Haunted

by Irene Preston

  He had never told Annemarie the Cothron House ghost had been his first hoax.

  Across from him, Noel had started fidgeting again. His eyes had an odd, almost hesitant look. He opened his mouth as though he might say something, then took another swallow of beer instead. Adam watched the beer bottle with something like jealousy. When he met Noel’s eyes again, the hesitancy had been replaced by sleepy, knowing invitation.

  God save him. Those bedroom eyes ought to be illegal.

  He didn’t know what game Scruffy was playing, but Adam was ready to let him win this round. “I’ve got coffee back at my place.”

  Chapter Seven

  Adam

  The walk to his apartment turned the beautiful Garden District into a background blur. The only thing in focus was Noel, who managed to cover the same distance as Adam’s longer legs while still looking half-awake and languorous. The energy coming off him, though…

  They walked without touching, but for the first time, Adam almost understood what psychics meant by aura. Noel didn’t glow, but the chemistry he exuded wrapped around Adam, setting off chain reactions until every molecule in his body yearned toward the man next to him.

  Back inside, he closed the door behind them and reached for normal. What had he offered to get them here? “I’ll start the…”

  Noel turned and closed the distance between them. He tasted of beer and po’boy and something sweet and sharp that took all those yearning molecules and heated them into a frenzy of need. Adam groaned and wrapped his arms around Noel to pull him into closer contact. He delved down into that sweet mouth, looking for more heat, more sweet, more Noel. When he came up for air, he rubbed his face along Noel’s cheek and shivered at the scrape of scruff on his newly shaved skin.

  Noel shoved at his chest, and Adam laughed as he slumped back against the door. Sure, the door, why not? His dream in reverse.

  Noel followed, hands busy until they were both free. And damn, of course Scruffy wasn’t at all scruffy down there. Neatly shaved, in fact. Adam froze because he… Well…his junk was pretty much the opposite. Then Noel’s hand closed over him, and he forgot all about grooming. He wrapped a hand around the back of Noel’s neck and drew him in until their mouths collided again as he wrapped his own hand around the smooth skin of Noel’s cock.

  Christ. Too much already. The edges of his vision went black and sparkly. He pulled back to gasp out, “Bedroom?”

  Instead, Noel fisted both hands in his shirt and pulled. “Suck me.”

  That worked too. Adam sank to his knees, then hesitated, suddenly unsure. Was this just Noel getting his dick sucked by anyone handy? He was so fucking hot. Adam had no doubt he had guys lining up to get him off. Adam didn’t mind a friendly fuck, but he wasn’t up for being a toss away.

  Faced with a beautifully engorged, long, cut cock and those smooth, hairless balls, it was hard to care. Adam gave in to temptation. He ran a finger up the inside of Noel’s thigh and gently cupped his balls. Above him, Noel gasped, and his legs trembled. Still cradling the warm handful, Adam rubbed his thumb along just the base of the firmer flesh higher up.

  Noel’s hand slapped against the door, and he leaned forward, as if he needed the support. His other hand found Adam’s head, fingers sliding through the curls, then gripping and pulling to just short of pain.

  Adam looked up. Noel’s gaze bore into him, wild and desperate. “I want my dick down your throat.”

  A demand, not a request. But those eyes… He should have known Noel would need to be in charge. He moved his thumb again. Noel’s breath hitched, but the hand in Adam’s hair stayed steady, not using any pressure to force.

  Adam breathed in, adding the scent of Noel’s musk to the taste on his tongue. Then he leaned forward and did exactly what he wanted. He wrapped his mouth around Noel and lowered his head until he felt the blunt bump at the back of his throat. Then he opened his throat wider and went deeper.

  Noel’s body went rigid.

  Adam pulled back and repeated the movement. This time, Noel thrust shallowly at the end, as though he couldn’t help himself.

  Adam slid his hands around Noel’s hips, pulling him in, giving him permission.

  The hand in his hair clenched tighter, and it was as though a dam burst. Noel braced himself against the door and gripped Adam’s hair while he fucked his mouth. And Adam held him, welcomed him, gave him a place to lose control.

