Harlequin Nocturne March 2016 Box Set Read online

  Before he could say anything, though, one of the other guys took a break from twirling Angie to duck close to them. “Hey. This is Steve. He hasn’t been laid in a year.”

  With that introduction, he turned back around to leave an embarrassed-looking Steve to face Chelle, who covered a laugh with her hand. Steve coughed. Chelle smiled.

  “Why haven’t you been laid in a year?” Vodka asked that question, not her.

  Steve leaned a little closer so she could hear him. “I’ve been...busy? I guess?”

  “Don’t worry,” Chelle said as they both danced a little closer, letting the crowd push them. “I haven’t been laid in longer than that.”

  He put his hands on her hips to keep her from being jostled too much. They moved together easily enough. He was a good dancer.

  “How come?”

  Chelle leaned in to let her lips brush the curve of his ear. Vodka again, and more than that. The music. The crowd. The idea that the man in front of her hadn’t been in bed with someone else in a long time.

  “I lost my boyfriend,” came out of her mouth instead of something sexy and carefree, something casual. The truth slipped out of her, followed immediately by regret.

  Lost him. As if they’d gone to the park and he’d slipped his leash. Lost, as though he could ever be found.

  Steve didn’t seem fazed by her admission. He pulled her closer and nuzzled her cheek. He had nice hands, flat and warm on her hips, his fingers curling against her. “His loss.”

  Chelle wasn’t drunk, but when he kissed her, she did feel unsteady and uncertain. He tasted of dollar beers. He kissed too hard, too fast, but softened when she tried to draw back. Over his shoulder, Chelle saw Angie deep in conversation with one of the guys from the bachelor party, not the bachelor himself. The best man, the one who’d told Chelle that Steve hadn’t been laid in a year.

  She was going to do this, Chelle thought with sudden determination. Make out with a cute random. Have fun. Dance.

  Forget the past.

  She kissed him this time, and it was better. He laughed when she pulled away. His glasses were a little askew. She straightened them.

  “Buy me a drink,” Chelle said.

  He did. They kissed some more, in a dark corner with black light turning the flecks in his black T-shirt brilliant white. The kissing got better. Steve got handsy, and it felt good to be wanted. To be touched. Dirty, in the good way. The music played on. They danced.

  Chelle did not want to go home with him. Home being a room in the hotel attached to the club, a room he was sharing with two other guys. Definitely not her own house, which would require a twenty-minute cab ride and then breakfast in the morning.

  “They want us to eat hot dogs with them,” Angie said, bright eyes, lipstick worn off, her hair tousled. “Girl, I can’t eat any hot dogs at this hour.”

  “You want to go home?” They’d ducked into the bathroom together, leaving the “boys” behind. Chelle washed her hands and used a damp paper towel to blot away the sweat. She turned to her friend. “We can totally slip out the side. They’ll never know. Did you give him your name? Your number?”

  “I said my name was Amy, and hell no.” Angie laughed. “I wanted to make out, not get married. Let’s run. Oh... Don’t... You want to go upstairs? Sorry, I should’ve asked.”

  Chelle stepped aside to let someone else use the sink. “No. I mean, he’s nice and all, but I don’t want to go with him.”

  Angie took her by the shoulders gently and looked closely at her face. “Honey, if you want to go upstairs and kiss up on Steve a little bit more, I’m good with that. I just didn’t want you to feel...”

  “No.” Chelle shook her head, refusing to give in to melancholy. It was that time of night, when the buzz from the drinks and the kissing was wearing off. “Let’s get out of here.”

  In the surge of people exiting the club, Chelle and Angie managed to duck away from Steve and his buddy, whose name Chelle still didn’t know. She caught a glimpse of him, looking for her, and guilt prickled through her. Not so much that she turned back, though. All she wanted now was her bed.

  In the parking lot, something ugly was happening. Too many drunks, not enough cabs. A fistfight. She and Angie held back.

