Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) (13 page)

“Yeah, we tried staking the area out a few times last night.” Matt yawned, his eyes heavy with bruises and bags. “It was crap. Every time we came back downstairs, the screens lit up. Orbs. Dashes. Everything but faces and full forms. My legs hurt from going up and down those damned stairs.”

“We thought maybe the birdcage thing was triggering something, so we parked it up on the third floor and ran up and down.” Gidget pointed to another shape edging into the corner of her video. “See that one? It’s shorter and moves quicker. I think it’s a kid.”

“No evidence,” Wolf responded automatically. They’d been down that path more than once. Gidget or Matt would get excited, and he’d be the one to pull them back. Evidence was only evidence when there were firm readings, and so far, a few pixels on a screen weren’t firm enough for him to call it a haunting.

Like the fucking dog that brought back a stinky red ball while he was busy getting drunk on Scottish whiskey and yearning for a pretty blond with soulful, changeable hazel eyes.

“Shit….” Take his own word for it? Ghosts were supposed to be people, not happy-faced terriers keen on a game of toss. “I’ve got to get readings. I just can’t….”

Saying something to the pair wasn’t going to do him any good. He had no proof. Only speculation and the curiosity of the black frost coating Tristan’s library windows. Frowning, Wolf flicked through the feeds, hoping to find a view of the Grange’s exterior.

“Let’s set up more cameras,” he finally pronounced. “Close up the holes. Assuming you guys are talking to each other again.”

“Yeah.” Matt sounded sheepish. “About that….”

“Tristan said you guys went pretty hot at each other in the garden. And not in a good way.” Wolf pierced Gidget with a look. “Said you tossed something into that pond by the fake ruins.”

“Shit, the ring,” Matt murmured.

“Wait until it stops raining.” Gidget moaned softly, burying her face in her hands. “I can’t fucking believe I did that.”

“I’m not saying this is true…,” Wolf prefaced. “But Pryce said something happened when you tossed the ring into the pond. Did you guys feel anything? See anything?”

“I was pissed off.” Gidget looked sheepish. “He….”

“I had sex with someone else,” Matt explained, then held up his hands when Wolf turned to give him a filthy look. “It’s not like that. Not
real
sex. In game—in a video game. Sorta. She’s not even on that server.”

“Dude,
cheating
.” The anger might have left Gidget’s voice, but the firmness remained. “Do not nookie another person’s bits. Flesh or pixels.”

“Get back to the ring.” Wolf steered the conversation back to its original subject. “Did you
see
anything?”

“Storm hit right about then,” Matt replied. Leaning back in his chair, the young man stared up at the ceiling, his eyes unfocused. “Um, there was a lot of thunder. And it was close—”

“You could feel it on your skin, you know?” Gidget interjected. “Like it was punching through the air at us.”

“Yeah, it did.” Matt looked down, staring at his boss. “The rain was just so fucking cold.”

“And hard.” Gidget looked toward the ballroom’s curtained windows. “I don’t think it’s stopped, even. Maybe a little bit but not enough for me to go out there to look for Matt’s grandma’s ring.”

“Great-grandmother,” Matt corrected. “It was her wedding ring. From her first marriage. Some duke or something. He died, and then she married a couple of other guys afterward.”

“What? Five more?” Gidget frowned, counting off on her fingers. “Yeah, I think it was six total, right?”

“She got married six times? Jesus, I can’t get married
once
.” Wolf shook off their inquiring looks. “Not that I want to. Just… shit. Six? How many ex-husbands can one woman have? What the hell did the family dinners look like?”

“Not ex-husbands.” Matt grinned at Wolf. “Dead husbands. That’s what Great-Grandma Winnie was known for. Killing off her husbands. They finally caught her before she killed off number seven. Turns out he was allergic to quinine. Got blisters and shit in his mouth when he drank some tea she gave him. Someone came over from Scotland Yard and leaned on her a bit, and she confessed to trying to kill him. Apparently she killed all of her husbands because you couldn’t get divorced back then or something.”

“So your great-grandmother was a serial killer?” Wolf rubbed at his eyes, feeling the tint of a migraine blooming behind his right orbital.

