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