by G. G. Andrew
And what a lover he’d been. No doubt Lucas Moore was usually a considerate man when he made love, but there was a fierceness in him tonight, a gnawing hunger for her growing with every thrust, and she’d thrilled at it. He’d gripped her hips tightly as she’d rode him, and the friction between their bodies had made her come quick and hard, like a match striking.
It was all a woman wanted: a kind man who was a demon in bed.
“Where’d you say everyone was?” he asked, looking around the second floor.
She sighed again. “Tucker’s downstairs playing with his toys. And Adele and Mina are upstairs trying to talk to dead people.”
There came a shuffling over their heads. Both of them slowly looked up.
“Someone’s up on the third floor, all right.” Lucas’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.
“I’ll go check it out,” she said, eager to ease his anxiety and get him back to bed. Her muscles still pulsed with the memory of him, the shape he’d made inside her.
“No.” He shook his head and swallowed again. “I won’t let you go alone.”
Laney’s skin grew warm and tingly. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but damn it if she didn’t feel charmed that this firefighter wanted to protect her from some imaginary thing. She’d seen his hands shake and the way his face looked when he’d told his story. He believed this. He was scared to go on the third floor. Yet he was doing it anyway so she didn’t have to go alone.
They walked to the staircase on the opposite end of the hall, then crept up it, Laney in the rear.
Halfway up, Lucas called, “Adele, are you up there?”
Silence.
“Maybe Mina’s put her in a trance,” Laney whispered, though she wasn’t completely sure why the older woman wasn’t answering them back either.
Exhaling hard, his steps quickened up the second flight and Laney rushed to keep up. But when he hit the landing, he stopped short.
“What?” she said, stepping up beside him.
Adele stood in the middle of the third floor hallway, facing them. Her skirts swished around her like she’d just turned around. A short ways behind, Mina was leaning her palms flat against the wall, her head down and hidden behind her dark hair. A large bag lay between them.
Seeing them, Adele put her finger to her mouth. A smile played on her lips. Slowly, she glided closer to where they’d paused at the top of the stairs.
“Hello,” she whispered. She put one hand on each of their arms and squeezed. “I’m glad you’re here.” Adele’s eyes drifted to Laney’s neck, which she was almost embarrassed to realize probably had a hickey from Lucas’s mouth. Laney tugged over a strap of her sundress.
“Are you okay?” Lucas asked. His gaze darted all around: Adele, the hall, Mina, the ceiling, the hall. He hadn’t budged from where he’d paused by the steps. The threshold stood just a foot and a half away, but his eyes considered it as if it were an invisible force field.
“Of course, Lucas,” Adele said pleasantly. “Mina’s just trying to make contact with my husband. It takes a great deal of focus and, of course, silence is helpful.”
As she stopped talking, a soft whispering rose from Mina’s direction. It was too low and fast for Laney to catch any specific words, almost like a chant.
Adele turned to Lucas, grabbing his right hand with both of her own and pressing it between them. “I’m sorry if it is hard for you to be up here, dear. All these memories—I know.”
Lucas’s chest rose as he took a deep breath, but he moved not a step closer to the hallway.
“Thank you, Adele,” he said tightly.
The widow squeezed his hand so tight his fingertips drained of blood. “We were so lucky it didn’t take you too, you know,” she told him. “I know it wanted to; that’s why you have that…” She nodded to his bicep, in the place Laney remembered that strange hand-shaped burn was.
His lips parted, but no sound came out.
A deep moan came from Mina, and a shudder coursed through the young woman’s body. She was really putting on a good show.
Adele’s eyes held the firefighter’s. “He knew it was going to take you, and that’s why he saved you, my Bill. He was a good man. He couldn’t let a child be hurt, and he must have known it was coming for you.”
A shadow crossed Lucas’s face, and it was different than the fear that had tightened his features earlier. This was like regret—or confirmation of an ugly secret only he knew. Laney didn’t like it.
