it crashing down on top of several of their pursuers.
JK let out a low, delighted laugh as she jumped to her feet beside him and hand in hand they bolted for the nearest door. It wouldn’t budge, but Adam recognised it. This was the carefully guarded door to the speakeasy. “Show your face,” he breathed, just as the blind moved. Since she was their star performer, the door opened immediately, and Adam burst in, punching the door thug in the jaw—which bloody hurt—before he and JK dived as one under the roulette table just in time to avoid a renewed hail of bullets.
There followed a short, hilarious game of hide-and-seek among the tables.
JK said breathlessly, “The cops are bound to come now and catch or kill the bad guys. Must be points for us in that.”
“So many I’ll get a really deadly mission next time.”
The shooting was deafening, as were the screams of the patrons trying to get away, and there was glass and debris and carnage everywhere. This, Adam thought happily, was what computer games were all about. Sheer escapism, exorcising aggression and secret desires for dangerous situations without any of the actual risks. Apart from the sluggishly bleeding, barely noticeable graze to his arm, neither of them was hit. And he couldn’t remember ever having quite so much fun in any game as he did bolting around that room, avoiding bullets and planning their escape. Of course, it all had an extra edge because they were totally naked throughout. When he dived behind an upended table where a young woman was already sheltering, she averted her eyes in even more horror. He grinned and winked at her, and by the time he scrambled out to rejoin JK closer to the back door, the woman was cramming a piece of paper into his hands and saying huskily, “Call me.”
Adam laughed aloud, then landed in a heap behind the bar with JK. The barman already had his hands up. “I’ll have a gin and lime,” Jilly told him and let loose another barrage at the thugs closing in.
The barman’s jaw dropped, but he rushed to obey with shaking hands, grabbing glasses and bottles and ducking with them below the level of the bar counter.
“Two, if you please, my good man,” Adam said cheerfully. “Hell, have one for yourself—you need it.”
The barman didn’t have to be told twice. In seconds, he came up with three glasses of pale green liquid. JK stopped shooting for long enough to grin and grab hers, and clink with both Adam and the barman.
Then the cops burst in through the door. “All right, nobody move!”
The barman said, “We can get out the back door. Come on.”
He crawled through first, just as someone started shooting again. JK rolled through, treating Adam to another close-up of her gorgeous bum, and then, without warning, it all vanished. No shooting, no speakeasy, no JK.
****
It was a good opportunity. The poltergeist was so focused on breaking through whatever barrier kept it from the room beyond that it barely noticed Sera or even Blair until he walked right through the ripple of air it was creating. His hair actually stood on end. Only then did the poltergeist back off, and by that time, Sera already had her psychic teeth in it, pushing and tearing it apart.
She’d got it. She could feel its energy waning, until, with a last-ditch gust of fury, it seemed to hurl itself sideways and into the main part of the room. Sera hung on to the invisible thread linking her to it, walked slowly forward after it. Vaguely, she was aware of Blair leaping from side to side, trying to keep it away from both the computer and the trigger point through which he couldn’t follow. And deeper in the room she could see Jilly jogging on the spot and dodging around as if hiding behind various things no one else could see, except in a curiously slow, almost disjointed way that bothered Sera, even through the effort of her concentration. Was Jilly under threat in Adam’s virtual world?
Even more weirdly, Jilly held her hands out as if holding an imaginary gun, which seemed a bizarre way to protect herself from all the stuff hurling straight at her, courtesy of the poltergeist. Without warning, she suddenly fell over, did an energetic forward roll and came up again holding her imaginary gun in a different direction.
What the fuck?
But at least the poltergeist didn’t seem to be feeding off Jilly’s