by Shayla Black
Carys let her shadows fall away then. The hatch on the cage opened to let out the combatants. She raced to meet Rune, shouting his name and applauding with the rest of the throng as her man collected yet another victory.
Rune’s rugged face lit up with private promise when he saw her. The brutal, fearsome fighter stepped out of the cage and caught her around the waist, hauling her to him.
His dark eyes glittered with need he didn’t even try to conceal. Ignoring the cheers and applause that swelled around him, he took her mouth in a possessive kiss.
Then he scooped her up and carried her out of the arena.
All Hallows Eve
A Krewe of Hunters Novella
By Heather Graham
Prologue
Come to me. Please, come to me.
The words seemed real to Elyssa Adair, like a whisper in her mind, as she looked up at the old mansion.
The Mayberry Mortuary was decked out in a fantastic Halloween décor, customary each year starting October 1. It sat high on a jagged bluff near the waterfront in Salem, Massachusetts. Just driving toward it, at night, was like being in a horror movie. Dense trees lined the paved drive and it was surrounded by a graveyard. The old Colonial building, when captured beneath the moonlight, seemed to rise from the earth in true Gothic splendor.
She shivered and looked around at her friends, wondering if the words had been spoken by one of them. Vickie Thornton and Barry Tyler sat in the backseat, laughing with one another and making scary faces. Nate Fox was driving, his dark eyes intent on the road.
No one in the car had spoken to her.
She gave herself a silent mental shake. She could have sworn she’d actually heard a whisper. Clear as day. Come to me. Strangely, she wasn’t afraid. She loved the artistry of Halloween—the fun of it—and few places in the world embraced the day like Salem.
This was home and she loved Salem, despite the sad history of witch trials and executions. A lot of that was steeped in lure and myth, but the local Peabody Essex museum and other historic venues seemed to go out of their way to remind visitors of the horror that came from petty jealousy and irrational fear.
“Boo,” Nate said, leaning toward her.
She jumped with a start.
She’d been deeply involved in her thoughts and the view of the old mansion. Nate, Vickie, and Barry all giggled at her surprise.
“Do you have to do that,” she murmured.
He frowned, his eyes back on the road. “Elyssa, we’ve done this every year since we were kids. So are you really scared now?”
“Of course not,” she said, and tried to smile.
She loved Nate. They were both just eighteen, but they’d been seeing one another since their freshman year. She was young, as everyone kept reminding her, but she knew that she would love him all of her life. Despite them being opposites. She was a bookworm, born and raised in the East, red hair and green eyes. He was from South Dakota, a Western boy, whose mom had been from nearby Marblehead but whose dad had been a half Lakota Sioux. He was tall and dark with fabulous cheekbones and a keen sense of ethics and justice. He was their high school’s quarterback, and she was debate team captain.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Last year, I played a zombie, remember?”
And what a role. She’d arose from the embalming table and attacked one of her classmates who’d played the mortician, terrifying the audience.
Nate grinned. “That you did. And what a lovely zombie you were.”
Please.
She heard the single word and realized no one in the car had spoken it. Instead, it had vocalized only in her mind. Incredibly, she managed not to react. Instead, she pointed out the windshield and said, “Looks like someone has decided to toilet-paper the gates.”
White streamers decorated the old wrought iron, which seemed original. Time had taken its toll on both the gates and the stone wall that had once surrounded the property. She’d never minded that such an historic property was transformed each year into one of the best haunted houses in New England. And despite the decorations, the house remained open daily until 3:00 P.M. for tours. It had been built soon after Roger Conant—the founder of Salem—moved to the area, around 1626, starting out as a one-room building. Nearly four hundred years of additions had blossomed it into a spacious mansion, the last editions coming way back in the Victorian era. In the early 1800s it had been consecrated as a Catholic church, deconsecrated by the 1830s when a new church had been built closer to town. Some said the site had then been used for satanic worship, taken over by a coven of black magic witches, but she’d never found any real support for those rumors. During the Civil War it served as a mortuary—drastically needed as the torn bodies of Union soldiers returned home. That continued until the 1950s when the VA made it a hospital for a decade. Finally, the Salem Society for Paranormal Studies bought the property. Along with historical tours, it offered tarot card and palm readings and ESP testing of anyone willing to pay the fee. The society had repaired and restored the old place, eventually garnering an historic designation, ensuring its continued preservation.
In the 1970s, Laurie Cabot came and created a place for dozens of modern-day Wiccans, and the area soon become a mecca for everyone and everything occult. Overall, though, the society people were barely noticed, except by fundamentalists who just didn’t like anything period. Actually, the Wiccans had brought a great deal of commerce to town, and that was something to be appreciated.
Please, please, come. I need you.
Elyssa didn’t move, not even a blink. Now she knew. Those words were only in her head. Maybe she needed sleep. Definitely, she shouldn’t drink any more of the cheap wine Nate’s brother found at the convenience store.
Last night’s overindulgence had been plenty enough.
