by D. D. Chance
A wave of emotion rose up out of nowhere, threatening to swallow me whole. Because it wasn’t all she’d ever wanted, as I’d realized after she’d died. She’d wanted her family to know about me, too. To be proud of me. She’d wanted that so badly, she’d started writing a letter to them when I’d been only five years old…and had kept writing that same letter, all the way up until the cancer had taken her.
I blew out a long, careful breath. I would deliver that letter for her. In person. I’d find the family she’d written to for more than fifteen years…and I’d tell them that she’d been amazing. Strong and true and beautiful, the best mother a girl could ever ask for. I’d tell them she’d kept me safe.
“Nina,” Tyler whispered, as the tears crested behind my eyes, threatening to spill. “What is it?”
I blinked hard, staring at him without really seeing him anymore, my mother’s voice shouting far in the back of my mind, a word I hadn’t remembered before—but now bubbled to the surface on a wave of blinding terror.
“Run!”
8
“Nina,” Tyler snapped, sharper now, and I jerked back to the present, my mind abruptly clearing. The panic swept away again, as quickly as it had come.
“Nothing.” I managed. “It’s nothing…sorry. The past kind of creeps up on me sometimes, is all.”
I cleared my throat, wiping away the tears sprouting in my eyes with a rough swipe. Tyler didn’t say anything during all this, merely watched me. My nose started to burn, and I rubbed it with the back of my hand as well, then met his gaze again, offering him a stronger smile.
“The lessons started that day—easy stuff at first, things I could understand. As I got older, they got more intense. At first, I thought the monsters were going to stay in my house, but then I started seeing them around town. They rarely bothered me if I was with my mom, but if I was alone—I’d see them, they’d see me. Sometimes I’d come on them stalking other people, but I learned pretty quick that I was a good distraction.”
I grimaced, a trickle of annoyance punching back my chagrin. “What was it that Grim called me? Monster bait? Is that even a thing?”
“He shouldn’t have said that.”
Embarrassment flushed through me, which only made me angrier. “So it is a thing.” I couldn’t help how defensive I sounded. I’d always thought of myself as something of a warrior. A fighter, anyway. But now, come to find out, I was only bait? Screw that. “Do you guys have a lot of people come around who are monster bait?”
“No,” Tyler said firmly. “And what I mean is, he shouldn’t have said that because we don’t know anything about you. I’ve never heard of a human being designated monster bait, but from where Grim comes from, who knows. It could be true. Regardless, you’re not bait, Nina. If you were, you’d be dead already.”
“Yeah.” I picked up my coffee and stared at the wall for a second while I took a long draft, practically simmering with an anger I didn’t know how to disperse. Because truth was—I didn’t seek monsters out. They attacked me. If they pushed me too far, or if I thought they were a threat to anyone else, I killed them. But they were always the ones who acted first…always.
Maybe I was monster bait.
Or…I took another drink of coffee, keenly aware of Tyler’s eyes on me. Or maybe Tyler and his little group of besties were a bunch of assholes who made anyone not part of their little club feel like idiots, and that was what Mom had wanted to warn me away from. Also totally possible.
I grimaced and refocused on him, trying not to pay too much attention to how warm and concerned his gaze had become, or the shimmering gold depths in his whiskey-brown eyes.
“I keep wanting to apologize for all this,” I said. “I have to remind myself that you’ve experienced the same thing. Or sort of the same thing.”
“Sort of,” Tyler agreed. “I didn’t ever have to fight monsters, though—that didn’t come until later. My childhood trauma was pretty much constrained to nightmares.”
My brows went up. “Oh?” I didn’t have nightmares. Monsters in my gym locker? Sure. But no nightmares. “Were they bad?”
“Pretty bad, yeah.” He shrugged. “It started when I was a little kid. I thought there were ghosts in the walls—demons, maybe. Talking, moaning, doing anything they could to scare me. Like spirits trapped in the house, never able to move on to the afterlife. The house had become their prison.”
I stared at him. “Dear Lord. That…would be a lot. How old were you?”
“When it first happened?” He scrunched up his face and looked to the right, and I could see it then. The little boy huddled in his bed, alone and scared, convinced he was hearing voices, thumps, and bumps in the night. “I was maybe six. Actually—I was six. It was like a light switched on a few weeks after my birthday, and it became ghost central in my bedroom.”
“Did you tell your parents?” From his very few comments on the subject, I didn’t know if that would be a good thing or a bad thing.
“I didn’t for about three months. But the clamoring got worse, and I became nervous during the daytime—dropping stuff, falling asleep in class, lashing out. My dad was having none of it, and he ripped on me about it so long one morning, I flipped out. Screaming about monsters in the walls, demons, devils, ghosts, fairies, and boogeymen.” He chuckled grimly. “That did not improve my situation.”
“He thought you were lying.”
He snorted. “Oh, no. He thought I’d been holding out on him. Apparently, though no one had bothered to tell me, the ghosts of Perkins Hall were the stuff of legends. More importantly, nobody had had the gift of communicating with them for generations. The fact that they were willing to talk to me and I was too much of a chickenshit to let them infuriated my father. He instructed me to fall asleep while he was in the room with me, but I refused. Unfortunately, I was only six years old. After about three or four hours of defiant resistance, I zonked out standing up—and they came out.”
