by Stacy Gail
“I’m changing back to my maiden name as soon as I can afford the legal crap, but for now Denton will do.” The woman’s voice matched her looks—miles and miles of bad road, with no end in sight. “Who’re you and whaddaya want?”
Kendall dug into the wallet-sized purse slung diagonally across her front, and handed the woman a card. “I’m Kendall Glynn from KPOW News. May I come in to—”
“No.”
He snorted, then pulled at the layers of shadow around him when Kendall glanced toward his hiding place near the building’s outer stairwell.
“All right.” As undaunted and stubborn as he had accused her of being, Kendall’s chin came up. “Forgive me for being forward, but may I ask you to confirm that it was your husband, Jimbo Denton, who passed away at Fisherman’s Wharf a few nights ago?”
“I don’t need this crap.” Throwing a lethal look at Kendall, Mrs. Denton began to shut the door.
Kendall slapped a hand against the door’s dirty surface. “And you do have a son, don’t you, Mrs. Denton? James Jr., who attends Bayside Community College, the same college where another murder-suicide took place earlier that morning?”
For a dangerous moment, his concentration slipped and the shadows around him lightened. But he couldn’t help it. Damnation, she’d actually found a connection, when he would have sworn nine ways to Sunday there wouldn’t be one. Beauty and brains, guts and determination, all rolled into one dangerous package.
No wonder he couldn’t resist her.
The closing door suddenly sprang open and the woman stuck a gnarled, arthritic finger in Kendall’s face. “I won’t have you drag my boy into the gutter with his loser father. So what if Jimbo strangled his latest trailer-trash whore, then did his own sorry self in? Scumbag wasn’t worth the dynamite it’d take to blow him to hell, and I’m glad he’s gone. But I won’t have you say one word about my boy.”
“Of course not. I merely wondered if your son had the chance to tell you about Denise Draper’s death at the hands of James’s former art professor.”
“What? Denise? Are you talking about James’s girlfriend?”
Kendall hesitated. “Is that what James told you? That they were in a relationship?”
“They were in a relationship, a very serious relationship. After what happened with his father that night, he must have decided to not tell me about poor Denise. Oh, my poor boy must be heartbroken.”
“Ah...yes. Would it be possible to talk with your son, Mrs. Denton?”
“No,” she said again, her dour lips curling back in a snarl. “Hasn’t the kid been through enough? Get the hell out of here and don’t come back!” With that, the door slammed in Kendall’s face. She stood statue-still as she stared at the door, but he wasn’t fooled into thinking she was stunned by the rude behavior. By now he knew that look, and it made his heart drop like one of Wile E. Coyote’s Acme anvils.
Kendall was thinking.
Before he could decide how best to get her moving, a familiar pulse stabbed behind his eyes. In an instant, the white-hot shock of adrenaline mainlined through his system.
Where is it? Where the hell is it?
He slipped between the layers of shadow just as the door between himself and Kendall opened, and a beefy middle-aged man stepped out in nothing more than boxers and a stained undershirt.
The undershirt was nasty enough in its own right, but it was the sledgehammer the man cradled that got his attention.
“Kendall!”
If she hadn’t pivoted, she would have been made into a grease spot. The sickly aura of the geist housed within the hammer-wielding man throbbed and oozed. Soulfire surged from his hands, readying him to pass the geist into the afterlife. But even as he rocketed forward to snatch up the maddened spirit once and for all, the geist shot out of its host and blurred into the side of the apartment like the spirit it was, that bizarre rippling of the air suddenly everywhere he looked.
Dazed, the beefy neighbor looked at the hammer. “How’d I get out here?”
Kendall backed away, her eyes on the hammer just as another door opened behind her.
This time Zeke thought he was prepared. He launched, pulling at the shadows around him, every nerve alive and thrumming with adrenaline and soulfire. He cocked an arm back to blast the new enemy, only to falter when a tottering, blue-haired lady with an osteo-humped back and orthopedic shoes shuffled out, a pair of shiny metal knitting needles in hand and the geist’s aura boiling around her. This time Kendall didn’t need a warning as she flinched back from her ancient attacker, even as Zeke nearly crashed into the open doorframe to stop himself from breaking the elderly woman’s frail body into a thousand pieces.
“You need to get out of here, now!” he yelled to Kendall, then hissed with surprise when the geist-possessed woman swung the needles down and nearly stabbed his arm.
Great. Almost punctured by Grandma Moses and her knitting needles of doom. He was getting soft.
“No!” Kendall leapt forward, much to his dismay, because the geist suddenly belched out of the needle-wielding granny and once again took possession of the man behind Kendall. The beefy guy swiftly closed the distance, sledgehammer lofted over his head for a blow that would have made the mighty Thor proud.
Kendall was caught in a pickle and on the verge of being tagged out—permanently.
With the geist bouncing between two armed hosts at such a fast clip, there was only one thing left to do.
Retreat.
Hauling Kendall into his arms, Zeke leaped off the second-story apartment balcony and aimed for the sky.
