Her Last Whisper

by Karen Robards

  As a result of what she could only consider some weird chemical alchemy, Michael could make her burn hotter than any other man she had ever met. The problem lay in what he was: a ghost. In the living world, in her experience, ghosts had short shelf lives.

  In other words, no long-term potential there. They were two different species now: the living and the dead. They had as much chance of being together as a dog and a cat.

  He stopped to lean a broad shoulder against the door frame and watch as she dropped her purse on the dresser, opened the closet, dragged a suitcase out, plopped it open on that way-too-disturbing bed, then headed back to her dresser to start retrieving clothes.

  Michael snorted. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  She shot him an unfriendly look. “Believe whatever you like.”

  “Charlie, baby, you ever consider that because your mom’s an alcoholic, and she wasn’t willing or able to be the mother she should have been, and you pretty much had to take care of her, you’ve been trying to take care of everybody around you for most of your life?” The fact that his voice was now incredibly gentle should have robbed his words of any sting. It didn’t: each one flicked her on the raw. Her lips parted in shock as they hit. “You’ve even been doing your best to take care of me, which is just about as sweet as it is stupid. Maybe you want to start thinking about taking care of yourself.”

  Straightening with a neatly folded pile of undergarments in her hands, she slewed around to glare at him as she honed in on the part of that speech that really struck a nerve. A few times, when she’d been feeling particularly vulnerable in the hospital and elsewhere, she’d told him little bits and pieces about her background. She’d definitely mentioned her mother, but she’d never told him that about her. That her mother was an alcoholic—she never talked about it to anyone.

  Loyalty ran deep. Deeper even than the pain her mother’s drinking had caused.

  “I never said my mother was an alcoholic.” Her voice was sharp. Stepping over to the bed, she deposited the underwear in the suitcase and turned back to glare at him all over again.

  “I’m good at reading between the lines.” He wasn’t smiling. “You ain’t the first shrink I’ve ever seen, you know. Since I got arrested, they’ve had shrinks coming at me every time I turned around. I heard about adult children of alcoholics until I wanted to put my fist through a wall. That my damned bastard of a stepfather was a drunk was supposed to be a mitigating factor for me being a serial killer. My defense lawyers used it at my sentencing, to try to get me life in prison. Didn’t work out, but I learned a lot.”

  “My mother is none of your business!” Shoulders rigid with anger, she returned to the dresser to jerk open another drawer and extract her running gear.

  “Maybe not, but I think she’s the reason behind this savior complex you’ve got going on, and that is my business. It’s liable to get you killed.”

  She turned from depositing her running gear in the suitcase to march toward the closet, glaring at him some more on the way. “You know what? When you get your medical degree, I’ll consider your opinion. Until then, I have to tell you that you’re full of shit.”

  “I’m trying to look out for you here.”

  Heading back toward the suitcase with her arms full of clothes, she gave an angry snort and shot bullets at him with her eyes. “You’re trying to manipulate me, you mean. To get what you want, which is to not go to Las Vegas.”

  “Hey, you tried sweet-talking me.” His voice was still mild. He was looking at her with the barest suggestion of a smile, which she found infuriating. Actually, she found him infuriating. Times ten. “I’d say that makes us even.”

  “I’m not talking to you about this anymore.” Dropping the clothes in the suitcase—she was so mad she didn’t even bother to fold them—she turned her back on him and stalked toward the bathroom. It was en suite, with the door on the same wall as the bed, all white tiles with a big, claw-foot tub and separate shower. Once inside it, she flipped on the light, caught a quick glimpse of herself in the mirror—her hair had fallen from its loose knot to hang in disordered chestnut waves around her shoulders and she hadn’t even noticed; her lipstick was gone; and her eyes blazed as deeply blue as her shirt—yanked open the medicine cabinet, and started pulling out the toiletries she was going to need.

  “Charlie.” He was there in the bathroom doorway, looking at her. She was actually surprised it had taken him so long to get there. “Do us both a favor: forget Vegas.”

  She shot him a sizzling look through the mirror—which damn it, was way less effective than it should have been because, since he was a ghost, she couldn’t actually see him in the mirror. Turning around, she gripped the edges of the sink behind her with both hands as she glared at him. In the confined space of the bathroom, his tall, muscular form seemed to take up way more than its fair share of space.

  “What part of I’m not talking to you about this anymore did you miss?”

  “The part where you still think we’re going to Vegas.”

  She was usually pretty even-tempered, really she was. Calm and controlled in the face of all kinds of extreme situations, that was her. But now she was mad.

  The look she gave him could have lasered through a wall. “The good news for me is that you don’t get to make this decision. I do. You’re attached to me, not the other way around. And I’m going to Las Vegas. You can do what you want, except, oh, wait, if you get more than fifty feet away from me, you’ll be sucked into Spookville and the scary monsters will get you. So I guess that means you’re going to Las Vegas, too.”

