Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “What’s so funny?” he says.

  “Nothing,” I say, pressing my hand over my forearm.

  “You’re sure twitchy.”

  “Am not,” I say, like a teenage girl.

  His delicious, pink candy tongue finds the corner of his mouth.

  I want to suck on that tongue, drawing it into my mouth like a lollypop.

  He taps my nose, getting my attention.

  “Huh?”

  “What were you reading?”

  “Nothing, it was nothing.”

  “It looked like something.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “It looks like something interesting.” His arm snakes out to grab my wrist.

  I slam my hand on top of his. “Let it go, Jonas. It’s just a book. I was reading a book and I found something that was funny, all right?”

  “Okay, all right, you’re sure touchy.”

  “I have a right to be. I had an impulsive moment I now regret. And I’m paying for it.”

  He keeps his voice low, trying to be discreet. “Damn, Vienna, telling me a secret shouldn’t tweak you out that much. You’ve told me plenty of secrets over the years.” He rakes his hand through his dark wavy hair. “Unless you want me to fulfill my promise,” he whispers in my ear.

  I push him away. “You’re right. I’m being stupid.” I remove my hand from the skin display.

  “I wouldn’t say stupid, but awfully edgy.” His eyes glance over to my arm. “Women’s Sexuality, huh?”

  “Yes, now drop it.”

  “Consider it dropped,” he says, putting both his palms in the air. “But you don’t need a book to overcome your…”

  “Drop it,” I say in a menacing tone.

  We sit in awkward silence.

  “It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you,” he whispers.

  “I said drop it,” I hiss.

  “It’s normal.”

  “It’s not normal. I’ve had enough sex in my life. It should have happened by now.”

  “Not even with Elias?”

  Elias used to work for Jonas. He had a hot body, was funny, kind. I dated him for about six months before we broke it off. We had sex a lot but I think he knew I was faking it. He told me one night I was frigid. I told him he was an asshole. Besides, he wasn’t Jonas, I think and want to beat my head against the wall. “No! Not your business! Now can we fucking drop it?”

  “Okay, okay,” he says and once again makes a gesture of surrender. “It’s dropped.”

  “Okay,” I say, changing the screen display to something to do with medical advances using howler monkeys. I flip the screens without registering a word displayed on my arm. All I’m wondering is what Jonas’s lips would feel on mine, what size cock he has and what kind of magic he can do with his junk.

  “But Vienna?”

  “What?” I say, slapping my thigh with my hand. The SkinScreen makes a garbled screech in my ear. “Would you please, please, please drop it?”

  “Christ, Vienna! I was only going to ask you out to dinner. Jenner has her watercolor class tonight.”

  “Oh.” I turn to look at him and am met with his sincere, open gaze. I’ve always liked that about him. He’s an honest man. But the gazes he’s giving me lately are, well…they’re different…way different.

  His blues eyes slide into my head like sensuous fingers, parting my resistance. My mouth opens slightly and I draw my tongue along my lips.

  Jonas swallows, his gaze never leaving mine.

  I’m literally beginning to unravel from his touch, thread by thread. It makes me extremely apprehensive. I can’t do my job if I’m vulnerable. I blink and wrench my eyes from his. “Will she get all pissy about it again, like she did a couple weeks ago?”

  “Nah. We had a talk about how I get to have friends, she gets to have friends. Hell, she meets with her co-worker Brian every day for lunch. I’m the one who should be jealous.”

  “Are you?”

  “Not really. The guy’s a dick. If she wants him, she can have him.”

  I nod my head. His words sound like something a guy would say to cover up his vulnerability. “Okay. Where do you want to go?”

  “Feel like Italian? Luigi’s has managed to stay the course and they’re pretty much open every night.”

  “Italian it is, then.”

  A harried-looking nurse pops her head out from behind a swinging door. “Evelyn Peabody?”

  “Over here,” I call and I gently shake Grammy’s shoulder.

