Krewe of Hunters, Volume 1: Phantom Evil ; Heart of Evil ; Sacred Evil ; The Evil Inside

by Heather Graham

  “I’ll get the costume to the lab. I don’t want a miscarriage of justice, Sam. I just can’t believe that someone else has done all this. The kid was covered in blood. Covered. In. Blood. But I won’t have it be said you were denied anything in the right to defend your client.” He pointed at Sam. “You two chose not to call the police, and the costume is in your hands. So as long as we’re being ‘unofficial’ about everything, you see to it that school is afforded a new costume. And I’ll see to that Martin Keller is—”

  Jenna started to move forward again. Sam stood to block her.

  “No, John, please. Meeting the kid was a good lesson for both of us. We know what a lot of the local people are feeling. Let’s not say anything until we know about the costume. I don’t want to make it so no one in Salem will speak to us by having a kid arrested for a prank.”

  “If by a bizarre chance something is found…”

  “Of course. It would be remiss if you were not to become involved all way through Martin Keller, his parents and the school. Thanks, John.”

  He herded Jenna out, and then remembered he didn’t have his car. “Um, John, a ride to my car, if possible?”

  The same officer who had come upon them at the cemetery drove them to Sam’s car.

  It wasn’t there.

  “Tow zone, Mr. Hall, I’m afraid,” the officer pointed out. “You won’t be able to pick it up until tomorrow. I’m afraid you’ll have to pay that fine, too.”

  Sam was ready to explode. He didn’t give a damn about the fine, but he did love his car. It made coming and going the distance so much easier.

  It was a material object, he reminded himself.

  Yeah, but it was his material object. He’d always loved cars. He’d mowed lawns for his car, painted, hauled trash, worked hard. He couldn’t help it; he just really loved cars. He spent a lot of time in his car; it was a place he often spent a lot of time just thinking and calculating his arguments.

  “I can drop you somewhere else,” the officer told him.

  “You can drop me at the foot of Essex,” Jenna told the officer. “I think that Sam is just going to stand here and stare at the spot where his car used to be.”

  She got back into the police car. Sam shook his head. “Right. I’m going to stand here.” He tapped on the hood. “Go.”

  He watched as the car drove away, and then he kicked the ground. Damn it. He’d been frantic over her, and now, because of it, his car had been towed.

  She lost her phone in the cemetery while accosting the kid who had tried to scare her. What the hell was she doing in the cemetery again—communing with her ghosts? And she was flipping pissed off at him because he’d stopped her from speaking so that he could get a rational argument through to John Alden.

  But she was safe. That was worth a car being towed. Well, of course. Logical and ethical. Human life was always the most precious commodity. When life was gone, it could not be returned.

  It was more than that.

  Tense and angry, he walked back toward his own house. He didn’t find the streets all that charming at the moment; partygoers were out, dispersed among families, just trying to find a place for dinner before settling back into their bed-and-breakfast inns or hotel rooms for the night. There were endless balls in Salem as Halloween approached. Some private, some sponsored by the Wiccans, some sponsored by frat houses and sororities. It was true that every manner of costume known to man could be seen in the city.

  As he walked, he turned back to look at a rowdy crowd of fraternity boys. They were all dressed up as Greek heroes.

  A Warrior Princess Xena was following in their wake; she must have been freezing her…assets off. The night had definitely grown chill.

  He frowned suddenly, stopping dead in his tracks. Just behind Xena Warrior Princess was someone else who didn’t belong in the crowd of Greeks.

  Someone in a Celtic costume—that of the horned god, or the goat god. He started walking toward the group. The warrior princess cried out as she was pushed by the horned god, falling over and only just being saved from a hard meeting with the pavement because Sam was there in time to catch her.

  “Rude asshole!” one of the Greeks called out. “Thanks—” he began to say to Sam, but Sam was already moving through the crowd.

