The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  A strip of pictures lay there.

  He pulled them out, noticing that they were muddied, stained and punctured. He turned them over. They were the missing second set of pictures.

  The strip that was supposed to have been his.

  In each picture, TJ’s face had been stabbed repeatedly.

  Penknife? Nail? Mike didn’t know. Couldn’t guess.

  But he knew where he was going next.

  Mike stood in the snow at the end of Brandon’s steep driveway, unable to force his feet up the walk. He knew he had to talk to Brandon. Confront him.

  He knew the answer to his questions, and maybe the end of his years-long search, lay at the top of that hill. But he was frozen at the foot of the drive, kept there by some barrier inside himself he couldn’t cross.

  The drive to Brandon’s home curved from the street up the hill to the estate. The house hunkered at the top of the hill, blank-eyed and forbidding, a darker smear against the lead-grey sky.

  No lights were on.

  Brandon might have decided to take his honeymoon alone, Mike thought.

  Or maybe, when Mike told him TJ was back, he’d decided to leave the country for good.

  The answers were up the hill.

  Mike kept standing at the bottom, shaking. He was going to lose the man who had been his best friend since he was ten. And he realized TJ wasn’t coming back because she was dead. The two people Mike had loved most in his life were gone, and he couldn’t find the strength to walk up the hill and find out whatever truth waited there.

  I should have stayed in the car and driven up to the house, he thought, and then couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t done just that.

  At that moment, though, he caught movement from the wooded lot behind the house.

  Light. Faint, pale light.

  Whatever force had nailed his feet to the ground released him, and he started walking toward that light, and then running, and then racing as if his life depended on it.

  “TJ!” he shouted, but his voice disappeared into the darkness and the falling snow.

  The light started moving toward him, toward him.

  He slowed.

  The light was TJ. Dressed in jeans and a Silver Obsession T-shirt, without sweater or coat or gloves or boots to keep her warm.

  She watched him solemnly, and stopped as he drew close to her. Waiting.

  Waiting in a place he never would have thought to look for her. The place she would never have come on her own.

  He knew what he was seeing, and he knew why, but he didn’t want to admit it. He wanted to think that when he reached for her, he would be able to touch her. That when he wrapped his arms around her, he’d be able to pull her close.

  “You found me,” she said when they were close enough to touch. “You promised you’d find me. And you found me.”

  He nodded. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t find a way to force words to move past his tear-choked throat.

  Why had she come to him during Brandon’s wedding? If she’d been on Brandon’s property all along, why hadn’t she reached out to him sooner?

  “I have things I have to tell you,” she told him. He moved toward her, but she backed up a step and held up her hand to stop him. “Listen first. This is important.”

  “Brandon did this to you,” he croaked.

  She nodded. “He followed the bus, caught me when we stopped for gas, told me you’d been hurt in an accident on your way home, said you were in the hospital and you were asking for me. He said he was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  “And you went with him.”

  “Of course. I didn’t get my things off the bus, didn’t waste time letting anyone know I was going. I figured I’d catch up with them. But I would have gone with him if you’d scraped your knee and asked for me. I was missing you so much I couldn’t think from the second I got on that bus.”

  “How long had he been after you?”

  “After me?”

  “Stalking you.”

  “He wasn’t after me, Mike. Not the way you think, anyway. I think he snapped that day, when I left and he realized even with me gone, you still didn’t see him the way he saw you.”

  “But he killed you.”

  She nodded. “He took me to my hiding place in the barn.”

  “I’d told him about it. I just thought you were so cool for making a place like that for yourself. I never, ever thought anyone would use it to hurt you.” Mike closed his eyes and focused on breathing slowly, the only trick he’d ever learned to calm himself that actually worked. He’d given Brandon the tools to destroy her. He thought of those bloody handcuffs, imagined her up there, begging for mercy, and Brandon— “What did he do to you?”

  “Not what you think. He gagged me, dragged me up there, handcuffed me to the wall so I had to listen to him, and offered me an ungodly amount of money to disappear from your life. He was calm at first. Fighting hard to sound reasonable, and to keep me from seeing how desperate he was. He offered to fund my career, get me meetings with the biggest guys in the music business. Offered to pay for production and distribution for every album I made if they wouldn’t sign me. Promised no matter what it cost, he’d make sure I had the career I wanted – the career I’d fought so hard for. He told me he’d make sure I wouldn’t have to do crummy tours. He kept pointing to all the things in my corner of the barn that were reminders of my dreams of singing and writing songs and being famous. He said that I was lucky. That I had a big dream, a magnificent dream. He told me I could have a wonderful life just having that dream come true.

  “And then he told me you were the only big dream he’d ever had. He said all he’d ever wanted since you guys were boys was for you to look at him some day and see him the way he saw you. For you to love him back.”

  Mike said, “I didn’t figure that out until today.”

  “He feared rejection by you more than anything else in the world. So he made sure you would never guess he was gay. That until you loved him, he wasn’t going to let you know how he loved you.”

