Me and You and a Ghost Named Boo

by Selene Charles

  The muscles in his back trembled as her fingers rested right on top of them. Her eyes grew wide, and her lips parted, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass that she was covered in blood and just seconds ago had been ready to tear into the human’s throat and end its miserably short life. She was his Scarlett and always would be.

  “I had a mom who loved me. A dad. A fiancé,” she whispered.

  He cringed as memories of her soldier’s final seconds replayed through his mind.

  “People who cared. No one cares about me here. No one wants me. No one needs me. I’m just a mons—”

  Placing a finger over her mouth, he silenced her words. “You’re wrong, Scarlett. I care. And you are... loved.”

  She gasped, eyes growing wide and unblinking as she looked at him with a question burning bright in her gaze: Had he meant what she thought he meant?

  Yes, with all his soul.

  “You... love—” Her words were unsure.

  He nodded once, hard. He was still not quite able to say the words but needed her to know, needed her to understand that she had to fight, to stay strong, to remain in the game because it wasn’t just her in this world, but him too.

  Without Scarlett, Mercer would be lost.

  The words of the Darkness still haunted him, but admitting his love for her hadn’t been as hard as he’d first imagined. Nothing life altering had happened. The sky didn’t break in half. The universe didn’t implode.

  She beamed, eyes cast down toward her feet. “God, I’m filthy,” she said, voice shivering with both shame and happiness.

  Unable to resist touching her cheek again, he brushed his thumb down its petal softness. “Go in the back. Take my spare key from the office. You can use my shower. Probably not smart to walk around Silver Creek drenched in blood.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, probably not.” A wide grin cut across her face, making his blood sing in his veins.

  Tonight. He would tell her tonight. To hell with that Darkness and its stupid words. Scarlett wanted him as badly as he wanted her, and he was going to make her his.

  She turned to leave then latched onto his fingers, gripping so tightly he felt the blood rush out of them.

  “Will you come to me when your shift ends?” Her voice shivered with hope and made him tremble.

  Pulse pounding so violently in his chest he could practically taste it, he could only nod.

  Scarlett vanished a second later.

  Mercer stood where he was, shoving his hands into his pockets and grinning like a complete idiot. Clarence was gonna piss his pants when he figured out that his heir apparent was about to irrevocably bind himself to a blood sucker, but Mercer didn’t give two shits.

  Not anymore.

  This was his life, and it was time to live it.

  He turned on his heel, still wearing that smile, only to have it slip a millisecond later when he stared into the glowing eyes of the Darkness.

  She came to him as she always had, wearing a cowl and a cloak of shadows. Fire burned so brightly from within that cowl that it brought instant tears to Mercer’s eyes.

  “What the fu—”

  “I told you to leave her alone. Didn’t I?” Her deep, resonant voice shook the heavens, causing lightning and thunder to crack and roll. The calm wind suddenly howled, barreling through the treetops.

  The world was alive with the sounds of the Darkness’s fury.

  “What?” Mercer snapped. “Why are you here?”

  She lifted her chin, causing a beam of moonlight to glint across her features, exposing the bone of her face. A scrollwork of gleaming gold and silver, tattooed into the bone itself, winked in the faint light.

  Mercer’s skin crawled.

  “You have failed me, dog,” she hissed, shaking her head slowly.

  It was on the tip of Mercer’s tongue to tell her that he’d done everything to protect Scarlett—that she was blossoming into a powerful vampire, one far stronger than almost any he’d encountered at her age—but the moment he opened his mouth, a sudden powerful clamping grabbed hold of his throat.

  Gasping, shuddering, he clutched at the Darkness’s hands, suddenly wrapped tightly around his neck. Lifting him several feet up off the ground as if he weighed nothing, the fires of her eyes sparked and snapped like hell flame.

  “You think you can disobey me?” Her words were low and filled with skin-crawling power. “Never think it.”

  Snap.