They drove through the gates and past the graves. Like every other New England cemetery, this one came with elaborate funerary art and plenty of stone symbolism. One angel in particular had always been her favorite. She occupied a pedestal near the drive, commissioned for a Lieutenant Colonel Robert Walker in 1863, there to guard his grave, on one knee, head bowed, weeping, her great wings at rest behind her back.
They drove by and the angel seemed to look up—straight at Elyssa. Again, she heard the words in her head.
Please, help me. Find me.
“Look at the people,” Vickie said.
The lines to get inside the haunted house stretched down the main walk to the porch, then around the corner of the house. The mansion was huge—seven thousand square feet over three stories, with a basement and an attic. Creepy windows filled the gables and projected inside dormers from the slate roof, like glowing eyes in the night.
“It’s three days before Halloween. What were we expecting?” Nate asked. “This place is popular. But it looks like there are vendors walking by with hot chocolate. We’ll have fun in line.”
“Elyssa, can’t you get us into the VIP line?” Barry asked. “Don’t you still have friends here? Didn’t they ask you back to work inside the haunted house this year?”
She nodded. “I just couldn’t make it happen, not with getting the whole college thing going for next year. But, I’ll see what I can do. John Bradbury still manages the place. He’s a good guy to work for.”
“Don’t you know Micah Aldridge too?” Vickie asked. “Isn’t he one of the main guys in the paranormal society?”
“He’s never around at night. He and that weird, skinny lady from Savannah—Jeannette Mackey—have their noses up in the air at this kind of thing. They think they’re a little above all this fun.”
They parked far away, almost in the graveyard, and walked back to the line.
“Work your magic,” Vickie told her.
Elyssa headed toward the makeshift desk and plywood shelter in the front where Naomi Hardy was working ticket sales. She was surprised to see that she’d been wrong. Micah Aldridge was there, helping with the sales.
Elyssa smiled at Naomi
, then leaned down to talk to Micah. “I thought you hated this silliness.”
He was a good-looking man who worked his dark hair and lean, bronzed features to add an aura of mystery to his appearance. His usual attire was some kind of a hat and long coat, reminiscent of a vampire, regardless of the season, and tonight was no exception.
“I don’t hate what pays the bills,” he told her, adding a smile. “Wish you would have worked this year. It’s always great to see you.”
“I just couldn’t, not with college coming up.” She drew in a breath. “Micah, I have some friends with me, and we’re happy to buy tickets, but we can’t afford VIP entrance and the line—”
Her words trailed off and she grimaced.
“Say no more, little one,” he said.
To her surprise, he didn’t let her pay. Instead, he set a BE BACK IN A MINUTE sign before his seat. He then whispered to Naomi Hardy, a pretty young woman of about twenty-five, who was selling the tickets to each person in line. Naomi was John Bradbury’s assistant. She knew Naomi took a room in Salem for the month of October, but lived down in Boston.
Naomi smiled and nodded an understanding, then said, “Enjoy.”
Micah led them up to the porch to wait for the next group to enter. She thanked him profusely, but he brought a finger up to his lips, signaling for quiet.
“Not even time for hot chocolate,” Vickie noted, smiling.
“We’ll get some after,” Nate said.
In the mansion foyer they were greeted by a hunchback Igor-like actor who told them a tale about black masses in the house, mad scientists, and more. They then began the walk-through, starting with the dining room where skeletons had gathered together for a feast. One was a live actor who rose to scare each group as they entered. Next came the kitchen—where a cook was busy chopping up human bodies for a stew and offering the visitors a bloody heart.
Staged gore had never bothered Elyssa. She didn’t mind the mad experiments in one of the bedrooms, or the Satanists sacrificing a young woman in the tarot card room. She didn’t even mind the demented baby or the usual scare-factor pranks typical for haunted houses.
In an upstairs bedroom, they came to the mad scientist’s lair where an actor was busy dissecting a woman on the bed, vials, wires, tubes, and beeping machines all around him. The woman—despite the fake gore—looked familiar.
Then she realized.
It was Jeannette Mackey.
Elyssa smiled and kept quiet, but when the rest of her group had filed out, she paused and hurried to the bed.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Jeannette grinned at her and replied with her sweet accent. “Darlin’, when you can’t beat’em, you’ve got to join’em.”
Elyssa laughed, found Jeannette’s hand, and squeezed it. “You and Micah working the show and Naomi Hardy on the ticket booth. Did they not get enough kid volunteers this year?”
“Gotta get back to work,” Jeannette said. “New group is coming in. But, no, we’re doing this just because we love the place.”
Elyssa grinned and hurried out.
The other bedrooms on the second floor offered a Satanist mass, a headless tarot card reader, and two displays of movie monsters with ice picks, electric saws, and more scary weapons.
Then it was time to head down—way down.
Elyssa had always been oddly uneasy in the basement. That’s where the embalming had once been done, and it hadn’t changed much since the days when the house had served as an actual mortuary. The trestle tables were still there. The nooks and crannies where shelves with instruments had been kept remained too. Hoses above stone beds still hung, where real blood and guts had been washed away, the bodies readied for embalming. There was something sad and eerie about the place.
