Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) (9 page)

Instead, he’d stabbed his pie and stared at Pryce’s crème-dotted lips for the rest of the dinner.

Shoving aside any thought of a naked Tristan lying on his back with meringue speckled his blush-pink nipples, Wolf pointed at the banquet table set up as their mess. “Matt, go fire up the coffeemaker. It’s going to be a long night.”

The team decided against roaming the halls. Hoping their equipment would help pinpoint high spectral areas, they each settled into comfortable chairs Pryce offered for their use. By midnight, they’d seen very little and heard even less. Matt continued to pat at his belly and by one in the morning was dozily leaning his head on his lover’s shoulder. Sighing in contentment, Gidget glanced over at their mess table, obviously debating something to eat.

“Pryce’s heading outside,” Matt declared from his place in front of the camera monitors. “Dude’s hardcore. It was fricking ball-freezing cold when I went out for a smoke. Must be penguin-nut chilly now.”

“That’s pretty cold.” Gidget unfolded from her chair and ambled over to the trays, lifting up covers and oohing over what she found. “I should go take him a sweater or something. Think he wants a Hellsinger hoodie?”

The last thing Wolf wanted in his head was the idea of Gidget chatting Tristan Pryce up while he shrugged on something to keep his slender body warm. Especially not something with Wolf’s name on it.

“I’ll do it. I’ve got to ask him a few more things about the place, anyway. You two stay here,” Wolf muttered, grabbing one of their promo zippered jumpers. “And no fornicating.”

“Never on the clock, boss,” Matt assured him. “Once the cameras are on—”

“The eyes are on the screen,” Gidget finished for him. “Maybe take some coffee with you. Looks like fog’s rolling in too.”

He knew how Tristan took his coffee. He’d watched the man stir in mostly equal amounts of sugar and cream, and apparently his brain somehow counted off the seconds it took for Pryce to whiten his brew. With the hoodie shoved under his arm, Wolf balanced two mugs of coffee and headed out to the back of the Grange.

The mansion was eerily quiet. A house its size should have sounds of people, murmurs of conversation, or music playing softly from one of its elegant rooms. Instead, Wolf walked through a dirge of silence, his footsteps muted by the plush carpets laid on the Grange’s honeyed oak floors.

French doors led out to the Grange’s back pavilion, a semicircle elevated patio overlooking the grounds below. The slope was a gentle one, cut through by a rough cobblestone path leading to the ponds and gardens surrounding the manor house. The tip of the carriage house’s roof could be seen beyond a brace of juniper trees, its peaks echoing the Grange’s larger turrets.

Gidget had been right about the fog. Thick misty banks were slowly rolling over the gardens’ hedgerows and bushes. Wolf found his quarry leaning on the marble banister, his legs crossed at his ankles and his ass jutting out when he rested his weight on his elbows.

The moonlight bled the color out of the Grange’s vibrant surroundings, turning the greenery to dots and lines of pitch against a rainbow of grays. Spots of red poked out of the monochromatic sea, tired heads of cabbage roses bobbing under the touch of the mist’s creeping fingers. The silver light coming from the sparse clouds touched Tristan’s body, pouring shadows into the dip of his spine and brightening a hand’s width of skin above the waistband of his jeans, where his T-shirt was pulled up on his back.

It was the perfect spot to place a kiss. The shallow crease of Tristan’s lower back begged for one, and Wolf’s mouth watered when he thought of his teeth scoring red lines on that patch of pale skin. Then his throat closed up, dry and wanting, as he realized he could just as easily tug down the man’s loose jeans and bite into the succulent rounded ass hidden below.

He was going to hate hiding the man’s sensual lines under the swaddling fleece, but the wind chewed through Wolf’s face with icy teeth, and Tristan was probably freezing, even if he wasn’t paying much attention to anything but the dark swatch of a large pond stretched out in front of a small Gothic-style folly.

“Here,” Wolf said, shoving the mug he’d brought at Tristan. “Got a hoodie for you to put on too. Gidget’s worried you’ll catch cold.”

“Ah, thanks. Hold on, let me put that on first.” Tristan’s fingers brushed over Wolf’s, and they were as cold to the touch as he’d imagined they would be. Wolf watched Tristan shrug on the fleece then zip it up. He patted at the Hellsinger logo on his chest, then took the cup from Wolf’s clenched hand. “I didn’t expect it to be this cold tonight. You’d think I was a tourist or something. I’m never prepared for the weather.”

