by Sheryl Lynn
She turned her head slightly, her crystal-blue eyes shadowed by thick lashes. A tremulous look that made him feel bigger, more powerful. A look that made him feel magnificent. A silent laugh twitched his throat. He doubted he’d ever used magnificent in conversation.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
“Sure.” His unhappiness returned, deeper than ever. Before that night in the Moore house, before Desi issued her invitation, he’d thought he knew how to handle Dark Presences.
Hide. Pretend they didn’t exist. Keep his eyes averted and his thoughts to himself.
Too late now. Hiding wasn’t an option. Deserting Desi was completely out of the question. That thing had taken up residence in her house and it wouldn’t leave on its own. A showdown was inevitable.
Dallas popped his head out of the tech room. “Hey, guys! Did you bring pizza? I’m starving.”
From the kitchen Ringo called, “I’ll put it on the table. Who wants a beer?”
Desi went to the kitchen. Buck headed to the tech room, where he found Tara Chase and Tony Keegan. Tara asked if the information she’d provided had done any good. Buck said, “I hope so.”
He looked at a pair of computer screens Dallas had activated. Both showed sound waves. The screens were in sync.
“New software,” Dallas explained. “We’re trying to get it to work.”
“It’s for EVPs, Buck,” Tony said. “You haven’t had the pleasure yet of catching EVPs. Borrrring. Sometimes we’ll collect thirty or forty hours of audio recordings. Then we have to go through them in real time. You sit, you listen, you try to stay awake.”
“It’s tons of fun,” Tara said with a snicker. She had a lean, outdoorsy attractiveness, and was working on her master’s degree in history. She vibrated with hummingbird energy, and Buck wondered how she stilled long enough to do the research she did. “Especially when you’re listening to eight hours of an empty room.”
“I’m working on software,” Tony said, “to detect variations in base wave noise. I know we miss some EVPs because they’re so brief or subtle. What I hope is that the computer can catch noises. It’ll mark the time on the recording. That’ll still mean going through hours of audio, but at least it’ll give us a heads-up about where to start.”
“So that’s what you do, Tony? Software?”
“Yeah. Medical software. Boring compared to this, but it pays the bills.”
Realization came slowly to Buck. Headquarters was very quiet, in a spiritual sense. He’d seen entities around Tara and Dallas before. Like Mary Hollyhock, they were no-shows tonight. He couldn’t sense the slightest shimmer of otherworldly energy.
It had been like that at the grocery store where he and Desi stocked up on food for the coming storm. The store had been packed with shoppers, but no spirits. There hadn’t been any in the pizza place, either. Buck thought hard, trying to remember. Spiritual entities to him were like the mountains. Pikes Peak, over fourteen thousand feet tall, towered over the city of Colorado Springs, but he’d lived here long enough that he rarely noticed it anymore. It was just there. Spirits were like that. He only noticed when something unusual happened.
Now they were gone. Like looking west and seeing a big hole where the mountain had been. It made him itchy all over.
“Did you talk to Alec?” Buck asked Dallas.
“Briefly. Pizza first. I haven’t eaten all day.”
Once everyone gathered in the main room, Tara looked out the front window and groaned.
“My car drives like crap in snow,” she said. “I have to get home.”
Tony pulled back the draperies, showing everyone that the snow screamed from the sky, whipped into sheets by the wind. It was sticking to the window in clots. “I gotta blow outta here, too. Dallas, my man, we’ll work on the program later. Okay?”
“More pizza for me,” Ringo said. He was a bear of a man with a black beard and a mop of black hair that didn’t look as if it could be tamed.
Buck suspected the sloppy shirts Ringo wore disguised a mountain of muscle. As clownish as Ringo acted, he was far from simple. Intelligence blazed from his deep-seated eyes. Buck had asked Ringo once what he did in real life, when he wasn’t hunting ghosts. “Butter sculptor,” Ringo had said.
Tara and Tony put on coats and gloves, said their goodbyes and headed into the storm. A wicked gust of wind swirled snow inside before Dallas could get the door closed. No psychic power was needed to know Buck would be putting in a lot of overtime the next few days.
