Ghost Moon (16 page)

A phone hung on the wall. Hurrying across the tile floor, she picked up the receiver. But she heard no dial tone. Apparently,it was turned off.

Sorry that she couldn’t communicate with the Marshall house, she went back to check on Caleb again. He hadn’t moved. And he didn’t stir when she leaned over and put her hand on the back of his neck.

She gnawed on her knuckle, fighting the impulse to wake him. She had so many questions. About the two of them. And about the two men who had buried him alive.

They’d beaten him. Or somebody had. They had been talking about a military man—a colonel—who had sent them. Or could the title be just a courtesy term? Like the Colonel Sanders who sold fried chicken?

She was too exhausted to think about it. Maybe rest would give her some perspective on things. And maybe when Caleb woke up, he’d remember something about the blond-haired man. It was strange to call him that, but it was the best she could do.

The storm eased away as she began opening drawers and closets. After finding a man’s T-shirt she could wear, she went into one of the bathrooms, took a shower, and washed her hair, then dried it with a towel.

She thought about lying down next to Caleb. But that seemed like a bad idea. So she investigated the other rooms. Most were furnished only with a wide bed and a chest, and nobodyhad made much attempt at decorations, which reinforced Caleb’s assertion that men came here to hunt. Women would have added some homey touches.

The sun had come out again, and she pulled down the window shades to darken the room before crawling under the covers. The bed was comfortable, like the ones in Logan’s house.

For a few minutes, unanswered questions swirled around in her head. But she was bone-tired, and she quickly dropped off into a troubled sleep.

SOME
time after he had fallen onto the bed, Caleb’s eyes blinked open. He pushed himself up, grimacing as pain shot through his arm. Rolling to his back he looked to his left and right. When he realized he was alone, a chill skittered over his skin.

He had come here with Quinn. He remembered stumbling into the house in the middle of a thunderstorm with her.

Where was she now?

Quickly he levered himself out of bed, then had to stand still for a moment because his head was spinning.

Staggering across the room, he leaned against the door-jamband saw a hallway that he barely remembered. When he found Quinn two doors down the hall, he breathed out a sigh of relief.

She was here. He stood gripping the door frame for long minutes, just staring at her.

He could see her face and her beautiful hair, but her body was covered by a blanket and sheet. He wanted to wake her.

But he felt an unfamiliar pressure in his abdomen and struggled to identify the sensation. Then it came to him. He had to pee.

Exiting into the hall, he found the bathroom between his room and Quinn’s.

After using the toilet, he stood with his hands clenched for long moments. He wanted to avoid the inevitable. But he knew he had to deal with reality. So he walked the few steps to the mirror and stared at his face.

He suppressed a gasp as he regarded his image. Not the face he remembered. Not at all. He saw blond hair. Icy blue eyes. Thin lips. A wide chin. He rubbed the blond stubble on his cheeks. It was thinner than the facial hair he remembered.

With a feeling of unreality, he raised his hand, looking at his broad palm, seeing a row of calluses. How old was he? Who was he?

To hang on to sanity, he said his name, “Caleb Marshall!”

Then said it again. It sounded wrong in his mouth. This man’s teeth were bigger, and his tongue hit them differently.

He closed his eyes, trying to call up some memory from the man’s past. He could only remember Caleb Marshall.

He had been dead. A ghost. And now he was alive. The reality made his throat close and his vision swim. His heart started to pound wildly. His heart?

He gripped the cold edge of the sink, waiting for the physical sensations to settle down.

He wasn’t even sure how he had gotten into this body. He’d sensed the man die. Heard him call out. Not aloud, but in Caleb’s mind.

He shuddered as he remembered the feeling of the man’s spirit passing his—shooting upward toward the place he’d never been able to go himself.

He couldn’t go to the other side. But somehow he’d been able to change from ghost to man.

He came back to the question of what—exactly—had happened. There was still no answer.

He only knew that he had been dead. And now he was alive—in another man’s body. Apparently, because the man had wanted it.

