Tested in Fire Read online

  Luke chuckled, a sly burr that set Stefan’s teeth on edge. “Very well.” He turned away, erect cock bobbing in the air. He ran his hands across his own chest and belly and for an instant, Stefan was afraid he was about to jack himself off.

  Then Luke picked up his briefs and drew them on, and Stefan let out a brief sigh, his shoulders relaxing a fraction.

  Luke stepped into his pants. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my phone or keys about?”

  Stefan crept to the other side of his worktable, to keep something between them. “No.”

  “Wallet?”

  “No.” Stefan picked up a handful of paint tubes and began arranging them in strict color-spectrum order. “How did you get here without your keys anyway?”

  Luke paused for an instant with his shirt half on, then shrugged the rest of the way into it. “I stopped in at several stores. Or perhaps I left everything in my car.”

  “Is that why you were upstairs?”

  He grinned. “Caught me again. Can you blame me, though? I didn’t want you to think I could be so careless.”

  Stefan fumbled several paint tubes. “No worries. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  “I appreciate it.” Luke picked up his jacket, slinging it over his shoulders. “I will see you later.”

  He left without attempting to kiss Stefan or hug him or grab his ass, all of which could be considered Luke’s SOP. As soon as the door closed behind him, Stefan locked it—and shoved a file cabinet in front of it for good measure.

  He strode to the table and picked up his original sketch, trying to figure out what the difference was. The man and the sketch had the same lean muscles and broad shoulders and narrow hips. The same shaggy hair and square jaw and Roman nose. But he had just felt wrong. So wrong he’d made Stefan’s skin crawl.

  If Stefan didn’t know better, he’d think the man in his studio today hadn’t been Luke Morganstern at all.

  The sketch fell from his nerveless fingers, wafting to the tabletop.

  Christ. Could it be? Another fucking ghost?

  How could he tell? Luke wasn’t acting like himself, but would anyone notice except Stefan? He couldn’t just call the police and tell them he was afraid his boyfriend was possessed. Look how well that had worked out for Thomas.

  A church maybe? Did people even do exorcisms anymore? Would they pay any attention to an agnostic? Of course, Luke—or whoever was sharing brain space with him—might smell a rat if Stefan asked him out on a cheery little date involving holy water and containment circles.

  One thing for certain— He was incapable of handling this himself. He needed help. An expert. Someone who could recognize possession when they saw it. He tapped his lips with his fingers, squinting at the light dying in the windows.

  Right, then. He nodded once and ran up the stairs. Have to start somewhere.

  He sat down at his tiny desk, booted up his laptop, and googled Sarasota psychics.

  “Where is it?”

  The hissed command pulled Luke out of a troubled dream of fire and pain and falling. He tried to sit up but couldn’t move, his body like lead.

  Shit-goddamn-mother-fucker. He was in somebody else’s body.

  DiBartolo’s body. DiBartolo’s bed. And unless he was unable to recognize his own voice with a faded Italian accent, DiBartolo himself, wearing Luke’s stolen body, was in the room, making demands.

  Luke blinked and blinked again, but his eyes didn’t get any less blurry. Too vain to wear glasses, eh, you narcissistic SOB, even though you can’t see shit. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad. Luke could make out most of the details in the room—the massive antique furnishings, the incongruous mini-refrigerator humming in the corner. From the light leaking in through the heavy drapes, it was morning.

  Apparently, visiting hours for DiBartolo, who was next to the bed, glaring at Luke out of Luke’s own eyes. “I asked you a question. Where is it?”

  Luke turned his head away, so he wouldn’t have to see the scowl that twisted his features. God, I look like a troll. Is this what Stefan had seen, whenever Luke had thrown one of his temper tantrums about Marius—or lately about their living arrangements? The man has the patience of a saint. Luke closed his eyes against the well of tears that threatened to spill out. I’ll fix this. Somehow, I’ll get my body back and I’ll make it up to him.

  “Oh, you’re going to cry now? I should have known. You are not a real man, after all.”

  Luke ground his teeth together— He could still do that anyway. Slowly, deliberately, he raised his right hand.

