by Stacy Gail
The hell of it was, none of it made sense. Kendall’s mouth flattened as she found herself turning her car toward St. Francis instead of home. Dave’s behavior hadn’t given any hint that he was about to go postal in front of a half-million shocked viewers. He’d been fine, reading her copy, and she’d been listening to every word. Her words, her story that she’d dug up a mere hour before they’d gone on air, with a gut feeling that this was an important story churning away inside her. Everything had been going beautifully, with Dave reading about the two murder-suicides like the professional he was. Then, in a blink of an eye, he began screaming as he turned into Freddy Krueger.
Not exactly how she’d imagined launching her first lead story.
There was a veritable forest of satellite antennas stabbing up from a fleet of news trucks around St. Francis Hospital, including a couple from her own station. Eager to avoid anyone she knew, Kendall drove to the back and parked beside an empty ambulance bay, only to freeze at the sound of a voice just as she shut the car door.
“You can’t park here.”
Guiltily she started and looked around. Under a porte-cochère and illuminated by harsh sodium lights, she spotted a gray-haired, scrub-clad man leaning against a wall by the automatic sliding glass doors. Clearly on a cigarette break, he looked at her as though she were something that had crawled out of a sewer.
She waved a vague hand toward the front. “I’m trying to avoid the news crews. Is there somewhere I can get in without being seen?”
“Why? You famous?”
“No, I...” She shrugged a little helplessly. “I write copy for KPOW TV News. I was the one who tackled Dave Beamer.”
“Oh yeah. Thought you looked familiar. Your wrestling match with that anchor guy is all over TV.” The man flicked his cigarette away and wandered toward her, a bluish-white haze of smoke swirling around him. “You here to get a scoop, or are you injured from tackling a crazy-ass guy twice your size?”
“Neither.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Good question. “I want to know why my friend is dead. Whether it was a dose of bad drugs, or a brain aneurysm, or a hitherto-unknown funky allergic reaction to shellfish, I want to know why. Whatever the answer is, I’m not going to be able to rest until I find it.”
“The only answer I can give you is that you’re not allowed to park here. We’ve got emergency vehicles coming in and out of...” The man stopped and craned his neck far to the left, as if he had a bad crick in it.
She frowned. “Are you okay?”
There was no warning. A muffled grunt escaped him as he lunged at her, hands outstretched. And his eyes...
His eyes were white.
A scream ripped from her already-abused throat, only to be abruptly choked off as his powerful fingers closed around her neck like a living vise.
This can’t be happening, this can’t be—
Her sneakered feet left the concrete with the force of the impact. If her airway had been open, the breath would have been knocked out of her as she landed flat on her back, with the man landing hard on top of her. The back of her head smacked the pavement hard enough for her to see stars shoot across a darkening expanse. By the time her vision cleared, her assailant was looking down at her with a contorted face, his eyes milky white.
Oh no...
Wildly Kendall clawed at the fingers squeezing her neck so hard she felt bone grind against bone. An alarming buzz droned in her ears, while her eyes pulsed with the pressure of trapped blood, until that throbbing was all she knew and everything else faded...
Another violent impact rocked her, and it took her a few dazed moments to grasp that she wasn’t the one who had suffered the hit. Gagging, wheezing, not sure if her throat could even function after being so viciously abused, she sucked in precious gulps of air until the world came back into focus. She rolled to a wobbling sitting position, driven by the instinctive need to find her feet and run. But what she saw made her freeze in dumbstruck amazement.
The figure looming over her attacker was shrouded in black. It was as though the harsh artificial light itself couldn’t penetrate the darkness surrounding the masculine outline dressed in what looked like a long fitted coat straight out of The Matrix. His head was also covered in darkness, complete with a black, Zorro-like cloth that covered not just his head, but the upper half of his face as well.
A mask?