Desi and Ringo had set out the pizzas, paper plates and a roll of paper towels on the old conference table. Dallas and Ringo popped open beers. Buck took a soda. Desi wrapped her hands around a steaming mug of tea.
Buck opened his mind and listened with his inner ear. Other than howling wind rocking the apartment walls and the hum of electronics coming from the tech room, all he heard were the mundane sounds of people eating pizza. Unease made it difficult to sit. His appetite disappeared.
Dallas polished off a slice and took another. “Alec couldn’t talk much. He just got in from a survival trek with his boys and the storm has already hit at his place. He has his hands full. He’ll try to get down here next week, but that’s the best he can do right now. He e-mailed some information.” He drank deeply from the beer bottle, wiped his mouth with a paper towel and said, “Shadow Men spirits are the damned. They’re intelligent and interactive, but they can’t save themselves. All they can do is keep replaying whatever doomed them.”
The past dragged at Buck, filling his head with ugly memories of another place, another Dark Presence.
“The definition of insanity,” Desi said. “Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. So Skillihorn’s ghost is insane. How do we get rid of him?”
“According to Alec, it’s not easy,” Dallas said. “They’re vampires, sort of. They feed on human energy. They can feed on other spirits, too. Usually they’re connected to a specific place, trapped there, but if they’re disturbed, if they steal enough energy they can move. Native American folklore has lots of stories about traveling ghosts.”
“So how do we get rid of him?” Desi sounded exasperated.
“Alec said they challenge people because they need to be defeated. They can’t release themselves or break the curse that holds them. It’s sort of a stop-me-before-I-kill-again thing.”
“Can we communicate with it?” Buck asked. The mere thought of that drew his insides into a knot. “Ask it what it needs?”
“Alec thinks we can. The ritual requires a circle of four people. Everyone needs to be cleansed. Purified spiritually. Then it can be summoned and trapped in the circle.” Dallas looked at Desi. “Everybody has to be in their right mind.”
She bristled. “There’s nothing wrong with my mind.”
“You’re a little high-strung, kid.”
When she slumped in the chair, Buck patted her hand. He wasn’t any happier about Alec’s proposal than she was. The Dark Presence, however, wasn’t going away on its own.
“We’re winging this,” Dallas said. “Headed into a new territory. I trust Alec knows what he’d doing. We’ll get Pippin to be the fourth member of the circle. She’s fearless.”
Ringo nodded amiably. “She’s the least nutty out of all us.”
“So what’s the deal with cleansing and purifying?” Desi asked. “We have to wander in the wilderness for forty days? Build a sweat lodge?”
An inappropriate image of Desi languidly naked in a steam-filled hut popped into Buck’s head. He lowered his face to hide a grin.
“That’s Alec’s milieu,” Dallas said. “How are you doing? Are you staying with Gwen? You aren’t at home, are you?”
She touched her throat and gave a nervous laugh. “I’m in a motel.” She glanced at the window where the wind made the glass groan. “I can hang for a few days.”
Buck wondered if she’d accept an offer to stay at his place. She could have the bedroom, and he could take the cou
ch. Or whatever.
“I just want my house back,” Desi said. “I want my life back. I hate being scared. I hate jumping at every little noise.” She crossed her chest with a finger. “I swear, I will never again disbelieve anyone who says their house is haunted.”
Ringo patted her arm with a paw-like hand. “I knew we’d bring you around. Welcome to the dark side.”
“YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO ESCORT ME,” Desi told Buck.
She was glad he had insisted on following her to the motel. They were in whiteout conditions, and snowdrifts were piling up against curbs and buildings. Snowplows rumbled along the interstate and main streets, but the snow came down faster than they could clear it away. Desi’s Subaru had all-wheel drive, but the curvy, hilly roads between Dallas’s place and the motel made for white-knuckle driving and a lot of breath holding when SUV drivers who thought themselves invincible roared past her little car. The steady shine of Buck’s headlights in the rearview mirror had made her feel safer.
