HauntMe

Lena
Loneson

Minerva Silence, TV psychic and fraud extraordinaire, can
read them all. She’s not even aware that her gift is real until she’s
confronted by the spirit of her late husband, and by the man who murdered him.

Bram would do anything to protect the woman he loves, even
from beyond the grave. But he needs her passion, her body’s response to him, if
he’s to manifest and help her to defeat the men who mean to kill her.

A
Romantica®
horror erotic romance
from Ellora’s Cave

Aware

They were all haunted, the faces in the audience—every last
one of them.

Minerva watched them as the TV studio filled with the sound
of applause and chatter, welcoming her back from commercials. Nearly every
chair in the three hundred-seat studio was full.
Sex Psychic
was at an
all-time ratings high and the Los Angeles audience knew it. The air was
electric tonight, static raising hairs on the back of her neck. She knew this
feeling—the show would be a total success or a complete disaster. It could go
either way.
Focus, Minerva.
With an analytic eye, she organized the
audience into candidates.

Three women sat in the front row, two in their late twenties
and one middle-aged. They applauded with enthusiasm but their eyes glistened in
the stage lights, tears illuminated until they shone like marbles. Recent
unexpected loss, Minerva concluded—a mother and her daughters wanting some
final word from Dad. Haunted by grief. She’d like to help them but it wouldn’t
be interesting TV.

A middle-aged man at the back caught her attention, lights
flickering against his black-rimmed glasses. His face wore the expressionless
mask of the skeptic, but his hands twitched between claps, grasping at the air,
brushing sweat against his pants. His nails were filed almost to a point.
Minerva shuddered—it wasn’t a good look for him. His slacks were perfectly
creased, too creased, likely purchased and worn for the first time today. He
was dressed to impress, but nervous. Minerva guessed he’d ask a romantic
question in an uninterested voice—he considered himself too intelligent to
believe but he was too hopeful not to. Haunted by loneliness. She might get
something good from him. A fetish he kept hidden? Something to do with those
creepy-as-fuck nails?

Minerva noted the group of women in their forties seated at
the front, their faces flushed, tipsy on wine, giggling and whispering to each
other as they applauded. Likely a girls’ night to celebrate a birthday—perhaps
they were members of a book club. They’d had to get there early for front row
seats. One didn’t laugh as quickly as the others. The blonde’s gaze slipped to
the woman on her left and she blushed as she looked away. Unrequited love.
These women could be a possibility. Love and sex were ratings generators like
nothing else, and the TV execs had known it when she and Rachel had pitched the
show as “John Edward meets Sue Johanson”.

Minerva Silence, TV psychic extraordinaire and giant fraud,
could read them all.

There was nothing supernatural about it. The ghosts she saw
were figments of her imagination, specters painted in words using the pigment
of the seeker’s inadvertent revelations and Minerva’s own creativity. The
whispers from beyond were the voices of her three assistants who eavesdropped
from their seats in the audience, projecting from their hidden microphones into
a tiny speaker in her shimmering jade earrings.

Her eyes drifted back to the lonely man with sharp features
and glasses at the back. Something was different about him. He wasn’t just the
usual geek unlucky in love. The dark pools of his eyes flicked toward her and
met hers. Hairs rose on her arms. It wasn’t often that a man went for her eyes
first, at least not while she was wearing this dress, her full breasts
straining beneath silver sequins. Maybe he didn’t find her attractive? A
possibility.

Minerva felt a cold breeze rustle around her legs. It was
the air conditioning, that was all.

The book club women in the front row had matching cardigans
hanging on the backs of their chairs. They weren’t cold.

She had to keep moving. As the applause settled, Minerva
took her mark, stepping forward in heels that pinched her toes. She ran her
hands down her womanly curves, smoothing the sequins and setting them
sparkling, giving her an otherworldly glow. Minerva tilted her head toward the
camera, knowing by instinct and experience just when the light caught the
mahogany highlights in her brown curls. She pursed her lips thoughtfully,
careful not to smear the scarlet lip gloss. She inhaled.

