Free The Hot Zone (A Rainshadow Novel Book 3) by Jayne Castle Page A

spectrum. In another second or two she would set fire to the cottage.
    She pulled hard on her talent, dampening the flames from the normal end while the paranormal circle of fire continued to burn around her. She did not know what to expect. Most people discovered the nature of their paranormal senses more or less by accident when they first came into them. Until you knew what you could do, you couldn’t do it very well.
    Still, power was power and control was control, and she had always possessed a lot of both.
    She could not halt the flood tide of dreamlight but she could force it to flow around her, just as she did when she controlled the psi-winds of a gate or an energy river. The terrifying images and the currents of eerie lights streamed around her on all sides. The voices faded. The dreamscape was no longer as disorienting as it had been a moment ago but the boundary between the normal and the surreal was murky, at best. It helped to keep one hand on the wall. The tactile sensations were easier for her fractured senses to interpret than the visual and audible kind.
    This wasn’t the first time she had waded through a sea of bad energy. She could do this.
    She concentrated fiercely on navigating out of the darkened hallway. She knew she was in the living room when she lost contact with the wall. The weak glow of the night-light beckoned from a great distance, illuminating the path to the front door. She could not maintain her balance so she went down to her hands and knees and crawled across the room, moving within the eye of the energy storm.
    Behind her the ghastly dreamlight subsided but she needed time to recover. The nasty little trap had caught her by surprise. She knew that her senses had taken a serious blow. She was stunned and disoriented. All she wanted to do was collapse on the front porch but the chimes warned her that she had to keep moving.
    In situations like this, you went with your intuition, she reminded herself.
    She used both hands to open the front door. When she finally succeeded she found herself looking out into a wall of moonlight-infused fog and a muffled stillness. Her senses were still flaring but at least she was no longer generating flames.
    Should have brought the flashlight. No, a flashlight would give away my position.
    She could not explain why it seemed so important to get out of the cottage. She just knew it had to be done. She fought back the last of the hallucinations as she inched her way across the porch. The front door squeaked as it swung slowly closed behind her. She found one of the wooden posts that marked the steps.
    She managed to haul herself upright and limp cautiously down the three steps. When she felt hard ground under her shoes she walked forward slowly, her hands outstretched in front of her face.
    She could not see a thing in the absolute darkness, but her senses were no longer disoriented. She knew approximately where she was. She veered left, counting the paces to the woodshed.
    When her outstretched fingers found the structure she breathed a ragged sigh of relief. She worked her way around the shed and stopped behind it, utterly exhausted from the effort it had taken to fend off the dreamlight.
    She put her back against the rear wall of the shed and slowly sank down until she was sitting on the ground. Her fingers brushed against a fist-sized rock. She gripped it tightly. She still clutched the flicker in her other hand but she was not sure she could count on anything more from her talent tonight. She might need a more traditional weapon.
    For a time she sat there, wondering why she had gone to such an effort to escape the cottage. Maybe the intuitive side of her nature had been badly scrambled by the psi-explosion.
    But eventually she heard muffled footsteps. She glimpsed the faint, thin beam of a small flashlight slicing like a needle through the mist. The light disappeared when the newcomer went up the front steps.
    From where she sat, shielded by the