Voices in the Darkness
The Coveted Book 2
Ripley Proserpina
Rebecca Royce
Copyright © 2020 by Ripley Proserpina and Rebecca Royce
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Content Editing by Heather V. Long
Copy Editing by Jennifer Jones at Bookends Editing
Proof Editing by Meghan Daigle
Created with Vellum
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Rebecca Royce
Ripley Proserpina
Other books by Rebecca Royce…
Also by Ripley Proserpina
1
Breathing deeply, I filled my lungs with icy cold air. The sensation was almost painful, but I reveled in it. Here, as far north as I could get, the cold and snow were a reminder that I had made it where I wanted to be.
Even if I was alone.
I lifted the camera to my eye, zooming in with the telephoto lens the way my boss, Rick Shane, PI, had taught me. The window to my car was open as I sat across the street from Moose Lodge Motel—hourly rates available—and waited for my mark to emerge.
I’d lived in Anchorage for ten years, but the cold and snow still thrilled me to my core.
My breath made small puffs of white, and my fingers were a little numb, despite my fingerless gloves. I smiled, but the air was too cold on my teeth, so I mashed my lips together again. It was only November, but winter was settling in hard.
The door opened, and I pressed the shutter button. “Nicki, Nicki, Nicki,” I said under my breath. “You are in so much trouble.”
My mark was a middle school teacher named Nicki Devlin. Her husband was the assistant manager at an Office Depot, and he’d hired us to catch his wife in flagrante delicto. Poor guy was certain she was having an affair, but Nicki—like all of them—denied it.
Well. Here was the proof Mr. Devlin wanted. Nicki turned around, leaning in to kiss someone had who started to step into the sunlight. I recognized this guy from her social media. It was the assistant principal at her middle school.
Maybe she had a thing for guys who were assistants.
I continued to take pictures as her boss walked her to her car, kissed her goodbye, and watched her drive away.
I lowered the camera as the car turned in front of me and started to roll up the window. As I did, I glanced to the side and found Mr. Assistant Principal watching me with a narrow-eyed stare.
Uh-oh. Time to go.
“Hey!” the man yelled. “You! Wait!”
I started my car, an all-wheel drive POS, and took off. It had snowed this morning and the streets were still slick, so I couldn’t go as fast as I wanted. I glanced in my rearview mirror in time to see the man’s car sliding over two lanes of traffic after me.
Shit. As much as I wanted to put the pedal to the metal, I knew the only outcome would be that my car would end up in a snowbank.
The other guy didn’t seem to have that worry, though. In seconds, he was on my ass, honking and swerving from side to side.
Double shit.
“Call Rick,” I told my phone, waiting for the guy who’d gotten me in this mess to answer.
“Jello,” he answered, chuckling at himself like he always did.
Even though a maniac was chasing me, I still rolled my eyes. “The guy is after me, and he’s going way too fast.”
“Come back to the office,” Rick said. He seemed totally calm, probably because this exact same thing had happened to him a billion times over the thirty years he’d done this job. “Don’t speed. If he gets aggressive, call the cops.”
“Ok—” I was suddenly jolted forward when his car rammed mine. My response was automatic. I jammed on the brakes, which was the wrong thing to do when the streets were snowy. My car spun out of control, leapt the curb onto the sidewalk, and hit a pole.
The last thing I remembered before the world went dark was Rick’s voice. “Lacey? Lace—”
I woke up some time later in the hospital. The beeping of a machine made my head ache worse than it already did. Rick stared down at me, concern etched on his face, and I winced. “Sorry,” I managed to whisper.
He was one hundred pounds too heavy, and I was terrified he was going to have a heart attack any day. The doctor was too, as he’d been told at his last insurance company mandated physical. The company wasn’t going to insure our operation if Rick might die on the side of the road in the middle of a job. I still didn’t know how he’d managed to convince them to give him the policy anyway. But that was Rick. He convinced the world to do what he wanted.
And he took in strays, like a starving and confused teen who hadn’t even been sure how she’d made it to Alaska.
He was the only one I’d told my story, and I knew he’d never tell another soul. Rick kept secrets. Unless he was paid to expose them.
Somehow, I’d lucked out the day I tripped into him on the sidewalk. Turned out, he’d been the closest thing I’d ever have to a father.
“I know I taught you how to drive on ice and snow.”
I grimaced, and that hurt like fuck. “He took me by surprise.”
“I know he did. Guy’s a psycho. If he gets caught having an affair, he loses his job. His wife. Most of his money. But don’t worry. I already dealt with him. Right at this moment, he’s hoping you don’t sue.”
I tried to sit up, but he put a hand on my shoulder in an attempt to stop me. “Relax. You’re going to be here all night. Concussion. It’s a good thing you have a hard head.”
I groaned. “Yeah. Serves me well.”
