After Moonrise: Possessed\Haunted
Read After Moonrise: Possessed\Haunted Online
Authors: P.C. Cast
Join two of the biggest names in paranormal romance on a
breathtaking journey to a world where ghosts live on and love never dies…
POSSESSED
#1
New York Times
Bestselling
Author
P.C. Cast
Being a psychic detective who can channel only negative
emotions makes Kent Raef good at catching murderers, but bad at maintaining
relationships. Then Lauren Wilcox arrives with a most intriguing case: her twin
sister has been murdered and is communing with Lauren’s spirit—and sharing her
body. Raef’s the only one who can track the killer and free the spirit. But soon
he begins to wonder just which twin he wants to save…and why….
HAUNTED
New York Times
Bestselling Author
Gena Showalter
Artist Aurora Harper is convinced she’s witnessed a crime—a
murder so brutal she’s repressed the memories, only to paint the scene by the
light of the moon. Now she needs her new neighbor, Detective Levi Reid, to help
her track down the victim—and the killer. Levi’s dealing with his own memory
issues, but one thing he knows for sure: Harper is meant to be his, and nothing
can take her away from him—not in this life…and not in death….
Praise for the novels of #1
New York
Times
bestselling author
“Cast once again challenges readers to look beyond outward
appearances and, simultaneously, crafts an exciting adventure that will appeal
both to romance and traditional fantasy fans.”
—
RT
Book Reviews
on
Brighid’s Quest
“The action becomes both intense and thoroughly
entertaining.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
on
Destined
“P.C. Cast is a stellar talent.”
—
New
York Times
bestselling author Karen Marie Moning
Praise for the novels of
New York
Times
bestselling author
“One of the premier authors of paranormal romance.”
—#1
New York Times
bestselling author Kresley
Cole
“Gena Showalter knows how to keep readers glued to the pages
and smiling the whole time.”
—
New York Times
bestselling author Lara Adrian on
The Darkest
Surrender
“The Showalter name on a book means guaranteed
entertainment.”
—
RT Book Reviews
on
Twice as Hot
Also available from P.C. CAST
Elphame’s Choice
Brighid’s
Quest
Divine by Mistake
Divine by Choice
Divine by
Blood
Time Raiders: The Avenger
Also available from GENA SHOWALTER
Wicked Nights
The Darkest
Seduction
The Darkest Surrender
The Darkest Secret
The
Darkest Lie
The Darkest Passion
Into the Dark
Heart of
Darkness
The Darkest Whisper
The Darkest Pleasure
The Darkest
Kiss
The Darkest Night
Twice as Hot
Playing with
Fire
The Vampire’s Bride
The Nymph
King
Jewel of Atlantis
Heart of the Dragon
Alice in Zombieland
Twisted
Unraveled
Intertwined
Dating the Undead
(with Jill Monroe)
And coming soon
Beauty Awakened
After Moonrise
#1
New York Times
Bestselling
Author
P.C. CAST
New York Times
Bestselling
Author
GENA SHOWALTER
Acknowledgments
I want to send hugs and kisses to Gena Showalter! It is beyond
awesome to be able to work on cool projects with my girlfriend. Ms. Snowwater, I
totally heart you!
A big thank-you to my wonderful longtime editor Mary-Theresa
Hussey. It is soooo nice to be working with you again!
Katie Rowland—THANK YOU FOR THE TU DETAILS. Now, go get ready
for finals. Seriously.
As always, I appreciate, respect and adore my agent, Meredith
Bernstein.
CHAPTER ONE
The bully’s dad caused Raef to
discover his Gift. It happened twenty-five years ago, but to Raef the memory
was as fresh as this morning’s coffee. You just don’t forget your first
time. Not your first orgasm, your first drunk, your first kill and, not for
damn sure, your first experience of being able to Track violent
emotions.
