Michael?
“I did what I could,” Tam said in response to the look on Charlie’s face, then moved on across the room to sink down heavily on the couch. Bending at the waist, she rested her head on her knees and wrapped her arms around her legs. The moonlight streaming through the window glinted on the silver of Michael’s watch; it dangled from Tam’s fingers.
Charlie froze. Her stomach turned inside out and her blood congealed in her veins and her ears started to ring. For a moment she thought her knees would give out. Then the bathroom door pushed open more and Michael walked out.
Michael, with his tawny blond hair and too-handsome-for-his-own-good face and drool-worthy body. Michael, with all six-foot-three muscular golden inches dressed in jeans and tee and boots, looking like himself again.
“Hey,” he said. His voice was husky but his, the same honeyed drawl that had been doing its best to seduce her from the first time she’d ever heard it. He smiled at her, a crooked twist of his lips that stole the breath from her body.
Relief made Charlie dizzy.
Even as the dark room revolved around her, even as the floor tilted and the stars and moon and city lights outside the window spun into a single sparkling pinwheel, Charlie did what every instinct she possessed urged her to do. She walked straight into his arms, grabbed two desperate fistfuls of his shirt, rested her forehead against his chest, and closed her eyes.
And breathed.
His arms came around her, hugged her close.
The faint scent of lilacs clung to him. It was as real, as tangible, as he was.
So overwhelmed was she that it took her a second to realize that he was tangible: she was actually in his arms. She could feel him. He was as firm and substantial against her as any living, breathing man. Her breasts were nestled against a sturdy wall of muscle. The arms holding her were hard and strong. Her hands were twined in cool, smooth cotton.
He was there. Physically.
Her lips parted with astonishment. Looking up to make sure, she met a blaze of sky blue eyes.
“Michael.” His name came out on a shaken breath.
“Charlie.” His hold on her tightened until she could feel every rock-solid inch of him.
“Oh, my God.” She threw her arms around his neck even as he bent his head to kiss her.
His lips were warm and dry and unmistakably male and just as unmistakably there. They slanted over hers, brushing against the soft curves of her mouth before hardening with a carnality that sent heat shooting through her. She closed her eyes. Her lips parted for him. He licked into her mouth, and she instantly went all soft and shivery inside. Then they were kissing, really kissing, deep and hot and hungry for each other. He kissed her like he was starving for the taste of her, like he could never get enough of her, and she kissed him back the same way. Her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. His hands splayed over her back. She could feel the size and shape and warmth of them through her thin blouse. She could feel all of him, the powerful length of his legs, his narrow, muscled hips, his broad shoulders beneath her arms. Greedily she touched the warm smooth skin of his nape, threaded her fingers through his hair. Her breasts tightened and tingled with pleasure as they pressed against the unyielding wall of his chest, and she made a little wordless sound of wanting into his mouth. She could feel his response in the rigidity of his arms around her, in the super-heated insistence of his kiss, in the hard, urgent mound beneath his jeans as he rocked into her a little.
If they had been alone, she would have started ripping off his clothes—and hers. She ached for him. She burned for him.
Then all of a sudden he wasn’t there.
Her eyes flew open. He was there, still tight up against her, lifting his head from their kiss with the same glazed and hungry and yet slightly bewildered look in his eyes that she knew must be present in hers, staring down at her with the same dawning realization that she was experiencing as it burst on her that his physicality had been a temporary state, that they were once again on different sides of the barrier, that he was spirit and she was human flesh and never the twain shall meet.
She didn’t need to step back from his arms. She could no longer feel them around her. Her hands fell down through his body, just fell of their own weight without the wide shelf of his shoulders to support them. The electric tingle that was all she felt now when touching him was suddenly as horrifying as anything she had ever experienced.
Because it meant that they were once again impossible. Two different kinds of creatures, with no future that they could share.
“What the hell?” His voice was a growl as he took a step back from her. The note of frustrated anger in it echoed her own sudden devastation.
“Oh, my God, for a few minutes there I thought you were alive,” she told him. Her gaze swung to Tam, who was still bent almost double on the couch, although Tam’s head was up now as she watched them with a troubled expression that was just discernible in the starlight. “I thought you’d somehow managed to bring him back to life.”
Her tone was a mixture of anguish and pleading.
Tam shook her head. “That can’t be done. The dead cannot be brought back to life. Don’t hope for it, cherie, because it can never happen.”
Charlie knew that, knew that, had known it all along and had never before even questioned it, but still that moment of wild hope and joy when he had emerged from Tam’s spell feeling as warm and solid as any living, breathing man refused to release its grip on her, and Tam’s words felt like a knife twisting in her heart.
Looking at Michael, Tam said, “You understand, spirit. You cannot be made alive again under any circumstances. The spell doesn’t exist that can do that.”
“I never thought it did.” Michael’s voice was wry. “Miracles are kind of thin on the ground where I come from.”
Charlie must have made a wordless sound of distress, because he looked down at her with a gathering frown.
“Babe—” he said, reaching for her. Like her, he was obviously having trouble remembering that he was once again in a noncorporeal state.
