Romancing the Paranormal

by Stephanie Rowe

  One look into their shining eyes spoke the only truth he needed.

  Worth it. All of it.

  Liam swiped at his cheek and cleared his throat, providing Crixus the opportunity to play a role that could rescue him from the tidal wave of emotion threatening to capsize his teetering vessel. His port in many a storm—insensitive asshole.

  “Dude.” Crixus asked. “Are you crying?”

  “You got a problem with that, Crickets?” Liam challenged.

  “No. No problem. But if you could dry it up so we can get back to what really matters here, I’d appreciate it.”

  “And that would be?” Liam asked.

  Crixus propped his boots on the coffee table and folded his hands behind his head.

  “Me, of course.”

  “No wonder that succubus blew you up four times,” Liam muttered. “I’d have done worse.”

  “Shit. Five. I forgot about the mimes.”

  “Five times,” Liam repeated. “What the hell did you do to this chick anyway?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Crixus snagged gazes with Matilda, whose ability to hone in on a defense mechanism from forty paces left him feeling naked and raw.

  Her eyes softened and the thoughts behind them came to him without effort.

  I don’t know why you’re really here, but I know whatever you’re doing, you’re doing for me.

  Crixus could not bring himself to lie. Not to her. Yes.

  A single fat tear spilled down her cheek. Thank you.

  The whole exchange was over by the time Liam had unbuttoned his coat.

  “I’m afraid we don’t have time for long stories.” Matilda’s tone held just the right amount of harried efficiency. She glanced at the clock on the wall behind the couch, dabbing at her cheek with a tissue plucked from the box at her elbow. “My next client will be here any minute.”

  Crixus took a deep breath and forced himself into a seated position.

  “I accidentally made Lavinia my soul mate two thousand years ago and didn’t know about it until I signed a contract with Hades to bring her in because she’s killing a shit-ton of artists and the Muses and Fates are all kinds of butt-hurt about it.”

  “Jesus.” Liam shook his head. “You’re fucked.”

  “Wait a minute.” Matilda deposited her chips and dip on the end table and swept crumbs from her skirt. “You have a soul mate?”

  “Apparently.”

  “You mean, you didn’t know?” Matilda asked.

  A crowbar would have come in handy to pry the next word from his mouth. He already knew where she was going with this, and would have preferred to go anywhere else. “No.”

  Matilda leaned forward in her seat, a satisfied smile spreading across her face. “I thought you knew everything.”

  “So did I. While we’re on the topic of shit I don’t know, how do I make her stop hating me?”

  “Be someone else,” Liam suggested.

  “Last time I checked, your wife was the therapist.” Crixus turned to Matilda, who cleared her throat and pushed her glasses up her nose.

  Not a good sign.

  “I hate to say this, but Liam may have a point.”

  “Be someone else,” Crixus repeated. “That’s your professional advice?”

  “It’s just that, sometimes when you’re threatened, you can come off a little…” She trailed off, searching the air for a kind way to say an unkind thing.

  “Douchey,” Liam finished for her.

  “Overconfident,” Matilda restated. “Or insincere. Or superficial. Or—”

  “I think I preferred douchey,” Crixus said.

  “Look, Crickets, it’s really simple.” The man who was more used to disposing of bodies busied himself disposing the remnants of Matilda’s snack. “Next time you’re having a conversation with—what’s her name?”

  “Your mother.”

  Liam paused with his hands hovering over the trashcan. “Now, see? That right there is a perfect example. Because instead of helping you find a solution to your problem, I’d like to rip your intestines from your ass and use you as a skipping rope.”

  Crixus felt a brief burst of gratitude that this option had not yet occurred to Vinnie.

  “I think what Liam means is,” Matilda began delicately, “maybe you should take the first thing that comes to mind, and say the opposite. Or nothing. Saying nothing is always a viable option.”

  “Am I really that bad?” He didn’t want the answer to this question, but it was out of his mouth before he could call it back. Something to consider.

