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

  “Crystal,” I say, now knowing, now understanding, now remembering all of it, every second, every moment we’ve had together.

  And how I love her.

  “I remember,” I say. “Crystal, I...I...remember.”

  The darkness begins to fade, the blackness disappearing, replaced by a dark gray with no shapes or sounds. But slowly I feel it, the wet grass under my hands, the smell of dew, the rising sun behind a horizon.

  “LUKE!” Her voice is clear, right here, in these woods that I’m arriving in, blinking my eyes to recover from the bleary vision.

  When I see her, my insides shatter. She is a vision come alive, an angel manifest. A ghost from another world.

  But she’s none of that.

  She is as real as the sun and the rainbows and the leaves and the water. As real as flowers and daisies and breasts and skin and were it not for the staggering shock of the concept of it all, I would take her completely now, as if I had been denied her for a decade.

  But I feel weak, shaking, almost unable to stand as I begin sensing my limbs in this world as if it were the first time. Because it is the first time. I have never felt the dreamworld as it is now, the wind against my skin, the rush in my breath.

  She weeps as she runs to me; weeps as if she understands what’s happening already. Her arms are around me in a long-lost lover’s embrace and when she jumps on me I almost fall back. We’re in the woods, gray and misty, I see this now. She kisses me, wet eyes and lips all over my face. My hands find her thighs and slide back to her buttocks, touching them for the first time. Really touching them. And the thought of finding her heat maddens me. It becomes desperate and feral, overwhelming my every thought and idea. I can’t wait. I fight her clothes off in a terrible frenzy, absolutely hungry for her, to feel her, to know her like I’ve never known her before.

  I get on my knees and bring her with me to the ground, her shirt already torn asunder and her red bra flashing at me like a call from the wild. “Is this really happening?” I say.

  With tears of joy in her eyes she nods. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, it’s really freakin happening.” And as she says it, she spreads her legs quietly to welcome me, her need as desperate as my own.

  She sits up and rips my shirt off, undoes my buckle in a mad hurry. I kiss her hair and ears and knead her body like an animal. There is no patience between us, none at all. We know this will be our first time—truly our first time—and that I will remember.

  I get on top of her, maneuver myself between her.

  I almost weep as I stare into her eyes, relishing the moment forever. “Florida,” I say suddenly. “West Rocks, Florida. Ally Joe’s Bar. Remember that.”

  She understands. If the dream ends, she’ll find me. “Florida,” I repeat, as if the first time wasn’t enough. “Florida.”

  She slides down on her back, pushing the tip of me into her hot folds.

  And then I stop saying Florida, because I’m thinking of nothing else but being sheathed inside her.

  And then I am.

  I crush her body to mine and lose myself inside her. The thrusts are not gentle, and she moans and digs her nails into my back as I push deeper into her. But every time I push, she says, “Yes, oh, yes.”

  The words are a melody in my soul.

  “Yes. Oh, fuck, yes”—thrust—“Oh yes”—thrust—“Oh fuck yeah”—thrust—“Oh yes”—thrust, thrust, thrust—“Oh yes, yes, yes”—thrust, thrust, thrust, thrust—“yes, oh yes, oh yes, yes, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”

  Yes.

  Neither of us waits. We want the climax, the burst, the relief.

  We charge down the railroad at full speed, clutch and grab and bite and hold and pull, groaning, shouting—

  And then the moment arrives.

  The moment before.

  That millisecond of quiet which is everlasting in itself.

  I see it in her eyes, the way they start to roll back, the lined tension on her skin, how her chest holds in that final breath.

  Her mouth parts slightly.

  I reach overload.

  My fingers tighten against her shoulder blades.

  It’s when her groan starts that I can’t hold back anymore—a soft, moaning wail as the fury finds her.

  And then we shatter.

  The moment is bliss.

  -12-

  I awoke in a frenzy in the middle of the night.

  And my headache was back.

  The outer-body experience with Crystal had done nothing to mitigate the Tsunami of vengeance happening inside my head in the real world.

  The room spun. I tried to get up but realized I was in the snatch of a deadly fever. The same fever I had as a child, I realized.

