Duck Duck Ghost (10 page)

“That was a milk delivery theft ring.” Wolf nodded. “Very fierce—for kids who skimmed buttermilk off of the morning deliveries.”

“Only two of those kids walked with a limp afterwards. Life lessons!”

Wolf snorted. “You also shot up the Albuquerque Wells Fargo in ’66 because you thought you saw a repeater.”

“It was an honest mistake!” She sniffed imperiously. “The same man kept going into the bank vault over and over again.”

“So she unloaded two rounds of rock salt into everyone inside the place.” Wolf rolled his eyes at Tristan, but it was obvious he was only teasing the older woman. “They were triplets.”

“Common mistake.” Gildy pulled at the hem of her dress, picking at the eyelet. Fixing a steely eye on Wolf, she sniped, “At least the family still talks to
me
. Which is more than I can say about you.”

Wolf stiffened against Tristan, and his expressive face shut down in an instant. Every inch of his large frame tightened, and Tristan automatically slid his hand up to rub at the spot between Wolf’s shoulder blades.

There was a story there, an achingly rough tale lying just beneath the surface of Wolf’s skin, and Tristan pulled away just enough to stare up at his lover’s face. A raw vulnerability flashed over Wolf’s expression, as if the old woman had taken a hot blade to his gut and twisted it deep into his stomach. Tristan could almost taste the pain in Wolf’s eyes, and a bitterness lingered in the tight smile he’d affected to put Tristan at ease.

“Hey, it’s okay, babe,” Wolf reassured him, but Tristan wasn’t buying it. Especially since Gildy immediately began to babble away her sharp, thrusting remark.

“I didn’t mean that, boy.” She began to struggle to her feet, but Wolf shook his head. “Wolf—”

“It’s okay, Aunt Gildy. You’re right.” If anything, the man’s expression grew more brittle before it flashed away into the cold, hard mask Tristan saw when Wolf first walked into Hoxne Grange. “The family
doesn’t
want to have anything to do with me. Hell, I should be happy Cin and Sey are still talking to me.”

“Wolf, I didn’t—”

Tristan lost track of Gildy’s voice. The living room walls slanted in on him, and he blinked, trying to shake off the dizziness swamping him. Something chattered nearby, and he turned to see what it was, surprised to discover the noise was coming from his own jaw as his teeth rattled together. Pinpricks ran over his skin, and under his shirt, his nipples drew in, growing taut with a chill. The house was getting colder by the minute, and his spine ached from the encroaching frostiness.

“Shit, it’s cold all of a sudden.” Shivering in Wolf’s half embrace, he leeched as much of the man’s warmth as he could. “I need to grab a sweater or something. Where did you put my stuff?”

Time slipped back into its easy flow, and Wolf turned, worriedly glancing at Tristan. “Babe, it’s almost eighty outside. You getting sick, maybe? A fever?”

“Don’t feel sick.” Tristan exhaled, and his breath frosted the air in front of his face. “Just… crap! What the hell?”

Not only was the room cold, it was breathing. The walls moved in and out in time with Tristan’s own breathing, and when he gasped, the room shuddered along with him, its pictures chattering against the plaster like a man’s death rattle.

It became a struggle to get air in and out. With each breath, Tristan had to fight harder and harder to keep going. The pressure on his chest grew, and with each stuttering shake in his lungs, the house quaked with him.

The glass in the living room’s double sash windows rattled violently, and a pane creaked, spiderwebbing a crack across its face. The army of half-assembled toys on a long table jittered across its surface, a few careening over the edge and hitting the floor below. The sound of porcelain shattering filled the room. Then somewhere in the house, something large fell, a thumping boom echoing through the floorboards.

Sey yelled from outside of the room, screaming at them to get safe, but Wolf was already on the move. Grabbing his aunt, Wolf looked around for someplace safe and settled on a large table. A vase on a nearby sideboard skittered across its length before falling over and rolling against the undulating wall. Cracks appeared across the room’s plaster, dark lightning shapes forming through the paint and kicking up small plumes of dust into the air.

“Gildy, get under there!” Wolf guided the old woman under one of the tables, then shoved couch cushions at her to protect her fragile bones. “Tris! Get under the other one!”

He was too cold to move. His joints were frozen up, and Tristan fought to stretch his hand out to Wolf. The cold fog of his breath grew thicker, and he could taste something foul and rotting on the mist. When he finally inhaled, he choked on the dank fear closing his throat.