“Welcome back, friends, lovers and spirits. Before the
break, we heard from Yukio, whose grandmother briefly crossed over into our
world to finally reveal who her grandfather was. I’m immeasurably touched by
her story of a torrid affair with an American World War Two soldier. And to be
honest, I’m a little turned-on. Who knew sex from seventy years ago could be so
sizzling? Thank you, Yukio, for letting us share in your story.” Minerva
inclined her head toward the woman in respect, and on cue the audience
applauded.
Rachel’s right—all this clapping is going to go to my head one of
these days. They don’t even make me work for it anymore.

She scanned the audience, looking for her next mark. She
specifically did not look the way of the guy who had given her the creeps. He
might give her good material, but if she was wigged out by him she wouldn’t be
fully on her game. The audience would tolerate a certain number of incorrect
“visions”, but she tried to keep them to a minimum.

Minerva spotted a young woman a few rows back from the book
club, clutching a friend’s hand. Married, or widowed—gold twinkled on her ring
finger. Minerva itched to rub her band. She still wore her ring after seven
years. A psychic with a tragic backstory made for more captivating TV.

The woman’s skin was white with pressure as she held her
friend’s hand tightly. Her clothes were simple, a black skirt and blouse
hugging soft curves, but her head was wrapped in a bright scarf of blues and
purples. Below the scarf, brown eyes sparked with tears beneath blonde brows.
She wore understated makeup and minimal jewelry, a small gold locket in
addition to her wedding ring. The headscarf wasn’t alternative dress, then, and
nor was it medical—or she’d be without the eyebrows, without the rosy
complexion and chubby cheeks of health.

Minerva’s gut told her that the scarf was a reminder. The
woman had shaved her head in solidarity and her hair hadn’t yet grown back. The
grief in her eyes, the way she grasped at the other woman’s hand, let Minerva
know the loss was recent. Cancer, most certainly. If her husband were still
alive, it would be his hand she’d be clutching. So—late husband, most likely.
Marital relations were rife with sexually charged material, so she could work
this into something interesting.

And the friend? Her bright-blue eyes were just as wet as the
scarf woman’s. A friend wouldn’t be that teary. Sister of the deceased? Minerva
focused on the blue eyes and decided to run with it. Her instincts were usually
right.

She noticed this in seconds, before the audience had
finished applauding. She touched a finger to her lips, silencing them and
signaling to her assistants to pay attention, remember what they could of what
they’d heard or seen from this woman earlier in the taping.

“There’s someone here. Someone close.” Minerva sucked in a
breath and widened her eyes, focusing deliberately on an empty space in front
of her. “He wants to say goodbye. It’s hard to see color through the veil of
the Other World, but his eyes are a most brilliant blue.” She took a chance on
that, betting on the sibling connection and hoping the eyes were hereditary.

If she got it wrong, there was likely someone else in the
audience missing a blue-eyed friend or family member.

“His head is fully bald but his face glows with happiness.
His aura shows me a kind soul.” Whatever the husband and brother’s personality
in life, death always softened it and those left behind preferred to remember
the best. “And yet he carries a dark secret.” Didn’t everyone? “He’s saying a
name but his voice is so soft. I cannot hear him through the veil. Is there
someone here who knows him? A loved one who can call him closer, where we might
listen?”

“Thomas?”

She had guessed right—it was the woman in the headscarf, her
voice quiet and raspy with emotion. Minerva let her mouth form into a genuine
smile. “Yes! He’s nodding. His name is Thomas. He’s someone close to you. A
husband?”

The headscarf woman was nodding.

“Yes.” Minerva imagined the dead man in front of her, skin
as soft and bare as a newborn’s, nodding and gesturing at his wife. “What is
your name, my dear?”

“Pirette. Thomas was my husband. He died of—”

“Cancer. I know. I’m so very sorry.”

“Yes.” Pirette’s blue eyes shone with tears. The sister
whispered in her ear, comforting her. The audience murmured amongst themselves
at the revelation of cancer, as if it weren’t perfectly obvious from Pirette’s
choice of clothing.

“He has a message for you,” Minerva said. “And he wants to
beg forgiveness. Before he can move forward to his eternal resting place, he
needs to know you forgive him.”

Minerva knew the drill—though there were some who came to
her show in anger, wanting their former loved ones to answer for a slight, her
bread and butter came from those who deep down wanted to know their loved ones
still cared for them and were in a better place. And so she gave them that comfort.
She could empathize better than anyone.

