Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) (14 page)

He didn’t know what to do. His hands felt like they couldn’t grab enough of the other man. Their tongues dove and dipped between their pressed mouths, and when Tristan finally needed some air, Wolf’s teeth joined the dance, scraping and biting at the tender spots on Tristan’s throat. The light sear of Wolf’s unshaven jaw prickled Tristan’s skin, chafing a skittering burn Tristan knew he’d feel later.

And if he didn’t, he’d feel cheated, because he wanted
something
to show from their kiss.

He got something fairly quickly. Wolf’s gentle nibbles turned fierce, and Tristan writhed, arching his back when the man’s bite dug in. Wolf’s hands came up, capturing Tristan’s wrists. Pulling Tristan’s arms up over his head, Wolf imprisoned him against the couch, his long fingers wrapping around Tristan’s delicate bones. He squeezed just tight enough for Tristan to know he was trapped. Then Wolf’s dark head dipped again, nipping along the spot he’d bitten down on before.

When Wolf’s teeth closed over his skin again, Tristan found out he really hadn’t known what being on fire felt like until right then.

He liked the weight of the man on him. Wolf fit into the place he’d longed to be filled, although one part of him ached, flexed in response to the sharp scoring along his throat. His jeans were taut, pushed up from his tingling erection, his dick craving more than the rub of cotton against its tight skin. Groaning, Tristan thrust his hips up, needing something to ease the throbbing anguish building up in his belly and crotch. Wolf responded, anchoring his mouth into Tristan’s throat, then grinding his hips down into Tristan’s hard length.

Wolf’s mouth left the stinging crease he’d made, moving back up to Tristan’s mouth and finding it open, parched and dry from Tristan’s mewling. More than willing to quench Tristan’s thirst, Wolf took control of Tristan’s mouth and filled him, pressing a skilled tongue up against the roof of his mouth, then licking at the underside of his upper lip. The sensation of the man’s tongue on his palate and slick inner cheek teased, and Tristan’s mind swam between being tickled and aroused.

“God, I want you,” Wolf said into the gape of Tristan’s panting mouth.

The man would have said more… probably even done more if the Grange hadn’t suddenly rolled around them. The room creaked and rocked, shoving the couch back a few feet, slamming it into a suit of armor held together by apparently what was a few strings and a chant to Herne. The armor’s antlered helm flew, striking the glass front of a long-dead aunt’s mantle clock, and its arms and legs scattered, landing in different parts of the room. The stuffed crow Mara swore hated her fell straight down from its perch on a tigerwood wardrobe, the bird’s lacquered beak piercing a book on Malaysian botany Tristan really hadn’t intended to read. The crow’s legs stuck straight out behind its rigid body, perfectly aimed to catch the curtains swaying nearby. Wrapped up in the length of fabric, the bird and book were yanked from the desk, swinging back and forth in the rippling aftermath of the house’s assault.

Neither man had taken a full breath when the Grange erupted again, this time with a terrified howling loud enough to fill the manor’s halls and pierce any seduction spell Wolf cast over a very disappointed Tristan.

“You okay?” Wolf asked when the couch finally settled into a corner of the room.

“Yeah,” Tristan grumbled. The shrieking continued, only stopping long enough for Tristan to hope it was finally over before starting up again. “Three days, huh?”

“Maybe?” Wolf grinned sheepishly. “Hoping?”

“You better fucking hope so.” Tristan worked his hands free of the man’s loose hold, gingerly untangling himself from Wolf’s legs and arms. “Because if it doesn’t, I’m going to kill you and you’re going to be the Grange’s new Cook.”

Chapter 8

“T
HEY
’
RE
LEAVING
, you know.” Mara trod up behind him, a silent harbinger of common sense and doom. “The guests, I mean. They’re going.”

“I know.” Tristan scowled at the register, glaring at the names on its yellowed, ink-stained pages. Names that were scribbled through with a rough hand, as if working a pen took great effort. He’d checked in a couple just yesterday, their smiling older faces turning younger with each step into the lobby toward the desk. By the time they’d reached Tristan, their monochromatic forms were bursting with a youth neither had seen in more than a century, if he judged their clothing right. They’d walked up the stairs, hand in hand, toward a honeymoon beyond their lifetime.