* * *
A scream burst from Kendall when terra firma was ripped out from under her feet, and she fully expected a plummet down to the parking area below. But there was no plummet, no bone-snapping splat where she feared her rescuer would take the brunt of their fall. There was no fall. Her mind seemed to bend in two as they defied every law of gravity in the universe, and shot straight up toward the moon. Somehow they were on an invisible express elevator powered by...by...
Wings.
Another scream wanted out, but it had no strength to gain escape, as shock robbed her of breath. The long black coat her masked savior always wore had vanished, and in a numbed sort of way Kendall realized it had never been a coat at all, but wings tucked around his body. His torso was covered in a black bulletproof vest that buckled around his back in such a way that it gave his wings total freedom of movement, while still protecting his upper body from harm.
No wonder he’d claimed a cape would get in the way.
I’m dreaming. This has to be a dream.
The speed he achieved was phenomenal, to the point where it was like trying to breathe in a windstorm, and her eyes streamed until she had to tuck her face into his neck in surrender. That somehow made the surrealism worse. With her eyes closed, she was more aware of the faint dip and lift with each wing beat. The muscles in his chest, shoulders and back worked with a power that spoke of absolute supremacy of an action that should not be within his grasp—the power of flight.
He has wings. Dear God, why does he have wings?
Though she was sure she didn’t want to, Kendall peeled her face away from its hiding place against his neck. The bejeweled lights of the city below spread out like a carpet across the land. It was breathtakingly beautiful, the sparkling outline of where the edge of the earth met the absolute darkness that was the Pacific Ocean, broken only by the delicate web of lights that were the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay Bridges. But it wasn’t the spectacular view she was interested in. There was simply no way to stop herself from peering over his massive shoulder to where the trapezoid muscles flowed on either side of his spine into wing base, the shoulder blades somehow acting as an extra joint that provided flexibility to a place that didn’t exist anywhere in Gray’s Anatomy. She tucked her face into his neck once more, but this time it was much harder to hide from the reality of seeing how human flesh blended and blurred into black feathers. Even with her e
yes closed she could see it. See it, and know that this man couldn’t possibly exist.
Yet, this...this impossibility had saved her life three times.
Her stomach dropped as they executed a descent worthy of a WWII dive-bomber, before the sensation of hovering snapped her averted gaze back to their surroundings. A low, hulking mound rose out of the darkness, a craggy shoreline ringed with the whiteness of the crashing surf she could hear above the rush of wind in her ears.
An island?
Stunned they had traveled so far so fast and alarmed she had no clue where she was, Kendall searched through the blackness of night as they descended. The island’s center pointed upward like a shark’s jagged tooth, with a semicircular structure jutting out on one side of this craggy outcropping. Though it was bathed only in the weak light of the moon, she could still see this was a modern building that had come from the mind of either a genius or a madman. It seemed to grow out of the side of the jagged point like a living thing, all curved glass and natural stone with a semicircular balcony overlooking the forbidding surf below, wide enough to land a small plane on.
Or, a single winged man.
As light as the breeze itself, he touched down on the balcony, activating motion-sensitive lights around them. With one last whoosh of his powerful wings, he tucked them back against his body. The steely muscles in the arms that held her bunched as he set her down as if she were made of glass, before he backed away as though fearing she’d haul off and attack him. She could have told him not to bother. It was hard to even think, much less move.
She’d always known The Guardian Angel wasn’t like anyone else. She’d just never imagined how profound that difference was.
“You can’t be near a populated area while that geist is on the loose,” he said, stepping into the shadows that existed in between the mellow pools of light spaced along the balcony’s low wall. “You’ll stay here until I know it’s safe for you to return to the city.”
“Wait.” Horrified that he would just take off—literally—Kendall discovered her feet still worked when she sprang forward. “I don’t think you know what you’re dealing with when it comes to that geist, and...you...” She gulped, because she suddenly realized she was a thin hair away from hyperventilating. “You have wings.”
Really, it had to be said.
Before her eyes, the cloak of night pulled around him like a blanket until she could barely see him. Obviously, that was another one of his spiffy hidden talents. “Yeah.”
“You fly.”
“Not for pleasure. I do it only in cases of extreme emergency.”
“But...seriously, you frigging fly. With wings.”
“I don’t know how else to do it.”
If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was laughing at her. “And your eyes glow, and you have white fire coming from your hands when you’re pissed off.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead to make the madness stop. It didn’t help. “What are you?”
“A mistake.” There was no laughter in his tone now, and the darkness around him grew to an almost tangible density. “You might as well make yourself at home since you’re going to be staying awhile. My grandfather had this place built out here on the Farallon Islands after he worked a deal with a government pal who owed him. To the rest of the world, it’s believed nuclear waste was dumped all along this stretch of the Farallones during the fifties and sixties, but I promise you that’s not the case. You won’t find another living soul for miles, unless you count the sea lions, orcas and great whites. You’ll be fine.”
That sounded so much like farewell she couldn’t help but reach out to him. “Wait—”
“Haven’t you seen enough, Kendall?” He rounded on her so abruptly she nearly stumbled in her haste to stop. “Do you want to see more of the freak show? Do you want to keep looking at me with a terrified expression that says I’m the most wrong thing you’ve ever laid eyes on? Is that what you want to do?”