“When you’re back on your feet, I have a job that only you can do.”
And just like that, he had my attention. Rick always knew how to distract me.
His own wife and daughter had been killed a year before I crashed into his life. He’d saved my life, but he said I saved his, too. According to him, I made him believe in a divine power.
And the guy made me think that maybe people didn’t suck quite as bad as I thought they did.
I was a lot darker than Rick. But I’d known that for a decade now. Since that night I’d beat Erdirg and discovered just how bad a person I truly was. Where did that come from? Fuck. The concussion must be messing with my resolve.
“That so?” I’d get it done if he needed me.
“The local sleep clinic that opened up downtown, around the corner from the hotel, Captain Cooke?”
I nodded, and then wished I hadn’t. “Sure.”
They’d made movies about the insomnia issues in Alaska, and it wasn’t a joke. We were all a little off, particularly this time of year when for the next sixty days or so, we’d have sunrise at ten in the morning and sunset at three in the afternoon. We were either too tired or awake all the time. There was always a doctor happy to declare they had the answers. My understanding was they rarely did.
I hadn’t slept in ten years. Not much anyway. I wasn’t looking for help with that.
“I have a client who swears her husband went in rational and logical, and came out rambling about ghosts, demons, and possession. She’s found an inpatient program for him, but she swears something’s wrong.”
I hadn’t started thinking about those long-ago boys for no reason.
“A demon.” At a sleep clinic. My head pounded, and I winced, touching my temples with my fingers. Holy shit, this hurt. Had I really hit my head that hard?
I tried to think back to the accident, but all that happened was that I was hit with a wave of nausea. Okay. I’d leave the probing until later.
“Yep.” Rick watched me, eyes narrowed. “But not until you recover. You’re on medical leave for the next few days. Doctors want you to stay overnight.”
Awesome. If I couldn’t sleep in my fancy-ass bed with my fancy-ass sheets, I’d never be able to catch a wink in a hospital. But it wasn’t worth arguing about. Rick would worry, and I cared about the big galumph too much to do that.
When I didn’t offer a word of resistance, he smiled and patted my hand like I was a child. I didn’t mind it. Not from him.
“Do we have a medical history of the guy?” I asked. “I’m just going off the cuff, but does he have a history of sleep apnea? Or sleep paralysis? Teeth grinding?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“My doctor was certain my insomnia stems from teeth grinding. Wait—do you want me to look into this because of the sleep issue or the demons?” I tried to hide my smile, but my boss knew me too well.
“Ha-fucking-ha, smart ass.” Rick glanced out the window, and I followed his gaze.
Jesus. I needed to close my eyes and hope the world stopped spinning. I caught sight of snow falling. This place was the most perfect spot in all the world. The cold. The snow. The bears. I didn’t even mind the darkness—not really—though like the rest of Anchorage, I was pretty jittery for some sunshine by the time April came around.
“Can you bring the files to my house?” I asked. “Since I’m going to be sitting around all week?”
“You have to promise me not to overdo it.”
I crossed my fingers over my heart. “Promise.”
He smiled and got to his feet, groaning as he did. “Getting old ain’t for wimps.”
“You’re not old,” I told him, like I always did. Sixty wasn’t old. Even though he was overweight, used too much salt, and never met a fried food he didn’t like, Rick looked nowhere near as roughshod as my gran had. That woman could have been pegged as anywhere from fifty to ninety.
But the desert—and cigarettes and booze and gambling—did that to people.
“I’m going to let you get some rest,” he said, knowing me well enough not to tell me to get some sleep. Sleep would come, or it wouldn’t. I could ride out the hours.
“Okay, Rick.”
He leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “See ya, peanut.”
I gave him a wave as he walked out the door. Left alone in my room, I moved gingerly against the pillows to find a comfortable position. And then, to my surprise, I fell asleep.
Gran took a drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke across the table at me. It burned my nose and throat, but I didn’t say a word. She wasn’t doing it to be mean—I could tell because when she did, she’d smile after exhaling—this time, she was distracted.
“I don’t like it here, Lacey.” She looked around the dining room. “It’s not like home.” Her fingers shook as she tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette onto her dinner plate.
Confused, I studied the room. It was exactly like home, right down to the clown on top of the refrigerator and the little Titanic baby-doll. I shuddered.
“We are home.”
She leaned forward, her rotting teeth catching my attention as she ran her tongue over the front two. “No. We live in this new place now. With the snow. With the darkness.” She motioned toward the window where, sure enough, it was snowing.
That was right. I didn’t live in this house anymore. It had collapsed under the weight of the demon. The last time I’d seen it, Christopher had promised they’d haul it away in pieces and handed me four hundred dollars. I’d taken that money and left.
Huh. I hadn’t… I hadn’t thought about that in years. “You’re right. I got out of here. Left. You aren’t here with me,” I told my gran.