Vickie screamed and gasped delightedly. Barry kept an arm around her—except when he was jumping himself. There were motion-activated creatures in the arched nooks along the way. One, some kind of an alien creature, took Nate by surprise and he leapt back, causing them all to laugh.
But Elyssa’s attention had been drawn to another of the basement nooks, a figure of a hanging man. She’d seen the group before them walk right by it—no blood, no gore, no actor to jump at them. To locals the image was nothing new. It could be seen throughout Salem, representative of men like George Burroughs or John Proctor, who’d also been convicted of witchcraft and hanged, like the women, during the craze.
Her head began to pound.
And she was drawn toward the image.
Yes, thank you. Come. Please, help me stop this.
She stared through the darkness and her first thought was how life-like the image was. But, of course, the man had been hanged. He was dead. No life existed. She could see every little hair on his head. He was dressed in Puritan garb, as if a victim of the witch trials. The nook had been painted to look as if it were outside at the hanging tree. He might have been about thirty-five or so in life, with dark hair and weathered features. And the smell. Rank. Like urine and rot. The area had really been done up to haunt all of the senses.
She moved closer.
Yes, yes. Help. Please, oh, yes, please.
The voice whispering in her mind grew louder.
One more step.
And then she knew.
The figure was real. Not an actor there to scare those who came so giddily through the house. And she knew him. He ran this place. He’d even given her a job here at the house last year.
John Bradbury.
Hanging, dead.
She screamed, which only evoked laughter at first. But she kept screaming and pointing. Her friends tried to calm her. Nate tried to show her that it was just part of the scare fest. A prop.
But he suddenly realized that it was much more.
White-faced and grim, he shouted, “That’s a real body. He’s dead.”
The night seemed to drag on forever with the police, bright lights and horrified actors wanting to go home, Mayberry Mortuary haunted house closed down. Eventually, there was hot chocolate as they sat in the mortuary café, answering questions for cop after cop.
But, that wasn’t the worse part.
That came when Elyssa finally made it home in the wee hours, lying in her bed, drifting in and out of sleep.
She felt her mattress depress and when she opened her eyes, John Bradbury was there.
Thank you. But you have to know. They’re going to kill again, unless you stop them.
Chapter 1
“There?” Sam Hall asked.
“Oh, yes. Yes. Touch me there. Right there,” Jenna Duffy moaned in return.
“Right here? I can touch and touch and—”
“Ohhhh yes. That’s it.”
Jenna rolled over and looked up at him, eyes soft, smile beautiful. He’d been straddled over her spine carefully balancing his weight as he worked his magic. Now he towered over her front.
“I think,” she said, reaching up to stroke his cheek, her eyes filled with wonder, “that you missed your calling. The hell with the law. The hell with the FBI. You could have been an amazing masseuse. My shoulders feel so much better.”
“You shouldn’t spend so many hours reading without taking a break and walking around.”
Jenna nodded. “I don’t know how Angela does it. She has such an eye for the cases and requests, when we’re really needed. I’ve read them over and over.”
She was referring to Special Agent Angela Hawkins, case facilitator for the Krewe of Hunters at their main offices—and wife of Jackson Crow, their acting field director. Both he and Jenna loved their work. When they weren’t in the field, he maintained his bar licensing in several states by working Krewe legal matters. Jenna assisted Angela in reading between the lines, determining where the team was most needed. The requests for Krewe help were growing in number; and while new agents came on all the time, it was still a race to keep up.
“We have tomorrow,” he said. “Then vacation.”
“Sun, se
a, and tanning oils for exotic massages,” Jenna said, laughing.
He stared down into her eyes—greener than the richest forest—and marveled at the way he loved her. Her hair, a deep and blazing red, spread out across the pillows in waves. It seemed incredible that this remarkable, beautiful, sensual woman could feel the same for him. That they could lie together so naturally, that laughter could combine with passion, and that they could live and work together.
And still be closer each year.
He smiled and kissed her.
Her fingers ran down his spine with a teasing caress, finding his midriff, then venturing lower.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
He groaned softly.
“Pardon?”
“Sex. Here, now,” he said. “The perfect place. In bed—both of us on it.”
She frowned.
“And you weren’t?”
She smiled and caressed him in one of her most erotic and sensual ways. “There?” she whispered teasingly.
“Oh, yes. Right there.”
“I can touch and touch and touch.”
He kissed her lips, then her collarbone and her breast, moving lower. He loved her so much, truly loved her, and every time they made love, it seemed sweeter and sweeter. Her skin was satin, her hair the fall of silk, and her movements—
Those were the best.
They slept after, entangled in one another’s arms, and he thought about heading to Atlantis and how he’d planned to ask her then if they shouldn’t begin to think about a wedding in the near future.
What a beautiful night.
But in the morning everything changed.
With the phone call.
* * * *
A wickedly big and warty witch atop a broomstick rode above a sign that advertised “Best Halloween Ball Bash in the Nor’East.”
New England. Halloween.
Nothing went better together.
