Dark Ghost (6 page)

Teagan was brilliant, and he hit on the idea of hiring her as his tutor. He’d struck gold with that. He had plenty of money – he didn’t give a damn about geology – but if he wanted his inheritance he needed a degree from a university in the United States. She spent a great deal of time with him. He’d poured on the charm. Spent money on her, although she didn’t seem to like it much. He’d brought picnic lunches on the pretext they could spend more time studying.

He woke some nights with the sound of her laughter in his head. He began to dream about her constantly. No other woman seemed to satisfy him and eventually, every fantasy he had was about her. He wanted her under him. He wanted to hear her screams, although he honestly didn’t know if he wanted to hurt her or pleasure her.

He kept in touch with her because he had to. He couldn’t let the relationship go, although he knew he was obsessing over her. When she’d emailed him and told him she was coming to his part of the Carpathian Mountains, looking for a particular stone or gem, he was certain she’d been just as obsessed with him. He’d been elated. Wild with joy. The dreams had turned so erotic he could barely eat, and he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

She couldn’t even tell him what kind of rock she was looking for, only that she knew vaguely where it was and she’d be able to find it. What kind of crap was that? Of course she was coming to see him. She had to be. She’d thought of him the way he thought of her. But then, all the way up the mountain, she’d played her stupid little game, teasing him, acting like they were just friends and nothing else.

She was nothing more than a damn cock tease and he was going to give her a lesson. He was a little sorry the others had followed him up. He still wasn’t certain he wanted to share Teagan with anyone, let alone kill her. But if he did, maybe the obsessive thoughts would stop and he could get on with his life.

A low moan came out of the night. Very low, a woman’s soft cry as if she was in pain. He shivered. He’d always liked that particular note and he worked hard to get it when he had a woman at his mercy. He paced around the fire, his eyes narrowed, looking into the thick fog.

Was Teagan out there? Hurt? The moan rose again, this time closer. The note played through his body like a violin might, soft and stroking. He stopped and stared directly toward the sound. His heart accelerated. “Teagan? Are you there?”

Silence met his call. He waited. He wasn’t going to step away from the fire, not with such heavy fog. He could barely see his hand in front of his face. The gray wrap of vapor seemed much thicker than normal, dense, a live wall of mist surrounding him.

Armend shook his head as fingers of fear crept down his spine. He’d hiked the mountains his entire life. They were his personal playground. He wasn’t ever afraid. Still, his hand dropped to the radio. Once again he didn’t pull it off his belt, but he needed the reassurance of it.

The moan came again, muffled, but definitely closer. It had to be Teagan. She was afraid of him.

“Teagan, just come toward the fire. We’ll talk it all out. Are you injured?”

He could almost taste her.
Finally.
He had her. Elation swept through him. His body hardened with anticipation. He’d have a long night alone with her and decide in the morning whether he’d share her with his friends and then kill her or just keep her for himself. There were a lot of places he could stash her and make her dependent on him. That might be fun. Hold her prisoner, give her food and water when he felt like it, force her to need him. His fantasy took off in his mind, and he really liked that idea.

Something moved in the fog, and his gaze immediately riveted there. The fog swirled, seemed to come alive. He saw a woman’s face pressing toward him through the gray vapor. No, the mist actually formed the face. He recognized his first kill. She swayed and moaned, staring at him with accusing eyes.

He gasped and stumbled back, nearly falling into the fire. All around him, in the tight ring of fog, faces began to appear. Women. Moaning. Calling to him softly, arms outstretched first in pleading and then to take him into the bank of fog with them.

Everywhere Armend looked, the women were there, surrounding him. Eyes on him. Arms out. Faces accusing. The sound of their moans continued to rise until he couldn’t hear anything else. Until the sound penetrated his bones, pierced his organs and frayed every nerve he had. He’d forgotten a couple of them, but each had been his victim over the years, his and his friends’.

“You’re not real,” he muttered. Then he raised his voice and shouted at them. “You’re not real.” He found his rock beside the fire and sat down because his legs trembled so much he couldn’t stand any longer. It wasn’t real. His mind was playing tricks on him.