  He was drowning in the taste, the smell, the feel of Noel. The chemistry, the wild energy Noel hid under that sleepy exterior, burst loose and ran along Adam’s skin lighting up the nerves. He hung in a moment of pure sensation.

  “Fuck, Morales. I’m not doing this alone, am I?”

  Not alone.

  Adam reached down to take his own cock in hand. Noel surged against him with an incoherent exclamation and came in a hot wave down his throat. Adam gave a final stroke, and all the frenetic energy coalesced into blinding white light followed by brief oblivion.

  ~⚜~

  The oblivion didn’t last long enough to be useful.

  Adam sat on the floor, back against the door, dick hanging out of unzipped jeans. He needed to do something about that, but so far, he hadn’t regained either the motivation or the coordination.

  Noel stood over him. His arm was still braced against the door, and his face was hidden in the crook. Probably not good. Probably trying to decide how quickly he could zip up and leave. Probably. But the utter stillness was…unexpected.

  Then Noel did something even more unexpected. He shifted and turned until he could slide down the door and sit next to Adam. He cleared his throat. “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure.”

  The silence stretched. Adam tried not to admit he liked it, sitting on the floor in a state of utter disarray with Scruffy next to him. Just breathing.

  “I should catch your show sometime.”

  “That’s just postcoital oxytocin talking.”

  “Damn, Professor.”

  “Want me to queue up an episode now?”

  Noel yawned. “Let’s not rush into anything.” He shifted, a hint of his usual fidgets returning. “Tell you what, I’ll watch the episode where you find a real ghost.”

  “I knew you’d cop out. Plenty of hoaxes. The ghosts are less conclusive.”

  “So you’ve never seen an actual ghost? What kind of ghost hunter are you?”

  Adam declined to answer.

  To his surprise, Noel stayed on topic. “You haven’t ever seen anything you couldn’t explain?”

  “Sure. That’s just it. Couldn’t explain it. Never found any proof there was an actual ghost.”

  “So what’s the most scared you’ve ever been?”

  “I’m a ghost hunter who hasn’t proven any ghosts exist. Why would I be scared?”

  “You said you keep an open mind. You must have seen something that made you wonder. What about your girlfriend’s place?”

  “No. Not that one.” Adam tilted his head back against the door to think. Plenty of shows where they couldn’t prove a hoax, but none that stood out as being probably real either.

  “You’re an asshole.” There was enough heat in Noel’s voice to get Adam’s attention. “All those fucking shows and you’re just making it up. Why did you even agree to do that first story?”

  “Hey, when we started, I didn’t know we weren’t going to find anything. And it’s fun. It reminds me…” He broke off.

  “What? Spill.”

  “Wow, I hadn’t thought about this in years, but I guess it was my first ghost hunt. Back when I was a kid, I used to spend a week every summer with my grandmother out in the country. I had a couple of cousins who were the same age, and she’d take us all at the same time. Because country. You can’t just walk down the street to find someone to play with.

  “There was this abandoned shack out in the woods. I have no idea why it was there, but we used to make up all kinds of stories about it. We’d compete with each other to come up with the most gr
uesome details. Typical kid stuff, until the year we were all twelve and we decided to camp out there.”

  “Grandma just let you wander off into the woods at night, huh?”

  “Hey, we were twelve. Three boys. I’m pretty sure by the end of the week, she was ready to take us back to town and let us play in the street. But this place was only about two hundred yards from the house. It’s not like we were hiking off into the wilderness.”

  “So what happened?” Noel sounded genuinely curious.

  Adam laughed. “Nothing, really. We spent the entire first half of the night one-upping each other on the stories. Then we started hearing stuff. Footsteps. Weird noises. Exactly what you would expect after all the stories. Finally, we got up the nerve to open the tent flap, and…there was something. A shadow, something, in the doorway of the house.”

  “So, what, you go check it out, Professor Ghost Hunter?”