  “All the men in the world who would have loved him back, and he wanted someone who never would. Not that way, anyway.”

  “I understood how he felt. If I’d made my deal with him, I could have found anyone in the world to replace you. But to do that, I would have had to give you up. You. And he didn’t understand that you were bigger than my music, or that I could want to go on crummy tours and have you not with me, as long as I knew you were making your dreams real, too. He didn’t understand us.”

  “No,” Mike agreed. “He could never figure out why I loved you.”

  TJ said, “I was stupid to refuse his offer, though. I could have walked away from the barn if I’d just been thinking. I didn’t consider that with what he’d done, he couldn’t just let me go back to my regular life. And he didn’t consider, of course, that I wouldn’t have a price – that he couldn’t buy me.” She sighed. “If I’d been smarter, I would have agreed, then found a way to get word to you, and given him his money back. But I wasn’t smarter. And neither was he.”

  Mike’s fists knotted into balls. “What did he do?”

  “First, he started crying. Hard, scary crying. The kind of crying you do when you look at everything you ever wanted, and it’s dead on the floor, burning, crushed, no way to save any of it. Then he got up and climbed down the ladder, and I could hear him still crying while he was digging around down there. He didn’t say what he was going to do, but I knew. It wasn’t until then that I realized I could have worked with him and saved myself, but I’d trapped him. So I fought to get away. He came back upstairs with my father’s cattle gun.”

  She paused. “He’d stopped crying by then, but he still looked sick and scared. He told me, ‘I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this, but I can’t let you go.’ He held the stunner to my head. I was terrified. And then it was over.”

  She stopped, and stood there looking at him.

  Mike thought through everything she’d
told him, considered Brandon, considered everything Brandon had done. And he came to an ugly realization. “You couldn’t have saved yourself.”

  “If I’d agreed to his plan, he would have let me go. You didn’t see him. He was devastated.”

  “I believe he was. But not for the reason you think. If he’d truly believed he could buy you out, he would have met you in a restaurant with his checkbook. He wouldn’t have dragged you to the barn where, I’m guessing, he already had the handcuffs nailed to the wall. He did, didn’t he?”

  She nodded slowly. She didn’t say anything, so Mike continued. “So he’d already made the trip there before he took you there. Premeditation. He’d thought out his plan. And Brandon is the least spontaneous person I know. He never does anything he hasn’t planned in at least six directions.

  “He never believed you loved me, TJ. He always thought some day you were going to break my heart. And I think he wanted to fool himself into thinking he would give you a chance – that if you gave him what he wanted, he would let you go. Some part of him was pretending that he could live with you still out there, able to go back on your word and seek me out at any time. But from the moment he decided what he was going to do, some part of him knew that he wasn’t going to be able to drag you into the barn and handcuff you to the walls and then let you walk out of there alive, no matter what you promised.”

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  “He knew what he was going to end up doing the moment you got into his car. If you’d agreed to take his bribe, he would have killed you without regret, because you would have proven to him you could be bought, and he would have told himself you weren’t good enough for me. As it was, he knew he’d been wrong about you, and you were the person I’d always known you were. Which made you a bigger threat. He still couldn’t set you free – and he didn’t want to, because he had to know I’d always choose you.”

  TJ closed her eyes. “He didn’t understand how true that was. He killed me, stuffed me into my sleeping bag and dumped me in the abandoned well at the back of this property. Then he used my email account to tell my parents I’d gone to Argentina. But he lost you anyway, because you gave up everything that mattered to you, including your painting, and being his best friend, to look for me.” She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “I felt so sad for him, for how desperate he was, and how much he hurt. Even when he killed his first wife—”

  “He what!”

  “Right. I knew about that because I saw him do it. I forget no one else knows. It looked like an accident, but it wasn’t. He went through with the whole thing – dated her, pretended to be her perfect man so she’d fall in love with him, and then killed her – all so you would know that he’d had someone who loved him, and she’d died. He wanted you to think he’d lost even more than you had, because he’d lost a wife who died, while you just lost a girlfriend you thought dumped you. He did it so you’d stop searching for me and go to him.”

  “Did he kill the second one?”

  “No. He thought maybe the reason you were still looking for me by that time was because I’d shamed you. He’d walk around his house muttering to himself about it. He thought if he had someone who did that to him, and he got over her and the humiliation of what she did, he could convince you to get over me.”

  “And when I didn’t?”

  “That’s when I got scared for you. Yesterday’s wedding was an enormous, expensive charade. He hired the bride and her fake family and the pretend minister, and paid them to act out that whole terrible scene so he could talk you into taking off with him for a month to help him get over this latest humiliation.”

  “His whole purpose in that wedding was to get me to go on his honeymoon with him?”

  “Yes. Only this time, you were in danger. The tickets weren’t for Aruba. They were for Argentina. No extradition. He had a passport for you, a house there, well away from everyone and everything. He intended to make you love him. The way he tried to make me agree to leave you.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “I had to warn you. It took everything I had to make myself visible to you. I was just lucky he left me on his own property. Making myself visible to someone alive gets harder the further I am from my body.”