She held a finger to her mouth, asking the audience for
silence and pretending to listen closely. “He wants to say how sorry he is—”

Static hissed in her ear. Her staff had come through. Greg’s
thin voice followed the static. “Husband had an affair. The women were talking
about it in the washroom. Sister found the text messages. Wife wants to know if
he ever even loved her. Maybe you could approach it from—”

Minerva nodded her understanding, tapping her lips again to
cut him off. Greg was new, a bright and eager young man, and hadn’t learned the
value of brevity. Still, with his pale skin and bright shock of red hair, he
made her smile.

She finished her sentence. “For the affair.”

Pirette gasped. “It’s really him?” Her friend whispered in
her ear. Was she a skeptic? Minerva had to keep talking, get Pirette hooked.

“It is. He can only imagine the pain you’ve been through.
Finding those texts from another woman. You felt so betrayed. First, to think
you had a marriage that would last until death, not knowing that death would
come so soon.” Minerva let her eyes moisten with the barest hint of tears,
knowing the camera would catch them. She found these clients to be the easiest,
and the hardest—betrayed lovers. The sense of loss combined with outrage was so
easy to empathize with. But also hard to put herself through again.

“And then, after supporting him through his illness, after
shaving your own head to show him how much you valued your partnership—to find
that he may not have valued it at all. He was getting sex from someone else.
You wondered what she did for him that you wouldn’t do.” Minerva shaped her
lips into a small smile of sympathy. “It must have felt as if he died twice.
First, his body. Second, the memory of the loving husband you knew.”

Pirette nodded. Tears were streaming down her face. Even her
dark-haired skeptic friend was literally sitting on the edge of her seat.
Minerva knew she had them. Now it was time to bring it home—deliver the
combination of sex and healing that made her the queen of late-night
television.

“He wants you to know that it wasn’t like that. He loved you
so much, Pirette. He
desired
you so much. Tell me, Tom. What do you want
to say to your wife?”

Minerva tapped a finger to her lips. Static hissed in her
ear again and Greg responded. “Uh, there was talk of, um…she was worried she
wasn’t good enough in bed.”

Minerva mentally rolled her eyes.
Every woman
who had
a spouse who cheated was worried she wasn’t good enough in bed. She needed
details! She tapped her lips again, impatiently. She squinted at the air as if
she were listening hard to the ghost in front of her.

“She mentioned blowjobs—said it was really hard to get him
off. She’d be down there for what seemed like hours, and nothing. He got off,
like, three times in the entire marriage. So she was worried the other chick
was better at them. That she deep throated or something.”

Minerva nodded. That she could work with.

“The affair was meaningless, Pirette,” she said. “The texts
you saw might have been hot and heavy, but whenever he was with her, he thought
of you instead. He was worried about burdening you with his illness and his
desire. He feels like such a fool.”

She continued. “Did you know that you’re the only woman who
could ever get him off with your mouth? Do you mind if I talk about this?”

Pirette was blushing, her fair face flushed with a rosy
glow. But she smiled and shook her head. She wanted to hear more.

“Your mouth was like nothing he’d experienced before. He
remembers the first time he came in your mouth as if it were yesterday.”
Minerva was careful not to give too many major details, such as whether she
spat or swallowed—best to go with generalities. Some details, the small,
specific ones, would add color for the audience at home and Pirette’s memory
would fill in the gaps. Surely, she would think, this must have happened or why
would Thomas be remembering it?

“Thomas, would you speak through me?” Minerva asked. She
nodded. There was a collective gasp from the audience—this was the part they
were all waiting for. She didn’t channel spirits on every episode, so it was a
treat to see this live.

She made her body shudder. Her eyes rose skyward in their
sockets, exposing the whites. She let out a small moan, high and girlish, that
turned deeper as she shook. The fabric of her dress rustled as she trembled,
lights dancing off sequins in a kaleidoscope of color. Minerva let her voice
continue to fall until her throat had relaxed, then abruptly stopped her
movements. Best to give the audience a taste and leave them wanting more,
without time to question what they were seeing. When she spoke again, she used
a man’s voice, deep and rough in comparison to her own.