Winter Lost

“Oh God,” I whispered in his ear as his arms closed around me with fiercely tempered strength. “Oh God, Oh God, thank you, God.” It was prayer. Unfinished, but I trusted it was still heard, as honest gratitude should be. “I thought he was going to kill you. Are you okay, Adam?”

His arms hurt the forming bruises on my back and made it a little hard to breathe. I was grateful for the pain. It meant we were both alive. And it gave me an excuse for the tears staining my cheeks.

I had almost lost him, because one of my few magics had failed me when I most needed it. Because I’d been stupid.

“I’m okay.” His voice shook a little, not with fear—he didn’t smell like fear. It was adrenaline fueled by frustrated rage. Pressed against him, I felt his stillness when he noticed my tears. Softer, he said, “I am okay, Mercy.”

I kissed him then. The kind of kiss required when your mate tries to die on you. Desperate didn’t cover it.

“What was that thing?” he asked eventually, after my heart admitted he was safe, so I wasn’t clinging quite so tightly. “I take it you are sure it’s not going to get back up and try again?”

“No,” I told him. “It’s gone.”

He set me on my feet and went to check the body anyway.

A ghost’s body, I supposed. It was certainly organic from the smell. I’d never encountered a ghost who left behind physical remains. Maybe a hungry ghost was more like a zombie.

I watched as Adam prodded it with an umbrella that had been hanging near the door for guests’ convenience in warmer weather. The unhealthy grayish mass seemed to have the consistency of Jell-O. It wiggled a bit before the end of the umbrella pierced its surface. It didn’t move on its own, but he did succeed in making it smell worse.

The spider had told me the hungry ghost had been attracted by my presence—called by the damage the Soul Taker had done, like a shark summoned by blood in the water. I had to figure out how to fix myself.

Once Adam had made certain the thing wasn’t going to rise again, we coped with our fears in our various ways. I told him about hungry ghosts in a babble of information that helped me calm the freak down. I would have told him about the spider, but he decided he needed to explain why I should have escaped and left him to deal with it as soon as I’d realized my ghost-mojo was broken.

That went well for him, with me still on edge from the utter terror of understanding I could do nothing while a ghost ate my husband, a ghost I should have been able to drive away except that a stupid ancient artifact decided to play around in my head.

Adam and I didn’t fight very often. He didn’t enjoy being mad at me, so mostly I tried to resist the temptation. I couldn’t say why it was such a turn-on or why it made me feel safe when he was angry. Perversity, probably—it was my besetting sin, after all. Sometimes you just had to accept who you were and move on.

Eventually I made him laugh by calling him a word I’d learned from the pack’s foul-mouthed British import. By that time, both of us were done fighting.

“I haven’t heard that one before,” he said. “Are you sure Ben didn’t make it up?”

“Urban Dictionary says not,” I assured him, and he laughed again.

“What does it mean?” he asked.

I bit his neck lightly and said, “Allow me to demonstrate.”

“You don’t have to nudge me twice,” he growled. And when I bit his neck again, he added, “But you can if you want to.”

By mutual unstated agreement we avoided the bed with its reeking mass of goo and made love on the floor.

Sex with Adam is never boring and seldom follows the same path. This time it had the give-and-take of a good conversation. I was never quite sure where the discussion was going, but we visited some interesting places. Sometimes our path covered emotional territory, sometimes we got a bit heated. In the end, we had a genuine exchange of views, to our mutual satisfaction.

Not even the sting of my elbow where it had hit something at some point in the proceedings put a dent in the joy that was my body. He’d started out on the bottom to keep my elbows safe.

“The floor’s hard,” he’d said. “Any bruises I get will heal up quick.”

That had lasted for a bit, but my elbow and both knees attested that sometimes passion and good sense have only a passing acquaintance. We’d ended up back where we started, though I was pretty sure I was way more comfortable than he was. Adam’s hard body only made a good bed if I was relaxed enough to achieve near bonelessness, which I was.

“I’ve got to get up,” I told Adam’s chest reluctantly. “Now that you aren’t quite so distracting…that smell.”

His quiet laugh bounced me up and down. “Rank,” he agreed.

The remnants of the ghost reeked like a skunk ten days dead on hot pavement—considerably worse than it had originally smelled. If we left it in here much longer, the room would be uninhabitable.