  I needed to get to LA. That’s where she was. I remembered she had told me once. I remembered all of it. Dear gods this is freakin unheard of.

  Silence. (Except for the heavy-metal drums in my brain...but I’ve covered that adequately by now.)

  I fell in and out of a fevered sleep. I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. So I just lay there, at the mercy of whatever power of dark magic was having its way with me.

  Let me tell you, whatever that force was or is, it had a fuckin field day with me. I felt like a pinball being splattered and smacked through a machine with dazzling lights.

  I no longer knew if I was awake or asleep. My fellow hunters were in my room with me, Lorian and Dania and Harkan and the leader, Aasiyah—all people I had met before. I remembered them all. But they weren’t here. No. Or were they? The witches I had failed to save were here as well, their bodies bloody and hanging on my wall. “Noooooo,” I moaned. “No!” But the moan only served to send stings through my skull.

  I felt the sweats break out on me. Crystal, I called out in my mind. Crystal. But I knew she wasn’t here. Only the memories were, being flipped through my mind like Rolodex cards high on meth. Memories of both this world and the dreamworld. They were uniting, knitting together, becoming one with each other in the most painful way. If I ever meet the dude who figured out this system, I’m gonna tell him he needs to come up with a better system!

  Images of me as a child. Mother. Father. Mom calling me. Freddie standing outside our house, cap in hand. Then there were other images, each looking like a faded seventies photograph, some with splotches of blood on them, some with flowers—very random. No sense to it at all. I recognized all the images at first, and then I saw others that I didn’t recognize. A little girl with green eyes, young. Four? Five? Kneeling on the floor, smiling, somebody taking a photo of her. “Daddy’s here, Crystal. Daddy’s here.” The smash and crash of windshields. Crystal waking up in a sweat in the middle of the night. Knowing. Knowing they had been killed. Her memories, I realized.

  Then the images were mine again. The time I fell on my head and thought I had cracked my neck and was told I survived only by some miracle.

  But there was one image that kept coming back. An image that had been haunting me since the beginning of the night: A woman on a crucifix. A beautiful woman with long black hair and bronzed skin. And a whip cracking behind her, blood running down her tattered white clothing—a man’s dress shirt covering her. The image flashed on and off as if someone were taking photographs of her in the dark, a buzzing lamp above her lighting up her body only enough to show its morbidity.

  And behind her, shattered glass high above as if she were in...a warehouse.

  The sweats hit me hard two hours later, and images of my childhood illness reappeared. And my mother, dear sweet Barbara as she had held a cold towel over my head.

  I was hot and cold now, shivering. My lips felt blue. My body was drenched with perspiration.

  I screamed and moaned and wailed in that vague way one does when in a fever. I wondered if someone might call the cops my screams were so loud. (So much for neighborhood watch. I always knew those signs were bullshit.)

  Agony. Days and days of agony. Weeks of misery. Pain. Images of torture
and horror...

  It’s too much, Crystal. It’s too much. It’s too much. Too much. Too much. Too much...

  ...

  I was mumbling the words Too much, Too Much, Too Much when I woke up the next day. My mouth tasted like ass. I was plastered on my bed, my comforter spread out everywhere, my old AC unit choking and wheezing in the other room.

  But the Medusa of all headaches was gone.

  And I remembered...everything.

  PART THREE

  ~ Luke ~

  -13-

  I didn’t know I could read minds yet, but it wouldn’t take long to discover it.

  I walked outside into the muggy heat of an early May morning. May’s about the last month you can walk outside without feeling you’ve just entered a bathtub. It’s also about when the roaches start to come out of their hiding places.

  It was a sensory overload. The sun was too bright, the blooming gardenias (a scent I usually looked forward to this time of year) made me sneeze. They made me sneeze so much that the little girl from across the street piped up and said, “Bless you!” in her sweet Georgian accent.