  Her eyes pop open and I help her to her feet and guide her to the back room for her yearly check-up, giving Jonas a small wave as we depart. “See you later,” I call out to him.

  He nods, grins and laughs. “Oh, yeah. You’ll do more than see me.”

  He’s got schemes in his head, I can tell. I can’t tell what they are but I have a pretty good idea what they are…or maybe I’m mixing up his fantasies with my own.

  Chapter 6

  AT LUIGI’S LATER that evening, I scan around for signs of Jonas. I find him sitting in a dark, intimate corner booth. He’s staring at his hands as if they’re someone else’s.

  “What’s going on?” I say, settling next to him. The atmosphere is dark, red glass and black tiled intensity. Shadows are cast around the room like walls, lending each table the illusion of complete privacy.

  He jerks, as if surprised, and brightens as he regards me. “Nice outfit.”

  “Thanks.” I felt like such a girl when I dressed tonight. I put on this outfit and that one, scrutinizing myself in the mirror before discarding garment after garment. I finally deemed my appearance complete, once I’d dressed in greenish bronze see-through leggings, a white and black silk tunic with a slash of black leather going from my right hip to my left shoulder, and a sleeveless long black leather jacket. “Why do you look so gloomy?”

  “Not gloomy anymore,” he says with a smile. His gaze rakes over me like a feathery caress.

  I shiver and try to compose myself. “You looked like you were contemplating having to choke kittens with your bare hands a second ago.”

  He winces. “That bad, huh?”

  “Uh huh. That bad.” He’s wearing a black jacket and a gold and black shirt that’s open at the top to reveal his dark chest hair.

  My fingers twitch, wanting to touch the curls of hair. What is wrong with me?

  The man dresses casually during the day but, at night, he knows how to rock a good look. I’ve always appreciated the way he looks. My eyes wander over the face of my friend—the friend I love and now seem to obsess over, like he’s the needle filled with sex I want to plunge into my arm. His dark hair is pushed back from his face. I love his dark blue eyes…his chiseled face…his chin…his full lips that usually curve into a smile when he’s around me. My gaze sweeps down his throat to his wide shoulders. I swallow, remembering we’re just friends—good friends. Great friends. The best of friends. He’s the safest of the safe. He’s someone I can count on. Uh huh. Right.

  A waiter hustles to the table. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  I eye him for a second. He’s a study in angles, opposites, and art. His hair has some sort of product in it that allows him to curve and shape it like a clay sculpture. It pierces the air in spikes on the right and flows down to his shoulder on the left, like a glam actress from the early nineteen hundreds. His face has been made up Greta-Garbo-Hollywood style on the side with the spiky hair, and modern Nuevo Imagina on the Garbo side. There’s this trend flowing around called Nuevo—it’s Nuevo this and Nuevo that and it seems to mean “whatever the fuck I want it to be.”

  A slight smile curves his lips. There’s a row of tiny, tiny diamonds along the top left lip. I’ll bet they’ve been affixed with a perma-product. Those babies are going nowhere until he wants them to—and until he applies a generous amount of solvent to his skin. “Well?” His shoulder goes up and down in a quick, practiced gesture.

  “Sorry. I was just admiring the scene.” />
  He twirls in a circle. “Admire away.” His eyes flick to the room and back to me. “But do it fast. This place is jammed tonight as usual.”

  “What are you having, Jonas?”

  “Mezzaluna, on the rocks.”

  “Vodka, huh?”

  “You got it.”

  I cock my head at him for a second. I’ve never known him to drink anything more than a beer or a glass of wine. “I’ll have a beer,” I say to our exotic waiter. “What do you have on tap that’s cool and amber?”

  “I’ve got just the thing,” he says, smiling mysteriously. “Let me surprise you.”

  “Surprise away.” As he hustles off, I turn to Jonas. “Okay, now’s your chance.”

  “To do what? Watch you getting off on someone who’s mastered Nuevo Imagina fashion? Any fool can do that.”

  A small smile creeps up my face. “Jealous?”