  And flipped the bastard off.

  “You—”

  “Jacques?” Antoinette stood in the doorway holding a tray with a steaming bowl of something. Let’s hope it’s not avocado-kale porridge. “What are you doing? Where have you been?”

  DiBartolo cast a dismissive glance over his shoulder at her. “This damned finocchio won’t tell me where the mask is.”

  Oh. The frigging death mask. That’s right. DiBartolo was his missing client. No wonder the mask had looked familiar.

  “How is he to do that? He cannot speak.”

  DiBartolo growled and strode to the bedside table. He yanked the drawer open and rummaged around in it, causing the bottles on top of the table to dance. He pulled out a palm-sized pad of paper and the stub of a pencil, and thrust them at Luke. “Then he can write.”

  Antoinette set the tray on the top of a highboy. “Be reasonable, Jacques. If you couldn’t write when you were— If you couldn’t write, then how can he?”

  “How do you know I couldn’t write?” His voice was low and fierce. “You never gave me the opportunity to try.”

  She gasped, one thin hand clutching the collar of her serviceable smock. “But . . . but you were barely able to move. The doctor said the stroke affected so much of your brain that you—”

  “You, Tonina, listen too much to these puling doctors. What do they know of my mind, of yours? We are not the same as these others, these feeble modern men, who have never had to fight for what they wanted, who haven’t the brilliance to conquer death. My mind was perfectly sharp. It was only the flesh that was weak. If you’d thought to give me a pen and paper, I could have told you so. I could have instructed you to find a proper host for me. To retrieve my first mask from this bastardo before you made it impossible for him to turn it over.”

  “Jacques—”

  “This is all your fault!” He pointed at her. “Whine all you like about your promises to him, but if you had the wit God gave a cockroach, it wouldn’t have been necessary to choose him at all.”

  Her lip trembled. “I had no idea. I only wanted to talk to you.”

  “Talk talk talk. Why does everyone in this benighted place want to talk? First, that infuriating painter, now you.”

  Chills chased across Luke’s skin. He’s talked to Stefan. What else did he do? Did he touch him? Hurt him? I’ll kill the asshole if he dared lay a finger on my man.

  “Be fair, Jacques.” She tossed her hair back, firming her chin. “How was I to know?”

  “Use your brain for once. You worked a jump without the Sicilian clay. Even Niccolo never attempted that. We’ve evolved, Tonina. We’re better than these paltry folk. More than them.”

  Luke snorted. More insane than us, that’s for sure.

  DiBartolo turned away from Antoinette to glare at Luke again. “You find this amusing, do you? Perhaps you should consider your position.” He smiled. God, have I ever looked that evil? “We hold all the power over you. We can make your life comfortable—to a degree—or torture.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Sadly, that life is not likely to be long, but we all have our crosses to bear.”

  Very deliberately, Luke lifted his top lip—and from the fury infusing DiBartolo’s borrowed face, Luke must have achieved a satisfactory sneer. Take that, you fucking asshole.

  DiBartolo lunged at the bed, but Antoinette grabbed his arm. “Non. You must not hurt him. It is wrong.”

  �
��So what if it is? We can’t proceed without the first mask. He owes it to me. I hired him to bring it to me.”

  “But you didn’t hire him to give you his life.”

  He glanced down at her. “No. You did that.”

  She let go of him and wrapped her arms across her belly. “Besides, if you injure him, Rudy will know.”

  “Another finocchio.” His tone dripped disgust. “Fire him. How you managed to surround yourself with nothing but—”

  “If I fire him, the doctor will insist on another. We do not have the same power as the old days. There are rules, institutions, oversight.”

  “Bah. You worry about nothing.” He tilted his head and looked down at Luke, then rolled the pencil across his knuckles. Luke bunched the blanket in his fist. Stefan does that with his paintbrushes. “Ah. You recognize this trick, do you? Then you know that I can go where you cannot. If you care nothing for yourself, you might spare a thought for him. So I ask you again. Where is it?” He thrust the pencil at Luke, holding the pad within reach.