  I call her a little girl but she was nothing of the sort. She was probably fifteen, sixteen. If I’d been seventeen, I would have been over there every morning. But I wasn’t. So I had let her be for the last year since she and her rich family had built the only modern-looking house on the entire street. I looked up and saw Leigh-Anne, that’s her name. She was in her black bikini (she was always in a bikini when I saw her—did she plan it that way?), showing off the flat stomach all women have before they hit their thirties. I lifted my hand to wave—

  Oh, dear gods, what am I thinking!?

  The image that slapped my head was...disturbing. I mean, it was actually...spine-chilling. I know plenty of guys my age who don’t give a shit if a girl’s young (Karl Leone claims to give it to his seventeen year-old girlfriend three times a day—he’s twenty-seven), but I’m not into that shit. I don’t care if she looks twenty or thirty or ninety. It turns me off.

  And the image I got then...

  What the fuck are you thinking, Luke? You could get arrested for having thoughts like this...

  ...She’s going down on me. Her lips are unbelievably soft, the suction perfect. Her sounds are a melody of violins—

  Stop! Stop! Stop it!...

  I looked away, ashamed, every bobble of her head in my mind only making me nauseas. Did I actually feel her lips on me? She was still standing there, leaning over her picket fence, grinning. “Off to work?” she asked with a lilt.

  When she said the word Work, I almost felt raped.

  It was at that moment that Mrs. Libovocz next door walked out with her walking stick to pick up the newspaper. I think she was the oldest living person in Florida. She waved, smiled at me with the paper in hand. (Leigh-Anne was still shooting sexual beams at me from over the street.) And then I got another image...

  ...huh?

  I’m in Mrs. Libovocz’s kitchen, sitting, waiting for a rump steak she’s making. She slides her hand over my shoulder...

  Oh, dear gods.

  I got off my front steps in a hurry, back through the screen-door into the front porch and then into my bedroom. I was sweating, hyperventilating. I jumped in the shower. I looked at my cock for a second as I dried myself off and couldn’t get the image of Leigh-Anne’s head down there out of my mind, her black hair bobbing up and down, the suction—

  “You’re sick, Luke. Totally fucking sick.” I looked away, checked out my face in the mirror and was glad I didn’t need to shave.

  It was when I got to Ally’s that things really went overboard. Sensory overload to the max. Impressions coming at me left and right. And the sexual thoughts—oh, sweet gods. It was insane. I felt like I was being done up against the wall by old women, young women, men. I felt violated, completely violated. (I know you’ve already seen where this is going, but I’m a slow MF, and it took me a while.) Sex wasn’t the only thing on people’s minds. Some of the men hated me—men with girls under their arms. A few single guys held me in awe, hoping to have a body like mine...

  I didn’t have time to think about the revelations of my double-life yet. I was still being pummeled by conversations happening in people’s heads all around me. If I hadn’t had those revelations I might have thought I was coming down with something bad, a weird bacteria in the ocean or something. Had there been something in the news?

  “Lukey baby, rough nigh’ again? You’re sweatin harder than a dingo’s arse after eez given it to a kangaroo, mate.” Eddie put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed.

  The new girl Kyla was filling a sixteen ounce cup with Apricot Peach Ale behind the bar and making eyes at me. Her thoughts: Ooh, hey Lukey honey. Mmmm, I’d love to bend over for you and feel that cock—

  I put my hands to my ears and cried out, “NO!”

  Kyla giggled, unaware that I’d heard (and felt) every dirty thought she had just had about me.

  Woman on the right, Hispanic, extremely round—tongue on my—

  No!

  Guy on the other side of the bar, sipping on a Bud Light, smirking. Wondering about the size of my—

  “I’m...I’m going nuts, Eddie.”

  Eddie looked at me seriously, grabbed me by the elbow and started tugging me and said, “Come. Talk. Now.” And then he bellowed, “ROSIE, WE’RE TAKIN FIVE. TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT!” Rosie was in the kitchen. Eddie felt it better to announce his plans to the entirety of Florida instead of walking the five paces to tell her in person. He was the only guy who could “take five” at will when it came to Rosie. She made concessions for him.

  He dragged me out to the back behind the lavatories, stood me up against a brick wall and put his hands on my shoulders. “Talk,” he said. I’m worried about you, little mate. You’re all I got in this godforsaken town. You make me feel young again, mate. Don’t go out on me now, alright?