I stared at him. “What happened then?”
“I realized I’d been all wrong about the ghosts. They weren’t trapped in the house—they simply refused to leave. Fully a dozen bastards dating back hundreds of years with opinions on everything that ever happened in the place, and they were happy to unload it all on me. Stuff a kid of six shouldn’t know. Stuff a man of sixty shouldn’t know. And there I was, getting an earful of every theft, love affair, private indiscretion, harrowing breakup, and balls-out war, with my father staring at me, demanding to know answers to questions I couldn’t understand. I knew immediately I couldn’t tell him everything they were telling me, but even after I gave him the information he was hot for—something about the location of some family heirloom—he tried to beat the rest out of me anyway.”
“At six?” I asked, aghast. “He actually beat you?”
Tyler grimaced. “He had a saying he loved to share. You didn’t get to be a Perkins by luck. You had to earn the right.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. “What did your mom say about that?”
He shrugged. “She was already out of the picture, and I was an only child. And he wasn’t wrong. I should do more—be more. I should earn the right to be a Perkins. I haven’t done that yet, even after all the things I’ve been given, all the education, the safety, the support. But I should.”
I narrowed my eyes at the double-barreled criticism in his voice, but he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were unfocused, as if he was looking into his past, and judging himself every step of the way. Then he shook his head again, and kept going. “To be fair, it only happened that one time. The next day, I was terrified he’d come after me again, but he informed me he’d be leaving on a trip, and that I could remain in the house with the staff, or stay with Liam.”
“Liam,” I echoed. “You were friends already?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “The Grahams were several rungs down on the social ladder, but my father respected his father, and that made everything okay. I know, I know,” he sighed, actually seeing my gri
mace this time. “It was a messed-up childhood on several levels. But at any rate, I totally get your need to hang by yourself as a kid. I didn’t want to introduce too many people to my crazy.”
“And did your dad leave you alone after that?”
“He did, for the most part. When he returned a few weeks later, he apologized to me for his outburst, and asked me to keep him informed if I learned anything else. Like I was some kind of spy, which did make it sort of cool. And back then, I was willing to do a lot to get on his good side, so I did. If the ghosts showed up, and I remembered anything they’d said, I’d spill. But it didn’t happen all that often, and eventually, they sort of faded out. By that point, Dad also seemed to have learned everything he needed to about our twisted family tree…or maybe he understood that I’d learned stuff about him too that he didn’t want me using against him. After that, everything got a lot easier. I was maybe, what—thirteen? Since then, it’s been pretty quiet. I’ve felt safe falling asleep, anyway.” He pointed a fork at me. “Where did you go to feel safe? Where did the monsters usually leave you alone?”
“Actually?” I thought about it, the memory bringing a smile to my face. “Probably the quietest area in my entire town was the cemetery.”
Tyler’s brows lifted. “You’re serious?” he asked, sounding genuinely interested.
“Yup. I worked there as a groundskeeper for most of my high school years and had even planned to work there throughout college. Then my mom got sick. She didn’t want me to drop out, but she went downhill in a hurry. Cancer, they said, but they weren’t really sure. One of them even said she had a concentration of heavy metals in her blood, and that made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. No wonder she never attracted that many monsters, right?”
I laughed a little unsteadily at my own joke, but Tyler merely watched me with his quiet eyes, his gentle smile.
“How long ago did she die?” he asked.
My eyes dropped to my coffee mug—Mom’s favorite mug, actually. Sky blue, with a bright painted sun on one side, a cheerful moon on the other. “It’s been about four months now. Seems longer, most days.”
“And you came here first thing?” Tyler asked. “Why Boston?”
I smiled. That question, at least, was easy to answer. “My mom had family here. She had a letter that…that I want to deliver to them, if I can find them.”
He cocked a brow. “If you can find them? She didn’t have their address?”
“She did, but…” I hesitated, but I didn’t see any point in lying about this part. “It was to a post office box that doesn’t actually exist. Like anywhere, not even in old postal records.”
Tyler tilted his head, considering that. “Maybe she miswrote it?”
I grimaced, remembering all the past envelopes, every one with the same carefully lettered address. “Maybe. But I decided to come on up here myself, see if I could find them. She definitely lived in this part of town when she was younger. Before I was born. I think she must’ve taught somewhere, maybe at a high school or something. She didn’t talk about it much, but she always got a look in her eye when something came up about Boston, at least the good news anyway. It seemed the right thing to do to come and check it out.”
“Well, I think you should do more than check it out,” Tyler said, leaning toward me slightly. “You should come to Wellington, maybe take a couple of classes. I can think of three right now that would’ve kept you safe last night.”
“I guess.” I lifted a shoulder, dropped it, as my anxiety reawakened. “I manage pretty well on my own, though. Last night, I wasn’t paying attention.”