The bully’s name was Brandon. He’d been a
big kid; at thirteen he’d looked thirty-five—and a rough thirty-five at
that. At least, that’s what he’d looked like through nine-year-old Raef’s
eyes. Not that Brandon picked on Raef. He hadn’t—not especially. Brandon
mostly liked to pick on girls. He didn’t hit ’em. What he did was worse. He
found out what scared them, and then he tortured them with fear.
Raef discovered why the day Brandon went
after Christina Kambic with the dead bird. Christina wasn’t hot. Christina
wasn’t ugly. She was just a girl who had seemed like every other teenage
girl to young Raef: she had boobs and she talked a lot, two things that,
even at nine, Raef had understood were part of the pleasure and the pain of
females.
Brandon didn’t target Christina because of
her boobs or her mouth. He targeted her because somehow he had found out she
was utterly, completely terrified of birds.
The part of the day that was burned into
Raef’s memory began after school. Brandon had been walking home on the
opposite side of the street from Raef and his best friend, Kevin. On
Brandon’s side of the street was a group of girls. They were giggling and
talking at about a zillion miles per hour. Brandon was ahead of them and, as
usual, by himself. Brandon didn’t really have any friends. Raef had barely
noticed him and only kinda remembered that he’d been kicking around
something near the curb.
Raef and Kevin had been talking about
baseball tryouts. He’d wanted to be shortstop. Kev had wanted to be the
pitcher. Raef had been saying, “Yeah, you got a better arm than Tommy. No
way would Coach pick—”
That’s when Christina’s bawling had
started.
“No, please no, stop!” She was pleading
while she cried. Two of her friends had screamed and run off down the
street. Two more had stayed and were yelling at Brandon to stop.
Brandon ignored all of them. He’d backed
Christina against the fence to Mr. Fulton’s front yard, taken the smashed
body of what was obviously a road-killed crow and was holding it up, real
close to Christina, and making stupid cawing noises while he
laughed.
“Please!” Christina sobbed, her face in
her hands, pressing herself against the wooden fence so hard that Raef had
thought she might smash through it. “I can’t stand it! Please
stop!”
Raef had thought about how big Brandon
was, and how much older Brandon was, and he’d stood there across the street,
ignoring Kevin and doing nothing. Then Brandon pushed the dead bird into
Christina’s hair and the girl started screaming like she was being
murdered.
“Hey, this isn’t your business,” Kevin had
said when Raef sighed heavily and started crossing the street.
“Doesn’t have to be my business. It just
has to be mean,” Raef had shot back over his shoulder at his
friend.
“Bein’ a hero’s gonna get you in a lot of
trouble someday,” Kevin had said.
Raef remembered silently agreeing with
him. But still he kept crossing the street. He got to Brandon from behind.
Quickly, like he was fielding a ball, he snatched the bird out of
Christina’s hair, and threw it down the street. Way down the
street.
“What the fuck is your problem, asshole?”
Brandon shouted, looming over Raef like a crappy version of the Incredible
Hulk.
“Nothin’. I just think making a girl cry
is stupid.” Raef had looked around Brandon’s beefy body at Christina. Her
feet musta been frozen because she was still standing there, bawling and
shaking, and hugging herself like she was trying to keep from falling apart.
“Go on home, Christina,” Raef urged. “He ain’t gonna bother you
anymore.”
It was about two point five seconds later
that Brandon’s fist slammed into Raef’s face, breaking his nose and knocking
him right on his butt.
Raef remembered he was holding his
bleeding nose and looking up at the big kid through tears of pain and he’d
thought,
Why the hell are you so mean?
That’s when it happened. The instant Raef
had wondered about Brandon, a weird ropelike thing had appeared around the
boy. It was smoky and dark, and Raef had thought it looked like it must
stink. It was snaking from Brandon up, into the air.
It fascinated Raef.
He stared at it, forgetting about his
nose. Forgetting about Christina and Kevin, and even Brandon. All he wanted
was to know what the smoky rope was.
