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Synopsis
Set in a lush, steamy world of ceaseless rain, swamps, alligators, overgrown cemeteries, and home-grown magic, these are dark and scary, yet pleasurably thrilling stories that unfold sinister secrets at every turn. These paranormal, suspenseful Southern Gothic romances are by both bestselling authors and bright up-and-coming talents, including Jill Archer, Sonya Bateman, Amanda Bonilla, Angie Fox, J. D. Horn, Elle Jasper, Erin Kellison, Laurie London, Shawntelle Madison, Bec McMaster, Hadley Monroe, Dianne Sylvan, Jessa Slade, Shelli Stevens, Tiffany Trent and Shiloh Walker.
Release date: November 20, 2014
Publisher: Robinson
Print pages: 534
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The Mammoth Book Of Southern Gothic Romance
Trisha Telep
The states of the Southern USA have a bad reputation for great drama. Just ask fans of Charlaine Harris’s Louisianaset, Southern-fried vampire fest that became TV’s True Blood. And although Southern literature has a respectably long and storied history, it’s essentially the creepy, dark, ghost-ridden, crocodile-infested roots of Southern Gothic that we’re interested in at present.
It’s always fascinating to see what fifteen feisty romance writers will get up to when you ask them to write in a subgenre they may never have written in before. It’s plain to see that the Southern Gothic elements of menace, mystery, and magic aren’t more than a stone’s throw from the fantastical, creature-loving paranormal romance that we know and love. So, when issuing the challenge to the writers featured in The Mammoth Book of Southern Gothic Romance, I was pretty sure they were going to take to the subject matter faster than a knife fight in a phone booth. And you know what? They did.
Some writers have transplanted their series to a Southern milieu, like Angie Fox, who’s moved her merry band of biker witches into a field off Route 11 in Georgia, and Laurie London whose Sweetbloods may or may not have a dirty weekend planned in New Orleans. There are grim reapers, ghosts of every size and shape, including Civil War fiddlers, pirates and time travellers and more wrought iron than you ever thought possible. It’s a well-known fact that the thin veil between the living and the dead, the present and the past, and the possible and the impossible just doesn’t exist in the South.
Paranormal romance is right at home down South. Hunky Southern shape-shifters, elegant vampires in crumbling mansions, werewolves under ancient curses and little girls in lonesome graveyards who can see the dead fit effortlessly into Southern climes. And you’ll find writers having a little fun with the genre too – “Southern” becomes southern California, and bright summer days can prove just as sinister and mysterious as the darkest swamp.
So grab your umbrella and your Tarot cards and return to the honorary birthplace of paranormal romance, where the living is easy and the handsome ghosts are too.
an FBI Psychics story
Shiloh Walker
There was a child in his graveyard.
Gabriel Tallant Tallman stood in the shadows, staring at the small figure. It was a cool evening. Fog had rolled in, the wisps of it winding in and out of the monuments, clinging to the ground. The girl was almost motionless as she bent her head over whatever it was that held her so fascinated.
She sat with her back pressed against one of the family vaults. Either she wasn’t concerned by the fact that there were bodies inside that structure or she just didn’t know. It could go either way. He knew from experience.
There was a look to her face that unsettled him. One that spoke of an age beyond her years. Some sort of wisdom that didn’t suit her youth. As the mist thickened around her, he had the strangest sense that perhaps she was one of the spirits that so many people came to the cemetery hoping to find.
Of course, he knew better.
If a person wanted to find a real ghost, you didn’t come to a place of rest. The people who ended up here were just the empty shells of the dead. Their spirits would linger on in other places, unless of course somebody had actually died in the graveyard.
Nobody had.
That’s why Gabriel liked it.
It was quiet.
Ghosts didn’t bother him.
But that girl did.
She didn’t belong here.
He debated between ignoring her and asking her why she was here, but in the end, the lateness of the day decided it for him. It was coming up on seven and the sun was already kissing the horizon. Soon, this place would be shrouded in darkness and it wasn’t a place for children.
When he moved out from behind an obelisk, she lifted her head. If his presence surprised her, she didn’t show it. Her gaze bounced off him and then returned to her notebook.
He had to amend his earlier observation. Maybe she wasn’t as wise as he’d thought. Those eyes, as old as they’d seemed when she looked at him, might be more naive than he’d assumed. A smart kid wouldn’t ignore a total stranger like that. She should be more careful.
Abruptly, Gabriel felt angry. Where were her parents? Didn’t they think to teach her about strangers and crazy people?
Why was she here in a cemetery?
She shot him a look, a quick flick of her eyes. She had pretty eyes, he noticed. Absurdly so. They actually reminded him of somebody. A woman. Before that thought could become an ache, he blocked it out. Thinking about her never led to good things. How much good could come of it when all of it had led to heartache, anyway?
Instead of letting his mind wander down that long, painful path, he focused on the here and the now.
The young girl with her blue-green eyes and her café au lait skin sure as hell shouldn’t be out alone this late, so far from anybody.
Almost as if she could sense his thoughts, she looked back at him and her chin went up. “You got a problem, mister?”
“It’s getting late,” he pointed out. “Not the best place to be at night.”
She wrinkled her nose and looked around. “Why? Is the boogey man gonna get me?”
Frowning, he shoved his hands in his pockets. Mouthy, arrogant bratty girl. “If you believe in the boogey man at your age, then somebody needs to have a talk with your folks.”
“It’s not my folks. It’s just my mom.” She shrugged and looked back at whatever she had in her lap.
Craning his head, he caught a better look of it. It was a notebook, the spiral-bound kind, and she also had a pen clutched in one hand. “Well, when you talk to your mama about the boogey man, maybe she should explain to you about why you shouldn’t be messing around in cemeteries this close to dark. Or … at all.”
“What’s wrong with cemeteries?” she asked. “They’re quiet. Not like there’s anything dangerous here.”
They’re quiet. Those words hummed through his brain. Thoughtfully, he narrowed his eyes. Gabriel studied her closer, but this time, she kept her gaze locked on the notebook in front of her. “What do you mean, quiet?”
“Is the word foreign?” She shrugged, her voice selfconscious. “You know. Quiet. It’s the opposite of loud.”
He had a feeling that his idea of quiet and her idea were two very different things.
