Harlequin Nocturne March 2016 Box Set (19 page)

CHAPTER 7

“W
hy so...cereal?” Reg pointed at the bowl of frosted wheats in front of Jase.

Jase dug his spoon into the mess of milk and soggy mush. “Nice one.”

“Seriously, man. You've been in a shitty mood all day.” Reg pulled up one of the bar stools and gave Jase a long, steady look that wasn't going to be easy to ignore.

Jase shrugged, not wanting to admit that he'd had a... Well, shit. What had happened anyway? A weird kind of dream? An out-of-body experience? Whatever it had been, it might be tied to the rest of this case or it might not, but either way, it had happened to
him
, damn it, not some random asshole who probably deserved a little roughing up from an imaginary monkey. He didn't want to compare himself to guys like that, but the truth was, that weirdly fantastic dream and the aftershocks of glittering color had made him more than an investigator in this case. They had made him a victim.

Jase had not been a victim for a long damned time.

“The dream I had last night,” he began and stopped.

Reg looked curious. “Yeah? What about it?”

“I don't think it was a dream. It was something else. Like a hallucination. But with physical results.” Jase grimaced, remembering the exact nature of those results. He'd had to put the evidence in the laundry this morning.

“Like a giant gorilla beating on some douche bag?”

Jase nodded. “Yeah, but...”

“Not a gorilla,” Reg said. “Please tell me you didn't have sex with a gorilla, dude. I mean, you've been with some ugly girls, but...”

Jase snorted. “Fuck you.”

Reg crowed a little more about it, teasing him. That was his way, to make light of serious things. It was why they made such good partners. Jase took everything too seriously, Reg sometimes not enough.

“But seriously. It was like a sex...thing?”

“Yeah. But hard to describe. I mean, it was so real, but it wasn't.” Jase shook his head. “Messed up, man.”

“Too long between lays?” Reg offered, not even joking. “And you're sure it wasn't something in the Ephemeros? Dreams can feel really real.”

“It wasn't. And there was all that glittery sort of...”

“Spooge,” offered Reg.

Jase grimaced again. “Gross.”

“So, we're definitely dealing with something related to the other cases. Spiritual, maybe? It's not ectoplasm. Something like it, maybe.”

Jase got up to put his dishes in the dishwasher, then leaned on the counter. “No. But it felt like something close to that. Like...while it was going on, I couldn't have told you for sure it wasn't real, but when I came out of it, I could remember everything that happened but almost like it happened to someone else. Like I'd been watching it in a movie. Or maybe...more like reading it in a book.”

“I don't read books,” Reg said.

Jase hadn't read a book in a long time, though not because he didn't like to. “When you read a really good one, you sort of get immersed in it. Like whatever's happening to the characters is happening to you. You're still aware that you're, say, sitting in your chair, but you're in it, whatever it is. That's what it was like.”

“Freaky. Remind me not to read a book.”

“Like playing a really great video game,” Jase said.

Reg grinned. “Okay, now I got it. So I guess the question is, why you and not me? And can we make it happen again?”

“I don't want it to happen again,” Jase said at once.

“Sounds like it was a good time...” Reg began, then stopped himself at Jase's look. “Okay, sorry. I get it.”

He didn't, really. Jase wasn't sure he did, either. Except that he worked cases. He didn't want to become one. Jase never again wanted to experience something like what had happened that long-ago summer when he'd nearly lost his mind and his life.

Not ever.

CHAPTER 8

O
kay, so finding a cute guy to make out with wasn't going to kill her, Chelle thought with a look around the crowded dance club. But it very well might break something. She sipped her vodka Collins so she didn't have to make conversation with the guy who'd been trying hard to catch her attention for the past five minutes.

“C'mon,” Angie said and put her empty glass on the bar. She glanced over Chelle's shoulder at the would-be paramour. “No.”

Chelle didn't dare look behind her to see his reaction, just set her glass down next to Angie's and let her friend pull her onto the dance floor. The music was thumping, the entire floor shaking, and for a weekend in the off-season, the place was full to overflowing.

“Sausage party,” Angie shouted into Chelle's ear with a grin. “We're outnumbered four to one!”

Chelle, being rump-humped from behind by a guy in a pink polo shirt, could only laugh. “May the odds be ever in your favor!”

Boy, were they ever. Angie's goal had been to make out with a random cute guy? Before another hour had passed, she'd successfully been smooched up on by three guys who appeared to be in a bachelor party. The fourth guy in their group, a little shorter, a little less drunk, though that was relative at this point in the night, hung back laughing. He caught Chelle's eye.

Before he could say anything, though, one of the other guys took a break from twirling Angie to duck close to them. “Hey. This is Steve. He hasn't been laid in a year.”

With that introduction, he turned back around to leave an embarrassed-looking Steve to face Chelle, who covered a laugh with her hand. Steve coughed. Chelle smiled.

“Why haven't you been laid in a year?” Vodka asked that question, not her.

