Duck Duck Ghost (28 page)

“Kincaid secret.” He did it again, just to get another wiggle, and this time, Tristan retaliated with an insistent push of two fingers on his rim. Hissing, he huffed in his breath, taking the intrusion, then slurped down Tristan’s cock once more. “God, you feel good. You taste good too.”

“Don’t know how long I’m going to last,” Tristan warned. “Something about almost dying always makes me horny.”

“You weren’t going to die,” he scoffed. “Aren’t you the geeky sidekick? Doesn’t he live?”

“I think that’s the guy who heroically sacrifices himself so the lovers can survive the movie,” Tristan corrected. “Wait, we’re the lovers.”

“Yeah, we’re going to have to get Cin to sacrifice himself. For the plot, you know.”

“We’ll thank him in the end when we’re looking off into the sunset after the apocalypse is over and we’ve found the hidden oasis of civilization.” Tristan hummed over Wolf’s dick, sending a delicious ripple through his nerves. “Maybe even name our kid after him.”

“I am
not
naming my kid Cin—just no,” Wolf warned, scraping his teeth around the ridge of Tristan’s cock head. “And you know what, much like my mother, my cousin doesn’t get space in this bed either. More sucking. Less talking.”

There really wasn’t much sucking left in either one of them. After a few more lollipop slurps of Tristan’s mouth on his dick, Wolf was ready to spill everything he’d ever had boiling up inside of him. A quick rearranging of bodies, and he found himself on his hands and knees, legs spread apart and his back arched as Tristan’s fingers stretched him open.

He hadn’t had anyone other than Tristan for a long time, but really, his body didn’t seem to remember anyone
but
Tristan inside of him. He could imagine how Tristan’s cock looked as it slid into him, wrapped in a clear sheath, turning the ruddy clean length opalescent in the thin sconce light. He liked playing with Tristan’s dick. It was so different from his own, and the sense of power beneath its silken pale skin always brought him to a delighted wonder.

Especially as Tristan worked it into the clench of Wolf’s ass in a slow, agonizing crawl.

Tristan hit his nerves straight on. Wolf’d come to expect it. He did it every time they had sex and Tristan penetrated him. His lover seemed to have a dowsing rod for a cock, and Wolf knew he’d have to ride the shock wave of that hit nearly as soon as Tristan seated himself. But it hit every time, a lightning stroke blasting through him, and Wolf always lost his mind before he could even clench his passage around his lover’s shaft.

Then Tristan began to ratchet his hips, and Wolf let himself be blown away.

They slapped together, inelegant and messy. Covered with a smear of lube and sweat, he couldn’t get a hand down around his cock, and when Tristan leaned forward to help, it shifted the rhythm of what they were doing, enough to throw Wolf off for a beat or two. He squeezed down on his lover, finding Tristan still hard and aching inside of him, and pushed back, impaling himself on Tristan’s length.

His dick was already weeping, sobbing out for its release, nearly as needy as its owner, especially when Tristan’s fingers worked over its head and pinched lightly. The tremors of almost-pain were all Wolf needed, and he slammed back into Tristan, begging for more.

With each stroke he felt them building to a zenith, and he hung there, almost falling as Tristan pulled back each time, until Wolf dropped his shoulders and drove down to meet Tristan’s now erratic thrusts. Their grunting grew louder, and even the far-off thunder rolling over the distant canyons couldn’t drown them out. They struggled with words, turning to sounds and curses while they raced each other to the edge of their bursting nerves.

It hit Wolf fast. Not the crawl of a rippling orgasm starting at the base of his spine and working out to the ends of his fingers. No, this one hit fast and hard—much like Tristan’s pounding against his ass, and he cried out, unsure if he could take much more of the man’s shaft splitting him apart or if his dick would survive the breaking loose of his seed.

In the end, it didn’t matter which one destroyed him, because he felt the hot shoot of Tristan’s body aching to fill him, and Wolf flew out into the darkness cloaking them, carried off on the sheer glut of fire erupting out of his bones.