“Fucking look at me when I’m talking to
you! It’s sickening how easy it is to kick your ass!” Brandon’s anger and
disgust fed the rope. It pulsed and darkened, and with a whoosh! it exploded
down and into Raef. Suddenly Raef could feel Brandon’s anger. He could feel
his disgust.
Completely freaked out, Raef had closed
his eyes and yelled, not at Brandon, at the creepy rope, “Go away!” Then the
most bizarre thing happened. The rope-thing had gone away, but in Raef’s
mind he went with it. It was like the thing had turned into a telescope and
all of a sudden Raef saw Brandon’s home—inside it. Brandon was there. So
were his dad and mom. His dad, an older, fatter version of Brandon, was
towering over his mom, who was curled up on the couch, holding herself while
she cried and shook like Christina had just been doing. Brandon’s dad was
yelling at his mom, calling her an ugly, stupid bitch. Brandon watched. He
looked disgusted, but not at his dad. His look was focused on his mom. And
he was pissed. Really, really pissed.
It made Raef want to puke. The instant he
felt sick, actually felt his own feelings again, it was like turning off a
light switch. The rope disappeared, along with the telescope and the vision
of Brandon’s house, leaving Raef back in the very painful, very embarrassing
present.
Raef opened his eyes and said the first
thing that popped into his head. “How can you blame your mom for your dad
being so mean?”
Brandon’s body got real still. It was like
he quit breathing. Then his face turned beet-red and he shouted down at
Raef, spit raining from his mouth. “What did you just say about my
mom?”
Raef often wondered why the hell he hadn’t
just shut up. Got up. And run away. Instead, like a moron, he’d said, “Your
dad picks on your mom like you pick on girls. I know ’cause I just saw it.
Inside my head. Somehow. I don’t know how, though.” Raef had paused, thought
for a second and then added, trying to figure it out aloud, “Your dad was
calling your mom an ugly, stupid bitch last night. You watched
him.”
Then the weird got, like, weird squared
because Brandon reacted as if Raef had all of a sudden grown two feet,
gained a hundred pounds and punched him in the gut. The big kid looked sick,
scared even, and started backing away, but before he turned and sprinted
down the street, he yelled the words that would cling to Raef for the rest
of his life. “I know what you are! You’re worse than a nigger, worse than a
creeper. You’re a Psy—a fucking freak. Stay the hell away from
me!”
Oh, shit. It was true. No way…no way…
Raef had sat there, bloody, confused
and—embarrassingly enough—bawling, while his best friend called his name
over and over, trying to get him to snap out of it. “Raef! Raef!
Raef…”
“Mr. Raef? Raef? Are you there, sir?”
Coming back to the present, Raef shook himself, mentally and
physically, and picked up the phone, punching the intercom button off. “Yeah,
Preston, what is it?”
“Mr. Raef, your zero-nine-hundred appointment is here, thirty
minutes early.”
Raef cleared his throat and said, “You know, Preston, it’s a
damn shame my Gift doesn’t include predicting the future, or I’d have known that
and been ready for her.”
“Yes, sir, but then I would probably be out of a job,” Preston
retorted with his usual dry humor.
Raef chuckled. “Nah, there’d still be all that filing to
do.”
“It’s what I live for, sir.”
“Glad to hear it. Okay, give me five and send her in.”
“Of course, Mr. Raef. Then I’ll get back to my filing.”
Raef blew out a breath, grabbed his half-empty coffee mug and
stalked over to the long credenza that sat against the far wall of his spacious
office. He topped off the coffee and then stood there, unmoving, staring out the
window. Not that he was actually seeing the excellent view of Tulsa’s skyline on
this crisp fall day. Kent Raef was trying to scratch the weird itch that had
been tickling his mind all morning.
What the hell was wrong with him? Why the walk down memory lane
this morning? God, he hated the thought of that day—hated remembering that
scared, crying kid he’d been. He’d just wanted to be shortstop for his team, and
try to fit in with everyone else. Instead, he’d been a psychic. The only one in
his class. Norms didn’t react so well to a Psy—especially not a nine-year-old
Psy that could Track violent emotions, no matter how supportive his parents had
been—no matter how cool it had been when the USAF Special Forces had recruited
him. Raef hated remembering those years and the pain in the ass it had been
learning to deal with his Gift and the way asshole Norms reacted to it.