Even as his hands brushed her arms, even as the too-familiar electric tingle made her heart ache, Charlie shook her head at him. She wasn’t done with Tam.
“Then what was that?” she demanded. Pain still shivered in her voice. “The only times I’ve managed to break through to his side of the barrier I’ve had to fall asleep first. And he—he gets thrown into Spookville—the Dark Place—whenever he manifests, but here he still is. So what just happened?”
“You must understand, it’s all about vibration,” Tam said. “These planes—the plane of the living, the plane of the dead—operate on different frequencies, like radio channels. The spirit said you drowned, that the white light came for you. If that’s true, then your frequency must have been altered by the experience: you’re closer to the Afterlife now, and you’re vibrating at a higher frequency because of it. Intense emotion like what I just saw from you would send your vibrations higher still. The spirit’s vibration was probably temporarily lowered by the spell I cast. You were briefly able to meet at the same level. But it was only temporary. He had to return to his plane, to go back to vibrating at a higher frequency, and your extreme emotion leveled out, and so you’re once again on different frequencies.”
“In other words,” Michael said drily, “we’re just two metaphysical ships who happened to pass in the night.”
“That’s right.” Tam sounded pleased that he understood.
Welcome back to cold, hard reality. The words popped into Charlie’s head like a slap in the face.
“You okay?” Michael asked her. His eyes—thank God they were back to their normal sky blue!—searched hers. Suddenly the memory of the things they had said—if he gets destroyed it will break my heart; I didn’t want to leave you—hung in the air between them. She could see that he was remembering them, too, in the deepening intensity of his gaze, the tightening of his lips. The air between them surged with—something. Whate
ver it was, the depth of emotion she was experiencing scared her. You can’t love him, she told herself fiercely, and broke eye contact, looking away. A second later, he was speaking to Tam.
“So what you’re saying is that she’s permanently stuck on a higher vibration than she was before, because she nearly died,” Michael said. Internally, Charlie was still a quivering mess. That he was able to pick that one detail out of everything Tam had said, to hone in on that, when she was still raw and bleeding inside, surprised her. He sounded, and looked, so calm and together that she didn’t know whether to be impressed or affronted. But wishing things were different or railing against the cruelties of the universe was useless, as she had learned long since, so she pulled herself together instead and locked her emotions down and looked at Tam, who was shaking her head.
“Not permanently. I’m almost certain that any alteration would be temporary.”
“Would it be the kind of thing that would let her hear voices that nobody else—me included, and keeping in mind that I’m on the other side of the line—can hear?” Michael asked. Charlie looked at him with dawning respect: affronted now definitely took a backseat to impressed. She would not have thought of that. At least not right now, as shaken and off-kilter as she was.
“Is that what she’s doing?” Tam sounded interested. She was still leaning forward, but her forearms were resting on her thighs now and she looked altogether more alert.
Michael nodded. “Since she woke up in the hospital after she almost died.”
“And that would be how long ago?”
“About three weeks.”
Charlie frowned: the experience of having herself discussed as if she weren’t even present by two people (if Michael even qualified as a person) who meant about as much to her as anybody in the world was new. She wasn’t sure she liked it.
“I’ve been experiencing clairaudience,” she told Tam, claiming ownership of her own symptoms with a withering glance at Michael. “I hear voices inside my head now. I’m almost positive that they’re real voices and not hallucinations. From the dead, I think. Michael can’t hear them, or see whoever’s talking, so the voices don’t belong to spirits who are around me that I just can’t see. I have no idea who’s speaking or where the voices are coming from. It’s only intermittent, and it seems to happen pretty much at random.”
“And at damned inconvenient times,” Michael added, and Charlie was reminded of her bandaged hand.
Tam’s expression as she looked at Charlie was one of almost clinical appraisal. “If that’s only been happening since your near death experience, then I’d say it’s probably because you’re vibrating at a higher frequency now. It will go away in time. I am almost—”
She was interrupted by the ringing of Charlie’s cell phone. The sound was so unexpected, so cheery and normal in that heavy atmosphere, Charlie jumped a little with surprise. She knew immediately what it was, of course, and glanced toward her purse, which was on the coffee table where she had left it.
“—sure,” Tam concluded, and looked at the purse, which was right in front of her. “It’s important, cherie.”
Charlie didn’t even question how Tam could know that the incoming call was important: over the years, she had learned that the psychic part of Tam just did. Given the time on the East Coast, the caller almost had to be Tony, or possibly Buzz or Lena, wondering where she was. Charlie had no idea how long she’d been gone, but the bottom line was, too long. Now that Michael was restored to himself again and that particular crisis was past, she needed to concentrate on the job she had come to Las Vegas to do: helping to find Lena’s sister.
“Excuse me,” she murmured, and dug her phone out of her purse. A glance at the caller ID told her that it was indeed Tony. “I need to take this.”
“Where are you?” Tony asked without preamble when she answered. His voice sounded blessedly normal, an antidote to all the craziness she’d been experiencing. Michael’s sardonic expression told her that he recognized the caller’s voice as soon as she did. He could hear both sides of the conversation, she knew. She narrowed her eyes at him. He kept on listening unashamedly.