  He saw the horned god, and he took flight after it once again. The horned god turned and saw him, and slipped back into a crowd of princes, princesses, a frog and one Freddy Krueger. Bert and Ernie and the Count from Sesame Street took up most of the sidewalk.

  By the time he made his way through the cartoon menagerie, the horned god was gone.

  He stood, puzzled. It was a common costume, especially in Salem. At one time, surely, the Christian church had mistaken the Celtic goat god or horned god for the devil, and thus the creature of decadence had become something like evil incarnate.

  Pictures of the horned god adorned many of the museums dedicated to explaining what might have happened to cause the Salem Witch Trials.

  So why run? Why run away in the costume because Sam had seen him?

  Because Jenna was right?

  Feeling uneasy, still angry, angrier with himself because he’d allowed himself to get caught up in it all and angrier still because…

  She did something to him. It wasn’t like the simple burst of hormones, wanting a beautiful woman. That would be too easy. True, he thought. Men could be ruled far more easily from below the belt. But that was easy, simple. I want you; do you want me, too? His life had been gifted, too many appetites easily achieved.

  This…this was a different kind of hunger. Not the kind that was easily appeased, and not the kind that he could walk away from and…

  He didn’t like it.

  Sam Hall. Oh, yeah, the clever one. Sometimes you’d need to intimidate—investigate. Become a P.I. Size mattered, psychologically, face-to-face with someone in a courtroom. Remember to go to the gym. Join the defense—remember to win.

  Fall for a red-haired Irish lass and…

  “Ah, yes,” he said softly aloud. “Burn in hell!”

  He reached his house. Inside he shed his trench coat and stripped haphazardly as he headed into the shower. Cold first, cold as ice, and then hot, the kind of water to knead the tension out of his muscles.

  It worked on his muscles, not on his mind.

  Death. Death was what you couldn’t take back. You could argue, you could rail. You couldn’t win against death.

  He’d learned that.

  And then, tonight, when she hadn’t answered her phone…

  FBI agent. Competent. Trained.

  Competent, trained people, veteran cops and marshals and soldiers all fell when they were ambushed, unadvised, unwary.

  He heard his doorbell ring as he turned off the water. Frowning, he slipped into his terry robe and padded barefoot to his bedroom. He kept his Smith & Wesson in the drawer next to his bed. With all that was going on, if someone was ringing his bell at night, he was going to the door armed.

  He looked through the peephole and felt all the tension he had just tried to ease from his body slam right back into it with a searing sensation of heat.

  9

  As she stood on her toes to see if she could actually look in the peephole, Jenna saw that it darkened. Sam had come to the door.

  It swung open. He stood there, still damp from the shower, wrapped in his robe, feet bare, a rigid and wary look on his face and a gun in his hand.

  “Hey, I come in peace!” she told him.

  “I doubt that,” he said drily, turning from her. “If you’re coming in, lock the door behind you.”

  He’d headed off toward one of the rooms to the right side of the stairway. Jenna walked into the foyer and stood uncomfortably, then turned and locked the front door.

  Had she come in peace?

  Not really.

  Why had she come?

  She didn’t have to answer her inner turmoil; he reappeared, the gun now gone. Her heart was fluttering and she
couldn’t seem to breathe correctly, and worst of all, it felt as if there were a burning sensation that stirred in the center of her core and shot down her thighs.

  Disgraceful, good God! Sex, desire, they were all human instincts, and all kept under control in a civilized society, and…

  “So, what do you want?” he asked flatly.

  What do I want?

  The dead blunt question took her by surprise. She was disappointed that she couldn’t quite lay it on the line.

  You.

  “You’re a jerk,” she said.

  Good beginning.

  “This couldn’t have waited until tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  She walked over to him and shoved him on the chest. “No, it can’t. You almost put your arm down my throat to make sure that I didn’t speak this afternoon. What? You were afraid that I would just sit there and blurt out to the repressed New England cop that I see and speak to ghosts and that I can also relive certain experiences sometimes by being somewhere?”