“No,” she said with forced calm, if only because his words—too accurate for her to deny—slapped her out of her shock better than any hand across the face. “I’m not going to apologize for being stunned. You might be used to having some extra spice in your anatomy, but I’m going to need more than a handful of minutes to make sure I haven’t lost my very last marble. Find a way to cope with that.”
The darkness swirled around him, ominous and impenetrable, before he growled out a sigh. “Fair enough. And for what it’s worth, it’s your world that’s gone crazy, not you.”
“You might not be so sure once I tell you what I think is going on.”
“What do you mean?”
She fished out her phone. “Do you get reception here?”
“Of course.”
Of course. She shook her head and tapped the screen. What sort of secret stronghold would it be for a winged avenger if it didn’t have awesome cell phone reception? “The first and second murder-suicides have one person in common, a young man by the name of James Denton—college student, amateur artist and Internet rapper-wannabe. I spent all day researching him online, and in addition to some emo-gangsta rap lyrics about sucking living souls out of human bodies and feasting on their emotions like the psychic vampire he is, I was particularly interested with his Divine Art site.”
“His what?”
“Divine Art is a hosting Web site where artists from all mediums post their work. And James Denton’s site is an eyeful.” Finding the correct file, she closed the distance separating them and leaned close to show him the screen. “Denton’s called this piece The First Time, and posted it a year ago. I could be wrong in my interpretation, but it seems to me this painting depicts a soul being pulled out of this person here, who looks like she’s falling to the floor in a stupor, maybe even death. The work called The Second Time is much clearer, showing tendrils of what look like cobwebs of energy clinging from the person’s prone body to the soul, with some of those tendrils having already snapped.”
“That’s the geist,” he muttered, leaning closer. “See that swirled thatch of blond hair over the eyes and pug nose? The geist has been warped from being in the physical realm for so long, but those features are still present.”
“I’m not surprised to hear you say that.” She flicked her finger across the screen. “This latest piece posted about two weeks ago is called Puppet Master. It’s more of a self-portrait than the others, because James Denton depicts himself clearly here at the top of the painting, while he holds the strings that control this hideous hunchbacked monster covered in boils. A monster that has that thatch of hair and pug nose you just mentioned.”
“He can see the geist.” His words were faint, stunned. “That’s exactly what the spirit looks like. Denton must be profoundly psychic if he can see it as clearly as I can.”
“I don’t think you fully understand what I’m trying to say. It’s not just that he has the supernatural ability to see it. I believe Denton created the geist.”
That made his attention swing back to her, and though she couldn’t see his eyes through the darkness, she felt them rake over her like a longing caress. “Kendall, I think you might be the one who doesn’t understand. No one can create a geist.”
“If you put his rap lyrics of sucking out souls together with the scene depicted in The Second Time, I believe Denton made this person into a ghost, then kept that ghost with him until the poor thing devolved into a geist. But it gets worse than that.”
“It can’t get much worse than the unnatural removal of a soul from a living body.”
“Since James Denton depicted himself as holding the strings on the geist, and this piece is called Puppet Master, I believe James Denton is psychically controlling that geist to do his bidding.”
“You’re right. That is crazy.” He shook his head while the darkness around him dissolved. “He’s human, Kendall. Humans don’t have that kind of power. I don’t know of anything that has that kind of power.”
“I think I d
o.”
He sighed. “Why am I not surprised?”
“I’ve done research on the thing Denton mentioned in his lyrics—a psychic vampire.” She pressed on, ignoring him. “It’s possible this guy possesses a psychic ability that feeds off another person’s life force, or soul, to the point where he might be able to manipulate it from a living body, and then have it do whatever he wants.”
“But a human using a geist to commit murder? Even if a fraction of this is true—and I’m all but convinced it’s impossible—it’s not like the police can handle something as bizarre as a psychic murderer.”
“Look, I know it sounds insane, but you did say this geist was acting like no other. People who are personally connected to James Denton are dying, and I believe the source could be a psychically gifted human.”
“No.”
“But—”
“No, Kendall. I don’t want to hear another word about this.” Without warning he caught her by the chin and stilled her mouth with a kiss that was searing and hungry and so familiar the shock of it forked through her like lightning. Heat rushed along her nerve endings even as reality had her jerking away, and as she stared into his eyes—those beautiful golden-brown eyes—she didn’t know if her pulse raced from desire or amazement.
“Zeke.”
Chapter Eight
The barks of sea lions on the rocky shore below reached Zeke’s ears as he hunkered down on his favorite perch on the edge of the balcony. Though it was still dark, the sun was making the sky blush over the forty-four hills of San Francisco, and his shift at Bayshore would begin in less than three hours. If this was a normal day he’d be in his apartment, probably headed for a shower and a cup of coffee strong enough to wrestle his eyes open after a long night of searching for that demon who’d slipped his grasp, and the geist that had turned his world upside down.
But this wasn’t a normal day. He was at The Roost, his family’s stronghold, which was to be used only in cases of emergency. And there was no way he was going into work when the one woman who needed his protection had just become the biggest danger he’d ever encountered.