Dark & Dangerous: A Collection of Paranormal Treats

by Julie Kenner

  “So how was the class reunion, Marcy?” asked Sharona brightly, to cut the awkward moment. “Were you depressed, or did you feel validated?”

  “Did you see a lot of your old friends, dear?” asked Mrs. Bridges.

  Interesting, how Marcy avoided the question about the friends. “It was kind of depressing,” she admitted. “Especially the people who weren’t there. Do you realize, seven people from my graduating class have died? Traffic accidents, cancer—and fires! What are the chances that three separate women in the same class would…?”

  Tomas had put the pieces together before Marcy’s words petered off. Was it possible Marcy was number four on someone’s list? “Madre de Dios,” he said.

  The rest of the Bridges family looked from him to Marcy, blissfully oblivious to their connecting of dangerous dots.

  “Fires, you say?” prompted Marcy’s father after a moment of awkwardness. “That’s a bad way to go.”

  Marcy took a strangled breath, and Tomas found her hand under the tablecloth and squeezed it. Nobody was going to hurt her. Nobody.

  “Liz Carpenter,” she said, squaring her shoulders as she returned the squeeze on Tomas’s hand. “And Judith Barstow. And Cassie Adams. Do you remember any of them, Sharona?”

  Sharona made a face. “Not really, thank God. Wasn’t Cassie a cheerleader?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Marcy. “I wish I did—”

  “Happy birthday to you,” sang a group of voices from across the restaurant, then, and their waitress approached with a cluster of other staff, carrying a birthday cake, serenading Marcy.

  “Oh, Dad,” protested Sharona, when Marcy only stared in dismay. “You didn’t!”

  “It’s her birthday,” insisted Mrs. Bridges.

  “So you put her through hell?” her sister demanded.

  Tomas leaned closer to Marcy. “And here I thought we left Hell back in the elevator.”

  Marcy’s smile came out crooked…but at least she made the attempt.

  Someday, he thought, she would have to start standing up for herself. But the better he got to know Marcy, the more he could see it wouldn’t be over a birthday cake with her parents.

  She was too afraid of hurting other people.

  He just hoped that didn’t apply to people who deserved hurting.

  Marcy didn’t want to say goodbye to her family. She hadn’t felt this kind of separation anxiety since summer camp. But now she had a far better reason to cling to normalcy.

  As her parents and Sharona drove away in their wonderfully normal minivan, they unknowingly left Marcy to a world of demons, curses, possible fiery deaths…and definitely fiery maintenance men.

  Managers, she corrected herself, still having trouble readjusting to that particular bit of reality.

  “Let me guess,” said Tomas beside her as the van rounded a corner and vanished. “Your yearbooks are in the closet, right?”

  “They’re in the living-room bookshelf,” she corrected him. “But going anywhere near that apartment is too dangerous now. We should…just…”

  There was no reason to finish her suggestion, since Tomas had paused by his own door and opened it, but was now stalking toward the stairs. “You stay down here. Don’t open any doors on your own.”

  “Wait!” she called.

  “No,” he called back, vanishing up the first flight.

  She stared after him, annoyed and impressed and envious. What would it feel like to have an impulse and just follow it, right then, and damn the consequences? No comparison of pros and cons. No deep worries about worst-case scenarios. Just pure, fearless action.

  What could it possibly feel like?

  “I hope,” she murmured to herself, “that it doesn’t feel like eternal damnation.”

  Then, hesitating a moment longer, she turned and went into his apartment, wondering only briefly how he’d deduced that the demon seemed only able to get at them from doorways.

  She would try to hunt down her magical stalker first. Then she would worry about Tomas Martinez’s fount of occult knowledge.

  By the time he brought in the yearbooks, blessedly whole if a tad sooty, Marcy was on his computer, perusing the Web site one of her classmates had created for the reunion. They’d already posted quite a few digital pictures.

  “I got them,” announced Tomas, dropping the books on his coffee table.