  His next blink woke him up in a world full of flames and screams. Fire licked at his flesh. Agony burned through his brain. He roared as dozens of bodiless hands snatched at him, clawing the flesh off his bones as they cackled and shrilled.

  He was dead.

  Then...

  Then he was awake again, lying on the ground by the Darkness’s feet, curled up into a ball of agony as the phantom flames still continued to dance upon his flesh.

  Laughing evilly, she knelt beside him and brushed her hand down the side of his face. That hand, nothing but bones, made him gasp, made his heart jerk violently, made the blood freeze in his veins.

  “What you felt just now was only a taste of the agony you’ll experience if you ever disobey me again. I brought you back, but I can just as quickly send you straight back to Hell. Your choice. But know this, wolf: if you ever tell her you love her again, I won’t just kill you. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill that shell you love so much.”

  Eyes going wide, he forced himself to his unsteady feet, shaking his head and choking on his breaths.

  “You wouldn’t...” He hacked, black spots dancing before his eyes as he wondered if he’d ever be able to breathe right again.

  Blasé laughter surrounded him. “Of course I would. I couldn’t care less about Scarlett. It’s not her you’re protecting, shifter. It’s that beautiful darkness inside of her. Scarlett’s just the shell. She’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

  When he finally managed to work his way home several hours later, he found Scarlett sitting on his sofa, wearing a pair of his sweat pants and an oversized shirt and staring up at him as if he was her whole goddamn world.

  She looked fresh.

  Beautiful.

  God, his heart ached as he rubbed at his chest. He didn’t care what happened to himself, but her... He could never hurt her. His wolf whined deep inside himself, and he felt torn in two, staring at the only woman he’d ever love, knowing he could never make her his.

  Her smile beamed with radiance. “I thought you’d never get home.”

  Forcing antipathy into his words, he walked toward his room without looking back at her. “Well, I’m home. And it’s time for you to leave. I’m tired.”

  “But... Mercer?”

  He’d wanted to keep walking, to slam the door on her and never look back, but the sound of her heart breaking was too much to bear. He turned, feeling dead inside, weighed down by the truth he’d tried like hell to pretend away.

  Scarlett could never be his.

  Not now.

  Not ever.

  “But I thought—” she said softly, eyes looking wild and wide with alarm and confusion.

  He shook his head with laughter welling up and mixed with so much raw pain that he wanted to fucking die from it.

  “C’mon, Scar. You’re a vampire. I’m a shifter. It could never work. You know that. I love you like a brother loves a sister. But that’s it. Now, go home.”

  She gasped, covering her hands with her mouth. “You don’t mean that.”

  Bloody tears dripped from the corners of her eyes, and it was all he could do not to yank her into his arms and rage against the heavens that she was his and always would be.

  But never at the expense of her life. Face crumpling, knowing he was about to destroy any belief in him she’d ever had, he scoffed. “Dammit, Scar. You’re smarter than this. Go home.”

  He wanted to die when she wilted in front of him. His soul jerked in his chest, and his wolf howled within his head at her look of total and absolute devastation.

>   Then that spine of steel she’d always possessed took hold, and she shook her head, flicking her wild hair away from her eyes, turned blood red. Her face had begun to shift, reforming in her anger into that of her own beast.

  She yanked his shirt and pants off herself and tossed them at him, standing before him naked, her small but perfectly rounded rose-tipped nipples heaving with each furious breath she took.

  Mercer forgot how to breathe as his gaze devoured her, memorizing each dip and luscious curve of her body, the soft swell of her stomach, the smoothness of her thighs, the groomed hairs between them. Goddamn to know now what she looked like but never to touch her. Never to hold her. Scarlett couldn’t have a fucking clue what this did to him. How he wanted to rage. How he wanted to destroy and kill and do whatever the fuck he needed to do to try to burn her out of his system, to excise her from his soul.

  But he never could, and that was a torture all its own.

  Scarlett was so damn gorgeous it felt as if something had just shoved a fist through his chest and ripped out his mangled heart.

