But what if there was no smoke? At least, none that you could smell?
Orchid closed her eyes. Instantly the room stilled. She could feel the kitchen floor beneath her knees, right where it should have been.
She was right. There was no smoke in the kitchen. Nor could she hear the roar of the flames in the hallway.
Illusion.
She kept her eyes closed, cutting off the vision of an inferno in the hall. Gradually her jangled nerves stabilized. In the absence of visual input, her other senses began to convey logical information once more.
She became aware of the sound of rain pounding on the roof. The storm had struck. Voices came from the front room. The same voices she had heard last night when she and Rafe had encountered the two men in the unnatural fog outside Theo Willis's house.
"It has to be here somewhere."
"We've turned the place upside down, Jink. Come on, we gotta get out of here."
"Keep looking. He won't like it if we don't find it. Let's check the bedroom."
"What about the woman?"
"Forget her. She won't give us any trouble. She's too busy having a nervous breakdown out there in the kitchen."
Orchid listened to the footsteps of the two men as they receded in the direction of Morgan's bedroom. Very cautiously she opened one eye.
The flames still consumed the hall. The kitchen writhed.
Orchid quickly closed her eye. The illusion-talent was strong. So was his prism. Together they were powerful enough to maintain the vision here in the kitchen while they searched the bedroom.
There was no way she could get down the hall and across the living room without the two men noticing. Her only option was the wall phone.
Unable to trust her visual sense, she kept her eyes firmly closed and tried to recall the exact location of the icerator. Directly behind her and a little to the right.
She turned, crouched, and began to crawl blindly across the floor. Thuds echoed from the bedroom. It sounded as if the intruders were pulling drawers out of a dresser.
Orchid knew she had found the icerator when she banged her head against it. Damn, damn, damn. But she managed not to cry out.
She used her sense of touch to guide her to her feet.
The icerator handle was reassuringly firm in her grasp. She clung to it with one hand and groped for the wall phone with the other.
A jolt of unwarranted relief raced through her when her fingers touched the receiver. Then she realized she would have to punch out the numbers without opening her eyes.
Where were the numbers on the phone?
Think. The number one was at the top on the left. The nine had to be last. No, that wasn't right. There were all those other little buttons. The pound key. The star button.
She risked opening her eyes long enough to squint at the number pad. A mistake. The keys swam before her, each digit moving in meaningless circles.
Hastily she closed her eye and stabbed at the key she thought might be the nine. Then she fumbled for the number one key. She punched it twice. Nothing happened. How hard could it be to dial 911 without sight? she wondered.
The answer was very hard. It took her two more tries before she got it right.
"New Seattle Emergency Center."
"Fire," Orchid whispered. She hoped that the driving rain would keep the men in the other room from overhearing her. "Shelter Cove Marina."
"Please speak up, ma'am. I can barely hear you."
Orchid raised her voice slightly, listening all the while for sounds from the bedroom. "There's a fire. At Shelter Cove Marina. Houseboat number four. Hurry, please."
"I'm dispatching help right now. Can you stay on the line?"
"No." Orchid fumbled the phone back into the wall cradle.
"Sonovabitch, Jink, she got to the phone. Probably called the cops. We gotta get outa here."
"Don't worry about it. We got what we came for. Let's go."
"Shit. I thought you said the illusion would hold her."
"Don't worry, she can't tell the cops a damn thing. She never saw our faces. Come on. Move it, man. I can hear a siren."
Orchid crouched on the kitchen floor and listened to the two men run from the apartment. When she heard their footsteps outside on the dock she opened her eyes very carefully.
The kitchen was back in the right universe. The hallway was no longer filled with fire. She drew a deep breath, trying to quell the tide of adrenaline that was sending chill after chill down her spine.
She straightened slowly and picked up the phone a second tune to dial the emergency number.
"New Seattle Emergency Center."
"This is number four, Shelter Cove Marina again. We need an ambulance, too."
Then she called the one person she wanted to call most of all.
Rafe.
Fifteen minutes later, Rafe stood on the dock in front of Morgan Lambert's houseboat. He had one arm locked so tightly around Orchid that it was a wonder she could breathe. He was certain that he had set a record for the short trip from his hillside house to Curtain Lake.
Her phone call had come as both a relief and a terrible confirmation of the increasing unease he had been experiencing for the past hour. He had called her home phone every five minutes after the first trickle of restlessness had hit.
At first he had felt foolish. He knew as well as everyone else that there was no such thing as telepathy. But after the night he had felt the consuming need to phone Orchid and had awakened her from one of her psychic vampire nightmares, he had not been so quick to shrug off his intuition when it concerned her.
He watched the grim scene unfolding on the street above the marina. The rain had stopped a few minutes ago, leaving a damp sheen on the pavement. The medics were in the process of trundling the still unconscious Morgan into an ambulance. Two police cruisers were parked at odd angles. The uniformed officers were inside Lambert's apartment, taking notes.
"Are you sure you don't want to go to the emergency room?" Rafe asked Orchid for the third, possibly the fourth time. He had lost count.
"No, I'm all right, really. Just a little shaken. Rafe, the cops are going to want to talk to us after they finish inside the houseboat. You heard the officers. They're working on the assumption that Morgan overdosed himself on dirty-ice and got ripped off by some drug-dealing friends. What are we going to say?"
"There's not much we can tell them. As far as we know, that may have been exactly what happened."
She turned in the circle of his arm. Her eyes were steely green. "Morgan did not do hard drugs. He would never touch something as dangerous as dirty-ice."
"You want to tell that to the medics who just pumped out his stomach? One of them said it's a wonder he's still alive."
Her mouth tightened mutinously. "Those two intruders must have forced him to swallow the stuff. Maybe the illusion-talent made the drug look like milk or wine or something." She shivered. "It had to be the same talent-prism team we ran into the other night at Theo's house. I'm sure of it."
The bastards would pay for scaring her, he thought. But he had a hunch she would not want to hear about his plans for retribution just now. She was too busy worrying about her friend, Morgan.
"You said you think that the two men were after a letter Theo Willis sent to Lambert?"
"I heard enough to know that they were searching for something. It had to be the letter Morgan mentioned in the phone message he left on my answering machine.
Unfortunately, I think they found it. We won't know what was in it until Morgan wakes up."
"In other words, we don't have any hard facts to give to the cops."
"No. But we have to protect Morgan. Those two men wanted him dead. What if they try to get at him while he's in the hospital?"
Rafe considered the matter briefly. "I doubt that they'll risk attempted murder in a hospital. After all, Lambert can't identify them. But just in case, I know someone who will keep an eye on him. For a price."