She stared down at the spilled liquid, baffled by the sudden attack of nerves. Zack had been on her mind virtually all day but this was the first time the thought of him had rattled her like this.
She turned around and hurried back into the kitchen. Setting the mug down on the counter, she yanked a couple of white paper towels off the stainless steel holder and returned to the living room.
Crouching, she mopped up the spilled tisane. When she was satisfied that she had got it all, she went into the kitchen again, opened the cupboard door beneath the sink and dropped the crumpled towels into the trash.
Now her pulse was racing. She looked at her fingers. They were shaking.
What was happening to her? She had been feeling fine only a few minutes before. Now something was very wrong, something involving Zack.
It was ridiculous, but she couldn’t overcome the overwhelming urge to call him, just to make sure he was okay. He’d written the number of his cell phone on a card and given it to her before they left Shelbyville. Just in case we get separated and you need to reach me, he’d said.
What had she done with the card? It was imperative that she find it. She tried to think. It wasn’t easy because the adrenaline was pounding through her now, filling her with a sense of frantic urgency.
Batman meowed loudly at her feet. Robin wrapped himself around her legs. The cats were channeling her anxiety.
This is crazy. Oops, wrong word. Not crazy. Just weird. Really, really weird. For Pete’s sake, slow down and focus.
She had dropped Zack’s card into her purse before getting behind the wheel. Her purse. Where else would one put a card with a phone number?
Okay, that made the next step simple.
She hurried into the foyer and opened the closet door. Her purse was right where it was supposed to be, on the shelf next to her keys, a pair of gloves and a stack of neatly folded scarves.
When she reached for the purse, the back of her hand brushed the side of her black raincoat hanging nearby. Dark psychic energy splashed through her, acid hot.
…Let the witch know she’s being hunted. Make her afraid…
“No.”
Instinctively she jerked back, promptly tripping over Batman, who had come up behind her. She staggered and fell against the wall. She grabbed for the door handle to keep her balance, missed and landed on the floor in a distinctly undignified position.
For a moment she just sat there, trying to get her nerves and her senses under control. Batman and Robin prowled around her, restless and agitated.
“Don’t look at me,” she whispered. “I don’t know what’s going on, either.”
Maybe the incident in Shelbyville followed by the revelations about the mystery of Vella’s death had been too much for her psychic nerves.
Don’t think that way. Zack told you you weren’t going to go crazy because of your psychic side. Pull yourself together. Find out what the hell just happened to you. You had that raincoat on earlier this evening and there were no psychic zingers from the freak.
“Some kind of fluky psychic echo effect,” she told the cats. “Maybe Zack can explain it. He has all the answers.”
Zack. She had to call him immediately. That was what had started this whole thing.
She gave Batman a pat and scrambled to her feet.
Gingerly she reached back into the closet and touched the raincoat.
…Punish her like the others. Burn, witch…
She snatched her hand away again. It was the freak. But what she was hearing in her head was not an echo of what she had heard earlier. This was something else, something new.
Clenching her teeth against the invasion of the voice, she took the coat out of the closet and examined it closely. There was something in the pocket that was giving off the bad vibes.
She opened the pocket cautiously and looked inside, afraid of what she might find.
A piece of broken china gleamed. She recognized the dainty green-and-yellow floral pattern. She was looking at a broken cup from the Shelbyville B and B.
Twenty-three
There was something wrong with the little old lady. She was blurry. And then, in mid-stride, she morphed into a man clad entirely in black. A black ski mask covered his face. Instead of an umbrella, he gripped a military-issue knife.
Zack’s eyes were confused by the abrupt transformation but his psychic senses were fully jacked and had no difficulty whatsoever interpreting the situation. Intuitively, as he always did when the chips were down, he went with his parasensitive instincts. His mirror-talent abilities recognized a would-be killer regardless and telegraphed the assailant’s next move in a nanosecond.
He slid to the right, knowing that the attacker expected him to shift to the left. The ski-masked man blurred again. In the next instant the elderly woman reappeared. She adjusted with dazzling speed, whipping around to run down her prey.
The old lady was a para-hunter.
That was not good news. He had spent a lot of time in the gym and the dojo, sparring with his hunter relatives. He was good but he lacked the preternatural speed and lightning-fast reflexes of a level-ten hunter. Ski Mask was definitely level ten.
He yanked the gun out of his holster. The elderly woman lashed out with a slashing kick. He managed, just barely, to evade the killing force of the blow but the toe of the woman’s shoe caught him in the ribs and sent him reeling back. A second strike numbed his shoulder. The gun flew out of his fingers. He heard it clatter on the concrete. There was no time to search for it. He could not take his eyes off the old woman.
In the next instant she morphed back into Ski Mask. This time Zack’s mirror talent caught the cues just before the transition and telegraphed the information to his brain in a neuro-chemical way that was literally faster than the speed of thought. He suddenly understood something very important. The constant morphing came with a price. Switching from ski-masked killer to little old lady and back again slowed the guy down a little. So why was he wasting the psychic juice it obviously required to shift back and forth?
Even with the faint hesitations that occurred when he jumped from one identity to the other, the attacker was still hunter-fast. It was all Zack could do to avoid the slashing knife. There was no way to escape the assault. The wrought-iron gate was at his back. The assailant blocked the only exit out of the breezeway.
The old woman came at him again in another lethal charge. His mirror talent noted the way she was balanced and he knew without being able to explain how he knew that she expected him to dodge right. He waited until the last possible second and went left.
The old woman slammed into the iron bars. For a fraction of a second or so she seemed disoriented.