Her Mind Games: A Dark and Erotic Paranormal Romance Read online

  Madness erupted around me as people fought to get the girl out, vain hope in their eyes. Idiotic hope.

  Because she was dead.

  Her skin was blue. Lividity had settled in. The blood had been pulled down by gravity. She was swollen, the body becoming disfigured by the process of natural decay.

  Even in the blackness of her eyes, I saw that she had been a beautiful girl, an extremely beautiful girl. Black hair, wide eyes. Innocent lips. Had she had a boyfriend?

  People screamed on the beach. Now they saw her! Now they had moved away from their volleyball games and their freaking towels and their godforsaken sunburns to actually see what had been right in front of their eyes from the start. Or had it?

  I stayed in the water, uncomfortable in its warmth. It was almost cooler to stay out of it. Maybe that’s why it had been so empty. Maybe that’s why no one had seen her. Reasons. Endless reasons. None of them important. None of them even slightly able to bring her back.

  And none of them true.

  On the beach, I saw the tragic hopelessness in people’s faces. The girl lay on the sand now, eyes closed. She looked horrible now, not the same girl I had seen only seconds ago. Not the same girl I saw last night in my dream. It was as if I had seen her in her purity before. But now the signs of death were unmistakable. People gawked at her, made comments. Can you believe that some even took photos and made videos?

  I held my temper, walked slowly over to her. Some people asked me questions. Did I know her? Was I friends with her? Was I...her boyfriend? Heck, the girl looked barely a teen. What were these people thinking? I was twenty-two, but my build made me look older. I’ve always been larger than most guys.

  I rammed a few people aside, put my hand in my back jeans pocket to grab my wallet. It was drenched, and so was the money inside it. But US currency is a magical thing. It’s made of this special paper that dries very quickly and is practically indestructible. (I learned that in a Jack Reacher novel.) I grabbed a few twenties, held them out. “Someone give me a towel!” I shouted. An older woman in a one piece brought her towel to me, pushed my hand down indicating she didn’t want the money. At least there was some decency left in the world. I had begun to think there wasn’t.

  Onlookers kept taking photos.

  I put the old woman’s towel over the body, covered the girl completely. I was on my knees now, head bowed. The woman kneeled next to me, made the sign of the cross. Started praying in Spanish. A few other people kneeled as well, bowed their heads.

  That shot made the papers. Front-page news. A shot of me and the old woman, kneeling, and a few others kneeling around us.

  If I knew the kid who’d taken it, I’d kill him.

  -7-

  The press descended on our small little tourist town like a horde of vampires to blood. I was interviewed endlessly, and Ally Joe’s bar turned into a scene from Hollywood with paparazzi wanting to get shots of me and Eddie and Nancy and everyone else who worked there.

  Rosie was pissed. She used her bulk to muscle the guys out of the bar as best she could, but the place is open plan and sprawls out onto the street so there’s only so far you can take them without actually kicking them off the sidewalk. One of the reporters tripped over a twelve-year-old kid playing beanbag in the enclosed street just outside the place, and the kid’s dad flipped and socked the reporter hard in the face. The cameraman caught it all, and the heading on national news was Tensions Run High in West Rocks Resort Town. No mention of the kid whose hand was almost crushed by the prick holding a mic.

  My answers were always the same: I didn’t know the girl (technically a lie), had never seen her (another lie). How did I catch a glimpse of her from so far away? I guess I just...had a feeling about it. Did I feel like a hero? No, because in my dream I was supposed to have saved her from the demon who was mounting her in her sleep, and I failed. (I didn’t say that.) It took a few days for most of the clamor to die down, but it stayed on the news. Customers asked me about it. Ally Joe’s filled up from the free promotion.

  And I was going silently insane.

  A darkness descended on me, the kind of darkness you see in a Floridian sky just before a hurricane, clouds roiling fast and heavy. Black as death.

  I started thinking about my mom. She popped into my mind every now and then, but now it was constant. Maybe it had been the bloated look of the Jane Doe as she had lain there on the beach, the swell of her eyes, the unmistakable feeling of death around her. And also the constant beauty, as if Death himself could not swallow up her grandness completely.

