Hearts of Darkness: A Valentine's Day Bully Romance Collection

by Joanna Mazurkiewicz

  “I...” Avila swallowed hard. “Is that a ghost? Someone who died at the hospital?”

  “No,” Emma answered quietly. “That being has never been human.”

  Tyler felt like he was choking. “Is it a demon?”

  “That all depends on your definition,” she shrugged. The haunted look in her eyes said that the casual body language was a lie. “I prefer the term non-human entity. ‘Demon’ has too many religious connotations. It was at the hospital because it feeds on pain and fear, and it takes the souls of people who are dying and consumes them.”

  “Jesus...” Tyler muttered. “That certainly sounds like a demon to me.”

  “What happened that night?” Professor Montcalm asked.

  “Clive tied me to the chair, his priestess did the summoning, and it came.” She looked up at the blank screen as if she could still see the photograph that had been projected there. “I was terrified. The creature was angry when it came, and I was the scapegoat. It swirled around and around me, and then it took corporeal form right behind my chair. It grabbed my head, and then there was pain, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital.”

  Avila was pale. “It was trying to kill you.”

  “And it damned near did.” Emma turned back toward Professor Montcalm. “So now you know why I wanted out of Arizona, and why I can’t go back. So I’ll be part of your group, and I’ll wear the slutty clothes that the producers want me to wear, and I’ll do my best for you. But I am not going back to Arizona... ever.”

  “That... was actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” Avila said slowly. “I convinced Henry that the clothes were a bit too obvious, and that you should be able to wear what you want. After everything you did for me with that reading at the restaurant, I didn’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

  “Thank you.”

  Emma was visibly relieved, and Tyler wondered what sort of pressures the producers were putting on her. He felt guilty for giving her such a lukewarm welcome, and doubly bad that he hadn’t tried to make his friends be more charitable.

  Avila hesitated. “There’s still the matter of the information...”

  “I told you that I’m not going to read it. I don’t want to have details planted in my head,” Emma said firmly. “I’m going to do this, but I’m going to do it honestly.”

  “See, that’s what I told Henry. So he wants to give you the chance to do it your way.”

  Professor Montcalm asked, “What do you mean?”

  “He’s agreed to film the team on a test investigation, where Emma is able to go in cold. If she can get information that’s supportable by facts, then he’ll let her continue that way. But if she can’t, then she has to use the planted data. Okay?”

  Tyler nodded. “Sounds perfectly fair to me.”

  Emma smiled. “That’s awesome! Thank you.” She gestured at the blank screen. “I’m sorry you distrusted me so much that you had to go and do background checks, and I’m especially sorry that you found this. I didn’t want to tell you any of that.”

  “I’m glad I know,” Tyler told her. “Now that I know some of what you’ve been through, I know that you need to be protected.”

  Emma looked at him, openly surprised. “Protected?”

  He nodded. “From dark spirits, and from suspicion.”

  “So you believe me now? I thought you all hated mediums.”

  “I don’t hate anyone,” he said softly, “and Quinn has his reasons for being an asshole. But I’ll try to get him to cool it.”

  He looked into her dark eyes and felt his stomach flutter. He pushed the sensation away, but not before he noted how doe-like and innocent those eyes really were.

  “Thank you,” she said with a smile.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Tyler felt his insides quiver, and the air between them felt charged. The rest of the room vanished for that second, until Emma flushed and looked away. He watched her face, struck by the need to protect her from the darkness. His emotions surprised him, and he did his best to swallow them before he turned away and brought the other people in the office back into focus.

  “I’ll find a good location for the investigation,” Professor Montcalm said, his expression thoughtful. “We’ll meet here on Saturday morning with the whole team. Is that acceptable?”

  “Perfect,” Tyler nodded.

  Avila smiled. “I’ll bring the new guys - the camera man and the sound tech guy.”

  “Great.” Professor Montcalm stood. “I’ll look forward to it.”