  Luke swallowed—something he’d never realized was such a complicated process—and fumbled to take the pencil. It was as if he’d never held anything like it before, although he couldn’t tell whether it was his flesh that was foreign or the feel of the pencil in his non-dominant hand.

  Sweat broke out across his forehead as he wrote. Stroke by stroke. Letter by letter. By the time he dropped the pencil onto the blanket, he might as well have hauled a fucking piano up the stairs.

  DiBartolo snatched the pad up. “What is this? Chickens could scratch more legibly.” He thrust it at Antoinette. “Can you make it out?”

  She tucked her hair behind her ears and peered down at it. “I can’t—” Her pale cheeks flushed, and she cut a glance at DiBartolo. “I believe it says . . . ah . . . ‘Fuck you.’”

  Stefan had firsthand experience that the whole alternate plane of existence crap was real—he’d been the victim of it once. But just because he’d been possessed by a ghost didn’t mean he knew horsepucky about how to find a real expert in the occult. After interviewing the first nine jokers on his list, though, he knew a hell of a lot about how to find bogus ones.

  And so far, they were all bogus.

  Now, as sweat trickled down his back in the humid Florida afternoon, his belly cramped with growing panic. Only two more to go. He blotted his forehead with the hem of his T-shirt. Someday maybe he could afford a car that wasn’t a POS—although he’d settle for one with a functioning air conditioner. Hell, if he was indulging in wishful thinking, how about a paranormal expert who wasn’t a fucking charlatan? He could tell already that the shop across the street was not going to hold one.

  He scowled at Probable Charlatan Number Ten’s shop. The storefront was peach stucco, not that that meant much in Sarasota—the whole place was a festival of soft-hued architecture. He wouldn’t be surprised if the BDSM clubs were draped in pastel gauze and crystals instead of leather and chains.

  He was tempted to shove the car back in gear and drive on. But he’d started down this path, and he’d damn well finish it. For Luke. For both of them. He wrestled the dented door of his car open in a screech of protesting metal, and gave it the extra shove with his hip to close it again. No point in locking it, because what idiot would steal the stupid thing?

  He stalked across the street, the sun hot on his head and shoulders, and ducked under the store’s blue-striped awning. The calligraphy painted on the window (in sea foam green) read Marguerite Windflower, Psychic Counselor, followed by a bullet-pointed list of offerings, including tarot, incense, horoscopes, and third eye exams. Great. Just fabulous. At least the books in the window display weren’t faded, flyspecked and dusty like the last three places. Or not-so-vaguely threatening like the two before that.

  The string of silver bells inside the shop door tinkled as Stefan stepped inside, a long narrow room reeking of jasmine with an undercurrent of clove. After he closed the door, though, the tinkle continued. Wind chimes. The sound set Stefan’s teeth on edge even more than the pyramid lighting fixtures swathed in diaphanous scarves.

  A woman in a tie-dyed caftan, her wig an explosion of white-blonde ringlets, stood behind the counter. Her hands sketched broad gestures in the air, setting the dozens of bangles on her arms chinking in opposition to the wind chimes. The customer, a Goth teenager as incongruous in the pastel palace as a skull in a Monet mural, nodded with each loop of the woman’s hands.

  Screw this.

  Stefan turned and yanked the door open to the accompaniment of more damned tinkling.

  “Wait.” The barked command should have been backed by the grunts of a football practice or an Army boot camp instead of the tinkle of wind chimes. Christ, she must be desperate for sales.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Wrong shop.”

  He pulled the door closed behind him. One last stop to make, and he’d have exhausted all his local options. He sniffed the sleeve of his T-shirt. Terrific. When he visited Venom’s Skull Emporium, he was going to stink like a florist with an incense bong.

  He trotted across the street and climbed into his car, which now doubled as the inside of a toaster with the westering sun pouring in through his windshield.

  “Sundown can’t come any too quickly,” he muttered, as he pulled into traffic.

