I just had mind-blowing sex with the hot ghost of one of my serial killer research subjects, was the thought that popped into her head, and the really crazy thing about it was that she didn’t regret a thing.
Then reality intruded and she surfaced like an underwater diver coming up for air.
She took a deep breath. Her eyes opened. She got an excellent view of a broad bare shoulder, a strong back, and the curve of a tight, athletic ass. He was collapsed on top of her, hot as a pizza oven, heavy as a steel beam, his face buried in the curve of her shoulder, his arms locked around her like he never meant to let her go. The firm muscularity of his big body, the smooth heat of his skin, the brush of his long legs against hers, were all wonderfully, intoxicatingly real. Greedily, she wanted to savor every second.
Because she knew it couldn’t last. Fear speared through her at the thought. But for the moment, he was still in her world, as solid and tangible as she was, and she pressed her hands against the flat, smooth planes of his shoulder blades in an instinctive bid to keep him there.
“Michael.”
“Mm?”
“Let me up. I need to call Tam.”
That brought his head up. His eyes were heavy-lidded and slumberous, and they gleamed at her through the darkness. His mouth had a sensual look to it that was only slightly marred when he frowned at her.
“You call that pillow talk?” he chided. “How about something like, That was incredible. Let’s do it again.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me too.”
He nuzzled the side of her neck while his hand found and fondled her breast. Oh, God, she loved the way—
She thrust the thought aside.
“Would you let me up? I need to call Tam because I want to bring her in on this before whatever is going to happen to you happens. Maybe she can—”
He silenced her by kissing her, a lush sampling of her mouth that would have totally distracted her if she hadn’t been terrified of what was coming. As it was, she kissed him back because she just couldn’t help it, but briefly. Then she pulled her mouth away.
“Michael.” He was too damned big to just push off of her. “Let me up.”
“You can be a real buzzkill, you know that?” He shook his head at her. His hand still covered her breast, and she could feel the weight and heat of it clear to her toes. Her nipple was pebbled against his palm. “Forget calling the voodoo priestess. I’d rather spend whatever time I have like—”
Charlie’s cell phone started to ring. In that quiet, dark, sex-laden room the sound was startling. They both jumped, and looked toward the source.
As if the shrilling phone had ripped open the cocoon that had protected them, the atmosphere changed just like that. Charlie felt something that she could only describe as a kind of disturbance in the Force. Like an increase of static electricity in the room, or—
Oh, God.
Her eyes snapped fearfully back to Michael. He felt it, too: she could see it in his face. She locked her arms around him, terrified.
That was all there was time for.
He was swept out of bed and sent hurtling away into darkness so impenetrable that it was impossible to see anything at all.
Charlie knew because she was swept away with him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Michael’s muttered curses were the next thing Charlie was aware of. His voice sounded furious and desperate and scared, all at the same time. The thought of what it would take to scare Michael brought her eyes fluttering open.
It didn’t help. The world was still dark.
Otherworldly dark. That realization hit her along with the smell.
Of rotting things. Of damp.
And it was cold. So very, very cold.
Spookville. It had to be. She shivered. The knowledge frightened her to the marrow of her bones.
“Michael?” Instinct made her whisper. He was carrying her. She could feel his hard arms around her, one behind her shoulders and the other beneath her knees. She could feel the solid warmth of his chest against her body.
“Thank God.” His voice was scarcely louder than hers. His hold on her shifted as he hitched her a little higher against his chest. Her arms instinctively wrapped around his neck. Before, she’d been lying limply in his arms. She was decent, if just barely. Her nightgown covered her to the tops of her thighs. She could hear the faint brush of denim on denim and guessed he’d managed to get his jeans back on. “You okay?”
“Yes.” She was, she realized. Whatever had occurred to render her insensible, she was over it now. “What happened?”
“My luck ran out and somehow or another you got taken along with me.” His reply was terse. “My guess is, it was because of that vibration thing with you, and because we were so, ah, entwined.”
Charlie had a vivid memory of exactly what he meant. They’d been lying all but naked in each other’s arms. His hand had been on her breast. He’d still been partially inside her.
“What are we going to do?” Curling tendrils of fear wrapped around her heart.
His reply was grim. “We’ll figure something out.”
She got the sinking feeling that he’d said that just to reassure her.
Sexy as she found his demonstration of manly strength, there was no point in him continuing to carry her. “You can put me down.”
“Not now. And quit wiggling.” The tension in his voice was unmistakable. His arms around her, his chest against which she rested, were taut with it.
Her eyes must have adjusted to the darkness, because she was starting to be able to see a little. What she saw was like nothing she had ever seen in Spookville before: black on black on black, different shades of the color in a curving sky that arched maybe fifty feet over their heads, and walls that rose to meet them maybe thirty feet away on either side. The walls seemed to keep on plunging down, far below the level of the ground over which Michael was moving fast but—delicately. As her eyes adjusted more, she looked down and saw why.
He was carrying her across a terrifyingly narrow stone footbridge that spanned a vast chasm. The walls and ceiling were the rough stone of the inside of a cave. Below them was—nothing. A seemingly bottomless drop.
