by Stacy Gail
The Wharf was tourist-friendly by day, but nighttime brought out the seedier dregs of society. Added to that were the unseen denizens—beings that fed off the electrical fields of the city’s lights and gorged themselves on the roiling flow of emotion that emanated from people who used the cover of darkness to hide their dangerous appetites.
The night was for people like him. Not Kendall Glynn.
As silent as the shadows surrounding him, Zeke kept pace with her, and he told himself he was simply being watchful as he drank in the long-legged gait that swayed the lush curve of her hips in an almost hypnotic rhythm. As the fog rolled in off the bay and the brine-kissed breeze ruffled her hair, he admired the muted fire of it as she tucked it behind her ear. Maybe she was here playing tourist, he thought, a low sigh escaping him when she gnawed on her full lower lip as she searched the boardwalk area. She hadn’t been in San Francisco all that long, after all...
His meandering thoughts jerked to a halt when she zeroed in on a familiar popcorn vendor, and he sighed again.
She really was such a pain in the ass.
“…questions about the murder-suicide that took place here.” Kendall’s voice, much improved since the last time he’d heard it, carried to him on the chill night air.
“Do you now?” The man behind the popcorn cart—which now had plastic taped over the hole that had been punched through the glass—shook back shoulder-length dreads. “I’m thinking how nice it would be if a pretty lady bought something while we talk about it.”
She flashed a smile at the vendor that was a real wowser. For some reason it irked Zeke no end.
“I think I can handle that. Have any Junior Mints?”
“What sort of man would I be if I didn’t have Junior Mints for a pretty lady?”
Zeke’s irritation grew when Kendall laughed outright, a husky, fluttery sound designed to bring a strong man to his knees. He doubted she’d ever call the vendor an ass the way she had with him. And he’d saved her life, for crying out loud. Where was the gratitude?
Oh wait, that’s right. In his frustration over the geist getting away, he’d thrown her gratitude back in her face.
Crap. He was an ass.
“Keep the change.” She handed over a large bill and tucked the candy into her bag. “So. The other night?”
“I saw the whole thing. The man and his lady bought some popcorn, nice as you please. He fed her, all lovey-dovey, then suddenly he just...flipped. Strangled her right in front of my eyes, then did himself in, along with the popper on my cart.”
“Did you see anything unusual about him?”
“You mean besides crushing his lady’s throat with his bare hands?”
“Besides that.”
“Like what?”
Hidden under a tightly woven cloak of shadows beside a souvenir kiosk, Zeke leaned forward in an effort to hear her.
“Were you able to see the attacker’s eyes?”
“Those crazy eyes.” The vendor made a gesture to ward off the evil eye. “That man, he stared straight ahead, like he was sleepwalking. Only he was sleep-strangling.” Then he shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he didn’t want to share his popcorn.”
Her snort covered his.
“Can you remember if he said anything? Vocalized anything? Screamed?”
“Just one thing—‘you’ve had this coming for years, you no-good, whoring bastard.’”
Kendall’s brow puckered. “He said that to his female companion?”
“That’s it.” The vendor nodded. “Like I said, he was fine one minute, a madman the next.”
“I know this will sound strange, but was there anything hanging around him? Like fog or maybe a cloud of smoke?”
Zeke couldn’t stop the wince. Way to sound crazy, lady.
“What? There was nothing like that.” The vendor seemed to shrink behind his cart before he picked up its handles and began to trundle away. “I saw nothing like that and I want nothing to do with something like that.”
“I didn’t mean to offend.” She took a quick step after him. “Forget about the cloud, it doesn’t mean anything. What about the masked man the security guard reported seeing? Did you see The Guardian Angel?”
He almost lost his grip on the shadows veiling him. Well, well. Kendall Glynn was just chock-full of surprises, wasn’t she?
The vendor kept going. “Don’t know anything about a masked man, or a security guard.”
