Glenn hitched his thumb toward the screen behind him. “That will be a major renovation to the land. Did you think I wouldn’t have covered all the bases?”

She bit her lower lip, not looking too pleased about his answer. “Enough to wake them?”

“Oh I hope so, Tess.”

“How long will it take?” Wide green eyes caught and held his gaze.

He could see the vulnerabilities, naked and exposed to him at this precise moment. Did she know she was open now for penetration testing? He surely wasn’t going to tell her. “About as long as you have left before moving on to your next career goal. The clock is ticking, Tessa, I know.”

“If I pay you for it now, would you do it while I move on?”

Ah woman, he thought. That is not the chance I want you to take. Glenn didn’t say that. Instead he searched for an answer that wouldn’t sound her alarms. “Well—”

“I need to practice with some of my friends. I need speed and wickedly sharp minds for counterattack. You don’t need that here at Haven. I don’t want to do that to your lovely little hackers’ hangout. This place is almost a wet dream.”

He laughed. “Who are these friends? From the city?”

“There’s a guy—“

He snorted. “I figured that.”

Well that must not have been a wise choice for him to say aloud because her back straightened and her green glare captured him in crosshairs like her firewall was ready to shoot the intruder with no questions ever asked.

“It’s not like that.” She shook her head. “Know what, I don’t care. Think what you will. Oh yes, it’s just like that and that’s the big hurry, his sheets will grow cold. Better?” She walked to the door of his office. “Send me a bill.”

Glenn followed her out of the office, but she sat down at a back computer, stuck earbuds in her ears and he could hear the playlist thumping from where he was standing. The woman was on lockdown.

Glenn nodded at Cole then cocked his head toward Tessa. Good. Let him be the intruder she shoots. And Cole didn’t disappoint him. Cole walked over to where she sat and yanked one earbud out of her ear. Uh-oh, he touched her wall of supposed invisibility.

Cole shook his head and grinned at the imminent nuclear explosion in her eyes. “I see you.”

For a second, Glenn wondered where her gun was. She looked cocked and ready.

She surprised him though when Tessa quietly stated, “Do you mind?” She picked up her cell and pushed in a number before speaking to whomever she had called. “I’m ready; how about you?” After a pause, she said, “No way!”

She slid the purple USB from earlier into the front port, ignoring Cole totally even though he sat in the chair next to her, surfing off her right shoulder without trying to hide watching her. The system booted off the flickering purple USB. Knoppix.

Glenn walked over to her now. “What are you doing, Tessa?”

She’d hung up the phone though and was chatting to an alias called silly puTTy. Other people joined her online until there were eight of them.

She typed command lines into another box, her text neon green against a black background. Data, she was tweaking data and executing code. Lightning fast, she sent command after command before her whispered, “Oh no.”

She picked up her cell again and made another call. “You’re right. Get closer to him. I don’t have an oscilloscope handy. Call me the second you manage to get in range.”

She jumped to her feet and paced around and around computers while Cole slid over in her seat and typed more commands.

Glenn sat down next to Cole, but Tessa returned and tried to brush Cole aside to resume her seat.

“Move,” she ordered in a quiet but firm tone.

“Wow,” Cole stated, shaking his head and sliding over one seat. “Wow!”

“What?” Glenn asked.

“Denial of service attack,” Cole stated. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell.

“So?” Glenn snorted. “Big deal DoS; it doesn’t warrant the seriousness on her face.”

Cole leaned closer to him. “Denial of service to an ICD. Someone is pinging the hell out of the senator’s heart. It’ll slowly wear the battery down to his pacemaker. As in boom, he falls over dead with no attacker evident, no smoking gun. As in the perfect assassination.”

Glenn cupped her soft cheek. “Stop, Tessa! You’ll get busted. It won’t be pretty. I won’t be able to help you.”

“Consulting,” she said, insulting his intelligence.

“What hat are you wearing, woman?”

“I’m on his payroll,” she growled. “I warned him; he hired me as his personal medical implant protector.”

“What?” Glenn gasped.

“Only one of many, I assure you.”

“Call him and warn him then,” Glenn insisted.

She nodded once. “If I can’t reverse-engineer it. This is a slow but sure attack.” She nodded toward the security scanners on either side of his front door. “What company did you call to turn down that frequency earlier today?”

She snarled when he told her and nodded once more. “Figures. Major security player or not, they are run by griefers. Find a different company. Don’t help payroll them.”

Tessa grabbed his hand. “RFID. Radio frequencies.”

“I know how they work, Tessa.”