“Yep, pretty much.” Matt nodded. “Loved her kids, though. Had three of them. None by the duke or we’d be sitting in some castle somewhere drinking oolong and sniffing about the riffraff. She had insurance out on all of them but put it in her kids’ names. The courts couldn’t take any of it back.”

“And
you
….” Wolf stopped his rubbing and stared at Gidget. “You threw the ring of a known serial killer into a pond of a house we’re investigating for spectral activity? A place pretty much known for
generations
as an inn for ghosts?”

“Yeah, kinda.” Gidget grimaced. “We were going to get it back once the rain stopped. That pond’s pretty fucking deep. It’s more like a minilake. Really, someone could drown back in that shit.”

“It’s dark too. Can’t even see the bottom,” Matt murmured. “Even without the rain. ’Sides, I wasn’t the one that tossed it in there.
That
was Gidge.”

“Hey! I was pissed!” Gidget protested.

“Why would you even want a ring that was worn by a woman who offed her husbands?” Wolf asked, fearing the answer. “And why the hell would you give it to her, Matt?”

“I thought it would be cool, you know? I mean… her being a serial killer and everything. It’s a pretty ring.” Gidget crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s a ruby. The family thinks it came from India.”

“No one else in the family wanted it.” Matt shrugged. “Gidge and I thought it was sweet… kind of in a macabre way, but sweet. It was from her first marriage. You know… her first love.”

“And her first kill. Maybe. They didn’t prove she did
him
in.” Gidget smiled at her lover. “Not like she chopped the others up into meat pies.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Wolf sighed heavily. “It’s like the two of you are trying to get us killed.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Matt protested. “It’s not like you believe in any of this shit. It’s just a storm… and a damned ring! It’s not like tossing the ring made anything happen. We don’t even have any proof this is real, and you don’t believe in ghosts, remember?”

Wolf stood up, sending the chair toppling onto its side, pissed off at the skeptical doubts that were no longer whispering in the back of his mind. Growling as he stalked out of the room to find Tristan, he shot back at them, “Well, I fucking do
now
.”

T
HE
FLOOR
was wet. More importantly, there were damp footprints coming into the Grange, a large puddle and then footprints, just as moist as the ones before, leaving again.

Tristan couldn’t quite believe it.

There was no Heather Cook. There was no inquiry of employment. There wasn’t even a shy confession about having no references because the lady had turned her out.

Nothing. Just water, footprints, and silence.

He didn’t even get a chance to
see
her.

Heather Cook, the Grange’s spectral cook for at least two generations, did not come to ask for a job she’d always been given. Instead, she took measure of the place, and despite having no letters or good word from a spiteful woman whose husband’s attention wandered over to a pretty Cockney girl who’d tried to better herself, Heather Cook got the fuck out of Dodge without a single word to the man waiting for her.

Tristan wanted to cry. In some way, he felt like he was losing parts of Uncle Mortimer all over again.

Or worse, parts of himself.

He jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder, then steeled himself not to cry when Wolf gently turned him around. The compassionate look on the man’s face broke him, and Tristan bit into his lower lip, hoping the pain would keep him from blubbering like a baby into Wolf’s broad chest.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” It was hard to ignore the sensual rub of Wolf’s voice against the crumbling bits of his heart. Especially when the man’s wide, rough hands scraped over his jaw, a tender, gentle touch Tristan didn’t even realize he’d been missing until he felt it. “Pryce, talk to me. What’s happened? I can see it in your face.”

“She’s not coming.” He glanced over at the door, his gaze catching on the watery footprints marring the floor. “Well, she came, but she… didn’t stay. Something’s
wrong
, Kincaid. Something’s horribly wrong.”

“Yeah, I know.” Wolf’s mouth lowered, brushing on Tristan’s cheek, and anything he might have said was now caught in his throat, stymied by the warmth of the man’s body against his. “Come on, we need to talk.”

“T
HEY
THREW
a murderer’s ring into my pond?” Tristan stared out the window of his library, not quite believing what Wolf was saying. “And not just any murderer, but a woman who killed six of her husbands?”

“Five. The sixth… well, really he was the first… is disputed,” Wolf murmured, refilling Tristan’s wine glass. “He might have just died of natural causes.”

He’d allowed Wolf to bring him upstairs to his apartment, wrapped himself in a mound of quilts, then curled into one of the old floppy cushioned couches in his library. The room’s expanse of windows were now clear, the black frosted shadows either wiped clean by the torrential rain or perhaps even had crept into the manor, playing havoc with his peaceful existence.