“Quiet or not, that doesn’t make it safe. You can still run into dangerous people, get hurt. Your mama know you’re here?”
There was a pause and the girl finally glanced up at him. “She probably knows.” She pursed her lips, giving him the same thoughtful study he’d given her. “Don’t tell me you’re dangerous.”
Honey, if only you knew.
But he kept that thought tucked safely inside his head. “You should get home. The graveyard locks its gates at dark.”
“You sure are paranoid about this. You act like you own this place or something.” She paused, one eye squinting thoughtfully. “You don’t, do you?”
A reluctant smile tugged at his lips. “No. I don’t own this place.” That didn’t mean it wasn’t his, though. When he was in town, he spent more time in this old garden of stone than the actual groundskeeper, walking the paths, caring for the overgrown weeds and leaving the plots alone where the families had left such requests in place. He knew this place so well, he could walk it in the dead of night with no light to guide him. Especially lately.
This was his haven and he wasn’t going to share it with some mouthy child.
“You should leave,” he said again, looking around. It was full dark now, and if somebody didn’t know the way, it was easy to get lost in the shadows. “Can you find your way out?”
She sighed and pushed herself up, clutching the notepad to her with skinny arms. “Yeah.” She plodded off past him. “I liked this place better before you saw me.”
Jonni Hart was calling the cops.
That girl had less than five minutes to walk through the door before she made the call. Pacing back and forth, she gnawed on her left thumbnail, a habit she’d tried to kick so many times over the year.
Up until she’d been forced to come back to Golgotha, Mississippi, she’d actually managed to do it.
Thanks to losing her job in Nashville, thanks to the damned economy slump, thanks to a lot of things, she’d been forced to do the one thing she’d never wanted to do – move back into the house where she’d grown up. It had been left to Jonni – Jonquil on her driver’s license and birth certificate but she’d hurt the person who called her that – and her brother, Royce, after their father had died two years ago.
Royce, a cop on the minuscule Golgotha police department, had been fixing the house up over the months. They wanted to sell it, rid themselves of the place, of the memories, of a time when their lives had consisted of long, tense nights, of days with little food, and a drunken bastard who had barely managed to hold a job. The only way they’d been able to keep the bills paid was because Royce was smart enough to swipe money out of the old man’s wallet once a week come payday.
It was cleaner now. Quieter. The walls no longer echoed with the sound of his drunken bellows. Keep the noise down, you little brat …
She cast a look around the small living room, painted a smooth, easy shade of pale green. Quieter, yes. Cleaner, yes. But it wasn’t the place where she wanted to raise her kid.
“Damn it, Tally, where are—”
The door opened.
Hurling down the cell phone she’d been clutching like a talisman, she whirled on her daughter. “Where the hell have you been?”
Big, blue-green eyes, the same shade as her own, stared back at her as Tally heaved out a sigh. “I was just out, Mom,” Tally said, shrugging out of her coat and hanging it up.
“Out. Out where? We’ve been here for less than two weeks and to my knowledge you haven’t told me about any friends, which means disappearing with any of them is a big, fat no in the mom book of rules.” She propped her hands on her hips and waited.
Tally shot her a look that managed to crush Jonni’s heart. Oh, baby …
“I haven’t made any friends,” Tally said, her voice soft. Then it turned sulky. “So don’t worry. I just wanted someplace …”
She stopped and looked around, while her smooth, light-brown skin went white. “I needed it to be quiet.”
Quiet.
Jonni refused to think about how much it worried her when Tally talked about needing things quiet. The last few months before they’d left Nashville, Tally had looked for quiet places a lot. She’d found them, too. Usually in weird places. Jonni had hoped moving would help whatever had taken her normally happy child and turned her into this worried, truculent shadow. Even as much as she herself had hated to come back to this tired old river town.
“Quiet.” Jonni smoothed her hands down her jeans. Blowing out a breath, she settled down on the couch and stared at the wall in front of her. In her mind’s eye, she saw the wall as it had been the day she finally left. Royce had packed up and moved out the same afternoon.
That wall had once borne the marks of a fight between Royce and that mean, old son of a bitch – a hole in the plaster where Jimmy Hart had thrown him when Royce had stuck up for her, yet again.
“It’s quiet here,” Jonni said. Please talk to me, baby. “Why do you have to leave to find quiet when it’s just you and me? It’s not like there’s an apartment next door or sirens blaring down in the street or a baby crying upstairs. How much more quiet do you need, Tally?”
Tally didn’t speak for so long Jonni didn’t think she would answer.
But, finally, the girl sat down on the couch next to her. “It’s not that kind of quiet, Mama.” She leaned her head against her mother’s arm. “It’s hard to explain. If I can figure out how, I will.”
Wrapping an arm around Tally’s thin shoulders, she said, “You’ve been needing this kind of quiet for months now. How much longer you think it will take?”
“I don’t know.” Tally turned her face into her mother’s embrace, the way she’d done since she was a baby. “There’s just so much noise in my head, Mama.”
Silence fell between them and Jonni squeezed her eyes shut. “Is this because of how rough the last year has been? I know it’s all kind of sucked. I’m getting more work coming in with my freelance stuff, but …”
“No.” Tally looked up and shook her head. “It’s not that. I mean, sometimes I miss Nashville and yeah, I didn’t like it when I had to quit piano, but it’s not like I can’t practice on my own. It’s just other stuff.”
Jonni caught a fat, soft curl in her hand and wound it around her finger as she studied Tally’s face. “Other stuff. Listen, baby, I’m trying to respect the fact that you’re growing up, but whatever this is, it’s bothering you and I want you to trust me enough to tell me.”
Something scared flitted through Tally’s eyes.
Jonni bit her tongue. Tally was a good kid, and a smart one. But that didn’t negate her fear. If she didn’t start talking soon, Jonni was going to have to take desperate measures.
“I will, Mama,” Tally said, almost as if she’d read her mother’s mind.
They were back, insistent questions and voices pressing at him almost from the time he woke. The voices of the dead chased him, but he’d learned to ignore them.
Gabriel was on vacation – more like a sabbatical really, and there was only so much he was required to do.
Maybe it made him a jerk, but if he didn’t take time away, he’d go insane.