“Turned up too high, wireless radio frequencies can interfere with other frequencies. Tweaked just so, it’s a fine way to launch an invisible assassination. And who would think to look twice at an event earlier in the day when the security alarms went off? Blame it on electronic keys or cell phones.”

Cole sighed. “And I was sure it was your way in.”

She glanced at Cole this time. “To hack a heart? To buffer overflow an insulin pump? To induce V-FIB with a one joule shock via command lines to assassinate someone? No. I’m on other side of that tarnished coin.”

She answered her singing cell phone. “Uh-huh.” The code she typed scrolled over the LCD screen, working fast, cyber gun firing.

When she logged off later, she looked wiped out. She confirmed it to him. “He’s safe now. I’m tired, Glenn. Kinda wired, but my brain is really tired. To me,” she withdrew her USB. “That’s the scariest thing going on now.”

“Wow,” he said while trying to take in everything that had happened. He was no amateur on the computer. “I always knew you were smart but . . ..”

She sent him a little lopsided grin. “Thank you ever so kindly. Will you take me to the hotel now so I can crash?”

“Sure thing.” Glenn stood and escorted her to the truck.

After he pulled to a stop at the hotel, he blew out a deep exhale and plunged into the unknown. “So you could chase your new career remotely from here?”

“No,” she quickly answered and grabbed the door handle. “Oh no.”

“But you just did it.” He placed a gray cowboy hat on his head and slid it low on his forehead, following her retreat from the truck, following her into the lobby. She walked down the hall to where her reserved room waited for her to slide the electronic key through the lock.

Glenn waited in the doorway once he had shielded her from the monitoring security cameras. She must be tired to not even try to hide from the eye in the sky as she called it, facial recognition and the lack of privacy . . . her most popular pet-peeve. She could tie the data together about tracking people into a chilling conspiracy if only it weren’t a conspiracy.

“Do you want to come in?” she asked a bit breathlessly like it wasn’t a common occurrence for her to ask a male inside.

Glenn wanted to howl, split down the middle with his beliefs and his desires. Instead he said, “Yeah. You are too much temptation to turn down.”

She laughed but plopped back on the bed. “Whew!”

Probably a mistake, being in her room, on a bed, he thought after sitting on the edge of the other bed. He’d told her he didn’t intend to have hot sex in a hotel room with her. He intended to show her that his word, his promise, had substance she could rely on. “Wired or tired?”

“Hungry,” she replied but the glint of rebel in her green eyes didn’t seem to indicate she wanted food. All six laptops at hand on her bed, but she didn’t look like she was hungry for knowledge.

“What are you in the mood for?”

She laughed a bit wickedly and pounced from the bed she was on to bounce on the bed beside him. “What are my choices?”

“Oh, darlin’, you’re flirting with fire.”

“Don’t burn me, Glenn.” Her shield had dropped again, vulnerability exposed in her eyes. She slicked her tongue over her bottom lip, sending him more signals than he had dared hope.

He groaned. “Burning you was never my intention.”

He slanted his mouth over hers. Heat flash-fired from her body to his. He wrapped his arms around her and lowered her back on the mattress. Too much too fast, but his brain barely registered the warning. Too much. Too fast. The warning pounded harder this time in his mind and across his heart. Nothing to do with his own honor code at all. Sometimes it sucked to do the right thing.

“Slow down, Tessa,” he murmured as her teeth sunk into his neck, her body bucking up against his. He closed his eyes and groaned. A raw bolt of lust electrified him as she raked her claws down his back. Maybe this way, if he held her to him in passion, maybe this was better than patience. Much better and damn good plan to make her crazy in love with him, all soft and sated.

Pound! Pound! Pound! knocked on the door connecting her hotel room to another.

“Go away,” Glenn ordered as he slid his hand up under her black hacker shirt, up over the dangling guns at her navel, tracing up the gold and silver entwined necklace holding the four USBs.

Pound! Pound! Pound! “I have pizza,” Cole coaxed from behind the door.

She groaned with frustration and closed her eyes, panting for breath. “Go away,” she seconded.

The hotel phone next to the bed rang unanswered except by their hard heaving breaths.

Glenn’s cell phone chirped, once, twice, three times.

“Go ahead,” she growled. “Take the call.”

Glenn growled too. He looked down at her, clothes and red-gold curls mussed as the bedspread, her lips swollen. She looked like he had ravaged her. He growled again. “It’s flipping Cole. I know it. He wants in here. He wants you.”

But he rolled to his feet, adjusted his shirt to hang just right over his jeans, and flung open the connecting door.

Tessa smoothed the hair back from her face. She looked from Glenn to Cole to the pizza. “You two don’t have a bet going or anything I should know about?”