He came hard, filling Tristan’s open palm and coursing through his parted fingers. His lover’s teeth were on his back, scoring him and marking his shoulder. It was hard enough of a bite so Wolf knew he’d be sporting a bruise, but he didn’t care. It would match the ache in his ass, and he’d worked so hard for both pains, especially as he clenched in on Tristan’s softening cock and twisted around until he knew he’d milked Tris dry.

They fell onto the bed, too exhausted to do more than breathe, although Wolf wasn’t too certain he successfully did that either. His tongue seemed to be in the way of his throat, and there was a curious upside-down feeling on the roof of his mouth as he tasted the salt of Tristan’s precome still lingering along the edges of his lip.

“It’s like you came hard enough so I taste you,” Wolf murmured, flopping his hand over to stroke at Tristan’s sweat-matted hair. “Right up to my throat.”

“Yeah?” His lover’s eyes were sleepy, bruised from lack of sleep and too much drama. “I’d ask you to show me what that feels like, but we’re supposed to help Cin with the boxes. He said he’d expect us after an hour and a half. It’s like he knew we’d end up like this.”

“Cousin’s stubborn, not stupid.” Wolf chuckled as he glanced at the clock on the dresser. “We’ve got forty minutes left. How about if you catch a quick nap? And when we’re done excavating the Island of Misfit Toys, I’ll show you what else we can do with that mail-ordered treasure chest you brought with you. There’s a couple of things in there I’m just dying to see how they look on—or in—you.”

T
HREE
HOURS
after he’d finally crawled out of bed, showered, and joined the Kincaid boys in the quest to bathe in dirt and debris from days gone by, Tristan was ready to admit he was sick to death of staring at toys and all of the crap people seemed to pack with them.

They couldn’t really let anything slip by. Any scrap of paper tucked into a box or cavity had to be examined, discussed, and then—as they’d done countless times before—discarded so they could move onto the next insignificant shrapnel of porcelain or silk formed into a seemingly innocent face.

So many damned faces.

He used to think clown dolls were the worst, but in some ways, the shattered baby heads were the stuff of nightmares. Some cried in squeaky drones when turned, their eyes rolling about, seemingly independent of natural movement. Others were too far gone to be saved, the remnants of someone’s childhood or perhaps a life spent untouched on a shelf watching the world go by without a single moment spent in play.

Rough eyelashes scraped at his hands and arms as he handled them one by one, hoping to find a glimmer of something when he touched them. Wolf and Cin pored through documentation, old newspapers and diaries, looking for a whisper of a name to lead them to the cause of Sey’s troubles.

Because Murphy was a greater manipulator of lives than Fate herself, they found what they were looking for in nearly the last box left in the room.

“Hey, I might have found something, Thursday.” Wolf held up an old red wraparound portfolio. “Come take a look at this.”

The dark brown ribbon used to hold it closed was frayed, and at some point, it’d snapped, and someone’d knotted the two ends back together. Worn white along the folds and edges, it wore its age like a tired, frumpy housecoat, draped over its bloated body and straining at the seams.

“Keep everything together,” Cin warned. “Whatever’s in the box, we’ll want to dig through all of it.”

“You act like I haven’t been doing this for the past few hours of my life,” Wolf snarked back. “Dick.”

“Asshole.” Cin scoffed at Wolf’s brandished middle finger. “How about I break that for you later? Let’s deal with this shit first.”

As boxes went, it was one of the smaller ones, and unlike the others, it didn’t have burn marks on its exterior. If anything, the box was only slightly newer than the portfolio, and Tristan was surprised it’d even made it to Sey’s house as intact as it was. Strips of peeling duct tape closed off one torn seam, and another edge seemed about ready to go when he nudged it with his foot as he sat down.

Still, everything held together as Tristan settled into a chair to peer inside.

Then he nearly sucked his tongue down his throat when he spied the face of the doll staring back up at him.

It was the little girl’s face. Down to the tiny dimple in her chin and the oblong-shaped beauty mark on her right cheek Tristan didn’t even realize he’d remembered until he was staring down at it.

