Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) (20 page)

“Yeah, mine aren’t doing too well right now either,” Tristan muttered. “I’ve got to go brush my teeth. They feel all furry.”

“If that’s a crack at my name….” Wolf paused when Mara’s narrowed gaze settled on his naked body. “Hey, Mara… mind turning around a bit?” Wolf made a little circling motion with his finger.

“If you are ashamed, I would suggest pulling the sheet over you and putting your knickers on under them.” The older woman gave Wolf a withering look hot enough to sear his balls off. “Yours is not the first dick I’ve seen, Dr. Kincaid. And it certainly isn’t the best.”

“Quit looking at Wolf’s dick, Mara, and tell me what’s going on.” Tristan stalked to the bathroom, and Wolf heard the sound of water being turned on.

“She’s into everything. Moving things. Destroying things. The mint vase in the lobby is broken. I tried to clean it up, but there’s too much…
she’s
too much to bear. All of the moaning and crying. I can’t be here with this, Tristan Pryce.” Mara’s face was strained and her mouth tight with fret. “If you don’t mind, I might go stay with my… sister in town. Or stay in the carriage house until she’s gone. Anywhere but here.”

“Your sister hasn’t lived in town for like… centuries, but yeah, I don’t mind. I just want you to be safe.” The blond returned to the bedroom, a speck of toothpaste on his chin, and patted Mara on the shoulder. Glancing at Wolf, he frowned. “How come you’re not dressed?”

“So much for the afterglow and cuddle,” Wolf muttered under his breath. His jeans going up his hips hurt as much as his back did. Tristan Pryce had very sharp teeth and seemed to like to chew. Mara stomped out, and he was left standing there, his fly undone and his shirt half-on. Reaching out, he snagged Tristan’s arm and pulled the man closer. “Hold on there, Pryce. Let’s take a second here.”

The last time he’d been that close to Tristan’s face, Wolf had taken his time licking at the faint freckles on the man’s nose, then lost himself counting the amber flecks in Tristan’s seafoam irises. The burnt gold was bled down to a thin-hammered bronze, and his pupils were blown out from the fear he was keeping inside of him. Pulling Tristan closer, Wolf wrapped his arms around the man’s body, holding him tight until he felt Tristan relax in his embrace.

“No matter what’s downstairs, Pryce,” Wolf murmured into his lover’s hair. “I’m going to be here with you. We’ll take care of this. I’m going to make this right.”

“Can you?” The man’s shaky whisper was so very different from the husky, purring moans Wolf had pulled out of him last night. “Fix this?”

“Believe it or not, yeah,” he reassured. “I can. Now, do I have time to brush
my
teeth, and can I borrow a toothbrush?”

I
T
WAS
a scene out of an old movie or a child’s ride gone wrong.

A haunting had come to Hoxne Grange, and whoever set up the attraction had left out all of the fun bits and only brought a scattering of broken filmy toys.

Tristan stepped out of his suite and immediately wished he hadn’t.

The Grange felt like it was pushing back at him, squeezing something inside of his soul until it whimpered from the pressure. Something dark and cold crept through the familiar aroma of old paint, lemon polish, and old books, a slithering tendril of sharp bitterness that left a sting on the back of Tristan’s tongue when he gasped.

If Wolf hadn’t been at his back, there was a good chance he’d have gone back inside and joined Boris in his hiding place beneath the large table in his library. He had enough food in his kitchen to last him at least a week. Three weeks if he wanted to break into the dried food stash he’d stored in the pantry. If he was feeling generous, he might even let Wolf join him.

A nudge at his lower back reminded him why he couldn’t do that. The long night they’d had left more than a few bruises and strained muscles in spots he’d never thought about having to work out. Between those aches and the gentle throb deep inside of him, he didn’t know if he could survive a couple of weeks barricaded with Wolf Kincaid.

“That and we’re out of condoms,” Tristan reminded himself with an angry mutter.

After more than two decades of virginity, he hadn’t exactly planned for a hot-mouthed, wicked-eyed man to pry him open until he lost his mind from the pleasure. If he had, there’d have been more than the dated Vegas dregs in his nightstand. He’d been about to slide into Wolf’s primed body when the sole remaining condom they’d freed from its sticky foil prison split down the side, and he didn’t know who’d been more frustrated. Wolf certainly was disappointed, but Tristan was left aching and hard.

