Copper Beach

our way, that we would probably be the ones who found him. He did his best to leave us a message.”

    Carefully, he smoothed the old page and studied the illustration. The cold sleet of psi that had been stirring his senses all morning transmuted into an ice storm.

    “What?” Abby asked.

    “This message isn’t for you. It’s for me. He knew that I would be with you when you got here.” He shoved the page into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Let’s move.”

    “I don’t understand. What does that drawing mean to you?”

    “I’ll tell you when we’re in the car.”

    Mercifully, Abby did not question the decision. She followed him quickly out the front door. Newton dashed ahead, more than enthusiastic about the prospect of leaving the grim scene.

    He got Abby and Newton into the SUV, climbed behind the wheel and drove swiftly back toward the main road. The icy-cold feeling on the nape of his neck was getting more intense.

    “What’s the rush?” Abby asked, fastening her seat belt.

    “Damned if I know.” He took one hand off the wheel long enough to rub the back of his neck. “Just a feeling.”

    “What is it about the page that Thaddeus tore out of the book that has you so worried?”

    Sam reached inside his jacket. He pulled out the torn page and handed it to her. “Take a look.”

    She took the page and examined it closely. “It’s an artist’s rendering of an alchemist’s laboratory. Competently done, but it certainly isn’t Dürer’s Melencolia. So?”

    “Look at the setting.”

    “It’s different from most pictures of an alchemist at work, because the setting is clearly Victorian,” Abby mused. “Scenes of this type are usually set against medieval or Renaissance landscapes. This has got more of a Frankenstein vibe. The mad-scientist thing. But there is the usual mishmash of allegorical images from Egyptian and Greek mythology.” She looked up from the picture. “What makes this illustration different?”

    “That picture is not an artist’s generic vision of an alchemist’s lab. Take a closer look at the fire on the hearth.”

    Abby glanced down. She stiffened. “The flames are formed by the stylized wings of a phoenix. Oh, geez, Sam. The bird looks an awful lot like that tattoo on your shoulder.”

    “Where do you think I got the idea for the tat?”

    “You’ve seen a copy of this book?”

    “Not that particular text but some related writings. I told you that when Dad and his partners found the crystals, they did a lot of research into the scientific literature. They were trying to track down references to previous discoveries of similar crystals. They didn’t find much that was useful, just some old alchemy texts. But they did come across a few notes made by the guy in the picture. Dad gave them to me.”

    Abby read the title under the drawing. “Scene from Dr. Marcus Dalton’s laboratory.”

    “Dalton conducted some experiments on crystals that he called the Phoenix stones. Very little of his work survived, unfortunately. He sensed the latent power in the stones, but he never figured out how to access it. He theorized, however, that in the hands of someone who could tap the energy of the crystals, the stones could be used, among other things, as weapons.”

    “Like that crystal bug zapper you used on poor Nick?”

    He let the poor Nick comment pass. “Yes, but on a much larger scale. The most I can do with my little zapper is temporarily paralyze certain currents in an individual’s aura. It’s probably similar to what you do when you channel the energy in an encrypted book into someone’s aura. And I need physical contact to achieve the results. Dalton believed the crystals had the potential to create much greater destruction, and from a distance. But he also theorized that the crystals could be engineered to create a source of power.”

    “Which, presumably, is why your father doesn’t want to destroy all the records of the experiments and why he doesn’t want to obliterate all traces of the Phoenix Mine.”

    Sam smiled. “Good guess. The world is going to need new sources of power in the future. Engineered correctly, those crystals might be an answer.”

    “What happened to Dalton?”

    “He was killed in an explosion that occurred when one of his experiments went out of control. All of the crystals he was working on at the time disappeared, and most of his notes were lost.”

    “Just like the explosion in the Phoenix,”