Jerking the radio from his belt, he pressed one hand to his ears in an effort to drown out the terrible moan. He would never be able to hear that particular note again as long as he lived. “Giles, come in, over.”

Static answered him, and then faintly, very faintly, he heard a woman’s voice calling to him –
over the radio
.

Join us, Armend. Come to us. Forever is a such a short time to spend with us.
 

He dropped the radio into the dirt and kicked it away from him. “Shut up!” he yelled. “All of you, shut up! You’re dead.”

The moment he uttered the words
you’re dead,
those faces in the fog turned to skeletons, horrible bones with teeth and sunken holes for eyes. All of them. Surrounding him, bony fingers reaching for him.

The wind picked up and the women moaned louder, the sound making him feel sick. He couldn’t escape the terrible penetrating moaning note of pain, and now it was consuming his body, bit by bit, as if it were eating him alive. He could feel the reverberation biting into his flesh, taking him, wanting him to join the women in the fog.

He pressed both hands to his ears, trying to drown out the sound. The moan was physical, ripping and tearing at his body like teeth. The sound of their bones only added to his mounting terror. He circled the fire, trying to find a way to escape, but the ghosts had him completely surrounded.

Ghosts. He took a deep breath. The women were dead. He was alive. They weren’t real. They couldn’t come out of the fog and drag him into it. Very carefully he backed away from the few wisps that strayed from the main wall of dense gray matter. He found his rock again and slowly sank back down. He didn’t take his eyes from the thick fog bank as his hand reached toward the ground to feel along it for his radio.

The ground felt damp. Wet even. He dared to take his gaze from the macabre sight of the skulls with their empty eye sockets, opening their empty mouths and calling to him. He glanced down and froze. There on the ground, he could see tendrils of fog, much like the root system of trees, creeping along the dirt. Alive. Searching. He had a terrible feeling the creepers were searching for him.

What did roots do? They
fed
the tree. They were searching for him. For his body. His blood. He was nearly hysterical, and he tried to force himself to think beyond the fear. This couldn’t really be happening, no matter how real it seemed.

The moans continued, but one woman – his first kill – changed her note, her voice rising on the wind to a howl. A call to the hunt. He knew that sound. He’d heard it earlier. An alpha calling his pack to the hunt. Another chill went down his spine and his heart thundered.

He fed the fire quickly, building it up. All around him, along the ground, the veins of fog, tubes of gray stretched like the bony arms of the women in the fog bank. His body stilled. He felt them. The wolves. When he dared to peer into the dense wall of mist, he saw the red eyes staring back at him.

There was nothing worse in his imagination than to be killed and eaten by wolves. He counted at least seven in the pack. They surrounded him just as the women in the fog did. Strangely, the bony hands looked as if they were petting the wolves, although he couldn’t see the creatures through the dense fog.

He heard them. The growls and snarls. He felt them. The hair on his body stood up. His heart pounded so hard he feared he would have a heart attack. Occasionally he glimpsed a large beast pacing back and forth, waiting for some kind of signal.

The fog swirled, forming another shape. At first it looked like a wolf. A huge wolf. The animal turned its glowing eyes on him and then, to Armend’s horror, stepped right out of the fog as if it was really alive and not a part of the mass of dead creatures. The wolf took several steps toward him, and then he wasn’t a wolf, but a man.

The man was tall, broad-shouldered, solid. Real. He wore a long, hooded cape that fell to his ankles. It was difficult to see his face as it was in the shadow of the hood. There was no denying he was real. Not a wolf. A man. The sight of him had Armend’s shoulders sagging. He nearly sobbed with relief. His imagination had gone wild. He’d been experiencing a hallucination, but now, with this man, things could get back to normal. He forced a smile.

The man didn’t smile back. He looked at Armend with ice-blue eyes that seemed to look straight through to his soul. Eyes that could see his dark perversions and his need to see women in pain. Women suffering for his amusement. Suffering because he enjoyed the pain of others – particularly women. This man knew he had killed and that he craved killing and would continue to kill because he needed it just as much as he needed air to breathe.