  “Huh? What did you say?” I asked. Sensory overload. The light of the sun dug daggers into my eyes.

  “I didn’t say nuthin, mate.”

  “You did. You said I make you feel young and I’m all you got in this godforsaken town.”

  Eddie’s grip loosened off my shoulders. He stood there looking at me stunned for a second. Then: “You read my bloody mind, mate.” And then, more enthusiastically, “You read my bloody mind!”

  “Eddie, don’t shout. It’s all a little sensitive at the moment.”

  He looked like a kid at Christmas. Stood back. Shook himself off as if getting ready for a race. “What am I thinkin now?”

  The thought hit me like a sledgehammer. “Oh, gods, you and Rosie!?”

  “Hah!” He slapped my shoulder so hard I almost fell. “Hah!” He slapped it again. “Crikey!” I stopped the third slap. “This is fuckin incredible!”

  “Rosie?” I asked again, incredulous.

  “’ey, fat chicks are freakin goddesses in bed, mate.”

  He was happy.

  I was feeling ill.

  “EDDIE, GET YOUR GODDAMN ASS BACK IN HERE BEFORE WE LOSE ALL OUR CUSTOMERS! AND YOU, NO ONE SAID YOU COULD TAKE FIVE! IF YOU’RE ILL, TAKE AN ASPIRIN. TABLE FOUR NEEDS MORE SALT! MOVE YER-ASSES!”

  I looked over at Rosie, her curly red hair, her generously bountiful figure (that’s being polite). And I smiled. She had a glint in her eye as she bawled me and Eddie out.

  Everybody deserves love.

  -14-

  LA. LA? Could I not have asked for more precise details? An address, maybe? Heck, a Twitter account!

  In the middle of the whirlwind of people’s thoughts hitting and caressing me, Rosie called out to me. “LUKE! PHONE! MAKE IT QUICK OR I’M DOCKIN YER PAY. SOME GIRL CALLED CRYSTAL.”

  The world stopped moving.

  “ARE YA FUCKIN COMIN OR WHAT?”

  I raced to the phone and held it to my ear with a trembling hand. “C—Crystal?”

  “Luke.” Her voice was even more angelic in real life. A soft husk of desperation as I fel
t the relief flow from her like torrential rain. “I—I searched for Ally Joe’s Bar online. I—I— It was a long shot.”

  “Crystal, you have no freakin idea what’s happening to me. I’m...” Kyla was looking at me curiously. “I can’t talk now. Crystal, tell me where you are. I’ll come over there. I’ll take time off—”

  “We’re coming ourselves,” she said.

  “We?”

  “Me and Shira. She’s desperate to meet you.”

  I didn’t want to see this Shira women. I didn’t want to know about demons and hunters and duty. I wanted Crystal. Only Crystal. Alone. “O—OK,” I said. “Crystal—I...” Kyla kept on cleaning the same glass she’d been cleaning since I’d picked up the phone. I turned my back to her and cupped my hand over the phone. “I—can read minds,” I said.

  She stayed silent.

  “Crystal?”

  “Like a witch,” she answered.

  I guess. I hadn’t thought of it.

  “We’ll be there in about a week, Luke. Shira has some friends she’s going to call a meeting with. And then we’re driving through Marfa. I need to see Roxy.”

  “You can’t,” I said. “Not Marfa.”

  “I must, Luke. It’s something—I sense it. I’ll be fine. Shira’s a powerhouse.”

  Reluctantly I agreed. “Be careful,” I said.

  After a pause, she said, “Luke, this is a miracle.”

  I didn’t believe in miracles. But I believed in magic now.

  ~ Crystal ~

  -15-

  Shira never made it out of Beverly Hills.

  I wish I could tell you there is such a thing as the Big Bad Book of Magic, but there isn’t. Either there never was any knowledge, or it’s all gone. I also wish there was a book called How A Witch’s Mind Works and Why She’ll Always be a Witch and Do What Witches Do No Matter How Hard You Try to Change Her Basic Character.

  Maybe I’ll write that one myself.