Me and You and a Ghost Named Boo

by Selene Charles

  Full lips tugged up at the corners as she inclined her head with an almost regal air. “Deal.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath, ready to take the hand the witch had offered me when Mercer swooped in and slammed his palm against hers.

  “A vow to the darkness that binds.” His words were blades dipped in honey.

  A golden wash of light sealed their handshake, and I shook my head as panic stole my breath. What the hell had he done? He’d sealed the deal with his own soul.

  “Mercer, what the fu—”

  “I can and I have,” he shot back furiously, jumping to his feet and growing impossibly big before my very eyes.

  The man was being superseded by the wolf. Soon, he’d be nothing but instinct and animalistic aggression.

  I looked at him in shock, but he stared at me with a raw intensity and furious hunger that stole the words from my lungs. The air between us shivered with the ripples of his beast coming to life. My skin broke out in goose pimples, and I wet my lips, responding to the wildness that lay within him.

  I’d never been afraid of Mercer’s wolf. In fact, I’d always craved more of it. His pupils dilated even as his face began the process of transformation. His jaw grew long, extending, his fangs punched out, and his brows became thick and disproportionate.

  My breathing hitched, responding to his demon in the only way I ever had.

  “I swore an oath to protect you always.” Real anger trembled through his thick words. His voice wasn’t a man’s but a beast’s. It was gravel and whiskey and fire. The room suddenly filled with the sharp claws of his displeasure as his blazing eyes raked down my body possessively.

  Growls rumbled from deep within his chest, even more massive than normal. Mercer was now half man, half shifter. He was the stuff of nightmares, and my monster bit its lip with undisguised lust.

  With a mighty roar that caused spittle to fly from his lips, he dove in, taking my mouth into his, slashing through my lips with his fangs as he sank them deep into my tender flesh.

  This kiss wasn’t about love or passion or even desire. It was darkness and fury and wonder. I shoved my tongue between his lips, sucking in a trembling breath as his sharp teeth sliced my nerve-rich flesh, but I didn’t stop, only groaning at the exquisite pain and pleasure.

  Mercer, lost in his own haze, banded one arm around my waist, yanked me in tightly and shoved a thick bulge against my leg that had me desperate and squirming.

  Wolves were primal creatures. They didn’t think beyond meeting the most basic of needs and wants: sex, blood, adrenaline. That’s what fed him, and that’s what was fueling him.

  I wasn’t a shifter, and I’d never before seen Mercer that crazed or wild, but in a few seconds, his beast was going to fight to the death, and fighting, just like sex, was part of the very primal and basic nature of a shifter’s identity.

  Blood ran between us as I returned the fire of his passion, curling my claws into his back, lost in the adrenaline-fueled haze that was elemental and necessary.

  When he tore away from me, I whimpered in anxiety and desperation for more. The wolf in his eyes practically gleamed with satisfaction, and my heart thudded violently in my throat.

  I’d not realized I’d been drinking from him until I felt the rush of his power coiling through me.

  Mercer was my addiction, my desire, my everything.

  He started moving away from me.

  “You can’t do this!” I screamed at him, trying to grab his hand and yank him back as he turned for the door.

  He shook his head. “Deal’s been done, Scarlett. Let me go.” His voice was only slightly less feral than before.

  Helplessly, I looked toward Jezebel, but she only cackled and ran a long fingernail along her bottom lip hungrily. The whites of her eyes glowed, and sexual desire pulsed off her in thick, cloying waves.

  Fuck, I was losing my mind, having done what I’d just done with Mercer in there, but I’d never been able to resist his wolf, and he’d never done to me what he’d just done.

  I shook my head, clutched my hands together, and weakly whispered, “No.”

  The shifter that just moments before had violently and wonderfully fucked my mouth then trailed a tender knuckle down my cheek. His eyes blazed the green of neon, and for just a moment, I didn’t see the wildness of his beast but the tenderness of the man.

  Then he was gone, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop him.

  Chapter 16

  Mercer

  He felt her. Even in a sea of bodies, his wolf was attuned to Scarlett. She was terrified for him, but he couldn’t allow himself to think about her.

