Wicked Memories (CASTLE OF DARK DREAMS) (5 page)

The White Knight put down his sword. “Well, hell. That was an epic fail. Find someone to replace Zane fast because I don’t want to do this fantasy again.” He turned and left.

Sparkle watched him leave and then turned back to her. Kayla avoided her gaze. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this flustered and uncertain. Probably because it had never happened. Dad taught all of them to blend in. The business demanded that they avoid calling attention to themselves. He’d have her on the first flight back to Philly if he found out about this.

That thought perked her up. If Sparkle told him about tonight, she wouldn’t have to ask that he replace her with one of her brothers.

Kayla had managed to forget about the one man remaining in the dungeon for about three whole seconds. She refused to meet his gaze as she released him. Staring at her feet, she addressed her shoes. “I hope tonight has taught you the power of Mistress Sparkle. Obey her or you might find yourself bound here again. And next time will be worse.”

“Really? Worse?” His voice was deep and filled with laughter.

“
Much
worse.”

He swung his feet to the floor. Kayla shifted her attention to the iron maiden. She would
not
look at him.

He took the decision away from her. Placing his finger beneath her chin, he forced her to meet his gaze.

“In that case, I’d better get moving if I want to beat those other guys to the ticket counter.” He leaned close. “What’s your real name?”

Sparkle reached up to firmly remove his fingers from under Kayla’s chin. “The fantasy is ended. Let her always remain as Katnip in your memory.”

For just a moment, danger filled the dungeon. It was a suffocating cloud, a warning. Sparkle dropped her hand from him.

He stared at Sparkle. “Don’t ever touch me again.” Then he turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.

Sparkle looked intrigued. “What a fascinating man.”

“Yes.” Enough said about him. “You promised me answers.”

“Tomorrow. Get a good night’s sleep first. You can leave in the morning if that’s what you decide you want to do.”

Kayla thought about that. “Fine.” She
was
exhausted. She needed to be clearheaded when she spoke to Sparkle. Kayla started to step past her.

“Wait.” Sparkle moved to block her. “You surprised me tonight. In a good way.” She wore a speculative expression. “Meet me in the restaurant tomorrow morning at nine so we can discuss your job.”

Kayla nodded and made her escape. She tried to think things through calmly on the way to her room. She’d order room service a little later, but first she had something to do. Kayla pulled out her cell phone. To hell with Sparkle’s mysterious “answers”. She hated that she’d allowed Sparkle to bribe her into doing that fantasy.
With him.

She didn’t give her father a chance to speak. “Dad, who exactly is Sparkle Stardust?”

“A very important client, sweetie. Treat her with respect.”

If Kayla didn’t know better, she’d swear she heard a note of uncertainty in her father’s voice. Not likely, though. Dad never seemed to have doubts about anything in his life.

This was the man who had seen every gangster movie ever produced. He did homage in his own small way to their awesomeness by modeling his career after them.

“She says a vampire owns the amusement pier across the street, the one I’m supposed to spy on and hopefully destroy.”

She hated the family business. Whatever It Takes said it all. Dad took on clients that other private detective agencies wouldn’t touch—the ones who wanted someone who would climb over the fence into illegal territory if needed. This was her first and last job for Dad. And if he thought once she got her degree she’d use it to haul his behind out of trouble with the law, he was in for a huge disappointment.

“You’ll have to be creative with this one, Kayla. But I taught you, so I’m not worried.”

“Hello? Dad, I said a
vampire
owns it.”

“Right. Make sure you cover your neck when you’re on the job. Do you still have that cross your grandmother gave you?”

Kayla had to be hallucinating. Her father couldn’t be giving her hints on how to deal with a vampire. “Vampires don’t exist, Dad.” As soon as she got home, she’d talk to Mom about getting Dad some help.

“If you say so, sweetie.” He sounded distracted. “Whatever you do, keep Sparkle happy.”

There was a pause. Kayla could hear him breathing.

“Sparkle can be a dangerous woman. But if you treat her right, she can be very generous. She introduced me to your mom.”

“Yes, and that worked out so well.” Had she injected the right amount of bitchiness into her voice?

“We were great together while it lasted, Kayla.”

Was that nostalgia in his voice? Nah.

“I want to quit, Dad.”
A cat talked to me in my head.
Would it matter to him? Not if he didn’t find a vampire who owned an amusement park strange.

“No. Don’t. Sparkle wants you.”