Steve leaned a little closer so she could hear him. “I've been...busy? I guess?”

“Don't worry,” Chelle said as they both danced a little closer, letting the crowd push them. “I haven't been laid in longer than that.”

He put his hands on her hips to keep her from being jostled too much. They moved together easily enough. He was a good dancer.

“How come?”

Chelle leaned in to let her lips brush the curve of his ear. Vodka again, and more than that. The music. The crowd. The idea that the man in front of her hadn't been in bed with someone else in a long time.

“I lost my boyfriend,” came out of her mouth instead of something sexy and carefree, something casual. The truth slipped out of her, followed immediately by regret.

Lost him. As if they'd gone to the park and he'd slipped his leash. Lost, as though he could ever be found.

Steve didn't seem fazed by her admission. He pulled her closer and nuzzled her cheek. He had nice hands, flat and warm on her hips, his fingers curling against her. “His loss.”

Chelle wasn't drunk, but when he kissed her, she did feel unsteady and uncertain. He tasted of dollar beers. He kissed too hard, too fast, but softened when she tried to draw back. Over his shoulder, Chelle saw Angie deep in conversation with one of the guys from the bachelor party, not the bachelor himself. The best man, the one who'd told Chelle that Steve hadn't been laid in a year.

She was going to do this, Chelle thought with sudden determination. Make out with a cute random. Have fun. Dance.

Forget the past.

She kissed him this time, and it was better. He laughed when she pulled away. His glasses were a little askew. She straightened them.

“Buy me a drink,” Chelle said.

He did. They kissed some more, in a dark corner with black light turning the flecks in his black T-shirt brilliant white. The kissing got better. Steve got handsy, and it felt good to be wanted. To be touched. Dirty, in the good way. The music played on. They danced.

Chelle did not want to go home with him. Home being a room in the hotel attached to the club, a room he was sharing with two other guys. Definitely not her own house, which would require a twenty-minute cab ride and then breakfast in the morning.

“They want us to eat hot dogs with them,” Angie said, bright eyes, lipstick worn off, her hair tousled. “Girl, I can't eat any hot dogs at this hour.”

“You want to go home?” They'd ducked into the bathroom together, leaving the “boys” behind. Chelle washed her hands and used a damp paper towel to blot away the sweat. She turned to her friend. “We can totally slip out the side. They'll never know. Did you give him your name? Your number?”

“I said my name was Amy, and hell no.” Angie laughed. “I wanted to make out, not get married. Let's run. Oh... Don't... You want to go upstairs? Sorry, I should've asked.”

Chelle stepped aside to let someone else use the sink. “No. I mean, he's nice and all, but I don't want to go with him.”

Angie took her by the shoulders gently and looked closely at her face. “Honey, if you want to go upstairs and kiss up on Steve a little bit more, I'm good with that. I just didn't want you to feel...”

“No.” Chelle shook her head, refusing to give in to melancholy. It was that time of night, when the buzz from the drinks and the kissing was wearing off. “Let's get out of here.”

In the surge of people exiting the club, Chelle and Angie managed to duck away from Steve and his buddy, whose name Chelle still didn't know. She caught a glimpse of him, looking for her, and guilt prickled through her. Not so much that she turned back, though. All she wanted now was her bed.

In the parking lot, something ugly was happening. Too many drunks, not enough cabs. A fistfight. She and Angie held back.

“God, it's like a pack of zombies,” Angie said as they waved over a cab at last. “You should write that story, Chelle. Two friends go out dancing and get caught up in the end of the world.”

“Sexy,” Chelle said with a laugh as the cab pulled out of the parking lot.

At home, though, with a couple glasses of cold water in her but a still-unsettled stomach, she wasn't ready for bed yet. She didn't want to think too much about Steve or why she'd ended up passing up the chance for what might've been a few more hours of fun. It wasn't the idea of hooking up—she'd had a few one-nighters, a long time ago.

It had been the way he'd looked at her as the night wore on. Hungry, but something else, too. Something soft and hopeful, which was not what you were supposed to find in the gaze of the random cute guy you wanted to make out with in a dark corner. At least, that wasn't what Chelle had wanted to find.

She opened her laptop, thinking to browse her emails, but instead, she pulled up GOLEM and a fresh file.

Hungry
, she typed.
Steve had never been so hungry.

CHAPTER 9

“Y
ou have to be fucking kidding me!” Jase pulled his knife from the back of his belt as Reg unholstered his weapon. “That's not... Is it?”

Reg spat to the side. “Sure looks like it to me, man.”

The thing in question was a rotting, stinking corpse in tattered clothes. Half its jaw swung, gaping, but it still managed to burble a gargling refrain of complaint. Jase would bitch, too, if he were the walking undead trapped under a Dumpster with a beady-eyed gull aiming to pluck out his tongue.