The sight of a masked man was certainly more than enough to stop anyone dead in their tracks, but then the seemingly empty black sockets behind the mask’s eyeholes shimmered. Then they glowed. Then they burned with the ethereal whiteness of pure light, and his hands...
His hands were on fire.
Only it wasn’t like any fire she’d ever seen. It was a rolling, vaporous flame that matched the white flare of his eyes. The sight of it, along with his whitely lit eye sockets, was enough to lock the breath up in her abused throat.
Dear God, I’ve lost my mind.
Her attacker swiveled his head around so hard Kendall heard the man’s neck pop before he swung at the man in black, and she had to blink at how his movements smudged together. The newcomer jumped back, only to unleash a crescent kick the moment he landed, and again her eyes couldn’t quite see the movement in the stark sodium lighting.
No. Wait.
It wasn’t the lighting. And it wasn’t the whack she took on the head, or being choked half to death. Though she knew it was impossible—like everything else she’d seen tonight—the movements of the two combatants were so fast they were blurring before her eyes.
The kick tagged her attacker, who spun with it and took a swipe at her savior’s middle even as an ominous snap of something in the hospital worker’s body rang out. With one of those too-fast-to-see-it moves, her savior evaded, spinning low and into her attacker’s body. Before she could fully register the move, he brought one of his glowing hands up to the aggressor’s chest, while the light where his eyes should be intensified until it was like looking into the sun.
“You’ve done enough damage for one night.” The masked man’s voice rolled forth like a cold wind across a barren plain; harsh, unforgiving. Inhuman. So terribly inhuman it made her want to curl up in a tight ball and never come out again. “I’m ripping you out of there once and for all, you unclean bitch.”
Before her disbelieving eyes, the vaporous white flame encasing his hand flowed into the man’s chest. The attacker’s white eyes bulged as though overfilled with the flame, his mouth opening on a soundless scream before he collapsed as if someone had suddenly pulled his power cord. A blue-white haze—the same haze she’d thought was a cloud of smoke—erupted from him and zipped off into the night.
Chapter Two
Zeke was stunned when the geist slipped from his grasp as if being sucked into a black hole. In a last-ditch effort he tried to wrap soulfire around the spirit, but a weird, heat wave-like warping shimmered around it before it ripped away. The host it had inhabited slumped to the pavement, used up and broken in a gruesome heap now that the knuckle-walking phantasm had evacuated.
No. Not just evacuated. Like the last time, it had been yanked right out of his grasp.
Impossible.
He whipped around to give chase, only to freeze when he saw her.
What the hell. After the night she’d had, Kendall Glynn was the last person he’d expected to see here, much less caught in the grip of the rogue geist yet again. Since no one was that unlucky, he wasn’t stupid enough to swallow that this attack was just a coincidence. But before he had a chance to untangle the mystery of why that damned phantom had decided to haunt her—pun intended—she raised her gaze to his.
Without warning, the world went still.
Even half-dead her beauty was almost unreal, as if she were a forgotten fantasy come to life. Her silky auburn hair framed her face in a sleek cut that ended at her jaw line. Her jewel-colored eyes seemed too big for the rest of her pixie-perfect face, now chalk white beneath a faint
dusting of freckles. She stared at him with one hand collared around her neck, the other supporting her weight with an effort that shook her body. She looked like a puff of air would shatter her into a thousand pieces.
All thought of bird-dogging the slippery geist vanished. Everything vanished; the obsessive need to keep his city peaceful, the wavering strangeness that kept tugging the malevolent spirit from his grasp. There was only this woman who had very nearly become a spirit herself.
Zeke moved toward her, only to freeze when she flinched. Of course. His hands balled into fists before he consciously reined in the soulfire while it surged through him in a sweaty need to be vented. Even if she hadn’t suffered a savage assault, the sight of him would be enough to send her into hysterics.