“I ran into a friend,” Charlie replied, which was perfectly true. “I’m still here, in the hotel.”
“We finally tracked Kaminsky down. She’s at the morgue, says she thinks she has a lead. Crane and I are heading there now. Are you coming?”
The instinctive shiver that ran down her spine was, she hoped, visible to no one else. She hated morgues. They were worse even than hospitals for someone with her particular sensitivities.
“Yes,” she said. The thing about it was, though, that if there was something in the morgue that might help Lena’s sister, Charlie was the best person to pick up on it: morgues tended to be full of the recently, violently dead. The good news about morgues was, there weren’t likely to be any serial killers in them. At least, not live ones.
“Meet us in the lobby in front of the reception desk in ten minutes,” Tony said, and when Charlie agreed he disconnected.
“You sure you’re up to this?” Michael asked quietly as Charlie picked up her purse and tucked the phone back into it. “It’s been a long day.”
“I should be asking you that. You’re the one who nearly got obliterated.”
“If I say I’m not up to it, will you forget about heading out to a damned morgue tonight?”
“No, but I’ll feel really bad about dragging you with me.”
“In that case, I bounce back fast.”
Charlie looked at Tam, who was watching them with an expression that was very nearly sour, and said, “I have to go. Are you heading home tomorrow?”
Tam nodded and held Michael’s watch out to her. Charlie took it, glanced at the time—she was shocked to see that only about half an hour had passed since she’d met Tam in the lobby; it had felt like multiple lifetimes—and slid it back into its accustomed place on her arm.
“I told you about the hunter,” Charlie said to Tam, barely repressing a shudder as she remembered. “How much danger are we in from it, do you think?”
“He”—Tam put an emphasis on the pronoun—“should be in no danger here. Executeurs almost never come through to the earth plane. The walls must be especially thin where you were. Concentrations of evil, which I have to imagine your prison contains, do occasionally serve as portals, though. He should probably stay away from them.”
“Good to know,” Michael said, with a significant look at Charlie. She barely repressed a sigh. She was more thankful than she could say to have Michael restored to himself again, but she didn’t look forward to ongoing arguments about continuing her work at the prison.
“Want to do lunch before I head back?” Tam asked.
Charlie thought about how intense the team’s investigations tended to be. They went flat out, with only the bare minimum of time carved out for sleep and food, because lives were inevitably on the line. With Lena’s sister involved, the stakes would be even higher. But she hadn’t seen Tam in forever, and she had no idea how long it would be before she saw her again. And her role in the investigation was less boots on the ground than the others’, especially now that she’d taken active serial killers in serious aversion and meant to deliberately pull back from the fieldwork as much as she could as a result. Doing her best for Lena and her sister meant using her special ability when it could make a difference, like, possibly, at the morgue tonight, and using every bit of her training and expertise to provide a forensic analysis of the psychological facets of the case.
In other words, she should be able to fit in one nonwork-related meal.
“How does breakfast sound instead? At, say, eight?” Charlie slung her purse over her shoulder. “That’s the only time tomorrow I’m almost sure I can get away.”
Tam made a face at the early-for-her time, then nodded with resignation. “Eight it is.”
“I’ll meet you at the buffet downstairs. And Tam—thanks for coming to our rescue tonight.” Charlie
’s last words were heartfelt.
“Yeah, thank you,” Michael echoed as, with a quick smile at her friend, Charlie headed toward the door. “I owe you one.”
Glancing over her shoulder, Charlie saw that Tam was on her feet, no doubt meaning to follow them to the door and lock it behind them. She watched Michael smile at Tam—full-on charm offensive from a guy guaranteed to knock just about any woman’s socks off when he just stood there and breathed—and Tam frown in response.
“You’re welcome.” Tam directed her words to Charlie. Michael got a long cool look in response to that smile. “Although I’m still not sure I did you a favor.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Once they were in the hall Michael said, “I don’t think the voodoo priestess likes me very much.”
“You’re a ghost.” They reached the elevators and Charlie hit the down button. “Tam thinks they have their place, which isn’t here in the earthly plane following me around.”
The elevator arrived and they got on. Of course, when she could really use some company to keep from having a one-on-one conversation she didn’t feel ready for, there was no one else in the car. Charlie punched L for lobby.
“Lucky for me you don’t agree.” Michael was studying her. Charlie could feel his gaze on her averted face, but she resolutely kept her eyes on the changing numbers over the door. She’d felt too much as she’d fought to save him, and what was worse was she’d let him see it. Now she was pulling back emotionally like a turtle retreating into its shell when danger threatens. It was an instinctive reaction, one no doubt honed by years of psychological issues she wasn’t ready to delve into, and it was also, she recognized even as it was happening, the only sane thing to do.
“What makes you think I don’t agree?” She still wasn’t looking at him. Her reflection in the brass doors reminded her of what he was, because there was no reflection of him standing beside her. It also showed her that her hair was a mess and her lipstick was gone. Those were the matters she chose to concentrate on. “Just because I didn’t want to see you get turned into a crispy critter and then go poof into oblivion doesn’t mean I like having you here following me around.”
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