Kiss Me Deadly: Tales of a Paranormal Romance

tablecloth.

“Enjoy-a!” the waiter pronounced and trotted off with a little skip.

It was too much to take. They’d been talking about sweet and sour pork and stuff and now all this yummy food? Velvet couldn’t resist.

She glanced at Nick’s head sticking out of the wall next to her like a hunting trophy. “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”

“Probably.”

“Well I’m thinkin’ we do a quick little possession and fill our mouths with some yum.”

He nodded. “Then yeah. We’re thinkin’ the same thing. Yeah.”

They didn’t need a count of three, just rushed forward. Velvet dove headfirst into Mr. Pin-Stripe Suit, his cheeks already puffed out with creamy, garlicky clams. He was in a state of such taste-bud ecstasy that he barely noticed Velvet locking his mind away and taking possession. She always imagined encasing minds in an imaginary box near the subject’s left ear. Whether there was a box or not, she could care less. The visualization was the important thing, you understand.

Nick struck out for the man’s date, a woman in a poofy gown. She could have been his daughter, but she wasn’t—Velvet felt the girl’s hand on the man’s thick knee the minute she slid him on like a new outfit. She watched as Nick took hold of the girl’s brain and jerked her hand away prudishly.

“It’s just me, knucklehead.” Velvet chided.

“Yeah,” he said. “But right now, you’re kind of a guy.”

Velvet ignored him and glanced down at the plate. Swoon. It was hard to figure out what to do first. The extent of a Purgatory-bonded soul’s nourishment was the entertainments they took in at the weekly Salons. But this. This was real food. And she planned to cherish the experience.

She scraped a clam out of its shell and spun it in the creamy sauce, plunging the tines of the fork deep in the noodles and spinning. She didn’t much care if she was making the guy look like a pig or not. She shoved the giant ball of slippery noodles and seafood into his mouth and chomped like a pig at the trough. The garlicky goodness exploded throughout her senses, and she closed her eyes, munching quietly as the clamor of the room was washed away in her rapture.

“Oh, oh. I think that’s our guy!” A woman’s voice stuttered.

It took Velvet a second to realize the voice came from Nick. She opened her eyes to see Mr. Pin-Stripe Suit’s date, face smudged with chunks of marinara and noodle debris, pointing across the room. Velvet followed her gaze and noticed a man, wearing sunglasses and a waiter’s uniform, shoving his arms into a raincoat.

She shoved one more forkful of pasta into the man’s mouth and gave it a final loving chew before dispossessing the body and darting through the room after their prey. Turning around mid-run to scream for Nick, she noticed she was waist high in the center of one of the round tables, a fluttering hurricane lamp glowing inside her abdomen.

She chuckled a bit at the sight.

Once Nick had given up on his food—the man’s date spasmed a bit as he disentangled from her—he joined her, running flat across the restaurant. Nick wasn’t nearly as proficient with the living as he was the dead. You should see him maneuver a corpse, though, Velvet thought. Fast zombies do exist. At least when Nick was working on them. But she didn’t have the stomach for the job and, thankfully, she’d only had to steer a dead body once.

Velvet darted for the door, Nick hot on her heels.

They sped out the front door and into a dark rainy street. Huge drops pelted off car roofs in sharp tink s, a salty wind blew, and the shadows of young lovers holding each other under umbrellas stretched toward them like freaky mushrooms grown up out of the sidewalk.

There was no sign of Abner Conroy.

“Do you think he saw us?” Velvet asked. “Or you rather, since you were pointing at him like you’d seen an alien or something.”

“Um ... I was distracted.”

She nodded. “Mmm hmm. Well, he’s definitely working in the restaurant. So close to the crack, he’s literally on top of it. It doesn’t make sense that the Vermillion team couldn’t find him.”

“Maybe they weren’t looking,” Nick suggested.

Velvet thought about that for a moment. They had said they were terribly busy. But what had she and Nick really seen? The kid spent his evening conning old souls out of their paper coins, Amie was busy all right—being a bitch and a tease, to put it mildly—and the other poltergeist enjoyed her snooze time. Not quite as active as Amie had led them to believe, it’s true.

“I think you’re right, but we’ll have to get to the bottom of it tomorrow. Tonight we’ll have to go back and endure some more of Vermillion’s warm and cheery hospitality.” She turned, and they padded back into the restaurant.

* * *

Velvet slipped her feet between the horribly scratchy sheets draped over her thin canvas cot, a far cry from the comfy pillow-topped mattress that she’d earned in the Latin Quarter Salvage dorm as the leader of the team. It was like she was in the military or something. Clearly Vermillion had something to learn about comfort.

She’d hardly made a dent in the paper-thin pillow supplied before she heard a soft rap of knuckles against wood.

“Are you busy?” Nick was no more than a shadow in the doorway, barely visible if it weren’t for the glowing orbs of his eyes.

“Nope just thinking.” Velvet slid her legs out from under the flimsy afterthought of a blanket and reached out for him.

A moment later they were in each other’s arms, Nick’s lips pressed against her throat, into the clefts of her shoulders. “Whatcha thinkin’?” he murmured.

Velvet pondered the question. What had she been thinking?

Nick didn’t wait for an answer. He pressed soft kisses onto her eyelids, down each cheek. He covered her mouth with his, nibbling at the flesh there, beseeching her with tiny invasions from his tongue, cradling her head to pull her more deeply into his affections.

Oh my God, she thought.

The boy could kiss. But he could also make her forget.

From the first days of their acquaintance, Nick was her biggest distraction. A welcome one, at the time, but dangerous. Loving him put everything she held dear at risk: her job, her friends, her reputation. It was against the rules to fraternize with your team members. So they hid. Making out in the shadows. Sharing kisses in those brief moments of privacy.

Lucky for them—and it was that: pure luck—a wicked turn of events and a show of heroism allotted some leniency. Manny had pulled the necessary strings and now they could be together openly.

Lucky.

But even then, wound up in shrouds of blankets like a pair of mummies, Velvet and Nick couldn’t be entirely open about their love. The dorm was quiet. Their voices had to be hushed.

“Nyx,” she whispered his secret epithet, the word stretching out into a whimper.

A smile played across the boy’s lips, the flesh around them rubbed clean of ash and glowing like the blush from a slap. “Velvet,” he moaned and trailed the tips of his fingers down to her waist.

Then the bed began to shake, but it had nothing to do with them.

“Nick,” she said.

He hummed some unintelligible response into the flesh of her neck.

What started as a low rumble from deep beneath them, soon shook the walls of the cinderblock cell. Grits showered from gaps in the rattling metal roof. Screams filled the air.

“Dammit!” Nick yelled and in an attempt to scramble from the bed, crashed to the floor, dragging Velvet off, too, their feet twisted in the bed sheets.

She was about to shout, “Shadowquake!” But the darkness was already coiling around the gas lamp outside