  They needed the charm, and no way in hell would he let her into that cage. Scarlett could’ve handled herself, but he didn’t trust the witch to hold up to her end of the bargain.

  Sacrifices had to be made, and he would risk the safety of his pack and his people to protect her. That was an oath he’d made to the Darkness decades before and one that still held sway over him even all those years later.

  Cracking his neck from side to side, Mercer stepped through the cage, ignoring the taunts and jeers of the frenetic crowd raging around him. His wolf was awake, pacing, jittery, furious, and thrumming off the taste and touch of his female.

  Men and women slammed their hands against the cage, rocking the wire as they screamed at him with faces contorted, bloated full of greed and lust. Women bared their bodies to him—some men, too—telling him they’d give him anything, everything if he won.

  Money was counted and exchanged.

  Needing to drown out the sea of emotions all around him, Mercer closed his eyes, quieting the hum and the noise with one thought in mind. For her. Always for her.

  His wolf paced but stilled, growing more aware, less feral, sharper to the scents and the ebb and flow of energy all around.

  Moon madness was a disease any wolf could sink into at any time if he let his primitive side reign too long. The man must always be in charge of the beast.

  The cage door swung open, and Mercer sniffed the air, going stiff not a moment later.

  Eyes flashing open, he felt the beast rising inside himself, confused, annoyed, and furious. Walking into the cage was a female.

  However, it wasn’t her gender that incited his wolf—it was her: brown hair, brown eyes, short, pretty, vampire. The rosy bloom of Et Prochrae stained her features, but she wasn’t Scarlett.

  He roared, and his wolf raged in its cage. The witch was playing dirty, trying to throw him off, trying to make him hesitate, but a wolf always knew its mate.

  Rolling his shoulders back, he gave in to the beast, keeping just enough of a rein to let it know he still ruled. Then he charged.

  ~*~

  Scarlett

  I stared in horror as a female who bore a striking resemblance to me entered the arena. Mercer went stock-still, and my pulse lurched as I took an infinitesimal step toward him, shaking my head.

  Jezebel was trying to get under his skin, trying to trip him up. She was sadistic and cruel. Then with a mighty roar, Mercer charged.

  The battle was ferocious. The female, unaware of Mercer’s innate knowledge of vampires, tried to mesmerize him with a look, but Mercer quickly glanced to one side before pouncing.

  With no hesitation, no compunction, half-shifted between man and beast, he wrapped his mighty jaws around her throat and sank his fangs in. Giving his head a rough shake, he tore out a section of her windpipe. No blood appeared, which told me she’d not fed in at least twenty-four hours.

  Her face transformed into one I myself was familiar with, sunken cheeks and curving fangs. A liquid leaked from the tip of her left canine, and I clutched my throat.

  “Mercer, move!” I roared, but I knew he’d not heard me when she sank the tooth into his wrist.

  He batted her away like a human swatting at a gnat. The wound wasn’t deep and didn’t seem life-threatening, but it was.

  She was an envenomator, and within an hour, Mercer would be fig
hting for his life. He knew that. I knew he knew that by the way his shoulders stiffened for just a flash of a second.

  He was an Alpha, though, and would not lose the war. Grabbing her by the neck, he flipped her over, slamming her so hard to the ground that, even from my vantage point a floor level up, I felt the thunderous ripple of it vibrate through the soles of my boots.

  I knew the moment she landed on her back, she was done. The vampiress screamed, scrabbling at his hand to try to shake him off her, but Mercer was ruthless.

  Shoving his fangs into her belly, he eviscerated her, tearing her apart limb from limb. The savagery and brutality of his attack made me breathless.

  Mercer was a thing of raw, unmitigated strength, and I wasn’t the only one to note it. The crowd, which just seconds before had been animated with bloodlust, gazed on in both shock and awe.

  With one final twist of his head, he spat a chunk of flesh from his teeth, and with as graceful a movement as any predator’s, stood to his feet. Neon eyes found mine without even trying.

