Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) (11 page)

It looked to be an epic battle, one bards would have penned lengthy songs about and added verses to as pub drinkers called for more. Too far away to hear anything specific, Tristan could only imagine the furious, sharpened words Gidget flung at the now-cowering Matt. He winced at one particular volley, his shoulders shaking and pulling back as he tucked his elbows in against his ribs as if staving off an attack.

“She’s a sight to behold,” Mara proclaimed. “Good form, really. Arms have nice gestures, and her legs are apart enough to steady her. Look how she’s facing him, full force. Whatever he’s done, it’s pissed her right off.”

“Best thing about being gay, then,” Tristan murmured. “I don’t think I’d survive that. Look at Uncle Walter and Ashley. She looks like someone who’d stab you while you’re sleeping. With tiny little needles. Poisoned needles so it’ll look like you fell into an orgy of lesbian black widows.”

“Most men wouldn’t survive that. Gay or no,” the woman replied. “Really, Tristan? Black widows?”

“Best I could come up with. You knew what I meant. Praying mantises wouldn’t have worked. Had to be black widows.”

Gidget’s voice grew louder, a banshee wail carrying over the bushes, and Tristan caught a snatch of an accusation. There seemed to be a question of infidelity, and she’d found something out but he couldn’t tell what.

“I didn’t see what shoes she had on. Hope she’s not wearing those stilettos I saw her in the other day,” Mara commented. “She could kill a man with those.”

“They looked like switchblades.” A small nibble of an idea bloomed into a larger awareness in Tristan’s mind. “That’s why they call them stilettos. Well, shit. I never knew.”

“It’s good you’re pretty, Tristan.” She patted his shoulder. “Or I’d worry that no man would want to marry you.”

“Nice,” he grumbled. “I don’t think about women’s shoes. Hell, I barely think about
my
shoes.”

Matt’s beseeching arguments seemed to only infuriate the woman more, and she stopped at the end of the steps, right on the edge of the garden path. Pulling at something on her finger, Gidget wrenched and twisted before finally coming up triumphant. Whatever she yanked off her finger—Tristan could only assume it was a ring—sparkled as it turned in midair, a flash of white and gold against its graying skies and lush evergreen backdrop.

The ring flew, winged by the woman’s ire, then landed in the middle of the folly’s pond, rippling out a small splash across its murky waters.

The water wasn’t the only thing that rippled when the ring struck the pond. Something dark flowed up out of the disturbed waters, a malingering otherness that spread over the garden and smacked Tristan full in his face. Next to him, Boris whined, hunching over and tucking his head into the back of Tristan’s legs, trying to bury his muzzle into Tristan’s knees. Mara gasped and clenched the balcony’s railing, her knuckles white as she tried to stay on her feet. Buckling, she held on, riding out the forceful undulations as the rings grew outward, spreading a thin, dusky veil over the grounds and the manor behind them.

Anything Matt or Gidget might have said after that was buried under the roar of thunder ripping out from the growling cloud banks above them and flickers of lightning spitting across the sky, pushing back the shadows for a brief instance before the grounds were consumed again. The storm moved in quickly, spreading its coal-dust front much faster than Tristan could imagine. In seconds, the rain began, its enormous drops hot and painful where it struck his skin.

“Get inside, Mara,” he growled, bending over to hoist Boris to his feet. The dog whimpered and cowered, but he hefted him up, cradling Boris in his arms. “Get out of this.”

They ran the short distance from the end of the wide pavilion to the house, but the rain had already done its damage. Soaked through, Tristan gently placed Boris on the floor as soon as he crossed the threshold, not trusting his balance on the polished wood.

“What the fuck was that?” He turned to Mara, not caring about the puddle he was making on the parquet. “What the hell just happened out there? What did we just see?”

“I don’t know, Tristan love.” Mara turned and stared out of the french doors at the rain and hail pounding the Grange’s sturdy walls. “I really don’t know.”

I
T
WAS
a bad time for the children to have a spat. Not that any time was a good one, but Wolf had just wrestled the crates a courier service dropped off for them and sent back what they’d broken during their stay at the Grange. Hefting five bins across the long haul to the ballroom made his shoulders ache, and what he’d really wanted to do was hunt Tristan down and demand why the man was avoiding him. He’d spent the last few days playing cat and mouse with the blond, only pinning him down long enough to ask if they could stay longer, but when Wolf tried to talk about their single kiss, Tristan was like smoke in the wind.