Her heart seemed to stop. Her arms tightened around his neck. Her knees curled up closer against him. After that instinctive response, she went absolutely motionless. Quit wiggling, indeed.
“Oh, my God,” she breathed.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged her reaction a split second before a growl froze her blood. It was low and guttural, loud enough so that she knew it came from the throat of something huge, and behind them. Accompanying it was the scrabbling sound of claws racing over stone.
The hair stood up on the back of her neck.
“Fuck.” Michael moved faster, almost running now, balancing carefully on that perilously slender bridge in what felt like an aerialist’s race against death. Another growl, more scrabbling sounds, the thud of enormous feet coming after them: it didn’t require genius to deduce that they were being chased.
“Is that a hunter?” There was no doing anything about the squeak in her voice.
“Yep.” His answer was grim. “We came through at the bottom of a ravine about thirty feet in front of it. I managed to get us away, then ducked into this cavern, but it must have picked up our scent.”
The growl came again, louder, closer. Charlie cringed.
There was nothing she could even say.
Her heart pounded. Her mouth went sour with fear. Michael took a last flying jump, and then they were off the bridge and on solid ground. He skidded to a stop on the uneven surface and put her down. A glance around showed Charlie that beyond the giant cavern in which they found themselves, a concentrated area of more intense darkness seemed to indicate a passageway that continued on indefinitely.
“Run,” Michael told her urgently the minute her bare feet hit the cold stone.
An earth-shattering roar from the other side of the chasm made Charlie
whip around to face it instead.
A huge, terrifying shape blacker than the blackness all around launched itself across the chasm toward them. A hunter: there was no mistaking the enormous bulk, or the glowing yellow eyes. Forget the footbridge: the thing had leaped.
Charlie’s blood froze. It was too close: there was no chance that they were getting away.
“I said run!” Michael roared at her, shoving her behind him. “It wants me, not you!”
He’d turned to face it, balancing on the balls of his feet in a half-crouched fighter’s stance. A baseball-sized rock he’d scooped off the ground was ready in his hand. He was bare to the waist, in stocking feet, big and bad and dangerous in the world they came from but practically helpless in the face of this.
Charlie’s heart lodged in her throat. Her pulse raced as panic surged in an icy tide through her veins. The hunter roared again, the cry echoing off the stone. It was almost upon them: without iron, or salt, or anything at all to work with, there was nothing she could do.
“Charlie, run!” Michael screamed. The hunter was arcing down toward them, coming in for the kill, its huge bulk blocking out almost everything behind it as if the night itself was falling in on them. Its roar had shrilled and amplified into a hawk’s fearsome death screech times about a thousand.
Michael’s feet planted as he braced for the impact.
Charlie ran.
Toward him.
“Damn it, get back!” he cried as she wrapped her arms around his waist from behind, ducked her head against him, closed her eyes, and did what he’d told her to do when they’d found themselves in Spookville together once before.
Think of somewhere safe.
She did, with all the fervency of desperate prayer. The air around them seemed to vibrate as the hunter’s scream filled her ears. The rush of its big body in passing felt like a million electrified hairs brushing against her skin. Terror stopped her heart even as the ground beneath her feet dropped away. She kept her arms locked around Michael and her head tucked into his back as they were whirled into blackness. An enormous suction almost pulled them apart but she clung to him as if her life depended on it, which in a way she supposed it did. He grabbed her before she could lose her grip, clamping her close as they fell forward through what seemed like an eternity of nothingness. Then the air was suddenly still, and her feet hit solid ground. Michael was there, firm and warm against her. She clung to him as if to the only solid thing in existence as her eyes cautiously opened on darkness. It was a different type of darkness than the Stygian one they’d left: this was illuminated by the faintest of neon glows.
Her hotel room.
Charlie barely had time to recognize it, to go all weak-kneed with relief, before two things struck her simultaneously: she’d obviously astral-projected again, only this time without falling asleep first, because she was looking at her body lying almost naked on the bed. The other thing was, someone was pounding on the hotel room door.
“Babe—” Michael began, but she never heard the rest of it, because just then the room seemed to collapse around her. She felt a whirling sensation, a blast of cold air, and he was gone from her arms as everything went black.
She had the sensation of catapulting through space, then tumbling to a landing on something soft.
Her eyes snapped open on impact, and she discovered that she was lying on her hotel room bed. She realized instantly that she was once again back in her body, that she was to all intents and purposes naked, and that Michael, clad only in his jeans, his big body outlined against the closed curtains, was standing beside the bed.
And someone was still banging on her door.
She sat up, yanked her nightgown back into place, turned on the bedside lamp—the sudden explosion of light made her blink—and got out of bed.
“You okay?” Michael asked. His voice had a gravelly quality to it. His eyes—they were solid black, with the soulless glitter that she’d seen in them before. He looked even more badass than usual, and barely controlled aggression radiated from him in waves. Encounters with Spookville and its denizens had that effect on him, she remembered. Hadn’t Tam said something about it turning him evil? Or bringing out the evil that was already in him?
