“The book is still encrypted,” Abby reminded him. “It won’t make any sense to you until I break the code.”

He closed the book with a snap. “Do it now.”

“You promise you’ll let us go?”

“I promise,” Lander said. Anger flashed in his cold eyes. “I told you, I have no reason to kill either of you.”

“He’s lying, Abby,” Dawson said.

Lander aimed the gun at him. “It occurs to me that now that I have your sister, I don’t have any more use for you.”

Dangerous currents swirled in the atmosphere. Dawson started to sweat. He gasped for breath.

“No.” Abby grabbed the lab book. “You said you wouldn’t hurt him. I’ll break the code for you.”

“Do it,” Lander snarled.

She jacked up her energy, found the frequencies and held out the lab book.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s done. Here, take the book and let us go.”

Lander reached for the book, ignoring her plea. His fingers closed around the spine. Abby seized the energy of the encryption and sent it into his aura.

Lander stiffened. His eyes widened in dawning horror.

“No,” he screamed. He tried and failed to let go of the book. “You can’t do this to me. I’ll kill you first, I swear it.”

His left hand was still frozen to the book. Abby sensed that the energy of the unlocking code was channeling straight into his aura. But he was so much stronger than she had realized. He managed to let go of the lab book. Gaining strength, he turned the pistol toward her.

“Bitch,” he screamed.

The barrel of the pistol glowed hotter. Icy currents flowed around her heart.

Sam came through the doorway, the Phoenix ring on fire. Paranormal lightning crackled across the small space, igniting Lander’s aura. Ultralight flames blazed. Lander jerked and twitched and writhed.

He stared at Sam from the heart of the inferno. “No. It can’t end like this. The crystals are mine.”

In the next instant, he crumpled to the floor. His aura and the psi-fire winked out with a terrible finality.

Sam scooped up the crystal gun and looked at Abby.

“I told you this was a bad plan,” he said.

“I thought it all went quite well,” she said. Her voice sounded far too high and thin.

She hurled herself against Sam’s chest. His arms closed fiercely around her.

47

“I DON’T GET IT,” DAWSON SAID TO SAM. “HOW DID YOU MANAGE to sneak up on Knox? He watched Abby’s arrival with his binoculars and made sure that she was the only one who came ashore from the floatplane. That island wasn’t much larger than a big rock. We would have heard even a very small outboard engine.”

They were back at the Copper Beach house. Sam had used his phone to summon the floatplane that had been standing by to pick them up. The pilot was a resident of Copper Beach. He had asked no questions about the unusual charter.

Abby sat in a chair near the hearth. Newton was on the floor at her feet. Willow had made coffee for everyone. She and Elias were following the conversation with sharp-eyed attention.

“I came partway out on one of the whale-watching charters,” Sam said. “Figured Knox wouldn’t be overly concerned if he happened to catch sight of a boat full of sightseers in the distance.”

“I understand,” Dawson said. “But how did you get the rest of the way to the island?”

“Kayak,” Sam said. “They make almost no noise. I came ashore on the far side of the island and walked the rest of the way. I stayed out of sight and kept an eye on things from the trees. The plan was for me to move in as soon as Abby started to unlock the psi-code. We knew that even if she couldn’t take him down with encryption energy, she would probably be able to distract him long enough for me to get on board.”

Dawson shook his head. “I still don’t understand this whole code thing. Knox kept talking about how he’d need Abby not just to get the book for him but to unlock it. At first I assumed he meant a real code, one with secret meanings for certain letters and numbers. When I realized he thought the book was encoded with some kind of psychic energy, I figured he was just flat-out crazy.”

“I think he was, in a way,” Abby said.

“But you aren’t.” Dawson looked at her. “You never were. The family is wrong about you. There is something to this whole paranormal thing, isn’t there?”

Abby smiled. “What makes you believe that?”

“I felt something weird happen when Knox turned that strange gun on me, and again when you gave him the book. It was as if there was some kind of invisible storm inside the cabin. The air seemed somehow charged.” Dawson looked at Sam. “When you came in, the sensation got a thousand times worse. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Except maybe once.”

“When was that?” Abby asked.

“The day you burned the book in the bathtub and Mom decided that you had tried to set fire to the house.”

“In hindsight, I have to admit that she had some reason to be concerned,” Abby said. “I was just coming into my talent. I had no idea what I was doing.”

“What really frightened Mom was the fact that you seemed to believe you had set fire to the book with some kind of mental energy. But that’s exactly what happened, wasn’t it?”

Abby sighed. “Pretty much.”

Elias looked at Sam. “We need to find the missing crystals. We’ve got one lab book, a good shot at getting the second one if it’s with Frye’s things, and we’ve got Knox’s crystal gun. That will give us a lot to work with.”

“Still got a long way to go,” Sam said. “We’re going to need Judson’s and Emma’s help. They are the only ones we can trust, the only ones who have a sensitivity to the Phoenix crystals.”

Willow picked up her coffee cup. “What did you do with Lander Knox’s body and his yacht?”

“I made sure there was nothing on board that tied any of us to the boat, and then I sank it,” Sam said. “The water is very deep off that island. I doubt that the wreckage or the body will ever be discovered, but if they are, it won’t cause much of a stir. Just one more tragic summer boating accident in the San Juans.”

Abby looked at him over the top of her cup.

“What?” he asked.

“I was just thinking of what Dixon told me about you the first time he brought me here to the island.”

Sam raised his brows. “That would be?”

“I was given to understand that if you ever had to get rid of a body, it would disappear for good,” she said. “Something to do with all the deep water around these parts and the cleverness of Coppersmiths in general.”

“Damn straight,” Elias growled.

Sam let that go. He turned back to Dawson. “Are you going to tell your grandmother that she was giving out details about the family finances to a killer?”

“I don’t think that I’ll mention that he was a killer.” Dawson tapped one finger on the arm of the chair. “That gets complicated.”

“Yes,” Sam said. “It does.”

“I doubt that she’d believe me if I did tell her the whole truth, anyway,” Dawson continued. “But I do plan to let her know that the guy she was doing lunch with on a regular basis for the past few months was the architect of the Ponzi scheme that she insisted I invest her money in. I’m also going to make it clear that it isn’t Abby’s fault that Knox was a fraud and a scam artist.”

Willow exchanged a look with Elias. Abby was sure she saw some unspoken message pass between them. Willow looked at Dawson.

“It might be possible to recover whatever is left of the money that you invested with Knox, assuming he didn’t spend all of it,” she said.

“He didn’t have time to go through that much money,” Sam said. “He was focused on acquiring the lab book and getting the encryption broken. Depriving the Stricklands of the family fortune was merely a means to an end, collateral damage.”

“In that case, I’ll see what I can do,” Willow said.