“We need to discuss your tendency toward playing hard to get,” Miss Prim said. “That shows commitment issues. As you know, Detective Wilcox did not appreciate your attitude. His manner toward you at your first meeting reflected it.”
“I am not playing hard to get. Detective Wilcox got annoyed because you pinched his butt. I was the only person he could place the blame on. Key word being person. No one likes being sexually harassed.”
“You pinched his butt?” Margaret asked.
“He has a really great butt. I’ll take you to the police station tomorrow so you can see it.”
Oh, for the love of—
“What happened in your childhood that now makes you avoid commitment to one man?”
“Nothing happened.” Other than Aunt Kate’s poor advice with The Boyfriend Rules. Miss Prim should have Aunt Kate on the shrink’s couch, not me.
“When was your last date?”
Oh, wow. Had it really been eight months, around the time I began working at Maude’s? Jared, the guy who was obsessed with Chia Pets. Chia Pets. Yeah, that only lasted a few dates. I had problems with taking dog-shaped Chia Pets to the dog park. I gave Miss Prim my best stop prying glare. “Not any of your business.”
“What is Detective Wilcox’s most appealing feature?”
His eyes. “Not answering.”
“Now, Kiara.” Miss Prim leaned forward. “We are here to help you work through this.”
“Yes,” Margaret said. “Finding true love is very important, and something you should take seriously.”
“Are you saying Detective Wilcox is my true love because you believe it, or because you can’t have him yourself and want to live vicariously through me?”
The two ghosts shared a smirk, and I knew that I’d hit the bullseye.
“She’s going to end up alone, isn’t she?” Margaret asked Miss Prim.
“I’m only twenty-six.” I protested.
“I know.” Sympathy shown in bright eyes. “Tragic.”
“This is the twenty-first century and women are no longer expected to marry young and spend their life playing Betty Homemaker.” I turned to Miss Prim. “What do you know about Detective Wilcox other than he has a great butt?”
“Oh, uh, well…” Her eyes darted away to look anywhere but at me.
“What is his first name?” I asked, and then gave her a hard look at her continued silence. “It’s Ty. Are you going to tell me you’ve stalked Detective Wilcox numerous times this past week, and you still haven’t learned his name?”
“In my defense, people only refer to him as detective.”
“Yet you swiped his cell phone and sent his sister a text message, but still, couldn’t figure out his name?” Miss Prim had the decency to blush. Well, as much as a ghost could blush, anyway. She should feel utterly ashamed for all the stalking she’d done on the man, yet knew nothing of actual substance about him. “Did you know he likes kids? He has a three-year-old niece who he completely dotes on, but you wouldn’t know that if you only stare at his butt. And he has a hint of a dimple in his left cheek when he smiles, like really smiles because he’s happy. Not his stupid, arrogant smile. And…”
Aw, crap. I stared at two smiling faces. Suspicion was strong I’d been played by ghosts.
“You like him.” Miss Prim positively beamed.
“You two, leave. This is a place of business, and I have to work.” I got up from Miss Prim’s shrink’s couch. “Move those chairs back before… Hey, is it hot in here?”
“How would I know? Dead ghost, remember?”
I walked over to the thermostat. It was jacked up to ninety-five. “Who played with the thermostat?”
Two ghostly expressions of pure innocence stared at me as I turned the air down to forty to counter the extreme heat. I shot them a look. There wasn’t an ounce of innocence in either one of those manipulative, scheming ethereal bodies.
My frown lasted until I sat down at my desk. Then if I’d had mirror, I’m sure my face would have reflected nothing but bewilderment. “What the hell?”
“What’s wrong?” Miss Prim poofed before she rematerialized in front of me. We both stared at my desk, and I wondered if my brow had drawn as many puzzled wrinkles as hers.
The contents of my purse lay in a neat row across the desk surface, and I was ninety-nine percent certain neither ghost had been near those contents.
“How did this get out of my purse?”