  “God, it’s like a pack of zombies,” Angie said as they waved over a cab at last. “You should write that story, Chelle. Two friends go out dancing and get caught up in the end of the world.”

  “Sexy,” Chelle said with a laugh as the cab pulled out of the parking lot.

  At home, though, with a couple glasses of cold water in her but a still-unsettled stomach, she wasn’t ready for bed yet. She didn’t want to think too much about Steve or why she’d ended up passing up the chance for what might’ve been a few more hours of fun. It wasn’t the idea of hooking up—she’d had a few one-nighters, a long time ago.

  It had been the way he’d looked at her as the night wore on. Hungry, but something else, too. Something soft and hopeful, which was not what you were supposed to find in the gaze of the random cute guy you wanted to make out with in a dark corner. At least, that wasn’t what Chelle had wanted to find.

  She opened her laptop, thinking to browse her emails, but instead, she pulled up GOLEM and a fresh file.

  Hungry, she typed. Steve had never been so hungry.

  CHAPTER 9

  “You have to be fucking kidding me!” Jase pulled his knife from the back of his belt as Reg unholstered his weapon. “That’s not... Is it?”

  Reg spat to the side. “Sure looks like it to me, man.”

  The thing in question was a rotting, stinking corpse in tattered clothes. Half its jaw swung, gaping, but it still managed to burble a gargling refrain of complaint. Jase would bitch, too, if he were the walking undead trapped under a Dumpster with a beady-eyed gull aiming to pluck out his tongue.

  The call had come in from a couple of drunks who’d gone into the alley to fuck but who’d found this thing instead. Whoever scanned the 911 calls had been quick to alert Vadim, who’d sent them out on this. The cops apparently hadn’t done anything about it, and who could blame them? Ocean City at four in the morning had enough other shit going on without responding to a call about a zombie in an alley.

  “You want to kill it?” Reg asked. “Splat, punch that effer in the brain?”

  Jase was well out of reach of the thing’s clutching fingers. “Dude, you know this isn’t a real zombie.”

  “It looks real enough that you could kill it,” Reg said mildly. “And shit, it stinks bad enough that you should.”

  “It’s like the flying monkeys, or King Kong,” Jase said in a low voice, easing closer. God, the thing did reek. Puddles of goo leaked out of it, so freaking gross. And it wasn’t as if he wanted to take a chance on it getting its teeth into him, even if virus zombies had never been proven to be real. The kind raised up from voodoo, yeah, but this guy on the ground was clearly the product of someone’s movie imagination. “Shine the light.”

  Glowing sparkles everywhere. The entire alley lit up with them. Not phosphorescence, and nothing actually present.

  “What the hell is going on?” Jase murmured, going to one knee to look the zombie in its desiccated face.

  Reg spat to the side. “Just off it.”

  That would’ve been easy enough to do. Knife to the head. Would it fade away, the thing, or would it remain as proof of what had happened?

  It snapped its teeth at him. Jase studied it. “Trying to find the link between this and the others.”

  Reg stood behind him. “Same glowing stuff under the black light. That’s about it.”

  “Did it attack anyone?”

  “No.” Reg scuffed at the garbage spilling out of the Dumpster. “Looks like it wants to.”

  Another thing shambled around the corner. I
dentical to the first, but this one upright and moving. It let out one of those disgusting gargles and reached for Reg, who rolled with a shout to escape. Jase, stuck between the Dumpster, the zombie on the ground and this new arrival, ducked its lunge and ended up with his back to the metal.

  The one on the ground sank its teeth into his boot; a quick kick thoroughly crunched its face into mush, but it kept going. The walker lunged at him again, and over its shoulder, Jase saw Reg draw.

  “No!” he shouted.