  Matilda consulted the carpet like it was the Delphic oracle but said nothing. Crixus found this infinitely worse.

  A knock on the door provided welcome absolution.

  “I’ll get it.” Liam was across the office before Matilda could attempt to lever her body out of the chair.

  The kid was leaning on the doorframe when it opened, looking like the human equivalent of an empty juice carton. Drained, translucent, and in imminent danger of collapsing.

  “Casey?” Matilda asked. “Come in, I’ve been expecting you.”

  “Hey. Sorry I’m late. Band practice went long. Been up for five days straight working on this new sooo…”

  Liam had alarmingly fast reflexes for a human. He caught the kid just as his knees gave out but before he could crumple to the ground. “Jesus. You okay?”

  Casey looked up at them from a pale face sheened with sweat. “Yeah. I’m great. I’ve been on this creative high, but I feel like I might be…you know.” His finger circled his ear.

  Crixus felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck rise. “You have a girlfriend?”

  “Do I ever. I met a muse, man. Like, a real muse. She’s been helping me with my songs. But…I think I’m losing it. Last night, I dreamed she was like, fucking me to death.”

  Liam and Crixus exchanged a look of the kind only hunters knew. In that moment of shared understanding, a revelation came: his need and Liam’s need was the same. To see Matilda safe.

  They were bound by their love for her.

  He could not allow them to be bound by their grief.

  Casey took Liam’s offered hand and shuffled over to the couch Crixus had vacated.

  “How long have you been together?” Crixus asked.

  “Just a couple weeks. I met her at this gig we were doing at Frankie’s Tiki Room. She followed me off stage and stuck her hand down my pants.”

  A sympathetic pain arose in the crotch of Crixus’s jeans. The pattern struck him as familiar.

  “When did you last see her?”

  The kid scratched the spider web of tattoos on his neck. “Like, two minutes ago. She likes to be in the studio when we play.”

  “Where?”

  “Brickhouse Recording Studios. Just off 19th.”

  The demigod was on his feet and angling for the door but stopped just inside the frame.

  Crixus was not, had never been, a man who looked back.

  His past was a cavern beyond all reckoning, a swath of time and experience too large to consider. Standing on the precipice came with the vertigo that had warned him away from the edge. Looking forward, into battle, Crixus would take with him only the image of the woman he had loved, her belly full of life and her cheeks pink with hope.

  She would be his standard. The image he would have laid across his coffin if he failed.

  Because if he failed…he would find a way to die.

  “Stay with her,” Crixus said over his shoulder without turning.

  “I will.”

  *****

  The Brickhouse Recording Studio was neither brick, nor a house. A cheap stuccoed shoebox squatting under a row of palm trees provided a stark contrast to the lofty Italianate architecture Crixus had chased Vinnie through over the past day. Red terracotta roof tiles still clung to the merciless Vegas heat and radiated warmth into a night made muddy by distant neon lights.

  Crixus could not imagine her in this place
. Not Vinnie, who wandered the streets of old London with a sigh on her lips and a song in her heart. Vegas was too crass, too loud. The very air screamed with desperation—an emotion he had only understood in theory until meeting Matilda.

  He thought he had wanted her for his own as much as he could want anything. Each step toward the place that might end them both echoed back the untruth of this.

  He wanted her happiness more.

  He wanted her the way he had seen her today: warm and alive.

  Two elements that were now entirely dependent upon his plan, itself born of desperation. If success demanded that he be someone he had never been, then he would have to do something he had never done.

  He was going to beg.

  Muffled music floated out to him when a couple of leather-wearing punks pushed the door open for a smoke. Crixus walked past them, paying no attention to their ‘can I help yous’ and ‘where do you think you’re goings.’

  Best to save up every ounce of courtesy he could muster for the task ahead.

  The reception desk was unmanned at this hour, leaving the long hallway to the sound booths unguarded.

  Not that it would have mattered.

