Burning Darkness Read Free Page A

once.
    She grabbed her switchblade and peered through the door’s peephole to see a man she didn’t recognize. Wait a minute. She did recognize him! The man who’d been following her last night. Holy crap, how had he found her?
    “What do you want?” she called out, hoping he couldn’t hear the tremble in her voice.
    “Fonda Raine?” He knew her name. Stalker? Crazed rapist?
    “Who wants to know?”
    “Agent Westerfield with the FBI. I’m here to ask you about your work with Gerard Darkwell.”
    That threw her. She tried to get a better look at him. His long coat was draped over his arm. He wore a simple suit, hair brushed back in a neat style, posture straight and businesslike, sort of Fox Mulderish, she supposed. She’d had a ginormous crush on David Duchovny in the X-Files days. He believed in monsters and psychic abilities, in oddities like her. The man at her door was handsome, but he was no Fox.
    “Hold on a minute.”
    She ran to the bathroom, grabbed the switchblade from the floor, and pressed it behind her back as she opened the door a crack. “Your ID?”
    He showed her a badge that looked authentic, but how could you really know? He was probably in his late forties, his brown hair streaked with silver. He glanced in both directions before saying, “The FBI is studying the unusual project in which you were involved. With the fire, some of the data is lost. I need you to fill in the gaps.”
    She didn’t want to go back there. Only look ahead, not back. But the words came out: “Will the FBI continue the project?”
    “Possibly.”
    Darkwell, a muckety-muck at the CIA, had tapped her for a top-secret government program. She, a nobody from the projects, doing important work. For the first time in her life, she had felt important. And the money had been great, enough to give her a cushion of security she’d never had.
    “Come in.” She opened the door and gestured for him to sit in the bright yellow vinyl chair, a relic from the sixties. “It’s a rocker,” she warned as he eyed it dubiously. “Or you can have the bubble chair.”
    He cleared his throat. “This is fine.”
    She loved things from the past. Life seemed safer then, more innocent. She tucked the switchblade beneath her leg as she sat on the arm of the couch.
    He settled into the chair, steadying it, and then looked at her. “We’ve been trying to track you down since the fire at Darkwell’s estate.”
    The fire Eric Aruda had no doubt set, which destroyed the mansion where she’d been living and working, and that killed Darkwell. “I spent some time with my father.” Sounded so nice and heartwarming, going home for support. “What do you want to know?”
    He held up a digital recorder. “May I? I want to get the details right.” He flipped it on and held it in his hand. “Tell me about your work with Darkwell. I know it was of a supernatural nature.”
    “We considered it paranormal. How much do you know?”
    His mouth twitched, but he kept his expression passive. “To be honest, not much.” He paused, maybe giving her a chance to start rattling away, which she didn’t. “Let’s start with you. You obviously have a super-paranormal ability that Darkwell considered valuable.”
    “I can astral project.” It had been so odd to hear Darkwell casually put into words what she had hidden for so long.
    Westerfield gave no indication of what he thought. “You and the two other contractors were using your abilities to do what, exactly?”
    “Find and kill terrorists. It was supposed to be ones in the Middle East, but a local group called the Rogues were trying to sabotage the program, so we were mostly targeting them. They also have abilities.”
    Finally something made him react. His light gray eyes glittered with interest. “Tell me everything you know about them.”
    She did, ending with, “They’re dangerous. Will you kill them? That’s what Darkwell was trying to do.”
    Instead of answering, he verified the