Shadow Phantoms - H.P. Mallory Page 0,9
reached into my bag for yesterday’s issue of The Sight, flipping straight to the crossword.
I squinted down at the seventh clue where I’d gotten stuck yesterday:
I’m a word that’s barely there. Take away my start, and I’m herbal flair. What am I?
“Good freaking question,” I muttered. I tapped the empty boxes with the eraser end of the pencil. Maybe if I glared at the empty boxes long enough, the answer would just appear. Like those Words with Friends knock-offs where the letters start shaking when you’ve exceeded the threshold for acceptable stupidity.
“Herbal flair.” So, spice, I guess? Eight letters.
Camomile. Except ‘amomile’ isn’t a word.
“Sparsely.” A smooth rich voice spoke from above me.
I looked up and felt my breath catch. A man sat next to me on the bench, openly staring at the crossword. Tan skin, blue eyes, goldish-brown hair. Handsome. Beyond handsome, actually. And slouching. He wore a plain black sweater under a tweed jacket. The elbow patches—along with their associated elbows—rested on his knees.
“What?” I said stupidly. The man leaned forward and pointed at the seventh clue slot.
He clasped his hands together and pointed vaguely towards the paper. “Sparsely, it means ‘barely there. And if you remove the ‘s’ it spells ‘parsley’—herbal flair.”
“Yeah, I heard you,” I said and didn’t mean to sound ungrateful but there it was.
“Then what’s the ‘what’?”
He smiled, and I kinda wanted to smile back.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Am I wrong?”
“No.”
He stared at me. He looked like he was waiting for me to say something.
Eventually, I said, “Thanks.”
“Any time,” he went on casually. I looked up to find a heart-melting grin on his gorgeous face. “I didn’t mean to spoil the puzzle for you…” He trailed off, a question in his voice.
“Emma.”
“Emma,” he repeated. Really rolled the letters around in his mouth. “Nice to meet you, Emma.”
“Thanks. Nice to meet you…” I leaned over and eyed the documents on his lap, hoping to catch his name. I got lucky with the guest ID form in front. “Stone,” I read. “Interesting name.”
“Befitting of the man, I assure you,” he said. “So, Emma.” He nodded at the office door. “What are you in for?”
“Beating the system,” I said with a sigh.
“Beating the system?”
“Cheating, I guess. Technically. Supposedly.”
“Supposedly?” he repeated, his grin growing. “So, you didn’t do it?”
“Not on purpose.”
“How does one cheat on accident?”
“Umm… that’s kind of… personal,” I answered. Then decided to change the subject. “What about you?” I asked. “Why are you here?”
“Jury duty.”
“Hmm.” A light laugh bubbled out of me. “I think you might be lost.”
He grinned.
“I’m new here.” He tapped the thick brown folder in his lap with the back of his hand. “Paperwork.”
“Ah.” I said, nodding sagely. “Fucking paperwork.”
“Fucking paperwork,” he echoed. The smile hung softly on his lips, radiating an easy good humor. His smile was warm, inviting like a hearth.
The office door opened.
“Mr. Draper?” The secretary’s chipper voice called through a crack in the door. She peeked around the corner just long enough to nod to Stone, then stepped quickly away to clear a space in the doorway.
Stone stood up and readjusted the button on his jacket. He looked down at me and smiled again, his teeth perfectly white through his brown, sun-kissed stubble.
“It was a pleasure meeting you, Emma.”
“You too. Have fun in jury duty.”
He chuckled and closed the office door behind him.
THREE
SINJIN
If I closed my eyes, I could hear the blood thundering in her veins as her heart beat fast with anticipation.
“Will it hurt?”
“I will put an influence on you to take away the pain,” I replied.
Still with my eyes closed, I traced a finger up her throat, following the line of her carotid artery, feeling the flow of blood with only a thin layer of skin separating me from it.
“Oh, Sinjin…” She moaned my name, and it was the voice of my beloved tempest.
Unable to wait any longer and spurred by the sound of that deep and sultry voice, I sank my teeth into her throat, taking the pain from her as I did so.
“Sinjin…” Without the pain of being bitten, the sensation of being drunk by a vampire could be wonderfully intimate, and her voice—the voice of Bryn—was thick with pleasure.
But the taste spoiled the illusion.
I opened my eyes to try to recapture the moment, for the woman (Denise—a name I had never liked) looked as much like Bryn as she sounded like her. Of all the women I had found who physically resembled my lost love, Denise was the one who most sounded like the wildcat who