  Receptionists were a particular specialty of his. Matilda had never appreciated this fact for reasons he was beginning to understand. Seeing Vinnie tangled on the bed with those two pale boy band rejects in London was enough to make Crixus want to skin them alive and make himself a pair of rockabilly boots.

  And that was before he’d fucked her. Or she fucked him.

  Crixus couldn’t quite figure out which description better suited their last meeting.

  Perhaps a couple more rounds would assist him in finding the right words.

  Kicking the door to the studio down was the second most satisfying thing he’d done all week. Watching the band scatter and the wide-eyed technicians behind the glass duck under their instrument panel when Crixus bared his teeth was a close third.

  When the human debris had vacated, the demigod turned his attention to the curtained booth in the corner.

  Two pairs of feet were visible beneath the curtain’s hem. One set clad in snakeskin boots with toes pointy enough to double as suppositories if Crixus was feeling creative, and the other, delicate sandals and slim ankles.

  Crixus reached in and grabbed the headphone-wearing singer out by his V-necked shirt and thrust him toward the door. “Get gone, or they’ll use this recording to dub over a horror movie after what I do to you.”

  The singer fell over a drum kit in his haste to beat a path out of the studio. The upended cymbals heralding his departure like an orchestral climax. A fitting tribute for the moment Crixus dropped to his knees before the curtain with Vinnie still behind it.

  “Vinnie, before you come out of there, there’s something I need to say. Will you just give me two minutes? After that, if you still want to kill me again, you can.”

  Silence. Good enough.

  “I’ve thought a lot about what you said in Rome, and I just wanted to tell you that you’re right. I’m wrong. I’m not sorry. Not sorry enough, anyway. I can’t even begin to appreciate the pain my actions caused you. I was young and stupid. Okay, I’m still no scholar, I think we both know that, but I will try to make it right. Whatever vengeance you need to exact upon me, I will gladly accept. I deserve that.”

  The sandals turned to face him and Crixus braced for the killing blow. It didn’t come. He talked on.

  “But Vinnie, I need your help. There’s a woman, a human woman, who deserves to draw breath in a way I never will. She’s good, and kind, and there is no price I wouldn’t pay for her. She’s the reason I can understand now how I’ve wronged you.”

  More silence. His head not exploding had to be a good sign, right?

  “Vinnie, I’m begging you. On my knees. Come with me to Hades. He’s reasonable. I know we can work something out. Do this, and I will be your…slave. My life is yours to do with what you will. But please. Please, help me save Matilda.”

  The silence gave way at last, but to a sound Crixus had not expected.

  Applause. The curtain parting.

  A face emerging from between the velvet panels.

  Not Lavinia’s face.

  “Calliope?”

  Her blue eyes were hard and cold as diamonds within the moonlit oval of her face, her blond hair released from its gilded bands to drape her shoulders in waves of corn silk. Her slim body was wrapped in a short jean skirt and leather bustier.

  “Bravo, gladiator. I wouldn’t have thought you capable of silver-tongued flattery. At least, not without my help.”

  “But Hades said you were in Rome.”

  “Was in Rome, yes. And in London. And in Florence. So were you. What’s your point?”

  Crixus’s mouth opened, ready to spill forth the questions gathering like steam in his chest. He tried to push to his feet but collapsed as a wave of agony spiked into his limbs.

  The muse’s cold finger fell across his lips.

  “Sit tight, beefcake. I can make this so much worse for you. You are only a demigod, after all. Impure. Contaminated by human frailty. That whore might have killed you. But I…I can destroy you.”

  Pain stole the breath from his lungs. Every word she spoke was a wound.

  “Bitch,” he growled.

  She held up a finger in a tisk-tisk gesture. “And just when you were doing so well with your words. I suppose I can’t fault you for that. Must be hard to watch the woman you love die because you couldn’t get the job done. Isn’t it, gladiator?” she cooed in a syrupy poor baby tone.

  “Fuck you.”

  An invisible blast knocked him onto his back. He was unable to writhe as the searing flames in his body demanded. Calliope crawled up his legs, lithe as a snow leopard, and straddled his hips.

