Keep Me Close

by Elizabeth Cole

  “It’ll work out,” Vinny said, trying to sound convincing. “Let’s sort this haunting thing first. Then you can rip him a new one for getting back on the drugs. He promised you he’d stop that. And you deserve to be happy. With or without Jonas.”

  “We’ll be fine. It’s just a rough patch,” Emma said, with the ease of someone who’d said that many times before.

  Vinny leaned back in her chair, taking a sip of beer. An idea came to her. She was going to prove to Emma that she didn’t have to stay with Jonas. The news about the drug use was interesting, but clearly even that wasn’t enough to make Emma rethink her marriage. But if Vinny could get some solid evidence of Jonas’s cheating… She knew he’d done it. She knew it in her gut, but she never had any facts. Jonas’s behavior was just a thing that everybody knew about and never mentioned to Emma. Some BS “politeness” that kept them from telling her the truth because they didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

  Vinny was one of the few people who did actually try to tell Emma. She brought it up a couple of times in the past. But Emma wasn’t having any of it, and in fact, their most recent conversation was what put their friendship on ice for the past couple of years.

  Still, friends were friends, and Vinny had messed up enough in her life. Now that she was here, and saw that Emma was unhappy, she could do this one thing right.

  “Vin,” Emma said, her tone shifting. “What really made you come out here? What the hell made you hitchhike all the way here?”

  “Lack of money,” Vinny said quickly.

  “Don’t be cute. You know I would have covered you. Give me the real reason, ’cause I know there is one. Don’t forget, sweetheart, I know you.”

  Emma did know her. And Vinny did need to tell her about the nightmare. No time like the present.

  “I’ll tell you, but you have to not interrupt. And you can’t laugh it off.”

  “Oh, wow.” Emma leaned forward. “I’m listening.”

  So Vinny told her about the recurring nightmares, how intense they’d been, and the underlying sense of danger she’d felt Emma was in.

  “Oh, my God,” Emma said finally. “That would scare the shit out of me.”

  “Yeah, well. Me too. So I came. Because I had to see you, and know you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine,” Emma said, spreading her arms out helplessly. “I mean, I guess my house is haunted, but…wait.” Her forehead wrinkled up. “Am I in danger from a ghost? A ghost that’s been around for a year?”

  “I don’t know,” Vin said. “I’m honestly not sure about anything right now. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I just need to go into therapy again. But I needed to get to you.” She looked down at her necklaces, thinking she ought to thank Emma for the new one Jonas just gave her. But the light was failing, and the new necklace seemed to have gotten buried under several others, so Vinny couldn’t pick it out. Well, it would wait. She finished, with conviction, “I had to get here.”

  “And now you are here,” Emma said with a grin. “Whatever ghost is dumb enough to haunt this place is going to be so sad. Nothing’s a match for a couple of ex-riot grrrls.”

  “Amen.” Vinny finished the beer and rose from the table. “All right, enough of this talk. I got no answers and I’m beat.”

  “Sleep tight, pumpkin,” Emma said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Glad you’re here.”

  “Me too.” Vinny gave her a smile and turned to go back into the house.

  Once inside, a sense of quiet surrounded her. It was such a gigantic place, with so few people in it. Funny how she never thought of Emma and Jonas’s house being like the ones she grew up in until now. She’d always lived in grand old houses and penthouses with pedigree, as her parents put it. Neither of them liked new construction—new construction was too easy to obtain. They liked expensive estates with impressive addresses. And that meant old.

  So Vinny never compared Emma’s place to the cavernous spaces of her childhood. Right now, though, she felt a lot like she had so many years ago. Lonely, lost in a big, cold space with no friends or family she could run to for comfort.

  Vinny took a breath, trying to shake off the feeling. It was the mention of her father earlier. That had thrown her out of whack, especially on top of everything else. She got a hold of herself and kept going. She didn’t head for her bedroom, as she’d told Emma. Instead, she was going to poke around the house and see if she could figure out how to prove Jonas’s years of misbehaving.

