Wicked Whispers (2 page)

Right now, though, he needed to stop the pain. When he’d put some distance between himself and the Castle of Dark Dreams, he glanced around. Not far enough away from humanity to cut loose completely, but he could at least siphon off some of his music and relieve the agony for a while.

A moonless night, but there was some light filtering down from the streetlights across the road. No one on the beach. That’s all he had to know. The pain was almost to the point of exploding from him. That would be a bad thing for everyone in Galveston
and
for him. He wasn’t ready to leave the castle yet.

Drawing in a deep breath, he allowed his music to escape in a slow, controlled flow of sound. It mirrored his mood of the moment—dissatisfied, confused, and even a little sad. Murmur let the intertwined melodies build to a crescendo of angry frustration. Why the hell was he feeling these emotions now after so many thousands of years?

He closed his eyes at the remembered bliss of times long past. Times when he released the fury of his songs on entire villages, watching as everyone within the sound of his music died screaming. Or, if he was in a more playful mood, they’d die dancing, unable to stop until their puny human hearts gave out.

Murmur hadn’t done that in a long time. He wasn’t ready to examine the reason why.

Ivy stepped onto the beach and wandered toward the waterline, where gentle waves lapped at the sand. The Gulf was quiet tonight. The lights from the street didn’t do much to help her see where she was going. Symbolic? Maybe. Because three days ago she’d made the first impulsive decision of her adult life.

She’d taken a job at Live the Fantasy, an adult theme park where people could unpack their dreams of being more than they were, dust them off, and play the part for a half hour. Tomorrow she’d meet her boss for the first time. Ivy glanced back at the castle. Still time to run.

Before she could begin to obsess about the insanity of accepting a job as the personal assistant to someone named Sparkle Stardust, she heard the music.

It came from everywhere and nowhere. The melody wrapped around her, tendrils of compulsion that seeped into her soul and made her—she widened her eyes—want to dance.

Ivy didn’t dance. Ever. She had no rhythm. But she was okay with that. Dancing didn’t further her life’s goal—a solid, well-paying job so she could build her own white picket fence around a home in suburbia. She’d never depend on a man to do her picket-fence building.

But suddenly, for no apparent reason, she wanted to dance,
had
to dance. Without her permission, her feet began to move with the throbbing beat. Closing her eyes, she let it happen. If she really concentrated, she could almost hear words—of futility, frustration,
need
.

Ivy realized she was dancing farther and farther away from the castle, but she didn’t seem to care. All that mattered was the music. Its bass pounded out an ever-more-frenetic message of anger and so much need that brought tears to her eyes. She swirled and leaped on waves of emotion, even as the Gulf’s waves curled around her ankles before retreating.

The person she’d always been—logical, grounded in reality—screamed, “What the hell are you doing?” But nothing mattered. Everything she was floated away on the compulsive rhythm urging her to dance and dance and dance…

And then she saw him
. He stood in the darkness, waiting as she danced closer and closer. At first he was only a shadow among many shadows. But as she drew nearer she saw him more clearly. Tall, elegant, with broad shoulders and a body that she imagined would be powerful and lean-muscled beneath his black boots, black pants, and what looked like a black silk shirt, open at the throat. All that unrelieved black only served to lead her gaze upward to…

Her heart was a frantic drumbeat, her breathing a harsh rasp in her throat, and it had nothing to do with exertion.

His face.
She gathered all of her willpower and forced her body to still while she studied him from only a few feet away, too close for safety.

Shining blond hair fell in a smooth curtain to halfway down his back. He watched her from eyes framed by thick lashes. She couldn’t see the color of those eyes in the darkness. The angles and planes of his face cast shadows highlighting male beauty that seemed impossible, but obviously wasn’t. Her gaze drifted to his lips, full and so tempting that…

He smiled. Ivy felt that smile as an ache that started in her chest but moved rapidly south. This was
not
good. She glanced away and tried to recapture her sanity along with her breath. “I wonder where that music is coming from.”

