Wraith

By Lita Locke

Welcome to 'Howling Moon Detective Agency' -- where the cases (of beer) are cold, the women are hot-blooded (important if you're a vampire), the crims are cool-headed…

Oh, and the owner's a werewolf!

But that's nothing out of the ordinary, and just a regular day at the office!

What's not right is that a Scottish castle has a Bogle, a York theater needs ghost busting, and a grown man can't go five minutes without crying.

It's up to the team at 'Howling Moon' to sort the clues, catch a killer, avenge the dead and scare off the nearly departed still treading the Victorian theater boards.  Thing is: they've got two weeks to solve the supernatural, otherwise it's ghost lights out for everyone!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lita Locke
• Release date: Jan 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393387633

Book preview

WRAITH

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~  Lita  Locke  ~

WRAITH

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Welcome to ‘Howling Moon Detective Agency’—where the cases (of beer) are cold, the women are hot-blooded (important if you’re a vampire), the crims are cool-headed...

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Oh, and the owner’s a werewolf!

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But that’s nothing out of the ordinary, and just a regular day at the office!

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What’s not right is that a Scottish castle has a Bogle, a York theater needs ghost busting, and a grown man can’t go five minutes without crying.

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It’s up to the team at ‘Howling Moon’ to sort the clues, catch a killer, avenge the dead and scare off the nearly departed still treading the Victorian theater boards.  Thing is: they’ve got two weeks to solve the supernatural, otherwise it’s ghost lights out for everyone!

Wraith

Copyright © Lita Locke 2015

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Cover design by Design for Writers

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Cover credit:

Snow Queen photograph © Nejron Photo via Shutterstock

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All rights reserved.

This e-book is under a limited electronic license.

Not to be resold, relicensed, reproduced, redistributed or transferred.

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This is a work of fiction.  All characters, names, businesses, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Model image used for illustrative purposes only.

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Contains mature themes, humor and language.

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~  www.litalocke.com  ~

CONTENTS

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1.  Once Upon A Scotland Dreary

2.  London Today

3.  Annie’s Dilemma

4.  Wheezes and Giggles

5.  Three Owls Theater

6.  The Plan

7.  Those Little Things

8.  Midnight at The Witching Hour

9.  Wynter Wytch

10.  In-terror-gation

11.  Old Plan Out, New Plan In

12.  The Going Odds

13.  Shades and Shadows

14.  Signed, Sealed, Liver

15.  Not The Usual Night Out

16.  Darkness Within

17.  Each A Part To Play

18.  Enough Drama For One Day

Book  List

1.  Once Upon A Scotland Dreary

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Blast, bugger and double damnation!

The man hopped on one foot and clutched his throbbing shin as the lights winked out.

Yet again.

Golden spears of light continued to fork in the roiling sky while a torrent of rain sheeted down the windowpanes.  A shutter banged somewhere upstairs, accompanying the dramatic timpani of nature’s thunderclaps that shook the very foundations of this dratted, dreary castle perched on the side of this dratted, dreary hill.

The storm provided the perfect accompaniment to an already creepy setting, in other words.  But then again, what could you expect from Scotland?

This place, this architectural behemoth of a castle, with its dark stone slabs hewn from even darker mountains, gothic architecture and grim, gloomy grandeur was one step away from being the optimal location for some vintage Vincent Price flick.  The backdrop was perfect.  The weather was cooperating.  And it wouldn’t surprise the man in the slightest to feel something hairy, toothy, scaly or slimy, and straight out of a black-and-white horror movie, breathing heavily on the back of his neck in the next few seconds.

But he had a job to do and he was going to do it; lousy weather, lousy location, lousy Scotland be damned!

His task?

Supposedly simple.

To clear out this decrepit castle then hand it over to the new owners, a young, eager family who’d inherited this blasted thing from some ancient and now dead uncle.  They wanted to raise their kids here.  In the open wilderness with fresh country air and clear streams teeming with fish and Highland mountains running with game and covered in heather just made for hiking.  They wanted, as they’d told him earnestly, to return to nature and good, clean country living.

