by Megan Derr
He should have known that the day would be a wash when he woke up to find that Casper had run away. Stupid, useless, ungrateful feline. Who needed the mouthy, troublemaking ball of fluff anyway? Stifling a sigh because sighing would accomplish nothing, Astor slung his duffle over one shoulder, the laptop bag across the other, and trudged toward the inn.
To give it credit, the inn had a horror movie setting that did not seem overly contrived. If he were not all too aware that ghosts did not exist, Astor would be creeped out by the place. It was, however, damned hard to terrify a man with fangs who drank blood to live and debunked ghost stories for a living. But the place made a good showing, he would concede that. Dark stone and old wood, check. Creeping ivy, check. Wrought iron, check. Nothing else around for miles, check.
He was further impressed there were no tacky signs proclaiming the ghosts, no boards spelling out the long, tedious story. Only a single sign on the far side of the parking lot that marked the beginning of the 'historic' trail that led to where the infamous cabin had once been located, close to the lake that gave the inn its name—which itself had been named for the woman who had died there, the woman whose ghost seemed to do a hell of a lot of haunting across the damn mountain.
But trekking around the mountain was the next day's task. Right then, he was interested only in unpacking and finding a beer. He grimaced as he recalled that for reasons unknown, Tennyson was there. His head throbbed, and Astor sighed before he could catch himself.
Pushing open one of the double doors, he stepped into the lobby and was immediately assaulted by an over-enthusiastic use of potpourri. The entire place smelled like the bastard child of a florist and a perfume shop. The inn's interior continued the outside theme of 'vaguely creepy' and he would definitely acknowledge the atmosphere in his book. Dark wood, dark oriental carpets, lamps and electric candles meant to look like more old-fashioned gas and wax candles.
Hell, as he reached the desk, he saw the place came complete with a sour-faced crone. He only barely avoided wrinkling his nose at the dry-as-dust smell of her blood. He fervently hoped there would be better pickings when he needed to drink.
His thoughts slipped dangerously to Tennyson then, and a night he could never forget no matter how hard he tried.
Biting down, arms dragging Tennyson closer, fisting a hand in Tennyson's hair as he drank, as Tennyson pounded into him, both of them wanting more and more, never sated—
He cut the memory off, hating himself even as his hand curled around the coin in his pocket. He forced a polite smile as he slid his ID and credit card across the desk. "Good evening. I have a reservation under the name Astor Wheaton."
The woman at the desk nodded, but said nothing—did not even smile. Astor made a mental note of her deplorable manners. His only real task was to debunk ghosts, but he prided himself on thoroughly representing all aspects of the inns, hotels, and bed & breakfasts he wrote about.
Thus far, he was not impressed with the staffing of Grey Lake Inn, though she worked quickly on the computer, then returned his cards along with a receipt—and keycard, mercifully. He hated the places that maintained a 'quaint aesthetic' by continuing to use actual keys. "Room 31, down the west wing. Welcome to Grey Lake Inn, Mr. Wheaton; we hope you enjoy your stay."
Astor thanked her, then turned and headed toward the west hall. It was a small inn, only the one floor with rooms in east and west wings—a hundred in total, including special suites. He stopped as a door opened and a man slipped out into the hall. Astor swallowed. Hard. His fingers tightened around his keycard and the straps of his duffle bag. Tennyson Nichols, his agent of nine months. Astor had only completed one book under him and was starting the next one, but they were a good fit professionally. Much better than his last agent, a stupid man with sour-smelling blood who thought he knew everything and could not be bothered to listen to anyone with real intelligence.
He'd had high hopes that Tennyson would be better than what he'd come to expect, but fuck. Tennyson was everything, the whole damned package. Smart, clever, intelligent—and those were not all the same thing, he did not care what anyone else said—funny, hard-working, and so damned beautiful. Stunning. And he had no issue with Astor's being a vampire. Hell, he fucking loved the fangs. Astor had never once in his life met a human who really was completely comfortable with vampires. Plenty of them talked it, but rare were those who walked it.