  That had been my mother, too.

  Barbara Dresner fought the cancer inside her to the very end. We had a very special relationship, she and I. Perhaps it was because she had raised me alone since my father died when I was twelve, just before the fever dreams started.

  Dad had spent thirty years on the force only to have his head blown off in a bust that should have been handled by the feds. But that was dad, always the macho man, always the tough guy, never thinking maybe he might die and that the invincibility he carried around him like a Robocop suit would be exposed as nothing but the tattered shawl of cobwebs it really was.

  He wasn’t a great dad. He drank and he swore and he did things to my mother that, if I had been older, I would have knocked his block off for. But he was the only dad I had. I was twelve when the Captain and dad’s partner Freddie arrived at our house, caps and flag in hand, full blue uniform, and gave us the news. I had never seen Freddie cry. I had never seen anyone on the force weep. But Freddie’s eyes were redder than a weed smoker’s when I opened the door.

  And just before I had opened it, even before I had seen his tears and the American flag, I already knew.

  I also knew the night before mother died. It didn’t take a genius to know it was imminent. She had been coughing up blood and gagging her lungs out into a red-stained cloth next to her bed for weeks. The last weeks were dismal, really rough.

  But her beauty remained. In all those years as the disease whittled her away in front of me, she remained beautiful with the coiled red of her hair always lying untidily around her face. Even when dad had been alive I remember her hair being like that. A force of nature, she used to call it. According to my friends, she was an extremely attractive woman. And I can’t tell you what about her they found alluring. She had a flattish chest and the lines of age on her.

  But there was a power inside her, a reservoir of strength that resounded like the cawing gulls as they flew over our Floridian home toward the bay.

  I thought of her now because she had always credited my dreams. I had gotten ill after my father’s death, violently ill, and the fever dreams ransacked me nightly; dreams of ghouls and devils and women on slabs with men above them, hurting them, tasting them, cutting them. They were maddening. And in my dreams I would be this powerful hunter, afraid to my core but driven by a sense of duty so profound that to deny that duty was like denying air itself. There was no logic in the dreams, only the sense that oxygen was made of honor and that obligation overrode all notions of comfort. In the dreams, many of the victims died. And when they died, a little bit of me died with them.

  My mother would ask me about them in detail the moment I awoke, and I remember remembering. At the instant moment of wakefulness, still trapped in that half-dream / half-awake world, I would remember every detail, the taste of blood on my lips, the burn of a dagger gash running down my arm, and the sense that I was dying. I died often in the dreams, but never saw myself passing completely away.

  But after that brief moment of lucidity, the dream would rush away from me like the vacuum suction of outer space, traveling at the speed of light, so fast that not even stretching my hands out could make me reach it.

  And then I would remember nothing, only the vague hint of childish nightmares, the occasional weak memory of a woman, a huntress, or perhaps a sacrifice. But soon that faded too. Until the next dream.

  My mother’s interest in the dreams grew and g
rew and I would fight with her for interrogating me about them so closely. It was as if some great urgency drove her to know, to understand, to fathom their connotations. But there were no connotations, not to me. I was ill, and I was feverish. And I was hallucinating.

  Her own illness began shortly after that. It happened almost as mine began to disappear. But her illness was much more malevolent, imbuing her very soul with blackness. The cancer hit her hard and she was given only a few months to live. She lived another six years, old enough to see me finish school but not old enough to watch me go off to college if I had chosen to.

  I dreamed of her the night before she went.

  In the real world, she was unable to speak or listen or make any efforts at taking care of herself. We hired no nurses. We didn’t have the money. And I took on the duty of cleaning her when she had lost control of her basic functions. It is no life for a person to suffer like that, and quietly I prayed for her to be taken, because no one should suffer to that degree. I implored her openly as well, told her I would be fine, I would survive without her. But she held on, held on eternally. The doctors called it a miracle. I called it...a force of nature.