The call had come in from a couple of drunks who'd gone into the alley to fuck but who'd found this thing instead. Whoever scanned the 911 calls had been quick to alert Vadim, who'd sent them out on this. The cops apparently hadn't done anything about it, and who could blame them? Ocean City at four in the morning had enough other shit going on without responding to a call about a zombie in an alley.

“You want to kill it?” Reg asked. “Splat, punch that effer in the brain?”

Jase was well out of reach of the thing's clutching fingers. “Dude, you know this isn't a real zombie.”

“It looks real enough that you could kill it,” Reg said mildly. “And shit, it stinks bad enough that you should.”

“It's like the flying monkeys, or King Kong,” Jase said in a low voice, easing closer. God, the thing did reek. Puddles of goo leaked out of it, so freaking gross. And it wasn't as if he wanted to take a chance on it getting its teeth into him, even if virus zombies had never been proven to be real. The kind raised up from voodoo, yeah, but this guy on the ground was clearly the product of someone's movie imagination. “Shine the light.”

Glowing sparkles everywhere. The entire alley lit up with them. Not phosphorescence, and nothing actually present.

“What the hell is going on?” Jase murmured, going to one knee to look the zombie in its desiccated face.

Reg spat to the side. “Just off it.”

That would've been easy enough to do. Knife to the head. Would it fade away, the thing, or would it remain as proof of what had happened?

It snapped its teeth at him. Jase studied it. “Trying to find the link between this and the others.”

Reg stood behind him. “Same glowing stuff under the black light. That's about it.”

“Did it attack anyone?”

“No.” Reg scuffed at the garbage spilling out of the Dumpster. “Looks like it wants to.”

Another thing shambled around the corner. Identical to the first, but this one upright and moving. It let out one of those disgusting gargles and reached for Reg, who rolled with a shout to escape. Jase, stuck between the Dumpster, the zombie on the ground and this new arrival, ducked its lunge and ended up with his back to the metal.

The one on the ground sank its teeth into his boot; a quick kick thoroughly crunched its face into mush, but it kept going. The walker lunged at him again, and over its shoulder, Jase saw Reg draw.

“No!” he shouted.

Gunfire would attract attention. It would also splatter zombie gunk all over Jase, and he didn't want to get a face full of guts. Instead, he kicked the looming monster in the knees, one at a time, sending it tumbling forward as he rolled out of the way. The thunk of its head connecting with the metal Dumpster was the sound of a watermelon hitting pavement.

“Cool,” Reg said.

Jase got to his feet, waiting to see if the thing was going to get up again, but it didn't stir. He waved a hand in front of his face. “God, that smell.”

“The smell's kind of the same as that guy in the closet,” Reg said conversationally, turning as a couple of drunks stumbled into the alley. “Hey. You. Get the fuck out of here!”

“You didn't need to pull your piece on them,” Jase said. “What if they call the cops?”

Reg grinned, but before he could answer, two more zombies rose up from behind the Dumpster. These were faster. Stronger. They didn't fall apart at the first punch or kick. Still, it took only about a minute's effort from both Reg and Jase to send them into a heap with the others.

Barely panting, Reg gave Jase a look. “Okay, so...where are they coming from? Hole in the wall, like rats? What? Did you see them manifest or anything?”

“No.” Jase nudged the pile with his foot. “And they're physical, for sure. I don't—”

Four more zombies rose up from the shadows, though it was impossible to tell if they'd manifested from the darkness or had been merely lying in silent wait all this time. Four against two was still odds Jase and Reg could handle, especially against rotten corpses unsteady on their feet. It took more effort this time, and Jase had to use his knife, but they downed all four of the things in a splash of goo.

“Okay, man,” Reg said. “This is getting freaky.”

Eight zombies.

No more conversation. He and Reg went into battle mode without words, without effort. They slipped as easily into the fight as if they were on the practice field. Fists and knives, still no guns because just around the corner, they could hear the laughter of a few more late-night revelers. The hint of a red-blue light drifted into the alley but faded along with the warning whoop of a police siren.

Sweating, Jase dropped the last zombie and stood over it, watching it writhe for a moment before it went still. Swiping at his face with a grimace of disgust at the goop and stench, he shot Reg a look. The other man was in a similar pose.

“The fuck,” Reg said.

Jase shook his head. “Whatever's going on, it's got to be—”

Sixteen zombies. The alley swarmed with them, and they backed Jase and Reg against the Dumpster, ankle deep in dead, rotting flesh. They'd come from nowhere. Slavering, lunging, jaws snapping. A bite wasn't going to turn either of them into the risen dead, but it was going to hurt like hell and might still get infected.

Reg waded in, knife slashing. Jase was right beside him, both pushing, slicing, kicking, punching. Jase brought his knife down, then up. Gore spattered. The zombie in front of him fell apart.

They all fell apart.

They were all gone.

Reg looked at him. “Dude.”

The only thing left in the alley was a swiftly fluttering bunch of trash on the ground and the gull, and that flew away with a startled squawk.