He ignored her comment. “Dance with me.” His voice—husky, compelling, but with a harsh rasp of some emotion she couldn’t identify—hinted that unspeakable pleasures awaited anyone who danced with him.

No.
She didn’t dance with strangers she met on the beach. It absolutely wasn’t going to happen. “Sure.”

And so they danced. Together. Touching. Not what she thought she’d ever enjoy, because with his arms around her she’d have to follow his lead. Ivy knew from experience that she couldn’t match her steps with a partner, not in any aspect of her life. But she did.

It was like floating. She swayed in time with her silent partner as he swept her into the dance. Everything seemed more intense, more… everything. The sand felt deliciously cool beneath her bare feet. When had she kicked off her shoes? The water sparkled. There was no moon, so how could it sparkle? When she tipped her head back to allow her hair to float in the sudden breeze, she saw a sky filled with millions of glittering stars. Not real,
couldn’t
be real. But the impossibility of all those stars didn’t bother her. Only the man and the dance mattered.

He’d pulled her close, and she felt the realness of him as surely as if he wore nothing—the hard planes of his body, the pounding of his heart where her head rested against his chest. And when he cupped her bottom to tuck her between his thighs, she had proof that the dance was affecting him in the same way it was her.

Desire clenched low in her stomach. Shock made her miss a step. She drew in a deep, calming breath and tried to recapture the magic of the dance. But she couldn’t. This wasn’t her. Ivy didn’t go around wanting to throw men to the ground and then ride them until a screaming orgasm shattered her. She pulled away, and it was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

The music stopped. Ivy just stood there breathing hard. Exertion or hyperventilating? Didn’t matter, the result was the same. She felt lightheaded.

“Thank you.” His words were cool, his tone distant. He turned and disappeared into the darkness.

Ivy stood staring at the water that no longer sparkled. When her dizziness finally passed, she found her shoes, and then walked slowly back to the Castle of Dark Dreams. Aptly named, as it turned out. If anyone qualified as a dark dream, her unknown dance partner did.

She felt strange, all shiny and new,
younger
. But that was impossible. Ivy was twenty-seven, and a brief dance with a stranger shouldn’t make her feel nineteen again. Go figure.

She decided to wait until she got back to her room before thinking about what had just happened. There was always a logical explanation for everything.
Except when there wasn’t.
Ivy pressed her lips together. Of course there was an explanation. She just had to find it.

Ivy paused before entering the castle. For a moment, she thought about going around to the great hall entrance and taking a look at the ongoing fantasy. No, she didn’t need another shot of make-believe after what she’d experienced on the beach.

Was he staying at the castle? Would she run into him again? Ivy narrowed her eyes as she strode through the door leading into the hotel lobby. He didn’t matter. What did matter was her new job. She needed to concentrate on that.

She stepped into the elevator still wrapped in thoughts of what tomorrow’s meeting with Sparkle Stardust would bring. Someone stepped in with her. Ivy dragged her thoughts away from her new job long enough to notice the man sharing the elevator.

She blinked. He was short and squat with dark hair that stuck out everywhere and looked like steel wool. He had a nose that seemed to swallow his face, and his wrinkled skin was the color and texture of a walnut shell. He stared at her from beneath bushy brows the same color as his eyes. Black. Did anyone really have shiny black eyes? He didn’t look friendly. She prayed the elevator door would open and spit her out onto her floor.

“You took my job, human.” His voice was a dark, threatening rumble.

Human?
Ivy stared gape-mouthed at him. “Your job?”

The elevator door slid open. But shock rooted Ivy in place.

“I would have made a better assistant than you. What do you know about the needs of a person of power?” On that contemptuous snarl, he stepped from the car and the doors silently closed behind him.

Okay, that was just bizarre. Ivy took a deep fortifying breath before pressing the button to open the door again. She stepped out. Thank God, the strange—and yes, disturbing—man was gone. He must have a room on her floor, though. That made her uneasy.

Trying to shake off the encounter, she unlocked her door and stepped inside. She sighed her relief as she turned on the light. And froze.