Whatever. She didn’t care. He’d once said, “You’re mine, Doc” to her. Now her too-stupid-to-live heart was saying it right back: he was hers.
The other half of her very own illicit love affair.
It was a scary thought. One she didn’t have time for.
“I’m fine,” she said brusquely. “On the other hand, your eyes are black and you look like you eat little children for breakfast.”
He gave her a hard look. “Next time I tell you to run, run.”
“See, the thing is, I like to use my own judgment on these things.”
Bang, bang, bang went the door.
“Charlie.” The voice on the other side of it belonged to Lena. A glance at her bedside clock told Charlie that it was almost four a.m. Alarm widened her eyes. The time coupled with Lena’s use of her first name—this could mean nothing good.
“Hey,” Michael said as she hurried toward the door, and she glanced at him over her shoulder. “Thanks for saving my ass back there. I guess that makes you”—he batted his eyes at her like a bashful girl—“my hero.”
She shot him an aren’t-you-funny look, and pulled open the door.
Lena was wearing blue men’s pajamas and no makeup. She was barefoot, and her fist was raised to bang on the door again. She looked up as Charlie opened the door and snapped, “My God, do you sleep like the dead or what?”
In the hall beyond Lena, Tony, clearly having had his door banged on, too, was leaning out of his room. Charlie couldn’t see his lower half, but his black hair was ruffled and his leanly muscled chest was bare. A wedge of black hair tapered down toward his belly button, Charlie saw. Buzz, wrapped in a hotel-issue robe, had just emerged from his room and was walking down the hall toward them.
“What?” Charlie said to Lena.
“You’ve got to come and look at this, all of you.” Lena’s voice shook with excitement. “I’ve found something.”
In her hotel room, Lena’s laptop sat open on the small table in front of the window. The curtains were closed, the lamps by the bed were on, and they were all gathered around the laptop as Lena ran a thumb over the touchpad to bring the screen to life. Like Buzz, Charlie had pulled on a hotel-issued robe over her nightgown. Tony was clad in the previous day’s shirt and pants, half-unbuttoned, untucked, and rumpled. Michael had added his usual tee and boots to his jeans.
“I was on the Dynasty Films site, fooling around with a list of like a thousand computer-generated most likely passwords, trying to get into the members-only section, and I typed member into the log-in just because it took six characters. I couldn’t believe it: it worked. I got in.” Lena looked back over her shoulder at them as the Dynasty Films logo appeared on the screen and warned, “I took it to the end, but still, this is pretty graphic.”
Then she tapped the play arrow in the middle of the screen and stepped back.
A naked woman hung by her wrists in front of a scarlet backdrop. Her toes just touched the floor. There were ugly red welts on her thighs that looked like they’d been made by a belt or whip. Blood trickled in thin red lines from maybe half a dozen small cuts around her breasts. The woman was young, shapely, pretty—and hysterical. Her shattering sobs made Charlie’s throat tighten. Doing her best to divorce herself from the emotion of it, Charlie worked to take in details: the scarlet seemed to be silk or satin cloth, some kind of draping. The floor was gray and looked like poured concrete. Silver handcuffs glinted around the woman’s wrists; the chain was passed through a black metal grid set into the ceiling.
A black metal grid. A full-breasted brunette.
With a thrill of horror, Charlie realized what she had to be looking at a second before the woman began to speak.
“I don’t want to die.” The woman’s soft, Spa
nish-accented voice was terrified and pleading.
“You have failed to give satisfaction.” The man was off camera. His voice was harsh, full of menace. Unaccented. Relatively young?
“Oh, please. I’ll do anything! Anything you want.” There was a pause, not even long enough for Charlie to sneak in a breath, as the woman struggled wildly within the limitations of her restraints. Her wide eyes focused fearfully on the off-camera man. Then she begged, “Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”
A large hand in a black gauntlet streaked into view. Charlie barely registered that it was wielding a wicked-looking knife before the blade plunged into the woman’s stomach and slashed through the vulnerable flesh, slicing her open so that blood spilled like a waterfall.
The woman barely had time to shriek before the knife flashed again, higher this time. It cut her throat in a single swipe. Her eyes went huge, more blood gushed, and then came that hideous sound that had carved its own special niche in Charlie’s memory: the death gurgle.
Amidst the gush of blood, the woman’s head flopped hideously forward in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if she had been alive.
They had just watched a woman die.
Cold sweat broke over Charlie in a wave. The voice was the same one that she’d heard the last time she’d been in the morgue. The one that was attached to Destiny Sherman.
Her knees suddenly felt rubbery, and she took the few steps needed to reach the nearest chair and sank down in it.
“Babe?” Michael crouched beside her, frowning at her with concern. She met his eyes, mouthed, “Hers was the voice in the morgue,” then as his eyes flared with comprehension and he said, “Oh, shit,” she took a deep breath, and got a grip. This time the voice wasn’t in her head, so it didn’t make her sick. What made her sick was the knowledge that she’d just watched a woman die live, on camera.
Her Last Whisper Page 30