Until Wolf’s mouth and prying fingers took their sweet time, and Tristan was left panting and dazed, sticky from his own seed and the spray of Wolf’s release on his thighs.

The incessant sensation in his ass throbbed again, and Tristan sighed. No, they definitely could stand to go a few hours without having one part or another inside the other, and he really didn’t have enough food for Boris to last those two weeks. Dealing with the wispy, horrified men running through the Grange was something that definitely had to be handled first.

Besides, he really didn’t know if he could sit down long enough to drive into town and get anything from the drugstore.

The third floor seemed mostly empty, but they passed a scrawny man cowering against the banister sweep, his eyes bled white and his skeletal hands working through the tatters of clothing hanging from his thin frame. Plumes of dust wisped up from his thighs when he slapped at his legs and arms, but Tristan couldn’t tell if he was trying to keep warm or brushing something off. There wasn’t much left of his face other than bone and skin. The droop of his nose hooked down over his nearly invisible lips, and his tongue moved thick and sluglike around the edges of his mouth, leaving behind a glistening shine so bright Tristan could see it on his gray, translucent skin. Crouched over, his body ended at his knees, misting off into nothingness below the joint, and he hung in midair, his sightless eyes wide with fear and poised to flee if anyone came near.

He neither saw nor heard them, and Tristan gave him a wide berth, edging as close to the wall as possible.

“Tell me you see him,” Wolf said softly. “That man there. With no legs.”

“I see him.” Tristan reached for Wolf’s hand. The man’s warmth felt as good on his skin as it did inside of him, and the ravenous butterflies in Tristan’s stomach calmed.

He hadn’t been around an oblivious specter in years. Not since he was a teenager and decided to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d made it only a few feet before the people began flinging themselves off the edge, and he’d crumbled into a heap, a chittering mess that had to be led home like an insensible child. All his ghosts since then had been guests at the Grange, spirits looking for one last glimpse of the mortal world before leaving to sights unseen.

Something startled the man, something unknown and terrifying, because his body jerked, pulled up tight as if yanked on by strings, and he flailed about, howling soundlessly at the ceiling. Wolf hooked his arm around Tristan and pushed him back, edging between Tristan and the ghost.

If he hadn’t been so unsettled, Tristan would have taken Wolf’s head off, but protesting seemed stupid, especially since Wolf was only playing knight errant.

There wasn’t much time to protest anything. Tristan blinked, and the man flew up, his missing legs apparently strong enough to hurtle him into the air. Both men moved to the rail, and Wolf’s arm snapped out, creating a ripple through the man’s bony arm. The thin ghost tumbled, his arms and thighs cartwheeling uncontrollably for a long, agonizing second before he splattered onto the lobby floor below.

Peering over the banister, Tristan saw there was nothing left of the specter. No body. No blood. Nothing but a wide ring of dust where his twitching, skinny body hit.

“Why do they always jump?” Shivering, Tristan stepped back, bumping into Wolf’s chest.

“Because it’s the easiest thing to do. People are driven by flight or fight. Biologically, it’s our only choice when confronted with fear. I think we’ve worked hard to try to talk things out, but deep down inside, it’ll always be
jump away or jump on
,” Wolf whispered as he rubbed Tristan’s chilled, bare arms. “Come on.”

There were others on the way down. The stairs were littered with victims. Most were men, although a few were shivering women, their filmy skin darkened and punctured from blows and knives. But all were screaming.

Some Tristan could hear. A whispering, high-pitched wheeze that cut through his ears and burrowed down into his brain. The cold of the storm had somehow gotten into the Grange, eating away at its delicious heat and frosting over its many-paned windows. Invisible hands clawed at the glass from the inside, scraping through the winter glaze and littering the manor’s parquet floor with icy shavings.

“It’s okay.” Wolf squeezed his hand, and Tristan’s heart began to skip again. “I’m here, Tris.”

“You’re going to take the ax for me, is that it?” He squeezed back, raking his fingernails over Wolf’s wrist. “’Cause it seems like she likes weapons now. Of course, I guess it’s harder to poison people when you’re dead.”

“Well, if I
had
to take an ax for you, I would, but really, it’d be a pretty shitty thing for me to do.” The man turned, walking across the lower landing backward until he got to the next flight of stairs down. “I’ve ruined you for all other men, remember? You said that last night. Without me, you’re going to die only knowing heaven once.”