  “No!” he says quickly. “Of a gender bender? Hardly.”

  “Good. Because I was thinking you could even the playing field by telling me what’s bothering you.”

  “Even the playing field as in that topic we’re not talking about? I shoot because you spilled?”

  The words ‘shoot’ and ‘spill’ land between my legs, making me sit up and pay attention. It’s either that, or slither to the floor, grabbing Jonas’s pants as I fall, resulting in his naked legs wrapped around my head. “One and the same. And yes. You spill next. Take the heat off of me.” I smile, saucily.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I had words with Jenner before I left but what’s new?”

  “What kind of words?”

  “Sharp and angry words. The kind that slice and dice.”

  “Who stabbed first?”

  “She did. She told me I haven’t been paying enough attention to her.”

  “Haven’t you?”

  “I always pay the same amount of attention to Jenner. How can you not? She demands it.”

  “Yeah, but is it ever unasked for, spontaneous bursts of affection?” I pick up a fork and twirl it between my fingers wondering what it would feel like to run my fingers between his legs. I drop the fork with a clatter.

  He blows his breath out between pursed lips. “Not for a long time.”

  “Well, I’m no expert in LTRs but I know they can go up and down—sometimes easy, sometimes work.”

  “Ours is all work. It’s like a construction project. Not only that, it’s so damn fragile, I have to wear gloves and whisper all the time. Some days I get it right and she’s kind. Some days I don’t and she’s a bitch. I just never know what’s going to set her off.”

  “You’re such a good guy, Jonas. I hate to see you getting yanked around by her. I feel protective of you, like a lioness.”

  “That makes me think I’m a child, V. Not what I was going for tonight.” His leg relaxes against mine.

  A jolt of electricity jump starts me and I pull my leg away. “Sorry. You know I’m as loyal a friend as there is.”

  He flashes me a grateful expression. “That I do. We’ve been friends a long time. How’s the counseling job going, by the way? Is this the kind of thing you do with your clients? Get them to spew their innermost thoughts?”

  “Oh, sure,” I say, a little too quickly. “Exactly right. You got it.”

  “So you’ve been doing this job for four months,” he says, probing deep.

  “Yep. That’s it. Four months.”

  “I thought you told me six?” A cynical, suspicious look darts across his face.

  “What? Oh. I did. Six months. Sorry, I got distracted.”

  “By?” His gaze blasts through my brain like a cannon ball. Yet again, I feel my insides ooze with wet, creamy desire. I reach for my forehead and rub. I can’t, I won’t, I mustn’t. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I scan for our waiter.

  “It beats the last job, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Come on waiter dude, come on! “Selling clothes to the rich and entitled wasn’t my cup of tea. I had a bad attitude. Good thing I quit first or else I’d have been fired.”

  “You make good money doing what you do?”

  “You could say that.” I’ve already pulled six figures. “I manage.”

  “Tell me again—where’d you get the training to do that kind of thing? Don’t you have to have a degree or something?”

  He knows I haven’t been telling the truth. I’ve been so vague with details, Jonas seems to have endless question whenever we see each other. It’s getting harder and harder to keep the secret. Plus, I can never remember what I told him last time. “Oh, you know.” I wave my hand breezily in the air. “You can get any degree you want via contextual computing platforms.”

  He scoffs. “You got that right. The other day, I was reading about up and coming technologies. The newer chips are the size of a human cell. They can be inserted into your skin with nary a pinprick of sensation. My phone chip hurt like a mother when I got it inserted.”

  “Yeah, mine, too.” I finger the place behind my ear where mine is, remembering how long it took to heal.

  “Anyway, these new ones are connected to your home’s mainframe and they monitor all your habits. Once embedded, they surround your body with electrical impulses. And get this,” he says, sitting up excitedly. “The damn things reproduce inside of you. Once they’ve been planted, they grow like little invading weeds.”

  “The kind of weeds that grow where they’re not wanted?” I blurt.