  His lips thinned. Those disturbingly black eyes raked her. “So you’re going to put your life at risk just to prove you can?”

  “It’s my life. I can if I want to.”

  “Babe, you need a keeper.”

  “I suppose you think that should be you?”

  “At least I’m not as irrational as a teenage girl lately.”

  “You,” she said through her teeth, “are a sexist jerk.”

  His lips thinned. “Yeah, well, I’d rather be a sexist jerk than a brainiac with her head up her ass.”

  “A what?”

  “You heard me.”

  Charlie clamped her lips together. She fumed. She seethed. She would have told him to drop dead, except, guess what, he already was. Telling him to go to hell was a waste of breath, too. She could already hear his reply: been there, done that. Complete with accompanying smirk.

  She was just opening her mouth to verbally lay him out with none of the above when he folded his arms over his chest. Something about the movement, something about all those brawny flexing muscles and corded, rippling sinews caught her eye. She looked—and her heart stopped.

  “Oh, my God,” she said in a voice that didn’t even sound like hers. Her eyes collided with the disconcerting jet black of his. “Take off your shirt.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I know you want me bad.” Michael lifted his eyebrows at her mockingly. “But are you really gonna jump me in the bathroom?”

  Ordinarily, given how she’d been feeling about him until just about half a heartbeat previously, the drawling insolence of that would have been the flame to her already smoldering dynamite. But under the circumstances she didn’t even care. Shoving away from the sink, she all but leaped toward him.

  “Look at your arm.” She always forgot how tall he was until she was standing right in front of him. The top of her head didn’t reach much higher than his shoulders. She glanced up, met his eyes. The soullessness of those newly black eyes suddenly held a terrifying significance for her. Her heart was beating again, in hard, fast strokes like she’d been running for miles.

  He looked down at his arm, and she followed his gaze.

  His left arm, from the hard muscle bulging out beneath the edge of his sleeve to below his elbow, was a deep charcoal gray. More gray ran in streaks down his forearm. If the streaks had been red instead of gray, she would have immediate
ly suspected blood poisoning.

  “Jesus,” Michael said.

  “Take off your shirt.” This time, although it shivered with urgency, her voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.

  He met her eyes without saying anything. Then he reached down, grabbed the hem of his shirt, and pulled it over his head. The white tee dropped to the floor.

  “Oh,” she breathed on a distressed note as she looked at him, the word so quiet as to be barely audible. His broad shoulders, heavy with muscle, were where her gaze rested first. A sliver of the green and black cobra tattoo that adorned his right biceps caught her attention. Then her focus shifted to his chest, his beautiful, wide, muscular chest, which she knew from personal experience was sleek and firm to the touch. It was still as ripped as ever, he was still every bit the eye candy he’d always been—except for the area just below his left shoulder. A mark in the shape of a large, jagged C appeared to have been seared into his flesh. It was deep and black, with charred-looking edges. Above it, radiating across the edge of his shoulder and down the top of his left arm, the skin was blackish and burnt-looking. From that point to just past his elbow the color faded gradually to a charcoal gray; the shade, she thought, of overdone meat.

  Streaks of the same color extended down his forearm almost to his wrist. She had looked at his arm in the prison as well as in the car on the way home: they’d been casual glances, directed at him as a whole and not at his arm in particular, but if any of the visible flesh had been gray she was sure she would have noticed. The discoloration was spreading: if nothing was done, pretty soon his whole arm would be the same horrible, charred blackish-gray as the area around the injury. Then what? How far could it/would it spread?

  Just thinking about that made her go cold all over.

  “Fuck,” Michael said. As she flicked a look at his handsome, chiseled face Charlie saw that he was still slightly ashen, with shadows beneath his eyes and a drawn look that was doubly frightening now that she had seen his chest and arm. He was staring at the injury with obvious dismay.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked in a constricted voice.

  He shook his head.

  What she did next came from a place of pure instinct: forgetting what he was, she reached out to gently touch his bare chest, the uninjured part just beside the burnt-looking C. Part of the reason was to check for unnatural heat in what appeared to be firm, tanned skin. The other part of the reason was, well, because he was hurt and she wanted to comfort him. Of course the second her fingers made contact with him, they passed right through. At the now-familiar electric tingle, she drew back a little, then carefully repositioned her hand so that it lay flat against the sleek muscle. The smooth warmth of his hard flesh beneath her hand—that wasn’t real: she knew perfectly well that she could only see rather than feel him, because he had no more substance than air. This time the electric tingle was more of a gentle pulsing against the palm of her hand. She’d gotten used to the sensation, she thought: it no longer felt alien.

  It felt like Michael.

  His hand closed around her wrist as though he would hold hers in place against him; she saw the long, strong fingers wrapping around her slender bones, but that, too, she only felt as a kind of pulsing.