  In my dream of her before her death, she was a beautiful woman, her hair ever in dishevelment, her slender body covered in a long flowing white gown fit for saints. “You’re going,” I said to her in the dream.

  “Yes.”

  “You look beautiful.”

  She smiled.

  “I’ll be alright,” I told her.

  She closed her eyes in acknowledgement. Her voice was as the voice of the wind when she spoke. “The dreams are real,” she said to me. “Never deny them, Lucien.” She had not called me by my given name in many years.

  Even in the dream I thought she was positively mad. Her serenity was that of an ethereal being floating in the sky, losing sense of her mind.

  “Never deny them,” she said again. And then she began to fade.

  It didn’t cross my mind that she shouldn’t leave. I was happy she was going. Sad and happy. It was time. It had been time for many years already.

  I never took heed of what she said at first. It was, after all, a dream. And it would be many years before I acknowledged these dreams as a second life of mine, a life as real as the one I was leading in the real world, mowing the lawn, receiving bruises, falling in love...or lust. It is the way the hunters were built. The separation of the two worlds was for our own protection. Damage and pain inflicted in the dreamworld did not carry over into the real world. Not like the witches we were created to protect.

  I knew none of this at the time.

  I woke up from the dream of my mother in the middle of the night and went to her bedroom which was next to mine. We were living on the second floor of our three apartment home. We had had lodgers stay with us some years prior, but not anymore, not since mom had gotten really ill.

  When I entered her room, the stench of recent death hit me so hard that I gagged.

  I didn’t need to turn on the lights. Because I already knew. Just as I had known when my father had died.

  Under the moonlight, I saw her tremendous beauty as she lay there, her eyes open as she faced the door, perfectly positioned to see me just as I walked in, as if she had been expecting me all along. Her hair was a frazzled mess around her. Beautiful hair. Stunning hair. The hair of my mother.

  I wept a single tear in the moment I saw her. And I don’t know if it was the shock of her beauty or the sudden reality of her being gone. Perhaps it was alleviation that her degradation was finally over. It was probably all of these things.

  I didn’t credit the dream, of course.

  But I did remember it. It was that dream that would keep me from checking myself into a psych ward over the years. Never deny the dreams. I still did, for many years. Except for this dream. Part of me held onto the recollection of a beautiful young woman who had spoken to me under the backdrop of mountains and a black sky, her body dressed white, her hair a burst of fire. My mother.

  She kept me sane all the years after, even long after she had died.

  -8-

  I want to tell one more short anecdote here before we continue.

  We had a guy at school called Lewis. He was one of those wild guys who picks on little girls and steals people’s lunches. He and I weren’t good friends, and if I didn’t have the size I do, he might have tried to pick on me as well. But no one picked on me. It’s the benefit of being over six foot and packing a fair amount of muscle.

  Already back then I was pumping weights. I started when I was fourteen. There was little else to do. The football program at our 2A school was dismal, and I’ve never been much of a team player anyway. Many of my friends were smoking weed and getting drunk and jumping on cigarettes, but that wasn’t the life for me. I’ve smoked a joint or three in my life. Cigarettes made me gag. And I like my booze now when I’m feeling sorry for myself. But those same guys who were “cool” then are all either pushing up daisies or sporting paunches large enough to float.

  So I pumped weights. And I stayed clean.

  Lewis got the bright idea to push up on me one day. He got brave, bumped me in the school hallway and just kept walking. Big mistake. My temper is not my greatest asset. It’s a downright liability. I grabbed Lewis by his jacket and swung him to the lockers. There was a young girl behind him and she almost got crushed. I was seeing red. My fists were whirlpools. The guy never saw what hit him. He was on the ground, broken nose, blood spurting, and begging for mercy so much that I just left him. I could have kicked him on the ground. When I get going, I’m not that easy to stop. His friends weren’t on me. No one was on me. I could have killed him. But I didn’t. I grabbed my bag, apologized to the young girl I’d almost crushed. (She blushed, and said it was cool. Really cool. No problem at all, Luke. Wanna have coffee some time?) And I walked out, skipping the rest of the day. I needed to cool off.

