Keep Me Close

by Elizabeth Cole

“Worst thing to happen was when—well, I’m not going to name names, but let’s just say we had some very famous vomit in our pool after one party. That was years ago, though. I discourage that sort of party nowadays.”

  “You two don’t always agree on those things, though. Right?”

  “So now you’re a marriage counselor?”

  “Hell no. I’m just trying to figure out what’s bothering my client. He’s convinced there’s something evil in the house, but there’s no story behind his concern.”

  “Then maybe he’s not telling you the whole story!” Emma burst out. Then she immediately backpedaled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Yes, you did,” said Dom.

  “I just meant…I don’t know.”

  Dom could see her putting up a shield. He was a stranger and despite the already personal conversation, she wasn’t going to confide in him any further. He didn’t push the issue. Emma left quickly, obviously eager to not be around any longer.

  Dom took a long breath. He was frustrated. Nothing in this house made sense. He wasn’t being told everything. And it was hard to solve problems when people refused to tell him what the real problems were.

  So he’d try it another way.

  “I’m going to take a stroll,” he told the cat.

  It’s dangerous, Pie responded. She knew he didn’t mean an actual walk, but rather a journey into the otherworlds, so he could see this place from another angle.

  “I’ve just cast the circle,” he said, “It’s strong right now, so if I keep my body inside, I should be fine.”

  He stepped back into the circle. This time Pie followed him.

  “All right,” he said. “Watch out in case I do something stupid.”

  That is my life’s mission, the cat noted.

  “Here goes.”

  Dom closed his eyes, preparing to open a pathway to the otherworlds. His grandmother had once explained the process—terrifyingly—as separating one’s soul from one’s body in order for the soul to travel where the body could not. The risk was getting lost, or being trapped while in the otherworlds. In that case, his body would basically remain comatose, a vegetable until it died. The risk was high enough that many capable people never even attempted it.

  The Salem family always viewed danger a bit differently—each of the Salem brothers had to prove they could travel to the otherworlds before they were allowed to learn about “serious” magic. Lex described it as a bar mitzvah where one of your presents might be death.

  But it did mean that Dom was now very comfortable doing this. He pictured the house again, keeping his breathing slow and even, just as in meditation. Idly, he wondered where Vinny was at that moment.

  Not her, Piewicket told him. The house. The land. Focus.

  “I’m trying.”

  Are you? All I see through your mind’s eye is her.

  “Sorry. She’s…um…” As a rule, Dom did not get hung up on women. But Vin was different. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Nothing. You’re just human. Piewicket ran her head into his shin, an affectionate gesture. He picked her up and gave her a good minute of scratching behind her ears. Her purr rumbled to life. A second later, the little cat had insinuated herself into the crook of his shoulder and neck, purring contentedly.

  “This isn’t helping me find the ghost in the house,” Dom pointed out.

  Your mind is bent solely on her. Until you clear your head of this obsession, all other searching will be useless.

  “I’m not obsessed with her. Just because I’m thinking about her…a lot…doesn’t mean I’m obsessed. I mean, it’s not my fault that we’re in the same place and we keep running into each other.”

  Then whose fault is it?

  “No one’s. It’s coincidence.”

  Pie’s purr stopped short, just as a sick feeling hit Dom’s gut, then his mind. Something, some supernasty thing, slid into his consciousness before Dom had time to put up any defenses.

  A dizzying sense of vertigo gripped him. If he had been standing, he would have fallen down.

  All around him he saw thin, glimmering threads crisscrossing each other, forming hatch marks and lines and random shapes. He could feel himself drawn into the maze of lines, aware that if he started falling, he’d never stop falling.

  A sharp physical pain jolted his attention away from the hypnotic patterns. Pie’s claws in his leg. She was helping him find himself.

  He inhaled, trying to get control of his mind again.

  The lines weren’t entirely random, he realized. Some seemed to lead to…right here. The house. The house at the center of a web.