Tennyson walked it. Strutted it. Wanted it. Begged for it as hard as Astor had begged to be fucked. All night they'd gone at it. He'd never been so ravenous in so many ways, so gone on someone in just one night, but Tennyson had been so—so everything Astor had ever wanted, he almost seemed too good to be true.
And, of course, he had been too good to be true. The morning after the best night of his life, Astor had woken up to an empty bed. Later that afternoon, he had met his new agent and found they already knew each other very well indeed. But Tennyson had made it clear he preferred to keep things strictly business. Astor wondered sometimes what would happen if he got another agent, but he dreaded the outcome too much to find out. He'd rather have Tennyson a little bit than not at all.
He was taller than Astor, which Astor found more than a little hot though he would never admit it. Like Astor, he was always sharply dressed. His hair was dark brown, closely cropped, but just long enough to show a hint of wave; it was dusted at the temples with silver even though Tennyson was just barely past thirty. The glasses were a nice final touch; he was a wicked combination of city slick and sleepy professor.
Astor would never, even under pain of death, admit it, but one of his favorite memories of that damned night had been when Tennyson had smiled, slowly removed his glasses to set them on the table before leaning over to steal a kiss.
Astor was the oldest in his generation of the family—older than his brother, older than his cousins. It was his job to look after them, to tell them when they were being stupid, to clean up the mess when they didn't listen. He had been looking out for his family from the moment he was old enough to understand the responsibility. They all considered him an ass, a jerk, a heartless bastard, nosy, interfering—
Evil Astor was hard-hearted and mean. He was not a romantic sap who fell head over heels for a man in one night. He definitely was not stupid enough to stay in love and grow more in love even after said man made it clear he had only been interested in one night.
Thank god no one in his family would ever find out he was stupider than all of them. "What are you doing here?" he asked as Tennyson looked up and saw him. Astor strode past him to the door to his room, assuring himself he did not notice the sandalwood and orange of Tennyson's cologne, or the sweet-spicy scent of his blood. He noticed with annoyance that their rooms were next to each other.
Tennyson laughed and leaned against the bit of wall between their doors as he watched Astor battle with his door. "Hello to you, too, Astor. Card goes the other way."
"Shut up," Astor muttered, flipping the card and swiping it. He turned the handle and pushed the door open, then flicked on the lights and asked over his shoulder, "So why are you here? You only show up when I've pissed someone off, and I haven't done that yet."
More soft laughter as Tennyson made himself comfortable in the room's only armchair, propping his legs on the footstool. "That's not the only reason I ever come to visit you in the field. I've come to see you for other reasons."
"Rarely," Astor said, thinking of all the reasons he wished Tennyson would come see him. Swallowing again, he turned away from the delightful view to open his duffle and put all his clothes away. He closed and opened drawers with a bit more force than was strictly necessary, but it did little to ease the tension pulling his shoulders tight and knotting his stomach.
"I had to go see Edith," Tennyson finally said. "She was having another fit and needed to be calmed down and put back on track."
"Ah," Astor said. Another of Tennyson's clients, and a greater drama queen Astor had never met. Her home was only a couple
of hours away from the Inn. "So you put out that fire then came to harass me."
Tennyson rolled his eyes. "I came to say hello to a friend. You're going to be stuck here for a month, over Christmas, and it looks like the 'meals' you'll be getting will be paltry at best. I figured you could use a friendly face."
"I've dealt with worse," Astor replied. "I'm not Edith; I don't need to be coddled."
"You don't need me to coddle you, no," Tennyson said, "but you do often need me to placate locals." He laughed again when Astor shot him a scathing look. "It's true, you said it yourself. For someone who relies so heavily on people for sustenance and income, you are remarkably good at pushing them away—or getting them to attack you."