“Babe? Tristan?” Wolf’s voice seemed so far away, and the room was turning black on its edges, speckles of shadow eating away its walls and moving to the floor. “Babe, you’ve got to move!”

He couldn’t say anything. As hard as he tried, Tristan couldn’t form any words, and even worse, the air he’d gotten in clotted in his lungs in a sour storm. Wolf’s mouth worked in silence, but the fear on his face was nearly as heavy as the rot forming in Tristan’s chest. Wolf moved toward Tristan and reached out to grab him.

As Wolf’s hand touched his arm, the rattling stopped as suddenly as it began, and the plumes of frost coming from Tristan’s open mouth whispered away, leaving the air without a trace. There were small tremors of sound throughout the house as items settled down or rolled up against something solid, but for the most part, the air was heavy with a silence so deep Tristan thought he could hear the cattle breathing outside.

Or, he thought, looking about the room, the shushing noise could have been Gildy hyperventilating from where she crouched under a thick oak table.

“What the hell was that?” Gildy called out from her hiding place. “That was sure as shit no quake.”

“I don’t know, Gildy.” Wolf rubbed at Tristan’s arms, his hands moving quickly to create as much friction as he could. “Shit, Tris, you’re freezing cold. Are you okay? Did you see anything? What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t an earthquake, Kincaid. Definitely something else.” Tristan shivered violently as the day’s heat rushed back into him. “I think Sey’s place
is
haunted.”

“Y
OU
OKAY
?”
Wolf put down the last of their bags. “Better?”

The house had settled down, back to normal, but he still wasn’t certain Tristan was fine, especially since it took nearly three minutes before he stopped feeling like an icicle inside.

They’d cleaned up the sparse damage as best they could. There was no fixing the spiderwebbed walls or glass pane, and Sey declared the damage to her toy pile was kept to a minimum. Gildy’s insistence on being armed was loudly voted down, and the old woman sulked for a few minutes on the couch, then loudly pointed out they could have been killed by a poltergeist in the time it would have taken her to find her weapon, load it, and fire.

While they were all in agreement about keeping Gildy shotgun-free, none of them had a clue about what triggered the event, and Tristan’s flagging energy concerned Wolf enough to press him to lie down for a little while.

It concerned him even more when Tristan readily agreed.

Wolf talked them all into spending some down time before having dinner and talking about the possible reasons for the house’s odd behavior. Whatever went down in Sey’s living room, it’d also been enough of a rattle for Tristan to agree to sharing a room—and a bed—with Wolf. He even hugged Wolf tightly before following Sey upstairs to one of the sun-filled master suites.

“Yeah. It was just weird. It’s been a long time since weird happened to me outside of the Grange. Guess I wasn’t expecting it, and it was… okay,
weird
.” Tristan bounced experimentally on the room’s king-sized bed, cocking his head as if to listen for something. “No squeaking. Good. Although I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable having sex in your cousin’s house.”

“Shit, wish Gidget and Matt felt like that. I about tore them new assholes for groping each other in the Grange’s ballroom.” Wolf rubbed at his face, feeling the miles he’d driven crawl over his skin.

“They had sex in my ballroom?” Tristan gaped at his lover. “Really? Weren’t they supposed to be working?”

“Trust me, we had the conversation. And thing is, not only do I really like them, qualified techs willing to work crazy hours and on ghost hunts are kind of hard to find.” He sat down next to Tristan, testing the feather top’s softness. “Besides, it would have been safer if they’d kept to sex. If they had, Gidget wouldn’t have tossed Winifred’s ring into the pond.”

“Okay, sex wins,” Tristan agreed as he flopped back onto the bed. He lay there for a moment, then twisted onto his side and sat up to stare at Wolf. “What was that about? Downstairs with your Aunt Gildy? What did she mean about the family not talking to you?”

“How about if we focus on you instead?” Wolf lay down on his side next to Tristan.

He didn’t want to talk about his family—not with Tristan’s enormous hazel eyes looking bruised around the edges. The man’s pupils were still blown out, swallows of black against flecks of green and gold, but they were clear, and Tristan’s uncanny ability to see right through him seemed to be in fine working order.

“Less bullshit, Kincaid.” Tristan shifted a bit. “More talking. And not about what happened downstairs. I need to take my mind off of that for right now. I’m still a bit freaked out.”