“Sir—”
“You want to talk to the security guards, they have a kiosk across the street in the parking lot. I want nothing to do with this.” And with that, the vendor practically ran down the wharf.
The curse that popped out of Kendall made Zeke grin. Then she turned with a resolute tilt of her chin he would have spotted a mile away. She was across the street before he knew it, and it didn’t take a huge leap to know her next stop was an interrogation session with any poor schmuck who happened to be on duty at—
He sensed it before he saw it.
The telltale ice pick stab behind his eyes screamed out the presence of a spirit. He spun wildly in search of it, only to move at top speed toward the geist no more than ten feet from Kendall. It was the same hideous thing he’d seen before—a hunchbacked, ogrelike phantasm whose aura popped and oozed with a sickly blight that spoke volumes of just how old the poor thing was. An old spirit meant bat-crap crazy and mean, and without a doubt this one was the meanest he’d ever encountered.
No. Not just mean. Murderous. And that was a first for a geist.
It was so hunched over it knuckle-walked. Its blurring movement shifted around Kendall as if looking for a chink in her armor, and its hesitation to get any closer was as baffling as it was unnerving. But that didn’t matter now. The geist couldn’t be allowed to attack her. Hell, it couldn’t be allowed to attack anyone. It had to be crossed over before all of heaven spotlighted San Francisco with its unforgiving light.
But...it damn well better not attack Kendall.
The geist seemed to become aware of his presence almost at the same time he’d noticed it. A massive ripple twisted the thing’s aura, the same bizarre heat wave distortion that made all his senses jangle. He blinked, nearly stumbling as his attention wavered.
What the hell is that?
Before he could puzzle it out, the geist pivoted with unexpected grace, its attention seemingly cutting to him as he approached. But all too soon its intention became clear. Zeke’s heart iced over as the rogue geist grabbed up a moped and swiveled with its hideous, no-longer-human strength and took aim.
Right at Kendall.
Chapter Four
Note to self—keep all amorphous smoke clouds out of casual conversation.
Irritated by both the vendor’s reaction and her careless flub, Kendall crossed the empty street to the parking lot, zeroing in on a small security trailer. It was amazing how the mention of one measly little cloud was enough to make some people look at her like she was a few clowns short of a circus.
Like the way Zeke Reece had looked at her.
Another curse hissed out of her. Having Zeke haunt her thoughts was driving her as crazy as he thought she was. She was an idiot to let him linger in her mind’s eye, with his gentle hands and a sculpted body that fulfilled her every secret fantasy. The fact was there was no hope of striking up a relationship with him at this point. The way things stood now, he either didn’t know anything about what was going on and believed she was a hot box full of crazy, or he was just twisted enough to enjoy making her think she had snapped under pressure.
One was sad, but understandable. The other was unforgivable.
She’d do a better job of questioning the security guard, she decided, pleased to see lights through the trailer’s uncovered windows. And this time she’d do her best to keep The Twilight Zone stuff down to a minimum as she asked about The Guardian—
Strong arms engulfed her in a viselike grip, and in a blink she was off her feet and moving so fast the world around her blurre
d. There was no time to scream even as she came to a screeching halt, the breath knocking out of her as she was pushed against the side of a building on the opposite end of the parking area. Her brain scrambled in a frenzy of alarmed confusion as the press of a hulking, hard body pinned her in place. Panicked, she sucked in a breath to scream, but it came out as a mere squeak as a sudden crash of metal against metal tore through the darkness.
“What the hell—” She caught an improbable glimpse of some sort of scooter embedded into the front of the security hut she’d been heading for, before she was hauled unceremoniously into the engulfing shadows of a narrow alley at the back of the building. A babble of excited shouts pierced the night as security officers spilled out of the damaged hut, but before she could call out to them, a hand clamped over her mouth.
“That moped almost took you out, and you don’t even know it,” the man who held her growled, shocking her into stillness. “What is it going to take for you to realize you’re digging into something that’s bad for your health?”
