Silver Master by Jayne Castle Read Free Book Online Page B

City Guild when current chief Harold Taylor steps down….
    He did a quick search on the Ingram Connection and learned that the agency had quietly closed its doors less than a week after the photographs at the Lakeside Resort & Spa had been taken.
    No wonder Celinda had been so anxious not to get involved in Guild business. She’d been badly burned by a high-ranking Guild man.
    He did a quick search on Benson Landry. It was no surprise that Landry fit the profile of most of the ghost hunters at the top of the Guilds: a strong dissonance-energy para-rez talent, extremely ambitious, hints of ruthlessness, and enough gaps in the record to indicate that he had some secrets.
    Davis looked at Max. “Wonder what the hell she saw in him.”

Chapter 4
    HE HATED THIS GREEN HELL, BUT IT WAS THE PERFECT HID ing place for the gun. He pushed it inside the small grotto and covered it with a few leaves and palm fronds. The foliage was green, but not the natural-looking green you saw on the surface. Everything down here in the underground rain forest was a weird shade of iridescent green, like the luminous quartz that had been used to construct the catacombs. Even the artificial sunlight was an eerie green.
    It wasn’t just the colors in the jungle that were strange. Most of the flora and fauna bore a vague resemblance to the plants and wildlife on the surface of Harmony, but down here evolution, modified by the underground environment, alien engineering, and the constant presence of a lot of ambient psi had produced several startling twists and turns.
    The experts theorized that the aliens had engineered the belowground ecosystem because the one aboveground was toxic to their kind. It was clear that the aliens had never been at home on the surface of Harmony. They had evidently lived most of their lives in the vast maze of tunnels and chambers they had built beneath the surface. When they had fashioned cityscapes aboveground, they had surrounded them with massive green quartz walls. It was believed that the psi energy given off by the quartz and by something here in the jungle had been an antidote to whatever it was that had been dangerous to them aboveground.
    He surveyed his handiwork and was satisfied. The gun was well-concealed, but it would be easily available if he needed it again in the future.
    He hurried quickly through a stand of tall fern trees. It made him nervous to get out of eyesight of the gate. He had an amber-rez compass with him, but they were not infallible down here where vast currents of psi energy called ghost rivers could distort the delicate devices. He had a great fear of getting lost in the jungle.
    The hot, humid atmosphere was almost smothering. It would rain soon.
    A large green bird took flight directly in front of him, startling him so badly he cried out. The creature flapped madly, shrieking its annoyance, and then disappeared into the heavy green canopy overhead.
    The constant din of birdcalls and mysterious rustlings in the undergrowth rattled his nerves. He was terrified of snakes and insects. While thus far no species down here had been identified as lethal to humans, that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. Exploration of the jungle had barely begun. The Guilds were still in the process of trying to find the special kind of psi talents who could open gates to the rain forest. To date only a handful had been discovered.
    The gate he used was not one that had been opened under the auspices of the Guild. It was not listed on any official chart. The six-foot-tall hole had been created for him by one of his street clinic patients who happened to possess the unusual type of para-rez talent needed to access the rain forest. The junkie had suffered a most unfortunate overdose once he had finished the job. But what could you expect of an addict?
    He hurried through the opening, breathing easier once he was outside in the green quartz corridor. It always amazed him that nothing from the rain forest followed him