Night Magic (46 page)

“I didn’t fight so hard for control of my life just to let my agent talk me into a new form of servitude.”

“Uh-oh. Incoming at six o’clock.” Jax gestured with her glass.

Greta sighed. In a place like this they weren’t likely to be the sweet, shy ones. She half turned, as though to survey the room, and caught their approach from the corner of her eye.  No. Not sweet and shy. A cluster of swaggering young men moved in on her. Leather jackets, scruffy hair and scruffier boots. The one in the lead had a leer to match his three-day stubble.

“You’re Gretchen Falk,” he accused, hooking his thumbs in his front jeans pockets.

She gave him her sweetest smile. Why the hell did she let Jax talk her into clubbing tonight? “Yes, I am. What can I do for you?”

He looked her up and down. Slowly. “Not what you can do for me, honey, but what I can do for you.” His voice was a gravely growl. She bet he practiced it, along with the smirk, in front of a mirror.

She sighed and swiveled back on her stool. “Think I’ll pass on that kind offer,” she muttered, pretty sure he couldn’t hear her over the din. She passed her glass to one of the bartenders who was setting drinks down in front of a another couple to her right. He finished and raised it to her to indicate he’d refill it.

The hand on her shoulder made her flinch as the smirker swiveled her around. He leaned in close enough that she could smell the whiskey on his breath, but his unfocused eyes told her that whiskey wasn’t all he was on. “You don’t want to miss out on an offer like this, honey.”

She tried to shrug him off, but he wasn’t having any of it. Damn. Maybe she needed those martial arts lessons, if she wasn’t going to use a bodyguard. “Look,” she said, “If you want autographs, fine. Show me something I can sign. Otherwise, leave me alone.”

“But that’s just what I know you don’t want to be tonight,” the guy shouted at her. “Alone.” He grabbed her arm, right as a mountain loomed behind him and grabbed his. Make that two mountains, one on each arm.

“Well, boys, you don’t want to be making a nuisance of yourself, do you?” The big man with the close-cropped hair asked, his voice surprisingly soft.

“Let go of me,” the punk said. As his attention shifted, Greta wriggled off her stool, pulling the skirt of her tiny beaded dress discretely down and took a step back to stand next to Jax. The bartender was hovering.

“I think you need to leave,” the second mountain said to the jerk. He gave a hard-eyed stare to the others in the pack. “Anybody else want to have privileges revoked?”

They looked like sulky children, but no one stepped up to challenge the two huge men as they walked the jerk to the door. The pack dissolved into the crowd.

“Sorry about that,” the bartender shouted. “I should have caught that earlier.”

“If I have you to thank for calling in the cavalry, I’m more than grateful.”

“Next martini is on the house.” All the bartenders at Magma were good-looking. He slid the drink in front of her.

The funny thing was, he didn’t have to shout. The place had gone quiet.

“There he is,” someone said, into the silence.

“It’s him.”

“The Ghost,” was hissed from several points in the room.

Jax swiveled, then froze, her Cosmo forgotten.

For Greta, things started to move almost in slow motion. She felt a tug, almost physical from behind her. She turned like she was moving through viscous liquid.

The man who strode through the crowd had shaggy dark hair, a long leather jacket and stubble of at least three days. But that’s where the similarity to the jerk who’d just been tossed out ended. This guy was no poseur. He couldn’t care less about the crowd. He didn’t even spare them a glance. The fierce look in his eyes was all for the red-washed stage. He strode toward it like he was moving through hell toward redemption. Greta noticed that he carried a backpack. It swung carelessly by his side.

“Get the guys on the board and the lights.” A hefty man in his late forties hissed to someone in the shadows. Club manager? There was some scurrying.

Greta was having a hard time catching her breath. What was with that? Yeah, the guy was a looker, but she’d been hanging out with beautiful men since she was twelve, and they never affected her this way.

The crowd didn’t yell at the newcomer or jeer. They backed out of his way, respectfully.

“It’s him,” Jax whispered, as the guy hopped up on the stage and surveyed the instruments abandoned there, his back to the crowd. No one challenged him, though Greta could see the band who owned the instruments had stuck their heads back in from the greenroom where they’d been taking their break. He glanced to the keyboards, but then settled on a guitar, a candy-apple red one that glinted in the dim light. He picked it up, flipped a few switches on the amp, and corrected the tuning. Then, back still to the audience, he strummed a chord.

That chord seemed to reach right down into your guts and quiver around there. Greta found it almost shocking. As the echo died away, the man on stage threw his head back and began to play in earnest. It was no song she knew. She’d be willing to bet nobody knew that song. The cascading notes were angry, but with a sobbing sound below them that vibrated with sadness in your lungs. After a while the notes started to soar, only to be dashed to earth again and again by evil riffs. It was as if the man was ripping his soul out with that music. It went on and on. Nobody fidgeted. Nobody talked. Nobody got up to go to the bathroom. They just listened, mesmerized. She’d be willing to bet they all knew they’d never hear something like this again.

He turned around to the audience after a while, but he wasn’t seeing anybody in the room. His face was transformed into a sliding mask of emotion as he pulled those notes out and sent them skittering, or thundering, or sidling slyly into the room.

When the last resounding chord had crashed into silence, he stood with head down as the place erupted in applause and shouts of “Ghost.” Greta felt like a linen suit in Arizona in the summertime, or a horse that was rode hard and put away wet. She came to herself and grabbed for her martini. Her hand was shaking.

What the hell was that?

When she turned back, the two security guards who had saved her bacon along with several others were converging on the stage.