Her room was crawling with spiders. Thousands of them. Big, fat, ugly spiders. They crawled over her bed, up her walls, and across the ceiling. They watched her from gleaming eyes that oozed malice.

Another woman might have screamed and run. Ivy just muttered a few curses as she strode to the phone on her night table. She didn’t see any black widows or brown recluses, so nothing too dangerous. What truly scared her was the thought that someone had purposely done this. She swept spiders from the receiver before making her call, even as she mentally chanted her personal mantra:
no fear, no fear, no fear
. Then she went back to stand at the open door and wait.

She tried not to think, to conjecture, to
panic
. Ivy had built her entire life on the premise that any problem could be solved if approached in a calm and rational way. There was always a logical explanation for things. Okay, so the man on the beach was an anomaly.

At least she didn’t have long to wait and stew. She heard steps behind her and turned.

A wizard? Would the weirdness never end? He was about the same height as her, and she wasn’t tall. Thin, gray-haired with a matching long, pointed beard, his narrowed gray eyes promised that she’d be sorry if she’d brought him here on a fool’s errand.

She scoped him out from head to toe and thought of the spiders to keep from chuckling. He was a walking stereotype. His gold-trimmed blue robe was decorated with glittering suns, moons, and stars. He wore a matching tall conical hat. It added almost a foot to his height. And he carried a strange-looking staff.

“Holgarth, I presume?” It had better be, since that’s who she’d demanded to see when she’d called the desk. Ivy moved aside so he could step into the room. “Unless you intend to beat them to death with your staff, I’d suggest you call in the exterminators.”

He pursed his thin lips, his cold stare saying that she wasn’t amusing him. Ivy decided that not much
would
amuse this guy.

“How unfortunate.” He sounded as though a plague of spiders was nothing more than a minor irritation. “I’ll get rid of them, and then you can—”

“Uh, no, to the rest of what you were going to say. I mean, you can certainly get rid of them, but I won’t be here to see the miraculous event. I want another room and…” She thought about the man in the elevator. “And I want one on a different floor.”

Holgarth sniffed. “Hired help used to know their places.”

Ivy widened her eyes. “Oh, I absolutely know my place. It’s in a new room not infested with spiders.” Was she trying to get fired? Maybe. All the weirdness that had happened so far didn’t bode well for her new job. “
You’re
the one who hired me. I’d think you’d want me to be happy.”

“I did
not
hire you.” He seemed bitter about that. “I wanted someone more tractable, but Sparkle insisted that you were right for the job.”

“Tractable? Does anyone even use that word in everyday speech? Well, if wanting a room where I won’t wake up every ten minutes imagining spiders two-stepping across my face makes me intractable, then so be it. I want out of here.”

He pressed his lips into a thin line of disapproval. “Come with me.”

She frowned as another thought surfaced. “I never spoke with Ms. Stardust, so how did she know I was right for the job?”

For the first time he looked as though he approved of something she’d said. “Exactly the point I tried to make.” He glanced at his watch. “Enough useless chatter. My time is valuable.”

“What about my things?” She moved into the hall and stopped to wait for him.

“Someone will bring them to you.” He lingered in the doorway, mumbling something to himself.

And just before he joined her, closing the door behind him, Ivy got a peek into the room. The spiders were gone. She blocked the sight from her mind. The unexplainable was piling up at an alarming rate, and her brain couldn’t handle it all at once.

Holgarth led her down the winding stone steps. “I prefer to avoid the elevator. It performs in an erratic manner when I use it.”

Hey, Ivy understood completely. She’d probably perform in an erratic manner too if she spent much time around him.

He didn’t stop when they reached the great hall, but took another flight of stairs down. Pulling out a bunch of keys on a large ring, he used one to open a door. “Your new room, madam.” He didn’t try to hide his sneer.

Ivy had a few questions. “There aren’t any windows on this level. And the sign over that door across from me says Dungeon. Why am I on the dungeon level?”

Holgarth raised one brow. “You’re not on the dungeon level. You’re on the vampire level. The dungeon just happens to be here. We use it in our fantasies.” He paused for effect. “Except when we’re using it to hold a recalcitrant creature.”