SEDUCTIVE SUPERNATURALS: 12 Tales of Shapeshifters, Vampires & Sexy Spirits (4 page)

“There’s a town called Diablo Springs,” she said, ignoring his sarcasm. She had a rich and melodic voice with a trace of an unidentifiable accent that teased the ends of her words. “It was a notorious place once. Do you know how it got its name?”

Reilly shrugged. He knew, but obviously she had her own theory and was dying to tell him.

“It’s not named for the hot springs, as many mistakenly believe,” she said. “It’s called Diablo because it’s haunted by the devil himself.”

“Interesting,” he answered, wishing she’d move along.

She stared at a point over his shoulder and her body became unnaturally still. For reasons he couldn’t explain, every hair on Reilly’s body stood on end. He thought of pushing away from the table and bolting, but the idea of it was ridiculous enough to keep him rooted.

As if hearing his thoughts, she snapped her attention back to him. “Diablo Springs is home to spirits that will never find peace. You’re familiar with this place, of course.”

“Obviously. You know the answer to that.”

She nodded. “I’ve been called there.”

“Then you should go.”

“I’ve been called to bring you. I’m leaving tonight.”

“Listen, Ms. Lamont—”

“You may call me Chloe.”

He’d pass on that offer. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about Diablo Springs, Ms. Lamont, but I can pretty much guarantee that it isn’t true. It’s just a dried-up old town.”

“A ghost town, but only the ghosts know it.”

“If you say so.”

“Aren’t you curious about who is calling me?”

“No.”

“Not even if it’s Carolina Beck?”

Had she said
Carolina Beck
? That got Reilly’s full attention. He hadn’t thought of Carolina Beck since the last time she’d slammed the door in his face. Her granddaughter, Gracie, was another story altogether. He was pretty sure he’d never stopped thinking about Gracie. Once upon a time, sparkles and unicorns had filled Gracie’s eyes and Reilly Alexander, her heart.

But that was a long, long time ago.

“You’re friends with Carolina Beck?” he asked skeptically.

“Her spirit.”

Her spirit?
“She’s dead?”

Chloe didn’t answer.

Reilly leaned forward, intrigued now. “How is she calling you?”

Chloe leaned in, “How did I know you’d care?”

A pale man appeared at Chloe’s side, younger than she by about twenty years, but still graying at the temples. Tall and skeletal, he struck Reilly as a hybrid of a vampire and Abraham Lincoln. Where Chloe was color, he was transparent. He put a protective hand on Chloe’s waist and a watchful eye on Reilly.

“You’re looking for your next story,” Chloe went on. “You’re worried because you can’t find one. It’s a question of destiny, but you can’t see what’s right under your nose.”

“And you can?” Reilly said.

“You’re part of this story, Nathan Reilly Alexander.”

“And just what kind of story would that be?”

“A ghost story, of course.”

Diablo Springs: Chapter Three

Gracie Beck leaned back from her computer and stared at the brochure she’d created for a distance education program. The banner read, “See the world from the other side of the textbook.” It was the kind of program she’d longed to go on when she was in college. But by then she’d had a baby, a job, and more life experience than she cared to remember.

She saved the file and leaned back in her chair. This evening, the house seemed cavernous, though in reality it was just a tiny one-story bungalow built in the giddy days following World War II. San Diego was filled with houses like this one. Apart from the two bedrooms—hers and her daughter, Analise’s—there was a nook that doubled as an office, a living room/family room, and a kitchen with enough space for a dinette. The yard was small, but Lake Murray, where she could walk her pair of horse-sized dogs, Tinkerbelle and Juliet, wasn’t far off.

Her third dog, a petite Yorkie named Romeo, sat on her lap while she worked. Gracie absently scratched behind his ears.

She supposed she should get used to the silence in the house. Analise was sixteen and soon she’d be off to college. She was an honor student with gifts that ranged from math to music. First-chair orchestra, accelerated calculus; she’d have her pick of universities. Gracie would miss her, but she was so proud.

Analise was at a sleepover tonight at her girlfriend’s. Nothing uncommon and yet the twilight hours had been filled with a bad feeling that wouldn’t go away. Her daughter had texted an hour or so ago—the kind of sweet check-in she always did—but still . . . something felt off. Gracie had tried to talk herself out of worrying but finally she’d called Analise and gotten her voice mail.