So he ignored everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.
Well, very little was absolutely necessary – he took care of those things, and some of his email. If he didn’t take care of email, certain people would start to call and that would kind of negate the whole point of being on sabbatical.
He hadn’t logged in to check his email in nearly a week and the sheer number of flagged messages had him wanting to gouge his eyes out. He grabbed another cup of coffee, tied back his dreads and bent over the laptop. Sunlight shone in through the window, the only light he chose to work in. His dark hands moved over the keyboard and he opened what he figured would be the easiest ones first.
Several from an old contact, Desiree Jones. Beautiful woman, married to a bastard whom Gabriel personally didn’t like and it had nothing to do with the fact that Taylor Jones ran the spook squad with the FBI. Gabriel didn’t like him on principle, because the man was an asshole. An efficient one, but still an asshole.
Several emails were related to cases connected to said asshole. Yet another reason that Gabriel didn’t like him. He’d hoped to sever any and all contact with Jones once he’d left the squad. If he wanted to work with the FBI, he’d still be there, instead of working for a freelance group.
The next batch of emails came from that group. He grimaced and mentally bitched his way through those. His former boss, Elise Oswald, had died recently. While the Oswald Group wasn’t going away, it was being restructured. Gabriel was taking some time to decide if he wanted to be part of it any more.
He was losing interest if he was honest. It wasn’t like he could turn off the need he had to work, but did he want to keep chasing the jobs?
He was debating that very question when the subject line from Taige Morgan – the woman who may be his new boss – had him freezing.
Possible newbie near you.
Gabriel’s hands hovered over the keyboard, his jaw going tight.
Part of him wanted to delete the email.
If there was somebody out there, it wasn’t really his problem. Taige had plenty of people she could send out. Or, hell, Jones could do it, too. Yeah, it was sort of a necessity because some things weren’t best left alone – nobody knew that better than him.
That didn’t make this his responsibility.
Except if he wasn’t connected – or meant to be connected – he didn’t think Taige would have emailed.
He wasn’t one of the altruistic sorts who stayed with the unit out of some innate need to serve and protect. That, in his mind, was the surest way to drive yourself insane. Half the people he’d tried to protect in his life either hated him or had abandoned him. The rest weren’t even aware of the things he’d done to help.
But Gabriel also knew that some things were just connected.
If he was connected to this, then he was connected to it.
“I need this like I need a hole in my head,” he muttered as he clicked on the email and started to read.
Within five seconds, he slammed the top of the laptop shut. It only took him another twenty to hit the stairs.
He had to get dressed. Get out of there. Find that girl.
It didn’t dawn on him until nearly three hours later that he’d have some trouble finding her, for several reasons. He didn’t know her name or where she went to school, and his cemetery might not be the only one she hung out in.
The biggest concerns were the first two. Namely because if she was anything like him, if she’d hit his spot more than once, then she’d developed a liking for it. He knew how that worked. He’d done the same thing. Once a person developed a connection, they just weren’t as comfortable elsewhere.
Prowling around Golgotha First Baptist Cemetery, he kept an eye on the front gate as he noticed signs that she’d been spending some time there. It had been a while since he’d had to do any major investigative work – he used a different skill set in his line of work now – but he could see where somebody had been spending time at several different spots. Namely, the family vault where he’d found her last night. And down by the little pond.
The grass was tramped down in both places, and by the pond she’d left a scarf. He picked it up and grimaced as his skin came in contact with it.
Well, if he’d had any question, it was all gone now.
“Hey!”
He turned around and saw the girl coming toward him, a grin on her face. “You found my scarf!”
He looked down at the bright bit of pink in his hand. “This ain’t yours.”
“It is, too.”
“No.” He jammed it into the pocket of the hooded sweatshirt he’d pulled on. “It’s not. I found it. Makes it mine. You want it, then you have to earn it back.”
“That …” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “That’s stupid. You want to take a girl’s scarf?”
“I don’t really want it. You can earn it back. Easy.”
Something skittered across her face. She backed up, finally showing some of that wisdom he’d wanted to see. Her hand went to her back and although he never saw it, he had a feeling she had pulled out a cell phone. “Fine. You keep it.”
He chuckled and turned around, staring out over the water, smooth as a mirror under the sun. “Don’t worry, kid. Nothing like what you’re thinking. I just want you to answer a few questions.”
She was quiet a moment. “What kind of questions?”
“Well, for starters, how about you tell me when you started to see them?”
He looked back at her as he asked and, judging by the way she’d gone ashen, he knew he’d hit the mark. But she played dumb. “See who?”
“Ghosts, kid. How long have you seen them?”
Jonni finished up work and checked the time. She’d made some serious headway on several of her projects. One of them was going to bring in a nice sum of money – nothing to write home about but she could pay off some bills.
Best of all, she’d finished at a decent time.
Decent enough to know it was past five and Tally wasn’t home. She’d been home, checked in after school, spent thirty minutes on her homework and then disappeared.
Jonni had asked where she was going and Tally had glibly said, “For a walk.”
“A walk my ass.”
Tally wasn’t spending an hour, an hour and a half outside because she’d developed a fascination with her health. She wasn’t out there wandering around and looking for social interaction.
Abruptly, Jonni pulled up Google maps and searched the area around the little house they now called home. She’d lived here for the first eighteen years of her life so she knew the area well, or had.
Where would Tally go for her quiet time?
The pond. No.
The old park where Jonni had used to go, even when she’d been too old to play … ? Her heart shied away from thinking about that spot for too long because that had been the place where she’d spent a lot of time with one particular person.
But the park was gone.
Out of a need she hadn’t been able to define, she’d driven by there a few days ago, and it had been torn down, replaced by a skate park. Tally had once expressed an interest in skating but the board had been sitting around unused for going on two years now.
So that was a no-go.
Her eyes skipped over it twice. But then she found herself staring at it, and her heart wrenched.
She knew. Just like that. She knew where Tally was.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do,” Gabriel murmured. He cocked his head, his heart twisting a little at the defiant, frightened look in the girl’s eyes. He’d been there. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
She darted a look around. “I … I should go home.”