  His hair was down, hanging in sweaty strands around his chiseled face. His chest heaved for air, and I clutched my hands to my breasts, terrified for him.

  “Winner!” The fight announcer stepped forward, a raven-haired witch in a long black gown grabbed his hand and lifted it high.

  The crowd, which had gone momentarily quiet, roared with satisfaction. A blue bolt of light shot up from the body on the ground, rushing toward the office just to the right of me, and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.

  I was frozen with terror because I could see what others couldn’t: the pinched look around his eyes, the way his lower jaw trembled, and the beads of sweat leaking more forcefully from within him.

  I stood where I was, letting him walk toward me. No one tried to stop him. All eyes were already trained on the next set of fighters.

  His mouth pinched as he took the final step toward me. He smelled of musk, wolf, man, and something noxiously sweet.

  I held out my hand to him.

  He took it, and that was the moment shivers wracked his large frame.

  Using all my strength to help keep him upright so that nobody noticed his weakness, I ran with him, keeping a tight hold on his jeans as his legs threatened to give out from under him. A groan tore from his throat, fueling my panic. When I finally got to Jezebel’s office, I didn’t bother knocking. Instead, I kicked it open.

  The blind witch sat laughing, her look knowing, expectant.

  “You bitch!” I screamed, desperately hanging on as the spasms began an uncontrollable assault on his limbs. “You did that on purpose. You made her look like me. You tried to kill him.”

  “Never said it would be easy, I. He won. Take your charm. Go.” She flicked her wrist at a necklace lying on her desk.

  It was a small golden cross on a necklace, but I recognized a faint pulse of powerful magick behind it.

  “You need to fix him,” I snarled. “Right fucking now!”

  That time, her laugh sounded amused, insolent. “Do I? This not how it goes, vampire. You want? You give back.”

  Mercer coughed, and I could smell the blood on his breath. My heart trembled, within an hour, he’d be dead. No way in hell could I get to an antidote in time, but the witch could. I knew she could. Triumph gleamed in her eyes.

  She’d designed the whole situation to happen as it had.

  “Why?” I snarled. “We did what you asked.”

  “Because I want you, girl.” She snapped her teeth at me. “You taste of fire.”

  Envenomators seldom killed. Their bite to another vampire wasn’t lethal so much as an annoyance. Trolls and dwarves, with their thick hides, could also process the majority of the venom out of their system so that, though it hurt like a son of a bitch, they wouldn’t die from it.

  Shifters and vampires, though, were the ultimate yin and yang. We were designed for the sole purpose of eradicating one another’s kind. I gently set Mercer down in one seat, dragged the other to him, and propped up his leg.

  His eyes had rolled to the back of his head, and foam was gathering at the corners of his mouth. Whatever the bitch had hit him with, she’d given him everything. That shit was moving like lightning through him, and Mercer might not have had even an hour. Jezebel laughed.

  Unable to tear my eyes off of him, I felt my heart seizing inside me. No way in hell was I going to watch the man I loved die. Not like this. Not like fucking this.

  “Put me in the ring. I win, I get the antidote,” I said, voice flat.

  He jerked, opening bloodshot eyes and coughing manically as he shook his head. “Scar.” His voice sounded like a bed of bloody razors. “No.”

  I shook my head, yanking my hand out of his pitifully weak one as he tried to hold me to him.

  “Deal.” She held out her hand.

  I took it.

  “By the darkness that binds.” As I swore the oath, a flash of heated power immediately poured through my limbs.

  Grabbing my chest, I curled my lips at the sensation of shackles binding me to her. I had no way out of the agreement.

  Mercer howled, the sound a mix of both pain and agony.

  “Shh, sweetheart.” I leaned over him and kissed his wet brow.

  He whimpered, clutching at me.

  “Shh. I’ll make you better. I promise.”

  “Scar,” he wheezed.

  I turned and left, the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.

  ~*~

  I had to wait an eternity to get the next match, five minutes of standing there, waiting and desperate.

