Fired Up

I will.”
    “Too late.” The stranger walked forward. He was not rushing in, but there was something lethal and relentless about his approach, a predator who knows the prey is trapped. “You’re already dead.”
    She felt something then, something she could not explain. It was as if she was caught in the center of an electrical storm. Currents of energy flooded her senses.
    “No,” her captor shouted. “She’s mine.”
    And then he was screaming, horror and shock mingling in a nerve-shattering shriek.
    “Get away from me,” he shouted.
    Suddenly she was free-falling. She landed with a jolt on the damp pavement. The man with the knife reeled back and fetched up against the alley wall.
    The unnerving energy evaporated as swiftly and mysteriously as it had appeared.
    The killer came away from the wall as though he had been released from a cage.
    “No,” he hissed, madness and rage vibrating in the single word.
    He lurched toward the other man. Light glinted on the knife he still clutched.
    More energy shivered in a heavy wave through the alley.
    The killer screamed again, a shrill, sharp screech that ended with stunning abruptness. He dropped the knife, clutched at his chest and dropped to the pavement.
    The dark figure loomed over the killer for a moment. She saw him lean down and realized that he was checking for a pulse. She knew that he would not find one. She recognized death when she saw it.
    The man straightened and turned toward her. Fear held her immobile. There was something wrong with his face. It was too dark to make out his features, but she thought she could see a smoldering energy in the dark spheres where his eyes should have been.
    Another wave of panic slammed through her, bringing with it a fresh dose of adrenaline. She scrambled to her feet and fled toward the street, knowing, even as she ran, that it was hopeless. The creature with the burning eyes would cut her down as easily as he had the killer with the knife.
    But the monster did not pursue her. A block away she finally stopped to catch her breath. When she looked back she saw nothing. The street was empty.
    She had always hoped that if the worst happened on the way home she might get some help from the men in the gym. But in the end it was a demon that had saved her.

1
    DREAMLIGHT GLOWED FAINTLY ON THE SMALL STATUE OF THE Egyptian queen. The prints were murky and thickly layered. A lot of people had handled the object over the decades, but none of the prints went back any farther than the late eighteen hundreds, Chloe Harper concluded. Certainly none dated from the Eighteenth Dynasty.
    “I’m afraid it’s a fake.” She lowered her senses, turned away from the small statue and looked at Bernard Paddon. “A very fine fake, but a fake, nonetheless.”
    “Damn it, are you absolutely certain?” Paddon’s bushy silver brows scrunched together. His face reddened in annoyance and disbelief. “I bought it from Crofton. He’s always been reliable.”
    The Paddon collection of antiquities put a lot of big city museums to shame, but it was not open to the public. Paddon was a secretive, obsessive collector who hoarded his treasures in a vault like some cranky troll guarding his gold. He dealt almost exclusively in the notoriously gray world of the underground antiquities market, preferring to avoid the troublesome paperwork, customs requirements and other assorted legal authorizations required to buy and sell in the aboveground, more legitimate end of the trade.
    He was, in fact, just the sort of client that Harper Investigations liked to cultivate, the kind that paid the bills. She did not relish having to tell him that his statue was a fake. On the other hand, the client she was representing in this deal would no doubt be suitably grateful.
    Paddon had inherited a large number of the Egyptian, Roman and Greek artifacts in the vault from his father, a wealthy industrialist who had built the family fortune in a very different era. Bernard was now in his seventies. Sadly, while he had continued the family traditions of collecting, he had not done such a great job when it came to investing. The result was that these days he was reduced to selling items from his collection in order to finance new acquisitions. He had been counting on the sale of the statue to pay for some other relic he craved.
    Chloe was very careful never to get involved with the actual financial end of the transactions. That was an excellent way to draw the