  “Fuck you, Mercer! You’re just like the rest of them. Thinking you’re too good for me. But you’re not. None of you are. And someday, you’re gonna know that.” She nodded, turned on her heel, and made for the door.

  “Be careful!” he called to her back, voice cracking, because whether she ever knew it or not, the truth he felt to the very marrow of him would never change.

  She snorted. “Screw you.”

  Then she was gone, leaving only the trace of her sunshine behind, and he stared with unseeing eyes, his future opening up before him in all its bleak glory. Kneeling with suddenly trembling hands, he swiped up the shirt she’d worn and brought it to his nose, sniffing deeply as the bloody ribbons of his shattered heart fractured within him.

  Tipping his head back, he howled long and low and deep into the night.

  Chapter 2

  Scarlett

  Present Day

  “You know I hate it when you leave.” I pouted at James, who held my hands in his. His thumbs brushed slowly across my knuckles as we stood on the tarmac of the Silver Creek regional airport.

  The sky above us was a soft shade of dusk, somewhere between navy and violet. The sun had weakened to the point of nonexistence, but still I squirmed on my heels. I wasn’t really a fan of sunlight, which probably had something to do with the whole being-a-vampire thing.

  “Scar.” James said my name with a touch of exasperation and fondness. “Don’t do this, lass. We talked about this last night. I’ll be back.”

  “Yeah, possibly in twenty years. Maybe never.” I crossed my arms.

  Life had finally been settling back down to something close to normal. It’d been four months since Sharp Elbows had tried to kill me and three since Mercer had been wrongfully imprisoned for a murder he’d not committed.

  During much of that time, James—having resworn his fealty to Clarence, Silver Creek’s Alpha, and the Wolf Pack—had been mostly absent. That was the life of one of the Alpha’s royal guards. They were basically what the Secret Service was to the President. If Clarence told them to jump, they had no choice but to ask, “How high, furry master?”

  In some ways, I understood it—maybe even felt a touch of relief about it if I was totally honest with myself—but I didn’t like it either.

  He shook his head as his jaw popped from side to side. “Ye ken the why of it, Scar.”

  Yeah, I knew why. Cuz Clarence was in deep dog doo with the Alpha council, not to mention there was still that not-so-insignificant matter of possibly being an oath breaker to deal with. James might work for Clarence, but everyone in Silver Creek knew he was the Alpha councils’ eyes and ears for the time being, which meant the already testy shifters of the Creek were even more hormonal and pissy than usual.

  “You shouldn’t have to heel every single damn time they call his number. That’s all I’m saying.” I knew full well that Clarence, with his super-sensitive wolfy hearing heard me, even strapped into the jet as he was, but we weren’t exactly chums, anymore. The blood was bad, and everyone knew it. “He’s already been called back to Ireland once. Why can’t they just freaking decide his fate and leave it at that?”

  His chuckle was deep and mellifluous. That was one of the things I liked about James—his accent, that hint of wildness in him that came from being over six centuries old and having literally seen the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. He was a caveman forced to assimilate to a modern world.

  James and I weren’t officially a couple. We hung out a lot and in some ways had become one another’s confidants, especially since Mercer’s obvious distancing of himself from me ever since I’d sprung him from lock up and James had returned to my bed.

  I wasn’t sure why Mercer was acting as he was. I’d offered Merc my heart on a bloody platter, making myself weak and vulnerable to him, begging him to be honest with me and let me know if he felt for me as I’d felt for him.

  Still felt for him, truthfully.

  His answer had been nothing but silence and walls. I got it. He didn’t want me, not as a lover, possibly not even as a friend anymore.

  It hurt, but it was what it was.

  “Hey.” James tipped my chin up, forcing me to look deep into his steady gaze.

  Staring down a full-blooded vampire wasn’t the wisest thing to do. We vamps tended to be sneaky sonsofbitches at the best of times, but I wasn’t much like the rest of my undead brethren.