  “Oh, hell no. We all almost pissed ourselves and fell over each other running back to Grandma’s house.”

  Noel was silent for a long moment. “So, basically that’s your show? A lot of build-up and you don’t prove anything?”

  “Nah. The show doesn’t run back to Grandma’s house. We’ve got a team of gung-ho minions with EMFs and infrared cameras and all the things to go check out the shadow on the porch. I just set up the story.” The minions, three attractive twenty-somethings who gave every impression of believing wholeheartedly in their work, were actually way more popular than he was with the fans.

  “And they debunk it.” Noel’s foot had started jittering again.

  “Eh…not all of them. I mean some of them, there’s no evidence either way. So I guess those are still possibilities.”

  Noel was still quiet, but his foot had picked up speed. Not a big movement, just tap-tap-tapping on thin air, like a built-in release valve for whatever pent-up energy he hid under that bored exterior.

  Noel was getting ready to leave. Adam had the vague impression he had disappointed him in some way, and he didn’t want things to end on this note. He stood up, tucking himself back into his jeans. “Come for a walk with me. I’ll show you what I do.”

  Noel didn’t actually agree. What he did do was offer his hand so Adam could tug him up off the floor, then disappear into the bathroom. When he came out, he followed Adam outside and onto the street. Adam gave himself a mental high-five when he kept following rather than split off and head for his car.

  Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 was only a few blocks away. Adam filled Noel in on the backstory as they walked. “Last summer, a bunch of people reported hearing voices in the cemetery after it was locked up for the night.”

  “Kids,” Noel said. “Drugs.”

  “Maybe. But at some point, one of the voices was a woman calling for help.”

  “Someone call it in?” Noel’s voice had gotten sharp. Cop, Adam reminded himself.

  “Yeah, that’s where it starts getting weird. This is a nice neighborhood. People would definitely call in kids breaking into the cemetery, let alone some woman in trouble.”

  “So what happened?”

  “None of them did.”

  “The fuck?”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t until the next week that some of them started remembering it. The guy that posted on Reddit, he said he had his cell out to dial 9-1-1 while he headed over there. The next thing he knew, he was waking up the following morning.”

  “Whole thing was a dream.”

  “Except he didn’t remember it at all until days later. And then he realized that was the morning he woke up in his clothes and couldn’t remember going to bed. It was so weird, he started asking his neighbors if any of them remembered anything going on.”

  “Did they?”

  “Not until he asked. Then a lot of them said the same thing. They heard a woman calling for help. They were going to call the cops or go check it out, then they just…forgot.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Adam laughed. “Maybe, but it makes a great story, right?”

  Noel didn’t look entertained. “So no one checked out what happened to this woman?”

  “We have no proof the woman existed. You said yourself the guy dreamed her.”

  Noel threw him an incredulous look. “So all these people insist they heard her, and not one person ever mentioned it to someone who could at least check the timing against ongoing investigations?”

  Interesting. Adam had run up against plenty of skeptics, but none had jumped straight to ongoing investigations. “Nothing seemed to be disturbed in the cemetery.” Then, because Noel seemed so genuinely outraged: “Honestly, I can’t get them all to agree on the date they thought the whole thing went down. You think the cops were really going to waste time on that kind of report?”

  Noel brooded in silence for a block before responding. “So what are we doing now?”

  “Well, I’m trying to come up with some kind of concrete history it might connect to. Everyone agrees the voices were coming from the northwest corner. I’ve got an index of the lots over there, but there are literally thousands of bodies in that cemetery. For the last few weeks, I’ve been concentrating on people who died on that date—see if any of them are women with interesting stories.”

  They’d reached the cemetery. “Sometimes it’s just nice to get away from the computer and take a look around, get a feel for a place.”

  “Scientific,” Noel grumbled. He had stopped at the entrance. “We really just going to wander around in there?”

  “Are you serious? Yes. Cemeteries are awesome. Especially this one. I mean, look at it.”

  “I dunno, dude. They probably expect me in the office at some point.”

  “Tell me you aren’t scared of cemeteries. Look, there’s a tour group over there.”