  Because the lines were all part of a web. An image of Vinny surfaced again. Vinny in her dozens of necklaces, looking like the independent spirit she was.

  Except she wasn’t totally independent. She was being drawn along one of the lines to the center of the web. Because someone, something wanted to catch her.

  Chapter 16

  Vinny had retreated to the library to get her act together. She had to figure out how she was going to get through to Emma, and short of learning how to be a hacker to get Jonas’s digital info, she didn’t have any ideas.

  She saw a bunch of old zines on a shelf and started paging through them. They all dated back to the years in New York City, when Vinny first got into the scene as a teenager, and met Jonas and later Emma. Even then, Emma was a writer, and she contributed to a lot of the magazines. She wrote accounts of shows, profiles of her friends’ bands, and album reviews. The writing was raw, but Emma had a voice. Vinny could practically hear the younger Emma narrating the words as she read them. Vin smiled at all the photos, deliberately grainy to echo the look of original, photocopied zines. There was Jonas, in his pre-Mercury Thief days, just another kid with a microphone. Emma, during her brief stint as a very bad guitarist—she had been happy to move into freelance writing. She called it a grown-up move.

  At the time, Vinny had been a little hurt by the comment. After all, she was still playing, and would play in one band or another for the next decade. But now, Vin wondered if Emma hadn’t been referring to Jonas. There was no reason to think he’d make it big. He wasn’t more talented or more hardworking than anyone else in the scene. But then he left his old band, started Mercury Thief, and overnight, he’d made it.

  Leafing through a later, glossier magazine, Vinny stopped at a page with a photo of her and Jonas at a piano, a photo she didn’t remember seeing before. The caption read: Jonas Belling shows a fan how to play.

  “You fucking kidding me?” Vinny hissed. She was no fangirl, and she was approximately a thousand times better than Jonas when it came to playing piano. She checked the date on the magazine. Yep, Mercury Thief had just released their first album, to wild, voracious approval.

  Just my luck, she thought. All those years of practice. All the times she had to turn down the chance of friendship or a fun time so she could perform or prepare a new piece. And it turned into Jonas Belling shows a fan how to play.

  Vinny frowned when she caught a flicker of something out of the corner of her eye. It was like someone was sneaking up behind her, but when she turned, no one was there.

  “Turning paranoid,” she muttered. Too much hanging around Dom and thinking about the supernatural.

  Then she heard something, this time in the hallway. Intent on catching whatever it was, she moved stealthily to the doorway. The sound kept coming closer—she imagined the footsteps of some spectral form, and then had flashbacks to Scooby Doo.

  Focus.

  Vin held her breath as the…whatever it was…approached and paused at the door. As a dark shape passed through the doorway, she lunged forward and grabbed for it.

  “What the hell?” A startled Dom shook her off him.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry. I thought you were somebody else.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Yeah? Who?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Look. Never mind. And next time, m
aybe say you’re here.”

  “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

  “You didn’t. I heard you. Obviously.”

  “Do you have a second to take away from your busy pouncing schedule?” Dom asked.

  “Sure. What’s up? You look like you saw a ghost.” She realized what she said and added, “Did you?”

  “Not exactly. I think I ran into one, though. If it’s the one that’s been worrying Jonas, he’s right to be worried.”

  “So I take it it’s not a friendly ghost.”

  Dom shook his head. Vinny did not like the way he was acting. Even when he fought the vampire, he hadn’t seemed so off his game.

  “Are you okay?” she asked in concern.

  “Fine. Physically. Vin, can you tell me more about the nightmares that made you want to reunite with Emma?”

  “Other than that they scared the crap out of me? I don’t know. It was more the feeling than the specific images.”

  “The specific image being a spider and a web of criss-crossing lines, and below the web was a lot of nothing. A pit,” he said.

  Vinny frowned. “Hold on a minute. How do you know about a pit? I didn’t say that to you. Why are you asking me this?”