“I mean it, Nina,” Tyler said. He put his fork down and scooted closer to me, his face now only a foot away from mine over the small kitchen table. His eyes were ever so slightly harder now, his manner more intense, like I’d somehow tripped some trigger without realizing it. “You can’t just keep dicking around by yourself. It’s too dangerous.”
Excuse me? I narrowed my eyes and glared at him, a lick of anger searing up my spine, scattering my worries. “I appreciate your concern, Tyler, but I’ve been dicking around by myself for my entire fucking life. And I’ve been doing a bang-up job of fighting actual monsters, not glow-in-the-dark holograms or CGI boogeymen. So maybe you should back the hell off.”
“You think you could beat me in a monster fight?” he challenged, his eyes boiling now with a fierceness I couldn’t quite understand—a fierceness that should have repelled me, but didn’t at all. I felt unexpectedly dizzy, as if I’d suddenly become drunk on whiskey eyes and anger, and though I never argued with anyone—about anything—this I liked. I really liked.
“I think I could kick your ass in a monster fight,” I corrected, my breath hissing against my teeth. The room seemed to shift around us, the table moving away from my hands, the chair rattling against my shins.
“Well, maybe you should try,” Tyler scoffed, then he winked at me with an insolent smirk. “At the school. After enrolling.”
I burst out with a sharp laugh, the unexpected dogleg to our conversation catching me completely off guard. This close to Tyler, I could smell him. I could practically taste him. My heart skittered and my entire body seemed to go electric with a need so quick, so real, it lit all my nerves on fire. I don’t know why I did it. I only knew I had to. Needed to the way I needed to take my next breath.
I leaned forward and kissed him.
9
Much like fighting monsters the night before, Tyler didn’t hesitate. I vaguely heard his fork clatter to the kitchen table, then both his hands were up, holding my face steady as his lips pressed hard against mine. The connection jolted me, and my heart leapt into my throat, pounding furiously as there suddenly seemed to be too much table, too much space, too much everything between us. I struggled upright and Tyler did as well, yanking me to him and fitting my body against his as if we were born not just to fight together, but to live and breathe and, most of all, kiss, his long, hard body hot and vital through the thin material of his jeans and even thinner fabric of his shirt.
For my part, I was practically crawling up his chest, my leg wrapped around his hip like I was climbing Mount Tyler without a rope and loving each ridge and indentation of the craggy cliff wall. An incredible burst of excitement raced through me, and I felt like I was coming home—power, insane power, built up in me, dizzying with possibility. We spun around, and I vaguely had a sense of the table being shoved, the chairs kicked, the crash of a ceramic plate bouncing off the counter and shattering on the hardwood floor. But with my hands entwined in Tyler’s thick hair and my breath tangled with his, both of us tasting, testing, devouring the other, I couldn’t tell what was up and what was down. It was all a dizzying whirl that didn’t stop until my back slammed against the kitchen wall hard enough that the windows shook.
Not only the windows, either. The kitchen cabinets banged open, the chairs toppled over, and the table screeched across the floor before crashing into the far wall.
Tyler and I froze in absolute stillness—and everything else did as well. There was no sound at all but the labored whooshing of our twin breathing—in, out, in. The room remained quiet except for the drip-drip-drip of coffee leaking from the knocked-over mug onto the floor.
Slowly, carefully, Tyler leaned back from me, his eyes searching out mine.
“What the hell?” he managed, sounding credibly shocked. He swiveled, keeping my hips locked in his grasp, my legs tight around his waist as we turned and surveyed the chaos of the kitchen. The cups had toppled but not broken, but the plates hadn’t fared so well. And the frying pan… “I hope you were done with your eggs,” he said ruefully.
I laughed, the sound dangerously close to a sob, and patted his back to get him to release me. Apparently picking up on my roiling emotions, he let me slide easily to the ground, though I didn’t miss the hard ridge of his shaft as I eased down his body. My throat tightened and my belly clenched as our gazes met again, and I had to physically fight
the urge to climb back up and send him crashing to the floor, right along with our ruined breakfast.
What the hell is wrong with me? This wasn’t who I was. Tyler wasn’t my usual kind of boyfriend. Which was generally no kind of boyfriend at all, since I never knew when monsters might want to double date.
Not to mention—he was kind of an overbearing ass. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—forget that. Even if he was hot. Way hot. Insanely—
“Oh, yeah,” he murmured, as if agreeing with my unspoken thoughts, and he reached for me—just as another glass toppled out of the open cabinet and crashed to the floor, shattering to pieces.
“I think you should go,” I said, too quickly, trying to hide the way my body was practically vibrating at the idea of being back in his arms. “You should get back to school. And I’ve got things to do. You should go.”
“I don’t want—wait. Of course.” Tyler shook his head hard, catching himself immediately. He blinked at me, then gestured a little helplessly around the room. “This normal with you? Or am I just lucky?”
I folded my arms. “I guess that will be something for you to think about as you take a walk. Back. To campus.”
A sharp flare of annoyance flashed across his face, then for the second time in just a few minutes, he surprised me again by laughing. A real, honest laugh, that somehow managed to puncture all my mad and toss me right back into the flames of want again. Who was this guy? And why did he have this effect on me?