“You don’t wanna do that, though. You come here because there aren’t any of them here. The dead don’t haunt a place like this. They’re drawn to the living – the places they knew in life. That’s why it’s quiet here.” He watched as her eyes rounded, understanding lighting them. “You wondered, didn’t you? Why they don’t bother you when you’re at a graveyard?”
She licked her lips, moving forward a step. Gabriel doubted she even knew she’d done so. “How … how do you know that?”
“Because I see them, too.” He held out a hand. “Come on, sweetheart. Let me help.”
“Why do you think I need help?”
“Because I did, too. I started seeing them when I was a little older than you and I didn’t have anybody to help me. For a good long while, I thought I was going crazy.” Gabriel continued to stand there and wait, hand outstretched.
Seconds passed and then she moved closer, lifting her own hand. When she put her smaller hand in his, something rushed over him. A wave of recognition that almost overwhelmed him. It didn’t make sense.
For now, he couldn’t let himself think about it.
All that mattered was helping this girl get a handle on what was happening in her head.
She was a lot younger than he’d been, and chances are, she was every bit as scared. Maybe even more so.
He didn’t understand why, but the longer he looked at her, the more intolerable it became for this child to be afraid.
“Now. Let’s try this again.” He squeezed her hand gently, his big, dark hand all but swallowing hers. “What’s your name, kid?”
“It’s Tally,” she said softly.
“I’m Gabriel.” He smiled at her. “Nice to meet you.”
“When did it start, Tally?” Gabriel asked. They’d found a bench near the pond, a spot sheltered from the wind by a copse of trees.
“Sometime last year.” She scraped her nail over a small brown smudge on her jeans, the notebook she’d carried sitting untouched next to her. “I thought I was just freaking out at first. Mom … she, um …”
Her voice tripped, faded away. After a moment, she tried again. “She was seeing this guy. We both liked him. Seemed really nice. Then one night, when she was out late cuz of work – she was a reporter for a paper in Nashville – Neil was watching me and he …”
She bit her lip and looked away.
Gabriel rose from the bench and moved away. He layered up his shields as he moved. He didn’t know just how strong her abilities were, or what she could do other than see the dead. He couldn’t take the chance of her picking up on what he felt. “Did he hurt you?”
“No.” Her voice was small. “But he scared me. Talked about how pretty I was, how much of a woman I’d be soon. He touched my hair and …”
She stopped, and when he looked back at her, she was staring at her hands, knotted in her lap so tightly her knuckles were bloodless. “Mama called. I answered the phone and he tried to stop me. She knew something was wrong because of the way I sounded. Neil tried to make out like I was just in a bad mood, said he’d fussed at me because I had an attitude but she came straight home and I told her. He started yelling. Mom hit him.”
“I like your mama already.” Gabriel moved back to the bench and knelt in front of Tally.
She gave him a nervous smile. “He acted like he’d hit her back and she said she’d bury him. My mama is scary when she wants to be. Neil believed her. He left. We never saw him again, but I started having nightmares. And …”
“That’s when you started seeing the ghosts.” It made sense. Puberty often brought it on and any kind of trauma could precipitate it, force the ability on sooner.
“I thought I was going crazy. Mama’s daddy was sick. She never said how but I know he wasn’t right up here.” Tally tapped her head. “I thought maybe I was the same way. But then our neighbor died and I started seeing her …”
Gabriel reached out and caught her hand.
Her fingers closed over his with startling strength and he squeezed back gently. “I can tell you that you’re not crazy.” He hesitated and then asked, “Have you told your mother?”
“No!” The word burst out of her, sharp and startled.
“Why?”
Tally shot up and started to pace, her movements erratic and uneven. “Because I … I …” She bit her lip.
Gabriel could practically see the words trapped inside her and his heart ached for her. “Are you afraid she won’t believe you?”
“Not exactly.” Tally wrapped her arms around her body, huddling in around herself.
In that moment, she reminded him so much of himself, it was surreal. It was almost like looking through a warped, twisted sort of mirror. The uncertainty, the fear.
“She might believe me,” Tally whispered, staring at the ground. “My mom’s wonderful. She might believe me. But I don’t want her to look at me and know I’m some kind of freak.”
“You’re not a freak, Tally.” He crossed to her, cupped her cheek and made her look up. How many times had he worried that same thing, and wished somebody would give him reassurance?
It hadn’t happened. Not for him. But he could maybe offer that reassurance for this child.
“Listen, I think you need to trust your mom,” he said, searching for the words to make her understand. Tally needed people around her to support her, to help her. “I think you—”
“Tallant Marie Hart, where are you?”
That voice, clear and steady, rang through the cemetery. Tally’s eyes went wide as she jerked away and looked around. Gabriel felt it echo right through him. He felt it echo all the way to his very soul. That voice.
But then the name hit him, and it hit hard. Tallant …
“Tallant,” he murmured. “Sweetheart. What’s your mama’s name?” She didn’t answer, but he didn’t need her to. Jonni Hart was behind her.
Time warp. That was all she could think. Time warp, and a dream come true, all at once.
How many times had she wished for just this, to see the two of them side by side like that?
But it wouldn’t ever happen, not after he’d disappeared off the face of the planet the summer she was eighteen. She’d gone to his parents, time after time, tried to find out where he was, but the Tallmans hadn’t exactly approved of their only son’s relationship with her.
If she’d been a little older, a little more confident, she would have pushed harder, fought harder.
But she’d been eighteen, scared and pregnant – a poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks, her father an alcoholic who could barely hold a job. Gabriel Tallman had been the only son of one of the wealthiest families in town.
That wealth hadn’t exactly translated to respectable. They lived in Golgotha, Mississippi, a backwoods Southern town. And the Tallmans might have money, but more than a few people in that neck of the woods were still trapped in an era where the white folk and the black weren’t supposed to mingle.
I have a better future in mind for my son than seeing him with some white trash child like you, Rochelle Tallman had snapped. Her husband had intervened then, his words kinder, his eyes kinder. But the message was the same. They wanted different things for their son, and no, they wouldn’t help her get a message to him.
Jonni’s father hadn’t kept his disapproval to words. Rochelle Tallman had called her father, and when Jonni got home, Clyde Hart had unloaded his fury, and his fists, on her. That was the day Royce almost killed him.
