Running Hot

think that it would only take a few weeks to recover from that event. So, doing some quick math, I have to assume that whatever happened last year was worse than what happened today.”
    She took a shaky breath. “You’re acting like a cop.”
    “Yeah, I do that sometimes. Look, I’ve got no problem with you lying to Fallon. But I need the truth. Your life may be in danger. You’re going to have to trust me.”

TWENTY-FOUR
    By the time they were in the car and headed toward the airport, she had recovered enough from the initial shock to succumb to a sense of resignation. Maybe she was just too exhausted to resist. No, she decided, the truth was that she simply didn’t want to lie to Luther any longer. She wasn’t sure what was going on between them. She was afraid to use the word “love” to describe the bond. It was too soon and she’d had too little experience with that particular feeling to be able to recognize it on sight. But whatever it was, she wanted desperately to trust him.
    She peeled the lid off the coffee cup. “Do you think Mr. Jones knows that I didn’t tell him the full truth about what I did with my aura today?”
    “Who knows?” Luther did not take his attention off the road. “He’s damn good at connecting dots, though, so you’d better assume he suspects more than he let on.”
    “Why didn’t he say anything?”
    “Probably because it didn’t suit him to say anything. Fallon is not what you would call the communicative type.”
    She slumped lower into the seat. “Damn.”
    “The real question is why didn’t you tell him what you can do with your talent? After all, you want to be a real J&J agent. Why not try to impress the boss?”
    She gazed glumly out at the sugarcane fields. “Keeping my secret is an old habit. You know how it is. You don’t go around advertising what you can do, either.”
    “What happened a year ago? Whatever it was must have been pretty dramatic. Were you assaulted?”
    “He tried to kill me with some sort of flash of energy,” she said quietly.
    Luther’s profile hardened. “The guy who attacked you was a sensitive, too?”
    “Yes. I fought back with my talent. When he realized he couldn’t murder me with his psychic-blast trick, he became enraged and tried to throttle me. I was running hot at the time, jacked to the max trying to defend myself. Something happened when he touched me. It was as if the energy that he was projecting at me rebounded back on him. The next thing I knew he was dead.”
    Luther was silent for a moment. She waited for what she knew would come next.
    “You said he hit you with some kind of psychic energy?”
    “Yes. He could focus it somehow. It was incredibly painful. I could feel it killing me.”
    “Fallon told me that one of his agents encountered a Nightshade operative who could make a person unconscious with a blast of energy. It happened a while back on a case in Stone Canyon, Arizona. The talent was drug-induced. The operative was injecting the formula at the time.”
    “The man who tried to murder me was also on the drug,” she said, letting the rest of the truth spill out. “He told me it gave him the power to kill without a trace.”
    Luther whistled softly. “Well, I’ll be damned. You killed Martin Crocker, didn’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Let me take a wild guess here. You were not the company librarian.”
    “I was his butler.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “That was my official title,” she explained. “No one pays any attention to the hired help, you see. Afterward, the newspapers barely even mentioned the fact that I had died in the same boating accident. It was as if I had never existed, which was fine by me.”
    “I seem to recall that the search-and-rescue team found Crocker’s boat drifting aimlessly in the water. How did you escape?”
    She shuddered, remembering the horror and the grim determination to survive that had ridden her hard that night.
    “What the searchers didn’t know, what no one except Martin and I knew, was that Martin kept a small inflatable boat on the island to use in case of an emergency. I waited until after dark. Then I got Martin’s body into the cruiser and took it partway back to the main island. I released the body into the water and left the cruiser to drift. Then I got into the inflatable.”
    Luther said nothing but he reached over and gripped her hand very tightly for a few seconds, letting her know that he understood both the horror and the will