  They all recognized the not-so-subtle signal that the impromptu meeting was over. Tyler reclaimed his thumb drive and turned to Emma.

  “Do you want to get some coffee?” Belatedly, he looked at Avila. “Either of you?”

  The production assistant gave a knowing smile. “I’ll pass, but you two should go.”

  Emma nodded. “I’d love some.”

  “Great.”

  Professor Montcalm moved his laptop back to his desk, saying nothing. Tyler could tell that his advisor was annoyed by something, and he suspected that Montcalm had seen his reaction to Emma. Tyler’s interest had been noted, and the professor was probably bothered because he didn’t approve. There were a hundred good reasons not to go down the path that he could clearly see ahead of him. Tyler was normally a cautious person, but at the moment, even though he could see the red flags, he really didn’t care. The professor’s annoyance only made him want to keep going. He might regret it later, but for now, the only thing he saw was Emma.

  They walked out of the office together, and she said, “I’m still not clear on where everything is around here. Is there a coffee shop nearby?”

  “Yeah, actually. Lots of them. It is a college campus, after all,” he smiled.

  She looked up at him and laughed softly. “Yeah, I should have expected that. I’ll follow you.”

  “My car is right outside. I can drive us.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  They went to the parking lot, and he was relieved to see that the show’s fans had gone. He opened the passenger side door for her, and she smiled her thanks. Tyler smiled back and hurried around to get behind the wheel. He felt unreasonably excited and couldn’t understand why he was feeling this way. It was pleasant, though, and he hadn’t felt such things before, so he was happy to follow where the feelings led.

  EMMA SMILED AT TYLER as he got behind the wheel, his eyes shining. His aura was mostly orange-yellow, which she had seen before, but now there was an edge of clear red, showing sexual interest. There wasn’t much there about emotion, but she would have been surprised if there had been. There hadn’t been enough time for feelings, but lust? That didn’t take much time at all, and that was the red that shone around him now.

  If she could have seen her own aura, she’d have seen the same color.

  Tyler glanced at her as he put the car into reverse. “Are you hungry?”

  It was dinner time, and she hadn’t been to the cafeteria yet, so she said, “I could eat.”

  “Great. Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  She suppressed a laugh at his earnest awkwardness. “Well, coffee isn’t very filling, so, sure.”

  He flashed a smile, his teeth white and even. He was a handsome man, she had to admit. All of the men who were on screen for Ghost U were easy on the eyes. As the fan sites indicated, Quinn was the standout when it came to physical attractiveness with his male-model looks and physique. Tyler had a studious air, and he struck her as a Clark Kent type - very moral, very cerebral, very sexy under the strait-laced button-down shirts. Brent was a little soft, a little bit of a frat boy, but adorable as a teddy bear. He seemed like a loyal person, based on what she’d seen, and she was certain that he would be a good hugger. Professor Montcalm was handsome and intellectual, an older version of Tyler, but he had secrets in his eyes that seemed to her like he’d be the living embodiment of the cliché about still waters running deep. She was curious about all of
them, and she hoped that she’d be able to get to know them all.

  “So...” He started. His voice trailed off as he either realized he had nothing to say, or he abandoned what he had planned. Tyler cleared his throat. “I’m sorry if you’re upset with us for looking into your past.”

  “I expected it,” she shrugged, looking out the window as they drove through campus. “I mean, you’re all very tech-oriented, and you all think I’m a total fraud, so...”

  “I never said that.”

  “Your team’s opinion of psychics is very clear,” she said. “Unless that was Quinn’s opinion and you were all parroting it.”

  “Brent can be Quinn’s echo chamber,” he admitted, “but I didn’t say anything.”

  “Agreement by silence?”

  “I just didn’t want to argue. Quinn is very set in his ideas, and it’s sometimes just easier to keep my thoughts to myself when he gets going.”

  She chuckled. “So he’s a tyrant? He certainly seems that way on the show, bossing all of you around and being the big shot.”