  “One and the same. When what you really want to grow is…” He reaches out a finger to push a strand of hair away from my cheek and leans closer like he’s going to…

  I shudder and pull away, brushing away his hand like a pesky, unwanted fly. “Why would anyone want something like that inside them? That sounds so…so…so invasive!”

  “You know how the ridiculously rich are. They get bored easily. So these things—they monitor your breathing when you look at something. Hell, they even observe and track your olfactory and skin sensation. They’re that sophisticated. And they monitor facial gestures—the miniscule clues that flash across our faces when we’re regarding something we want. Even the snapshots of your iris that BuyScanners take while you’re shopping are fed to the chip.”

  “I can’t stand those. You can’t even wander through a small corner store without being spied on.”

  “Not unless you have Blocker Goggles on.”

  “I don’t trust those either. I think they were developed by a company that wants you to think you’re safe. They probably enhance the connection the BuyScanners make with your body.”

  Jonas shakes his head. “Agreed. I’ve taken to sending someone else to do my shopping for me. Remember when I told you that I have an assistant who gets me what I need?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “It’s my own act of rebellion to the complete lack of privacy we live in.”

  Maybe that’s why he blocks me from entering his thoughts. “Yeah, but you can afford it. What do the poor have to protect themselves?”

  “Nothing, but they’re not the target audience. The BuyScanners want to find out what people with money are after. It’s the CrimeScanners that are watching the poor. They assume if you have no money, you’re more prone to criminal behavior. We all know it’s the ones with too much money to watch out for.” He taps his fingers on the table. “Anyway, back to the new chip technology. They’re programmed to monitor behaviors and patterns and deliver what they decipher. I hear the ones that are really good have a suite of educational services built within seconds of you desiring to learn something. Did you use something like that—the educational services modules?”

  “Uh, kind of,” I say, eager to switch the topic. “I wonder what happened to our waiter.”

  “And then you connect with your clients in some similar fashion? Mental highways? Those always seemed weird to me.”

  “Uh, well, they serve a purpose, Jonas. When you use Neural Nodes to hook people up to one another, it does enhance the connection.”

/>   “How do you know that?”

  I get a little twitchy. “I read about it.”

  “And what about those avatar salons?”

  I start to squirm. This topic is cutting way too close to the bone. “What do you mean?”

  “Haven’t you heard of them? They’re springing up everywhere. People take these designer drugs and then they log into Super Rooms, like the holographic rooms that were in use a few years ago. They build their avatars and then they get to watch them interact from inside the Super Room. I suppose the ones with the vivid imaginations do better than the others. But still…whatever happened to the thrill of human contact?” His arm drops next to mine and his little finger strokes my hand.

  I reach for my water as if I’m parched. I pour the entire glass down my throat, much to his amusement. I don’t like where this conversation is headed. I know Jonas has strong convictions but I didn’t know he doesn’t care for fantasy. And that’s exactly what I do for a living now—only my business is far more sophisticated than the avatar salons. Kaama’s technical skills combined with my freakazoid skills makes people think they’re having a real experience. They swear they really, really, really just had sex with a version of me. In an avatar salon they know it’s just fantasy. “People these days need an outlet. Life has sucked for the last decade or two. Even you might deserve a little fun now and then.” I’m starting to get defensive.

  “I suppose, but people spend far too much time in the fantasy realm. There’s plenty to be done in real time.” His exploring hand lands on my thigh and he strokes in soft, sweeping circles.

  Sweet baby Jesus, save me. I look up to see our waiter swishing over our way. He’s a gender bender for sure.

  Jonas’s hand jerks away as if he’s been burned, leaving a scorch mark on my leg.

  I breathe a sigh of relief. Jonas is in a pissy, pissy mood tonight. Jonas is in a dangerous mood tonight. He’s crossing long established boundaries and I’m starting not to care.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your drinks.” The waiter winks at me and sets a tall glass of amber liquid on the table. A slice of lemon floats in the foam. Specks of dark brown something rest on top of the lemon. I take a sniff. “Vanilla?”