  “Were you?” he asked.

  She laid her hand against her own breast. “I am a Federal officer, Sam Hall, with all the rights that go with that title, and I did all the running, jumping, history, science and arms training that went along with becoming official. I worked hard, and I’m real.”

  “You just see ghosts,” he said.

  “Hasn’t anything in your life been anything other than a Jaguar? Oh, probably a tailored suit!” she mocked. “Guess what? You can’t take them with you. You, me, everyone dies, Sam. And sometimes there’s a pain, a loss, something that can’t quite let you go. And you know what? Those left behind are here because of their hearts and their souls, things you can’t see in the living. Good God, I’d never expect you to see them in the dead! You see nothing that isn’t completely tangible, nothing that makes the rest of us human! And, for your information, Mr. High-and-Mighty bring-in-the-big-money Hall, I’ve done a hell of a lot more toward finding out the truth in this case than you have. And—” she came toward him again, poking a single finger at his chest “—you mark my words, the killer was wearing a horned god costume!”

  He caught her by the shoulders then, his hands not rough, but something of force about him as he backed her against the wall. “You listen! You came to me to defend a kid covered in a blood—the kind of evidence that leaves the prosecution dancing in the streets. You can’t begin to imagine all the motions that had to be filed, and you still can’t imagine what it’s going to be like to find the right jury, and most of all, how dare you? I don’t speak to the dead—dead is dead and gone, and therefore, no! They don’t answer questions for me, not in a court of law. I believe the last time that was tried innocent people were killed for ‘witchcraft.’ And if you’re so brilliant and precious and understand the psyche of everyone living and dead, why the hell haven’t you just asked Abraham Smith who the hell it was who murdered him?”

  She stared back at him, speechless for a minute.

  “Yeah, right,” he said softly.

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. It’s not dial-a-ghost and connect to the right spirit. No, no…but we’re close to the truth and I know it. I know what I have seen, I know what I’ve learned, and it all has to do with that damned costume, and the fact that people still don’t understand their neighbors, after all these years. We still don’t see each other clearly. We can’t tolerate, we can’t forgive strangeness…but it’s there, and we are close and…”

  “And we’re just about going to have to pray that someone runs into the middle of the common and screams, ‘Hey, I’m guilty!’”

  “Sam—” Jenna began.

  “Shut up!” he cried. “What?”

  “Shut up!”

  “You shut up!”

  “I’m trying to!” he shouted.

  She stared at him, stunned. And then she noted the look in his eyes, and he was suddenly close against her and she could feel the damp fire of the length of him, and she opened her mouth to speak but she couldn’t.

  “I didn’t want you to try to explain anything to John tonight, that’s true. But I was behind you. Whether I believe or understand or not, I was behind you. And you’re not really angry with me.”

  “The hell I’m not.”

  “That’s not why you’re here.”

  “Why am I here?”

  He lowered his head and found her mouth. His lips captured hers, and his kiss was firm and coercive, his mouth forming over hers with a liquid fire, desire seeming to burn in the very way that he touched her. She felt the incredible vitality and supple strength of the length of him as he pressed her there against the wall, and she was grateful for the wall, thinking that, for her, it had been far too long since she had let herself even begin to feel such sensation.

  His tongue moved into her mouth, again strong and coercive and seductive, and she was even more grateful that he pinned her there. This was what she had wanted, yes, but she hadn’t imagined that she would feel so deliriously weak, and so at a disadvantage. He was a good lover, she thought, because he was a practiced lover; she had seen from the beginning that he moved with a confidence and ease that meant he would hold everything an alpha male held, power unto himself, the physical arrogance that was undeniably attractive. She felt like an inexperienced teen again, unsure and uncertain, and afraid she was far out of her league.

  His lips broke from hers, and his mouth remained just inches away, but she could see his eyes again, and she was stunned that they seemed to be a clear gray, hiding nothing, offering something that might have been honesty and even humility.