That afternoon, the day after Cook failed to ask for her job, he opened the register rand found their names crossed off and a small, unsteady
Apologies
in the margin. He rifled back and forth through the pages, his stomach sinking with each scrubbed out entry.

For the first time in his memory, the Grange was empty of guests.

Except of course for Wolf and his team of Hellsingers.

“Fucking hell.” Tristan scrubbed his eyes. Blinking, he looked at the pages again, only to be disappointed once more. “
Pezzo di merda
.”

“That was nicely done. Was that last one for your Dr. Kincaid?” Mara plucked a dead leaf from the flower arrangement at the end of the reception desk. “The Italian was a good touch. He has the look of an Italiano to him. Maybe his mother? Kincaid is Scottish, I think.”

“No, it was for me,” Tristan sighed. “I never should have agreed to have them here. I’ve fucked everything up, Mara.”

“No one says the Grange
has
to be a gateway for departing souls,” she replied. “Other places have disappeared as well. It won’t be the first.”

Tristan shot her as filthy a look as he could manage. “The Grange is my legacy from Uncle Mortimer.”

“Legacy.” Mara couldn’t have put more derision into her scoff if she’d tried. “Grab life by the balls, Tristan Pryce. Or at least grab Kincaid. Have something they need to pry out of your cold, dead hands besides the deed to this place.”

“I have a life,” Tristan protested. “I write—”

“You write about silly monsters.” The woman dismissed his livelihood with a wave of her hand. “You live in an old mansion filled with ghosts and scribble cute pictures of hairy boo-wigglies. That’s not a life, Tristan. Those are things you’re doing while you’re waiting to die.”

“Are you done scolding me?” He leaned across the counter, stretching his legs out behind him. “Because you know, I’ve got
nothing
else to do in my life besides listen to you.”

“You can order more towels,” Mara sniffed imperiously. “I don’t know what it is about people. They
have
to steal towels. Even ghosts heading to the afterlife steal towels. I think everyone’s taking Douglas Adams a bit too seriously, if you ask me.”

“Towels, got it.” He was debating putting them on auto-purchase as the woman stalked off. Mara was right. Even ghosts seemed to walk off with a hotel’s linens. “Must have to take your own toga up with you to heaven. Thank fucking God St. Peter gives them their own halos. God knows what the hell they’d take for those.”

“Did you just swear at heaven?” Wolf emerged from the shadowy hall and gave Tristan a crooked smile.

The last thing Tristan wanted at that exact moment was Wolf Kincaid walking in on his own personal breakdown.

Especially while wearing a pair of jeans so old they could qualify for a seniors’ discount at any pancake house and the jeans’ obviously equally ancient wife, a body-hugging thin T-shirt. If he looked hard enough, he could see the perk of Wolf’s nipples under the tatty cotton. Taking a second glance, Tristan found he really didn’t have to search. They were right there, lustful and beckoning, nearly begging Tristan to take a taste.

“
Culus
.” Tristan tried out the sound of the word in his mouth. “I think that’s right…
culus
.”

“You’re a funny little boy, Tristan Pryce.” Wolf leaned on the reception counter, bringing his sensual mouth within whispering distance of Tristan’s face.

Leveling a serious glare at the man, Tristan said, “I’m not a little boy, Kincaid.”

Wolf gave him an impenetrable look; then his crooked smile grew wicked. “No, you’re definitely not.”

He was about to reply with something he hoped would be snappy and cutting, but something large and dark appeared through the misty rain outside the Grange’s front doors. Mottled by the glass insets, the form lumbered, filling the slender cut panes, but Tristan could definitely make out one thing in the shapes that had his heart pounding with excitement.

Wrinkles.

“It’s an elephant!” Tristan was around the desk before he could finish exhaling the breath he’d been holding in. His bare feet caught on the polished wooden floor, and he jerked sideways when his heel found a particularly well-oiled spot. “There’s an elephant outside! God, let it be an elephant. Too small for a brontosaurus, but still… an elephant?”

