Sizzle and Burn

floor. Raine knew he had taken the worst brunt of the initial explosive blast of smoke. It was amazing he had remained upright as long as he had. There was no telling what effect the drug might have on a powerful hunter whose parasenses had been running wide open when the herb-laced fumes hit them.
    Calvin coughed but managed to punch in a number on his phone.
    “Get out of here,” he roared to Raine. “Back door. Now.”
    Then he went down. The floor shuddered when he landed. He did not move again.
    The phone landed on the floor beside him. She had no way of knowing whether he had managed to punch in 911. Her own phone was in her purse in the other room.
    Breathing shallowly, she yanked her shirt out of the waistband of her pants. The smoke was thickest in the center of the room. She did not dare try to crawl through it to get to the safety of the front part of the shop. The alley door was closer.
    Holding the edge of her shirt over her nose and mouth, she wriggled awkwardly on her belly toward the rear door. The smoke was doing what it was supposed to do according to the laws of physics: rising. The air near the floor smelled strongly of herbs but the vapors were not as thick as they were a few inches higher. She knew she was still taking in a lot of the drug, however. The demonic cacophony in her head was getting steadily worse.
    The costumes around her began to come alive. She was suddenly in the midst of a nightmarish masquerade ball that was taking place in a room filled with funhouse mirrors. Capes and gowns swirled, making her dizzy. Malevolent eyes peered down at her through the empty sockets of the masks. Panic drenched her senses. The urge to leap to her feet and make a run for the door was overpowering.
    It’s the drug. Ignore it. Stay low.
    The voices were changing. Some of them seemed to be coming from the mouths of the masks.
    “…Kill her. Torture her. Burn, witch, burn….”
    She told herself that she was making progress through the ranks of dancing costumes. She could see the rear door but to her smoke-warped vision it kept shifting position. The masks were closing in around her.
    “…Hurt her—hurt her—make her suffer…”
    A bell chimed somewhere in the distance. She dimly recognized it. Pandora returning with the pizza. Thank God.
    Then she heard more voices, not the ghostly cries inside her head.
    “They should all be unconscious by now,” Cassidy Cutler said.
    “We’ve got to be careful.” Niki Plumer sounded worried, as usual. “That smoke is very strong. If it gets to us, we’ll be in trouble.”
    “We’ll give it a couple of minutes to clear. Lock the front door and turn over the closed sign. We’ll take her out the back.”

Fifty
    “S he set you up,” Zack said.
    “This doesn’t make any sense.” Bradley reached the end of the living room, turned and paced back in the reverse direction. “She’s Cassidy Cutler. She’s written four books.” He stopped in front of a bookcase, yanked out a copy of Cruel Visions and showed Zack the back cover. “Her picture is on every damn one of them.”
    “I’m not saying she stole Cutler’s identity, although it’s a possibility. I think it’s more likely that she really is Cassidy Cutler.”
    Bradley shoved the book back into the case. “Why in hell would she want to hurt Raine?”
    Zack chose his words carefully, sticking to the truth as much as possible.
    “My agency believes that she’s involved with a crowd that manufactures and distributes exotic designer drugs,” he said.
    Bradley dropped down onto one of the chairs, eyes narrowing. He knew drug dealing and the crimes associated with the business. “Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument, you’re right. What does she want with Raine?”
    “Raine’s father was a brilliant chemist.”
    “Yeah, I know. She told me.”
    “When Raine was a little girl, Judson Tallentyre worked for my firm’s client, a company that invented and patented a unique psychotropic drug.” Zack slipped easily into the familiar cover story, blending truth and fiction into a seamless whole. “The company abandoned research and shelved the drug after initial trials revealed that it was extremely dangerous. But Tallentyre suspected that the formula would be worth a fortune on the black market. It needed some tweaking, however. There were some extremely serious side effects. He left the company and took the formula with him. He continued to experiment on his own.”
    “Raine