It made him feel like shit to go back there—to revisit those
memories. Today it also made him feel kinda shaky, kinda strange. If he didn’t
know better he’d think he was picking up emotions from someone—soft emotions,
like yearning and desire, overshadowed by a deep melancholy.
“Shit, Raef, get it together,” he grunted to himself. He did
know better. Soft emotions? He snorted.
His
psychic
powers didn’t work that way—didn’t ever work that way. A pissed-off jerk who
took out his problems by kicking his dog was the softest Psy Tracking he’d ever
picked up. “I need to get a life,” he muttered as he returned to his desk and
sat down, just in time for the single knock on the door. “Yeah, come in,” he
snapped.
The door opened, and his secretary, Preston, announced, “Mrs.
Wilcox to see you, Mr. Raef.”
Raef automatically stood as the tall blonde entered his office.
He held out his hand to her, and ignored the fact that she hesitated well into
the realm of rudeness before she shook it. A lot of Norms didn’t like to be
touched by his kind, but
she
had come to
him,
not the other way around, and so she was going to
have to play by his rules. On his team, a handshake was nonnegotiable.
Of course, her hesitation might be due to the fact that his
skin was too brown for her liking—she did have the look of one of those
fiftysomething, old-oil-money cougars who were convinced that their shit didn’t
stink, and that the only reason God made anyone with skin a darker shade than
lily-white was because of the unfortunate but unavoidable need for menial
laborers.
“Constance Wilcox,” she said, finally taking his hand in a grip
that was surprisingly firm. He recognized the name as belonging to one of Tulsa
society’s elite, though he definitely didn’t move in those circles.
“Kent Raef. Coffee, Mrs. Wilcox?”
She shook her head with a curt motion. “No, thank you, Mr.
Raef.”
“All right. Please have a seat.” Raef waited for her to settle
into one of the straight-backed leather chairs in front of his wide desk before
he sat. He didn’t particularly like the fact that he’d had old-world gentleman
programmed into his genes, but some habits were just not worth the effort it
took to break them.
“What can I do for you, Mrs. Wilcox?”
“Don’t you already know that?”
He tried not to let his annoyance show. “Mrs. Wilcox, I’m sure
my secretary explained that I wouldn’t be Reading you. That’s now how my Gift
works. So, relax. There’s no reason for you to be nervous around me.”
“If you can’t read my mind, how do you know that I need to
relax and that I’m nervous?”
“Mrs. Wilcox, you’re sitting ramrod straight and you’ve got
your hands so tightly laced together that your fingers are white. It doesn’t
take a psychic to tell that you’re tense and that your nerves are on edge.
Anyone with half a brain and moderate powers of observation could deduce that.
Besides that, my Gift deals with the darker side of the paranormal. People don’t
come to me to find lost puppies or communicate with the ghost of Elvis. People
come to me because bad things have happened to them or around them, and bad
things happening in a person’s life tend to make him or her—” he tipped his head
to her in a slight nod “—nervous and tense.”
She glanced down at her clasped hands and made a visible effort
to relax them. Then she looked back at him. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m not
comfortable with this.”
“This?” No, hell, no. He wasn’t going to make it any easier for
her. Not this morning. Not when it felt like something was trying to crawl under
his skin. He was fucking sick and tired of dealing with people who hired
psychics from After Moonrise, but acted as if they’d find it more desirable to
work side by side with someone who was unclogging their backed-up septic tank—by
hand.
“Death.” She said the word so softly Raef almost didn’t hear
her.
He blinked in surprise. So, it wasn’t the psychic part that had
her acting like an ice queen—it was the dead part. That was easier for him to
understand. Death, specifically murder, was his job. But that didn’t mean he
liked it, either.