“Wasn’t he wonderful?” Jax was saying from somewhere far away. “I can’t believe we saw him. He could have been at a dozen clubs tonight, but I just had a feeling it’d be Magma. He hasn’t been here in three weeks. It was time.”

The bouncers were almost at the stage. “They aren’t going to throw him out, are they?” Greta asked, as if Jax would know such a thing.

“Oh, no. He just doesn’t like to be touched. They’ll escort him to the bar, and he’ll drink for free all night if he wants. He doesn’t talk to anybody. And then somehow he slips out without anybody knowing it, and just… disappears. That’s why they call him the Ghost.”

“Who is he? I mean he’s got a real name, doesn’t he?”

Jax’s eyes were big as she turned toward Greta. “Nobody knows.”

Greta watched as the Ghost set aside the guitar in its stand and jumped down into the empty center of the circle the bouncers had formed. He seemed to stagger. The phalanx made its way over to the bar. People were shouting his name now (well, to be fair, his name probably wasn’t actually Ghost) and pandemonium had broken out across the club. Greta glanced at her watch. He’d played for nearly an hour. Wait staff fanned out taking drink orders. The din was back in spades.

“No wonder he drinks for free,” she shouted at Jax. “This place is minting money with everyone hoping he’ll show up.”

“He’s been doing this for a couple of months. Business is up all over the club scene.” Jax’s short dark hair flipped as she swung to see where the phalanx would land at the bar. No wonder she’d refused the table they’d been offered. And that explained the drape neckline of the pink dress she was wearing that clearly showed most of her breasts. That wasn’t like Jax.

But she wasn’t alone. The pheromones were hanging heavy in the air as everyone along the bar, male and female, watched the phalanx approach. She could catch only glimpses of the Ghost behind the huge bouncers. He didn’t look up, just shuffled along with his striding escort.

Damn it. What was with this guy? Greta was not one to fawn over anyone, but the combination of all that talent and torment, and that tug she’d felt from the first moment he came in was making her….wet. And she didn’t like being that out of control.

Oh, sweet heavens. They were coming down to this end of the bar. The two front bouncers broke away and politely asked the two guys to her right if they might be provided a seat elsewhere in order to make room for the club’s guest. Drinks would be on the house. To Greta’s surprise, neither complained. They just took their drinks and followed the bouncers away, staring all the time at the man now revealed clearly in the center of the circle. The bodyguards were huge, all of them, but the Ghost wasn’t little. He was over six feet by several inches, and he had a pair of shoulders on him as revealed by a dark Henley knit shirt. His shaggy dark hair was wet with sweat. He looked…dazed and a little lost.

He took the far bar stool, the one in the corner. a bouncer laid his long leather coat and his pack on the seat next to him, almost reverently. Greta felt his presence like it was somewhere down in her bones.

“Thanks,” he said, as though he was someplace far away.

The bouncers, except for two, melted away into the crowd. Those two turned out to face the crowd, which was edging closer to get a look. A woman yelled, “That was really good,” over the noise of the band. But the man they all called Ghost didn’t acknowledge her.

“Scotch,” he said. “Old. A lot of it. Neat. ”

“Yes, sir,” the bartender yelled. He pulled out a bottle of Lafroig 15. “Will this do, sir?”

The Ghost nodded. “Yeah.” He hunched over the glass and downed it. “Might as well leave the bottle.”

The bartender didn’t blink an eye. He set the bottle on the bar in the empty space between Greta and the guy. “It’s all yours.”

Greta needed about three martinis herself. That might be the only way to numb the electric reaction her body seemed to be having to the man one barstool away. In the background, the regular band for the evening must have picked up their instruments, because their music blared out over the din of the crowd. It sounded tinny and predictable by comparison. Boy, she’d sure hate to have to follow this guy’s act.

Greta clutched her martini, trying not to sneak glances at her neighbor, but she could see in her peripheral vision that he downed another glass of scotch. She felt like some kind of schoolgirl, deliberately not looking at the object of her attentions, and she hadn’t felt like that since way before she’d stopped being a schoolgirl. Time to get out of here.

She was just turning to Jax to say the same, when, to Greta’s horror, her friend leaned past her and held out her hand. Her plump breasts would be front and center to their ghostly neighbor.

“Hi, I’m Jax,” she said. “Great session tonight.

Greta tried to sink into the barstool. Hadn’t Jax just told her he didn’t like to be touched? And he wasn’t exactly putting out “I’m-on-the-prowl-for-companionship” vibes with two bodyguards keeping people away. As though unable to look away from a train wreck, she couldn’t help turning to the guy next to her.

Unbelievably, he bothered to raise his shaggy head, but the look he gave Jax was filled with faint disgust and he didn’t take her hand. He just left her hanging there.

Then his eyes flicked to Greta, flicked away, slowly returned. They widened.

His eyes were dark, so dark she couldn’t really see the color in them in this pervasive red light. The faint disgust in his expression turned to something almost startled and then… revulsion. He thrust himself away from the bar, snatched up the bottle, his pack and his coat and dashed for the back of the house, mumbling something she couldn’t hear.

Greta was stunned. Insulted. And, God help her, fascinated.

She watched him push through the crowd, bearing the pats on the back by the men and the clutch of his arm by several women as though they were blows. He disappeared into the hallway that held the kitchen and the restrooms.

“Well, shit,” Jax said, beside her. Then she shrugged. “At least I saw him.”

“You won’t see him again tonight.” Greta threw two fifties on the bar and caught the barman’s eye. “Let’s get out of here.”