Third Sight
She woke in pitch darkness.
Nina Phillips rolled over, gasping at the searing pain caused by the movement. Her head throbbed, and for seconds, she could only focus on taking one breath at a time, her eyes open but blind. She didn't know where she was, didn't know anything but the darkness, nightmarish and unearthly.
Then she registered the cold and with it, her surroundings — the storage rooms housing items not currently on display in the Washington, D.C., Institute of Art and Culture. The rooms were environmentally controlled for the collections' preservation — which meant they were always too cold for her liking. Cold and windowless. And now dark.
Awareness came back to her in dazed increments, and she struggled to order her thoughts. She remembered clicking her security card in the slot, the sound sharp in the stillness of the museum after closing time. She remembered opening the door to Storage Room One. Switching on the light, she'd set down her purse and walked down one of the aisles to the drawered cabinets in the rear, where the El Zarpa stones — ancient, irreplaceable and vital to her research — ... read full excerpt from Third Sight ebook