One way or another, she was having one craptastic night.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” Instinctively he pulled at the shadows around him and held up his now-innocuous hands. Her gaze bounced from his hands to his face, as though her brain had decided it was going to take a pass on understanding English. “Easy now.” He edged close enough to hear her breathing was labored—rattling through a throat that probably felt like ground glass—but at least she no longer flinched when he knelt beside her. “Can you speak?”
She stared at him with that uncomprehending, nobody’s home look.
Great.
“I’m going to get you to your feet. You need to get up so you can walk yourself into the emergency room and get treatment—”
“What was that thing?”
She couldn’t have stunned him more if she’d tried. “You saw it?”
“I thought it was cigarette smoke, but...” She winced when she tried to swallow. “Thank you. You saved my life.”
He waved aside her gratitude, more interested in the little bomb she’d just dropped. “Have you ever seen this before?”
“I... I thought it was smoke from his cigarette. What was it?”
Ah. So she hadn’t seen it. Not completely. “Forget about it.”
“But—”
“Forget it.” With an economy of movement, he got her to her feet and stepped away, ignoring the surprisingly powerful pull to linger at her side. “Chalk it up to oxygen deprivation, or shock, or whatever else you want to call it. Put it behind you and forget this ever happened. You’ll be happier for it.”
“You’re dreaming if you think I can forget this.” With surprising strength, she caught his forearm when he would have distanced himself even further. He looked back to her, and couldn’t help but be mesmerized at the firestorm in her eyes. “I saw...something. You saw it too, you went after it.”
“Drop it.” He shook her off just as the crumpled figure of the man on the ground moaned and began to stir. “Look, this guy’s body was pushed beyond normal limits, and he needs medical attention. For that matter, so do you.”
She scowled at the prone man, her hand coming up to her throat once more. “To hell with him. What he needs now is a nice pair of handcuffs and some Thorazine.”
“It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t the one who attacked you.”
“What? You saw—”
“You have no idea what I saw.”
Her sharp sigh turned into a pained cough. “I have no idea about you, period. You saved my life and I’m grateful—”
“I don’t want your gratitude.”
“Stop interrupting me, you ass!”
The look on her face made him think she was going to knock his block off, and it almost startled a laugh out of him. Maybe it was a side effect of the adrenaline rush, but there was something crazy-sexy about a half-dead woman who could still come out swinging. “Right. Sorry.”
“No, don’t.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her temples, and he could just imagine the oxygen-deprived headache punishing her now. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I shouldn’t be yelling at my guardian angel.”
He flinched and turned away. “I’m nobody’s angel, trust me.”
“Wait,” she began, but he didn’t hang around to hear any more. The last thing he needed was the distraction of a scrappy, emerald-eyed beauty who could see just enough of the spiritual world to be a problem. He had to keep his eye on the prize, and right now that was the geist. If he didn’t find that lost soul soon, it was going to bring an attention to his city that would be the death of him.
Literally.
* * *
Bleary-eyed, hair rumpled and sleep-flushed in her baggy giraffe-covered pajamas, Kendall staggered down the short flight of steps leading from the bedroom level of her loft apartment as the doorbell buzzed again.
“Coming,” she croaked in her ruined voice, squinting at the clock on the wall. Eight-thirty. Normally she was already up and hustling by this time, but the night before had thrown any thought of normal out the window.
Swallowing hard to clear a throat that seemed to be lined with razorblades and lava, she went on bare tiptoe to look through the peephole. Her grumpy scowl vanished under a wave of incredulity, and within moments she swung the door open. “Wow. This is a surprise.”
The handsome EMT from the night before stood in the doorway, his raven hair tousled, his navy blue windbreaker with the Bayshore Emergency Services logo on the chest looking crisply official. In one hand he held a brown paper bag, and in the other two large coffees in a cardboard tray.
Coffee.
“Uh-oh. It looks like I woke you. I thought you might be getting ready for work—”
“I’ve been given the week off,” she mumbled, trying not to drool as her groggy brain focused on the key ingredient to her survival. “That looks like coffee. Is that coffee? Coffee for me?”