  Tyler laughed. “Well, don’t judge him too hard. He’s a good guy under all the noise.”

  “If you say so.”

  He hesitated, then steered the conversation back to where he had started. “Look, I’m honestly sorry if my finding that information is upsetting to you.”

  Emma wasn’t certain what to say. Penelope, sitting in the back seat, coached her, -Tell him the truth.-

  She nodded to her guide’s advice. “It is upsetting, mostly because it’s a reminder of something painful that happened. It scared the hell out of me, and I almost died. That’s the sort of thing that sticks with you, even when you’d rather it didn’t.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I’d rather that you never found that, and I’d certainly rather that you didn’t make it public. I mean, it was behind a password for a reason.” She looked at him. “Although I suppose passwords don’t always mean much.”

  Tyler blushed. “I’m, ah, a little bit of a hacker.”

  “Apparently.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes, leaving campus behind and heading into Boston proper. Finally, Tyler said, “If I showed Quinn, it might make him think differently about you. It might prove that you’re for real.”

  “Or it might convince him even more than I’m just a fraud and a phony. Or worse, it’ll give him something to use against me.”

  “How would he use it against you?” Tyler asked, confused.

  “Oh, I don’t know. What about in season one, episode five, where Brent said he was afraid of clowns? What did Quinn promptly do?”

  Reluctantly, he answered, “Locked him in a room with a haunted clown doll.”

  “And in episode seven of season two, when you didn’t want anything to do with that cellar room?”

  “And he locked me in it alone for an hour. I get where you’re going.”

  “I’m shocked I had to spell it out.”

  Tyler argued, “He only does that because he thinks that fear and heightened emotions are more likely to get paranormal entities to react.”

  She crossed her arms. That attitude was a sticking point with her. She had heard it a hundred times, and every time, it made her want to scream. “It makes negative entities react. And that’s not something that you should be messing with. Your viewers emulate everything you do, you know.”

  “We tell them not to.” He shook his head. “I mean, every episode has a message at the first commercial break not to do what we do, since we’re professionals.”

  “Trust me,” Emma said. “I’ve met enough of your fans to know that when you put that up on the screen? They take that to mean, ‘the next segment is super cool, so you should totally try this yourself.’”

  “We never tell them that,” he defended. “If they take it that way, that’s on them, but we never...”

  His cell phone rang, and he grabbed it. He glanced at Emma, who nodded. “Go ahead and take it.”

  “It’s Quinn.”

  “Then by all means.”

  He took the call. “Hello?”

  “Where you at?” Quinn’s voice was rough, and he sounded groggy.

  “Heading out for some dinner. You want me to pick you up anything?”

  “Hmm...” The sound that came through the connection was a cross between a groan and a hum, and Emma had heard enough hungover men in her life to know what the teams’ fearless leader had been up to. “Just get the usual from Burger Royale on the way home. The greasier the better.”

  “Understood. Is Brent up yet?”

  “I don’t know.” He sighed into the phone, the exhalation loud over the line. “Did you find anything interesting?”

  Tyler glanced at Emma, who raised an eyebrow. -If he tells, you should punch him in the stomach,- Penelope suggested.

  “Not really,” Tyler lied.

  “Hmph. Okay. I’ll see you when you get home.”

  The call ended, and Tyler put the phone aside. Emma asked, “You guys live together?”

  “We share an apartment off-campus.”

  “You know... there are some fan theories about you and Quinn...”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh my God, I’ve heard. We are not a couple.”

  “I didn’t think so, but I had to ask.”

  “Ask without asking.”

  “I’m good at that,” she smiled. “Isn’t that what you guys say psychics do? Drop hints and then take note of who picks up on them? Carnival games, I think you called them.”

  Tyler blushed again. “I... okay, I said that, but I was talking about mind-readers at traveling circuses. I wasn’t talking about mediums.”

  “Good to know.”

  They reached the restaurant and got a booth against the back wall. Emma put her purse down on the seat beside her and surreptitiously checked her cash.