Static buzzed from the floor.
They all started, then Laney laughed. She recognized it as one of the walkie talkies Tucker had insisted they use to communicate between floors of the house.
“Guys!” Tucker’s voice was excited over the speaker. “Guys! You’ve got to come down here and see this.”
Laney guessed that the kid was freaking out about some two-point temperature difference between the lobby and the library—something she might be able to mention as an afterthought in the article. Obviously the real story was up here with the grieving widow, the scene of the supposed haunting, and the psychic making silly noises.
She glanced at Lucas. He’d pulled away from Adele, and he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else.
An inky feeling of guilt spilled into Laney’s stomach. She shouldn’t have asked him here—not to the third floor, and maybe not to the inn. Still, she needed this paycheck more than she needed to bed this noble, troubled man a second time, as much as her body desired it. Plus, as Mina let out another moan and dramatic shudder, Laney could almost see the click rates on her piece skyrocketing. She dug her cell out of the bag she hadn’t left behind in the room.
“She won’t mind if I take photos of her, right?” Laney asked Adele, turning on the phone’s camera and aiming it toward Mina.
“I suppose not,” Adele said.
As she walked into the hall, Laney called over her shoulder to Lucas. “Go see what Tucker’s found. But if it’s something good, tell him to text it to me so I can use it in the article.”
Chapter Ten
Lucas
Lucas was ashamed of the relief he felt when Laney told him to go back downstairs. Being on the third floor of Cattleman’s Crossing had made his guts twist and his fear spiral outward from there, shortening his breath and making the hairs on his arms stand on end.
He didn’t like the way that smell kept creeping in and out of his consciousness. He would’ve thought it was just him, if Laney hadn’t confirmed that she smelled it too. It was this place. Was that smell always here, just waiting around the corner?
Could Adele not smell it?
Lucas also didn’t like that psychic being here. He didn’t know if she was for real, but he hoped she didn’t have power to call that creature out from whatever depths it came from. That thing didn’t need an engraved invitation.
He clomped down the stairs, some of the dread seeping out as he reached the second floor and crossed the hall to the staircase that led down to the lobby. Though in its place came a new apprehension: how could he have left Laney and Adele up there? An old lady and a woman he had feelings—surprisingly strong feelings—for? If history repeated itself…
He’d almost turned around as he reached the staircase to the first floor when rapid footsteps came from below.
It sounded like too many feet to be one person, but when Tucker’s face appeared around the curve of the staircase, Lucas realized it was just one young guy, fast and out of breath.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Tucker said, pushing his hair out of his eyes. “You have to see this.”
“Are you okay?” Lucas said.
“Yeah, totally,” Tucker said. “I just got to show somebody this or my head’s going to explode. Come on.”
He gestured Lucas down the steps, the walkie talkie in his jeans pocket and some kind of remote-like equipment in his hand that emitted tiny lights and beeps. He disappeared around the curve and out of sight.
Casting a quick glance behind him at the
second floor, Lucas followed the kid down. The third floor seemed quiet, and whatever was happening down here had caught Tucker’s interest. He moved down the steps.
Along the way, he passed pictures of the inn along various points in its history, but in reverse order. There it was in its most recent iteration, and as it blurred past he caught photos of its restoration twenty years ago. Lower down, he spied with a sickening lurch a photograph of the charred-out remains of the building after the fire. He passed this, and time flowed backwards. Here was a framed photo with a tiny plaque listing it as from 1968, and another that looked like it was shot in the 30s or 40s, and finally an old black-and-white of when the inn was first built at the turn of the century. Surely men and women had planned and built and cared for Cattleman’s Crossing, but they were absent from the images. As he reached the bottom step, something else was contained in a frame—not the inn he’d come to fear, but a small saloon in a sepia photograph.
Funny he hadn’t noticed this when he’d walked up these steps earlier.
