The steel hatch rose higher. A storm of paranormal wind roared out of the dark opening. It was unlike anything Isabella had ever experienced. She felt as if she were standing in the teeth of a hurricane, but nothing around her was affected by the strange gale. The grass did not bend beneath the force of the howling energy. No leaves rustled. Her hair and clothes did not flutter.
But her senses responded with an all-consuming awareness. Adrenaline splashed through her veins. An intoxicating excitement rose within her. She was suddenly jacked. She looked at Fallon and knew by the heat in his eyes that he was experiencing a similar reaction to the heavy radiation.
“Shit.” Henry dropped the crowbar and staggered back. “See what I mean?”
“Yes,” Fallon said. He aimed a flashlight into the opening and got the intense, thoughtful expression Isabella was coming to know well. “Lot of energy down there, all right. Must have been one hell of an explosion. The nexus currents in the area would have intensified the effects.”
Vera edged farther away. The dogs hung back, heads lowered. Poppy growled. Walker stayed where he was, but his agitation increased visibly. He rocked madly on his heels and wrapped his arms around himself.
“Alien weapons,” Walker said. “The Queen g-guards them.”
Isabella braced herself and struggled to focus her talent. When she went into her zone, she saw heavy waves of psi fog crashing out of the shelter hatch.
“Lasher and Rachel must have been fairly strong talents of some kind,” she said quietly to Fallon. “That’s why they were able to go down there.”
“Probably explains why Lasher chose the Cove to found his community of Seekers in the first place,” Fallon said. “Consciously or unconsciously, he sensed the nexus currents here and was drawn to them.”
He stirred the darkness with the beam of his flashlight. Isabella saw a ladder leading down into the shadows. The light glinted on the corner of a rusted metal lab bench. Shards of broken glass glittered in the depths. There was also a scattering of yellowed papers and what looked like a couple of notebooks.
“They pulled out in a hurry,” she said. “No telling what they left down there.”
“The Queen,” Walker muttered. “Watch out for the Q-queen.”
“I will,” Fallon promised.
He disappeared over the edge and descended into the shadows. It occurred to Isabella, not for the first time, that for a big man Fallon Jones moved with an easy, masculine grace that conveyed an impression of both power and control.
“Ladder’s in good shape,” he called up a short time later. “And the energy level down here isn’t any stronger than it is at the opening of the hatch. Come on down, Isabella.”
She stuck her flashlight into the pocket of her jacket, stepped over the edge, found her footing on the ladder and descended cautiously. It was like going down into an invisible whirlpool. The energy whipped and flashed around her.
When her foot touched the bottom rung of the ladder, Fallon’s strong hand closed around her arm.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes, but I have to say I’ve never experienced anything like this. Any sign of Walker’s Queen?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s royalty for you. Always the last to arrive.” She took out her flashlight and switched it on. “Of course it would help if we knew exactly what he was talking about.”
“Whatever it was, Walker took it seriously, so we will, too,” Fallon said. “Watch your step—there’s a lot of broken glass in here.”
She crouched and picked up one of the larger shards. “Very thick glass, too.”
Fallon took it from her and held it up to the beam of his flashlight. “Looks like the kind they use in banks. Bullet-resistant. Exactly the type of glass that researchers familiar with laws of para-physics would use to deal with the energy generated by Bridewell’s curiosities. The best way to disrupt psi that is infused in glass is with a glass barrier.”
Together they swept the concrete chamber with their flashlights. Broken lab equipment, overturned metal benches and scraps of paper gave mute testimony to the violence of whatever had occurred in the shelter twenty-two years earlier.
“This place is larger than I would have expected,” Isabella said. “It’s as big as a double-wide. There’s even a second room off this one. I was expecting a tiny, cramped space.”
“The folks who built bomb shelters planned to live in them for several months or even a year while they waited for the radiation levels to go down on the surface,” Fallon said. “They wanted all the comforts of home.”
She shuddered. “I can’t imagine camping out down here while all of my friends and neighbors were dying of radiation poisoning on the surface.”
“Guess you had to be there to get into the mind-set.”
“Guess so. Well, safe to say that something chaotic certainly happened in here. But aside from the broken glass, there are no signs of a normal explosion. No fire damage. The papers and notebooks aren’t even charred.”
“There was a violent release of energy, but it all came from the paranormal end of the spectrum.” Fallon broke off abruptly. “Huh.”
Isabella glanced at him and saw that he was aiming his flashlight at the doorway that opened into the other chamber.
“What?” she asked.
But he was already heading toward the second room.
She started to hurry after him, but a faint scratching sound in one dark corner distracted her. She jumped and flicked the light beam in the direction of the noise. Something moved in the shadows.
“Crap,” she whispered. “Rats.”
“That’s not a surprise,” Fallon said. He did not look back. “We’re underground and this space has been abandoned for years.”
“I’m not interested in logical explanations, boss. We’re talking about rats.”
“They’ll run from the light.”
“Oh, yeah? I don’t see any signs of this sucker running away.”
“Wonder how he got in here,” Fallon mused. “The place is supposed to be sealed.”
“Rats can get into anything.”
The scratchy noise got louder. An old-fashioned clockwork doll waddled stiffly out of the darkness. Isabella watched it with a sinking feeling. The doll stood almost three feet tall. It was dressed in what had once been an elaborately worked gown in the late-Victorian style of fashionable mourning. The dress was tattered and frayed, but it had obviously been made of expensive materials and trim.
The doll was mostly bald, but what was left of its hair was parted in the middle and pulled back into a tight chignon. A miniature crown, studied with small, ominous crystals, was perched on top of the porcelain skull.
“I think the Queen has arrived,” Isabella whispered. “It’s Victoria. She’s dressed in black from head to foot. They say that after Prince Albert’s death she wore mourning for the rest of her reign.”
“It’s motion-sensitive, like the clock,” Fallon said. “That’s a hallmark of Bridewell’s work.”
“How can it function after all these years?”
“We’ll worry about that later.”
Energy heightened abruptly in the atmosphere. The doll trundled toward Isabella with unnerving accuracy.
“Looks like she’s got a fix on you,” Fallon said.
“I can sense it. She’s starting to generate some kind of energy. Reminds me of the psi that emanated from the clock just before everything went dark.”
“Move,” Fallon ordered. “Fast. Force her to get another fix.”
Isabella tried to step out of the Queen’s path, but her muscles refused to obey. She opened her mouth to tell Fallon that she could not move only to discover that she could not speak. Her mind began to grow cloudy. A terrifying numbness crept through her blood.
She concentrated fiercely on focusing her own talent. She knew how to disorient human psi but this was a doll, a clockwork robot. Nevertheless, the energy that had been infused into the thing originally was human in origin, she reminded herself.