for the first few years. She had been on track to fulfill all of her goals. But approximately seven months ago, everything had come to a screeching halt. The disaster in the catacombs that she bitterly referred to as her Lost Weekend had nearly gotten her killed. Worse yet, it had shattered her promising career.

The experience had also left her with a case of amnesia regarding the events of those two days. She had no clear memories of the forty-eight hours that she had spent wandering in the endless glowing tunnels and passages beneath the Dead City.

The details of the incident had been pieced together at the inquiry. According to her companions on the research team, she had disappeared down an unexplored and unmarked corridor and never returned. As soon as someone had noticed that she was missing, the team leader, Ryan Kelso, had sent the ghost-hunters to search for her, of course. But it was too late. She had vanished.

Forty-eight hours later she had awakened to find herself alone in a small, uncharted chamber. That was not the worst of it. The really bad news was that she had somehow lost her rez-amber. She had known then that she was doomed. Tuned amber functioned like a compass in the maze of the catacombs. Without it she had no means of making her way to any of the exits.

But Fuzz had found her.

To this day she did not know how he had done it, let alone how he had sensed that she was lost in the first place. But she would never forget the glorious sight of him crouched beside her, anxiously licking her face when she had at long last opened her eyes.

He had led her unerringly to the nearest exit. She knew only too well what her fate would have been had he not appeared when he did. The only question was whether she would have died of thirst before she went mad wandering aimlessly through the endless green night of the alien catacombs. The odds of being found by a search party were almost zero.

No one had been more surprised to see her reappear than her colleagues on the excavation team who had given up hope. There had been great joy and celebration all around-for about three days.

And then the reality of her new situation had sunk in: Everyone assumed that her experience underground had shattered her para-rez pitch. The shrinks who had checked her out afterward quickly filled her medical file with such ominous phrases as sustained para-psych trauma and para-amnesia. Typical aftereffects of an encounter with an illusion trap or a large energy ghost.

The most amazing aspect of the case, as far as the para-psychologists were concerned, was that she was able to function with any degree of normalcy after the experience. She was certainly not the first ephemeral-energy para-resonator to lose control of one of the nightmarish traps or blunder into a powerful energy ghost. She was, however, one of the few who had gone through such an experience and not ended up in an institution.

She was labeled extremely fragile, psychically speaking, and therefore unreliable on a professional excavation team. No one wanted to work with a tangler who had been badly fried.

At the formal inquiry the two ghost-hunters who had been charged with responsibility for protecting the team had blamed Lydia for taking off on her own without due regard for the very strict safety rules. She, in turn, had accused them of failing to do their job properly.

The findings of the investigation had been pretty much a foregone conclusion. Officially, the disaster was deemed to be a result of Lydia's failure to follow established procedures. She had been dismissed from her position at the university.

For her part, she had vowed never to trust a ghost-hunter again.

Life had certainly changed a lot in the past few months, she reflected. Instead of working on an academic research team, she was now employed at a third-rate museum, Shrimpton's House of Ancient Horrors, and she was dating a ghost-hunter.

On the positive-rez side, her sex life had definitely improved.

On the negative-rez side, she knew that she had fallen in love.

She was aware of Emmett sprawled heavily on the bed beside her, one arm flung around her waist in a casually possessive grip.

She stared up at the ceiling. "I can't believe that I'm sleeping with a Guild boss."

"Temporary Guild boss," he mumbled into the pillow. "Acting Guild boss. No, wait, let's make that consulting Guild boss."

"I'm sleeping with a Guild boss."

"Former Guild boss?" he tried.

"Guild boss."

He rolled over onto his back and folded his arms behind his head. "You can be a little too literal-minded at times, you know that?"

She levered herself up on one elbow. "Probably a result of my academic training."

"Probably."

For a few seconds she allowed herself to savor the sight of him in her bed. He still wore his shirt but that was all. The shadow of his untrimmed beard enhanced the stark, uncompromising planes and angles of his hunter's face.