  Marcy said, “Good for you,” without looking up. She was busy scrolling past pictures, after all. She didn’t want to miss a clue.

  “No, really.” Sarcasm gave Tomas a thick accent. “It was my pleasure.”

  She clicked ahead to yet another picture, using the computer’s mouse. “I get that.”

  Then he was standing right beside her, his hip near her shoulder, and she couldn’t have ignored him if she wanted to. She wasn’t sure why she would want to. But she felt a tightness in her neck, in her shoulders; a strain in her forehead. It made her short-tempered.

  “What does that mean?” asked Tomas as she looked reluctantly up at him. He seemed dark and glowering all over again, as well as sooty. She could only imagine what had happened in the apartment. “You get what?”

  Actually, she wasn’t sure she could imagine. Had he been fighting with the demon, or conferring in other ways?

  That’s stupid, she thought, and looked back at the computer screen. “I get that it was your pleasure,” she said. “Why else would you go barging into an apartment that’s already proved dangerous? You like taking chances.”

  Tomas said, “Ha.” Then he strode back to the coffee table and sank into an easy crouch beside it.

  Marcy turned in the computer chair. “Ha?”

  He sorted the yearbooks in quick, strong movements. “What you consider taking chances is what other people consider normalcy.”

  Oh. She should have realized he wouldn’t let that topic drop so quickly. “You think sleeping around is the only measure of normalcy?”

  He made a tsk-tsk noise, and drew an invisible circle around him with his index finger, a reminder of his definition of sleeping around. “I have only slept here,” he said, pointing in one direction. “And here.” He pointed in another, then considered it. “Maybe here, depending on your definition. But it is not a round. A triangle, maybe. Maybe a quadrangle.”

  “That doesn’t make either of us more normal than the other,” she insisted. “I’m not about to be blackmailed into having sex. We’ve got to find out who it was who cursed me. That’s the only way.”

  The catlike ease with which Tomas rose from his crouch made her throat hurt. “I was teasing before, Marcy. But what if we don’t find out in time? Death before dishonor?”

  To be honest, the word dishonor didn’t sound anywhere near as bad as it should. Not when she’d gotten such a great demonstration of the power in this man’s thighs. “Talk to me again at eleven-thirty,” she said, forcing herself to turn back to the computer.

  Tomas grinned and, just like that, the tightness in Marcy eased. “It’s a date.”

  “If we don’t find the bastard who cursed me,” she reminded him.

  “What, you have other plans?”

  She grinned at the computer screen, scrolling past pictures. Was Tomas Martinez flirting with her? He might be right. She wasn’t exactly an expert on taking chances. It had been so much easier to stay home with Snowball, where she was comfortable and could judge her companion’s contentment by the purring, that she’d gotten out of the habit of socializing with humans.

  On that topic…

  “Snowball,” she said, pushing her chair back on its castors.

  Tomas raised his eyebrows.

  “I forgot to leave a faucet dripping for her,” Marcy explained, heading for the bathroom. “She likes to have fresh water. Here, kitty kitty kitty.”

  She turned on the faucet in the bathroom sink, then turned it down to a bare trickle. It wasn’t the best way to save water, but it kept her cat’s kidneys in good working order. “Here, puss puss.”
>
  But Snowball didn’t come running.

  Frowning, Marcy stepped to the doorway into the hall. Something was wrong. “Kitty?”

  “Maybe she’s hiding under the bed.” Tomas turned another page in the yearbook he was skimming and grinned at something he saw there. Probably a picture of her with braces.

  “She doesn’t—” But who knew, maybe Snowball had adopted new habits since demons took up residence in her closet. She went into the bedroom and kneeled on the carpet. “Snowball?”

  No cat. She burned her knees on the carpet, spinning to then look under the bureau, under the dresser. “Snowball!”

