Otis got very excited—his usual response to anything he considered a treat. He ripped open the wrapping of the energy bar. Gabriel continued with the pat-down.
Lucy took a deep breath. Okay, the good news was that she hadn’t actually killed anyone. Ponytail and Sweat-Stink were not nice guys, but she did not want to have the weight of their deaths on her conscience for the rest of her life. Punishing them was the job of the judicial system.
The bad news was that Gabriel now knew what she could do, given an intense paranormal environment. Most clients would be alarmed by the wild side of her talent. Anyone who wanted to employ a weather channeler because of her ability to generate a potentially lethal storm was probably not someone she wanted to work for. Generally speaking, there were no legal uses for killer storms.
“Sometimes I get a little carried away,” she ventured.
“I noticed.” Gabriel stood, removed his camera, and started taking photos. “I’d really like to talk to these two, but obviously they are not in a chatty frame of mind at the moment, and we don’t have time to hang around down here. One of them must have a portal key. As soon as I find it, I’ll cuff them and haul them into one of these chambers. With a little luck, they’ll still be here when the Coppersmith security team comes down to collect Croston’s body.”
Lucy became aware of a warm sensation between her breasts. She had felt it earlier, but she had been so busy channeling storm energy that she hadn’t paid any attention. The entire Underworld had seemed hot for a few minutes.
Alarmed, she hauled the chain out from under her shirt and stared at the amber pendant.
“Gabriel, look.”
She held up the pendant. The amber was no longer gray. It was glowing a deep, eerie blue.
“That’s the color it was when the fake doctor gave me the injection in the para-psych clinic,” she said. “It lit up when the other demon—I mean, creepy bad guy—came into the room. It’s the color of the pendants that the kidnappers wore. Maybe using my talent activated it. Or the energy in the doll’s eyes?”
“But you just now noticed it?”
“Yes. No. I think it started getting warm a few minutes ago, but I was distracted by those two guys with the flamers. And then there was that storm and the lightning and, well, I wasn’t paying close attention, if you see what I mean.”
“So you didn’t notice it until this pair showed up?”
“Right.”
Gabriel tugged the leather jacket off Sweat-Stink, exposing a stained khaki shirt that had seen better days. He opened the front of the shirt.
A portal key dangled from a chain around Sweat-Stink’s throat. So did something else: a crystal that glowed blue. Without a word, Gabriel moved to Ponytail and opened the man’s shirt. Lucy saw another pendant. It, too, radiated a blue light.
Gabriel snapped the chain that held Ponytail’s pendant. Gripping the stone in one hand, he walked several feet away from the unconscious men. The blue glow of the amber faded rapidly. He turned around and walked toward Lucy. The pendant brightened. So did the one that Lucy wore around her neck.
“The ambers are tuned to respond to each other,” Gabriel said. “Signal stones. Must be a form of identification for a gang.”
“Like a tattoo or a secret password.”
“Right.”
“Those three men who tried to grab you last night weren’t wearing blue crystals,” Lucy pointed out. “Neither was Croston.”
“No, which is interesting.”
“They took a big risk ambushing us down here.”
“No,” Gabriel said. “It’s the perfect spot for an ambush. Lethal accidents happen in the Ghost City. Searchers would have found my body, and it would have looked like I died of natural causes. I think you would have vanished.”
“It’s me they wanted, isn’t it? You were in the way, so they tried to take you out.”
“That’s what this looks like.”
“And to think I always wanted to be one of the popular A-list kids back in boarding school.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I can’t begin to tell you how relieved we are to have the artifact back in the vault, Mr. Jones,” the curator said. “Obviously we must upgrade our security here at the museum.”
His name was Reginald Peabody. He was in charge of the Midnight Carnival, the legendary museum of the Arcane Society. Lucy listened absently to the conversation he and Gabriel were engaged in while she wandered through the enchanting array of exhibits, scaled-down thrill rides, and miniature towns and buildings.