“Yeah, I was—”
“Coffee.” Without a thought to social etiquette, decorum, or even basic human communication, Kendall snatched up a cup. “Coffee, coffee, coffee.”
“It’s a latte, actually. I wasn’t sure what you liked.” When she retreated without a word through the open-plan loft to huddle at the breakfast counter, he followed her, closing the door as he went. “I hope you don’t mind my dropping in unannounced.”
“You brought steamy, creamy caffeine. All must be forgiven.” She’d downed nearly half the cup before she woke up enough to blink at the man who’d taken the stool next to her. And with her wakefulness came the fact that she’d let a virtual stranger into her home, seduced by nothing more than the fine aroma of the drink that gave her life.
Except that wasn’t the only reason she let him in. There was something about this man that hit every one of her internal buttons. Of course he was all sorts of eye-candy, but her reaction to him went much deeper than that. Maybe it was because he was obviously a born nurturer; a gentle giant with soft eyes and hands that made her tingle. Or maybe it was because he was the most magnificent male specimen she’d had the good fortune to come across in her twenty-six years. Whatever it was, simply looking at him made her give fervent thanks she’d been born a girl.
A corner of his mouth curled as he watched her sip her coffee. “Nice to know something as simple as coffee can grant me a get-out-of-jail-free card with you.”
“I’m hopeless, aren’t I?”
“I’m not complaining.”
Heaven help her, she couldn’t stop staring at him. “You’re Zeke, right? Zeke Reece?”
The brilliance of his smile cut through the remainder of her fog. “Good memory. Considering what happened last night, I’m surprised you remember anything about me.”
Like she could ever forget him. “A good memory is only one of the weapons a journalist has. For instance, I just remembered I never gave you my address.”
“True, but you did give it to the officer who brought you home, and she was kind enough to give it to me when I asked her for it.” He unpacked the bag, revealing two insulated cups of maple-drizzled oatmeal and plastic spoons. “You were in such bad shape last night, I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Touched by his thoughtfulness, and more than a little thr
illed at the prospect that he’d felt the same spark of interest she had, she turned to accept the cup. “Thank you. I’m fine, really.”
His answering smile quickly turned into a frown. “Are those bruises on your neck?”
“What? Oh. Um...” Horrified, she slapped a hand to her throat and tried to come up with a non-insane explanation. “I was attacked last night. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Attacked? Let me see.” Going into paramedic mode, he rose and faced her fully. Before she could object, he walked the pads of his fingers up her neck, touching her as if he believed she was made of the finest crystal. “Did you go to the police?”
The mere thought of explaining white-veiled eyes, masked men and how that masked man insisted the attack wasn’t her assailant’s fault to the police was nothing short of snort-worthy. “No. Like I said, it wasn’t a big deal.”
He made a noncommittal sound. “I’ll give you this—you lead one hell of an exciting life. Is there any one place that hurts more than anywhere else?”
“No.” It took her last drop of will to keep from stretching her neck like a needy cat. But if he didn’t stop touching her soon, she might make a total fool of herself by purring. “Really, no permanent damage was done. I just sound like a phone-sex operator, that’s all.”
“I like how you find the silver lining in all this.” His thumbs brushed like a caress under her jaw line. “Any other injuries?”
She bit her lip to keep from blurting she had an all-over body bruise in need of his professional ministrations. “Just a lump on the back of my head when I hit the ground, but I made sure I didn’t sleep on it.”
“You’re not supposed to sleep with a head injury, period.” His fingers sifted through her hair. “You didn’t see a doctor after the attack, did you?”
“Why would I do that?” It took all her strength to stifle a shiver of unexpected delight as the loverlike glide of his fingers plowed rows through her hair. Sweet languor drifted through her like a drug, heating her blood and stroking her every nerve ending to vibrant life. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”