"You didn't even get a chance to shave this morning, did you?" she said. "You must be exhausted."

"Like I said, the phone was ringing when I walked in the door around three a.m." He took one hand out from behind his head and rubbed his jaw, grimacing. "The doctors didn't know if Wyatt was going to make it so I just dropped the camping stuff and got back in the car."

"There's something I don't understand here. Why did the hospital call you? You're not even a member of the Cadence Guild."

He exhaled heavily. "Like I said, it's complicated."

"I'm listening."

"Wyatt was barely conscious when he dragged himself in to the emergency room. But he's a Guild boss to his bones. He stayed awake long enough to call a couple of members of the Guild Council and issue some orders. Then he made the hospital call me. He was being wheeled into the operating room when I arrived." Emmett shook his head. "And still giving orders."

"Wait a second." Lydia sat up, pulling the sheet around her. "Wyatt got himself to the hospital? But I thought you said he was nearly killed with a mag-rez gun."

"He should have been dead. Someone put two rounds into him. Both shots were probably intended to hit him in the upper chest. But he evidently sensed something was wrong when he got out of his car and tried to dive for cover. The result was that both shots went low and to the side. Still there was a lot of damage, not to mention shock and blood loss."

"It's a wonder he didn't bleed to death."

"He was in the Old Quarter near the South Wall when it happened. He managed to summon a couple of small energy ghosts. Used them to partially cauterize the wounds and slow the bleeding. Then he got behind the wheel of that big Oscillator 600 of his and drove himself to the ER."

"He used ghost energy on bleeding wounds?"

"No one ever said that Mercer Wyatt wasn't as tough as they come."

She caught her breath, astonished. Most of the green radiation given off by unstable dissonance energy manifestations everyone called ghosts was psi in nature, and the effects produced were most pronounced on the paranormal plane. But some of the eerie glow took the form of thermal energy. Ghosts were frequently hot enough to scorch paper or wood or a bedroom wall, as she had discovered the hard way last month.

Nevertheless, the thought of using one on an open wound was mind-boggling.

"I've never heard of such a thing," she said. "Theoretically, I suppose, it could be done. But the hunter would have to be able to exert an amazing amount of control in order to manipulate a ghost with the kind of precision it would require to staunch bleeding and not get badly burned at the same time."

"Hunters have some built-in immunity to the effects of ghost fire," he reminded her. "Comes with the psi talent required to handle them, I guess."

She shuddered. "Even so, I can only imagine how much pain it would cause on both the physical and the psychic planes."

He shrugged. "It hurts but not as much as you might think, not if you use some of the ghost's psi energy to distance your mind from the pain."

She frowned. "You've heard about this technique?"

"Sure. You get instruction and a little practice in basic training. It was an emergency medical procedure that was developed by Guild field medics during the Era of Discord."

Every child was taught the history of the Guilds in elementary school. They had been established a hundred years earlier as combat units to protect the cities against the threat of the charismatic fanatic, Vincent Lee Vance, and his followers.

Vance was a powerful dissonance-energy para-resonator—a ghost-hunter—who had spent his early years prospecting for amber. He had always been considered psychically unstable by those who knew him best but his eccentricities had not been much of a problem because for the most part he had shunned society to follow the solitary career path associated with the prospecting business.

At one point in his life Vance disappeared underground into the catacombs beneath Old Frequency City. When he had failed to reappear after several months, he had been presumed dead.

Eventually he had emerged, no longer a scruffy, half-daft amber man, but a visionary megalomaniac whose goal was nothing less than the conquest of all of the city-states. He claimed that he had discovered a great treasure house of ancient Harmonic secrets that would enable him to institute an ideal society. He promised that those who fought on his side would be rewarded with enormous power and wealth.

Life had been hard in the colonial cities a hundred years ago. The appeal of a Utopian world was strong.