We spun to Margaret. She shrugged. This one shrugged a lot. A ghost of few words. Miss Prim needed to take note. Or lessons. Or something.
“Okay, who is messing with…”
“What?” Miss Prim asked. “You have to finish a sentence if you want an answer.”
I wanted to answer. Really, I did. But that voice thing? Yeah, I’d lost mine. So I nodded. And when Miss Prim didn’t realize I nodded at something, I nodded again. Then gestured. Right before I resorted to shoving, a light bulb went off inside that thick head, and she turned and mumbled. It sounded a lot like oh, shit.
A red creature no more than two feet in height hunched on top of a chair. He had wings tucked into his side with a tail trailing off in flames. His facial features were sharp and angular and topped off with a pointed nose and ears. Teeth bared behind a joker-shaped mouth.
“Well, that explains everything,” Miss Prim said.
“Uh, what is…” Mouth had become numb as it gaped at the strange creature.
“It’s an Imp.” Miss Prim faced the creature. “Who are you spying for?”
Muscles turned into jelly, and my chair swallowed me as I deflated. If Miss Prim, who was petrified of my harmless hellhound, wasn’t weary of this thing, how bad could it be?
“I don’t like Imps,” Margaret said from her chair, and then poofed.
“Margaret?” Miss Prim called out. She turned to me as her crestfallen face sagged. “That’s my first friend in ten years, and you scared her off!”
“Wait, what did I do?” I gestured toward the ugly red thing who sat grinning like a fool, and certain to haunt my nightmares. Some people had clown phobia. This creature was so much worse than a clown. “I don’t understand what that thing is.”
“Look at the rims.” Its facial structure resembled an anorexic demonic red-skinned skull with glowing yellow eyes, but it hissed like a snake. “Two days.”
“Rims? What are rims?”
With a burst of black smoke, it disappeared. Light bulbs popped as the creature departed. I slid under my desk as glass sprayed and the fluorescents fizzled. The room grew dark, and I poked my head out to survey the damage in the dimness created by the single light bulb remaining unscathed. Its glow was enough for me to locate Miss Prim cowering underneath a chair.
“Okay, will you please tell me what the hell that thing was?”
“It was an Imp.” She crawled out.
“You said that, but what exactly is an Imp?”
“They’re not very nice. Imps play pranks on people and cause all sorts of trouble.”
“You called it a spy.”
“Well…” She looked at the chair the small creature had sat on. “They’ve always been rumored to spy for their masters.”
“Do you believe those rumors?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “It’s best to stay away from them. You won’t appreciate their sense of humor because it’s the kind that has started wars.”
“It said two days. Is it spying on me? For Satan?”
Miss Prim’s head started shaking before my sentence even completed. “No. They were gifted from Hell as servants to powerful Warlocks who practice demonic magic. They live within the veil on Earth.”
“Demonic?”
“Witches who want greater power than Earth magic.”
“Now you’re telling me there are different types of witches?”
“Of course.” Knowledge inflected in her voice, and Miss Prim seemed all of the eighty plus years she’d be had she still been counted among the living. I knew the
ghost had held out on me.
“I don’t understand.” I sunk down in my chair. “Why would an Imp come here?”
“Kiara, I think some Warlock’s watching you, and he knows about your contract with Satan.” Miss Prim tugged at the edge of her blouse in a nervous gesture. “But why would a Warlock spy on you?”
Good question. And one with no answer.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Get up.”
Seemed like two hours since my back hit the mat, but Eyes weren’t budging.
“Kiara …”
My name had ended on a sigh. Probably not a good thing.
“Five more minutes?” My lips pleaded, they totally had Eyes’ back. I knew Eyes would be appreciative of their support because the blackness beyond my lids was intoxicating. And sadly, that draw of intoxication had only come about when I was supposed to be wide awake. Which was now. Between the hours of ten and four—that would be the P to the AM—nothing had been able to deter Eyes from staring at the same fixed spot on the ceiling above my bed while Mind went on a trip down terror lane. Eyes now demanded their ten minutes of rest, but a splash of something containing both the words cold and wet in its description popped Eyes open wide pretty dang fast.