There were people in this image, too. Three men stood by the open entrance to the saloon. They all wore pants, shirts with vests, and hats perched on their heads. They were unsmiling, though by the way they all had their thumbs hooked into their pockets, their stance seemed casual and not unhappy. A simple sign stretched over the entrance proclaimed Cattleman’s Crossing.
A fourth man stood apart from the group, on the other side of the entrance. His clothes were markedly darker, and, to Lucas’s untrained eye, of better quality. Unlike the trio of men, he held only one hand in a pocket that seemed to be bulging. He wore a hat, but his head was bowed, his face unseen.
Something about the way he didn’t show his face made Lucas uneasy.
“You coming?” Tucker called, startling his absorption. “This is so fucking amazing.”
Lucas tore his eyes from the old photo and walked the final step to the first floor. Glancing around him, he saw nothing awry. The smell was gone, and the temperature not any hotter than when he’d left it earlier that evening.
“This way,” Tucker called, and he followed his voice into the library, whose door had been propped open by a large book.
“What’s going on?” Lucas stepped over the threshold into the square room lined with shelves.
Then came a metallic sound that made his gut twist.
Chapter Eleven
Laney
Laney captured photos of Mina in the throes of her psychic whatever, which seemed to be intensifying as the minutes passed, as she probably became more aware of the attentions of Laney’s camera.
“What would you call this?” she whispered to Adele as she took another shot. “A trance? A one-person séance?”
“Hardly,” Adele said. “I would call it a summoning.”
“A summoning,” Laney repeated, making a mental note to use that term in her article.
She lowered the phone and faced Adele. “So, who’s she trying to communicate with now? Bill?”
“She can’t talk to Bill, dear.” Laney was surprised by the peevish note that’d entered Adele’s voice. Although if she had to spend more than an hour up here listening to Moaning Mina, she might be a little irritated, too. Not to mention how hot and stuffy it was getting up here on the third floor.
“Oh, sorry,” Laney asked. “So, why can’t we talk to Bill?” She pushed the audio recorder on her cell.
“Despite what she might think, it just wouldn’t be possible. The other spirit is much too strong.” Adele leaned over to the bag in the hallway. She dug inside and pulled out a large black candle. Unearthing a box of matches from the pockets of her billowy skirt, she lit the wick and placed it on the floor. Then she walked over to flip off the hall light.
The third floor plunged into darkness, only the flickering flame illuminating the dark shape of Mina leaning against the wall and Adele’s upright form, the wisps of gray hair frizzing from her head backlit like she had a halo.
The psychic’s whispers grew louder and more distinct. “I can’t find him. Bill? Bill? Only the other, the hungry one.” Her voice raised. “He’s coming, he’s coming. Adele…”
The older woman didn’t answer her.
As the wick burned, the tender scent of warm wax pricked Laney’s nostrils, but alongside it came a strange, putrid, almost metallic smell. She looked closely to see a dark liquid that didn’t look like melted wax on the candle.
Laney’s jaw dropped. “Is that blood on that candle?”
“I tried to summon him before,” Adele said, lighting a second candle and placing it across the hallway, then a third. “It didn’t work. It has to be done here at the inn, with blood and a bargain. That’s how he wants it.”
Laney scanned the flickering walls of the third floor, musing at how creepily beautiful the scene looked. She could get a fantastic photo of this setup, for sure. “Blood and a bargain,” she said. “We’ve got the blood, so what’s the bargain?”
“Oh,” Adele said behind her, “I think you’ll help me get both.”
The last thing Laney remembered before her face hit the wall and her nerves exploded in pain was Mina’s gasp and her voice, clear as a bell, crying, “What have you done?”
Chapter Twelve
Lucas
In the library, Tucker knelt by the fireplace, his face hidden from Lucas. “So I was just getting some measurements in various rooms,” he began, “temperature, electromagnetic fields, that sort of thing. And I’m out by the front door and I suddenly hear this noise and I think my keys have fallen somewhere. But then I walk back here and I see this.”