Kendall stared up at The Guardian Angel, so dumbfounded she didn’t even notice when he removed his hand from her mouth.
“You,” she breathed. She struggled to get a clear view of him, but it was a hopeless task. Even if a mask hadn’t covered half his face, the darkness around him seemed deeper, like an impenetrable black hole where no light could exist. “Where... How...”
“Quiet.” The tension in his voice was palpable. She could even feel it in the body that pinned her to the alley wall, thrumming with a kill-or-be-killed urgency that made her own pulse pound. “It took off once it diverted me. I can’t believe how smart it is.”
“What’s smart?” Shadows filled the places where his eyes should be, leaving dark pools of endless mystery. Belatedly she realized their bodies touched in one long line from chest to knees, and it was all she could do to pull a coherent thought together. “What took off? Why did you attack me?”
A low growl emanated from him. “I didn’t attack you, I saved your life. Again. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“You saved me? From what, that out-of-control scooter? I’ll admit, I never heard it coming—”
“That’s because it wasn’t running at the time.”
“What?” Her eyes went wide as horror began to creep in. “That’s impossible.”
“Impossible is the definition of your life lately.” She sensed more than saw his head angle closer to hers, as if to share intimate whispers in the dark. A shiver she knew he must have felt shook her when the feathering of his breath caressed her lips. “The white-veiled eyes, the insanity that strikes normal people, the bizarre cloud of smoke moving of its own volition. All of it is impossible.”
“You forgot a masked man who appears out of nowhere.” Terrified he’d once again leave her drowning in a sea of ignorance that could get her killed, Kendall tried to hold onto his shirt, but it was some sort of tough material she couldn’t get a grip on. “You know what all of this means. I know you do.”
His hands came up to shackle her wrists as if he wanted to fling them away. “Let it go.”
“Damn it, don’t you see I’m trying to save my own life here? I can’t afford to let it go, or believe I’m as nutty as that jerk paramedic made me feel.” She gritted the words out through teeth that wanted to chatter in violent reaction to yet another near-death experience. “I’m smart enough to know that if I don’t figure this out, I’m dead. Now please, just answer me—have you ever heard of red-veiled eyes?”
“Red-veiled eyes means demonic possession, and glowing red eyes denotes an actual demon. That’s what I thought this case might be at first, since I screwed up and let one slip through my fingers about a month ago, but I was wrong. The thing on the loose now isn’t demonic in nature. It’s something else.” His voice had roughened around the edges. “Some paramedic was a jerk to you, huh?”
“Maybe he just thinks I’m pitiful.” She shrugged this away as unimportant, because it was. His casual acceptance of the horrific concept of demons running around loose in San Francisco—or anywhere else, for that matter—was nothing short of mind-boggling. “If you want to talk about glowing eyes, yours win the prize for going supernova when you took out my attacker at the hospital. And your hands...they were covered in some kind of weird white fire that didn’t seem to burn you. Yet in all the news reports I’ve read about you, no one has ever described anything like that.”
“You were able to see even that, were you?” His grip gentled by degrees, his thumbs rubbing the thin inner flesh of her wrists, as if to soothe her frenzied pulse. “You’ve got a gift. Though I’m sure right about now it’s feeling more like a curse.”
He had no idea. “My aunt can see ghosts. When I was a kid I thought I saw my grandfather’s spirit leave him, just as I thought I saw Dave Beamer’s. But I’ve been told that’s crazy talk, so I’ve always tried to pretend it’s not there.”
“Pretend all you want, but it won’t make it go away. If anything, you should be glad you have it. That gift seems to be protecting you.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Unlike Dave Beamer and the man at the hospital, you seem impervious to being possessed. You’ve got just enough of an unusual psychic spark to keep it at bay. I think that’s why it keeps attacking you physically—it can’t get to you any other way.”
“Keep what at bay? What’s attacking me?” Again she tried to grab him. “Please tell me. My life depends on it, don’t you get that?”
He loosed a rough breath. “It’s a geist.”
