“I won’t bore you with a lengthy explanation of how this works,” she said. “That would involve some complicated physics. All you really need to know is that you’re about to faint.”

“Faint? You’re crazy. Why would I faint? I’m in excellent health. I’m a vegan.”

She focused quickly and channeled a little heat through the mirror crystal, reflecting the currents of Keegan’s energy field straight back at him. The rebounding waves sent the equivalent of an electrical shock through his aura, effectively short-circuiting it.

Keegan stiffened. His eyes fluttered and closed. The gun fell from his hand and he sank to the floor without so much as a groan.

There was a sharp crack as the handsome nineteenth-century mirror on the wall fractured into a spiderweb of fissures.

Control was everything, Sierra reminded herself. She was pretty good when it came to channeling energy through the crystal, but when she got nervous, stuff sometimes happened. It was a pity in this case because the old mirror had definitely had a paranormal vibe. In good condition it would have been worth a lot of money on the underground market.

She had bigger problems, however. Her fingers burned. She flicked her hand several times in an instinctive but utterly futile attempt to cool the singed sensation. Hastily she pulled on the leather glove.

“Shit,” she muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.”

She took a few deep breaths and gritted her teeth until the burn began to fade. Using her talent at full throttle always gave her an unpleasant psychic jolt, but lately the experience was more painful than usual because she had not yet recovered from the severe burn she had received on the last job. Her senses tended to overreact to anything with a disturbing psychic vibe. She had never been comfortable coming into physical contact with strangers because she never knew what to expect from their energy fields, but these days the simple act of touch had become an extremely fraught experience.

Her mother had suggested the leather gloves. They had been made for her by a family friend who knew a lot about the physics of the paranormal. Leather was a reasonably good insulator. Not as good as steel or glass, of course, but definitely more fashionable. Walking around with chain-mail gloves or a pair made of glass would have drawn a lot of unwanted attention.

Sierra closed the locket and hurried across the gallery. She crouched beside Keegan, unwilling to take off a glove to touch his throat to check for a pulse. Luckily his chest was rising and falling in a normal fashion. He was alive but unconscious. There was no way to know how long he would remain in that state or what he would remember when he woke up.

It didn’t matter. The deal was off as far as she was concerned. She had done her job. The buyer had failed to hold up his end of the bargain. It was bad enough that he had tried to murder her. The bastard hadn’t paid his bill. Jones would not be happy about that. Keegan would not be able to purchase the services of a Vault agent in the future.