He felt like a little kid again, running through the lobby at the first hint of an arrival and Uncle Mortimer chuckling softly when Tristan threw open the doors to let in a new guest. He’d been so frightened during his first week at the Grange, but the soft huff of a ghostly camel plodding up to the manor changed
everything
. Majestic, proud, and shouldering the burden of a round, elaborately dressed man in a turban and jewels, the animal’s appearance was so
real
. When his elderly and kind-voiced uncle described to Tristan exactly what they were seeing… and everything matched down to the off-red tassels on the camel’s bridle, Tristan knew he’d found a home.

The Grange made him feel…
normal
.
His
kind of normal, and no one, not even the perky-nippled, charismatic Wolf Kincaid could take it away from him.

Roses from the gardens brushed his shoulder when Tristan grabbed at the center table for support as he headed to the doors. His bare feet made a
snick
ing sound as he ran, squeaking again when he paused only long enough to grab the door handles. The shapes outside the door were still moving, ponderous and lumbering by. Rattling at the latch, Tristan threw the doors open and stepped into the rain, eager to welcome his guests inside.

There was evidence.

Lots of it.

Mostly a long trail of circular footprints filling up with rain, embedded into the expanse of once pristine sod in front of the Grange’s broad steps, but it was enough to cause Tristan’s heart to skip more than a beat or two. That excitement soon fell to dust when he looked around and saw
nothing
.

The Grange’s drive was desolately empty, with not an elephant hair in sight.

Seeing the large press of tracks in the Grange’s central lawn dug deep furrows of pain into Tristan’s tender soul. The depressions were round, a curious two-step gait squished into the mud, an oddly graceful line of delicate circles. They were as deep as Tristan’s foot was high, almost single file, and edged up at the rim with a thick slurry. The grass suffered beneath the massive creature’s weight. The lawn’s lush green strands were pushed down deep into the sticky, rich mud, chunks of sod lying a few inches away where it flew off when the creature pulled its foot from the suckling ground.

But beyond that single line of depressions and the whiff of gamy flesh and damp straw in the air, Tristan saw no sign of the ectoplasmic beast. Or the ghost who rode it.

“Goddammit!” Tristan dropped to his knees, filling his hands with wet grass and mud. “Why didn’t you stay? Why aren’t any of you staying?”

Clenching his fingers, he drew up entire handfuls of soggy lawn and flung them as far as he could, nearly wrenching his shoulders out. The rain continued, uncaring and unabated, soaking him down to the skin. Mud crept in everywhere it could reach, its thick slurry stealing into the folds of his jeans and into the spaces between his toes. His face felt hot, stung with his tears and disappointment. Bowing his head, Tristan let his sorrow and frustration break, allowing his anguish out in shuddering, hiccupping sobs.

Despite years of Mara’s teachings, he had no words for how he felt and certainly nothing other than raw emotion when Wolf put his hands on Tristan’s shoulders to guide him back in.

“Don’t.” He jerked out of the man’s grip. Refusing to meet Wolf’s searching gaze, Tristan slowly got to his feet, smearing mud over his thighs in a futile attempt to clean his hands. The rain did as much as it could. As hard as it was falling, his fingers dripped with a viscous brown runoff. “Don’t
fucking
touch me. You did this. To me. To the Grange.”

“Tristan… wait….” Wolf turned, trying to grab at Tristan’s arm as he struggled to get by. “I want to—”

“I don’t care what you want,” Tristan ground out. “As of right now, you and your team are not welcome here. Pack up your shit and leave. In fact, stay the fuck out of my sight. Period. I never want to see you ever again.”

W
OLF
SPRINTED
after the enraged, mud-splattered blond stalking away from him. Tristan was definitely angry. His fury rolled off of his skin in hot waves that threatened to turn the pounding rain hitting him to a bank of steamy fog. He slipped on the wet asphalt, nearly going down on his ass, but he caught himself in time, staying on his feet.