Running Hot (The Arcane Society #5)(4)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“You’re pleading with me. I like that.”

“I’m not going to beg for my life. But there is one thing you should know before you do this.”

“What?”

“If you hadn’t come along, I would have owned that florist shop by now, a whole chain of flower shops.”

“That was always your greatest flaw,” Martin said. “Your dreams and ambitions were so much smaller than mine.”

He heightened the psychic heat of the dark energy he was generating, his face tightening with effort. She pushed back harder, pulling energy from her own aura. The pain lessened some more.

“Die, damn you,” he hissed. He took another step closer. “Why don’t you die?”

Her strength was coming back. She was able to focus clearly on maintaining the energy shield that her aura had become.

Martin staggered but he did not seem to notice that she was fighting him. Instead, he appeared disoriented.

Angrily, he pulled himself together and took another step toward her, almost touching her. He forced more energy through the murky bands of dark lightning he was generating.

“You’re supposed to die,” he shouted.

He reached down to seize her by the throat. She raised her arms in a reflexive, defensive gesture. He grabbed her hands. She gripped his wrists.

Her palms burned. The world exploded, sending jolt after jolt of shock waves through her senses.

Martin Crocker convulsed once. He looked at her with the eyes of a man who is peering into hell.

“No,” he screamed.

He reeled, lost his balance and went over the side of the dock into the water. His aura winked out with terrifying suddenness.

She rose, heart pounding. For the second time in her life, she had killed a man. Not just any man this time—a very powerful, influential multibillionaire who just happened to be involved in a dangerous criminal enterprise.

And her hands still burned.

ONE

WAIKIKI . . .

The big man in the short-sleeved, orange and purple flowered shirt was going to be a problem in about five minutes. It didn’t take a psychic to sense the angry, volatile energy stirring the atmosphere around table five. Any experienced bartender would have picked up on it. For a bartender who just happened to be psychic and who was also an ex-cop, the invisible warning signs had started blazing neon-bright when Mr. Orange and Purple Flowers walked into the Dark Rainbow half an hour earlier.

Luther Malone gave the mai tai a quick stir with a swizzle stick and set it on Julie’s tray next to the beer and the Blue Hawaii. Julie leaned over the bar to pluck a cherry and a slice of pineapple out of the chilled containers.

“Got trouble on five,” she said quietly. “The idiot is picking on Crazy Ray. Fortunately for the big fool, Ray hasn’t noticed yet.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Luther said.

Although the hole-in-the-wall establishment was located in Waikiki, they didn’t get much tourist trade. Tucked away in a small courtyard half a block off busy Kuhio Avenue, the Rainbow catered to an eccentric group of regulars. Some of the customers, Crazy Ray among them, were more eccentric than others. Ray had long ago dedicated himself to the gods of surfing. When Ray was not surfing, he went into a Zen-like state. Everyone who knew him acknowledged that he was best left in that otherworldly zone.

“Be careful,” Julie said. She garnished the mai tai with the pineapple and the cherry. “A lot of that bulk is muscle, not fat.”

“Yeah, I can see that. I appreciate the tip.”

Julie flashed him a quick smile. “I’d really hate to have anything happen to you, boss. The hours on this job mesh perfectly with my work at the hotel.”

Like so many others employed in the tourist trade throughout Hawaii, Julie held down two jobs. Life in the islands had its benefits but it was expensive. Friday and Saturday nights she showed up at the Dark Rainbow to help with the dinner rush. Her regular day job was working the front desk at one of the countless small, faded, budget hotels that somehow managed to survive in the shadows of the big beachfront resorts and high-rise condos.

In addition to Julie two nights a week, the Rainbow usually employed a dishwasher. That position, however, was currently open. Again. Dishwashers came and went with such relentless frequency that the proprietors, Petra and Wayne Groves, no longer bothered to remember names. They called each one Bud and let it go at that. The most recent Bud had quit the previous night. Evidently the job had interfered with his regular appointments with his meth dealer.

The door to the kitchen swung open. Wayne Groves, half owner of the Rainbow, emerged with a tray of platters, each laden with mounds of deep-fried food. Pretty much everything that came out of the Dark Rainbow’s kitchen was fried.

Wayne came to an abrupt halt, his attention riveted on the man in the orange and purple shirt.

Wayne had a lean, rangy build and hard, sharp features that would have suited an old school gunslinger. His eyes went with the image. They were ice cold. He was sixty-five but could still read the last line on the chart at the eye doctor’s. The truth was he could have read a few more lines below that but they didn’t design eye tests for people with preternatural vision.

Wayne was covered from head to foot in tattoos, the most distinctive one being the red-eyed snake coiled around his gleaming bald scalp. The head of the snake was positioned high on his forehead, a dark jewel in an ominous crown.

Wayne was a very focused person. Most of the time the full force of his concentration was directed at taking orders for fish and chips and hamburgers or polishing glassware. But at the moment he was locked on another target. Flower Shirt didn’t know it but he was now squarely in the sights of a man who had once made his living working as a sniper for a clandestine government agency.

Luther grabbed the cane that was hooked over the counter. Time to get moving. The last thing they needed at the Rainbow was an incident that would result in a visit from the Honolulu PD. The neighboring business establishments would not appreciate it. Around here, everyone liked to keep a low profile. That went double for the Rainbow’s regulars, most of whom were badly damaged sensitives like Crazy Ray.

He maneuvered his way out from behind the bar. He paused briefly near the still and silent Wayne.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll handle it.”

Wayne blinked and snapped out of his lethal stillness.

“Whatever,” he growled. He turned and glided toward a nearby table.

The kitchen door opened again on a wave of grease-scented heat. Petra Groves, the chef and co-owner of the restaurant, appeared. She raked the room with an assessing expression while she wiped her hands on her badly stained apron.