That was also the day she’d left, promising herself she’d never come back. She never would have, except her daughter mattered more than a promise.
Now …
Her mouth went dry as she stared at the man who still haunted her dreams, and the child he’d never known they had.
“Gabriel.”
Fury flashed in his eyes as he stared at her, but when he looked down at Tally, he just smiled. “Well, sweetheart. It’s a small world.”
He looked back at Jonni, and the warmth was gone from his voice as he said, “We need to talk.”
Gabriel’s head spun with so many thoughts, he almost couldn’t handle it. So instead of letting his mind wander down any of the twisted avenues open to him, he focused on the girl.
She walked along between him
It’s always fascinating to see what fifteen feisty romance writers will get up to when you ask them to write in a subgenre they may never have written in before. It’s plain to see that the Southern Gothic elements of menace, mystery, and magic aren’t more than a stone’s throw from the fantastical, creature-loving paranormal romance that we know and love. So, when issuing the challenge to the writers featured in The Mammoth Book of Southern Gothic Romance, I was pretty sure they were going to take to the subject matter faster than a knife fight in a phone booth. And you know what? They did.
Some writers have transplanted their series to a Southern milieu, like Angie Fox, who’s moved her merry band of biker witches into a field off Route 11 in Georgia, and Laurie London whose Sweetbloods may or may not have a dirty weekend planned in New Orleans. There are grim reapers, ghosts of every size and shape, including Civil War fiddlers, pirates and time travellers and more wrought iron than you ever thought possible. It’s a well-known fact that the thin veil between the living and the dead, the present and the past, and the possible and the impossible just doesn’t exist in the South.
Paranormal romance is right at home down South. Hunky Southern shape-shifters, elegant vampires in crumbling mansions, werewolves under ancient curses and little girls in lonesome graveyards who can see the dead fit effortlessly into Southern climes. And you’ll find writers having a little fun with the genre too – “Southern” becomes southern California, and bright summer days can prove just as sinister and mysterious as the darkest swamp.
So grab your umbrella and your Tarot cards and return to the honorary birthplace of paranormal romance, where the living is easy and the handsome ghosts are too.
an FBI Psychics story
Shiloh Walker
There was a child in his graveyard.
Gabriel Tallant Tallman stood in the shadows, staring at the small figure. It was a cool evening. Fog had rolled in, the wisps of it winding in and out of the monuments, clinging to the ground. The girl was almost motionless as she bent her head over whatever it was that held her so fascinated.
She sat with her back pressed against one of the family vaults. Either she wasn’t concerned by the fact that there were bodies inside that structure or she just didn’t know. It could go either way. He knew from experience.
There was a look to her face that unsettled him. One that spoke of an age beyond her years. Some sort of wisdom that didn’t suit her youth. As the mist thickened around her, he had the strangest sense that perhaps she was one of the spirits that so many people came to the cemetery hoping to find.
Of course, he knew better.
If a person wanted to find a real ghost, you didn’t come to a place of rest. The people who ended up here were just the empty shells of the dead. Their spirits would linger on in other places, unless of course somebody had actually died in the graveyard.
Nobody had.
That’s why Gabriel liked it.
It was quiet.
Ghosts didn’t bother him.
But that girl did.
She didn’t belong here.
He debated between ignoring her and asking her why she was here, but in the end, the lateness of the day decided it for him. It was coming up on seven and the sun was already kissing the horizon. Soon, this place would be shrouded in darkness and it wasn’t a place for children.
When he moved out from behind an obelisk, she lifted her head. If his presence surprised her, she didn’t show it. Her gaze bounced off him and then returned to her notebook.
He had to amend his earlier observation. Maybe she wasn’t as wise as he’d thought. Those eyes, as old as they’d seemed when she looked at him, might be more naive than he’d assumed. A smart kid wouldn’t ignore a total stranger like that. She should be more careful.
Abruptly, Gabriel felt angry. Where were her parents? Didn’t they think to teach her about strangers and crazy people?
Why was she here in a cemetery?
She shot him a look, a quick flick of her eyes. She had pretty eyes, he noticed. Absurdly so. They actually reminded him of somebody. A woman. Before that thought could become an ache, he blocked it out. Thinking about her never led to good things. How much good could come of it when all of it had led to heartache, anyway?
Instead of letting his mind wander down that long, painful path, he focused on the here and the now.
The young girl with her blue-green eyes and her café au lait skin sure as hell shouldn’t be out alone this late, so far from anybody.
Almost as if she could sense his thoughts, she looked back at him and her chin went up. “You got a problem, mister?”
“It’s getting late,” he pointed out. “Not the best place to be at night.”
She wrinkled her nose and looked around. “Why? Is the boogey man gonna get me?”
Frowning, he shoved his hands in his pockets. Mouthy, arrogant bratty girl. “If you believe in the boogey man at your age, then somebody needs to have a talk with your folks.”
“It’s not my folks. It’s just my mom.” She shrugged and looked back at whatever she had in her lap.
Craning his head, he caught a better look of it. It was a notebook, the spiral-bound kind, and she also had a pen clutched in one hand. “Well, when you talk to your mama about the boogey man, maybe she should explain to you about why you shouldn’t be messing around in cemeteries this close to dark. Or … at all.”
“What’s wrong with cemeteries?” she asked. “They’re quiet. Not like there’s anything dangerous here.”
They’re quiet. Those words hummed through his brain. Thoughtfully, he narrowed his eyes. Gabriel studied her closer, but this time, she kept her gaze locked on the notebook in front of her. “What do you mean, quiet?”
“Is the word foreign?” She shrugged, her voice selfconscious. “You know. Quiet. It’s the opposite of loud.”
He had a feeling that his idea of quiet and her idea were two very different things.
“Quiet or not, that doesn’t make it safe. You can still run into dangerous people, get hurt. Your mama know you’re here?”
There was a pause and the girl finally glanced up at him. “She probably knows.” She pursed her lips, giving him the same thoughtful study he’d given her. “Don’t tell me you’re dangerous.”
Honey, if only you knew.
But he kept that thought tucked safely inside his head. “You should get home. The graveyard locks its gates at dark.”
“You sure are paranoid about this. You act like you own this place or something.” She paused, one eye squinting thoughtfully. “You don’t, do you?”