“What the hell was that?” I sputtered, wiping away the liquid with an arm. “Are you trying to drown me?”
Tristan hovered above. A damn more enticing sight than the ceiling had been, even with a raised eyebrow of determination on his cocky, handsome face. I eyed the full glass of water clutched in his hands. “Do not even think about pouring the rest of that on me.”
“You have one day, now get up.”
“You don’t think I know that?” I rolled to my side and buried my face into an arm. The mat dipped, and Tristan settled down beside me.
“You’re not giving up,” he said. “You’re the one who demanded training at this ungodly hour of the morning.”
“You’re a vampire. This is your daytime.”
“Not ungodly for me… for you. You’re pure grouch without sleep.”
“Thanks. Give me an IV drip of coffee, and I’ll be good to go.”
“Don’t drink the stuff.”
“Damn.” I rolled my head back. He had so many strikes against him. Strike one: I barely knew him. Strike two: he didn’t drink coffee. Who in their right mind didn’t drink coffee? Strike three: vampire. Strike four: still a vampire. Yet he found the time to train me, and his efforts were sincere. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you helping me?”
He tried ignoring me. Then shrugged. “You can’t help but feel sorry for a woman who got beat up by a newspaper.”
He held something back. I was no relation to Spider-Man, yet my Spidey senses tingled. Or it could be indigestion I was experiencing from the severe stress and panic of the past few days. Hard to tell. I opened my mouth to ask… but shut those lips. What a wuss. A full-fledged card carrying member. If he knew something bad, I wasn’t certain I was up for the knowledge. At least not until after I had my mind-awakening I-can-take-on-the-world coffee. Which apparently was still a long time away from coming.
“How did you know I wasn’t a cambion?”
“Your blood smells different.”
My nose scrunched. “My blood? You can actually smell my blood?”
“A perk to being a vampire.”
I stared at his tight profile since his eyes were kept averted, and I couldn’t help but wonder how he fed. The thought of him hunting down humans made me gag. Because the raiding of established blood banks was the only vision of him I wanted to have. Not that of murderer where he caused death by anemia. But from a vampire’s viewpoint, the act wouldn’t be considered murder, would it? Food. Only food.
“So do vampires—”
“We’re not discussing vampires.”
“Okay, how about cambions? How many of them have the ability to see things?”
“What kind of things?”
“I don’t know. The future, maybe?”
His steady gaze returned to me. “None.”
“Oh.”
“That’s not a power a low ranking demon like a cambion would have. In fact, it’s not something the majority of higher-ranking demons have, either.”
“Really?”
“But you do.”
That wasn’t a question. Eyes became fascinated with a small hole in the leg of the yoga pants I’d rolled out of bed wearing. Too busy analyzing my bare skin peeking through to acknowledge his comment one way or another.
“That’s how you avoided my attack during our last session,” he said.
I looked at him and tried determining his thoughts on this revelation. “I don’t know how to make it happen. It just did, but only a couple of times.”
“What were you doing when it occurred?”
“Doing?” I watched him nod. “Nothing. I mean…”
The first time, I’d tried figuring out what was in his back pocket when it happened. The second time I had been staring at the mesmerizing circulating motion of his fingers, those same fingers that should have been wrapped around my neck. Then with New Target, it had been the children’s book. I pictured all three scenarios in my head. One common denominator.
“Focusing. I was focused on something.”
He smiled, and at that moment, I was positive he knew more about me than I knew about myself. Unsettling thought. Yet, still too chicken to ask. In as little as forty-eight hours, I might be calling the pits of Hell home for all eternity, and if he knew anything about that future I faced, I didn’t want to know. Yup, a wuss.
“So I need to focus?” I asked.
“Same as I’ve told you from the beginning.”