Panicked? Her dad? She sighed. No matter how much he annoyed her, she still loved him. And this job was evidently a lot more important to him than she’d first thought. At least she wasn’t crazy, unless Dad was delusional too. What were the chances? Kayla would probably regret this, but now that she was over her initial horror she was curious enough to consider staying for a while. After all, she could always walk away if things got too intense. Besides, maybe her beautiful victim from the dungeon would show up again. Not that he had anything to do with her decision. Really. Nothing at all.

“Relax. I’ve decided to stay unless it gets too crazy.” It was already too crazy.

“That’s my little girl.” His relief oozed from the phone.

“Oh, and Dad . . . ?” She paused. “Payback is a bitch.”

She hung up to his chuckle. Then she called room service and ordered something to eat. While she waited for it to arrive, she lay on the bed thinking. About
him
, her mystery guy.

Who was he? Was he staying in the castle? And then she remembered his eyes. Something niggled at her. She closed her eyes and pictured them. What was it . . . ?

When she opened her eyes again, she had her answer. He’d been wearing colored contacts. His pupils gave him away. They looked artificial, too perfect. Colored contacts had the center cut out of them. That meant that the pupils never seemed to change size, they always stayed exactly the same. Dad had taught her to notice details like that. Come to think of it, his lashes were way too dark for his hair. A wig?

She smiled. Things were getting interesting. Now she felt energized, because someone who felt the need to wear a disguise at the Castle of Dark Dreams had secrets.

And he was one mystery she wouldn’t mind solving.

4

Thorn paused to reclaim his clothes once he reached the great hall. He didn’t bother pulling up his hood again. Sparkle hadn’t recognized him. Guess he wasn’t a memorable kind of guy if she’d forgotten him after a mere thousand years.

He smiled. For the first time, Thorn admitted exactly how forgettable he must have seemed to someone like Sparkle. He’d been a twenty-three-year-old savage who thought he was a mighty Viking. She had probably laughed her ass off behind his back.

He stopped smiling. So she’d dumped him. No big deal, right? Okay, so it
had
been a big deal then. But that’s not what had fueled his need for revenge for so many centuries. It was what had come after.
That
he couldn’t forget.

Thorn had prepared himself for the bitterness and hate he’d feel when he faced her again. Sure, there had been plenty of that. And he’d handled it. But he hadn’t expected someone else to compete for his attention.

Katnip. His grin returned. He’d wanted to laugh out loud at her expression when Sparkle called her by that name. In fact, everything about his beautiful succubus made him feel like smiling. Not the reaction Thorn had expected when he’d descended into the dungeon. Katnip, with her long gold-kissed brown hair and her way-too-serious gray eyes, had captured his interest.

Not a good thing. He had to stay focused on making Nirvana a success and driving Sparkle’s theme park out of business. No distractions allowed.

Thorn glanced at his watch. The next fantasy was scheduled to begin in five minutes and would last a half hour. During that time, he’d be busy. He strode out of the great hall and into the hotel lobby right next to it. He was opting for the elevator rather than the stairs.

On the way up he went over the layout of the castle in his mind. Timing would be everything. He’d start with the towers and work his way down.

Twenty minutes later, Thorn was almost ready to head down to the ground floor. He stood in a shadowed corner, about to stick one of his few remaining transparent wafers on the wall. The size of an eraser head, the wafers were almost undetectable.

Suddenly, the elevator doors opened and two people emerged. Crap. He palmed the wafer and pulled out his cell phone. He held it to his ear and didn’t glance at the man and woman walking toward him.

Thorn was busy thinking about where he’d stick the last three wafers once he reached the ground floor when he
felt
them. The man and woman weren’t human. He glanced up and smiled as they went past before pretending to speak into his phone.

Except for both being so thin he wanted to feed them, they looked human. But there was something
off
about the two. Not vampire, not demon, not fae, not anything he recognized.

They had human features, but there was a strangeness about the male’s unblinking stare, the female’s sinuous movements that were definitely
not
human. Shutting his eyes, he reached for their scent. The sea. Unusual. He opened his eyes. Whatever they were had nothing to do with him.

He waited a few seconds until he heard the sound of a door closing before glancing down the hall to make sure they were gone. Then he finished attaching the wafer to the wall. Before walking away, he stripped off the clear plastic covering that protected the potent mixture beneath. A half hour of exposure to air and interesting things would happen.

Thorn was glad that he’d had the foresight to forge strong friendships with humans in the science community. They might not have the power of a nonhuman, but in many cases they compensated by being smarter. He owed Dr. Clancy for this amazing gem.