  “Fuck you. Of course not.” Noel edged inside the fence, then seemed to relax as nothing jumped out of a grave at him.

  Adam kept up a steady stream of commentary as they headed to “square 3” in the northwest corner of his map. He had spent a lot of time poking around the graves over the past few weeks. Honestly, the problem was narrowing the search down. Noel trailed at his side, still looking a little jumpy and making occasional snarky comments. As they got closer to the area he’d been researching, Adam got more excited. So much history. He dropped into show mode, trying out some of the material he’d dug up on a suffragette who would make a great ghost. He was hamming up her mysterious death when he realized Noel was no longer next to him.

  He spun around.

  Noel stood in the middle of the walkway, staring at a coffin-shaped slab of marble. Okay, maybe the suffragette wasn’t as interesting as Adam had thought. He backtracked to see what had caught Noel’s attention.

  “Hey, I told you this place was cool. What did you…” He broke off as he got a better look at the other man.

  Noel stood stock-still. His hands were raised to just above his waist, palms out. His face had gone so white, the scruff on his chin stood out starkly.

  “Noel?”

  Noel’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. He didn’t look like he’d heard Adam at all. His eyes were fixed forward. Adam took a look at the grave they were in front of, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  “Dude, if you’re fucking with me…”

  This time when he spoke, Noel turned toward him. Adam took a step back. Noel’s usually sleepy eyes were wide open and the pupils contracted to tiny pinpoints. His mouth moved again, as though he were trying to speak.

  “Okay. Okay, buddy. Take it easy.” Adam tried to keep his voice calm, but his nerves were screaming. Something had happened to Noel, and Adam suddenly realized he knew nothing about him that might help. Was he sick? Did he need medicine? Had Adam inadvertently triggered some kind of PTSD by dragging him into the cemetery?

  Whatever was happening, the lack of color and terrified eyes were scary as fuck.

  Taking a deep breath, Adam reached out and took Noel’s hands in his own.

&nb
sp; As soon as their hands met, a jolt of static electricity went through Adam strong enough to temporarily black out his vision. Even when he regained sight, everything remained dark, as if night had fallen in the middle of the day. The shock was accompanied by a strong smell of rancid roses and rot.

  He heard a woman screaming, then the voices of several men. One seemed to be speaking in Latin. He couldn’t make out the others, only guttural laughs that crawled up his spine and froze him in place like a rabbit faced with a fox. A flash of movement in the corner of his eyes made him turn his head. Black eyes filled his entire field of vision.

  Adam flinched back. As soon as he let go of Noel’s hands, the darkness receded, and he found himself standing in broad daylight again. They were alone in the corner of the cemetery.

  In front of him, Noel swayed, then collapsed, striking his head against the corner of the marble tomb.

  Chapter Eight

  Noel

  ShutupshutupshutupGodhelphelphelp

  “Help.” The word was torn from his throat, and he wrenched his arms free of the ropes. Wait. Gasping, Noel opened his eyes. He wasn’t tied to the grave, and there was no blood on the ground. The sun’s glare stabbed him, and he blinked hard. “Shit.” Shade darkened his eyelids, so he tried again, squinting this time. Adam scowled down at him.

  Noel inhaled and glanced from side to side. They were outdoors. Adam squeezed his shoulders. “Hey. What happened?”

  Scrabbling at the broken concrete under his hands, Noel tried to figure out how to answer. His heart’s heavy thud gave him a clue. “I guess I fell.” Which was true, as far as it went. The reason he’d fallen made him clench his teeth to keep from screaming. Shutupshutupshutup. “Here.” He grasped Adam’s arm. “Give me a hand.”

  They clasped forearms, and Adam put his other hand behind Noel’s shoulders, lifting him up. On the way up to sitting, the blood swirled in his head and the earth tilted. “Hold on,” Noel grunted, clutching at Adam. He drew his knees up until he could wrap his arms around his shins, resting his forehead on his knees to stop the spinning. No snake. No zombies. No…evil.