  It would be tough. Emma would forgive nearly anything, and Jonas was a sweet-talker. That’s how he kept Emma from going ballistic when she caught him doing stupid stuff. But even the drugs and the self-indulgent shopping—did anyone need a Jaguar E-type? No. Toyotas worked fine—didn’t open Emma’s eyes.

  Vinny entered a room on the first floor that looked like an office. There was a big desk with trays of papers. Mail was piled up, some opened, some not. In a mood to snoop, Vinny spread the papers out with a swipe of her hand. She noticed several envelopes from Hollywood addresses. Those would be contracts and offers for work. Smaller envelopes looked like checks, or stubs indicating payment. She picked a few up and examined them. Holy shit. Jonas was getting royalty payments from a fifteen-second long “song” used in a commercial, and it was more than Vinny made all last month at her service job, with tips.

  Well, she’d made her choice.

  She looked through a few more papers, but what she wanted wasn’t here. This was all official stuff, boring financial and legal exchanges. She needed to find out how Jonas was talking to people…especially women. She was going to take a look at his online life.

  Just as she reassembled the papers on the desk so it wouldn’t be totally obvious she was snooping, Vinny felt someone step into the room behind her.

  She whirled around—but no one was there.

  What the hell. She walked to the doorway and leaned out, looking both ways. No one.

  But was that a laugh?

  Vinny frowned. She was certain she hadn’t been alone in the room. She could have sworn there was a sound, and a presence.

  A little chill ran down her spine. She shook it off angrily. Vinny was not going to turn into some sort of fraidy-cat just because the house had a draft.

  Then all the lights went out.

  Chapter 14

  After leaving the dinner table, Dom had retrieved some of his tools and gone ghosthunting. In most cases, ghosts were relatively easy to hunt, because they were either consistent or obnoxious, or obnoxiously consistent. Such as when a ghost of a murdered spirit always manifested in the spot they were killed at the moment of the day they were killed. Easy.

  Sometimes ghosts were less predictable, but even then, once you knew they were around, you could track them down without a lot of trouble.

  Tracking a ghost was an art, not a science. Some of it was basic spellcasting, some of it was common sense, and a little bit of it was snooping. But mostly, he tried to relax his conscious mind and let the otherworlds near.

  “Santa Muerte, show me where the dead are awake,” he muttered. His connection to that particular spiritual practice usually helped him when looking for ghosts. Not this time.

  Not only did he fail to uncover any hint of a ghost or restless spirit, he got the distinct feeling that something was actually blocking him from seeing clearly. He could see just fine in the real world, but the moment he tried to move beyond, to shift his consciousness to the otherworlds, he got pushed back.

  There was something wrong in this place. Dom got a bad feeling. Less directly threatening than the biker’s hangout, and not as sharp as the vampire. The feeling persisted no matter where he went in the house, from the first floor kitchen to the upper level with the guest bedrooms, even to the other wing that held the master suite. He only peeked in—the area was almost as large as the entire Salem house.

  Dom wandered on, going up a staircase that led to a third floor consisting only of a room whose walls were one hundred percent glass. It was dark out now,
so he couldn’t see anything but a few sparkling lights from distant neighbors and more distant towns. Even that was spectacular. The daytime view would probably justify the house’s selling price. Probably.

  He should talk to Piewicket. The little cat was off scouting on her own, though, and Dom would just have to wait until she chose to rejoin him. Or he could go looking for her.

  He walked down the stairs to the second floor. Just as he reached the bottom, the lights all flickered once, and then went out.

  Dom stopped short. Partly, he was unfamiliar with the house’s layout, and didn’t want to trip. The other part was fear that the bad energy in the house suddenly chose to get active.

  Muttering a few words in Latin, he drew himself down so he could crouch against the wall. He waited a minute, keeping his breath even as he listened for sounds in any world.