Again, nothing to worry about. So why was she so anxious?

Standing, Gracie stretched, wincing as her joints creaked and muscles groaned. She’d just celebrated her thirty-third birthday, but she felt ancient. All three dogs stood when she did, but Juliet gave a sudden, low growl that lifted the fine hairs at Gracie’s nape. Tinkerbelle raised her head, ears pricked.

Probably nothing more than the wind in the trees, but Gracie scooped up Romeo and let the big dogs escort her to the hall. She paused at Analise’s door and listened, though she didn’t expect to hear anything. Analise was gone. Quietly, she turned the knob and pushed the door open.

The darkness and shadows seemed to fold over one another as she stepped inside her daughter’s bedroom and stared with a mixture of worry and confusion. On any given day, a chaos of jeans, peeled off and left where they dropped, shirts discarded with sleeves half in, half out, shoes strewn in between with stray socks and hair things—all would have littered the floor. But tonight it was spotless.

The whole week Gracie had noticed little things that seemed out of character for Analise. Her hair styled out of her face, her makeup less severe, a grouchy mumble in the morning instead of a smile. But none of it sent up the kind of red flag the clean room did.

A sound came from the front of the house and both Juliet and Tinkerbelle spun around with bared teeth and deep barks. Romeo joined in, late on the uptake but determined to be as fierce as his giant counterparts. He squirmed to get down and Gracie set him on the floor. Immediately he tore out of the room.

Gracie strained to hear beyond the yapping animals as she followed their furious barks. The hallway had never seemed so long, so dim, so cut off from the rest of the house. Gracie rounded the corner into the front room, filled with irrational fear. It was empty, of course. No intruder could make it past her dogs and the front door remained closed, the windows shut tight. Everything locked up. But Gracie couldn’t shake the nagging apprehension.

Without warning, Juliet launched herself at the front door, barking like a rabid wolf. Tinkerbelle charged just a half step behind and Romeo hopped between them. Over their ruckus, Gracie heard a sound, a scratching from the other side. Slowly she approached as the dogs frothed in their excitement.

From outside Gracie heard a long, agonized shriek echo on the wind. High-pitched and loud, it raced through her blood like ice and brought the word
keening
into her head.

Anxious, Gracie stepped forward. Her palms were damp as she braced them on the door and stood on tiptoe so she could see out the peephole.

The porch was empty, lit by the bright light over the door. A strong wind blew the branches of the giant pepper tree in the front yard, making a rustling sound as it blustered through the dangling limbs. For a moment, it seemed that someone stood beneath it. A woman . . . a small, bent woman. Familiar, yet too unlikely to be more than a trick of the eye.

Still, the woman looked like her Grandma Beck.

The telephone rang, startling a scream out of Gracie. She spun around and let out another scream when she saw the woman from outside sitting calmly at her dinette.

Gracie’s eyes had not deceived her. The woman’s face was deeply lined, aged since the last time Gracie had seen her, but unmistakable. She wore a house dress of pastel plaid, pearlescent snaps down the front with big square pockets. A lighter and box of Virginia Slims menthol cigarettes was in the right one. Numb, Gracie stared into her rheumy eyes and felt tears prick her own.

“Grandma Beck?” she whispered.

A sane part of her mind recognized that this could only be an illusion, but every beloved feature seemed so
real.
The gleam of pink scalp beneath the tufts of white hair, the downturn of her eyes at the corners, the deep groves around her lips from puckering as she drew on her cigarettes. Gracie smelled the smoke that clung to her and beneath it, the light scent of Skin So Soft bath oil, her grandmother’s favorite.

The phone rang again, insistent. Gracie ignored it. No one called the house phone anymore except telemarketers and politicians.

Grandma Beck said nothing. She lifted a book she held in her lap as if to show it. Frowning, Gracie tipped her head and stared at the worn, brown cover, the word Ledger
embossed in elaborate scroll at the center. Her grandma’s hands shook as she held it out. Gracie reached for it as the phone rang again, a shrill demand. Annoyed, Gracie reached for it, intending to hang up on whoever called, but Grandma Beck began to fade.

“No,” Gracie said, snatching her hand back. “No, don’t go.”