"Only two people attacked me, and that was because they could not accept their crappy inns were precisely that—crappy," Astor said irritably, not amused by the reminder of people coming at him with baseball bats and even a knife. He wrote stupid books about ghosts, and more often than not his books increased profits for the places he wrote about. So a few got bad reviews. That was no reason to bring a knife into it. "Anyway, they never should have figured out that Astor Wheaton is Henry Owsley."
Tennyson nodded. "No one else will, not on my watch. So what is the ghost story here?"
Astor shrugged as he set out his laptop and other tools of the trade on the desk, mildly annoyed that it was too small. "Standard trapped in the snow fare, but with some peculiarities—my sort of peculiarities. Didn't you read my email before you green-lighted the venture?"
"Skimmed it," Tennyson replied lightly. "I know you're good as gold whatever you choose to do. You have well over a dozen books to your name and not a one of them ever failed to be best sellers. I don't need to rake you over the coals before I give you the go."
Making a face, Astor went back to fussing with the desk. He set his phone down and only then noticed that someone had tried to call him six times. His Aunt, no doubt to yell at him for calling Amanda a nitwit and actually having the gall to inform her that she had lousy taste in men.
Really, they should learn to listen to him about such matters. It would save everybody hours of screaming and shouting and being mad. He'd had every bad boyfriend possible, like a damned checklist. The flighty, the clingy, the unfaithful, the violent, and the too perfect to be real, even though a one night stand hardly made Tennyson a boyfriend. "I strive to be a money-making, worry-free writer," he said acidly. "Let me change and then I suppose I must endure your presence at dinner."
Tennyson laughed again, but his gaze slid away as he said, "Yes, you must. Get changed, then. I'll meet you at the bar."
If he had left any faster, he would have caught something on fire. Stamping viciously on the bitterness that accompanied that thought, Astor reached into the pocket of his slacks and pulled out a coin, rubbing his thumb over it. A 1978-CC Morgan silver dollar. Astor knew shit about coins and collecting them, but he'd picked up bits and pieces in the nine months he'd known Tennyson, who did collect them.
The night they'd met, in that crappy bar he'd gone nowhere near since, the silver dollar had been a conversation starter. They'd met over the coin, and sometimes he felt bad about keeping it and letting Tennyson think he'd lost it in the bar—
But Tennyson was the one who had walked off with a great deal more than a coin and stomped all over what Astor had been stupid enough to give him—hadn't even noticed what he'd done to Astor, what Astor had been trying to offer. So in the end, Astor didn't feel that bad about keeping a stupid coin.
Slapping the silver dollar down on his desk, Astor stripped off his clothes and went to get a shower—and a thorough jerk-off session, because otherwise he would never make it through dinner without doing something stupid.
Forty five minutes later, dressed in a black suit with dark silver pinstripes and a purple and silver tie, he found Tennyson at the hotel bar, classy and handsome in dove gray and lavender. Tennyson motioned to the bartender, who nodded and brought over a glass of dark stout, sliding it across the bar to Astor. Thanking him, Astor turned to Tennyson. "How long am I stuck with you?"
"I thought it would take longer to deal with Edith than it did, which is why I drove a million miles instead of flying. Since I already made plans to be out of the office for a while, and brought all my work with me, I figured why not come stay with you? I don't have to be anywhere until a couple weeks after Christmas."
Astor drank his beer so he wouldn't throw it. At least they had separate rooms. He would not put it past his life to have somehow arranged for only one room, promptly followed by an epic blizzard and only Tennyson available for feeding. And despite his thorough session in the shower, his cock twitched at the memory of how Tennyson had loved every fucking minute—
Silently snarling at himself, Astor focused on uninteresting thoughts.
"Come on, then," Tennyson said, breaking into his thoughts, standing up and leaving money on the bar. He led the way across the small dining room to a table tucked away in the corner. "Place is awfully quiet for a popular haunted inn, especially given this is the time of year when it's most likely to show."
Astor looked at him in annoyance. "I thought you said you didn't read my email."