At the motel her tires crunched snow in the parking lot, and she pulled into a space that she hoped put her between the lines. Buck grabbed the groceries out of the trunk and they ran to the entrance. Desi had to clear snow off the keycard slot to get the door unlocked. Once inside the hallway they stomped snow off their shoes, but they still left a trail as they walked to her room.
“It’s no problem,” Buck said, as he waited for her to unlock the room.
She felt a long way from home, and didn’t want to be here. She hated the smell of industrial-strength cleaning products and the lingering essence of the hundreds of people who’d taken refuge here in the past.
Buck hesitated in the doorway.
“Come on in,” she said, the words tangling in her throat. She prided herself on her independence and her ability to solve problems on her own. She hated being scared and lonesome. Hated facing another night in a strange bed surrounded by strange noises, and awakening disoriented and unsure where she was.
Buck came inside and closed the door. He set the bags on the floor next to a tiny table.
The room had a coffeepot but no refrigerator, so her groceries consisted of nonperishables. There was a restaurant within walking distance, but if the storm got too bad she’d settle for tuna and crackers.
“I know you have to get up early in the morning,” she said. She forced a laugh. “You don’t have to stay.” She knew as soon as he left she’d start obsessing about cleansing rituals and mystic circles and facing the ghost head-on.
He looked around the room at a double bed, two nightstands, a dresser with a television bolted to the top, a tiny table with a pair of chairs and the requisite ugly painting featuring ducks flying onto a pond.
“I don’t know why you have to stay here,” he said. “This is depressing. Can’t you go to your sister’s? Or a friend’s house?”
“Like you said, I’m a vampire. I’ll be up all night working. I don’t like bothering people.”
He grinned. “You bother me.”
She felt bad.
He added quickly, “In a good way.” He lowered his head and scuffed the toe of his shoe across the shaggy carpet. “You should be in a nicer place. This isn’t a North Nevada flophouse, but it’s close. I could put it on my credit card.”
Torn between being touched by his offer and deeply offended, she stared at him until he lifted his head enough to see her.
“I can afford a better hotel,” she said. Being touched by his generosity and concern won out. “But all I need is a bed and a table. And a coffeepot. No sense wasting money on amenities I won’t use.” He looked embarrassed and she went to him, taking his hands. “That’s really sweet of you. I’ll be okay.” Now that she touched him, she couldn’t bear to let him go. “If you, you know, want to hang out a little bit, you’ll see it’s perfectly safe.”
He tipped her chin with a gentle finger. “You look beat. I know you aren’t sleeping. Even vampires need a nap now and then.”
“I have a lot of work to do.”
“Why? It’ll run off if you don’t get right to it? Trust me, it’ll be there tomorrow. I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to go anywhere, either. How about this? You get ready for bed. I’ll hang out for a while. We can watch TV. I bet you’ll fall asleep in five minutes.”
Fatigue washed through her. She doubted she’d slept more than two hours at a time since Skillihorn’s first attack. Suddenly her limbs felt weak and heavy, and the strain settled in her joints, making them ache. “That would be nice,” she murmured.
She went to the bathroom to change.
Her flannel pajamas gave her pause. These were pink with skiing polar bears printed on the pants and a large picture of a bear drinking hot cocoa on the shirt. “Oh so sexy,” she breathed. Gwen was always trying to drag her to Victoria’s Secret for fancy underwear and slinky pajamas. Now Desi wished she’d gone along. She changed into the pajamas and turned to the sink to wash up. While she brushed her teeth she began to wonder what Buck would think if she took off the pajamas and walked out naked.
She really, really wanted to see him naked. The mere thought of his tall, lean body with those broad shoulders and muscular arms made her knees weak. Imagining him touching every inch of her body, kissing every inch of her body, filled her breasts with heat. Her aroused nipples pushed at the flannel. She clutched the vanity until her knees steadied.