Silly, when she knew her grandma wasn’t really there. A gentle smile curved the woman’s thin lips and Grandma flickered, like a candle in a breeze, and vanished completely.

The third ring of the phone made her spin, snatch up receiver and jab the talk
button. “What?” she demanded, still staring at the chair where her grandmother had sat, still smelling the faint scent of smoke and bath oil. Her heart hurt and those prickly tears began to spill. Some spiritual part of her recognized what had just happened, but she didn’t want to acknowledge it.

“Gracie Beck?”

The man’s voice on the other end stirred a memory, though she didn’t place it until he told her his name.

“Eddie Rodriguez?” she repeated with both confusion and disbelief.

“Yeah. Remember me?”

They’d gone to grade school, junior high, and high school together. How could she forget?

“Listen, Gracie, I’ve got some bad news. I think you’d better come home.”

“Home?” she said, reaching for the edge of the counter to brace herself. Diablo Springs was a lot of things to her. But it wasn’t home.

The tears came faster, and she clenched her eyes, the memory of her grandma seated at her table so sharp and poignant that she had to bite her lip to hold back the sob.

“It’s your grandma,” Eddie said, like she’d known he would.

He paused and took a breath. Gracie did, too, steeling herself for his next words. “I’m sorry. There’s no easy way to say it. Or explain it for that matter. Gracie, your grandma’s dead.”

The words rolled over her like a numbing tide.

“Are you there?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“Okay.” He stopped again and this time it made Gracie’s heart lodge somewhere in her throat. “There’s more,” he said finally.

She swallowed, feeling like she’d been sealed in an airtight silo that filtered every sound but her thumping heart.

“Is— Gracie, do you have a daughter?”

Diablo Springs: Chapter Four

Reilly had always thought Diablo Springs looked like a Hollywood rendition of the town that time forgot. With the lightning storm giving it a strobe effect, it seemed to loom up like a spooky relic in a bad horror flick. Ironically, when he’d lived here, he’d thought the world ended at the town’s borders. He was right, he realized now, just not in the way he’d thought back then.

He glanced in his rearview mirror where Chloe, the Abraham Lincoln-vampire look-alike, and the priest with the gloves followed in a minivan. He wondered if they were as freaked out by the weather as Reilly was by the turn of events that had unfolded in just one short night.

The clouds had gathered during the drive from Los Angeles, and each mile east had brought them deeper into brooding skies and quaking thunder. Now the storm seemed to hover just over Reilly’s SUV like a twelve gauge with a tight trigger. According to the weather report, this was just the precursor to a tropical storm blowing up from Mexico. He planned to be back home long before that one hit.

He still couldn’t believe he was on his way back to Diablo Springs. What had possessed him to go home? To pack his bags and hit the road with complete strangers? Chloe said he needed a story, and God knew it was true. But no story was compelling enough to drag him across the desert to his home town . . . except his own.

Sure, Chloe walking into the bookstore with her entourage of weirdos and her bizarre claims that she’d been called to Diablo Springs by ghosts had piqued his interest. He couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t intrigued by the fact that she’d shown up to take
him
with her, either. But, in truth, he’d come for only one reason: It was time to finally write the painful ending to his brother’s chapter and reclaim the pieces of himself that had been torn out by Diablo Springs.

Honestly, he’d been brooding about it for weeks, months even. Since he’d learned that Matt had died. Since he’d acknowledged the relief he’d felt—the kind of relief that came from offloading the two-ton ball and chain he’d been dragging most of his life.

Matt’s death, however, hadn’t put an end to anything. In fact, it had opened flood gates inside Reilly and spewed a toxic mix of memories into his bloodstream. He’d sent instructions to Digger Young—Diablo Spring’s undertaker—to have Matt cremated and shipped to him in Los Angeles. He’d locked the ashes up with his memories and gone on like neither existed. But each day since, getting out of bed had been a little harder. Going to the computer, a bit more difficult. Facing himself in the mirror, a lot more painful.

He’d lost weight, lost his drive. Last week he’d shaved his fucking head. Next week he might move onto something more permanent . . . like maybe shave a few years from his life. The fact of the matter was, he needed to bury his ghosts and Matt was only one of them. Diablo Springs and all the blood and pain of his history there—that one needed to be buried, too.