by Sydney Croft
The Ghost Hunter department at ACRO had been there almost as long as the Clairvoyants, but it was a rarely used asset. Most of the operatives assigned there were kept busy disproving hoaxes, and it was on one of those missions, twenty-nine years earlier, that married Ghost Hunters Dave and Martha McCabe had discovered Creed.
At first, the crying decades earlier coming from inside the Tennessee cave the famous Bell Witch supposedly haunted had gotten the seasoned, and cynical, ghost hunters more than a little excited.
They weren’t sure what to think when they’d come across a squalling baby who’d been left naked on a scratchy wool blanket in the middle of the cave instead of the ghost of the Bell Witch. At the time, it had seemed like an amazing gift, since the McCabes had long since stopped trying for children, having been unable to conceive after many heartbreaking years. Martha had scooped the baby up and immediately felt the energy buzz tingle her skin at the same time she noted the small, swirled tattoo that covered the infant’s entire right side, from head to toe and a few places in between. But she didn’t care.
Upon further investigation, the McCabes learned that the baby had lain there for hours, because no one in the town wanted to enter the supposedly haunted cave. And rumor had it that the baby was a direct descendent of the Bell family, left there to appease a ghost that was due to make an appearance within the year to the family’s surviving members. A human sacrifice.
The McCabes had taken the baby home, named him Creed and didn’t worry about the Bell Witch nonsense. Even when they began to experience poltergeist activity from the minute the baby entered their house, it was all more of a blessing than a curse.
Creed told his parents later, when he was old enough to speak, that he wasn’t a descendant of the Bells, but a descendant of the actual ghost herself. He wasn’t sure exactly how he knew that. He just did.
Creed also wasn’t sure it was the Bell Witch who haunted him, but he knew it was the ghost of a Native American woman named Quaty. He called her Kat just to annoy her, since the good people of Tennessee always called the Bell Witch Kate.
Creed had confided to Dev years earlier, The bitch won’t let me get close to any woman for longer than it takes to have sex and roll over.
But Dev had felt Creed’s strange, wonderful energy from the second he’d been in the same room with the infant. Dev had been seven years old when the McCabes were visiting his parents, and had encountered the buzz through his brain.
Dev had asked Martha if he could touch the baby because he’d been fascinated by the tattoos. And while his fingers traced the contours of Creed’s face, he’d actually felt someone put his hands onto him, not hard, but with enough pressure for him to know that if he’d planned on hurting Creed, he was going to be up against something bigger.
Creed had remained at ACRO long after Dev left for the Air Force, was still working there when Dev returned to take over ACRO. He was one of the better-adjusted operatives despite the drag on his love life, and one of Dev’s most trusted ones too, next to Annika and Ender.
Couldn’t ask for more from an operative—any help, be it living or dead, worked in Dev’s book.
“Close it down and don’t let anyone in,” Dev told Trance, who was waiting outside his office, once he ushered Creed inside ahead of him.
“I’m on it, sir. I just swept your office clean. Nothing found,” Trance said.
“Have you heard anything from your friend?” Dev asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“Nothing, sir. But you know how Ender hates check-ins,” Trance said easily.
Yes, he knew. Fucker could block his mind better than anyone. “Let me know the second he deigns to notify us that he’s still alive,” Dev said.
He walked into his office and let Creed pass him before he shut the heavy door. And then he turned to Creed, who’d been busy pacing the room because he never could sit still, even when commanded.
“Does this have anything to do with what happened at the mansion?” Creed asked as soon as the door shut.
There was no use lying. Creed would figure out that the ghost he’d wrestled with was the same one now haunting Dev, a ghost who had a deep need to share something with Dev, although that had always come at a price.
And now he’d begun to pay the price again.
“Yes,” he finally answered. “It’s here.”
“I never let that spirit out,” Creed muttered to himself. “I made sure of it. It was trapped there.”
“I know you didn’t let it out,” Dev said.
“Then how…” Creed stopped. “You knew this was going to happen.”
“No, I didn’t think it was strong enough to leave the house. I never would’ve had you free it from the portal if I’d thought that.”
“So now it’s free to fucking roam. Have you involved Ani any more in this?” Creed demanded, and Dev was taken back for a brief second.
Ani? “No, I haven’t involved Annika since she returned from the house. And if I had, that would be my goddamned business. Are you going to help me or not?”
Creed didn’t miss a beat. “Of course. But you’ve got to give me more information.”
Dev hesitated briefly, but his senses told him this room was safe. As had Trance. Whoever the mole was couldn’t get into his mind unless he allowed it, and right now he was shut tighter than a steel drum and just as reinforced. If someone could get into his mind now, he had bigger problems and no way to solve them.
He turned his back to Creed as he unbuttoned his black BDU shirt, the same one that all the rest of the ACRO operatives were supposed to wear on base. Dev wore them in case someone from Itor broke in and tried to kidnap him. Camouflaging with one’s surroundings was a lesson Dev had learned from the military and still took very seriously.
He pulled the shirt off his shoulders and wondered for a brief second if Creed would be able to see it, if it was still there.