  After too much time spent with Venom as daylight faded, though, Stefan would have worshipped at the altar of high noon. The Skull Emporium, with all its inverted pentagrams and black candles, was fucking creepy. And Venom, with his pointed goatee and red satin skullcap, was a bigger fake than everyone else put together. Although Stefan wouldn’t put money on him not being a serial killer.

  On the road back to his studio in the twilight, he passed the Psychic Counselor’s place again. The shop was closed, but he pulled up to the curb across the street anyway, an itch at the back of his brain as if he hadn’t cleaned all his brushes at the end of the day. Luke always gave him shit for his commitment to routine, but it had gotten him through the dark time after Luke first left him, and the darker time after Marius’s death.

  I should have talked to her. Hell, he’d spent over an hour listening to Venom drone on, but it was too late now, and he couldn’t take another day off from the gallery, not with the show less than a week away. Antoinette had been gracious about letting him bail on his commitments to her today, but he couldn’t impose on her again. She had pieces to complete too.

  This place was his last local option. After this, he’d have no choice but to move on to Orlando or New Orleans. But time and budget were against him there—and something told him that time in particular was running out.

  The pastel script on the window said For after-hours emergencies, call: with a phone number. Oookay. At least she doesn’t expect us to contact her via thought waves. He pulled out his cell and dialed the number, trying not to roll his eyes.

  A hold message backed by wind chimes cut off abruptly. “Took you long enough.”

  Stefan pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it. “Sorry. I think I have the wrong number.” Still. How many hold messages featured wind chimes?

  “No, you don’t. You’re the guy from the shop this afternoon, right? The one who left.”

  “Um . . . yeah.”

  “Parked out front?”

  How did she know that? A seedling of hope unfurled in Stefan’s belly. “Yeah.”

  “Come around to the back. I live above the shop.” She hung up.

  Stefan climbed out of his car and circled the building. The placard above the back door’s buzzer read Peg Clapp. Huh. Maybe she was incognito. Or maybe nobody really has a name like Marguerite Windflower. Before he could push the button, a voice crackled over the intercom.

  “Top of the stairs. Pull the door shut behind you. It sticks.”

  Stefan stepped inside and pulled as instructed. The stairwell was lit by a single bulb halfway up the staircase. He’d taken only two steps upward before the nape of his neck prickled. He check
ed over his shoulder. Nothing. He hurried to the top, gooseflesh creeping up his back the entire way.

  Again, he didn’t have a chance to knock before the door opened.

  The woman in the doorway bore about as much resemblance to the shop proprietor as a fire hydrant did to a garden gnome. Same general height and circumference, but as far as decoration went, no contest. Gone was the caftan, replaced by cropped cargo pants, battered running shoes, and a faded blue UMASS hoodie with cutoff sleeves. She’d pulled her gray-streaked red hair into a knot on top of her head, and a cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth.

  Stefan raised his eyebrows. “What happened to the blonde curls and the tie-dye?”

  “That crap is for the psychic tourists. I’m off the clock.”

  “How do you know I’m not a psychic tourist?”

  She blew a stream of clove-scented smoke out of the side of her mouth and pointed at the bridge of his nose. “You’ve been touched. I can see the footprint.” She held the door wider and jerked her head sideways. “Come on in.”

  She led the way down a short hallway to a kitchen-dining area. Poker chips littered the top of a hexagonal table, and five of the six chairs had a scatter of cards in front of them.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your game.” Stefan looked around for the other players, but beyond an archway the living room was empty.

  “They’ll wait. Not like they have anything else to do.”

  “But—” He gestured to the circle of chairs. “Where are they?”

  She jerked her chin at the table. “Right there.”

  “I . . . ah . . . don’t see anybody.”

  “That’s because they’re dead, asshole.”

  Stefan blinked. “You’re playing poker with ghosts? How do they pick up their cards?”

  “They don’t. Fuckers always cheat.” She raised her voice. “I know damn well the deck doesn’t have five aces, Hootie.”

  “Hootie? A ghost named Hootie?”

  “Easier than his real name.” Stefan cocked an eyebrow, and Peg said, “Hieronymus.” A wind rushed past, sending the cards blooming upward like a fountain.