It was that kind of thinking that a city slicker like himself just couldn’t fathom.  Give him the mean, gritty streets of London, full of scoundrels and scum, the grafters and grifters, the shifters and drifters, the stinking, huddled masses begging pence for a pint pot—that’s the sort of place where he belonged.

Besides, he was much more inclined to think that inheriting this place had been that dead uncle’s sick sense of humor, some kind of twisted joke perpetrated on the living from beyond the grave.  What kind of sane person wrote something like that into their will?

After a week in this joint, in the wilds of wild Scotland, with no-one within cooee and the nearest store a ten mile drive over slippery, snow-covered roads, it had to be a joke, right?

And when the pipes had burst and the basement flooded; when a ghastly smell had permeated the castle from parts unknown; and when the local yokels in the local pub had gleefully regaled him with tales of ghosts and goblins and ghouls, well, you began to think seriously about the job you’d taken on.

Though the money did more than compensate for it...

There was that!

Inching toward the carved wood sideboard, while carefully avoiding further antiquated furniture, he fumbled in a drawer for a candle.  Even in this black darkness his vision was rather fine, but it always helped to have a little bit more light.

For atmosphere, you see.  For the look of the thing.

Always for the look of the thing!

A match flared, then puffed out, the frigid breeze floating past his cheek the cause of this particular misery.  Acrid sulfurous scent and something else, something in the chilly air that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

A second match flamed and he lit the wick before glancing about the Great Hall, a scowl now lighting upon his own face.

Damn!

Still the same macabre and decapitated animal heads staring coldly down at him, antlers and teeth glinting in the meagre candlelight.  Still the same freezing flagstone floor beneath his sock-covered feet.  Still the same chilly room with its humorously oversized furniture and expensive art and antique collection that a multitude of dead generations had spent a lifetime building up.

Nothing had changed.

Nothing at all!

He fingered a particularly fine piece of silverware, an engraved punchbowl stamped Scottish silver, estimating the street value of it to within an accurate gram or so, before deciding it would be too difficult to smuggle the thing out under his shirt.

With a rueful grin and a fond memory for earlier days in his youth, he decided it was time for bed.  The lack of electricity severely curtailed his evening of entertainment.  No TV, not that there was anything on up here worth watching.  No reading, not that he had brought any of his reading material with him.

Nothing to do but go to sleep.

And dream.

And wait.

Ambling toward the stairs, he paused at the base of them, his evening routine at least not changed here.

A life-sized marble statue of a woman, possibly Greek or Roman—he didn’t know, after all, he wasn’t the art collector around here—stood at the bottom of the stairwell.  She was artfully draped with a carved marble sheathe that didn’t reveal too much while at the same time revealing a scandalous amount, depending on which century you’d been born into!

But let’s just say that she was anatomically correct in every way possible.

Oh, and that he had pretty good knowledge of her attributes already!

Night, babe, he growled while fondling her ample plaster bust in the familiar way he’d done every night since first spotting her.  Pity you ain’t the real thing ‘cause you just reminded me of another fun activity we could be doing together with all the lights out tonight.

Even in this stupid castle, having a flesh and blood woman who was up for some rumpy-pumpy would cheer him up to no end.

What he wouldn’t give for some of that right now!

But the woman was statue of stone and unmoving, even if he did fancy that her mouth curved up into the tiniest of grins at the corner of her lips, and her eyelashes did flitter and flutter slightly as he flattered her epic proportions with his epic propositions.

With a tiny chuckle, the man continued on up the stairs, past scuttling spiders spinning silken skeins between the banister balustrades, their tiny dark eyes watching him as he went.

A jumble of hallways, solid wood doors, empty suits of rusted armor and richly decorated tapestries greeted him on the next level of the castle.  It was even colder up here, the wind whistling around the eaves and parapets, the rain lashing on the roof, fingers of Winter finding their way inside via all the cracks and holes in this place—and there were plenty of those.

Atmosphere?

This place had it in blasted spades!

Pausing outside the room he’d commandeered as his own, the man glanced down the corridor, his eyes checking each and every door, all closed, no movement in sight.