Much like Wolf Kincaid was doing to his body and mind.

Kincaid put the bottle back down on the table he’d taken it from, stretching his long arm across Tristan’s knees and in front of his face. If he’d wanted to, Tristan could have actually bitten the man, taking a bit of skin and flesh into his mouth until Wolf’s blood ran down his chin. Not that he was actually bloodthirsty, but he was pretty pissed off about what Gidget and the rest of the Hellsinger team had brought to his front door.

Apparently not so pissed off that his cock didn’t jerk up when Wolf brushed against him, because his groin began its own little dance club beneath his zipper as Kincaid looped an arm around Tristan’s shoulders and pulled him close.

“Fucking dick,” Tristan muttered at his traitorous piece of flesh. “I hope you fucking get bitten off by a barracuda someday. That’ll show you.”

“Who are you talking to?” Wolf looked around. “Someone here?”

A few days ago, Tristan would have crowed at hearing Wolf Kincaid, mighty ghost stalker extraordinaire, admit to the possibility of some other presence in the room. In the middle of a darkness eating his home, there was little joy he could find in the man’s words.

“No one’s here. Shit, even Boris is asleep on my bed,” Tristan grumbled, resting his forehead on his pulled-up knees. “I don’t know where Jack is, and hell only knows where Cook’s gone.”

“Has she ever
not
shown up before?”

“No, even if you miss her, she’ll usually be waiting.” The weight of Wolf’s arm on his shoulder was a distraction, nearly as much as the occasional burr of his unshaven jaw against Tristan’s cheek when he shifted about. “Stop moving. It’s hard… to think.”

“Hungover?” Wolf’s snort ruffled the hair on his neck. “Mara said you didn’t get… how did she put it? Ossified?”

If he’d been hungover by anything, it’d been by the uncoordinated mashing of Wolf’s tongue against his lips right before the man passed out on top of him. They’d shared whiskey and the storm between them, a hot, heady pounding of damp and lightning punctuated with kisses nearly as violent. It all ended too suddenly for Tristan, a searing heat, then nothing but a slack masculine weight and not-so-delicate snores.

It was like sleeping with Boris. Except a lot less hairy.

“I’m sorry about Cook,” Wolf whispered. Shifting, he stroked Tristan’s cheekbone with his fingers. “I feel like I should do something.”

“You should. You’ve brought this mess to the Grange.” He tried to sound angry or at least ruffled, but it was difficult to concentrate with Wolf’s feathering touch moving over his face.

“Because nothing shitty’s ever happened here before?” Wolf cocked his head, and Tristan blinked, caught in the man’s clear blue gaze. “Maybe it’ll be like the rest of your guests? Three days and it’ll be gone.”

“I—” Tristan gulped, his breath mingling with the sweet heat of Wolf’s exhale. “You’re making me crazy. I can’t think.”

“Yeah, well….” Wolf trailed another long, skittering path over Tristan’s cheek, ending with a press of his finger against Tristan’s lower lip. “You did that to me a few days ago. Glad to see you finally caught up. Never thought you’d be the slow one.”

He knew it was coming. Everything pointed to it. Hell, his
dick
pointed to it, but Tristan
still
wasn’t prepared for Wolf’s kiss. His mind churned with enough white noise to drown out the storm raging just beyond the library’s windows, and the scent of citrus and Wolf buried the cloying sting of rain in the air. It was a sweet touching of mouths and Tristan heard himself make some little noise, muted in the rushing pound of his heart as it began to skip a beat.

That’s when he found out Wolf was apparently turned on by little sounds when they became trapped between his pursed lips, because Tristan found himself pushed up against the side of the couch with one of Wolf’s hands tangled in his hair while the other skimmed up under his shirt.

Throwing caution to the wind, Tristan dove in, tossing himself into the uncertain tempest brewing between them.

There was too much of everything keeping Tristan contained. His clothes twisted around his waist and chest, and his shirt pulled at his shoulders when Wolf’s hand slipped over his belly and found his right nipple. With not enough room to do more than rake and pull at Tristan’s nub, Wolf could only do so much, but it was enough to drive Tristan’s cock to a frenzied heat.