A reluctant smile tugged at his lips. “No. I don’t own this place.” That didn’t mean it wasn’t his, though. When he was in town, he spent more time in this old garden of stone than the actual groundskeeper, walking the paths, caring for the overgrown weeds and leaving the plots alone where the families had left such requests in place. He knew this place so well, he could walk it in the dead of night with no light to guide him. Especially lately.
This was his haven and he wasn’t going to share it with some mouthy child.
“You should leave,” he said again, looking around. It was full dark now, and if somebody didn’t know the way, it was easy to get lost in the shadows. “Can you find your way out?”
She sighed and pushed herself up, clutching the notepad to her with skinny arms. “Yeah.” She plodded off past him. “I liked this place better before you saw me.”
Jonni Hart was calling the cops.
That girl had less than five minutes to walk through the door before she made the call. Pacing back and forth, she gnawed on her left thumbnail, a habit she’d tried to kick so many times over the year.
Up until she’d been forced to come back to Golgotha, Mississippi, she’d actually managed to do it.
Thanks to losing her job in Nashville, thanks to the damned economy slump, thanks to a lot of things, she’d been forced to do the one thing she’d never wanted to do – move back into the house where she’d grown up. It had been left to Jonni – Jonquil on her driver’s license and birth certificate but she’d hurt the person who called her that – and her brother, Royce, after their father had died two years ago.
Royce, a cop on the minuscule Golgotha police department, had been fixing the house up over the months. They wanted to sell it, rid themselves of the place, of the memories, of a time when their lives had consisted of long, tense nights, of days with little food, and a drunken bastard who had barely managed to hold a job. The only way they’d been able to keep the bills paid was because Royce was smart enough to swipe money out of the old man’s wallet once a week come payday.
It was cleaner now. Quieter. The walls no longer echoed with the sound of his drunken bellows. Keep the noise down, you little brat …
She cast a look around the small living room, painted a smooth, easy shade of pale green. Quieter, yes. Cleaner, yes. But it wasn’t the place where she wanted to raise her kid.
“Damn it, Tally, where are—”
The door opened.
Hurling down the cell phone she’d been clutching like a talisman, she whirled on her daughter. “Where the hell have you been?”
Big, blue-green eyes, the same shade as her own, stared back at her as Tally heaved out a sigh. “I was just out, Mom,” Tally said, shrugging out of her coat and hanging it up.
“Out. Out where? We’ve been here for less than two weeks and to my knowledge you haven’t told me about any friends, which means disappearing with any of them is a big, fat no in the mom book of rules.” She propped her hands on her hips and waited.
Tally shot her a look that managed to crush Jonni’s heart. Oh, baby …
“I haven’t made any friends,” Tally said, her voice soft. Then it turned sulky. “So don’t worry. I just wanted someplace …”
She stopped and looked around, while her smooth, light-brown skin went white. “I needed it to be quiet.”
Quiet.
Jonni refused to think about how much it worried her when Tally talked about needing things quiet. The last few months before they’d left Nashville, Tally had looked for quiet places a lot. She’d found them, too. Usually in weird places. Jonni had hoped moving would help whatever had taken her normally happy child and turned her into this worried, truculent shadow. Even as much as she herself had hated to come back to this tired old river town.
“Quiet.” Jonni smoothed her hands down her jeans. Blowing out a breath, she settled down on the couch and stared at the wall in front of her. In her mind’s eye, she saw the wall as it had been the day she finally left. Royce had packed up and moved out the same afternoon.
That wall had once borne the marks of a fight between Royce and that mean, old son of a bitch – a hole in the plaster where Jimmy Hart had thrown him when Royce had stuck up for her, yet again.
“It’s quiet here,” Jonni said. Please talk to me, baby. “Why do you have to leave to find quiet when it’s just you and me? It’s not like there’s an apartment next door or sirens blaring down in the street or a baby crying upstairs. How much more quiet do you need, Tally?”
Tally didn’t speak for so long Jonni didn’t think she would answer.
But, finally, the girl sat down on the couch next to her. “It’s not that kind of quiet, Mama.” She leaned her head against her mother’s arm. “It’s hard to explain. If I can figure out how, I will.”
Wrapping an arm around Tally’s thin shoulders, she said, “You’ve been needing this kind of quiet for months now. How much longer you think it will take?”
“I don’t know.” Tally turned her face into her mother’s embrace, the way she’d done since she was a baby. “There’s just so much noise in my head, Mama.”
Silence fell between them and Jonni squeezed her eyes shut. “Is this because of how rough the last year has been? I know it’s all kind of sucked. I’m getting more work coming in with my freelance stuff, but …”
“No.” Tally looked up and shook her head. “It’s not that. I mean, sometimes I miss Nashville and yeah, I didn’t like it when I had to quit piano, but it’s not like I can’t practice on my own. It’s just other stuff.”
Jonni caught a fat, soft curl in her hand and wound it around her finger as she studied Tally’s face. “Other stuff. Listen, baby, I’m trying to respect the fact that you’re growing up, but whatever this is, it’s bothering you and I want you to trust me enough to tell me.”
Something scared flitted through Tally’s eyes.
Jonni bit her tongue. Tally was a good kid, and a smart one. But that didn’t negate her fear. If she didn’t start talking soon, Jonni was going to have to take desperate measures.
“I will, Mama,” Tally said, almost as if she’d read her mother’s mind.
They were back, insistent questions and voices pressing at him almost from the time he woke. The voices of the dead chased him, but he’d learned to ignore them.
Gabriel was on vacation – more like a sabbatical really, and there was only so much he was required to do.
Maybe it made him a jerk, but if he didn’t take time away, he’d go insane.
So he ignored everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.
Well, very little was absolutely necessary – he took care of those things, and some of his email. If he didn’t take care of email, certain people would start to call and that would kind of negate the whole point of being on sabbatical.
He hadn’t logged in to check his email in nearly a week and the sheer number of flagged messages had him wanting to gouge his eyes out. He grabbed another cup of coffee, tied back his dreads and bent over the laptop. Sunlight shone in through the window, the only light he chose to work in. His dark hands moved over the keyboard and he opened what he figured would be the easiest ones first.