When Thorn had finished sticking all of his little gifts to the castle walls, he left through the great hall door and waited in the courtyard. He probably should have just gone home, but what was the fun in that? He wanted to enjoy his revenge, and that meant watching what happened when his time-release wafers did their thing.

He’d worked fast, so that meant once the ones he’d placed in the towers activated then the rest would follow at about five-minute intervals. And if his timing was right, the ones in the towers were about to go off right . . . about . . . now.

Within minutes, he could hear the rise in the level of voices drifting from the open door. Those voices grew louder and louder as the minutes passed. People started spilling from the castle. Soon the courtyard was jammed with pissed-off and complaining guests.

A woman with her hair in rollers leaned close to him. “I was getting ready for bed. But then this . . . this”—she waved her hands in the air—“smell oozed under the door and filled my room. I almost threw up right there. They charge megabucks to stay in this place. I want my money back.”

Thorn smiled into the darkness. “Yeah, it’s pretty bad.” And it was. Even standing thirty feet from the open door he could smell the raw sewage stench. It made even him want to run to the bushes and heave. He’d have to send Dr. Clancy flowers, candy, or maybe a few air fresheners.

The best part of the whole thing? Sparkle and her crew would find no evidence. The wafers evaporated as they released the odor. And this was the gift that kept on giving. The hotel’s staff wouldn’t get rid of the smell just by opening a few windows. Any guests who chose to stay would have to sleep with gas masks.

He was chuckling as he turned away. Then he saw her. Katnip. She wore jeans, a red T-shirt, and a light jacket along with a suspicious expression. Interesting. The other people around him assumed the castle just had a plumbing problem. He wondered what
she
thought.

Thorn worked his way to her side. “I’ve smelled some bad stuff in my time”—piles of burning bodies during the plague, charnel houses—“and this is right up there with the worst of them.”

Startled, she turned to look at him. “Are you staying at the castle?”

“No. I hung around to watch the next fantasy.” He smiled. “I liked ours better.”

She frowned. “Ours was a disaster.”

He decided not to comment on that. “What’s your real name?”

“Kayla.” She raised one expressive brow. “And yours?”

“Will.” Centuries of practice had taught him to lie smoothly, without any tells. “So are you going to be able to get back in there to sleep tonight?”

She nodded. “They have people working on it now. Sparkle said the smell would be gone in less than an hour.”

Thorn maintained his bland expression. Holgarth and Zane. Damn. He’d hoped it would take longer than that for them to get rid of the stink. Too bad. He would have enjoyed offering Kayla a place to stay for the night. He perked up at the thought that this might be the last night Zane helped save Sparkle’s ass. “So I assume you have a job description other than succubus.” He waited for details.

“Yes.” No details.

Kayla’s narrow-eyed gaze made him a little wary. Her expression said she was trying to solve a puzzle. He couldn’t afford to be that puzzle. “Guess all the fun is over. I’ll head on home. I live here on the island, so maybe I’ll see you again.” He turned to walk away.

“Oh, Will?”

He paused and glanced over his shoulder.

“Is there a reason you wear colored contacts and a wig for just a night out at the local theme park?” Her expression showed only casual interest, but her eyes said, “Gotcha.”

“I work for the dreaded Succubi Seekers. We heard there was a rogue succubus messing with men’s dreams in Galveston. I’ve been working undercover to find her.” He made sure his tone sounded lightly teasing. “Mission accomplished.”

She wouldn’t be able to see his eyes well in the darkness. But if she could, would she read the truth in them, understand the danger? If she didn’t fascinate him, and if he hadn’t worked for the last two centuries to suppress his vampire responses, she wouldn’t survive the night. She’d seen through his disguise, so she was officially a threat to him now.

Thorn didn’t give her a chance to reply. He strode from the courtyard and slipped out of the park. He’d take the long way home. He didn’t want anyone to notice him entering Nirvana.

He moved silently through the night, staying close to the outside of the park’s wall where the shadows were deepest. Two hundred years of perfecting his impersonation of a human hadn’t rid him of his predatory instincts. He loved the darkness. And even though his hunts didn’t end in death anymore—even vampires evolved—Thorn still loved the pursuit, that electric moment when he finally cornered his prey. Sometimes, on very special nights, his prey would outsmart him. Those were the moments he lived for, when he could match wits with someone who understood a predator’s mind.

Speaking of matching wits, two people were following him. He’d picked up their footsteps, their heartbeats, their breathing about a minute ago. To make sure they really were after him, he stopped for a moment and pretended to root around in his pockets. They stopped too. This wouldn’t be one of those special nights, because the men stalking him were clumsy and overconfident. They weren’t human, but they thought he was. They’d be expecting weak and helpless. They were about to get an unpleasant surprise.

