I shook my head. "I don't think it was the fire. Not the physical one anyway."
"Morgan…"
"Why don't I take a look at them?" Eddie suggested.
I turned my head in the direction of the voice. "It's okay, Eddie. It's no big deal."
"Of course not, my dear," he said as he sat down next to me. I felt his hands on my face, turning my head this way and that. "You've got a little power burn, that's all. Just as you surmised. Easily remedied."
Jack made a sound that was something like a snort. Eddie and I ignored him.
"Power burn?" Inigo this time.
"Well, Darkness seems to be Morgan's primary power," Eddie said, patting my hands. "My guess is, when she over-extended her abilities, she suffered a little…side effect. Nothing major."
"Nothing major!" Jack practically shouted. He lowered his voice, probably for the sake of any neighbors that might decide to call the police. "She's blind."
"Only temporarily," Eddie said. He patted my hand again as if to reassure me. "It's the Darkness, you see. It must leave some sort of residual effects. Like an afterimage when a flash bulb goes off."
"But you can fix it, right?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," Eddie assured me. "Just take a deep breath and…."
He touched his fingers to my temple. The lightest touch. Like a butterfly. Screaming pain shot through my skull. I must've screamed along with it, because the next thing I knew, I was lying on my back on the grass with my throat feeling like raw hamburger. Above me, stretched across the vast blackness of the night sky, were a trillion sparkling stars.
It had taken some doing for Kabita to convince the Portland Fire Department that a) the fire had been a kitchen accident, and b) I'd run off to find my boyfriend because I was scared. Playing faint-hearted female irked me no end, but the last thing we needed were a bunch of awkward questions. Eventually, with nothing to do after checking for hot spots and making sure the house was safe for us to enter, they loaded up and took off for the next crisis. I really should bake them a cake to say thank you, but I'd probably end up poisoning them by accident. Despite my love of cupcakes, baking was not my strong suit.
By the time Trevor's men showed up in the park, the Atlantean grimoire had disappeared into Eddie's lime-green waistcoat, and the amulet was back around my neck. With Alister finally in custody and on his way to Area 51, the only thing we had left to wrap up was the soul vamp technology. That still hadn't been found, and Alister wasn't telling. Technically, I guess there were two things. There was that pesky matter of the hit on my life.
It didn't take long for Inigo to exercise his Internet savvy skills and remove the ad Alister had put up. With him in custody, there was no one left to reinstate the ad once it was taken down. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. No more vampires jumping out of the bushes to kill me. Well, no more than usual anyway.
Inigo was also able to poke around in Alister's phone and track where he'd been over the past few days. By retracing his steps, we were able to find the soul vamp technology tucked away in a locker in one of those places where you store stuff. The craziest thing of all was that the storage units were right here in Portland. Kabita and I hit the locker on our own, making Inigo promise not to tell anyone. Not Jack or Eddie, and especially not Trevor.
"I'm thinking we shouldn't inform the SRA about this," I said as Kabita and I surveyed the storage unit filled to the brim with random bits of computers and other machinery.
"No kidding. Can you imagine the mess they'd make playing with this stuff?" She kicked at one of the pieces of equipment and it teetered over, hitting the floor with an ear-shattering crash. A tiny smile quirked her lips.
"Oh my gods," I said. "You totally want to reenact that scene from Office Space, don't you?" I was referring to the one where the three main characters take an annoying printer out into the countryside and essentially beat it to death. I'd always thought such an activity would be incredibly satisfying. Especially when my laptop was acting up.
"You better believe it," she said with a grin. "I only wish I had a baseball bat."
I laughed. "Well, let's get to it then. No time like the present."
We may not have had a baseball bat, but the tire iron from the car certainly came in handy. We spent the next twenty or thirty minutes bashing the hell out of the stolen machines. I had no idea what any of them were or what they did, only what the end results had been. And there was no way I was letting anyone do that to another human being. Trapping a human soul inside an undead vampire had to be quite possibly the worst thing one human could do to another. This ended tonight.