Several from an old contact, Desiree Jones. Beautiful woman, married to a bastard whom Gabriel personally didn’t like and it had nothing to do with the fact that Taylor Jones ran the spook squad with the FBI. Gabriel didn’t like him on principle, because the man was an asshole. An efficient one, but still an asshole.
Several emails were related to cases connected to said asshole. Yet another reason that Gabriel didn’t like him. He’d hoped to sever any and all contact with Jones once he’d left the squad. If he wanted to work with the FBI, he’d still be there, instead of working for a freelance group.
The next batch of emails came from that group. He grimaced and mentally bitched his way through those. His former boss, Elise Oswald, had died recently. While the Oswald Group wasn’t going away, it was being restructured. Gabriel was taking some time to decide if he wanted to be part of it any more.
He was losing interest if he was honest. It wasn’t like he could turn off the need he had to work, but did he want to keep chasing the jobs?
He was debating that very question when the subject line from Taige Morgan – the woman who may be his new boss – had him freezing.
Possible newbie near you.
Gabriel’s hands hovered over the keyboard, his jaw going tight.
Part of him wanted to delete the email.
If there was somebody out there, it wasn’t really his problem. Taige had plenty of people she could send out. Or, hell, Jones could do it, too. Yeah, it was sort of a necessity because some things weren’t best left alone – nobody knew that better than him.
That didn’t make this his responsibility.
Except if he wasn’t connected – or meant to be connected – he didn’t think Taige would have emailed.
He wasn’t one of the altruistic sorts who stayed with the unit out of some innate need to serve and protect. That, in his mind, was the surest way to drive yourself insane. Half the people he’d tried to protect in his life either hated him or had abandoned him. The rest weren’t even aware of the things he’d done to help.
But Gabriel also knew that some things were just connected.
If he was connected to this, then he was connected to it.
“I need this like I need a hole in my head,” he muttered as he clicked on the email and started to read.
Within five seconds, he slammed the top of the laptop shut. It only took him another twenty to hit the stairs.
He had to get dressed. Get out of there. Find that girl.
It didn’t dawn on him until nearly three hours later that he’d have some trouble finding her, for several reasons. He didn’t know her name or where she went to school, and his cemetery might not be the only one she hung out in.
The biggest concerns were the first two. Namely because if she was anything like him, if she’d hit his spot more than once, then she’d developed a liking for it. He knew how that worked. He’d done the same thing. Once a person developed a connection, they just weren’t as comfortable elsewhere.
Prowling around Golgotha First Baptist Cemetery, he kept an eye on the front gate as he noticed signs that she’d been spending some time there. It had been a while since he’d had to do any major investigative work – he used a different skill set in his line of work now – but he could see where somebody had been spending time at several different spots. Namely, the family vault where he’d found her last night. And down by the little pond.
The grass was tramped down in both places, and by the pond she’d left a scarf. He picked it up and grimaced as his skin came in contact with it.
Well, if he’d had any question, it was all gone now.
“Hey!”
He turned around and saw the girl coming toward him, a grin on her face. “You found my scarf!”
He looked down at the bright bit of pink in his hand. “This ain’t yours.”
“It is, too.”
“No.” He jammed it into the pocket of the hooded sweatshirt he’d pulled on. “It’s not. I found it. Makes it mine. You want it, then you have to earn it back.”
“That …” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “That’s stupid. You want to take a girl’s scarf?”
“I don’t really want it. You can earn it back. Easy.”
Something skittered across her face. She backed up, finally showing some of that wisdom he’d wanted to see. Her hand went to her back and although he never saw it, he had a feeling she had pulled out a cell phone. “Fine. You keep it.”
He chuckled and turned around, staring out over the water, smooth as a mirror under the sun. “Don’t worry, kid. Nothing like what you’re thinking. I just want you to answer a few questions.”
She was quiet a moment. “What kind of questions?”
“Well, for starters, how about you tell me when you started to see them?”
He looked back at her as he asked and, judging by the way she’d gone ashen, he knew he’d hit the mark. But she played dumb. “See who?”
“Ghosts, kid. How long have you seen them?”
Jonni finished up work and checked the time. She’d made some serious headway on several of her projects. One of them was going to bring in a nice sum of money – nothing to write home about but she could pay off some bills.
Best of all, she’d finished at a decent time.
Decent enough to know it was past five and Tally wasn’t home. She’d been home, checked in after school, spent thirty minutes on her homework and then disappeared.
Jonni had asked where she was going and Tally had glibly said, “For a walk.”
“A walk my ass.”
Tally wasn’t spending an hour, an hour and a half outside because she’d developed a fascination with her health. She wasn’t out there wandering around and looking for social interaction.
Abruptly, Jonni pulled up Google maps and searched the area around the little house they now called home. She’d lived here for the first eighteen years of her life so she knew the area well, or had.
Where would Tally go for her quiet time?
The pond. No.
The old park where Jonni had used to go, even when she’d been too old to play … ? Her heart shied away from thinking about that spot for too long because that had been the place where she’d spent a lot of time with one particular person.
But the park was gone.
Out of a need she hadn’t been able to define, she’d driven by there a few days ago, and it had been torn down, replaced by a skate park. Tally had once expressed an interest in skating but the board had been sitting around unused for going on two years now.
So that was a no-go.
Her eyes skipped over it twice. But then she found herself staring at it, and her heart wrenched.
She knew. Just like that. She knew where Tally was.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do,” Gabriel murmured. He cocked his head, his heart twisting a little at the defiant, frightened look in the girl’s eyes. He’d been there. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
She darted a look around. “I … I should go home.”
“You don’t wanna do that, though. You come here because there aren’t any of them here. The dead don’t haunt a place like this. They’re drawn to the living – the places they knew in life. That’s why it’s quiet here.” He watched as her eyes rounded, understanding lighting them. “You wondered, didn’t you? Why they don’t bother you when you’re at a graveyard?”
She licked her lips, moving forward a step. Gabriel doubted she even knew she’d done so. “How … how do you know that?”
“Because I see them, too.” He held out a hand. “Come on, sweetheart. Let me help.”
“Why do you think I need help?”
“Because I did, too. I started seeing them when I was a little older than you and I didn’t have anybody to help me. For a good long while, I thought I was going crazy.” Gabriel continued to stand there and wait, hand outstretched.
