Me and You and a Ghost Named Boo

by Selene Charles

  I swallowed, waiting for him to break the tense silence.

  Back here, with his door closed, noises were more muffled. If I’d really wanted to, I could have heard everything, each conversation and even the gentle swish and scrapes of rats’ feet running beneath the floorboards of the centuries-old precinct. I didn’t want to, though, because sometimes hearing all that hurt too much.

  Shifting on my ass, I focused on the steel-gray suit he wore, the fine stitching of it, the impeccably groomed style of the doctor... He was much more than he seemed, definitely not from around Silver Creek. From the quick glance I’d taken of his office, he’d gotten his bachelor’s from the University of Tennessee, but his master’s and his doctorate had come from Yale. The good doctor was from old money.

  So what the hell was he doing here?

  “Well, Ms. Smith. You’ve been avoiding me,” he said in that whiskey-smooth voice of his.

  Once I’d known clothes, but now I knew spirits, and if Dr. Elijah Monroe could be compared to one, he’d be like a Glendronach fifteen-year-old revival, a sherry-cask-matured whiskey with hints of coffee and burnt sugar. He was smooth, polished, and refined.

  Licking my lips, I shrugged noncommittally, picking at a loose thread on my shorts.

  “You’ve passed... No”—he held up a manicured finger—“you’ve excelled every examination given you by the SCPD. But I have to say there are some major red flags when it came to the mental health assessment.”

  Working my jaw from side to side, I pretended to really focus on the thread, but I was keenly aware of the solid beating of his heart, the whoosh, whoosh, hiss of every third beat... I wondered if he knew he had a heart murmur.

  “Scarlett.” He said my name softly.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I imagined in another life my pulse would have been fluttering by then, but it just sat like a cold, hard stone in my chest, lifeless and unbeating.

  They couldn’t reject me. They just couldn’t. I needed that assignment. I needed it badly.

  “It’s only been six months,” he said. “I’m not sure—”

  “I’m fine now.” I frowned, finally daring to look up at him.

  He sucked in a sharp breath and went rigid.

  I could only hold his gaze for so long before I had to drop it again. I wasn’t strong enough to hold a mortal’s gaze without causing them serious damage.

  Like scrambling an egg, the sight of my steady gaze on theirs could rewire the circuitry of a human’s brain to the point of mush. Merc told me until I learned to control myself, not to look up.

  I felt rather than saw him shudder and glance swiftly out the window.

  The heartbeat that’d been so steady just moments before now increased its tempo, though not in fear. I didn’t taste the oily essence of that emotion seeping from his pores, but I knew he didn’t like losing control for even a second.

  The man had OCD tendencies. I noticed in the way he arranged the pencils on his desk, from longest to shortest, but with all the points sharpened to a razor-fine tip.

  Blowing out a heavy breath, he tapped his fingers on the wooden armrests, and I felt the press of his stare shove against me like a two-ton weight.

  “I’m not going to lie, Ms. Smith—”

  I flinched. “My mama was called Ms. Smith. I’m just Scarlett.”

  My words trailed off. I’d not thought of mama since that night, the night I’d died. She wasn’t my mama anymore. That was an old life, a past life.

  I had a new family.

  “You sounded sad just now.”

  That wasn’t a question, and I could’ve chosen to ignore him, but I knew I would do so to my own detriment. I knew the moment I’d taken the mental health evaluation that I’d not done well, not with the questions it had asked.

  Have you ever wished to do harm to yourself or others?

  All the damn time.

  Have you ever attempted to harm yourself?

  Near daily.

  Have you ever committed murder?

  Yes. God, yes.

  I shuddered at that last one, squeezing my eyes shut for a brief moment as a powerful memory of hot, sweet blood rushing down my throat flashed through my mind’s eye. I recalled the way that strange woman’s hair had cascaded down my arms like a chestnut-colored waterfall and the way her smile had slipped so gradually as I’d sucked the last of her life from her veins.

  Dr. Monroe’s heartbeat had returned to a calmer measure. If he only knew...