  He heard a shuffling, a bump, then a low “Cheese and crackers!”

  Dom actually smiled. “Vinny. Over here.”

  He stood up and toggled the flashlight on his phone, creating a pool of light directed at the floor.

  Seconds later, booted feet entered the lit circle.

  “You can’t magically make light?” Vinny asked.

  “You’re confusing me with a wizard named Potter,” he said.

  “No one would confuse you with him. Are you responsible for the blackout?”

  “Nope.” Dom angled the light up to catch a little of Vinny’s face. “Are you?”

  “Why would I kill the power?” She sounded annoyed. “I nearly tripped on the stairs just now.”

  “You survived. Where were you headed?” He reached out to take her arm, but she shrugged away from him. The pale light of the phone revealed her furious expression. “Whoa. What’s wrong?”

  * * * *

  “What’s wrong?” Vinny was happy that she’d run into Dom and not a monster while she was wandering around in the dark, but she suddenly remembered she was pissed at him. “Let’s talk about that.”

  “About what?” he asked, too casually. She couldn’t see his face, due to the crappy light. That only made her madder.

  “Today. You knew we were going to the same place.” she said. “And you didn’t say anything. What’s the deal?”

  “Vin,” he said. “I didn’t know we were going to the same place until we were practically here. When you gave me the actual address. Remember? You never said which friends you were going to. I sure as hell didn’t know that when I first gave you a ride.”

  She wrinkled her nose, realizing that part was right. Still, pissed. “But you could have told me when you did realize it! You let me get all the way here without a hint that it was your jobsite. They spent the whole dinner thinking you were my boyfriend.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Not if you were my boyfriend, but you’re not, and you used me for…whatever it is you’re up to!”

  “Hey, I barely used you.” Dom’s calm tone was insufferable. “There’s a value in getting to see a place and people…unbiased. Both Jonas and Emma acted a lot more naturally because they didn’t know why I was here. I got to sense the vibes without anyone getting in the way.”

  “Sense the vibes? Is that a technical term?” she asked, laying on the scorn.

  “Sort of.”

  In spite of herself, she was curious. “What vibes did you sense?”

  “You want to know?”

  “They’re my friends who are getting haunted. Of course I want to know.”

  The phone’s light angled further down the hall. Dom said, “Let’s walk to your room. I don’t want to have this conversation in a pitch black hallway.”

  She nodded, though he couldn’t see it, and turned to the end of the hallway where her bedroom was, keeping her footsteps just on the edge of the pool of light. Dom fell in step beside her, and she felt the touch of his hand at her back, a vaguely protective move that was both annoying and really comforting.

  Then the touch was gone. Dom took her anger seriously, at least.

  Her room was pitch black too. She kept her right hand on the wall, walking toward the dresser. “Hold on. There’s a few candles over here. Emma’s a nut for candles.”

  Dom lifted the phone up to help her find a lighter. Vinny lit three candles—mercifully unscented—and turned around to face Dom.

  Her first thought was that he looked great by candlelight. The flickering glow of the three little flames cast a warm light, which did amazing things to his skin. She wanted to reach out and touch him, and see if the candlelight improved his looks below the neck too. Probably.

  “Vin?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. Did he know what she was thinking?

  “I’m still angry at you,” she said quickly, to cover her sudden attack of lust. “And I still want to know what the deal is. With the haunting.”

  Dom shrugged one shoulder. “Hard to say. With only an hour or so of looking around, I can’t tell exactly what’s going on. Clearly, something is…odd.” He gestured, referring to the blackout. “It doesn’t feel haunted, though.”

  “According to your vibe sense?”

  “Yeah. But Piewicket says she doesn’t like the place either. Told me after dinner that it reeks of malevolence. Then she dashed outside.”

  “Malevolence?”

  “Her word, not mine.”