But he knew it was. And knew that if the dermography scrawled between his shoulder blades hadn’t faded by now, it wasn’t a good sign.
When Dev had CRVed it last night, the writing looked the same as it had years earlier, the same broad script, the same four letters, all of it invoking the same feelings of helplessness and fear he’d tried to avoid.
Mine.
Creed sucked in a sharp breath, and Dev waited a beat before pulling up his shirt and buttoning it. When he turned, he was in charge again. “Can you help me?”
“You’re going to need someone stronger than I am,” Creed said, and Dev realized he was chanting, Don’t say it, in his head, over and over. But Creed pressed on. “You need someone who can see the dead. You need to call in Oz for this one.”
“No!” Dev hadn’t meant for that word to come out in a shout. When he spoke again, his voice had a normal timbre. “That’s not an option.”
“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I think it might be your only option.”
“There’s got to be something you can do.”
“It doesn’t want to deal with me. Might be that Kat is pissing it off or something, but it needs someone stronger to take it in hand. Someone who was born into this shit.”
“You were born into this shit.”
“Not like Oz.”
No, no one was like Oz. “Do you know where he is?”
“You mean you don’t?” There was definite surprise in Creed’s voice. He didn’t know what had happened between Oz and Dev. None of them knew. None of them ever would either.
“No,” he said simply, heard the defeat in his own voice. “Will you get him? See if he’ll come to ACRO?”
“Leave it to me.”
As Creed walked out of the office, Dev half collapsed in the leather chair behind his desk. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake by bringing in someone from his agency for help on something that wasn’t strictly an ACRO matter. Then again, if Dev was destroyed, he could end up taking the entire agency with him, the one his parents had built from the ground up, starting with
some of the original Stargate members after the military declared the project null and void.
The old guard at ACRO was never going to be happy about the way he ran things here. But Dev knew that in order for ACRO to survive, to stay ahead, they needed to employ more than just psychics. They needed strength and power, and if that meant a little instability at times, then so be it. A small price to pay to keep the world at large safe.
THURSDAY 3 P.M. MST
Kira had spent a lot of her life on the run, but Tom Knight gave new meaning to Don’t stop till you drop.
They’d set a brisk pace for another three hours after the coyote encounter, heading, as far as she could tell, east into the morning sun. They’d taken breaks for water and granola bars, but the breaks weren’t long enough. Finally, at around seven in the morning, Tom pulled a tiny portable tent from his bag. After he’d seen to her needs and they cleaned up in the stream they’d been following, they’d slept until she required him again.
Heat licked over her skin at the memory of how she’d awakened him, her mouth sliding up and down over his cock until he swelled hot against her teeth. He’d allowed her to mount him, to seat herself fully on his hard length, but then he’d pinned her wrists to her belly with one hand and used the other to grasp her waist and rein in her movements.
A simple, purely animal form of dominance, his grip had dictated the tempo, the depth of her thrusts, and just when she didn’t think she could take the restraint anymore, when she began to whimper and struggle, they’d come together in a combustive surge of pleasure that left her pleasantly immobile for several minutes afterward.
Now, hours later and ready to collapse right there on the side of the mountain, she felt her blood heat with the need to combust again. Soon.
“Kira? Do you hear that?”
She broke out of her sexual haze just as a black bear burst onto the trail ahead of them. It snarled, its teeth bared and shiny with drool that dripped from the corner of its mouth. Tom had drawn a gun from God-knew-where, and ice careened through her veins.
“Don’t shoot him,” she whispered. “Back away slowly.” She tugged him with her.
Concentrating, she sent the bear thoughts, pleasant images of salmon runs and fields of berries. Anything to distract it and send it in search of easier prey than humans.
Disjointed, broken pictures and scents came back to her, musky rage, bitter fear, blood, a larger, angry bear…this youngster had been attacked, was still confused and looking for a way to take out its fury.
It swung its head and ambled forward.
“Can’t you talk to the fucking thing?”
She met the bear’s gaze. Angst rolled off it in pungent waves. “No.”
“Then what good is your damn gift?”
The bear growled, curled its lips back from sharp teeth. “Hush. Fire your gun, but don’t shoot him. Scare him.”
“Shit.” He aimed at a rotten stump and fired. Dead wood exploded, showering the bear, which roared, but turned and lumbered off.
Kira breathed a sigh of relief, and Ender swung around to her. “Why couldn’t you talk it down?”
She rolled her eyes. “Just because I can communicate with animals doesn’t mean they’ll listen.” At his blank stare, she crossed her arms over her chest. “Look at it this way: You might be able to communicate with an angry mugger bent on taking your wallet, but will he listen?”
“He’ll listen to the sound of his throat being ripped out.”
She huffed, and he chuckled as he returned his weapon to his bag. “Yeah, fine. I see your point. Are all animals like that?”
She shrugged. “Some species are worse than others. Wolves are great communicators. And big cats. Lions are really open to cooperating. Tigers are a little more testy.”
“What are the worst?”
“Badgers. They are the most stubborn, hardheaded, obnoxious…” She cocked her head and studied him as he scanned the area as if he expected the bear to explode out of the brush again at any moment. “Kinda like you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Was my assessment wrong?”