She rinsed her mouth and lifted her face to the mirror. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were overly bright. Never had she been this hot for a man. Never. She, with the eagle eyes when it came to finding flaws in a man, couldn’t find a single thing wrong with Buck Walker. Not in his looks, his habits or his character.
Love is blind.
She blinked rapidly at her reflection. Love? Where had that come from? She barely knew the man. They hadn’t even gone out on a first date.
Lust? That made her wince. She wasn’t ruled by passion. Never had been, and couldn’t imagine ever doing so. She thought things through and acted with deliberation, after weighing the pros and cons.
She made a face at her reflection. Like now. Talking herself right out of jumping Buck’s bones when all it would take would be the barest touch from him to have her mindless and moaning. She did think too much.
Compromise then, she decided firmly. She wiggled out of the pajama pants and wore the shirt, which reached midthigh, as a nightshirt. Her bare legs tingled in anticipation of his touch. Even the touch of his eyes would shoot her to the moon. Heat made her feel liquid inside. Who was kidding whom? She stripped off her panties.
Already she was wet and soft, aching and weak in her hips.
She opened the bathroom door.
She paused there, her bottom lip caught in her teeth. “Hey, Buck?”
“Yeah?”
People on the television talked about the storm.
“Do you have any tattoos?”
A long pause, then a hesitant, “No. Why do you ask?”
“No reason.” She turned off the bathroom light.
Buck stretched out on the bed. He had one arm hooked behind his neck and held the television remote in his other hand. He had laid out his coat so his shoes didn’t touch the coverlet. He’d turned back the sheets on the other side of the bed.
His gaze went straight to her legs then rose slowly. It lingered on her breasts. His nostrils flared and the notion that he could smell her arousal made her dizzy.
She needed to say something, anything, but knew whatever came out of her mouth would be idiotic. Aware of him watching her every move, she went around the bed and slid under the covers. The icy sheets made her break out in goose bumps. When he offered an arm for her to rest her head, she snuggled against his shoulder. Her chest hitched as if her lungs had forgotten how to work in tandem.
She sensed sadness around him. It was in the tightness of his fingers against her arm, in the heavy silence of his breathing.
It softened her desire and the urgency faded. The ache she felt in her heart ove
rtook the ache in her body. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You know, other than the obvious.”
“The obvious is enough, isn’t it?” His low chuckle rumbled against her ear.
She knew she shouldn’t keep him here, not on a night like this. His Jeep was built for off-roading, for slipping and sloshing through mud, racing through snow and climbing boulders. City streets held their own brand of treachery, especially when other drivers were involved. She watched the blue scroll bar on the lower part of the television screen. It listed school and event closures. The entire city was shutting down.
“You’re in for a fun time at work tomorrow,” she said.
“No doubt.”
“What’s wrong?”
He looked at her. “You already asked that.”
“Tell me and I’ll quit.”
For a moment she thought he would ignore her, or laugh, or even turn his attention to the television, where the tail end of a medical drama had people in scrubs gazing fiercely into each other’s eyes. “I’m sick of ghosts,” he said bitterly. “I’m tired of trying to figure them out.”
She smoothed her hand over his chest. His flannel shirt was soft but substantial under her palm. His chest beneath had subtle contours. She fiddled with a button, fighting the urge to fill the silence.
In the end, Buck spoke. “I never really know what they want. In a way it’s kind of like communicating with animals. Body language and the expression in their eyes. Sometimes they show me things that are crystal clear. Usually I have to figure it out, like playing charades. Even the ones who can speak out loud, well, it’s like listening to EVPs. I pick up a word or phrase, or a mumbling I can’t quite hear.”
His shoulders stiffened and his muscles turned rock-hard beneath her head. “They don’t belong here. This isn’t their world anymore. Some of them are so sad, so lost, I can’t stand it. And I know, I know, most of them aren’t here because they want to be here. They’re sacrificing themselves for loved ones. I think something is supposed to happen once they get over to the other side. Heavenly reward, reincarnation, who the hell knows? Mostly I can’t help them. I can’t figure it out. I see them, I feel them, and I know most of them just have to figure it out themselves.”