Came Back Haunted (Experiment in Terror #10) - Karina Halle Page 0,6

between me and the house severing in two, and I spin around to see a man standing at the foot of the stairs, staring up at me.

Atlas Poe. The owner of the house.

He’s looking at me curiously, wavy dark brown hair blowing across his face in the cold wind, his cool eyes appraising me.

I haven’t seen him in the daylight before, so he takes me by surprise. He looks younger than I thought he was on Halloween, in his early thirties, though he’s dressed in all black just the same.

“I’m sorry.” I breathe out, my hand at my chest. Holy fuck, this is all sorts of awkward. I can feel my cheeks going red. “I don’t…”

“Didn’t know what you were doing?” he asks, slowly coming up the stairs toward me. He stops at the step below, yet he’s still taller than me. The dude has height.

I lick my lips, wondering how to explain myself. I figure the best way is always the truth. At least this guy will understand. He’s the one who gave us the tour of the place on Halloween, looking for his dead mother.

“I thought I saw someone,” I tell him.

He raises a brow but his expression doesn’t change. “Someone?”

“In the house.” I feebly point upward. “On the second floor. Someone I once knew.”

“Someone you once knew?” he repeats, more deliberately this time.

I can’t help but narrow my eyes. “Are you going to just repeat everything I say?”

Finally a hint of a smile. “I just caught you about to break and enter.”

“I wasn’t going to break and enter,” I tell him.

“So what were you doing?”

I cross my arms, staring at him for a moment. “Honestly, I don’t know. I guess I thought I could just walk in and see if I could find him.” I realize how crazy that sounds the moment it leaves my lips, even if it’s true. “I’m sorry, I’m obviously having some issues here.”

I move past him down the steps, but he reaches out and grabs my elbow. “You don’t have to leave. I know exactly what just happened to you.”

I eye his grip on me until he lets go, my heart hammering in my chest. Atlas, a supposed descendent of Edgar Allan Poe, doesn’t scare me per se, but there’s something about him that has all the alarm bells inside me ringing. There’s something not quite right about him.

It takes one to know one.

“Then what just happened to me?”

He gestures toward the house. “Why don’t you come inside and we can talk?”

I let out a dry laugh. “Yeah, no thank you. I saw enough the other night.”

“Right,” he muses slowly, his ice blue eyes growing sharp for a moment. I could have sworn a second ago his pupils were so dilated that his eyes appeared black. “I trust you’re enjoying my stepfather’s money already.”

And there it is. The guilt.

“You know I was talking to your husband the other day,” he adds, going toward the door.

“Dex?” I blink at him in surprise.

“Do you have another husband I should know about?”

“What did you guys talk about?” I hated to ask, but obviously Dex never told me anything. The last I heard is that he was going to call Harry about when we could come back and finish the job.

“Not too much, just that on the seventeenth it’s going to be a new moon. Perfect time to do shadow work and come back and finish what you started.”

The seventeenth? That was my birthday.

“Really? That makes it that much more interesting,” Atlas says.

I frown. What the fuck? “What are you talking about?”

“It’s your birthday.”

I freeze. Don’t tell me that for the second time today, someone else has heard my thoughts.

Atlas gives me another smirk and then taps his finger on his temple. “Who else heard your thoughts today?”

My heart thuds against my ribs, and I quickly shut my eyes, steeling myself, building walls around my mind. Normally I do it instinctively but apparently not today.

“It’s okay,” he says, raising his palm. “I won’t pry. You’re just such an open book, Perry.”

Okay, that’s another thing I don’t like about this guy. The fact that he acts like he knows me when he doesn’t know me at all.

“Look,” he says, putting his hand on the door. “Why don’t you come inside. You say your friend is here, then maybe he is. Maybe you can speak to him.”

I can barely swallow, my body awash with cold pin pricks as he slowly opens the front door, and I get a