Armend’s mouth went dry. He dared to take his eyes from the man sitting in judgment of him to glance at the moaning skeletons with the beckoning arms. The women were still there, watching. The wolves were still there, waiting. Armend backed up again, reaching for the knife he’d positioned right on his pile of wood.

His hand closed around the hilt. Fire burned through his body. The hilt glowed red just like the eyes of the wolves. His palm and fingers melted into the knife, the burning so bad he went to one knee. He tried to fling the blade away from him, but it stuck to his hand, burning and burning. He screamed and plunged his hand into the ribbons of fog that crawled along the ground.

He heard the sizzle as the fire spluttered against the cool, wet mist. The knife fell free, and he turned his hand over. His palm was covered in blisters, but he could see beneath the raw wounds that something else burned into his skin. His hand looked as if the flesh was falling from it to leave bones behind. White bones. Scored deep in blackened charcoal was a single word.
Murderer.

He screamed again. He didn’t know how long he screamed, but his throat was sore by the time he got control of himself. He shook his head. “This isn’t real. None of this is real. I’m having a nightmare. That’s all. Just a nightmare.”

He steadfastly refused to look at the moaning women or the glowing red eyes of the wolves pacing just a few feet from him. He wouldn’t look at the man who had to be the grim reaper, coming for him. “I’m going to go into my tent and get into my sleeping bag. When I wake up, all this will be gone.”

“Unfortunately, Armend,” the grim reaper said – and his tone was chilling – “your tent cannot aid you this night.”

Armend moistened his dry lips and forced himself to meet the reaper’s gaze. The impact of those eyes was terrifying. “What do you want?”

“You attacked my woman. What do you think I want?”

The voice was low. Soft even. Gentle. There was no threat in the tone, but the way the reaper stared at him, unblinking, the eyes of the predatory wolf, the face always in the shadow, kept Armend terrified.

“I don’t know your woman.”

“Of course you do. She thought you were a friend. She trusted you, and you beat her savagely. You tore her mouth with your teeth. You attempted to rape her. You would have allowed your friends to use her body and then you would have tortured and killed her just as you did the others.”

The voice never changed pitch. That was more chilling than if the reaper had shown some kind of anger.

Armend held up his hand. “No. No. That isn’t true. I wasn’t going to let the others have her. You’re talking about Teagan.”

“Do not say her name. Do not ever call her by name. You are not worthy of speaking her name. I know where every single body is. The women you tortured, raped and killed. They will all be found and returned to their parents.”

He shook his head. “No. You can’t do that. My mother. My father. It would kill them. My family’s name would be dragged through the mud, and for what? Who were they? Stupid women. They wanted me. They liked what they got. They begged for it.” He pointed his finger, the one that burned and hurt but he refused to acknowledge because none of this was real.

“I woke hungry. Starved. I need to feed. We’ll talk after,” the reaper said.

Armend blinked. He looked down at his cooking pot. He’d forgotten he was making food when the fog bank had rolled in. Suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, the reaper was directly in front of him. One moment he’d been several feet away and the next he was close, in Armend’s personal space.

He was big up close. Solid. All muscle. Intimidating. He threw off the hood and looked down into Armend’s face. And then he smiled. Armend shrieked like a woman, a high-pitched, terrified cry that echoed around the boulders. Armend was looking directly into the mouth of a vampire.

The moan of the women rose to a fever pitch. The wolves snarled and growled, their impatience rising with their dinner but a few feet away. Armend tried to move, but his feet were frozen into the ground. Stuck. Leaden. He could only stare at the man who appeared almost beautiful, his face wholly masculine, his eyes cold as he lowered his head toward Armend.

“Get away,” Armend yelled, trying to punch at the vampire’s face as it came closer to him.

The unholy smile widened. “Are you feeling what those women felt, Armend? The fear? The terror of being helpless? Are you afraid of what I will do to you? Tear through your skin with my teeth? Bite you savagely the way you bit my woman? I’ll drink your blood. I can make you my puppet. I can take your mind. What will I do? Isn’t that the game you played with those helpless women?”