  Gunfire would attract attention. It would also splatter zombie gunk all over Jase, and he didn’t want to get a face full of guts. Instead, he kicked the looming monster in the knees, one at a time, sending it tumbling forward as he rolled out of the way. The thunk of its head connecting with the metal Dumpster was the sound of a watermelon hitting pavement.

  “Cool,” Reg said.

  Jase got to his feet, waiting to see if the thing was going to get up again, but it didn’t stir. He waved a hand in front of his face. “God, that smell.”

  “The smell’s kind of the same as that guy in the closet,” Reg said conversationally, turning as a couple of drunks stumbled into the alley. “Hey. You. Get the fuck out of here!”

  “You didn’t need to pull your piece on them,” Jase said. “What if they call the cops?”

  Reg grinned, but before he could answer, two more zombies rose up from behind the Dumpster. These were faster. Stronger. They didn’t fall apart at the first punch or kick. Still, it took only about a minute’s effort from both Reg and Jase to send them into a heap with the others.

  Barely panting, Reg gave Jase a look. “Okay, so...where are they coming from? Hole in the wall, like rats? What? Did you see them manifest or anything?”

  “No.” Jase nudged the pile with his foot. “And they’re physical, for sure. I don’t—”

  Four more zombies rose up from the shadows, though it was impossible to tell if they’d manifested from the darkness or had been merely lying in silent wait all this time. Four against two was still odds Jase and Reg could handle, especially against rotten corpses unsteady on their feet. It took more effort this time, and Jase had to use his knife, but they downed all four of the things in a splash of goo.

  “Okay, man,” Reg said. “This is getting freaky.”

  Eight zombies.

  No more conversation. He and Reg went into battle mode without words, without effort. They slipped as easily into the fight as if they were on the practice field. Fists and knives, still no guns because just around the corner, they could hear the laughter of a few more late-night revelers. The hint of a red-blue light drifted into the alley but faded along with the warning whoop of a police siren.

  Sweating, Jase dropped the last zombie and stood over it, watching it writhe for a moment before it went still. Swiping at his face with a grimace of disgust at the goop and stench, he shot Reg a look. The other man was in a similar pose.

  “The fuck,” Reg said.

  Jase shook his head. “Whatever’s going on, it’s got to be—”

  Sixteen zombies. The alley swarmed with them, and they backed Jase and Reg against the Dumpster, ankle deep in dead, rotting flesh. They’d come from nowhere. Slavering, lunging, jaws snapping. A bite wasn’t going to turn either of them into the risen dead, but it was going to hurt like hell and might still get infected.

  Reg waded in, knife slashing. Jase was right beside him, both pushing, slicing, kicking, punching. Jase brought his knife down, then up. Gore spattered. The zombie in front of him fell apart.

  They all fell apart.

  They were all gone.

  Reg looked at him. “Dude.”

  The only thing left in the alley was a swiftly fluttering bunch of trash on the ground and the gull, and that flew away with a startled squawk.

  CHAPTER 10

  She didn’t have to be up at any certain time, but Chelle set her alarm anyway because if she didn’t, she’d end up sleeping until ten or so, and then it felt as though she’d wasted too much of the day. Writing wasn’t a nine-to-five job, of course. The good thing was that she could do it anytime she liked. It was just that she liked to get a start on her day like a normal person, not like some slug who didn’t have the wherewithal to get out of bed.

  Even if she had been up until four in the morning, she thought as she groaned and turned off the alarm. Maybe if she’d been working on something new and fantastic until that time, she’d have felt more justified about not getting up, but instead, she’d spent a lot of her time fiddling around with stuff she’d already written, cutting and pasting and revising, cobbling together bits and bobs of old things without really creating anything new. GOLEM was an awesome program, but it was also a huge time waster once you fell into the pit of character work sheets and plotting tools.

  The zombie story had been promising, she thought as she considered a shower but couldn’t quite rouse herself enough to get out of the warm blankets. If only because it had been so darned fun to write. A raging orgy of fluids and flying limbs. Basically the same thing as what she’d seen on Friday night at the club, she thought with a giggle, then felt another small pang of guilt about ducking out on the guy she’d been kissing.