  Every second I wasn’t fighting was another second that brought Mercer closer to death. I didn’t give a shit who they threw at me. I was gonna win. By hook or crook, I was gonna take the M.F.er down.

  Suddenly, I didn’t care that the person was going to lose their soul to the abomination back in that room. Nothing mattered but Mercer.

  Wiping my mouth off with the back of my hand, I tasted his blood and sweat on me. I should never have allowed him to take my spot in the first place, not that I could have stopped the stubborn bastard because that’s just who Mercer was, but he shouldn’t have done it, not for me—for his brother, his pack, sure—but not for me, a vampire who was nothing to him and could never be anything to him.

  James’s words echoed like thunder in my ears, and I realized that even though I thought I had been pushing Mercer away, I hadn’t. I’d been drawing him closer, making myself believe we could somehow still be friends, somehow still make a relationship work, but I’d almost let him get killed tonight because of me.

  “Go, vampire.” An angry male voice cut through my thoughts as someone gave me a stiff shove from behind toward the cage.

  I was shocked to realize the mat was already being watered down to get rid of the blood from the last violent match and that something else was already standing inside the cage, waiting on me.

  I wet my lips as I slowly marched up the steps, studying the figure before me.

  That it had fae heritage I had no doubt. Sharply pointed ears stood up in bold relief beside a face that looked softly innocent and young though I knew nubile skin was often a deception of the fae.

  The creature might have been a girl but could just as easily have been a boy. Its skin was pale, dusted with a fine layer of freckles all over, and it had shaggy auburn hair that lay haphazardly around its face.

  Its body was lanky, willowy, like that of most fae, its clothes so baggy that I still couldn’t tell gender, not that it mattered.

  The door slammed shut behind us, locking us in. I started, realizing what was about to happen, what I would be forced to do.

  Death wasn’t uncommon in Oz, but as a lawman, I waged an internal battle with my own sense of ethics. Intrinsically, I understood that the creature had signed away its rights just as I had and that we belonged to the blind witch until one or both of us fell.

  The thing looked young and innocent, though, and the only thing keeping me there
was the terrible realization that Mercer was slowly dying upstairs.

  I’d often said I would kill for him if push came to shove.

  Closing my eyes, I whispered a heartfelt apology to my opponent, knowing they’d never hear it, slipped my jacket off, and tossed it to the ground beside me.

  Thank God I’d opted for combat boots instead of fuck-me heels.

  Everything seemed to slow for me, the noise and the freneticism of the crowd. It all condensed into a tight spherical bubble of time where I was able to absorb it all. I watched as the announcer walked to the center of the ring to whip the crowd up into even more of a frenzy.

  A battle to the death between a vampire of the House Prochrae and a black hound of the highland hills.

  I sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh shit.”

  Black hound, a.k.a. death hound, a.k.a. hellhound. This was not good.

  The fae’s eyes swirled with threads of ebony that soon overtook the irises completely, making it look far more menacing than it had previously.

  Dropping to its feet, it began the shift, body snapping, breaking, contorting and turning into a thing of terror. Fur ripped from its face, its neck elongated, and a sound between a howl and a scream tore through the stands, whipping the already frantic crowd into a lather.

  Its transformation complete, the shaggy-headed beast lifted its head, looking at me with a demonic rumble vibrating through its barrel chest. I swallowed hard.

  I’d never personally fought a hellhound before, but my partner had—Carter, my real Carter. That had been our first case together, and the result had been fearsome.

  The escaped fae had killed three civilians, eating the hearts straight from their chests. That’s what made hellhounds so dangerous: their insatiable thirst for iron-rich meat.

  Before me, the hound licked its lips, and thick globs of drool landed on the mat as it paced to and fro.

  Years ago, we’d needed ten officers and several rounds of iron-laced bullets to bring that beast down.

  I flexed my fingers, counting my breaths as I waited for the beast to pounce.

  Fighting Clarence had attuned me to the predatory mannerisms of beasts. Hellhounds were a form of shifter, and while they were fae, meaning they had other forms of magick to them, an animal was an animal was an animal.