Well, all of them except the room at the very end of the hall!

Ah!

How strange, in the absence of all light save the occasional flash of ball lightning, that a glow emanated from under and around that door, the same door that had refused to budge the whole time he’d been here.

So, of course now, with the power off and no electricity to speak of, it was cracked wide open, a pale blue-white light seeping out.

Just begging him to investigate.

Come check me out, the mystery cajoled.

I won’t bite.

Or eat you.

Or do any of those nasty things that night creatures do in spooky haunted castles in spooky haunted movies.

Promise.

Biting back a sigh at the obvious melodramatics, the man went forth just like his ancestors had done, his courage up, any second thoughts viciously ground down, the hackles on the back of his neck raised, anticipation seething from every pore.

The soft glow of the candle oozed into the room ahead of him, adding to the bluish white light coming from some place unseen, filling up corners of shadows, reflecting off golden surfaces, mirrors and other gilt-edged things that glinted and glimmered now.

Another bedroom, he noted, as his eyes moved over an ancient four-poster bed, a stone fireplace, a carved armoire.  Glass vases, filled with dried and dead roses, glittered from the mantle.

There were smells too.  Eons of mustiness, overlaid with decades of deceased mice.  Plus a dash, if he was correct, of eau de mothball.

Large framed portraits and paintings leaned against the walls, draped with dustcovers and the accompanying dust.  With a flick of his wrist, the man twitched a cover aside, to stare at the oil portrait.

Some guy, probably some ancestor of the inheritors.  A young man with a tankard of ale in his raised hand, a haunch of dead meat on the plate before him, a sheathed sword in his scabbard, several scantily clad women in the background.

Wot ye lookin’ at, laddie, he fancied the portrait sitter sneered at him.

With a shrug, he covered up the drunken sot and obvious carouser, then turned to uncover another painting.

A woman, this time.

He took a step closer, drawn to her.

Candlelight flowed over her voluptuous form and translucent, milky skin.  Auburn curls tumbled over her shoulders, her green eyes twinkled merrily in amusement.  Ruby lips curved in a secret smile, some unspoken joke between herself and the portrait painter, no doubt.

Maybe they’d been lovers.

Or maybe not.

Her old fashioned gown draped itself around her body, the same color as those emerald eyes.  The neckline plunged scandalously low, her heaving décolletage, her cleaved cleavage threatening to burst out of the top at any moment.

This babe was giving the stone nymph downstairs a run for her money in the sex-me department.  Pity neither of them were alive, otherwise he could’ve been having the best sex and one hell of an orgy right about now!

Another step and he was by her side, the woman bewitching him in a way that he hadn’t been for such a long while.  Was she an ancestor?  Or maybe visiting royalty?

Perhaps she was a legend from Scottish storybooks?  Or even a Fey, part of the superstition and folk tales that had been common in Scotland not so long ago.

Whoever, and whatever, she was, she almost had him in thrall.

Taking a step away now, he pulled back control, not willing to cede anything here.

Pity though, because he could really go for her.  His fingers would tangle in her hair as he pulled those laughing lips to his, capturing her mouth with a kiss.  His hands would stroke that pale skin, over her cheek, her neck, her bare arms.  She would feel silky smooth and come alive under him as he whispered words of erotic enchantment in her ear.

The bed behind him would be the scene of their crime; a crime of passion and lust, as he made love to her in all her naked glory.

But that was not to be, as a particularly cold breeze blew, fingers of ghostly wind licking across his neck again, a chuckle of silvery laughter flowing past his cheek, a puff of frigid air that blew out his flickering candlewick and left the bedroom in full blackness once more.

But he didn’t need the light to see.

Not anymore.

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He lay on his back, his big body drowning in the oversized bed, the heavy coverlet and sweat soaked sheets twisted around his nakedness.

He existed in that twilight state between dreams and waking, where fantasy became reality, wishes were granted, thought ceased and feeling ruled.

A pregnant moon cast fingers of light over his inert form.  The storm had blown itself out, yet no animal of the night called.  No single cricket chirruped.  Not one beast howled.