  She paused, registering the weirder part of his comment. “Wait. You can talk with cats?”

  “Piewicket can be very communicative when she wants to be.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” Vinny said, stepping up to him.

  “Nope.” Dom smiled at her. “I can’t tell you all my secrets.”

  “Have you told me any?”

  He reached out to her, then dropped his hand. His smile vanished.

  Oh, no. Rachel.

  He’d told her probably the worst, darkest story of his life. And she just acted like it was nothing. Jesus, she was a horrible person.

  She sighed. “God, I’m sorry. That’s not…I shouldn’t have said that. I just felt like a dummy when you made your little announcement. Emma just gave me this look, as if I tricked her. And she’s been through so much shit lately, I felt bad about it. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

  “And I should have told you right off,” he said. “Truce?”

  “Yeah. Don’t mind me. Everything’s just so weird now.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Dom asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Vinny wanted to tell him about the creepy feeling she’d gotten just before the lights went out, but she also didn’t want to look like a wuss.

  “It’s probably nothing, but I got…I got this feeling like I was being watched earlier.”

  Dom looked at her intently. “That’s not nothing. Where did you feel it?”

  “My spine?”

  “I meant where in the house,” he corrected, though he smiled at her words.

  “Oh. Down in the office. First floor, that little room off the side of the hallway to the stairs.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t want to explain why she was alone in the office, but thankfully, Dom wasn’t focused on that.

  “Did you feel it come on fast, or was it more like a build up?”

  “Fast. I didn’t notice anything, and then felt it all at once. And I thought I heard a laugh. Not a nice laugh. More like…evil clown laugh. Have you and your brothers ever had to take out a clown?”

  Dom shook his head. “Not yet. And can we stick to today’s problem, please? Did you hear the laugh before or after the lights went out?”

  “A few seconds before,” she said, then added, “If it happened after, I probably would have screamed.”

  “Yeah, no one likes evil clown laughter in the dark,” Dom said. He sounded so normal about it that Vinny wanted to hug him.

  So she did, her arms going tight around his chest, her hands interlocking on the other side.

  After a second, Dom’s arms circled her shoulders, and
Vinny felt better right away. “Thanks for believing me,” she mumbled.

  “Vin, of course I believe you.”

  “It just sounds so nuts.”

  “Not to me.” He gave her a final squeeze, then shifted back so he could look at her. “Better?”

  “Yeah.” She gave him her best I’m not scared of ghosts smile.

  “Anything else going on?” he asked.

  “In this house, you mean? Just family squabbles,” she said. “I don’t want to bore you with that.”

  “You have never bored me,” he said, inviting her to share.

  “It’s just Emma. Not Emma. Emma and Jonas. They’re, um, having some difficulties.”

  “Beside getting haunted?”

  “Yeah, way beside. Obviously, Emma didn’t even hear about this haunting thing till you showed up and Jonas admitted he hired you. She’s got more typical marriage issues. I don’t want to get into details.”

  “I don’t think you have to,” Dom said. “He still lives like a rock star. It’s not super obvious, but he’s skinny in a way that doesn’t look healthy. I don’t know what drugs are trendy right now, but I’m guessing he sure does. That’s the short version, right?”

  “Basically.” Vinny thought of all the things Emma told her about, and her heart ached for her friend. “It’s been rough on Emma.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Hopefully, I can at least take care of whatever supernatural thing is making life rough for them. But she’ll have to do the rest on her own.”

  Vinny put her hands on her hips. “No. She won’t. I’m going to do something about it. And I need you to not get in my way.”

  * * * *

  Dom took in the sight of Vinny in her defiant, full fury mode, and liked what he saw. He said carefully, “I don’t know what mysterious mission you’ve given yourself, but I promise to not step on your toes.”

  “Good.” Vinny’s shoulders slumped a little. She was exhausted, he realized. And so was he.

  “I’m going to hit the sack,” he said, moving toward the door. “You should, too.”