  I wet my lips.

  “I haven’t thought of Mama since that night,” I softly admitted.

  “Why not?”

  Why not? I snorted. To think of her felt like a small death to me, to remember her as I’d last seen her, with tears shining in her eyes, her beautiful brown hair, thick with silver, wild around her face as her brown eyes, crinkled at the corners from years of laughing too much, turned down with deep furrows of sadness as she’d gazed into my casket with sorrow.

  I didn’t like to look into the mirror too often. Growing up, I’d always been told I was the spitting image of Mama. Looking at myself was like looking at her, but the woman looking back at me never smiled, not like her.

  I doubted she ever would again.

  “Because Mama’s gone from me now. And she always will be.”

  He’d grabbed a board and paper and was doodling something on it with a calligraphy pen. Judging by the scratches he made, he was drawing something. The lines of it were long and smooth, interspersed by little hash marks throughout.

  He nodded. “She’s seen you in a coffin. She thinks you dead, but you could go back to her if you wanted. Tell her who you really are. There’s nothing saying you can’t.”

  I bounced my left leg nervously. “What would I say to her? Sorry I lied? Sorry I went through that farce of a funeral, I just thought it would be easier on you? Like hell.”

  He looked up at me then, and I kept my eyes just a little to the left of his so that we didn’t look head on, but I felt his gaze imprinting itself all over my face.

  “Why don’t you start with who you really are now.”

  “I don’t think Mama would be able to accept any of this.” I paused briefly, thinking of her hurting, hurting too much. Best to never do it. Not anymore. “I run with a different pack anyway.”

  He chuckled softly. “That’s one way of putting it. A vampire living amongst the wolves. Doesn’t that make you nervous?”

  I shouldn’t have, but I snared his gaze. He froze like a lamb at the slaughter, and his pupils widened, bleeding through the iris so that they were almost entirely black.

  Sighing, I forced myself to look down at my boots. On the corner of the right boot was a dark-red dirt stain. It wasn’t red dirt, though. It was the blood—my blood—I couldn’t take out from that night.

  “I shoulda tossed these boots out like I tossed everything else out of my life that night.”

  It took him a moment, but he finally asked, “So why didn’t you?”

  “Cause they saved my life.”

  “You know what you have to do now, don’t you?”

  I squeezed my eyes tightly shut so that all I could see was a void of darkness. I didn’t want to be evaluated, not now, not ever. The shrink already knew a little about me, but he didn’t know everything.

  Nobody knew everything.

  Not even me...

  His pen stopped scratching.

  “Open your eyes, Scarlett.”

  I knew what I would see the moment I did. I shouldn’t have been so scared, but I was. I felt as if the floor was about to open up and swallow me whole. I was losing myself to the haunting voices of that night.

  “Open your eyes,” he commanded again.

  Then I did, and I sniffed as heat flared up my throat and rested behind my eyes as I gazed on his delicate drawing of a honeysuckle bush.

  “I read a little bit of the report from that night, but I’d like you to tell me the rest. If you think you’re able.”

  I
wanted to shake my head no, wanted to tell him to go rot in hell and die, wanted to beg him not to make me talk about that night.

  I knew if I did those things, he’d get up, shake my hand, and tell me I was free to go, but I’d never get another chance to work with the police in the Paranormal Investigative Unit, and I’d never get the chance to help others. I never wanted another woman to go through what I had. To stare, literally, into the beautiful eyes of death and feel the rush of terror I had that night. I needed a purpose again, and this was it.

  “What did I draw, Scarlett?” His whiskey voice was velvety soft and hypnotic—I felt spelled by his words, compelled to crack open the darkness of my heart and lay my sins out before him.

  He was only human, only mortal, but the man could sometimes terrify me.

  “A honeysuckle bush.”

  He nodded. “Yes. Why did I draw that?”

  Blood had splashed all over the snow-white petals, drip, drip, dripping to the concrete path. The night had been so calm, cool for a May night. Fireflies had danced through the air. I’d lain there—unable to move, lungs on fire as my blood gushed out of me—staring up at the navy-blue sky so full of stars I’d become dizzied by them and breathing in the sweet essence of honeysuckle memories.