  “Is this why you came?” he asked hoarsely. “Because, dear Lord, I think I might have simply burned to a cinder, longing for you and not knowing how to even begin to ask.”

  She nodded, not trusting her voice, and felt the brush of the back of his fingers on her cheek. She was astonished to see that his fingers trembled.

  She moved against him, burying her face against his chest, then lifting her head and finding his mouth again. She felt his arms around her, lifting her more tightly against him, and through clothing and terry, she could feel the rise of his sex, he was so instantly aroused. She slipped her hands beneath the terry of the robe, fumbled at the belt, and drew more flush against him. He backed away, and together they pulled off her sweater, and she realized then that his clothing was strewn about. She looked at him, puzzled for a moment.

  “Cold shower when you left me!” he told her.

  And she found that she could laugh, and crashed into his arms again. It seemed that they couldn’t kiss enough at first, delirious wet kisses that seemed both too much and somehow necessary between them, and then he began to half lead and half carry her into the bedroom on the side of the house, and they fell together onto the large canopy bed there. Jenna got one boot off before he pulled her back down, and she let the other go. Their mouths met again, and his lips trailed to her throat and her shoulders while his fingers eased around to her bra strap. She ran her hands down the length of his naked back, trembling and hungry and yet wanting every minute, every sensation that led to the pent-up desire she’d been so eager to suppress. His hands and mouth covered her flesh, and he was amazingly giving in all that he did, as if he were fascinated beyond measure by every aspect of her skin, every inch….

  She touched him as he touched her, running her hands down his midriff, taking it farther, wrapping her fingers around his erection and bringing a gasp from his lips. “Not fair, I was half-naked already,” he whispered, rising above her. For a moment she caught the silver-gray glint of his eyes in the shadows cast into the darkened room by the hallway light, and she was mesmerized by the dusky shade of the room that seemed to envelop them in some kind of ridiculously magical realm. Could she be so abandoned in bright light? She didn’t know, but she reached out, taking him to her when he moved down to kiss her lips again and then inch down the length of her body, kissing, caressing and stroking while he found the waistband to her jean
s and shimmied the denim down her body and, at last, rid her of her last boot, the last vestige of clothing.

  And then he rose above her, looking down at her again. He lowered himself, lacing his fingers with hers, and eased himself into her, pausing, and then moving, and moving again, more deeply and deeply, until it seemed that his trust shot through to her heart, and her body—core and limbs—became electric in themselves. She moved against him, arms around him, legs entwined around his back, and she marveled at the miracle of sensation and sensuality and sex, because it was magic, and she’d left the world behind, wanting nothing but the touch, scent and taste of him, and the writhing, undulating, wet, slick movement between them.

  She climaxed with a desperation that left her body drained. She felt him expulse, felt his arms around her tighten, and she felt his weight, and then the way he eased down beside her, and brought her back into his arms again. The drumbeat of their hearts seemed ridiculously loud in the room, and the bed’s comforter seemed cool, and still her body seemed to be on fire.

  And for a moment, she winced inwardly. It was sex, just sex.

  But she liked him so much; she didn’t want to…

  She did. She was fascinated by the way he moved, and the way he thought, and the tone of his voice, and his little idiosyncrasies, the way he paced and put his hands in his pockets, thought out his words and didn’t think out his words….

  For a moment, she must have eased away.

  He pulled her back, his voice husky. “Come here, Red.”

  “Oh, please! Don’t call me Red.”

  “Okay, come here, Irish.”

  “Don’t call me Irish.”

  “Is it bad to be Irish?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then…?”

  “Okay, you come on over here, Puritan!”

  “Ouch, ooh. That one does hurt!”

  “Well?”

  He rolled up on an elbow to look at her. “Jenna. Come here, please, Jenna. Please, don’t think about leaving me yet. I’m begging you.”

  She eased back against him. “I wasn’t leaving,” she said. “Not now.”