Ghouls Just Haunt to Have Fun (8 page)

When Steven and I reached our room he took the key card out of my hand and picked me up dramatically. “Allow me,” he said, moving in to kiss my neck.

I felt that tired feeling leave me immediately, replaced by raging hormones. The man
knew
how to turn me on. I heard a small click, and Steven had the door open and was carrying me across the threshold.

The room was dark, but there was enough light to make out the bed, and Steven moved from nibbling my neck up to my lips. The man is an amazing kisser, and I heard myself moan as my fingers found the buttons on his shirt.

He laid me gently down on the bed, and the heat between us rose a few degrees. I felt his fingers curl into my hair, and I couldn’t seem to get his shirt off fast enough. I ached something fierce to feel his skin.

Steven shrugged out of his shirt, and I ran my fingers through the small tuft of hair along his chest. He gave a soft moan when I thrust my pelvis up into his, and responded by deepening his kiss.

My shirt came off along with my bra, and just as things were getting
really
interesting there was a tremendous crash against the room door, followed by the shouting of two angry men clearly intent on killing each other.

Chapter 4

Steven was off of me in a hot second and racing to the room door. It took me a little longer, as I didn’t want to flash the “ladies” by running out into the hallway half-naked, but I joined him a moment later, wriggling into my shirt.

Steven was trying to get the door open, and having a hell of a time of it. “What’s the matter?” I shouted, my voice trying to rise above the commotion in the hallway.

“The door won’t open!” Steven said, pulling fiercely down on the handle and trying to yank it away from the doorjamb.

“Is it locked?” I asked, flipping on the light so that he could see better.

Steven grunted as he again attempted to heave the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. Meanwhile the fight outside seemed to be raging on, full force. “I’m calling the front desk,” I said, hurrying to the phone on the nightstand. “Look out the peephole, Steven, and see if you can give me a description so I can have the desk alert security.”

As I lifted the phone and pressed 0, however, the noise from outside our door vanished, and with a whack I heard our door open so quickly that it hit Steven right in the face.

“Ungh!” he said as he fell backward to land flat on his back.

“Front desk,” announced a woman’s voice into the earpiece of the phone.

“What the hell?” I gasped, looking at Steven clutching his forehead and swearing in both Spanish and German.

“Hello?” said the desk clerk. “Can I help you?”

I opened my mouth to say something, but the situation was so freaky I didn’t know where to begin. Finally I said, “There were two men fighting outside our door, and I think they hurt my boyfriend!”

“How badly is he injured?” asked the desk clerk, clearly alarmed.

“Steven,” I said, bending down next to him and pulling at the hand covering his forehead. “Let me see, honey.”

Steven resisted for just a second, still swearing; then he sat up awkwardly and moved his hand. I sucked in a breath as I spotted the deep vertical gash right above his left brow and told the clerk, “He’s going to need stitches.”

She responded by speaking rapidly to someone nearby, but she was obviously covering the mouthpiece, because it was muffled. Then she said, “I’m sending security right up, ma’am. Please stay in your room and lock the door until he arrives.”

I leaned out over Steven and spied the open door. No one was evident out in the hallway, and as my mind tried to grapple with what had happened our door abruptly slammed shut so hard that it rattled the walls. “Holy crap!” I screeched, jumping to the side. It was then that I became aware of the goose bumps running up and down my arms.

“Steven,” I whispered hurriedly while tossing aside the phone, “honey, I’ve got to move you over to the bed.”

“My head,” Steven said, his bloody hand going back to his brow. “Jesus,” he added. “I’m bleeding.”

All of a sudden my chest became tight, as if my heart were caught in a vise. “Oh, no!” I said, feeling my breath quicken. “Steven!” I insisted, tugging at his arm. “Get . . . to . . . the . . . bed!”

“What’s the matter with you?” I heard him say, but focusing on him was now intensely difficult. The tightening in my chest grew worse, and I felt as though I could barely breathe. “Someone’s trying to take me over.” I gasped. “You’ve got to get away from me!”

“What do you mean, take you over?”