“You’d think
he
was a damned ghost here,” Wolf muttered, shoving yet another crate under a table. “Where the fuck
are
those two?”

It was past their normal lunchtime break… and that
fucking kiss
.

“Goddammit.” Wolf leaned his head back and pressed his hands against the small of his back, working out a kink. “Pryce, between your mouth and that damned ball, you keep fucking with my head. It’s got to stop.”

There was no denying the ball’s reappearance. He’d thrown it away several times, even knotting it into a plastic bag and dropping it into the trash, but the damned thing reappeared when he’d least expect it. At six in the morning before they shut down for the night, he’d thrown it out his bedroom window. He’d grabbed a new pair of underwear to put on after his shower and found the ball floating in the tub—in a hot bubble bath he’d
not
drawn before he went hunting for his briefs.

Wolf had grabbed the ball from the water, tossed his underwear on the counter, drained the tub, and said fuck it to the bath. He’d shower in the morning.

Since his dreams were full of a lean, naked Tristan rolling about on dark satin sheets, his shower was an extremely cold one.

“You should just fuck him, Kincaid.” He slumped down into a wing chair, flipping on the camera feeds to look for his crew. “Fuck him and get it over with.”

Because having sex with the firm-assed young man was going to somehow stop the damned red ball from appearing under his feet whenever he left it someplace other than his pocket or on the nightstand.

He took the ball out of his jacket pocket, bouncing it against the ballroom’s marble floor. It made a
snick
sound, then another as he tossed it against one of the silk-covered walls. It hit and neatly ricocheted off, bouncing right back into Wolf’s open hand. There was some small, niggling sense of satisfaction in seeing a mark on the silk wallpaper, but that only lasted a few moments before he got to his feet to wipe it off.

“That fucking son of a bitch.” Gidget slammed through the ballroom, stomping toward the equipment setup. Skidding to a stop, she stared at the stacked bins Wolf had dragged in. Bedraggled was the best word Wolf could use to describe his electronics technician. She was sopping wet, her once spotless sundress soaked down with a strawberry Jell-O stain from the temporary color she put in her hair. The puddles she left behind were pink-speckled, and Wolf sighed, wondering where he could find a mop in the Grange’s massive kitchen.

“What happened?” He really didn’t want to know, especially when Matt came through the open doors, hot on Gidget’s heels and, if possible, even more drenched than his girlfriend. Gidget’s face got hard when she spotted Matt, and her chest heaved as she took a long breath, obviously filling her lungs for a good scream. Wolf stepped between them, holding his hands up. “Stop. I’m only going to say this once. When the two of you hooked up, you promised that your relationship wouldn’t impact the job. So I’m going to have to ask, is that what’s going on now? Because if it is, then you both need to take a step back and deal with this because I’m not having it in front of me. Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Matt murmured. Gidget said nothing but nodded, dropping her eyes to the floor, abashed.

“I don’t hear you, Gidge,” Wolf pressed.

“Yeah, boss,” she replied softly.

“Now, one of you go get a mop and clean up this floor. You tracked it in, you get rid of it.” Wolf stabbed at the table behind them. “Then dry off and get that stuff hooked up. If you’ve got time to deal with whatever you’ve got going on between you, then good. If not, then make sure it’s done by the time we sit our asses in those chairs tonight to do our jobs. Got it?”

They both nodded, eyeing one another over the ocean of pink-and-clear puddles they’d smeared over the ballroom. Matt cleared his throat. “Um, what are you going to be doing?”

“I’m going to find our host.” Wolf squeezed the red ball in his hand. “He and I have a few things we need to work out.”

T
HE
DARKNESS
was troubling. As Tristan stared out at the garden from his apartment, he watched shadows lengthen, a sheer impossibility considering the encroaching moonless night, but there they were, moving and writhing about the paths as if alive and seeking something to feed on. So far, the house seemed quiet, untouched by the fingerlings of darkness outside, but he wondered for how long and, more importantly, how the hell was he going to stop them?