Vance had gathered an army of disaffected followers before anyone even started to take him seriously. He also acquired a lover named Helen Chandler, an extremely talented ephemeral-energy para-resonator who, it was said, could untangle any illusion trap that had ever been discovered.

From his secret headquarters somewhere in the complex of tunnels beneath Old Frequency City, Vance had drawn up detailed plans of conquest. His strategy had worked well at first because the colonial cities had never established standing armies. There had been no need for a military on Harmony. All of the city-states had been closely connected and had cooperated from the start in the effort to survive.

There were also no large arsenals on Harmony. The high-tech hunting rifles and handguns that had been brought from Earth by some of the colonists had ceased to function after the first few years because there had been no way to maintain them or reproduce the ammunition. In Vance's era there were only a couple of small, privately owned munitions manufacturing firms turning out revolvers and some rifles for the use of the cities' police departments and for farmers and hunters. The weapons were notoriously unreliable because the technique of making an amber-resonating trigger had not yet been perfected. In any event, none of those firms had possessed the capability of supplying arms in large numbers to Vance's recruits, even if they could have been made to do so.

But Harmony had provided its own weaponry: the dangerous and powerful energy ghosts in the catacombs.

Vance had fought a guerilla war in the maze of tunnels beneath the city-states. His hunters had summoned and manipulated great numbers of powerful energy ghosts. His tanglers had cleared the traps out of miles of un-charted underground corridors, enabling Vance's forces to strike swiftly and then disappear into the catacombs.

In a series of fast strikes, Vance's army produced early, devastating results. Old Frequency had fallen within days. Old Crystal had followed less than a month later. But the hunters in the two cities had put up more of a fight than Vance had expected and in doing so they had bought valuable time for Old Resonance and Old Cadence.

Under the leadership of a powerful hunter named Jerrett Knox, whose arcane, scholarly hobby happened to be the study of the history of ancient warfare on Earth, Resonance and Cadence had quickly brought their hunters together. The Guilds had been established to organize the fighting forces.

Knox had proved to be a gifted leader and a shrewd tactician. He also knew the catacombs extraordinarily well because he had spent years mapping them.

It had taken nearly a year to defeat Vance and his followers but in the end his minions had been crushed. After the final battle of Old Cadence, Vincent Lee Vance and his tangler-lover, Helen Chandler, had fled into an uncharted sector underground. They had vanished somewhere in the miles of unmapped catacombs, never to be heard from again.

"I've seen some accidents while working underground but I've never known a hunter to try to use a ghost to stop bleeding," Lydia said.

"It's an old-fashioned, low-tech procedure that is almost never needed these days," Emmett explained patiently. "Underground emergency teams carry modern medical kits that contain safer, more efficient equipment."

"But the Guilds still teach the old methods?"

"They teach them," Emmett said deliberately. "But not every hunter can make them work. Manipulating small ghosts that precisely is tricky."

"I'll bet," she muttered. "But Mercer Wyatt can no doubt do tricky."

"When called upon, yes," Emmett said dryly.

"Probably a Guild boss thing." She wrinkled her nose. "All right, finish your story."

"That's about it. Like I said, Wyatt made it to the ER, gave a few orders, and was rushed into surgery. Last time I checked, he was still unconscious."

"How critical is his condition? Do they really think he might die?"

"I don't know. The doctors are being very guarded at the moment."

"But in the meantime, you're the new Guild boss."

"Uh-huh."

She sighed. "Well, I suppose I can understand why you felt you had to take over for Wyatt when he asked you to help out. After all, you've been connected to the Guilds your whole life. You probably have a very ingrained sense of loyalty toward them."

"Let's get something straight here," Emmett said quietly. "It wasn't some kind of knee-jerk sense of Guild loyalty that made me agree to take over until Wyatt recovers."

She scowled. "Then why in the world did you do it?"

He exhaled deeply. "Another type of knee-jerk loyalty, I guess. I did it because Mercer Wyatt is my father."