“No,” Cole assured her. “Not this time. All’s fair.”

Before Glenn could make it back to her side, she looked mad enough to knock his ass to the ground. Cole, on the other hand, looked smug like he’d intended to set off the old memory.

Tessa growled low in her throat. These two had a bet going years ago, the ancient bet causing a phantom burn in her back. She pointed toward the open door that connected the rooms. “Please leave.” She pointed at Glenn specifically. “You too.”

She jumped to her feet, grabbed the pizza box from Cole’s outstretched hand and tossed it next door on his hotel bed. She placed her hands on Glenn’s lower back and steered him through the open doorway. She shut the door in his face and then locked it.

“Come on, Tessa,” came Glenn’s quiet almost pain-laden drawl behind the closed door.

“Yeah,” Cole’s deep baritone agreed. “It’s not like that.”

“Goodnight, gentlemen.”

After Tessa had taken a mostly cold shower, she fell back on the bed. She yawned so hard her eyes watered. She plugged music in her ears, turned down the volume, and pulled up the sheet. “Ugh,” she muttered as she adjusted her pillow.

Her old but sometimes elusive friend, the sandman, danced back and forth across the back of her eyelids, step brush brush, step brush brush toe step, taking her down, down, down into the land of slumber where neither good nor bad dreams had the access code.

For the next three days, she stayed away from Glenn, stayed away from Cole, but stayed online with all six laptops running. She played voicemail tag; she wrote and cracked holes in code. She plotted with her friend from the senator’s office. The third evening, she paid the mechanic and accepted her car keys in the lobby.

When she entered her hotel room, she glanced hard at one of the LCD screens. Then she walked over to the connecting door to Cole’s room. She knocked twice. She heard the rumble of male laughter. “Touch my network again and I’ll come over there and kick your ass.”

The brute force attack for her wireless password kept pounding at the backdoor of machine number two.

She growled and then swung open her connecting door. Pound. “It’s on, Stone,” she warned.

Blond hair and silver-gray eyes greeted her when the door swung open. Glenn. Not Cole. “Oh.”

“I thought it was on?” He glanced around her and into her room. “Where is your gun?”

Tessa tried, she really did, but the laugh snuck out.

His almost eerie silver eyes studied her face. “I’m serious.”

She hitched her thumb behind her. “In the safe.”

“Good.” Glenn slid one strong arm around her waist and escorted her to the door.

She went along with him, finding she had missed him. Crud puppies. “Where are we going? I have my car back now.”

“I know.” Glenn held open the passenger side of his truck.

After she had climbed in, and Glenn had gone around and climbed in, Tessa slapped one hand over her heart. “Dang you, Cole,” she said to the man in the backseat.

Glenn drove away from the hotel.

“Where are we going?” she asked, wary now.

“Take it easy,” Cole advised. “We both want you to be rid of the darkness that haunts you.”

Glenn turned the truck off onto a gravel road. The backway to her haunted house?

“I don’t think so,” she began. “I don’t want to go there!”

“Tough break, chick,” Glenn grunted.

Cole rested one big hand on her shoulder. “Think again. Choose wisely, woman. I won’t let you jump out of his moving truck.” To Glenn, he said, “She fricking scared to death!” He thumped the other hand against his chest. “I’m not particularly thrilled with the idea. You sure this will kick up the activity?”

“I don’t want to go there really,” she insisted, hand still on the door handle as when Cole settled one hand over her shoulder.

Glenn floored it, fishtailing in the gravel. He lifted one finger to the radio and then depressed the button on his iPod, music flowing in over all of them. The pounding beat preparing them all to up their adrenaline level, attack mode, to prepare as much motivation as when piggybacking into the mafia’s sandbox.

When he turned the truck into the circular driveway, the first thing she noticed was her yard. Part of the landscaping was gloriously beautiful, part a work in progress and more of a wreck. The driveway was filled with cars, trucks, and a van with the backdoor open.

Glenn opened her door and steered her through the opening to the van. “Hack the house,” he suggested.

She glanced at a screen, white noise already fuzzying the house. Red flashes strobed out the front window upstairs. The equipment in the van recorded everything that was happening on the inside. A chair upstairs on camera rattled like an invisible person rocked violently.

“It’s on,” Glenn said simply. He held up one hand. “Two intelligent spirits have moved on, Tessa. They are not confined to this specific location and we convinced them not to stay here of their own volition.” He spread two fingers in front of her face. “Two are residual haunts, neither aware nor in control of their dysfunctional routine.”

He pointed toward the red glow from the front window. “That one is demonic.”