  “You know, I almost wish you had. I’ll admit to being just the tiniest bit jealous.” Her hips rode in a brazen circle over Crixus’s crotch. “You certainly seem to be gifted in that capacity.”

  “I’d rather my dick rotted off.”

  Her lips were soft and feather-light as they skimmed over his. “That can be arranged.”

  Claustrophobia took him. This was the polar opposite of every battle he’d ever fought, when life or death was determined by the strength of his arm and the speed of his sword. He needed to fight. To sweat. To bleed.

  He could do nothing.

  “Still, you’ve played your part perfectly,” Calliope purred. “I commend you for that. But I’m afraid you’ve outlived your usefulness. After this failure, Hades will have no choice but to turn Lavinia’s capture over to me. You’ll just be one more notch in mean old Vinnie’s score card. A regrettable casualty.”

  “You…killed them?”

  Calliope slithered around behind him, her fingers trailing across his broad shoulders. “It was painfully simple, really. People are willing to believe just about anything of a creature like her. The human deaths were worrying, yes. Plenty to stir Olympus to my side. But your death. Now that will be poetic.”

  “Why?”

  The muse sighed, bored of this question. “Because I am sick of going to museums and seeing her face. Her body. Of reading books about her. Poems to her beauty. She refused to go quietly like the others. She defied me. Me, the greatest of all muses.”

  Torment redoubled itself as night crept into the edges of his vision. He willed death to find him, and quickly.

  Coward was a mantel he was no longer too proud to wear.

  He had failed. Matilda would die.

  Heaven was not being alive to witness it.

  Chapter Ten

  Oh hell, no.

  Vinnie stood in the doorway to the recording studio watching Calliope straddling her soul mate and contemplated torture. And murder. And maiming. And lunch.

  In her defense, the demigod had been a little like Chinese food. Once Crixus filled her, she wanted him to do it again an hour later.

  She’d come hungry, and she was not abou
t to let this insipid, scheming twat make off with her meal.

  “Hey, cockmuppet!” Vinnie threw her weapon, and hard.

  Calliope’s blond head jerked up at the precise moment Moritasgus connected with her face. She shrieked as his patchy maw clamped onto her perfectly-upturned nose.

  “Ged hib off!” she howled. “Ged hib off!”

  “There’s only room for one homicidal sex-goddess in Crixus’s life. And trust me, you can’t fill my shoes, much less my bra.”

  A welcome surge of anger swelled from Vinnie’s stomach up through her chest, tingling down her arms and out the palms of her hands. She felt it surround the Greek goddess, who was not as young as Crixus, but scarcely mature by Vinnie’s standards.

  Calliope curled up like a worm and rolled onto her side. “Please!” she begged. “We’re muses. Sisters.”

  “You dare beg my mercy after what you did to him?”

  It was difficult not to look at Crixus, flat on his back, his chest rising ragged. She knew better than to give him her attention. Not yet. Not while she needed to focus.

  “But he’s…a user.” Calliope’s voice had gone thin and reedy. “A lascivious…womanizer.”

  “You make that sound like a bad thing,” she said, repeating words she’d heard earlier that evening from an altogether different source.

  “I’ll call off Hades,” Calliope groaned.

  “Oh don’t you worry about that. He and I have already had ourselves a nice, long chat.” Warmth bloomed in her cheeks and traveled downward with the memory. Truthfully, Vinnie wouldn’t have minded if they had done more than talk. She’d always had a taste for those dark, tortured souls. It didn’t get much darker than the Dark Lord. She could spend a century or two exorcising his demons, easy.

  “No,” she gasped. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Tell it to the judge, sister.” Vinnie clenched her hand into a fist and felt the same satisfaction all those granolas must get when they crush a can and lob it into the recycling bin. Calliope would awake in Hades’s office with some heavy explaining to do and an eternity to do it.

  Vinnie sauntered over to the felled gladiator, arms folded across her breasts. “You look like shit.”