I gasped again and felt myself being tugged backward, as if a black hole had suddenly taken hold of my energy. “Leave . . . me . . . alone!” I managed, trying to pull back from the incredibly powerful energy tugging at every fiber of me.

“M.J.?!” Steven said in a voice filled with urgency and alarm. “What’s happening to your face?”

I tried to focus on him, but my vision began to close in, and the tunnel I felt I was looking out of seemed to lengthen. “
Get . . . away
!” I shouted, willing myself to stay in control of my body. But the energy that had jumped into mine and was attempting to literally hijack me wouldn’t let go.

As if from a distance I felt myself being shaken, and Steven’s voice echoed into my thoughts. “M.J.!” he was yelling. “What’s happening to you?”

“Nooooooo!” I said, curling my fingers around his arms, struggling with everything I had to hold on and resist the sensations assaulting me.

The next few minutes were a bit of a blur. There was a hideous voice that kept echoing loudly through my brain, and I felt my lips moving and strange sounds coming out of my mouth, and then someone was pounding on the door, and I focused as hard as I could on the sound, like a drumbeat calling me back.

Finally I felt the shivers, and such a deep sense of cold that I didn’t think I’d ever feel warm again. And then my vision came back, and I could see Steven clearly again, his gash bleeding badly and such a look of concern on his face that it shocked me.

“Is she having a seizure?” I heard another voice ask.

“I don’t know,” Steven said, relaxing just a bit when he saw my eyes blinking at him.

“I’m okay,” I finally managed to say as my teeth chattered.

“Can you hand me the bedcover?” Steven asked the man standing in the room wearing a gray shirt with a badge and black pants, who was obviously hotel security.

The security guy yanked the coverlet off our bed and helped Steven wrap me in it. “Sir, you’re bleeding pretty bad,” the guard remarked, getting up and hurrying to the bathroom.

He returned a moment later with a washcloth and a towel. “Maybe I should call an ambulance for you two?”

“No,” I said, sitting up and clutching at the coverlet. “I’m fine.” But then I realized that Steven might be more hurt than he looked, so I quickly added, “Unless, Steven, you feel you want to go to the hospital by ambulance?”

My boyfriend took a long time to answer. He’d let go of me and was holding the wet washcloth to his forehead, applying pressure to his head wound. The look on his face was both frightened and suspicious. “No,” he finally said. “No ambulance. I brought my bag with me,” he added, his eyes roving to the small medical bag he usually carried everywhere he went. “I’ve got medical glue in there that I can seal the cut up with.”

“You a doctor?” the security guy asked. Steven nodded absently. There was an awkward silence before the guard asked, “Would either of you two like to tell me what happened?”

I looked at Steven and he looked at me, as if to ask each other who wanted to explain the unexplainable. I took the lead. “We heard a fight break out in the hallway. It sounded violent, and my boyfriend here went to investigate, but the door got stuck and wouldn’t open. And then it gave way, and it hit him in the forehead.”

“Did you see who was fighting?” asked the guard.

I shook my head, and Steven said, “No. We didn’t. But it definitely sounded like two men.”

“It was so loud I can’t imagine we were the only ones who heard it,” I added. “If you knock on a few of the other guests’ doors, I’m sure they heard it too, and maybe they saw something.”

“Okay,” said the guard, taking out a small pad and jotting down a few notes. “I’ll ask around. Ma’am,” he added, looking at me with concern while I shivered in my coverlet, “are you sure you’re all right?”

“Of course,” I said, and realized I probably didn’t look convincing, so I tossed in, “I’m hypoglycemic—low blood sugar. Sometimes it can give me the shakes.”

“Can I get you a candy bar?” he suggested kindly.

I forced a smile. “That’d be great, sir. Thank you.”

The guard quickly left, promising to return in a few minutes, leaving Steven and me alone in awkward silence. “You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?” I finally asked.

Steven shook his head. “I can fix this, no problem.” I noticed he was still looking at me oddly. “M.J.?”

“I was hijacked by a spirit,” I explained before he had a chance to ask the full question.

“What is this ‘hijacked’?” he asked.

“It’s only happened to me one time before,” I explained, remembering a tricky bust Gilley and I had done when I was still fairly new to this medium stuff. “Some ghosts are superaggressive, and when given the opportunity they can attempt to literally take over your body.”