“But still, I have to find Logan first and what if I can’t? What if I—”
“You will do this.” He tilted my trembling chin up with his steady grip of fingers. “Before a pack of beasts is unleashed from Hell to drag you down to the pits, you will get this ghost.”
The thought of a full pack of hellhounds chasing after me made me shudder. Tristan’s grip on my chin tightened, as if he tried forcing conviction into my thoughts. He refused to believe anything other than my success. I couldn’t help but ask, “And you have the audacity to call me stubborn?”
“You are stubborn, and that’s how I know you’ll prevail. This isn’t a job for the weak, and you, Kiara Blake, are not weak.” He stood. “Now, get up.”
My weakness level was up for debate, but I obliged.
“Let’s work on those visions.”
“How?”
His sigh was back to that of annoyed. “What did you do before?”
Oh, yeah. We’d had this discussion. Heat rushed my cheeks. But in my defense, Brain still needed coffee, and Eyes continued begging for sleep. I nodded to Tristan. “I’m ready.”
He had stepped back from me, and I watched his face for clues to his next move. No one could have such an emotionless face as Tristan when he was determined. Not sure I’d ever want to play poker with the man. As a testament to my exhaustion, visions of strip poker invaded my thoughts.
But tired Mind didn’t have the luxury of thinking about what did or didn’t invade because in a blur, Tristan was in front of me, and my back was on the mat… again. His body on top of mine, pinning me down. He’d dropped the shield of armor and allowed expectation to shine through as he quirked a brow. “Well?” he asked. “I assume that’s a failed attempt?”
“Since I’m lying here instead of standing over there, I assume you’re right.”
“What was your focus?”
We really didn’t have to go there, did we? “Well, uh, obviously something that didn’t work. Right?”
His eyes narrowed in puzzlement, but at least the expression wasn’t knowing. I was screwed if mind-reading ever became a vampire ability. Wait—that wasn’t already an ability, was it? Tristan got up from the mat and pulled me with him.
“Again.”
So demandi
ng. I stood in the corner and studied my opponent. Tristan was back to shirtless and I took unashamed liberties with analyzing the graceful, curved line from his neck leading over the solid bulk of muscle making up one sexy shoulder. Because the man even had sexy shoulders. Wondering how those muscles might feel underneath my hands drew to a sudden halt as the vampire moved. His speed was engaged, and for one second I saw vampire blur. In the next second, I saw nothing. The tap on my shoulder startled me enough to scream. Strong hands whipped me around forcing me back on the mat. Tristan’s body hovered above mine. And Brain was now wide awake. Because a sexy shirtless man stretched over me was a dang lot better than a cup of coffee.
I stood in my corner, and it took only a nanosecond for the realization to strike that I’d had a vision. Forcing my gaze away from the slope of his neck, I stared him in the eye and smiled. He moved. I waited until the vampire blur in front of me disappeared, then I turned and faced him.
“Hi.”
His head cocked. “Vision?”
“Yup.”
“And in that one, were you aware you were in one?”
The smile I knew was holding up my lips fell. “No?”
Yeah, that was a question because anything else would be a full confession we still had more work to do. Apparently, Tristan thought so too.
“We need to work on that. Again.” He got back in his corner of the mat. “And, Kiara? This time, when anything happens, pay attention to anything that seems off.”
How the hell was I supposed to do that? The visions were so brief.
“Kiara, focus.”
Sure. Focus. Right.
The next attack came from my left. Before I could blink, Tristan had me pinned against the wall instead of the mat. His body sank into mine since the hard surface was at my back, leaving his lips hovering a breath near my own. I’d only have to lean forward. One measly drift. Distraction begged to be acknowledged, and his words rang in my ears. Focus? Time seemed to stop, and instead of leaning in for the kiss my lips begged to receive, my body shifted away. Color was muted, and images weren’t as sharp as they should be. Another realization struck. Could I remain inside the vision for as long as I needed?
Reaping Havoc: Kiara Blake Book 1 Page 24