The silence was unnatural, as if the entire land was holding its collective breath.

Waiting.

Anticipating.

A single wisp of shimmering light trickled underneath his closed door, the trickle becoming a stream as each wisp joined others, writhing together and twisting sinuously, evolving, growing, taking shape.

And then.

She was there.

The ethereal, emerald-eyed figure studied him, her naked form glowing, luminescent in the moonlight.  Auburn locks spilled over her firm, high breasts and coiled down her bare back, ending in a silken caress at her flared hips.

She glided to his side, her feet skimming the wooden floorboards, as she answered his unconscious summons.  His eyes were squeezed shut, an arm flung out on the pillow beside him.

She heard her ancient name in his mind and then from his lips, as it wrenched free.

With the sweet perfume of roses, she teased his sleeping senses.  He tossed in the bed, the sheet slipping from his body, exposing his nude form.  His body was chiseled, to perfection.  The strong planes of his chest, the flat of his stomach, narrow hips and muscle corded thighs.

Such a fine specimen of manhood.

Animalistic, even.

Her phantom fingers trailed over his face, their misty outline brushing a mere inch above his forehead, his nose, his flushed cheeks.  The pad of her thumb ghosted over his lips and his tongue flicked out as if to capture the sensation of it.

Her own mouth twisted into a smile, knowing what she must do.

Her sensual explorations continued, tracing slowly downwards from his lips, now curved into a wide smile, over his neck to his chest.

Smoke and mist stroked his flesh.

Caressing.

Learning.

Loving.

With her hands splayed on his chest, she hovered over him, her lips seconds from his.  He exhaled deeply, his warm human breath caressing her spectral form.

Her voice, a sweet siren song in his mind, lulled him further into the dream.

If you wake now, she sang, our love will be over.

In a few seconds, her spectral form would pierce his elemental core, the center of his entire existence.  She would flow in his blood, his body, his mind, his spirit.  She would be in him.

She would be him.

She would stir his soul and toy with his being as she drove him towards the ragged cliffs of rage, the depths of despair.

And death.

Her spell of enchantment was the merest molecule away, ready to be woven, ready for completion.

Her gossamer, ghostly tongue traced spirals around the shell of his ear, her teeth working the sensitive lobe.  The man tasted...

Odd.

But then it had been far too long since she had been in any firm form or corporeal state, so she’d quite forgotten the taste of a man’s flesh.

Ah, but the taste of his spirit and that of his soul was another matter altogether!

So it was then that she leaned forward to press her lips to his.  Seeking his humanness and life, her kiss would provide her with both.

And end his for good.

But instead of the usual response, the sighs of a drowning man an inch from the doorway of death as he succumbed to this succubus’s soul spell, this man’s eyes flickered open, a smile parting his lips.

She was stayed by the sight, confused by his lack of proper reaction.

No!

It could not be!

In an instant she invaded his thoughts, but instead of finding him ready and aching for her, she ran into a wall, his mind throwing up a black block that was impervious to impasse.

Impossible!

His deep-throated chuckle made her glance at his eyes.  Moonlight shone in them, an unnatural, unholy light that reflected his true soul, the thing he truly was.

And that was not all.

His teeth, oh his horrid, horrible teeth, those incisors, they grew.

With a cry, she shrank back.

But it was far too late.

The man’s eyes flashed once more, red and gold and silver, as the full Blood Moon reflected in them—and something more.

Something akin to pity.

He bared his fangs then and she tried to escape, but it was all too late.  There would be no escape for her.

Not now.

Not ever.

Launching himself off the bed at her, sparks blazing where the realms of two incorporeal, ethereal beings met; he the stronger, she the weak.

Her echoed scream sounded in her ears, but it was still not loud enough to wipe out the quiet word he spoke to her—that awful word that would be her final curtain in this earthly plane as she faded away to nothing, the perfume of roses lingering in her wake.

"Gotcha."

2.  London Today

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So?  How was Scotland?

Bloody cold, Jack Wulfe growled.  "And I’m super glad to be