In Too Deep

She had appeared, as if by magic, late one night, carrying only the backpack. That was not so unusual in the Cove. The tiny community had always been a magnet for misfits, drifters and others who did not fit in with mainstream society. But most people moved on. The Cove was not for everyone. Something about the energy of the place, Fallon thought.
    The aura of power that shimmered around Isabella Valdez had sent up a lot of red flags. He did not like coincidences. Having another strong talent move into town and take a job at the café directly across the street from J&J had struck him as highly suspicious. The fact that he had been blindsided by the sudden and acute physical attraction he had experienced had been even more disturbing. He had not been able to explain away the sensation by reminding himself that he had been living a celibate life far too long.
    His first thought was that Isabella was a Nightshade spy. When he researched her online, he found a very neat, very tidy bio that, as far as he was concerned, only added to the mystery. Nobody had such a pristine personal history. According to what few records existed, she had been raised outside the Arcane community by a single mother who had died when Isabella was in her sophomore year in college. Her father had been killed in a traffic accident shortly before she was born. She had no siblings or close relatives. Until her arrival in the Cove, she had made her living in a series of low-level jobs, the kind that did not leave a lot of footprints in government databases or corporate personnel files.
    Hungry for answers and the need to make certain that Isabella was not a Nightshade operative, he had brought Grace and Luther, his best aura-talent agents, all the way from Hawaii, just to take a look. They had detected no signs of the formula in Isabella’s energy field. Grace’s verdict was that the town’s newest resident was just one more lost soul who had found her way to a community that specialized in lost souls.
    But Fallon knew that there was more to Isabella’s story. Sooner or later he would get the answers. For now he was left with his questions.
    And an inexplicable need to keep Isabella close and safe.

2
    T he old Zander place definitely fit the classic image of a haunted house, Isabella thought. A three-story stone monstrosity from the early 1900s, it hunkered like some great, brooding gargoyle on the cliffs above a skeletal beach.
    She brought the Mini Cooper to a halt in the drive and contemplated the weathered mansion. She was still not certain why she had felt compelled to take the case. Fallon was right. J&J was a for-real psychic investigation agency. The firm had enough to do handling the weird Nightshade conspiracy that obsessed Fallon, as well as the routine jobs commissioned by members of the Arcane Society. The agency did not need to take on Lost Dogs and Haunted Houses cases.
    But her intuition had kicked in after talking to Norma Spaulding on the phone. The familiar shiver of awareness and the compulsion to find that which was hidden had only grown more fierce in the past twenty-four hours. Now, looking at the old house, she knew that there was something important inside, something that needed to be found.
    A shiver of awareness ghosted her nerves. She slipped into her other senses. The house was enveloped in screaming cold fog. Ice crystals shimmered in the mist.
    The paranormal light that swirled around the mansion was very different from the fog she had perceived in Scargill Cove a month ago when she had walked into town late on a rainy night. The driver of the truck who had picked her up outside Point Arena had driven her north on Highway One, past Mendocino, had let her out at a gas station. She had walked the rest of the way to the Cove, following the faint sheen of energy.
    It had been a long hike, but the closer she got to the tiny town tucked away in the forgotten little cove, the brighter the eerie fog had become. It told her that she was going in the right direction. It was after midnight when she finally reached the heart of the community.
    The town had been enveloped in the other kind of fog, the damp, gray stuff that rolled in off the ocean. Every window, save one, was dark. The single window that was illuminated was on the second floor of a building directly across from the café. The light in that window glowed with the luminous aura of a computer screen. The paranormal fog that wreathed the upper level of the