Her eyes suddenly turned red, and she leaned across the table. “You’re wrong. You dragged me here with you,” she snarled. “You brought me along. I go with you everywhere. We all do. And we always will.”
I jolted up in bed, the monitor next to me beeping a loud tone that told me I was still in the hospital. I clutched at my chest just as the nurse came in.
“Good news, Lacey. You’re ready to go home.”
I blinked at her. “Great.”
She held up a tablet. “We just need some information. Since you came in through the ER and you weren’t conscious, we have some quick questions. Last name?”
“Madison.” My head hurt. And that dream. That had been fucked up. Why couldn’t I dream of other things from that time?
Never once had one of the four guys who had held me through that time appeared in my sleep. Seemed as if even my subconscious knew I didn’t deserve them.
I rattled off the rest of my information. Rick would cover the bills for this through his workman’s compensation. Most PIs didn’t get that, but he treated me more like family than an employee.
As the nurse left, I leaned back on my pillow. That was when it occurred to me that I’d given her my real name. Lacey Madison. I hadn’t used that since I left New Mexico.
I’d never even told Rick what it was. From the time I arrived here, I’d told everyone my name was Lacey Chambers. He’d known I’d been lying and told me to do a better job of it, but he’d never questioned me, and we continued on with our shared acceptance of my bullshit.
I sighed. It didn’t matter. No one would look into it as long as the bills got paid. And after ten years, who would bother? I’d run from the only people who ever cared about me. Of course, I’d done it to protect them from my dark soul. If they’d ever found out about that, they would have left me anyway.
When I left the hospital, I was surprised—though I shouldn’t have been—to see Rick waiting at the front entrance.
“Your chariot awaits.” He gestured to the Chevy spewing exhaust and opened the front door for me.
I climbed in. “Thank you. I hadn’t worked out what exactly I was doing.”
“I figured. Head injury and all that. I had the nurses call when you were discharged. I’m your emergency contact, remember?”
Oh yeah. I would have slapped my palm against my forehead if my head weren’t three sizes bigger than normal.
Rick drove me through the snow-covered streets, chatting easily all the way to my little bungalow on a quiet street. My house was the smallest on this block, only two bedrooms and one bathroom, but it was snug and kept in the heat.
It also had a working fireplace. It had taken me eight years of working to buy it, and it still needed some rehab, but it was mine.
Out front, I had hung a wreath in preparation for Christmas and decorated the flower boxes with pine boughs.
“Looks great, kid,” Rick said.
I smiled, house-proud. It did look pretty cute. “Want to come in?” I asked.
“Nah.” But he got out and walked to my door. “One of my employees crapped out on me today, so I have to do double the work.”
I knew he was teasing, so his jab rolled off my back. He walked me to the door, made sure I got it open, then kissed my cheek and waved.
“I’ll check in later!” he called.
I waved back and shut the door before leaning against it. I took in a deep breath. It smelled like home.
The floor, wide pine planks, creaked as I made my way to the bench next to the door where I kept all my snow gear. I sat, struggling with my boots, and finally kicked them off. They lay in a heap, snow melting into a little puddle on the rug I’d placed here just for that reason.
My head still hurt,
though it was more throbbing than nuclear. A cup of tea and a snuggle on my comfy couch sounded like the perfect thing for today.
The kitchen was old. That was the only way to describe it. It was on my list of things I dreamed about doing, but it was functional. Sure, the laminate countertops weren’t pretty, and the avocado-colored stove and refrigerator made me wonder at the person who’d bought such ugly things brand new, but they worked.
I plugged in my electric tea kettle and padded past the living room with its plush sofa and area rug, stone fireplace, and bookshelves, and upstairs into my bedroom.
Glaring at the bed that had cost me well over three grand, I snagged my pj’s from where I left them and went back downstairs into the bathroom.
I didn’t linger—quick shower, brush my teeth, done. My tea would be ready, and I really wanted to sit down. My hair dripped onto my shoulders, but with my fleecy goat-print pants, long sleeve T, and fluffy socks, I would be plenty warm.
By the time I opened the bathroom door, my kettle was whistling and I was ready for another nap.
Maybe that was all I had to do to get some sleep—knock my head into a steering wheel.
I sighed as I stood at the kitchen counter, waiting for my tea to steep. Today had kind of messed me up. Not just the concussion but that stupid dream. I picked up my cup and took a sip, but my stomach did a little flip-flop, like maybe things in my belly were a bad idea.
I decided to listen to my quickly flagging body. Holding my mug, I padded back to my room and slid under the sheets. My bed—I’d live here if I could. It swallowed me whole, and even if I spent more time awake than asleep in it, it was my favorite place.
Hopeful that my concussion might make sleep easier, I shut my eyes and waited for sleep to claim me.
And waited.
And waited some more.
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