  “So you saved my life.”

  TJ walked over, her eyes sad. She wrapped her arms around him, and he was stunned that she was warm. That he could feel her. He pulled her close, knowing as he did that he was hallucinating or was wishing he felt something he couldn’t feel. But for whatever time he could trick himself into believing this was all real, he would.

  Her cheek on his neck was warm and soft. Exactly as he remembered it. Exactly as he dreamed it. Her hair smelled like sunshine, her body was full and firm.

  She held him tightly, rocking slowly with him from side to side. “I want you to know that if you stay calm and just hold on to me now, you’ll be able to make your choices when you understand what they are. If you panic, I’m going to lose you again.”

  “What choices?”

  “There’s a moment when you realize something is true, and no matter how bad it is, you’re suddenly . . . free. I don’t know a better way to describe it. You know it doesn’t bind you anymore. You know you aren’t chained to it anymore. This is going to be one of those moments – and you have to know that sometimes, for some people, choosing to be bound is better than choosing freedom.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Are you cold, Mike?”

  “Well, no, but I have a coat and a hat and boots and . . .”

  “Do you?”

  He let go of her, stepped back, and looked down at himself. He wasn’t wearing a coat. Or boots. He was standing in the snow in a black tuxedo and a grey silk cummerbund, glossy black shoes and a starched white shirt.

  TJ said, “Brandon had an accident yesterday. He panicked when you told him you’d seen me. He was going to knock you out and take you with him, to try to convince you that you loved him. Only he hit you too hard.”

  “The Argentinian—” Mike said, then stopped. “Brandon killed you five years ago and made up the story of you running off, so of course there was never an Argentinian. He just yelled that so I’d turn my back to him.”

  “Yes.” TJ took his hands in hers and pulled him close to her again. “Brandon lost everything that mattered to him yesterday. I still might. You don’t have to.”

  “Talk to me, TJ. Make sense.”

  “You know the truth now. You died yesterday. So any second there’s going to be a bright light, and you’re going to be able to step into it and leave here.”

  “So we’ll step into the light together,” Mike said, “and live happily ever after.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. I turned away from the light when it came for me, because you didn’t know what had happened to me, and I couldn’t let you wonder. I knew someday I’d find a way to tell you what happened. And then, I realized maybe I could save your life – only that didn’t work.” She pulled back from him just enough to look up into his face. “I stayed, and now I can never leave. The light only comes for you once.”

  “Then when it comes, I won’t go. I’ll hold you until it gets here, and I’ll tell it to go away.”

  They stood holding each other. The light didn’t appear.

  They held each other for a long time. The light still didn’t appear.

  TJ said, “Mike? I don’t understand. Did you already see the light?”

  Mike considered. “I was in the shower this morning, horrible headache, looked like death warmed over when I saw myself in the mirror. And I got these blinding concussion halos—”

  “What were you doing when you got them?”

  “Figuring out how to find you.”

  “Did you have any urge to relax and embrace the light?”

  “No. I had the urge to take something for the headache to make it go away so it would stop distracting me, because I’d promised you I would find you, and for th
e first time in five years, I knew you were somewhere out there to be found.”

  “You promised, so you stayed.” She laughed. “Mike, you’re the only person in the world who would look at your invitation to the afterlife as a bother to be fixed with two aspirin, rather than as something glorious you were giving up.”

  “Not true. I’m the only person in the world who had a chance to find something more glorious than some shiny afterlife.” He looked down at her and grinned, and saw her smile in return, that luminous smile he’d seen for the first time on their first date. “So. We both gave up Heaven. Or whatever was supposed to come next. Does that mean we get to spend eternity here?”

  “If I have my way, it does. You kept your promises, Mike. You remembered me, you believed in me, and you found me. You didn’t quite have to march into Hell to do it . . . but close enough. And I kept my promise, too.”

  He studied her intently. “I never asked you for a promise.”

  “I made one anyway. On our very first date, when I knew you were the one I wanted to be with.”

  He closed his eyes and pulled her close, and she was warm and round and soft in his arms. He nuzzled her hair, and she smelled of summer and sunlight. “What was your promise?”

  And when he opened his eyes, they were in the middle of summer, in the hollow down by the stream, sitting on a blanket with a picnic basket between them, and she smiled at him like he was her hero, and she was the fire inside of the sun.

  She walked to their tree, once again unscarred, and trailed her finger across the bark. In its wake, her promise glowed gold.

  TJ

  +

  MK

  >>>--4EVR--->

  Author Biographies

  C. T. Adams

  C. T. Adams is a USA Today bestselling author and winner of the RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in Paranormal Romance. She frequently co-authors with Cathy L. Clamp and also publishes on her own under the pen name Cat Adams. Adams and Clamp have written the popular Blood Singer, Tales of the Sazi and Kate Reilly/Thrall series.