to do my job,” Isabella said.
The hunter led them through a section of gardens steeped in shadows. He wielded a flashlight, but Isabella knew that he did not need it for himself. His preternatural night vision allowed him to move through the darkness as confidently as if the path were lit with floodlights.
He stopped at a discreetly concealed side door and punched in a code. The door opened. He ushered Isabella, Fallon and Julian into a hallway.
“Got the floor plan?” he asked.
“Yes,” Julian said.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” the hunter said. “I need to check in with company headquarters. Don’t want to break routine or they might send someone to check.”
He closed the door, plunging the hall into darkness.
Fallon switched on a pencil flashlight. Julian did the same. Isabella raised her talent.
There were always secrets aplenty in old houses and the Vantara mansion was no exception. Traces of psi fog swirled in the hallway. Layer upon layer of wispy mists indicated decades of small, private secrets that were nobody’s business but that of the individuals who harbored them. Isabella suppressed her awareness of the old radiation and concentrated on the newer mysteries. As usual in a space that had been well traveled, there was a great deal of fog, including some very hot stuff that she recognized as having been left by the hunter.
“Nothing here that looks like it ever had any connection to your broker,” she said.
Fallon consulted the map. “According to the team, he entered the mansion on a regularly scheduled tour. All the tours start in the Grand Hall.”
“To the left,” Julian said.
He led the way around the corner and down a long, high-ceilinged corridor paneled in rich, dark hardwood.
Isabella lowered her senses, not wanting to waste energy that she might need later for more nuanced detective work. Still, even when perceived with only a fraction of her talent, there was an abundance of fog to wade through. There were no such things as ghosts, but sometimes she wondered if down through the centuries, others endowed with her kind of talent had started the rumors of spirits from the Other Side. It was easy enough to imagine phantoms in the eerie light.
She followed Fallon and Julian through another doorway and into a heavy sea of fog.
“Whoa.” She stopped abruptly, adjusting her senses down another notch. “This, I take it, is the Grand Hall?”
Even in darkness lit only by moonlight slanting through high, Gothic-style windows and the two thin beams of the flashlights, the vast space glowed with gilded splendor. The walls were hung with huge ancient tapestries depicting medieval hunting scenes. Marble tiles covered the floor. Heavy, ornate furniture adorned the room. Couches and chairs covered in velvet and embroidered brocades were arranged in groupings around tables inset with lapis and malachite. Massive chandeliers hung from the ceiling.
“We know for certain that the broker was in this room,” Julian said. “He was seen entering. He exited the house with the rest of the tour group through the kitchens.”
“There’s a high probability that your broker had some serious talent in order to survive as long as he did in his line of work,” Fallon said. He studied the cavernous space, keeping his flashlight aimed at the marble-tiled floor and the richly woven rugs. “Probably a strategy-talent or an intuitive.”
“He definitely had some juice,” Julian agreed, “although he seemed unaware of it.”
“Strats and intuitives often take their psychic side for granted,” Fallon said absently. He crossed the room to examine a wall of glass-fronted bookcases. “Their abilities don’t strike them or those around them as unusual unless they are extremely powerful.”
“If he did have some talent, he would have been jacked when he entered this hall,” Isabella said.
“Right.” Fallon aimed the beam of the flashlight at a gilded red lacquer console table. “He knew that what he was about to do was dangerous. There would have been a lot of adrenaline, and that means his senses would have bounced sky-high.”
“Which would heat up the fog,” Isabella said.
Julian frowned. “What fog?”
“Never mind,” Isabella said. “Just give me a minute to take a closer look.” She opened her senses slowly. “Sheesh. There’s a ton of energy in here.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Julian demanded.
“This place gets half a million visitors a year, according to the brochure,” Fallon said.
“Well, no wonder the mist is so thick,” she said. “There’s so much stuff in this house that anything smaller than a refrigerator would be hard to find unless you knew