“Where’s your furry companion?” Wolf looked around for the man’s overly large dog.

“Inside, probably sleeping on my bed where it’s warm.” Tristan grinned. “I needed some air, and I like coming out here. The view’s nice.”

“You often come out here at night to stare at… nothing?” Wolf leaned on the railing, looking down at the gardens. “Not much to stare at in the dark.”

“I’m waiting for the fireflies to come out.” The man sighed as he cupped his hands and took a sip of coffee. “I used to think
I
drank too much of this stuff, but you guys got me beat.”

“Comes with the territory. Most of what we do happens in the dead of the night.” He tried to ignore the man settling in next to him, but Tristan’s cooler skin gave him the shivers. Moving closer, Wolf told himself it was to help warm up the slender man, but the clench in his balls called him a liar.

“That’s funny. Ghosts. Dead of the night,” Tristan snorted. “You know, ghosts are around during the daytime too. Especially around here. No people.”

“You think people are the reason the spookies don’t come out during the day?”

“People are noisy.”

“Loud.” Wolf cocked an eyebrow at the man. “Ghosts like peace and quiet? They’re the librarians of the supernatural?”

“No, not that the ghosts don’t like sound. Well some kinds of sound, I guess.” Tristan gave Wolf an unreadable look. “People make
sub-physical
sound. Not by talking or anything, just by being around. Their heat, their bodies… everything thrums. They echo against things. Ghosts can hear that… feel that. They exist in that realm of sound and light… and consciousness. Live people bleed into that space, making their rude little reverberations. It’s quieter when people are asleep. Ghosts can slip out and not be stolen into.”

“So you think it’s Hoxne Grange’s quiet that draws your guests in?” Wolf mulled the man’s theory over. It wasn’t so much bullshit as some of the explanations he’d heard from other investigators. “Because people bleed into their existence?”

“Yep.” Tristan nodded. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Huh.” He blinked, thinking on the matter. “Kind of makes sense. Never really thought about the why of ghosts’ existence. Other than from a haunting aspect.”

“Ghosts are… smaller echoes than the living. They have no form. It’s harder to exist that way,” the other man replied. “I know it sounds simplistic, but wouldn’t it be hard to exist if someone’s always pushing into where you are? Not having equal mass means you can’t take up equal space.”

“So you don’t think they’re just memories? Imprints? That’s the popular theory.”

“I’ve never been popular.” Tristan’s laugh was bitter. “Maybe that’s how it works in other places. Here, they’re… people.”

“People you see walking around you? Talking? Having scones on the patio?” Wolf scoffed. “Convenient that there are always rooms for them. No overflow. No lost luggage.”

“I didn’t make the rules.” The man shrugged off Wolf’s skepticism. “I’m not sure who did. Maybe Uncle Mortimer? Hell, maybe even someone before him? All I know is what I’ve been taught. Open the doors, sign them in, hire Cook on Tuesday mornings, and be polite whenever one of them comes out of the silence to speak to me. I don’t see them all the time. Sometimes the
only
time I see one is when they check in. Other times, I walk into the ballroom and they’re all I see, but they don’t see me.”

“And you’ve never once wondered if they’re really there?” Wolf probed gently.

“No, not after I came here.” Tristan shook his head, a fall of gold-and-dun hair bleached out to floss and smoke. “Before, yeah. When I was a kid, I was afraid to fall asleep because there were see-through Chinese prostitutes being herded through my room by a large man with a gun. He would shoot one, maybe two. Every night. And she would die… she would take a long time to die, but I wouldn’t always hear them screaming. Sometimes they just lay on the ground, kicking their feet and twisting around until they turned to smoke. Then the next time, new women… young girls, really. And I would go through it all over again.”

“Did you tell your parents?” He could only imagine what a rational person would think if their son came to them with a tale of dying ghostly whores.

“I saw every psychiatrist ever to work in San Francisco.” Tristan sighed. “No school for me. Tutors. Because I couldn’t be trusted not to suddenly ‘see’ something and get crazy. After a while, I just didn’t say anything anymore. Not about the prostitutes. Not about the cowboys riding up Stockton. Not even about the little boy getting thrown into the water by the pier. They thought it all went away. It didn’t. I just shut up about it.”

“Until Uncle Mortimer.”