  Any vampire worth his or her salt would never be where I was now, standing on a busy, loud tarmac as jets jettisoned off the runway, surrounded by a pack of shifters all saying their goodbyes.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught the movement of a small shadow hugging a larger one. The breeze shifted, causing my nostrils to flare as I caught the heady scent of bergamot and soap.

  Mercer had brought Steven with him that day to say goodbye to their father. I’d promised to take Steven out for ice cream the next night. The poor little pup wasn’t handling the death of his mother well. I mean, who would, right? I was doing only tolerably better because I had no choice in the matter.

  Though my parents had died a grisly death, they’d also been close to eighty and sadly, very human. I’d known it’d only been a matter of time for them.

  But shifters were supposed to live a hell of a lot longer than Lucille had.

  “I’m gonna be fine, lassie. You know this. But...” James’s brows lowered, and again that weird mood burned between us.

  I’d been sensing for several days that James had been wanting to tell me something but just hadn’t known how. I’d been through enough breakups in my life to know what this was.

  “Just say it, Jamie.” I gripped his fingers tightly as my stomach flipped.

  “I’ll always be here for you, Scar. But I can’t rest in this relationship, knowing that there’s another who owns your heart.”

  I clenched my teeth, telling myself to say nothing, to let him speak his piece, but I wasn’t the only one clinging fast to a ghost. He and I both knew it.

  He shrugged. “Mebbe it’s time we took a break. Learn to be friends first.”

  I snorted, laughing, but not because I thought any of this was funny. “Yeah, sure. Whatever you want.”

  “C’mon, lass, be honest with yourself here. You know I’m right, okay? It wasn’t as if I didn’t know where you and Mercer stood when I was coming for you.”

  “Fine. I get that. But don’t tell me I’m the only one because we both know that’s horse shit.”

  He blinked. Gunmetal-gray eyes turned knowing before he finally dipped his head. “Isobel will always be my first and truest love. And there’s no denying it. I’ve no desire to. But I do care for you, vampire. Deeply.”

  Tugging on my arms, he tried to pull me in for a hug, but I resisted him at first. After the third try, I finally capitulated, resting my cheek against his chest. His swiftly beating heart was a soothing melody to my ears.

  I kn
ew Jamie inside and out, in every way imaginable. I’d taken him into my body in more ways than one. I cared for him too. Deeply.

  In many ways, he was right, though.

  I was trying like hell to move on, to not let my unstable vampiric emotions get the better of me. When I thought about the distance between Mercer and me, it literally made me sick to my stomach.

  James hadn’t judged me for that. I’d always been honest with him, and he with me.

  His hands were steady as they brushed at my lower spine. “We’ll be gone many weeks at best, months at worst. I don’t want you staying with me only because you’re loyal. Because that’s not fair to either one of us. Vampires have needs.”

  I snorted. “So do wolves, you mangy dog. Don’t think for a second I don’t know what this is. You’ll be in a different zip code, yeah, I know how this works.”

  “Scar.” He rolled my name with that sexy burr of his, and I wanted to punch him for it.

  Instead, I curled my nails into his chest and squeezed, letting him know I was still there.

  That bastard wielded his voice like a sharpened blade against me, and it worked every time. “That’s not what this is, woman, and well you ken it.”

  James’s words were nothing but sensible. There was only one problem. His Isobel had died centuries before. If she’d still been around, his eyes would never even have turned my way. Logically, I got that. Still sucked, though. No matter how much I cared for James, Mercer still held my heart fast.

  I resented him for it, resented him because he’d been the one to bring all those feelings out of me, only to then push me away in the end, but feelings weren’t reasonable or even sane. They simply were.

  I couldn’t help that anymore than James could his eternal devotion to his long-ago vampire bride.

  “I hate that you’re right.”

  “As always,” he chuckled.

  I snorted. “Don’t push it, Viking.”

  “Wheels up in ten!” The loud, booming voice of Medusa cut through our tender moment. A jack of all trades, she could swing a mean ax, fight like a beast on ’roids, and pilot a jet clear to another continent.

  Clarence had only ever surrounded himself with the best of everything.