  Lewis died two weeks later. Nothing to do with me. He hit an oncoming semi while driving at seventy miles an hour on the I-275. Going the wrong way. He would have flown out the windscreen (note, always wear a seatbelt) had the semi not been doing seventy or more in its own right. The Ford that Lewis had been in was crumpled up like a soft bullet hitting a wall. His body was unrecognizable, all mashed up and in a pulp.

  But here’s the clincher: I had known he was going to die. I had known so deeply that I called that fucker out of the blue and asked if he wanted to hang out with me. It was totally irrational. We hated each other. But I called him anyway. He shot me down in flames of course. So would I have done.

  But he died.

  And I had known.

  -9-

  Mom’s passing was pretty rough for me. Dad’s passing, not so much. It’s not that I didn’t love my dad, it’s that I was too young to really appreciate him. After he was killed in action, he just kind of faded from memory. Mom was sad a lot after that, that’s all I remember about him.

  But mom’s passing when I was eighteen—that smacked me. That knocked me out and sent me on a drinking binge until I met this guy Eddie at a bar down on South Beach and we started talking. I’d been pumping the booze for three solid months, running out of cash, always trashed, sometimes falling over on the street, getting picked up by WRPD and spending a night in the cooler.

  You know how it goes in a bar, you start talking with a fellow drunkard, you figure out the “Idea of Ideas” that’s gonna change the world and make you a billionaire so that all you’ll need to do is lie back in your boathouse, stretch your feet, and look out at the sun with a Piña Colada in your hand while some bounteous blonde goes down on you and her friend dangles her tits over your tongue. Drunk men—always full of ideas.

  Eddie was one such man. He had an idea. A great idea. An idea that would rock the world. “I’m a multi-millionaire, mate. And I’m fuggin sick of it. I’m sellin mah business. An ahm gonna become a fuggin waiter. Right here. Wessbank. Righ’ ’ere!” He smacked his index finger down on the bar, rai
sed two unsexy eyebrows at the blonde behind it (she and I had hit it off three or four times before; she still made eyes at me whenever I went there).

  “Why?” I remember asking him.

  “Beegause it ain’t worff it, mate? The cash? The money? The fuckin yachts? It ain’t worth the lawyers, the stress. I’ve ’ad mah fun. I’ve gotten mah cock sucked by beauties better lookin than this fox righ’ here.” He pointed at Toni, the blonde who’d done me in the most exotic of ways. “I’ll still be rich. Fuck, I’ll have enough for the ress of mah life? What the fuck do I wanna be a fuckin billionaire for? I’ve only got twenty years left wiff da way ah drink.” He raised his bourbon, and we toasted.

  “So why waiter? Why not just sell your shit and live on the beach?”

  He cocked an unimpressed eyebrow at me. “An’ not work? Are you fuckin insane, mate? Do you know people die after they retire? It’s a fact. Guy’s livin happily, workin in the fuggin mill, seventy, eighty, ninety. Some fucker tells im, ‘Ey, Charlie, why don’t you retire? Spend your life over on the coast?’ An Charlie does. Next fuggin day the man’s dead!” Eddie’s eyes bulged out wildly. Drunk as a skunk. “Nah, mate. I’ll be workin till the day ahh die. I’d sweep the fuggin street, but that ain’t no life. I like waitering. Bartending, too. You meet some good pussy doin it.” He smirked at Toni again. She’d obviously been listening to Eddie flaunting his verbal wallet. And she made eyes at him too. Slut.

  “An’ you? What do you do, mate?”

  And so the seed was planted. Eddie had a way with words. Ally Joe’s was the first place we hit. And Rosie, the big boss (and I use the word big advisedly), took a liking to the old man. She hired us.

  Before I knew it, four years had gone by.

  We had plenty of guys temping for a season or two here. Even when you were on a full-time shift it still felt like you were on vacation. I never got tired of the sound of the Gulf across the boulevard, the sultry air, the industrial fans spraying gentle water droplets on the guests and the waiters to keep us cool.