Ravenous Ghosts by Kealan Patrick Burke Read Free Book Online

the hell is she?
    He tried to close his eyes and his heart lurched.
    I can't close my eyes .
    The calm he 'd forced himself to muster dropped like a theater curtain torn from the rails and he tried to open his mouth to set free the scream trapped in his throat. His mouth wouldn't open.
    Oh God.
    Remember her. Start by remembering her , he thought, his mind spinning so fast he was almost able to convince himself it was really his body circling the room, somehow released from the vicious constraints.
    What good would it do to remember her? Would recalling her name send her running to his aid?
    It should damn it.
    But you can 't scream his mind countered and ice flooded through his veins at the spoken and yet not spoken truth of this waking nightmare.
    She drugged me. The bitch put something in my drink .
    Yes, that was it. Had to be. What other rational explanation was there? He was paralyzed, unable to move anything but his eyes. But then, why bind him?
    Of course, she would have had to seduce me into this so that the drug had a chance to work .
    A bar. He 'd been in a bar after a meeting with the insurance folks. One of their workers in the plant was threatening to sue after a routine check had shown his lungs were clogged with asbestos particles. It was a potentially lethal situation business wise and Bill had been drafted in to tackle the situation, to offer a significant amount of money to keep everybody happy and more importantly, keep it out of court. Five figures they could afford to part with for the sake of maintaining their good name; seven or eight was out of the question.
    The meeting had gone well, though afterward he wasn 't entirely convinced that they were going to escape the guillotine. Still, he'd done his part and done it well and when the blonde chocolate-skinned woman at the bar had started giving him the glad eye, he decided he had earned the reward.
    Fresh anger bloomed in his chest, his hands begging to clench but frozen, a denial that further inflamed him.
    A whore. I've been fleeced by a goddamn whore.
    Rage poured into his eyes and suddenly the urge to blink it away became a need and the need became desperation. And that led to torture as the inability to blink began to make his eyes boil.
    She had brought him back to her apartment, whispering promises of acts he was sure his wife had never even heard of. After the grueling ascent to her place (she told him the elevator was broken), she had led him inside. Told him to take a seat. This is where memory failed him.
    Now he prayed to God to stop the madness and felt an itch wind its way like an army of fire ants over his wrists. His teeth tried to clench, eyes flitting madly from one dank corner of the sunlight-shunning loft to another. Finally, aflame with agony, he looked straight ahead, through the small window and the shimmering hallway, looking less impossible now and more like the path to salvation, held cruelly out of reach for men who awoke to find themselves bound and frozen.
    Oh Jesus .
    And then someone swept into the doorway. He paused and watched, feeling sweat inside his skin looking for an exit that wasn 't there.
    It was a woman, wearing an ankle-length black coat, her auburn hair dancing in the breeze before the door hissed shut behind her and left it drop to her shoulders. As she strode purposefully down the corridor, a plastic name badge flashed in the sunlight, the light hitting him straight in the eyes. His mind compensated for his mouth 's uselessness and shrieked, echoing hollowly through the canals that were his nerves, setting his soul ablaze and wracking his body with shudders that rippled through his innards and broke well before the surface of his frozen flesh.
    Inside, he wept, knowing no tears were spilling from his eyes because that would have taken away the burning and it was obvious to him now that no reprieve was forthcoming.
    She'd left him here to die or go mad. Or both.
    But then he remembered the woman in the