“Glad the lobby’s open all the way to the top floor so there’s room for your ego there, Kincaid.” Tristan snorted, but the shivers were gone. “Okay. Let’s do this. Don’t you have a photon pack or something?”

“Nah, spent my cereal box tops on those damned sea monkeys.” The waggle of Wolf’s eyebrows turned lascivious. “Oh, and X-ray glasses. Those are going to come in handy now that I’ve got something hot to look at.”

F
ROM
THE
upper landings, the lobby hadn’t looked that bad, but once they hit the main floor, things went to shit pretty quickly. Wolf’s bare foot hit the parquet, and it seemed like all hell came out to play.

Mara told them the giant vase on the round table had been broken, but she hadn’t quite explained it was as much of a pile of dust as the hapless suicidal ghost on the third floor. A broad ring of faint green and white powder surrounded the lobby’s grand table, remnants of the porcelain monstrosity he’d last seen loaded with cabbage roses and some frilly yellow flower he couldn’t put a name to.

The flowers hadn’t fared much better. Torn into shreds, they were reduced to a layer of brightly colored, aromatic confetti, a sunset-hued stratum thick enough to hide the wooden surface they lay on. Tristan’s fingers left a streak in the scattered remains, and the blond who’d warmed Wolf’s body stood stock still as they drank in the carnage before them.

Granny certainly had been busy. The already dead lay about the fringes of the grand hall, caught in the throes of either their previous demise or the one newly created by their murderer. To the left of them, a rotund man wobbled on his bloated stomach, his torso stripped of a shirt. Something was trying to work its way out of his body, stretching the man’s mottled skin along his ribs and distorting the man’s already deformed body. His face was slack, and his tongue lolled back and forth as his body rocked from its parasite’s efforts to break free.

“Shittiest version of a black cat clock I’ve ever seen,” Wolf joked to ease the tension he saw building up in Tristan’s slender body. When Tristan turned to stare at him, he offered a weak smile. “You know, those kitschy plastic cat clocks where the eyes move back and forth?”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” the man sighed, looking at the remains of his lobby. “How the hell are we going to fix this?”

The other victims were in various states of distress, equally as disturbing as the fat man rolling around in his own juices. A woman’s skin and flesh lay on the reception desk, her bones piled up neatly in a stack next to her. She moaned as they walked by, her eyes rolling about in the sagging gaps of her former sockets. Her dress was a pristine white and covered with rows of pressed ruffles along its skirt. A pair of sturdy boots lay on the floor, arranged as if she were about to step into them.

Others were searching for their heads or trying to keep their innards from sliding out onto the floor. Another was a child, unmarked by any violence, but his enormous eyes were a stygian black and bulging and they followed Wolf and Tristan as they walked toward the end of the hallway to the ballroom’s entrance.

It was there they found the older woman they’d seen chasing Gidget, her fingers hooked into talons and scraping at the ballroom’s thick double doors.

She was nearly solid, so very different from the moonglow-clear ghosts they’d left behind in the lobby.

And unlike the others, she also seemed
quite
aware of them standing around her.

Time flowed differently for enraged phantoms, or so it appeared to Wolf, because one moment, the dead woman was clawing apart the doors, and the next, she had her hands latched over Tristan’s shoulders. Shocked, the blond stumbled back, slamming into Wolf, and they both went down, taking her with them.

A marrow-shattering chill cut into Wolf’s belly when the ghost’s knee pierced through his body and pinned him to the floor. An intense agony crept out from above his navel, a barbed-wire cobweb spinning out faster than he could absorb the pain. Next to him, Tristan writhed and fought to dislodge the woman, but his hands passed through her, his fists thrusting out through the jutting pricks of her bony shoulder blades.

While they couldn’t touch her, she didn’t seem to have the same problem. Her hands were pushing down into Tristan’s chest, rippling his shirt. As Wolf fought to pull free from her torturing pain, he could see fractal shadows beginning to flow up from Tristan’s exposed collarbone, a crinkled ebony-and-azure pattern spreading up his bared throat and down his long arms. His breath began to mist in the air above him, his chest heaving with the effort to breathe, and Tristan’s eyes caught Wolf’s, brimming with terror and pain.