  Stretching, Chelle snuggled back into her pillow for a few more seconds. Her eyes felt gritty. The residual aches and pains from getting hit by the bike were always worse in the morning, although her bruises had faded. There was just some remaining soreness in her shoulder and neck, and that could be attributed as much to her terrible posture when she was on her laptop as anything else.

  “Get up,” she told herself out loud, as though scolding were going to work. “Lazy ass.”

  When her phone pinged, she twisted to check the message, which turned out to be a reminder that her meter was going to be read. Excitement, she thought and gave herself permission to also check her email while she was there.

  “Holy...” Chelle sat straight up in bed, phone clutched in suddenly sweaty hands.

  Someone wanted to buy her short story. It was for an anthology, small print press, but there was a nominal advance. Far from what she’d been earning with her nonfiction work, but...it was a sale.

  An honest-to-goodness sale.

  She was already turning in bed to tell him the good news when she remembered she was alone. Still. Always.

  Chelle slid a fingertip across the phone’s screen to close her mail and let her hands rest in her lap. She was not going to cry, she told herself. Grant would’ve been happy for her no matter what had happened between them, and she would remember that, not any of the other stuff. She closed her eyes, breathing in. Breathing out. She was not going to cry.

  She’d go for a run instead.

  She would run and run and work this out, and when she got back, she’d answer the editor’s email, and then she would write more words and maybe even put together something for another submission. She was going to do this, make it happen. She was going to do this.

  Up and dressed, she decided against running through the streets. It was light out, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t get hit by another drunk dude on a bike. Besides, she needed the ocean today. She needed the rush and crash of the salt and sea.

  She needed a lot of things, Chelle thought, but she’d have to settle for this.

  CHAPTER 11

  Jase had grown up so far from the ocean it had seemed like a myth. He’d been nearly thirty before he’d ever tasted that particular grit of salt water and sand you could get in your mouth only after being tumbled by a wave. Since then, he’d made it a point to get himself into the sea as often as he could.

  He’d been up early this morning for a swim. The encounter behind the dance club had left him and Reg working overtime trying to put the pieces together, but though they’d interviewed a half dozen of the people who’d been in the parking l
ot that night, the ones they could find anyway, nobody else had seen anything except that first couple.

  They’d been lucky, he thought as he stretched, bare chested, in the brisk early-morning air. Getting beaten up by King Kong would probably have been a walk in the park compared to fending off a pack of zombies, even if they’d turned out not to be real.

  “I get it now,” Reg had told him after it happened, on the long, quiet and stinking car ride back to the condo. “I totally understand what you meant, about being inside it but looking back as though it had happened to someone else. We really need to figure this out and stop it, Jase. Someone’s going to get more than banged up. Someone’s going to get killed.”

  Reg, for all his joking around, took his job with the Crew really seriously. Jase had never asked his partner what had brought him to the job, but whatever had happened to Reg had left a scar as deep as anything could.

  They’d both been working all night but still hadn’t been able to draw any lines. Eggy had been researching all kinds of explanations, including solar storms, which she said could cause insomnia and headaches but had never been known to lead to hallucinations with physical manifestations.

  “Shit,” Jase muttered and scrubbed at his eyes.

  He stretched again, feeling ill at ease and with nothing to do about it. This morning he’d already swum farther, ran faster than usual. The cup of joe he normally needed first thing in the morning to even consider feeling like a normal person? Nope. The mug on the railing in front of him had gone cold from lack of interest. He tossed it over the edge now.

  And heard a scream.

  Shit—Jase looked over the edge to see a woman on the small path that led from the access road toward the beach. He’d completely drenched her, top to toe, with lukewarm coffee. At least it hadn’t been boiling, he had time to think before she tipped her face up to see who’d done such an egregious thing to her.