Steven’s jaw dropped in horror. “You were possessed?”

That made me chuckle. “Not exactly,” I said. “At least, not like they portray it in the movies. But I suppose that technically, yeah, I was a little possessed. Usually spirits who do this sort of thing can only hold on for a short period of time, but while they take over your body, you’re completely unaware of what’s going on.”

Steven’s expression looked haunted. (Forgive the pun, but it really did look like that.) “Something happened to your face. You looked . . .” He paused as if he were searching for the right word. “. . . masculine.”

“I did?”

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “Your face was angry, and your eyes . . . M.J., I swear they turned
brown
.”

For the record, my eyes are naturally gray. “That is
freaky
!” I said, half fascinated, half completely creeped out.

“And your voice changed too,” Steven added. “It got very deep, and you started speaking Portuguese.”

I felt my brows shoot up. “Really?” I was now very interested. “Could you understand what I was saying?”

Steven’s lips pressed together, and he gave a curt nod. “It was some scary shit. You said you were the eater of flesh. That you were looking forward to a meal of virgins and babies. That you wanted to quench the blood thirst of your ancestors.”

I gaped at him. “Whoa,” I whispered after a long pause. “This guy is one sick son of a bitch.”

“It was most upsetting,” Steven agreed.

“Did he mention a name? Did he tell you who he was?”

“No. After telling me you wanted to eat the babies, your face changed back to look like you, and then your eyes rolled up, and you fell back on the floor.”

“That must’ve been when I was able to fight him off,” I said with a shiver. “I felt him leave my body right when the security guard began knocking on our door.”

“Is this spirit still here?” Steven asked, his eyes warily roving the room.

“No,” I said, feeling out the area with my antennae. “He’s gone.”

“Do you think he’ll come back and do this hijacking again?” Steven whispered nervously.

“I sure as hell hope not,” I said, rubbing my neck, and when I noticed that Steven still looked intensely worried I added, “Now that I know this character is on the prowl, I can do things to make sure he doesn’t take me over again.”

“Like what things?”

“Well,” I said, getting up and moving over to my suitcase, searching through the zippered pocket to find a certain crystal I’d brought along. “This is sphalerite,” I said, holding up a gray, knobby rock for him to see and feeling an immediate sense of heaviness all through me, as if an invisible weight were pressing down on me. “It’s an ore found in zinc. As long as I keep it close by, my energy is too heavy for this creepy spirit to want to bother with me.”

Steven got up too and went to peer at his wound in the mirror above the dresser. “I don’t understand,” he said. “The stone is heavy?”

I came to stand next to him as he inspected his gash. “Not exactly.” I winced as he dabbed at the blood still leaking out of his wound. “But it does make my aura heavy. See, normally my energy is really light—I sort of raise my vibrations so that I can communicate with other spirits. And this is what is so attractive to negative spirits like this hijacker. I’m fairly easy to take over because my energy is vibrating so fast. But this little crystal slows those vibrations way down, and it’s much, much harder for someone to enter my auric field when that happens.”

Steven moved over to his bag and began lifting out tubes and a small bottle of antiseptic. “Are you sure it will work?” he asked, and I could tell he was still unnerved by what had happened to me.

“Yes,” I said softly, pulling out a chair and motioning for him to sit down. When he did I took the antiseptic from his hands and began to gently clean around the gash for him. Once I’d wiped up the blood, the cut on his forehead didn’t look nearly as serious as I’d thought.

“Let me see,” he said, and swiveled toward the mirror. Poking around the edges of the wound he said, “This is not too bad.”

“I should get you some ice,” I offered, and at that moment there was a knock on our door and the security guard stepped back in, along with another gentleman who looked like he’d had a rough day.

“I got you a Twix,” the guard said, holding out the candy bar to me. “And this is Murray Knollenberg, the general manager of the Duke.”

“I understand you were injured this evening, Dr. Sable?” said Knollenberg. “I’m terribly sorry,” he added when Steven turned to face him and the GM got a good look at the gash on his forehead. “Can I provide you with transportation to the hospital?”