  “You can’t find her?” Tomas stood in the doorway. Maybe he’d heard something in her voice. Her relief not to be alone mingled with her fear that something in his apartment had hurt her cat. Had he left some unscreened window open? Put out poison for bugs or mice? Was there some dangerous cranny or nook where a curious cat could trap herself, or hurt herself…or worse?

  “She’s got to be here,” Marcy insisted, voice uneven. “She’s got to.”

  Tomas gave her a hand up, steadying her, comforting her. “Where did you see her last?”

  “She was on top of the refrigerator.”

  He guided her into the kitchen—but no Snowball watched them from the top of either cabinets or appliance. Marcy hoisted herself onto a counter to look behind the unit, but Snowball wasn’t there, either.

  “Nobody would have been here since we left, would they?” she asked, and swallowed hard. “Nobody who might have gotten something out of the dryer, or the oven, or—”

  She stared at the refrigerator door—and this time she refused to dwell in inaction. She yanked it open.

  And whimpered.

  Part 4

  Tomas responded instantly, wrapping his arms around Marcy and spinning her away from the gout of flame that spat out of his Frigidaire.

  He couldn’t protect her so easily from the feline wail that warbled out, along with a malicious chuckling, from the depths behind the flames.

  “No!” screamed Marcy, struggling in his arms. “Snowball!”

  “Leave her.” He pressed his cheek against hers both to make himself heard over the demonic noise and to somehow steady her. “Leave her, Marcy!”

  “I can’t!”

  “You’ve got to!”

  Another cat cry wailed into the kitchen—and he kicked the door shut. With a soft sigh, the refrigerator sealed.

  Marcy twisted free of his embrace, not the least bit timid now. “No! Not my cat!”

  She reached for the refrigerator. He grabbed to stop her—and she bodychecked him out of the way. If he’d expected it, maybe it wouldn’t have worked; the woman was no linebacker. But since she took him by surprise, she had a chance to pull open the door almost ten inches before he shut it again.

  Both of them glimpsed the milk, condiments and bag of bread in the appliance’s lit interior before the door resealed.

  This time when Marcy opened the thing, Tomas let her. Again, it was just the interior of a refrigerator.

  “No,” she repeated, pushing food aside without any care of whether it spilled or not. “No. It can’t have Snowball.”

  “Marcy—”

  She fixed him with a glare that actually made him step quickly back. “Why didn’t you let me get her?”

  “Because that’s what the thing wanted! You’re what it wanted. If you’d gone in after your damn cat, it could have closed up behind you permanently.”

  “I don’t care!” And she started to push around some to-go boxes.

  He grabbed her by both arms and drew her back, again kicking the door shut. “Of course you care!”

  “But she’s my…” To his horror, her eyes swam with tears. He didn’t necessarily get that she could feel this much love for a cat. But there was no doubt that she did; that the quiet Marcy Bridges was capable of almost unimaginable love and loyalty.

  He drew her to his chest—and felt lucky to have that chance. “Of course she is. And as long as the portal stays open, maybe we can get both her and the priest back. But Marcy, listen to me. If you’re right, and the one thing it wants is you…”

  She searched his gaze, as if starving for his logic. “Then when it has me, the game’s over?”

  He nodded, and she tucked her head under his chin, and he rested his cheek on her hair. It felt good. It felt right. It felt like something he’d rather die than lose the chance of. “Except that it’s more than a game, querida.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Her words caught him by surprise and, despite the surprisingly intense pleasure of simply holding her, he drew slightly back. “What?”

  She dropped her gaze, momentarily looking like the old Marcy Bridges. Then, perhaps because the stakes were so high, she raised her eyes and faced him dead on again. “I’ve been reading about Wicca and magic for months, Tomas, and this seems completely foreign to me. But you speak its language. You seem to understand how it thinks, how it works. You’re the one who says that if we find the person who cursed me, we can stop this. But how is it you know so much in the first place?”

  He found himself surprisingly reluctant to confess. As if her opinion of him mattered more than he’d ever guessed it could.