Situated behind the kitchen and running along the length of the wing, his library was a hodgepodge of books, furniture, and artifacts culled from Uncle Mortimer’s travels before he settled into Hoxne Grange. Picked out mostly from his uncle’s hoard in the attic, Tristan found a soft comfort in the ancient, worn furniture, settling into a tapestry couch someone had dragged over from England during the house’s glory days. It was a fantastical piece, long enough for him to stretch out on if he wanted, but mostly, he curled up into its corners and pulled pillows up around him, watching the world pass by him through the Grange’s broad windows.

Now he wished he could pull at the filmy curtains and hide behind them, veiled from the shadows and the storm brewing just beyond the Grange’s walls.

The howling winds drowned out any other sound, and he nearly swallowed his tongue when Wolf Kincaid appeared at the end of the couch. His satyric presence loomed over him, a wickedly handsome man squishing the hell out of Jack’s red rubber ball.

Boris looked up from his place on the floor, rumbling a low hello before flopping back down into his nest of pillows. Stepping over the wolfhound’s lanky body, Wolf navigated around the dog, then sat next to Tristan, his long legs crossed under him. His feet were bare, like Tristan’s, but with a fine black down on the rises of his toes. It looked softer than the springier hair on Wolf’s calves, but Tristan would need to touch both to make sure.

As if Wolf Kincaid would want Tristan’s hands on him, especially after he’d pulled away from their kiss.

The feel of the man under his hands had been too much, and Tristan knew if he’d stayed ruched up against Wolf’s body for a moment longer, he would have torn off their clothes and embarrassed himself. More than he usually did.

Instead, Wolf eyed him suspiciously and held the ball up under Tristan’s nose, his fingers running over its curve. The smell of dog-spit rubber tickled Tristan’s senses, and he nearly sneezed, catching a whiff of algae and something danker on the ball’s surface. Rubbing at his face, Tristan drove the sensation out, waiting for Wolf to say something.

“Talk to me about Jack,” he finally said.

“Jack?” Tristan eyed him again, this time with a bit more heat. “Really? You want to talk about the dog?”

“Dog first. Then us.”

“I think I told you all I know about Jack. He’s about maybe a foot and a half tall? Bluish, like the others. They really don’t have a lot of color. I think he’s got white fur. A couple of darker spots on his body and ears. They could be black or brown. Hard to say.” Tristan pursed his lips thoughtfully, yanking on the man’s chain. “Oh, and he’s a
dog
.”

“And he likes this ball?” Wolf waved the smelly thing under Tristan’s nose again, and he pushed at Wolf’s arm with a swipe of his hand.

“Yes. Don’t make me smell it. It stinks. Worse than Boris’s tennis balls.”

“Okay,” Wolf said, tucking the ball behind him. “Now we’re going to talk about us. And this place.”

“I’d rather talk about how many ways I could lose a fingernail, starting with hot pliers,” Tristan muttered. “But sure, we can talk about
us
. What’s there to say? You kissed me. I ran away while you were watching my hallucinations. End of story. I’d rather talk about whatever your team did to my place.”

He got no further. The lights flickered. Then a bulb popped in a stained glass lamp by the door. Another followed, smoke rising from the cracked bulb, and Tristan sat up, startled at the black stain creeping over the library’s windows. Boris whimpered and shoved himself as far against the couch as he could, and Tristan thought he might fight the dog for some place safe to hide.

“Tell me you see that, Kincaid.” He got to his feet, nearly falling over Boris. An intense cold slipped over him, and the windows began to crinkle with a dusky-gray frost, curls of inky swirls folding over each other as it quickly covered the panes. “Tell me I’m crazy
now
.”

“What the hell is that?” Wolf came up behind him, and the man’s strong arms wrapped around Tristan’s waist, cradling him from behind. The touch of the other man felt too good for Tristan to shove away, especially since his warmth chased off the icy prickling slipping over his skin.

Something felt… wrong. Tristan had no other word for it. The sick of it stained his senses, and he swallowed, trying to get the film’s thick, oily taste off of his tongue. His fingers dug into Wolf’s forearms, a tight grip hard enough to bruise flesh, but the other man said nothing, bearing whatever pain he might have felt.

“Something happened today,” Tristan whispered softly. The chill was leaving him, a speck at a time, but it lingered, lurking just outside of the Grange’s once-clear windows. “Gidget and Matt were arguing by the folly… and she took something off of her finger. When she threw it, it landed in the pond… the big pond where the fireflies gather… where I’ve seen some of the guests… the spirits… walk into when they leave.