In Too Deep

of the clerks would be sure to call Security.
    She dropped the nightgown onto a table and started toward the door that opened onto the emergency stairwell. Darlene, one of her coworkers, emerged from between two rows of floor-to-ceiling shelving crammed with boxes of undergarments. She had a stack of lacy bras in her hand.
    “Annie, are you okay?” Darlene asked, frowning in concern. “You look like you’re not feeling well.”
    “I’m fine, thanks,” Isabella said.
    She had used the name and ID of a nonexistent woman named Ann Carstairs to get the job in the department store. There was only one individual on the face of the earth who knew her real name. In the past week she’d been forced to face the possibility that that person, her grandmother, might be dead.
If no one knows your real name do you even exist ?
she wondered.
    That’s it
, she thought.
Stop right there
.
Negative thinking will get you nowhere
. Until it was proven otherwise, she was going to go with the assumption that her grandmother was alive. Meanwhile, her job was to keep herself breathing. That meant avoiding the two hunter-talents.
    “You look a little shaky,” Darlene said.
    “Low on caffeine,” Isabella replied. “I’m going on break. Thought I’d use the stairs to the coffee room. I need the exercise.”
    “Huh.” Darlene hurried toward the door to the sales floor. “Seems to me we get plenty of exercise during a sale. My feet are killing me. I’m going to be exhausted by the time we get off work tonight.”
    “Me, too,” Isabella said. “Would you mind taking the blue nightgown out to the counter? There’s a customer waiting for it. Tell her there was no spot, after all. Just a trick of the light.”
    “No problem.”
    “Thanks.”
    She waited until Darlene disappeared out onto the sales floor, and then she opened the stairwell door.
    More fog swirled on the concrete staircase, but unlike the energy that enveloped the hunter-talents, this stuff glowed with a cold fire. It was the kind of fog she had learned to associate with impending death.
    “Oh, crap, not now,” she whispered.
    She was running for her life. She did not need any distractions.
    She started down the stairs, determined to ignore the atmosphere of the stairwell. But there was no ignoring the seething fog cascading down the steps. It was so very cold.
    She stopped and looked up. The fog came from the rooftop of the three-story mall, one floor above. The part of her that had been dealing with her talent since her thirteenth year screamed at her to follow the luminous trail. There was something at the top of the emergency stairwell that needed to be found immediately. Time was of the essence.
    The thought of getting cornered on the roof by the two hunters held no appeal. But the odds were good that the pair would assume that she would flee down into the mall garage or out onto the street. Going up might be an excellent strategy.
    Okay, she was rationalizing. Still, there was a slender thread of logic involved. The bottom line was that she had to find whatever was waiting to be discovered on the mall roof and she had to find it quickly.
    The emergency stairwell was a highly efficient echo chamber. The sound of footsteps carried from top to bottom. If the hunters realized that she was not coming back out onto the sales floor, they would surely guess that she had escaped via the emergency stairs. If they decided to risk following her into the stairwell, they would hear her climbing up toward the roof.
    She slipped out of her flats, clutched them in one hand, and went quickly up the stairs in her stocking feet. At least she was dressed for flight, she thought. She always wore trousers and flats or boots to work, always dressed to run for her life.
    She had been living on the edge for ten days. Lately she had begun to wonder how much longer she could keep up the unrelenting vigilance. The fact that Julian Garrett’s men had found her so easily tonight was a sure sign that her life in hiding was taking a toll on her senses. She could not go on like this much longer.
    Start thinking like that and you might as well jump off the roof when you get there
.
    At least it would all be over. If her grandmother was dead, there was no one left who was linked to her by bonds of blood. Ten days ago, she had been forced to sever the workplace friendships she had forged at Lucan Protection Services. Now she was profoundly alone in a way that most people could never