"I said I skimmed it," Tennyson said with a smirk. "Anyway, you always visit these places at peak spook-spotting time. Pity it's over Christmas; I know you like to see your family."
Astor shrugged, affecting disinterest. "The feeling is not mutual. I have not the slightest doubt they will enjoy my absence. I could use the peace and quiet anyway." If he was home, he'd just spend his Christmas trying to talk sense into Amanda, making certain Quinn's boyfriend wasn't going to finally freak out when surrounded by several vampires, and gods alone knew what else, all the while getting yelled at for his efforts. Peace and quiet sounded lonely, but it did also sound nice, however little sense that made.
Tennyson looked at him, thoughtful, silent and making Astor want to fidget. When he spoke, however, all he said was, "So I am told the steak here is excellent, and the venison a very close second."
"Deer," Astor said scathingly, wrinkling his nose in distaste. He had no taste for game meat, especially venison. Tennyson smiled faintly and sipped at his martini, and they subsided into a silence that was so comfortable it made Astor miserable, until the waiter appeared with fresh drinks and took their orders.
Sick of the silence, Astor started snarking about others in the industry, Tennyson laughing and commenting idly, and it just annoyed Astor all over again how easy it was just to be with Tennyson. After the waiter brought them their salads and bread, Tennyson said, "So tell me your tragic tale of cabin fever here at the majestic Grey Lake Inn."
Astor snorted softly, briefly amused. "This used to be a stopping point for those traveling south, one of the few before they pretty much ceased. Story goes a blizzard waylaid a group of travelers: a young woman, her elderly aunt, her brother, and two other young men. They were trapped for days, though I haven't found a very clear number—somewhere between a couple of weeks and a month and a half. Anyway, when the snow finally lifted enough to permit travel, new arrivals found only the young woman, covered in blood and crying about how the others had turned into wolves and run away."
Tennyson's gaze sharpened. "Oh, really. Werewolves?"
"Very likely," Astor replied. "The story continues that other than the blood, they could find no trace of the others. The only peculiarity was evidence of wolves—tracks in the snow, a bit of pelt that had caught on a nail, prints in the blood smeared on the floor. It was decided that wolves must have attacked the travelers, desperate for food, and by some miracle the woman lived."
"Some miracle if they thought she was mad, which they must have," Tennyson said.
Astor nodded. "Yes. It was concluded that the trauma had been too much for her, and she made up the story of their changing because she could not cope with their deaths."
"I wonder which one was the wolf in the group," Tennyson said thoughtfully. "They must have tu
rned or killed all the others, if they didn't have enough control once the moon took hold. Wild transformations were more common in those days, right?" At Astor's nod, he continued, "So between hunger and cabin fever and the moon, the wolf probably went crazy and attacked the others. Not the girl, though, which is interesting. Bad luck, an Alpha being stuck with the rest of them."
Smirking, Astor continued, "The rescuers took the girl away, stopped in a town to wait for a train that would take them all the way back east. Woke up in the morning to find the girl gone, and eventually realized she had run back to the cabin. When they finally found her, she was dead, killed by the cold while looking for the others." He made a face, then finished, "They say she was found with a ring in her hand, and it was eventually discovered the 'brother' had actually been a man with whom she was eloping. She went back to find him, unable to accept his death, and waits there still, a mournful ghost. And though wolves do not and have never lived in this area, people swear they can hear mournful howling along with the sad weeping and calling of a young woman." He rolled his eyes.
Tennyson laughed. "Indeed. She was the wolf, wasn't she? She turned them all, and they panicked and ran before she could get control of them and teach them how to change back. She went to save them and froze to death before she could. An Alpha female, I'll be damned. Those are rare even nowadays, never mind back then." Alphas were werewolves with potent enough venom they could turn humans with a single bite. For reasons still unknown, female werewolves were uncommon, and Alpha females were all but unheard of.
Astor nodded, stupidly pleased as always that Tennyson knew so much about paranormals and was so casual about it all when most humans chose to run for the hills and pretend nothing had ever happened.