  The last night I’d lived. The last night I’d truly been alive.

  “Because it’s where he killed me.” The words spilled from me almost trancelike.

  A corner of his lips twitched, as though with remorse. “How do you know it was a he?”

  I’ve tried to resist you... but I can’t. I can’t. God, forgive me. I can’t...

  “Because he spoke to me before he wrapped his hands around my throat.”

  “Why were you there? Who were you waiting for?”

  I’d snuck into the cemetery, my heart in my throat and my body alive with desires. Jimmy had come home from his military deployment, my old high-school sweetheart and fiancé.

  Boo, I’d called him.

  With blond hair and blue eyes, he’d once been the varsity quarterback. He’d loved me, and I’d loved him, but I was poor, and Jimmy’s family was rich. They’d not wanted us together, but he hadn’t cared, and neither had I.

  A tear rolled down my cheek. “Boo. I was waiting for Boo.”

  “And did he come?”

  I nodded slowly. “He came. He was beautiful, dressed in his Marines regalia. With his blond hair buzzed short”—I sniffed as another tear fell—“he wrapped me up in his arms.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself, imagining for a second they were Jimmy’s arms, but mine were small and delicate, nothing like his strong ones at all.

  I shook my head and stared out the window at the trees beyond. A vivid red cardinal sat on the outstretched branch of a massive conifer, just staring at me.

  Animals could look at me without harm. Their gaze was my only solace, and at the end of the day, that was also why I’d chosen to live alongside the shifters.

  “What happened then?”

  Hissing, I jerked my gaze up before quickly reminding myself not to make contact. The tips of his shoes pushed down into the carpet in a knee-jerk reaction, as though to get away from me.

  I frowned and stared back toward the bird, but it was gone.

  “You know what happened then. The man killed Boo, and he killed me too.”

  “Then you woke up a vampire—”

  “No.” I shook my head as memories assaulted me.

  I hadn’t known Mercer then. I’d been drowning in the scent of honeysuckle and blood. The stranger—the vampire—had been destroyed by the wrathful wolf.

  The last thing I’d remembered was glowing, jewel-green eyes, then I’d passed out.

  “Why didn’t he kill you?”

  I snorted. That was a question I’d asked myself many times since. Mercer hadn’t needed to save me. In fact, he shouldn’t have. I hadn’t known him before that night, but he was the closest thing I had to family now.

  “My boots.” A ghost of a smile whispered across my lips when I said it.

  He’d seen them poking out of the bushes. My honky-tonk-lovin’ savior had seen my cowgirl boots and had decided to forgo a millennium’s worth of age-old animosity to save me. At least, it was the story he always told me.

  “A vampire raised by wolves,” Dr. Monroe said.

  I knew we’d come back to that topic sooner or later.

  I heard the genuine curiosity in his voice. What Mercer had done that night had never been done before, and if the vampire had finished what he’d started, it would never have happened.

  I was leered at, sometimes spat on, but mostly given a wide berth by the shifters of Silver Creek.

  “There are worse things,” I muttered.

  “I suppose there are.”

  The cardinal returned, gliding in from the left and landing on the exact same spot he’d been in just moments before.

  Setting the clipboard down onto his lap, Dr. Monroe took a deep breath and said, “I shouldn’t let you into the program, Scarlett. Having read your personal file, you’ve killed. Many times.”

  I swallowed hard as my heart sank to my knees. Mercer had warned me not to get my hopes up too high. Newborn vampires weren’t known to be the most stable of the bunch, and because my death had been far more grisly than a typical rebirth, I’d suffered worse. I was a vampire with no house and no sire. Mercer had rescued me from my killer before he could enslave me forever to his whims.

  I was a freed vampire, a very rare and valuable commodity to the PIU, with my strengths and skillsets, which I’d not fully shown off yet. I’d be the only vampire on staff. They’d do almost anything to get their hands on me. I knew that, but I also knew I came with one giant hurdle.

