IT TAKES A PSYCHIC -Excerpt

The psi-lock was relatively simple. It had been designed to keep the dust bunnies inside, not to keep humans from opening it. She touched it with her fingertips, rezzed her senses, and unlocked the door.

The dust bunnies tumbled out. They bounced up and down in front of her-she got the feeling she was being thanked, and then all of them-including the one that had gotten her attention in the gallery and led her to the lab-dashed out the door and vanished into the dark hallway. Evidently they didn’t need her help to escape the mansion.

“Guess my work here is done,” she said under her breath.

But the discovery of the imprisoned dust bunnies put a new light on the Society. She had been well aware that the organization was one of the university’s major donors-that was why she had been sent to the gala-and she’d suspected that several of the members dabbled in the gray market. Avid collectors were obsessive by nature. They rarely went out of their way to ensure the legal provenance of valuable artifacts.

But discovering that the Society was conducting research using dust bunnies as test subjects was too much. It could not be overlooked. She would report the news to the director of the para-archaeology department when she met with him in the morning. Morton Bullinger might be willing to ignore issues of sketchy provenances, but even he could not ignore this. He would have to take the information to the university’s board of directors and they would be forced to confront the endowment fund people. There was no way the institution could continue to accept money from the Society.

She started toward the door. She was tempted to examine some of the more interesting artifacts on the workbenches, but she had taken enough risks. She could not afford to get caught inside the lab.

She changed her mind when the beam of her flashlight swept across a gracefully curved black crystal bowl in a glass case. She could feel the disturbing vibe of power in the object from across the room.

Curious, she went closer and rezzed her senses a little. The bowl was definitely Alien in origin and there was a lot of energy locked in the object. Fascinated, she put her fingertips on the lock of the glass case.

A sharp frisson of awareness sparked across her senses, rattling her already tense nerves. She was no longer alone. She whirled around, struggling to come up with a believable explanation for her obviously illicit presence in the lab. She was good at thinking on her feet but there were not a lot of options here. Something along the lines of the classic I was looking for the restroom would have to do. It was weak, but combined with her temporarily famous status and her connection to the university, it might work.

She opened her mouth to start talking very fast but she went blank when the beam of her flashlight illuminated the man in the slightly rumpled tux standing in the doorway. She recognized him immediately. She had picked him out of the crowd earlier in the evening when she realized she was being watched. Somehow she had known he was the one who had been keeping an eye on her. She had concluded that he was either undercover security or a professional antiquities thief. The one thing she had been certain of was that he was not the boring, harmless-looking collector he was pretending to be.

Oh, shit.

“Good evening, Dr. Griffin,” he said. He adjusted his black-framed glasses. “I thought I’d lost you. Are you selecting a little souvenir to take with you when you leave tonight? I don’t blame you. There are some very nice items in the Society’s collection.”

***

He thought she was a thief.

Under the circumstances, that made sense-after all, she was not supposed to be in the lab. But that left his own status unclarified. Was he a security guard, or did he plan to steal one of the artifacts himself? If she were a betting woman, she would have put her money down on the latter possibility. She was quite sure she was dealing with a professional thief. He probably saw her as competition and, maybe, a threat.

There was nothing notable about him-nothing at all-and that was precisely what had given her goose bumps. A man like this one ought not be the sort who got overlooked in a crowd, yet that was exactly what had happened out there in the ballroom. He had moved through the throng of well-dressed guests as if he were a ghost.

Not that he went completely unnoticed. On a subconscious, psychic level, people were aware of him. She had watched, intrigued, as individuals moved out of his way when they sensed his aura. A powerful energy field had that effect on others.

As far as she could tell, she was the only one who had really paid attention to him. She was pretty sure there was only one explanation for his near-invisibility-he possessed some serious talent. Yet he was going out of his way to try to conceal it. His ability to do that was even more interesting.

At one point he had cruised past her while she sipped a glass of sparkling water and pretended to admire a statue of the Society’s founder. She’d caught a glimpse of specter-cat eyes behind the lenses of the black-framed glasses and picked up the vibe of his powerful energy field. It would be very easy to underestimate this man. She would not make that mistake.

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Excerpted from It Takes a Psychic by Jayne Castle Copyright © 2025 by Jayne Castle. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.