The foreign-sounding word came out with great reluctance, and it only added to the ominous tone. “What is a geist?”
“You probably know it by another name—a poltergeist. But in reality, geists are nothing like they’re portrayed in Hollywood. They’re essentially human spirits that have gone bad.”
“Oh.” Kendall tried to even out her breathing. It didn’t help. The fabric of her reality was ripping under the pressure of everything she’d seen. If it ripped all the way through, she was terrified she’d have nothing left to support her sanity. “That’s a funny way of putting it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You make it sound as though spirits are like...I don’t know. Rotten fruit.”
“That’s as good a description as any. Try to understand—this is the physical world. The bodies that house our spirits, they’re nothing more than physical shells. Once that shell dies, the spirit no longer belongs here in the physical plane. If that spirit is not passed into the next world quickly, it changes. It devolves, goes insane. That’s when a ghost becomes a geist.”
“Um. Okay.” She swallowed, trying to accept his explanation when every word he uttered sounded like make-believe. “That doesn’t explain the whiteness in Dave’s eyes, or his sudden insanity.”
“He was possessed. Though I’ve never seen a geist possess anyone before now.” She couldn’t see his face, but there was a definite frown carried in his tone. “Usually ghosts and demons are the only culprits when it comes to human possession. Geists are the mindless, violent beings that toss physical objects around, throw door-slamming tantrums, pull a person’s hair, that sort of thing. They’re usually too unstable mentally to pull off possession, but not this one. This geist is one for the record books, including its fixation with you.”
“What?” The alarm rose so fast she could barely whisper the word, and she had to take a moment to tamp it back down. “You mean I was right to think this thing is targeting me? Like a stalker?”
“I don’t know how else to put it.” He shrugged, a movement she could feel far more than see. “A geist doesn’t have the mental capacity to focus on one person unless it’s emotionally bound to them, like a relative. Or a lover.” He caught her chin and tilted it up as if to receive a kiss, and her lips parted in a response she couldn’t help. “Has anyone in your life died recently?”
“Yes.” Her heart didn’t seem to know whether to stop
or start, so in the end it fluttered uselessly. “Dave Beamer.”
“This particular geist possessed Beamer and killed him, just like it possessed that man here at Fisherman’s Wharf and made him pull off that murder-suicide which mirrored the KPOW attack.”
Her mind spun in an effort to grasp what he was saying. “Are you sure it’s the same...um...geist?”
“There’s only one geist in this city now, and this one’s unmistakable. As soon as I can corner it, I’ll pass it on to the next life as easily as I passed on your friend Beamer.”
She couldn’t help it. Her jaw unhinged. “Wow, you can do that?”
He waved this away. “The geist we’re dealing with now is so old, its death would have occurred awhile ago. Months, maybe even years ago. Are you sure you can’t think of anyone close to you who passed away?”
“No. There’s no one.”
“Then its obsession with you is a mystery I don’t have time to solve. I have to get this geist crossed over before it kills you, or before...”
She waited a beat. “Before what?”
Before he could answer, a flashlight beam bounced in their direction. As if he was part of the night itself, he moved to shield her from it with his black-cloaked frame. The press of his length was as hard as the wall at her back, and without warning Kendall imagined she could feel every muscle-padded contour and raw-edged bone in his body. A spurt of something like alarm sizzled through her when it occurred to her just how big this man was. The shroud of night had managed to hide his linebacker frame, but there was no way to overlook how her breasts flattened against the lower part of his rib cage, nor could it mask the sudden awareness of his hips and lower region now plastered against her stomach. Could he feel the scorching heat their bodies generated, or was that just her overstimulated imagination? Her thoughts whirled off in a thousand different directions, each one on a path that was completely inappropriate for their circumstances. Like how it would be to try to fit her smaller stature into his embrace. Or if she would have to stand on her tiptoes to reach his mouth with her own. Or whether or not it would be more exciting for him to leave his mask on or take it off if he took her to his bed.