Seconds passed and then she moved closer, lifting her own hand. When she put her smaller hand in his, something rushed over him. A wave of recognition that almost overwhelmed him. It didn’t make sense.
For now, he couldn’t let himself think about it.
All that mattered was helping this girl get a handle on what was happening in her head.
She was a lot younger than he’d been, and chances are, she was every bit as scared. Maybe even more so.
He didn’t understand why, but the longer he looked at her, the more intolerable it became for this child to be afraid.
“Now. Let’s try this again.” He squeezed her hand gently, his big, dark hand all but swallowing hers. “What’s your name, kid?”
“It’s Tally,” she said softly.
“I’m Gabriel.” He smiled at her. “Nice to meet you.”
“When did it start, Tally?” Gabriel asked. They’d found a bench near the pond, a spot sheltered from the wind by a copse of trees.
“Sometime last year.” She scraped her nail over a small brown smudge on her jeans, the notebook she’d carried sitting untouched next to her. “I thought I was just freaking out at first. Mom … she, um …”
Her voice tripped, faded away. After a moment, she tried again. “She was seeing this guy. We both liked him. Seemed really nice. Then one night, when she was out late cuz of work – she was a reporter for a paper in Nashville – Neil was watching me and he …”
She bit her lip and looked away.
Gabriel rose from the bench and moved away. He layered up his shields as he moved. He didn’t know just how strong her abilities were, or what she could do other than see the dead. He couldn’t take the chance of her picking up on what he felt. “Did he hurt you?”
“No.” Her voice was small. “But he scared me. Talked about how pretty I was, how much of a woman I’d be soon. He touched my hair and …”
She stopped, and when he looked back at her, she was staring at her hands, knotted in her lap so tightly her knuckles were bloodless. “Mama called. I answered the phone and he tried to stop me. She knew something was wrong because of the way I sounded. Neil tried to make out like I was just in a bad mood, said he’d fussed at me because I had an attitude but she came straight home and I told her. He started yelling. Mom hit him.”
“I like your mama already.” Gabriel moved back to the bench and knelt in front of Tally.
She gave him a nervous smile. “He acted like he’d hit her back and she said she’d bury him. My mama is scary when she wants to be. Neil believed her. He left. We never saw him again, but I started having nightmares. And …”
“That’s when you started seeing the ghosts.” It made sense. Puberty often brought it on and any kind of trauma could precipitate it, force the ability on sooner.
“I thought I was going crazy. Mama’s daddy was sick. She never said how but I know he wasn’t right up here.” Tally tapped her head. “I thought maybe I was the same way. But then our neighbor died and I started seeing her …”
Gabriel reached out and caught her hand.
Her fingers closed over his with startling strength and he squeezed back gently. “I can tell you that you’re not crazy.” He hesitated and then asked, “Have you told your mother?”
“No!” The word burst out of her, sharp and startled.
“Why?”
Tally shot up and started to pace, her movements erratic and uneven. “Because I … I …” She bit her lip.
Gabriel could practically see the words trapped inside her and his heart ached for her. “Are you afraid she won’t believe you?”
“Not exactly.” Tally wrapped her arms around her body, huddling in around herself.
In that moment, she reminded him so much of himself, it was surreal. It was almost like looking through a warped, twisted sort of mirror. The uncertainty, the fear.
“She might believe me,” Tally whispered, staring at the ground. “My mom’s wonderful. She might believe me. But I don’t want her to look at me and know I’m some kind of freak.”
“You’re not a freak, Tally.” He crossed to her, cupped her cheek and made her look up. How many times had he worried that same thing, and wished somebody would give him reassurance?
It hadn’t happened. Not for him. But he could maybe offer that reassurance for this child.
“Listen, I think you need to trust your mom,” he said, searching for the words to make her understand. Tally needed people around her to support her, to help her. “I think you—”
“Tallant Marie Hart, where are you?”
That voice, clear and steady, rang through the cemetery. Tally’s eyes went wide as she jerked away and looked around. Gabriel felt it echo right through him. He felt it echo all the way to his very soul. That voice.
But then the name hit him, and it hit hard. Tallant …
“Tallant,” he murmured. “Sweetheart. What’s your mama’s name?” She didn’t answer, but he didn’t need her to. Jonni Hart was behind her.
Time warp. That was all she could think. Time warp, and a dream come true, all at once.
How many times had she wished for just this, to see the two of them side by side like that?
But it wouldn’t ever happen, not after he’d disappeared off the face of the planet the summer she was eighteen. She’d gone to his parents, time after time, tried to find out where he was, but the Tallmans hadn’t exactly approved of their only son’s relationship with her.
If she’d been a little older, a little more confident, she would have pushed harder, fought harder.
But she’d been eighteen, scared and pregnant – a poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks, her father an alcoholic who could barely hold a job. Gabriel Tallman had been the only son of one of the wealthiest families in town.
That wealth hadn’t exactly translated to respectable. They lived in Golgotha, Mississippi, a backwoods Southern town. And the Tallmans might have money, but more than a few people in that neck of the woods were still trapped in an era where the white folk and the black weren’t supposed to mingle.
I have a better future in mind for my son than seeing him with some white trash child like you, Rochelle Tallman had snapped. Her husband had intervened then, his words kinder, his eyes kinder. But the message was the same. They wanted different things for their son, and no, they wouldn’t help her get a message to him.
Jonni’s father hadn’t kept his disapproval to words. Rochelle Tallman had called her father, and when Jonni got home, Clyde Hart had unloaded his fury, and his fists, on her. That was the day Royce almost killed him.
That was also the day she’d left, promising herself she’d never come back. She never would have, except her daughter mattered more than a promise.
Now …
Her mouth went dry as she stared at the man who still haunted her dreams, and the child he’d never known they had.
“Gabriel.”
Fury flashed in his eyes as he stared at her, but when he looked down at Tally, he just smiled. “Well, sweetheart. It’s a small world.”
He looked back at Jonni, and the warmth was gone from his voice as he said, “We need to talk.”
Gabriel’s head spun with so many thoughts, he almost couldn’t handle it. So instead of letting his mind wander down any of the twisted avenues open to him, he focused on the girl.
She walked along between him
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