  Maybe it did. But her opinion of all of him, the real him, meant more. So he told her. “It runs in my family.”

  She swallowed hard, and her next question came out as a croak. “Demons?”

  “No! Magic. My abuela—my grandmother—was a bruja. That’s like a witch,” he explained, studying her, hunting for any clue that this was too much for her. “She believed very strongly in protecting against demons and devils. I was never sure if any of it was real or not, but I was still around it, and I guess…”

  He shrugged.

  She waited.

  He said, “I guess some of it rubbed off.”

  Marcy nodded.

  He waited there in front of her, in the kitchen. There were few people outside of his own culture that he’d told about his bruja abuela—and all she did was nod?

  Then she stepped closer to him, rose up on her toes—and kissed him. Soft. Light. But not at all timid.

  The sensation swam through him like lemonade on a fiery day. He recognized it, despite never having felt quite this kind of easy understanding before. Madre de Dios.

  He was falling in love with Marcy Bridges!

  “Thank you for being here,” she whispered, her heels sinking back to the linoleum.

  He could have simply said she was welcome. He could have made another joke about inoculating her against sacrifice by taking care of that little virginity problem. But her virginity wasn’t a problem and, to be honest, he understood exactly why she wasn’t going to be blackmailed into doing anything against her will.

  He respected the hell out of her for it.

  So he said, “Let’s go look at all those pictures again.”

  Maybe a half hour later, they found their man.

  It happened when, after having little luck examining yearbooks and class-reunion pictures, Marcy thought to find more information about her classmates who’d died. While Tomas looked up every possible picture of them in the old books, she did more Internet searches, confirming that all three women had been killed in suspicious fires.

  “How suspicious,” asked Tomas from the sofa, “is suspicious?”

  “Their bodies seem to have burned more than anything else around them. I found a Web site that’s using one of the deaths as proof of spontaneous human combustion.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “That’s suspi—Hold it.”

  She turned to look at him. He looked good, leaning over the coffee table, his elbow braced across his knees. She felt guilty for admiring the long, supple line of his body when a priest and Snowball were both gone, possibly—

  But no. She couldn’t allow herself to accept the possibility that they might be as dead as Liz Carpenter, Judith Barstow and Cassie Adams, much less that
tonight she…

  No.

  She would not become the bride of the fiery thing that had stalked her since this morning, especially not if that meant the person who’d done this to her in the first place would get some kind of demonic referral points. She would sleep with Tomas before she let that happen….

  She realized that the idea of sleeping with Tomas Martinez wasn’t at all unpleasant. She would prefer to take her time, of course, to get to know him better, to have a better reason than some kind of demonic deadline.

  A reason like love?

  She looked quickly away from the lean, swarthy man thumbing through her old yearbooks. True, he’d come to her rescue more than once. And he seemed to get along with her family. And his kiss gave her hope that sappy movies and romance novels got some things right after all. But there was a good chance he felt little attraction to her, kisses aside—circumstances had all but dared him into those. He might just be doing this as a thorough apartment manager, or because the abduction of his priest made things personal.

  On the other hand, he’d complimented her at lunch. And the kisses could be more than a dare.

  Was it possible that falling in love could feel this easy?

  If anything about this day could be called easy.

  Then Tomas said, “Here! Marcy, look at this!”

  She went gladly to his side, and not just because he might have a solution to all this. She went gladly because sinking onto his sofa, the slope of cushions sliding her hip against his, felt surprisingly right.

  Surprisingly safe.

  He showed her a glossy black-and-white rendition of early nineties varsity cheerleaders forming a pyramid, Cassie Adams second from the top.

  “She was a cheerleader,” said Marcy. “Why’s that matter?”

  Tomas moved his index finger, which had been indicating Cassie, to note a small form standing in the background of the picture, watching. “Who’s that?”

  Just like that, she knew. Her common sense struggled against such certainty—they needed more proof before they went around accusing people of anything, much less black magic. And yet—it felt right.