Tucker turned around, bowed over something cupped in his palm.
“What is it?” A dull glint caught Lucas’s eye. It was—
“Coins,” Tucker said. “Antique coins. They just fell from the fireplace!”
Lucas’s brows knitted together. “Must be something in the building,” he mumbled. He walked over and squatted down to look closer. “This place used to be a saloon, didn’t it?”
Tucker nodded. “Yeah, it was called Cattleman’s Crossing back then, too.” He studied the change as he stirred it around in his hand. There were gold coins of various sizes, grimy and tarnished. They looked like they were from a hundred years ago, maybe older. “But the thing is this fireplace doesn’t work. It’s all for show. I’m not sure where it came from…” He set the coins in a pile on the floor and peered at Lucas. “You ever hear of a guy by the name of Silas Bolton?”
A soft ping came from behind Tucker, and the kid whirled around. “There’s another one. Jesus Christ.”
Sure enough, Lucas looked around him to see another antique coin in the fireplace. His stomach turned.
“Don’t—” he started to say, just as the teenager reached to grab the currency.
“Ow!” Tucker shouted as his fingers grazed the coin. “Shit.” His hand now shaking, Tucker examined his finger. It was bright red with a white blister already forming on top, as if he’d burned himself on an oven.
The teenager’s eyes were wide, and, for the first time, a shine of fear simmered in their depths.
“Don’t touch any of those coins,” Lucas said, “and—”
The walkie talkie in Tucker’s pocket came to life in an angry buzz of static. He pulled it out.
“Lucas?” Adele Lyons’ voice on the other end sounded alarmed. “I need you to come up here. Something’s happened.”
It was Adele’s tone more than her words which made Lucas bolt to standing.
“Where’s Laney?” he asked.
There was only static on the other end.
“I’m coming!” he called.
As he rushed to the staircase, he pointed at Tucker and said, “Don’t move. And stay the hell away from that fireplace.”
Chapter Thirteen
Laney
Laney came to consciousness moaning so much she would’ve put that psychic to shame. Though her eyes weren’t yet open, she felt herself slumped against a wall. Her n
ose was throbbing—and, as she discovered as she tried to sniff, was clogged. She put a tentative hand up and felt wetness on her fingertips—and a telltale taste of copper on her tongue.
She was bleeding. Though she had a vague memory, almost like a dream, of someone wiping her face.
Her eyes flew open to a dark hallway flickering with candlelight. She remembered her nose breaking against the wall after someone had pushed her.
Adele Lyons?
Still seated, she rotated around. That psychic woman stood a few feet away, trembling and blinking at her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Adele was further down the hall, squeezing a rag of what looked like blood droplets onto one of her candles.
“You broke my nose!” Laney said, her voice slightly nasal. “What the hell!”
Adele didn’t look over at her as she wrung what was probably Laney’s blood onto another candle. “Honestly, I am sorry it came to that. You can be a snotty know-it-all, but you’ve got such a pretty face. But I had to do it so he’d come.”
“You’re crazy,” Laney said. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, and, if there were, they probably wouldn’t care if you broke my nose before they showed up. Jesus.”
Adele looked over and shook her head. “I’m not talking about Silas Bolton, dear. I’m talking about getting that young man to enter this hallway. He’s the poker chip I’m gambling with to get my Bill back.”
“What…” And then Laney heard it: the heavy footsteps on the staircase up to the third floor, moving quickly.
“Lucas!” Laney cried. “Don’t!”
She didn’t know what possessed her to say don’t when she should’ve been shouting for help, but a part of her knew something terrible would happen if Lucas entered the third floor hallway.
Mina was still shaking, her eyes focused on Adele. “What did you do? How?” The woman sounded genuinely shocked.
Adele smiled, and her expression was like a proud mother. “You are a very good battery,” she said. “The other psychic I met said you would be. I knew you’d have the energy to draw the gambler here tonight.”