What were they after? Had Sparkle remembered him? Not likely with his different hair and eye color. Besides, as far as she knew, he’d been dead for centuries. And there was no way she’d connect him with the owner of Nirvana.

Time to find out what they wanted. He turned and peered into the darkness. Thorn could see them clearly, but they didn’t know that. “Is someone there?” Did he sound like a nervous human?

“Yes.” The voice was a low sibilant hiss.

Thorn tensed, a human reaction. He wanted them to keep thinking he was human until it was too late. “What do you want?”

They drew closer and Thorn recognized the same scent of the sea that he’d smelled on the two people in the hotel. Coincidence? He didn’t believe in coincidences.

Thorn put his back against the wall. They’d interpret his action as fear. He saw it as a defensive move, which would soon lead to a lot of offensive moves on his part.

Anticipation thrummed through him. He wanted to laugh out loud. A good fight would rid him of some of the aggression he’d built up during his first meeting with Sparkle. It might even take his mind off the mysterious Kayla.

Suddenly they were in front of him. Wow, they were big bastards. Probably depended on their size and strength to beat the hell out of opponents.
Not this time, dumbasses
. He waited.

The smaller one—about six-ten—spoke.

“We saw you come out of Nirvana and enter the castle. We hoped that you would return. Do you work at the pier?”

“Yes.” Thorn frowned. Stilted speech, as though he didn’t do much of it. Strange. He wished the guy would talk faster, though. He wanted to get to the good part where he kicked their stupid butts.

“Then you can take a message to your boss. He must close the pier down, sell it, and leave Galveston.” They edged a little closer.

Thorn narrowed his eyes. Now they were officially in his space. “Why?” He crouched, ready to make mush of their very ordinary faces.

“If he does not follow directions, he will die.”

Okay, Thorn could accept that as a reason for now. He’d find out the real reason later, once he’d stomped on their heads a few times.

“We will give you something to make sure you will remember our message.”

Thorn admitted it, he was a bigot. He didn’t trust anyone who never used contractions. And now they’d try to beat him to a pulp to make sure he delivered their “message.” Well, he was about to deliver his own message. He smiled.

Kayla saw that smile from where she hid in the shadows and wondered if he was crazy. He was about to get pulverized by those men. Jeez, the tall one must be over seven feet and built like a jumbo jet.

She didn’t know what the men wanted with Will. She had decided to follow him at the last minute and had just caught up. But she didn’t have time to figure out what was happening before both men drew back their fists.

Kayla reacted instinctively. No gun. Too loud. She reached down and pulled the knife from her ankle sheath. Then she stepped from the shadows. “Move away from him.”

All three men turned to stare at her. The two big men looked shocked. Will just looked disappointed. Maybe he didn’t like a woman saving his beautiful ass. Too bad.

Kayla widened her eyes. “What? You’ve never seen a woman with a knife before?”

“Only in the kitchen.” The biggest man smiled. Not a nice smile. “You are small and insignificant. I do not believe you know what to do with your weapon.”

He hadn’t just said that. No one could be that dumb. She forgot all the snarky comments she could have made and just stared at him.

“Give me that knife, little girl, and then go away so we can finish this.” He started toward her.

Two things happened at once. Will leaped into the air and kicked only-in-the-kitchen in his big stupid head, followed immediately by a shot to his gut. Kayla would have liked to stand and enjoy his amazing speed and ferocity, but the shorter man had pulled out his own knife and looked as though he wanted to carve his initials in Will’s back.

Kayla shook her head in disgust. See, it was fine for
him
to carry a knife, but not small and insignificant her. With one smooth motion, she threw her knife. The blade sank into his throwing shoulder. He grunted and dropped his weapon.

She didn’t give him time to recover. Even as he bent over clutching his shoulder, she ran in and yanked her knife from his flesh before kicking his legs out from under him.

Glancing toward Will, she saw that his opponent had fled the fight. Giant wuss. He was stumbling across Seawall Boulevard. Must have a car parked nearby. Her guy scrambled to his feet and followed at a staggering run. She was surprised how fast he moved with a stab wound. Thinking that was the end of it, she crouched down to wipe her blade on the grass. But she was wrong. Will was racing after them.

Reluctantly, she followed him. She didn’t want Sparkle to find out about this. Rescuing random men outside of the park wasn’t part of her job description. Kayla was lucky the man she’d stabbed hadn’t screamed and brought everyone running.