  “Because I don’t think those nightmares originated in your mind. Something sent them for you to notice.”

  “Something got in my head?” she hissed.

  “More or less. You were…”

  “Manipulated,” she spat, already getting angry.

  “Influenced, yes.”

  “By a ghost?”

  “There’s a long history of ghosts doing exactly that, either through direct possession of a living person, or other means. This would be the second category.”

  “How do I stop it?”

  “You don’t. I do,” Dom said quickly. “I will figure out what this thing is and how to get rid of it. That’s literally my job.”

  Vinny knew he meant it to reassure her, but all she could think of was how helpless that statement made her sound. She was just meant to stand around and let a ghost take her over until Dom saved the day? “I’m not going to wait for you to do your ghostbusting.”

  “If you want to help out, you can talk to Emma.”

  “About what?”

  “Her marriage.”

  “Do all your clients know that you’ll go poking around their private lives when they hire you?”

  “Every job is different. Usually it’s not this tricky to find out what the hell I’m supposed to be doing here. Emma definitely wasn’t telling me everything when I asked about painful events in this house. She’ll talk to you, though.”

  “And I’m just supposed to spill her secrets to you afterward?”

  “If they seem like a reason for a house to be haunted, yes. I mean, you do want to help out, right?”

  “Sure. Emma’s my friend. But why are you helping out?”

  “I’m being paid to,” Dom said.

  “Always with the money,” she sniffed.

  “Money’s useful.”

  “I don’t have a lot of use for it.”

  “You didn’t stop me from using money on your behalf,” he noted. “You seemed really okay with it, after a little light protesting.”

  Vinny about lost her mind when she heard that. “Don’t you ever tell me how I feel about money.”

  He grabbed her by the wrists and pinned her against the wall to stop her from sliding away. “Did I hit a nerve, gorgeous?”

  “Stop acting like a caveman and let me go,” she hissed. “Or I’ll hit a fucking nerve you won’t forget.”

  Having Dom so close to her was throwing Vinny’s emotions all out of whack. She was furious at him, but the last time he had her pinned against the wall, it had been in that motel room, and she remembered every second of that encounter. And she hadn’t been angry then. She’d been turned on and practically feral, the way she’d been pawing at him.

  Now he was just as close, just as aggressive. But it didn’t feel the same. It felt wrong. Vinny took a deep breath and glowered at him. “You think this is going to make me all melty for you?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Dom, not looking the slightest bit interested in sexytimes. “I’m working. I didn’t chase you here. You’re the one who pounced on me.”

  He let her go and stalked back to the door. He muttered, “Let me know when you’re normal again and we can talk. Meantime, how about you stay out of my way?”

  Vinny glared at him. “Happy to. I’ll stay so out of your way you won’t see me again.”

  “Talk to Emma,” he reminded her.

  “Fuck you.” Vinny should have had a better comeback, for a lot of reasons, but the rage running through her took all her words away.

  She was not going to chat with Emma about some stupid ghost. She was going to do what she‘d set out to do: find out just how badly Jonas had been behaving, so that Emma didn’t have to be stuck in a shitty relationship ever again.

  Feeling thoroughly out of sorts, and angry at men in particular, Vinny decided it was time to play detective.

  Since rifling through the physical papers in Jonas’s messy office offered no leads, she moved on. She wanted his phone. The trick, of course, would be how to get it. People liked their phones, and tended to notice when they vanished. Vinny would have to be sneaky.

  She found Jonas in the studio, fiddling around on the production end, testing out different versions of tracks together.

  His phone sat on the table off to the side.

  She smiled as she came in, positioning herself near the phone. “How’s it going?”

  “Hmm. Pretty good,” Jonas said in a distracted tone. This part of the process always absorbed his attention, and honestly, was probably his greatest strength. “There’s some ambient noise mucking up the bass. Got to get that gone.”