He felt his chest tighten and his body begin to shake. Struggling for calm, he held more tightly to the cold porcelainof the sink.

He felt his heart pounding again. Another man’s heart beating inside another man’s chest. If he thought too much about it, his head started to spin.

He looked at a smudge of earth on his neck, and another truth came slamming back at him. He’d been in a grave, and the clammy feel of the dirt made him shudder. He looked towardthe shower and pictured water cascading over his body.

Not his body. Another man’s.

“Stop it,” he muttered. “He’s dead. It’s your reality now.”

He reached to turn on the water and stopped. Instead of knobs there was one sleek-looking lever sticking out from a circle of shiny metal.

He’d never seen anything like it, so he twisted the lever. Still nothing. Finally he figured out that he needed to turn it like the hand of a clock. He yanked it all the way to the oppositeposition. At first it ran cold, but soon the water turned warm, then hot.

Moving it back, he got the right balance between hot and cold and stepped under the spray that came down from above like rain falling on his head.

The sensation of the water hitting his body was amazing.

After a few minutes of simply enjoying the falling water, he washed his body with the cake of soap in a wall niche, captivated by the way the soap slicked over his skin and made him feel new-minted.

The sensuality of it made him think about Quinn, and he found himself instantly hard. He looked down at his cock. He had no foreskin, and he blinked as he took that in. Circumcision.He had heard of it. It was supposed to make you less sensitive during sex.

He circled the girth with his fist and slid his hand up and down. Big mistake. He was plenty sensitive. Yeah, with just a few strokes he had made himself so hot that he thought he might go off like a Roman candle.

He pressed his hands to his sides, willing himself to calm down. When he had a measure of control, he stepped out of the shower and toweled himself dry, avoiding looking at his face in the mirror.

The towel slid over crisp blond chest hair. Hair that should be dark. The look was all wrong. And when he glanced farther down, he saw that the hair above his cock was blond, too.

Wrong again. The guys in the Marshall family were all similar in appearance. No matter who they married, they bred true to type.

He made a low sound.

He didn’t want to think about his physical self and what it meant now. He only wanted to use the vessel he’d been given.

Quinn had accused him of stealing another man’s body. He supposed you could call it that. But the man had left it for him. Invited him to take it.

Did that make a moral difference?

He hoped so.

He opened the medicine cabinet and found a can of somethingthat read “shaving cream.” It was like nothing he had ever seen before. He shook it and tried to turn the nozzle, like the shower control, but nothing happened. By accident, he pressed on the top, and white foam came shooting out.

Next to where the can had been was a plastic thing that might have been a razor. But again, it was totally unfamiliar.

It suddenly struck him that he had a man’s body. Thank God. Would he have taken a chance at life if the dead person had been a woman?

He could hardly imagine that scenario. And he realized all over again how lucky he had been. He was a man. And the woman he wanted to make love to was just down the hall.

But before he went to her, he should brush his teeth. The medicine cabinet also held a new toothbrush in a see-throughcontainer. He pried it out, then used something called “toothpaste” that promised to whiten his teeth, sweep away plaque, and give him healthy gums. He squeezed too much out of the tube and had to rinse the foam out of his mouth several times.

But the clean taste felt good.

The dirty clothes he’d been wearing were scattered around the floor. Burial clothing. With a grimace, he stuffed them in the trash can, then returned to his room where he rummaged in the dresser drawers until he found soft, loose pants made out of some knitted material. They had a stretchy band and a drawstring at the waist.

He didn’t bother with a shirt. Just the pants, and he hoped he wouldn’t be wearing them for long.

Then he went back to the room where Quinn was sleepingand stood looking at her. She was under the covers, but they had slipped to her waist, revealing the T-shirt she wore. Had she put on panties? Or was she naked below the waist?

As he contemplated that possibility, he grew instantly hard again. Instantly wanting.