“Well, no.”
She shot him a smug look. “And I didn’t even need to use my cool animal superpower to know those things about you.”
A breeze rippled his sandy hair as he shook his head in what she suspected was exasperation. “Lady, I’ve met a lot of special-ability types in my career, but you have to be the first that’s so well adjusted.”
“That’s gotta be the first time anyone ever used well adjusted to describe me.”
“Yeah, well, the people I deal with are used to hiding their abilities. They deny them, or don’t have control of them, or they have this bitter I’m-a-freak thing going on.” He looked at her as if she were an animal species he hadn’t seen before. “Not you. I’ve never seen anyone so comfortable in their own skin.”
“Oh, don’t be thinking my gift isn’t a royal pain in the ass sometimes,” she said, remembering just the other night when four of her dogs had jumped on the bed to wake her, complaining about one another like a bunch of five-year-old boys.
“Life is a royal pain in the ass.” He motioned for her to sit, another fifteen-minute break for him to collect his bearings and her to rest her aching feet.
As she stretched her arms over her head, her muscles failed to relax, instead tightening. Everything tightened, her breasts, her abs, everything but her sex, which throbbed with a soft fullness.
Tom sat on the ground a few feet away, his back to her, his attention focused on the dense woods around them. His black T-shirt cut across defined muscles she’d never tire of admiring. One sleeve was bunched up around his biceps, and all she could think about was running her tongue over the hard swell.
Yeah, she’d do that.
She crouched, let her breathing grow shallow but slow. She went to her hands and knees, moved silently toward him, stalking. Her inner thighs rubbed together as she moved, heightening her already intense need. Pausing, she sniffed the air. Trees and soil and man…her heartbeat bumped up a notch.
She couldn’t stop the faint purring noise that rumbled up from deep inside her chest as she approached, and Tom shifted so slightly no one else would have noticed, but she knew she’d been detected.
Her pulse pounded as she brushed her mouth across the back of his neck and then nibbled her way up to his ear.
“You don’t have to seduce me, you know. I’m a sure thing.”
She sucked on his earlobe, and he moaned, tilted his head to grant her better access. “You could try playing hard to get every once in a while.” She nipped him, taking no special care to be gentle.
“I am hard to get,” he growled.
Smiling, her teeth still attached to his lobe, she wrapped her arms around his waist to pet his erection through his pants. “Oh, you’re hard, all right.”
He reached over his shoulders, grabbed her around her rib cage, then, in one smooth motion, he brought her forward while he lay back, and she found her face in his crotch. She felt his face in hers. In seconds, he had yanked down the BDU bottoms he’d finally made her wear, freeing one leg and leaving the pants bunched around the ankle of the other.
“Do you think you can hold off the main event for just a minute?” he murmured against the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, and she nodded, though he couldn’t have seen.
His tongue slipped into the leg opening of her underwear, teasing and probing as one finger tunneled into the other opening. The tip of his finger stroked the crease of her leg, and she wriggled to create more room for him to play. His smile tickled her skin and sent an involuntary shiver running through her body.
The warm, musky scent of arousal filled her nostrils. Eagerly, she tore open his BDUs and released his cock. It jutted upward, jumped as she pressed a lingering kiss to the shaft. No man she’d been with had ever been so well endowed, so ideally shaped for her feminine passage and hot buttons. Always before, orgasms were hit or miss durin
g intercourse. But with Tom, she came every time, several times, often from nothing more than penetration. It was as though his body was made for her, and it was time to reward him for that.
Raking her fingernails over the skin of his inner thighs, she flicked her tongue downward. She lapped at his balls, listening to the sound of his breathing as it came faster. His cock strained against her cheek, a rod of heated marble, and under her tongue, his balls swelled, the skin covering them growing taut, lifting them to her mouth.
“Jesus, Kira…oh, yeah.” His groan rumbled through her sex, releasing a gush of moisture his tongue dipped into. She squirmed, tilting her hips to allow him better access.
She fisted his erection, feeling his pulse beating in her palm as she brought the head to her lips. Creamy drops of pre-ejaculate beaded at the tip, precious little pearls she shouldn’t waste. But it had been so long since she’d even wanted to know any man so intimately, and her mouth watered with the desire to taste him.
A sound of desperation erupted from him as she traced his velvety cap with her mouth, applying his essence there like lip balm. She sipped at the tiny slit until he began to pant, and then she twisted around to smile at him. Slowly, seductively, she ran her tongue over her lips, licking his fluid from them. His flavor, wild and tangy, gave her mouth a buzz, and when she saw how he was watching her, so captivated that he’d forgotten what he was doing between her legs, her entire body buzzed with yearning so intense she quivered.
“You’re killing me,” he rasped, and then he paid her back for her little game by locking his penetrating gaze on her as he stretched the crotch of her panties aside and pierced her core with his tongue.
He didn’t take his eyes off her as he worked her, and as she began to peak, she dropped her head between his legs, drew his sac into her mouth and let herself scream around it.
“Oh, God!” he shouted, the echo bouncing off the mountains as her release thundered through her, her muffled noises vibrating through both of them.