“I don’t know if I’m comfortable….”

The blond he’d fallen for definitely wasn’t going to be denied, but Wolf needed a bit of time to get his brain kicking in. His mind raced still with the excitement from downstairs, and he wasn’t quite ready to delve into the depths of his relationship with the rest of the family. Not just yet.

It didn’t look like he was going to be given much more time, because Tristan grabbed at his hand and tugged, maneuvering around on the bed so they lay with their heads on the pillows and their bare feet tangled together.

“There. More comfortable.” Tristan nudged his shin with his toes. The man’s feet were practically prehensile, because his toes nipped and pinched like fingers when Tristan wanted them to. There’d been a moment when Wolf accused him of being able to fold them together like praying hands, and Tristan gleefully showed off he could do just that. “Talk. Or I start tickling.”

“Fuck, hon. I don’t know where to start.” Wolf nudged closer, pressing his body up against Tristan’s long length. The connection anchored him, and there was some part of him that lightened when Tristan snuggled in even closer.

“How about at the beginning?” Tristan’s breath was hot on Wolf’s face, a welcome change from the frosted exhale he’d been sporting down in the living room. “What happened? Is your family really not talking to you?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of like the Kincaid clan’s version of Amish shunning.” Wolf tried to lighten the heaviness growing in his chest. “I’ve kind of become He Who Shall Not Be Named. Kind of cool in a way.”

“Wait, why?” Tristan sat up suddenly, and Wolf immediately missed his touch. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Hey, lie back down. You’re supposed to be resting,” Wolf urged, guiding his lover back onto the bed. He waited until Tristan nestled against him again, but the man’s limbs were taut with tension. “Hey, it’s no big deal. Not really. I’m just kind of not welcome at any of the family things—like the yearly get-togethers. Not something I miss. And there’s a small thing of the older ones kind of cussing me out when they see me, but that’s rare. Most of my sane cousins still talk to me. The ones I like, anyway. Like Cin and Sey. My sister and brother are cool, but they’re not—Hellsingers.”

“That’s fucked. I thought you guys were like this huge Gypsy clan,” Tristan whispered, and his face drooped with a painful sadness. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner? And why would they do that?”

“Tell you what? That my whole family pretty much disowned me for becoming a paranormal investigator?” Wolf shrugged off the pangs of regret stinging through him. He longed for the Kincaid camaraderie he’d grown up with, and he’d not thought he’d miss one moment of his boisterous, brash clan until it was suddenly yanked away from him without any real chance to argue his case.

“Yeah, that.” Tristan reached up and traced Wolf’s mouth with the tips of his fingers. “God, that’s shitty. Why would they do that?”

“One of my grandmothers—I’ve got three because they have this lesbian threesome going—she thought I was going to be a Hellsinger. Like Cin. Hunting down hauntings and freeing spirits. Thing is, I don’t know if I believe they’re actually doing that. That thing with Winifred—with you? That was the first time I’d really
seen
that kind of activity. Shit, everything I’d learned up until the official shunning was theory, and even that was kind of shaky.”

“So what? They don’t actually see ghosts? The ones they’re supposed to be sending off?”

“See, remember when I told you I wanted to
prove
the existence of ghosts? Of having some way of actually verifying spirits?” Wolf lightly kissed Tristan’s wandering fingers. “For as long as I remember, I’ve always wondered if ghosts were real or if it was just some sort of scam the family was pulling. I mean, I’d seen things I couldn’t explain, but I was a kid at the time. And for all of their badass ghost hunting, it’s not like they can come back with a pelt or something. So I started really studying up on the paranormal—and not just what the family told me.”

“They didn’t like that?” Tris cocked his head. “Okay, now it’s sounding like a cult.”

“No, they’re not a cult. Mostly they’re fortune tellers, kind of. Like my mom. Owning crystal shops or reading tarot cards, but there are a few of them who actually go out and hunt spirits. Like Cin.” Wolf quirked his mouth in a sardonic grin. “Cin’s kind of intense and shit. I used to want to be like him when I was a kid, which is kind of stupid since he’s only a couple of years older than me, but he was always—leather jacket cool. Probably even when he was in diapers. He can sense ghosts—like Ophelia Sunday—and can tell when something’s malevolent. He’s the only Hellsinger who’ll talk to me. Hell, he’s the one who supported me when I told them I was going to be a scientist because I wanted documentation of spectral existence.”