  “Is that a notification?” she asked, pointing to the phone.

  Jonas woke the phone up with his pass code, squinted at the screen and said, “Nothing important.” He put the phone back down. “I think I know how to fix this track.”

  “Ok, I’ll let you work. See you later.”

  “Cool, cool.” He barely glanced away from the monitor. So he didn’t notice when she palmed his phone, touching the screen so it wouldn’t go to sleep.

  Tucking herself in the bathroom on the upper floor and locking the door, she started to go through his info.

  Emails first. There were hundreds—Jonas wasn’t an Inbox Zero guy. She scrolled through a bunch of them, pausing whenever she saw a woman’s name. Lots of business related stuff. Marketing. Sales. PR. Nothing incriminating, and not worth plowing through when she had no clues to help her out.

  She scrolled through his contacts. There were definitely a lot of women’s names in there, and some of them looked a bit sketchy. Who was Tansy—LA, Shaker Bar? She could picture a cute cocktail server who just loved Mercury Thief, and she could easily imagine a flirty conversation turning into a hookup. But with only a number, she had no proof. It was just as likely that Jonas put Tansy’s contact info into his phone with a promise to send her some autographed swag. He was a celebrity, after all.

  Vinny went to photos next, and here there were plenty of images that would raise eyebrows. Jonas had tons of selfies with absolutely random hot women, and lots of pictures of just a woman, with no hint as to where it was or why Jonas had it. Some were risqué, others were straight up pornographic, like the one where a brunette dressed in a thong and nothing else perched on a hotel bed in a pose that made Vinny’s back hurt just looking at it. The photo would have a different effect on most male viewers. But again, she couldn’t prove anything with it. The chick could have sent it to Jonas, and he just didn’t delete it. Vinny had gotten really inappropriate things sent to her while she was in bands, and she never got even a little famous.

  Emma would laugh it off. Jonas would have a story. Nothing would happen.

  She sighed, wondering what to do.

&nbs
p; A calendar notification popped up: V Day, it said, with her birthday marked. The calendar showed a big red dot on the day. Vinny smiled, and then felt sort of bad for snooping. Jonas was troubled, but he had a good side. Was she just making a mess with her quest to get Emma divorce dirt? Maybe what she should be doing was getting them both to talk to each other and work things out.

  Not that she’d ever been good at that sort of thing.

  Her mood soured as she remembered all the times she’d utterly failed to get both halves of a couple to talk to each other like adults, most memorably her parents. She was an idiot for thinking this would be different. Then she remembered Dom’s suggestion that she’d been manipulated into coming here. That something snuck inside her head and played with her brain. She shivered, feeling violated just imagining the possibility.

  Emma’s voice echoed up the stairwell and through the door. “Where did you see it last?”

  “I had it like an hour ago!” Jonas yelled back, fainter.

  “I’ll call your phone,” Emma said. Vinny didn’t have to see her to know she was rolling her eyes.

  Vinny dashed down the hall and opened the door to the ridiculously huge master bedroom. She dropped his phone onto a plush sheepskin rug by his bed. Maybe he’d forget that he had it in the studio earlier. Anyway, plausible deniability meant she had to get out of the room before anyone saw her.

  She almost made it.

  Vinny left the door partially closed and was about to walk off innocently, just as Jonas’s phone went off. His ringtone was the chorus of Mercury Thief’s first hit.

  Then she saw Piewicket staring at her from down the hall. The cat looked like she knew exactly what Vinny was up to.

  “It’s for a righteous cause,” Vinny pleaded. “Don’t give me away.”

  Pie didn’t move.

  “I’ll get you some fish. Fish for silence. Deal?”

  She mewed once and sashayed off, which Vinny took as a yes. She followed the cat and was out of the way before anyone knew she was there.

  But just when she felt safe again, she saw another flicker in the corner of her eye. She turned her head, but saw nothing out of place. Yet she was positive something was there, watching her.