“Yeah, until… Hoxne Grange.” His face grew wistful, and he took another sip at the cooling coffee. “Uncle Mortimer told my parents to leave me here during the summers. The summers became all the holidays. Then one day, I just never went home. The tutors came here, and I could be as crazy as I needed to be without anyone trying to measure me for a wraparound jacket.”

“They still might,” Wolf murmured and took the nudge to his ribs from Tristan’s elbow with a grin. “Especially since you’re out here looking for fireflies in San Francisco. They don’t glow out here. That only happens east of the Rockies.”

“What are you talking about?” Tristan frowned at him. “We have glowing fireflies. I’ve been watching them at the Grange since I was a little kid.”

“I don’t know what you’re watching, but it sure as hell’s not fireflies.”

“They’re here,” Tristan insisted. “They’re all sparkly, and they hover out there by the waters. We get a few that come in closer, but they’re usually over there. They’re little dots… like yellow-green with some white. Sometimes there’re so many it looks like the stars have fallen down. And when they’re in the fog, they light up the whole bank from underneath. It looks like one of the
leong
—the long dragons—during the Chinese New Year parade.”

“Well, not like it’s any more crazy than you’re seeing ghosts.” Wolf shrugged, then winced when Tristan punched his arm.

“I’m not crazy,” the man muttered under his breath. “You watch. I’m warning you. They’ll be here.”

“Just like you’ve warned me about this ball?” Wolf pulled the small toy out of his pocket. “Tell you what. I’m going to throw it someplace you won’t be able to find it in the dark. If it somehow comes back to me before morning, I
might
believe in your ghosts.”

“Everything has strings for you, don’t they, Kincaid?” Tristan’s smile was a sad pull on his pretty face. “Throw it. Jack’ll bring it back to you, and then you’ll never get rid of him.”

“Jack?”

“Yeah, the dog. He’s been here for as long as I’ve been around.” Another shrug but this time, the man’s smile was nearly smug. “He’s the only spectral dog I’ve ever seen here at the Grange. Horses, yeah, and a giraffe once, but they disappear with the guests. Oh, and there was a camel. Uncle Mortimer says he saw a couple of Tasmanian tigers, but I think he was pulling my leg. Jack’s the only one who stays.”

“And you know his name?” Wolf tested the ball’s weight in his hand. It was hefty enough to take a good toss, and he scanned the gardens, wondering if his arm was good enough. It’d been years since he’d played ball, and the occasional pickup hoops game wasn’t the same thing as tossing in something from outfield. “The dog. Not the camel. Or the giraffe. Does he talk? Or did you just hear it in your head?”

“It’s just what I call him, asshole. Not like he’s got a collar and a tag. I think he’s a Jack Russell terrier. They call them something else now, I think. Parsons something or other. But I’m not changing his name now. He knows it. I think.”

“You are a beautiful but strange young man, Tristan Pryce.”

“So some people say.” Tristan’s eyes followed the ball as it arced through the air. It landed with a small splash in one of the smaller man-made ponds pooling in the garden’s more informal walks. “Well, the strange part. Don’t think anyone’s ever called me beautiful.”

“Well, there’s no coming back from that one. And yeah, you’re beautiful. Someone should have told you that sooner. Maybe you’d be out in the real world instead of living here with your imaginary friends,” Wolf said before draining his coffee cup. “Don’t go wading in there now.”

“Wasn’t planning on it. The water’s too cold.” Tristan leaned forward again, staring back out into the gardens. The stone balustrades were spaced wide enough for him to lodge a knee in between them but not much more. Wolf set his cup down on the patio floor and turned so he was up against Tristan’s side. The man eyed him but didn’t pull away. “What?”

“You’re like Sleeping Beauty in this place. Waiting for a prince to climb the roses and battle the dragon to set you free?”

“I don’t think there was a dragon in the original story.” Tristan smirked. “And you’ve seen my studio. I’d sooner have the dragon than the prince. Besides, there’s no such thing as a Prince Charming.”

“And here I thought
I
was the cynic.”

He wanted just a small taste. The man’s mouth had haunted Wolf’s mind since the first time he’d seen Tristan staring at him from across the Grange’s reception desk. His hands itched to be buried in the man’s unruly golden-tinted mane. It was a good length to be wrapped around his fingers so he could pull Tristan’s mouth closer to him.

Which was exactly what Wolf Kincaid did.

The angle was awkward, but Wolf didn’t care. His palms were cupped around Tristan’s high cheekbones, and his mouth tasted of the man himself.