  His flesh beneath her hand was no more real than a mirage, an illusion with no physicality behind it to back it up, and she knew it. But for all that, the sensation of touching him was so vivid that she could almost feel the hard resilience of his muscles, the smooth texture of his skin. Deep inside, her body tightened and began to quake.

  “Charlie.” His voice was low and husky. Breathless, she looked up at him.

  For a moment their eyes met. The fathomless black of his made no difference to the wordless exchange between them: it was a moment charged with sensuality. But there was also a sense of profound connection, a depth of feeling, an unspoken acknowledgment: You matter to me.

  He bent his head and, still holding her hand against his chest, touched his lips to her mouth.

  Her lips parted. Her heart lurched. Her body went up in flames.

  She closed her eyes as her bones turned to water. The merest whisper of heat fanned her lips. She felt it clear down to her toes.

  She wanted to kiss him so badly that she felt like she would die if she didn’t.

  It was impossible. Impossible to press her lips to his and slide her tongue inside his mouth and kiss him like she wanted to. Impossible to wrap her arms around his neck and mold her body to his and let the fire that was building between them rage in any kind of a natural way. And that would be because, no matter how solid he looked to her, there was nothing physical of him there.

  He was a ghost; he did not belong in her world.

  That knowledge was what gave her the strength to open her eyes.

  He was still kissing her. He was watching her at the same time, studying her face as his lips moved carefully, gently on hers, and as she looked into the stygian depths of his eyes she was reminded, abruptly, of the harsh reality of the situation they were in.

  There was no future for them. She was a fool to have allowed this thing between them to go as far as it had.

  Too late to do anything about that, but she didn’t have to compound the error by totally losing her too-stupid-to-live heart to him.

  Pulling her mouth away from his, taking a step back, she took a deep breath and let the hand he’d been holding drop to her side. There was no resistance. Why? Because as strong and powerful as he looked, he couldn’t have kept his hold on her wrist if he’d tried.

  His eyes slid over her face. “Charlie …”

  His voice was husky.

  I can’t let this happen. She beat back the sense of near panic that accompanied the thought of how close she was to falling head-over-brain-dead-heels in love with him by focusing ruthlessly on the disaster at hand.

  “That wound on your chest,” she said, very calm. “The hunter did that to you, didn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  From the brevity of his response, she knew that he, too, was still experiencing emotional fallout from that almost kiss.

  “When?” She was trying to calculate how long it had taken the discoloration to spread to its present degree.

  “In your office.”

  Like her, he was pulling back, putting emotional space between them. She could feel it in the change in the atmosphere, see it in the tightening of his face, hear it in his voice.

  “What did it do?” Thinking of the shape of the injury, she had a sudden, dreadful thought. “Did it bite you, or …?”

  “Dug its claws into me. For a minute there, I thought it was going to rip out my heart.” He smiled faintly at her, and she knew that whatever heartburnings he’d been experiencing—always assuming that his emotions bore any similarity to her own—had been put behind him. “Then you went all Van Helsing on it.”

  “You said you thought its claws might hold poison.”

  “As bad as I felt both times it got hold of me? Only thing that makes sense.”

  Charlie felt a knot forming in her chest as she faced what she feared was the hideous truth. “The evil spirits that possessed Creason and the trustee—you said they were a burnt-looking gray.”

  “Yeah.” From the rueful tone of that, she realized that he’d made the same connection she had.

  “They were spirits who wound up in Spookville just like you.” She could hardly get the words out. Suddenly she felt so cold inside that it was a wonder she wasn’t shivering. “The hunter caught them. That’s what it does. Turns them into those things.”

  Her eyes clung to his, practically begging him to point out where her reasoning had gone wrong. As black as his eyes were, she couldn’t read anything, any emotion, in them at all. But his mouth was grim. It told her all she needed to know.

  “Given this,” he glanced down at his arm, “that’d be my guess.”

  “If we can’t stop it, that’s what’s going to happen to you.” Horror shook her voice.

&
nbsp; Even in this moment of extremis, he gave her another one of those faint smiles. This one struck at her heart. “Time to break out the woo-woo, Doc.”

  “I don’t know anything that’ll fix this.” Her voice sounded raw to her own ears. Get a grip, she told herself sternly. Wallowing in terror was useless. There had to be a way to save him. Determination straightened her spine, squared her shoulders. “Get out of my way. I’m going to call Tam.”

  Tam being Tamsyn Green, who, besides being her good friend, was also a psychic medium and the New Orleans–bred daughter of a notorious voodoo practitioner. Unlike Charlie, whose interaction with the dead was involuntary, unwelcome, and thankfully somewhat limited, Tam embraced her abilities with enthusiasm: she made her living from it, and was currently based in California giving readings to movie stars. Having been brought up in a household where the occult was as unremarkable as table salt, Tam was possessed of vast knowledge about the things that go bump in the night. Before the advent of Michael into her life, Charlie had rarely needed to call on her for help. Since Michael’s arrival, she’d spoken to Tam on the phone more often than she had to anyone else in years.