The Mystery Woman (Ladies of Lantern Str - By Amanda Quick Page 0,108

was slung over her shoulder.

It had not been a good day, and the night was turning out to be worse. Not only was she once again unemployed, she’d been experiencing the all too familiar edgy sensation for the past several hours. During the past year she had learned the hard way that the icy little jolts of warning were coming from her intuition. Someone was watching her. Again.

And now a couple of street creeps were about to try to mug her.

“Really, how much can any woman be expected to take?” she said to Houdini.

Houdini chortled again, eager to go on stage.

One of the thugs emerged from behind the far end of the garbage bin. His head, which had been shaved to better display the tattoos on his skull, gleamed in the light cast by the fixture over the stage door. He had a knife in one hand.

The second man popped out of hiding and moved toward her along a parallel trajectory. He wore a stocking cap over his long, straggly hair. The blade of his knife glittered in the light.

“Now what’s a nice girl like you doing out here all alone at night?” Tattoo Head asked. “Didn’t anyone tell you this is a dangerous neighborhood?”

His voice was high-pitched and over-rezzed with the sort of unnatural excitement that indicated he had been doing some serious stimulants earlier in the evening.

“Get out of my way,” Alice said. She adjusted the weight of the tote on her shoulder, tightened her grip on the suitcase, and kept walking. “I’m not in a good mood.”

“Now why you wanna go and talk like that to a couple of guys who just want to party?” the man with the stocking cap crooned. “We’re gonna show you a real good time.”

“A real good time.” Tattoo Head leered. “What’s that thing on your shoulder? Some kinda fluffy rat?”

Alice ignored him, closing the distance between the three of them as she trudged toward the alley entrance. No doubt about it, a really bad day was turning into a really bad night.

“Listen up, bitch,” Stocking Cap snarled. “Stop right there. First, put that big purse down on the ground. You hear me? You’re gonna take out all the money you got inside and if my friend and I like what we see, we’ll all have some fun. If we don’t like what we see, why then, you’re gonna have to give us a reason not to cut you up a bit.”

Alice kept walking.

“Hey, my buddy told you to stop,” Tattoo Head hissed.

Alice continued walking. She felt Houdini’s little claws grip her shoulder. He was no longer chortling. He growled a warning and sleeked out, his scruffy gray fur flattened against his small frame. He opened his second set of eyes and watched the knife-wielding pair closely. He was ready to rumble.

“There’s an old saying about dust bunnies,” Alice said to the thugs. “By the time you see the teeth, it’s too late. Turns out Houdini and I have our own little twist on that bit of wisdom. If you can’t see the teeth or anything else, you’re in trouble.”

“What do you think you’re doing, you stupid woman?” Stocking Cap said. He skipped and danced across the pavement, closing in on her. “You asked for it. I’m gonna have to cut up that face of yours to teach you a lesson.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Alice said. “I’ve got some real issues at the moment. You shouldn’t mess with a woman who has issues. Never say you weren’t warned.”

She jacked up her senses and pulled hard on her talent. She had never met anyone else with the same kind of psychic ability that she possessed—light-talents of any kind were rare. Those strong enough to do what she could do were considered the stuff of fairytales.

She cranked up her aura and used the energy to bend the wavelengths of normal spectrum light around herself and Houdini. The process was similar to the way a rock diverts water in a stream. To all intents and purposes, she had just gone invisible to the human eye.

She pushed a little harder and extended the shield to her tote and suitcase. It took a lot of power to bend light around not only herself and Houdini but the objects she was touching as well. She figured she wouldn’t have to do it for long. She had learned over the years that people tended to freak out when they realized that, in her case, going invisible was not merely