  “It’s on me,” Tyler told her. “Least I can do. Not very gentlemanly for me to ask you out for dinner and then expect you to pay.”

  “I always go Dutch,” she told him firmly. “It cuts down on expectations.”

  Craig settled into the seat beside her, and she subconsciously moved aside to give him room, even though it was unnecessary. The dead construction worker told her, -Penny said you was on a date. I thought I’d keep watch.-

  Thanks, Craig. You’re a doll.

  They placed their orders, then Emma crossed her arms on the table. “So, what made you get into paranormal investigating, anyway?”

  Tyler looked surprised by the question. “Quinn, Brent and I all grew up on the same street. We’ve known each other forever. Brent and I were there since we were babies, and Quinn and his mom moved in when we were six. We’re all the same age.”

  “Twenty-two.”

  He smiled. “Yeah. Was that psychic insight?”

  “I read it on your fan Facebook pages.” She laughed at his expression. “Okay, so that’s how long you’ve known each other. What’s the story with the ghost hunting?”

  “Well...” He looked embarrassed, which told Emma that he was about to tell a great story. She could hardly wait to hear it. “There was this abandoned house on our block. It had been empty for our whole lives. Turned out that a man butchered his whole family in there, and after they took him away to the looney bin, they could never sell the place. Naturally, all the kids in the neighborhood snuck in all the time.”

  “Naturally.”

  “We did, too, of course. We dared each other to spend Halloween night in the house when we were twelve, and we tried. It was the freakiest thing. Footsteps on the floors above us, voices, kids’ laughter in the basement... We ran out of there as fast as we could. I’ve never been so scared in all my life.”

  She nodded. “Did you try to say hello? See if the ghosts needed help moving on?”

  “Uh... no.... We just ran.” He shrugged. “We were only kids.”

  “I started helping ghosts move on when I was five,” she pointed out.

  He
frowned. “Well, you’re a medium. We’re just a bunch of regular joes. Anyway, what we saw and heard had no explanation, and we’ve been trying to explain it ever since.”

  Emma raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, no explanation? You said yourself that there were murders there. That’s the explanation.”

  He shook his head. “No, I mean, the scientific explanation. Like, yeah, ghosts are doing it, but how? What’s the provable, hard-science mechanism of how they make sounds? How do they still exist?”

  “They exist because souls are eternal,” she said. “And the mechanism is spiritual energy.”

  “I mean hard science mechanisms.”

  “Maybe hard science hasn’t caught up with the facts yet,” she suggested. “It’s not always something that can be measured and quantified.”

  -Can I show him?- Craig asked.

  If you want.

  -I won’t take much,- he promised.

  “Maybe it can’t be measured yet, but that’s why we want to work with new tech, and with inventors who are trying to study this field,” he told her, his voice strong with enthusiasm.

  “You can’t explain everything.”

  “Yet.”

  She sighed. “Okay. I know Quinn carries a K2 on him. Do you have any gear?”

  Tyler smiled. “Just the thumb drive.”

  “Too bad. We could have done an experiment.”

  She could feel her energy being wicked away, streaming out of the base of her spine and into Craig. The ghost pulled her life force and focused it, preparing for his big trick.

  -Salt shaker,- Craig told her.

  Emma took the condiment in question and put it in the middle of the table. “If you’d had your toys, you could have taken a reading on this.”

  Craig leaned forward, and the energy he had taken from her focused on the saltshaker. The metal-capped glass shook ever so slightly, then slid across the table to bounce off the pepper mill near the wall. Tyler gaped.

  “Oh my God! Did you...?”

  “No. One of my guides.” She took the saltshaker and held it up. “If you’d had your K2 or EMF meter or Flir or whatever the hell trained on this, you might have seen a fluctuation in temperature, or maybe an EMF spike. But you never would have seen the energy that my guide took and used to push this across the table. Some things can’t be measured.”