She had known him when he was a ghost. And she could have run away from him after he’d gotten into his new body. But she’d come here with him to the hunting lodge. And she’d stayed, even when she could have slipped away while he was unconscious.

Days ago, he had settled for a pale imitation of lovemakingwith her. Because that was all he could have.

And what could he have now?

He took a step closer, watching the rise and fall of her chest, seeing her breasts through the thin fabric of the T-shirt, with the darker circles of her nipples in the centers.

Raising his eyes, he focused on each one of her features in turn, loving the way her dark lashes lay against her cheek. Then he looked at her sun-streaked hair.

It suited a woman like Quinn.

Everything about her pleased him. He had felt connected to her. He thought she had felt it, too. Would it be the same—now that everything had changed?

THE
two wolves with light packs on their backs trotted through the woods toward the spot where neither one of them had ever ventured.

Logan had been out on a job, supervising the construction of a waterfall at an estate in Montgomery County. When he’d gotten a call from Rinna, he’d hurried home.

He was in the lead. His cousin Ross followed a few paces behind. Since this was Logan’s territory, Ross was letting the other werewolf take charge.

Ross was good at that. And he kept a cool head. Not like Logan who was likely to go into confrontational mode when he was under stress.

And he was under stress now. He’d agreed to take in Quinn and Zarah, the pregnant wife of a council member in Sun Acres, Rinna’s home city.

He’d been glad to help. Partly because he knew his wife appreciated the company of women from her own world.

But things hadn’t worked out exactly the way he’d expected.Quinn had met a ghost who held a grudge against the family. And she’d run off this morning to meet up with him again.

Was she helping the ghost plan an attack? Or what?

A sense of unease gathered in his chest as he trotted towardthe patch of ground that had always made him nervous.

It was probably the place where the ghost’s body was buried. But he didn’t even know that for sure. He had never seen the spirit. Or really sensed him. Yet some deeply buried instinct had warned him away from this place.

Now he felt a kind of electricity tingling over his skin as he ventured into the clearing. It looked like an ordinary patch of Maryland hardwood forest. And it smelled like that, too.

He dragged in a deep draft of the humid air, trying to catch Quinn’s familiar scent. But the rain had washed it away with casual efficiency.

He took another step forward, then stopped short when he spotted a gaping hole in the soil. It was long and thin. About the size of a man, and it went down several feet, below the layer of forest loam to the familiar red clay that blanketed this part of the country.

Had the ghost somehow risen up out of his grave?

Ross came up beside him, and Logan gave him a questioninglook. Ross was a private detective, and he had more experience than Logan in investigating burial grounds in the woods. A couple of times, he’d unearthed private cemeteries that had helped the cops take down serial killers.

He gave a signal with his head, and Ross trotted forward, sniffing the hole and poking with his right forepaw at a large piece of black plastic, not unlike what Logan used in his landscape business.

A shovel was discarded nearby on the ground. Not the shovel that Quinn had taken from the toolshed earlier. This one had a rounded blade and a red-painted handle.

Someone else had brought it. And the plastic. That wasn’t seventy-five years old. He knew the details of his trade, and he knew that such plastic hadn’t existed in the 1930s.

A wide trail led downhill. Ross started down that way, and Logan followed, keeping alert for danger—or for some clue to what had happened here.

He stopped short and made a woofing sound when he spotted something interesting, a place where the bark of a tree was newly grazed by a horizontal line.

Ross came back and eyed it.

It looked to Logan like a bullet had made the mark. Ross must be thinking the same thing because he turned and followedthe trajectory of the horizontal line until he came to a round hole in a nearby elm tree.

A bullet hole. So someone had been shooting recently.

Jesus! Was that why Quinn hadn’t come home? She was dead—or wounded?

Slipping from tree to tree, they followed the trail downhill to a spot where tire tracks dug into the mud. Tracks from an SUV or a pickup truck, judging from the size of the treads and the space between them. The vehicle was gone, but someone had left a crumpled wrapper from a sandwich shop on the ground. Also a beer can.