  At times, I could be unstable.

  With no sire to check me, my first month of rebirth had been nightmarish. I’d given into the bloodlust with fatal enthusiasm.

  Merc had saved me yet again, though. He’d found me, locked me in the dungeon of the wolf’s den, and reprogrammed me.

  I still lusted for blood. I wanted it right then. I wanted to bend Dr. Elijah Monroe to my will and drink from his veins until he withered in my arms, wanted to sink my fangs deep into that whiskey-scented blood and drown in the euphoric sensations of his taste and death.

  I couldn’t sweat, but I still wiped my fingers across my blue-jean shorts as if I had.

  He was close to making his decision, close to telling me they had no place in their unit for a homicidal vampire like me.

  “I stopped killing a month ago,” I said swiftly.

  He cocked his head to one side like a curious bird of prey. “Have you?”

  I nodded. “Merc’s got me on a regimen of shifter’s blood.”

  The curl of disdain on my lips was involuntary. Blood was blood, but not all blood tasted the same. I wasn’t exactly lying. I was on shifter blood, but only my adopted brother’s.

  Mercer was anything but stupid, though. He gave me eight ounces a week, all of it seasoned with wolfsbane. It tasted horrendous, but it’d done the trick.

  Since I had wolfsbane coursing through my body, any blood I took, regardless of who it came from, tasted the same: vile.

  “If I sign off on you and let you onto the force, you do understand that one kill and you’re gone. It’s only because of the”—his brows lifted—“pull of your father—”

  “Clarence ain’t my father.”

  Clarence was Alpha of the Silver Creek shifters and Mercer’s father, but he’d made it clear from the beginning that I was no kin of his. The only reason he ever did anything remotely kind for me was because of Merc.

  I owed everything to my guardian angel dipped in fur.

  “So am I in?” I tried to hide my excitement but failed miserably. Digging my nails into the cushion beneath my butt, I had to remind myself to relax or I’d rip a hole clean through his nice leather upholstery.

  He shook his head. “I still haven’t decided, Scarlett. You’re a dark horse for m
e. My brain screams no.”

  Clenching my jaw, I swallowed the taste of bile on the back of my tongue. I had one final ace up my sleeve, one way to prove they needed me.

  Mercer had made me promise to keep the secret, to tell no one of what I could do, to help guard my privacy.

  My brother knew a lot about vampires, a mystery I had yet to solve, but he knew. How he’d come to learn his information was a riddle for another day, but the one thing he’d taught me was that a vampire’s skillsets could be directly traced through their lineage.

  Some vampires could turn things beautiful with a touch. Others could call blood from the skin. Some could kill with a single caress.

  “Go out there and bring me an object involved in a murder. I don’t care what. It could be something big or small. And bring it to me.”

  His eyes narrowed, and I could practically read the thoughts whirling through his head. “What is she up to now? And why didn’t I already know about this?”

  I didn’t say a word. Sometimes in life, showing was better than telling.

  He could have refused, could have told me I just wasn’t good enough, but maybe the mystery of what I had planned was what made him finally decide to get up and walk out the door.

  A cop peeked in a second later.

  The precinct was pretty used to supernatural types wandering through its halls, but I was a vampire without a leash.

  I curled my fingers into my shorts and looked back out the window. Rain would fall that night. I could smell the water in the clouds.

  Dr. Monroe returned in five minutes, closing the door gently behind him, and only then did I exhale.

  In his hand, he held a pen, nothing special about it.

  It was black, with no lettering on it. A cap showed evidence of bite marks, but that was it as far as distinctive details.

  He held it in front of him like a shield for a moment, studying me. “You plan to tell me why you wanted this?”

  Shaking my head, I waited until he got close enough to me that I was able to reach up and snatch it away from him.

  Immediately I “saw” the life that’d been attached to the pen. My vision wasn’t like a movie where I could see every nuance of every second, but just before death, a human would experience a cognitive impression so intense that they’d often imprint it onto whatever was nearest them, in that case, the pen.