She huffed out two quick exhales, fight or flight kicking in. Paranormal pandemonium unfolded in front of her with night cameras and wireless microphones all over her old house.

He tapped one finger against his forehead. “It is intelligent also. Evil. Dives right into your head.” He pointed at the equipment. “It likes technology, likes to play with the equipment.”

She looked back at the thermal images, listening to some man asking the spirit moving the chair questions about why it was here. The hair lifted straight off her neck when something answered him in a creepy gurgle that sounded suspiciously like Tessa.

“It’s hitting hard now that you’re here. You know, responding.”

Another man she had never met stepped into the van. He held a chain with a little decanter of smoking incense. “I’m Paul, the demonologist. I’ve been fasting. We’ve been waging war for the last two nights.” He lifted a thumb that smelled of spicy oil and marked a cross on her forehead while chanting Latin.

“Glenn?”

“It’s okay. Protecting your mind is all.”

He turned to go. “Hack the house.”

“Glenn, be careful.” She stuck her head out of the van. “Is that the last one haunting this place?”

He did not answer her, but walked toward the house with the demonologist. The specialist anointed Cole’s forehead also, the Latin chant continual like the monks singing in Tibet.

Cole joined her in the van. “I don’t want to believe in this stuff, but . . .” he pointed toward the equipment, “it’s happening no matter whether I want to see it or not.”

“I lived here. I know.” Suddenly it was very important to her to collect as much scientific data as possible. “Having a haunted house isn’t really anything a person wants to confide in another. With proof, maybe another owner somewhere will know they aren’t crazy and look to Glenn for help. It’s not like they could ever call the police because the ghosts were attacking.”

Cole rubbed one big palm over his eyes before squinting hard at one monitor. “Is that a shadowman?”

“Shadow,” she said astonished to see him again.

“You have a name for him like a pet or something?”

“Once you get past being scared or angry, he’s not bad company. Spent a lot of years with him out here.”

Cole shivered. “Sorry, Tessa. Thinking you had an abusive stoner of a husband was bad enough, not even mixing this other dark stuff into the deal. I didn’t want to believe any of it. I thought you had an overactive imagination at first.”

A short dark figure jumped around like a monkey with rabies. She pointed to it. “That one is mean as hell.”

She jumped to her feet and shoved the keyboard in Cole’s very capable hands. “Hack the house!”

“Where are you going?” he demanded in an astonished tone.

“It’s going after Glenn. It has claws.”

She bumped into two other men coming out the door like they were working in shifts or differing locations. She didn’t bother to ask.

“Hey,” one guy said and grabbed her arm. “You can’t go in alone. You have to have a buddy.”

“Cole,” she shouted. “Come on. Hurry! We have to get to Glenn!”

“Hell,” he muttered when he jogged to the front door.

“Pretty much is hell,” she agreed, but he seemed to go one shade paler when she said it. “It’ll be okay.” She grabbed his forearm and took off running through the darkness to the basement where she had seen the monkey shadow move toward Glenn.

Tessa stopped so quickly at the bottom of the stairs that Cole ran into her. The jumping monkey leaped toward Glenn’s back but the demonologist squirted a bottle of liquid at it. A bright white light flashed against the dark shadow before it exploded into a spray like electricity sprinkling sparks.

“Holy water?” Cole asked.

Glenn turned toward them. “Not wise, Tessa, not wise at all.” Beyond him, almost as tall at six feet, the dark inky silhouette of a man moved toward her.

“Shadow,” she breathed.

Cole stepped in front of her. “Her pet,” he announced.

“Not at all,” Glenn disagreed. “He’s made it plain in telling us he is a jealous ghost. Get out, Tessa!”

“Oh don’t yell,” she said softly. “Don’t be afraid. He feeds on fear and fury.”

Too late, the big dark shadowman shoved Glenn back a step. But when she moved closer to Glenn and Cole made to follow her, Shadow shoved Cole back a step too.

“No, Shadow. Don’t hurt them. Move over here by me, not Glenn and not Cole.”

The demonologist pointed the bottle at her and doused her in holy water.

Glenn took another step toward her, but the demonologist urged, “No! Choose, Tessa. Activity is off the charts with you here. We need to go to the cave behind this house.”

He swung the incense, smoke slowly swirling up to fill the dark room. “Will you force him into a confrontation with you and this spirit when Glenn needs to be at the portal? Can you please confront it yourself? Or do you want Reston to provoke it so the energy grows stronger when it gets mad. One way or the other, you step up or Glenn does, that shadowman is exiting your life tonight for good.”

She brushed at the holy water streaming down her face.

But it was Glenn who made the decision, no force to it.

What did Glenn choose?