Sizzle and Burn

you.”
    “Figured he’d be calling,” Zack said.
    “Better warn you, I just told him that you and I are going to get married.”
    Masculine satisfaction etched his hard face. His eyes got very, very blue.
    “Well, now,” he said softly. “Within the Society that pretty much amounts to a formal announcement. How’d he take it?”
    “In another era I believe he would have been described as apoplectic.”
    “Don’t worry, he’ll survive.”
    “Zack?” Fallon’s voice, emanating from the small phone, sounded faint and tinny. “Is that you?”
    Zack took the phone from Raine’s hand, leaned forward and kissed her very thoroughly. By the time he raised his head she was tingling from head to toe.
    “Zack?” Fallon was shouting now. “You there? Talk to me, damn it.”
    “Later,” Zack said somewhat absently into the phone. “I’m a little busy at the moment.”
    He ended the call, dropped the phone into a pocket and went back to kissing Raine.

Fifty-eight
    T hey were gathered in her living room, drinking the first of the two bottles of Oregon pinot noir that Gordon had brought along. He and Andrew claimed they both needed the wine for medicinal purposes while they recovered from the shock of events. The pair occupied the sofa, the cats stretched out between them. Zack was in one of the two reading chairs. Raine took the other.
    “How did you figure out where she hid the journal?” Andrew asked. “Did you know about the wall safe?”
    “No.” Raine looked at the leather-bound book lying on the coffee table. “But this morning I suddenly remembered the painting on the wall of her bedroom. It was the first of her mask series. “In hindsight, I realized it must have been inspired by Wilder Jones.”
    Gordon glanced at the volume on the coffee table. “What did you find in that journal?”
    She fortified herself with a swallow of wine and set down the glass. “My father injected himself with his version of the formula.”
    “Damn.” Gordon’s silver-gray brows shot straight up. “That certainly explains a few things.”
    “I’ll say,” Andrew agreed.
    “I know what you’re all thinking,” she said. “Judson Tallentyre sounds like the original mad scientist.”
    “No,” Zack said. He drank some wine and lowered his glass. “Within the Arcane Society, that honor belongs to my ancestor Sylvester Jones.”
    Raine looked up, startled. “You’re calling the founder of the Arcane Society a mad scientist?”
    “Well, technically speaking, I guess you’d have to label him a mad alchemist, given that he lived in the late sixteen hundreds. Don’t think the word scientist was used in those days. It amounts to the same thing, though. Sylvester was unquestionably brilliant, and there’s no doubt but that he was a powerful sensitive. But it’s also no secret, at least in the Jones family, that he was obsessed, paranoid and probably delusional, at least toward the end.”
    “Interesting family history,” Andrew observed drily.
    “Family tree is riddled with what the Society euphemistically likes to call exotics ,” Zack said. “But in Sylvester’s case, I think there’s a strong possibility that some of his quirks were exacerbated by the experiments he ran on himself.”
    Andrew frowned. “Sylvester Jones invented the original version of the formula?”
    “Along with what was supposed to be the antidote,” Zack said. “But in the Victorian era, the Society found out the hard way that the antidote doesn’t work. In the late sixteen hundreds Sylvester died alone in his laboratory, which became his tomb. No one knows for sure what killed him, but there’s a widely held theory in the family that he probably poisoned himself with his own formula and died because the antidote failed.”
    Gordon absently stroked Batman and looked at Raine. “I suppose your father took the risk with his version of the formula because he was convinced it would work.”
    “Yes.” She picked up her glass and swallowed some wine. She was going to need it to get through the rest of the story. “He also injected Aunt Vella with the drug.”
    There was a short, horrified silence while they all absorbed that news.
    Andrew closed his eyes in pain. “That probably explains a few more things.”
    “The drug worked,” she continued evenly. “It dramatically enhanced both my aunt’s and my father’s psychic abilities. But Dad soon realized that there were problems. He and Aunt Vella began to have