All the Colors of Night (Fogg Lake #2)(5)
She had worked as a Vault agent for less than four months. She was still struggling to recover from the financial hit that had struck when she had lost the job at Ecclestone’s Auction House in Portland. In the meantime she told herself she was okay with the small apartment. It wasn’t as if she spent a lot of time in it. Like the other agents who worked for Ambrose Jones, her “office” was a booth in the underground level of the Vault nightclub.
Out of habit, she made her way through the apartment, locket in hand, checking to make sure she truly was alone. Mirrors glittered on every wall. She thought they made the place look bigger. Also, she liked mirrors.
Satisfied there were no zombies hiding under the bed and no psychic monsters in the closets, she changed into pajamas and slippers and padded into the kitchen to pour herself a large, medicinal glass of wine. It had been a very long night—also a very unprofitable night.
She sat down at the dining counter and picked up her phone. She had deliberately left it behind when she set out to deliver the artifact. Vault protocol dictated that agents carry minimal tech when operational. It was a precaution that made it more difficult to be tracked.
She hesitated before turning on the phone. Adrenaline mingled with exhaustion was still charging her senses. She should probably wait until morning to check her messages. But Mr. Jones might have decided to throw another job her way to make up for the Keegan fiasco. If she didn’t jump on the opportunity, he would offer the delivery to another agent.
She swallowed some of the wine, took a deep breath and turned on the phone. There were not a lot of messages. That was directly attributable to the fact that she did not have a lot of friends at the moment. Her former colleagues at Ecclestone’s had ghosted her in the wake of the scandal that had shaken the exclusive auction house to its foundations.
Someone had to take the fall for the fraudulent art and antiques that had been evaluated and authenticated by the experts in the house. The clients who had been scammed wanted blood. The firm’s reputation had been on the line. When rumors surfaced that the con artist was the new associate in the American Antiques Department, the CEO had leaped on the opportunity to throw Sierra under the bus. Julian Mather, the man she had been dating, was the first to disappear. The colleagues she had considered friends had vanished shortly thereafter.
Sierra told herself she understood. No one with a viable career in the world of fine arts and antiques could afford to maintain a relationship with someone who was rumored to deal in frauds and fakes. Reputation was everything. So, sure, she understood. Nevertheless, it hurt.
It didn’t help that losing the job had proven her parents right. Again. She was not cut out to live in the normal world, a world where those who claimed to have psychic talents were viewed with deep suspicion or, equally unsettling, a scary fascination. She had done her best to conceal her abilities during her tenure at Ecclestone’s, but the need to hide that part of herself was stressful, and it was a huge barrier when it came to establishing personal relationships. One of the quickest ways to lose a date, it turned out, was to tell him you could make him faint by using your psychic powers on him. A lot of people in the so-called normal world were not exactly open-minded when it came to the paranormal.
There was another issue that had made passing for normal difficult. She had been raised in what sociologists called an intentional community. Quest had been founded by an eclectic group of artists, misfits, neohippies, psychics—fake and real—and others seeking an alternate path. The thing about growing up in Quest was that none of her friends and neighbors had a problem with the concept of the paranormal.
That was because a number of residents, including her parents and grandparents, had come from Fogg Lake, the rural town deep in the mountains of Washington State that had the unique distinction of being a community in which psychic phenomena were accepted as normal. There was a reason for that attitude—in Fogg Lake, the paranormal was normal.
Decades earlier, in the latter half of the twentieth century, Fogg Lake had been the unwitting subject of a government experiment gone very wrong. An explosion in a secret laboratory concealed in the nearby caves had shrouded the entire area in a strange fog laced with unknown paranormal radiation. The locals had slept for a couple of days, and when they woke up they discovered that things were different—they were different. The ability to see auras was suddenly commonplace in Fogg Lake. Many people began to experience visions. Others heard strange voices or perceived colors that had no names.
The range of paranormal talents varied widely, and it wasn’t long before it became apparent that the changes had gone all the way down to the DNA level. The result was that Sierra and the other descendants of those who had been living in Fogg Lake at the time of what came to be known as the Incident were also endowed with paranormal abilities.
The first message on the phone was from her grandmother, reminding her that her grandfather’s birthday was coming up in three weeks during the Moontide celebration. Sierra dutifully responded that she was looking forward to the event and reminded herself that she had yet to find the right gift. She needed to focus on the problem. It wasn’t easy coming up with the ideal birthday present for a man who prided himself on a life of reflection, meditation and the study of philosophy. She would probably end up taking her usual gift—a bottle of good wine.
The second message was from Gwendolyn Swan, the proprietor of Swan Antiques in Pioneer Square. Interested in hiring you to authenticate an artifact rumored to be of unusual provenance . . .