“That’s probably why she doesn’t have eyes,” he murmured, reaching into the box to lift the doll out. “Because the doll’s eyes are closed.”

The doll was old, at least by American standards. Dressed in a puff of dress and petticoats, its porcelain body showed little signs of wear, with only a few chips and lines in its fingers and face. Its wig was a riot of slightly tangled dusky blond curls, and as Tristan straightened it up to look at it, the doll’s enormous glass eyes bobbed open, and it mewled out a croaking sound Tristan thought could be momma. A couple of minute teeth had been sculpted to show in its open Cupid’s bow mouth, its lips worn down to a pale pink by time. Everything on the doll’s body was artfully formed. From its turned-up nose to the scallops of fingernail beds on its hands, it was a perfect scaled-down version of the ghostly monster stalking the halls of Sey Kincaid’s home. A tag hung from one of its wrists, and Tristan snagged it as it turned away from him. Frowning, he read off what appeared to be a name from the thick cardboard flat.

“This says Estelle.” He flipped the card over, hoping for something to tie the doll to the name the ghost kept crooning and screaming at him. “This doesn’t make any damned sense. If this is Estelle, then who the hell is Simone?”

“I think I’ve got the answer to that.” Wolf’s husky rumble was thoughtful as he flipped through the contents of a small thick diary he’d found in the box. “Simone was our bloodthirsty ghost’s younger sister—and she’d been murdered just for touching the little bitch’s doll.”

“J
ESUS
,
THIS
kid was insane!” Wolf couldn’t believe what he was reading. If half of what Leona Sinclair of the Chicago Sinclairs wrote about her stepdaughter was true, she should have had the little girl bound to a rock in the middle of the ocean for the seagulls to eat out her liver for all eternity. “Listen to this.”

Cin and Tristan both stopped digging through the box they’d dragged into the living room to hear Wolf out. So far they’d found reams of documents and recorded conversations between doctors and law enforcement, as well as family members of their ghost—Charity Sinclair, a spoiled young girl born to a man who’d made his millions investing in the expansion of the railways to every corner of North America and Europe.

If there was one truth they’d found in the stacks of papers and written accounts, it was that Charity Sinclair was probably the most incorrectly named little girl ever to be born.

“Well, we’ve already heard a doctor’s report that she should have been bled for ill humors when she was three. How bad can it be?” Tristan blew a lock of his blond hair out of his eyes. A smudge of dirt darkened his cheek, and Wolf grinned when his lover’s cheeks pinked a bit when he tried to rub a stray cobweb off his chin.

“Still can’t believe they used to do that.” Cin looked up from a newspaper someone thought to fold up and pack in with the doll. “Read off what’s there, and I’ll tell you what I found.”

“It’s a wedding announcement for the marriage of Clarence Sinclair to Miss Leona Markham. Mr. Sinclair has a young daughter by his first wife, who died in a tragic lamp oil accident. Miss Markham had the dubious pleasure of being Mr. Sinclair’s third spouse. Here, take a look at the pictures, Tris, and tell me if this is your girl.”

From what he could tell, the sullen toddler was a dead ringer for the nearly life-sized doll she clutched to her chest. The couple, a middle-aged man and a young woman barely out of her teens, stood behind her. Both were solemn faced and self-possessed, but the man’s hand was placed either possessively or affectionately on her side. The woman held herself with a steeled spine and a fixed look of benevolent grace on her pretty face, staring back at the camera as if she were looking out over a vast ocean with no end of it in sight.

Wolf couldn’t help but notice the way the man’s coat was held tightly by the young girl, nor was it possible to miss the telltale crinkle of fabric where Mr. Clarence Sinclair gripped his daughter’s frilled dress, tension beading the knuckles up on the back of his hand.

“Leona is Clarence’s
third
wife?” Tristan’s finger traced through the article. “Damn, it doesn’t say what happened to the second one? First one? The first wife had Charity right? She probably died because the kid ate her soul or something.”