Roses & Haunts Read online

  Roses & Haunts

  A Caprice Halloween Special

  Book Five of the Caprice Chronicles

  Selena Page

  Roses & Haunts

  Copyright © 2016, Selena Page

  Copyright © 2016, Selena Page

  First electronic publication: October 2016

  Selena Page

  http://www.selenapage.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded, or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products 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.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Caprice Chronicles

  Love & Accusations

  Smoke & Longing

  Roads & Royalty

  Sin & Redemption

  Roses & Haunts

  Dirt & Desire – Coming November 2016

  Blood & Wine – Coming November 2016

  Find Selena Page online at http://www.selenapage.com or e-mail her at [email protected]

  Join the Family and stay up to date with the latest news, sneak previews and more from the Caprice Family!

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 1

  “We’re lost.”

  “We are not lost.”

  Alynia Tintreach nee Caprice eyed her husband with a steel-colored, penetrating glare from the passenger seat. In typical Iowin fashion, he ignored it. For a moment, she toyed with the idea of flicking her straw at him. The imagined joy of watching irritation and a fine splattering of cherry soda paint his Irish-pale profile with more than just shadows was well worth any future retribution.

  As pleasurable as that fantasy was, the thought was fleeting. The fading afternoon light turned his dark gold hair all shades of auburn, tossing hints of fall colors across the angles and planes of his face. They’d been married a little over a month now and when he was at his most stubborn, she couldn’t help but stare at him in disbelief and love.

  Disbelief that they had survived so much.

  Disbelief that they were still alive.

  Disbelief that he was really hers now and she was his, always and forever.

  Now they were on their honeymoon. Finally. It had taken that long to clean up the mess in Miami following the final defeat of the dark warlock known as Sean Shadowblack. Her “sudden” resignation from the Miami-Dade Police Department and his rapid dismantling of the Tintreach Empire nearly shattered their newly rekindled love. Still Iowin wasn’t completely free of his brother’s influence. Each day brought him a step closer to who he used to be, and she knew it would be a long climb from the dark back into the light.

  Traces of the Empire clung to him like a fungus, like the ghosts of a blood-soaked battlefield wherein the ground never truly dried. In a fit of the trademark Caprice Family temper, she’d thrown his phone into the trunk, hoping to cease its constant ringing. Her husband was NOT the leader of a drug-running Mafia-like mercenary squad anymore. Even that haunted her, and she swore she heard the damn thing vibrating over the blasting notes of DMX’s ‘X Gon’ Give It To Ya’ pumping through the car speakers.

  Alynia cranked down on the pounding bass, bringing the volume to less window-shattering decibels. “We’re lost,” she tried again. “Did you hear me?”

  “Unfortunately,” he slanted a lopsided grin her way, softening the harshness of the word with love.

  That earned the aforementioned straw-flick, droplets of soda adding a touch of crimson to the shadows caressing his cheek. Rather Impressionistic in her opinion. A Study in Red on Annoying Husbands. Bestseller if she ever saw one.

  His response was typically Iowin. A flash of pink tongue across expressive lips, slowly and deliberately ensuring she got an eye full of the motion. Starting at the bottom pout and working its way counter-clockwise around his mouth, his tongue vanishing around to the other side in a way that made her want to whimper. Not to be left out of the torment-the-wife show, his right hand rose slowly, sliding the dripping cherry sugar from his cheek to his mouth where his tongue picked up the clock sweep.

  Amazing talent he had with that tongue, enough that her own moistened her lips in reflex. Or was that anticipation?

  “I hope you intend to keep that promise,” she grinned. “Teasing your wife like that can be considered a crime.”

  His hand reached over, captured her fingers in his, and brought the simple gold of her wedding ring to his lips. “Planning to arrest me for it? I thought you gave up the badge.”

  “Badge, yes. Cuffs? Well, I just knew there were things I forgot to surrender.”

  “Now who’s making promises, love?”

  She chuckled, happily using her straw for its intended purpose and watching the trees blaze past in an impressionistic pattern of their own. They could have gone anywhere in the world for their honeymoon, yet settled on upstate New York of all places. The soda lost some of its sweetness at that, the real reason they were in the States and not on some tropical paradise intruding on her bliss.

  They were here because her parents had demanded it. Okay, precisely because her mother had cried over the phone when Alynia mentioned she married Iowin in a quickie justice of the peace kind of deal. No flowers. No dresses. No family. Just her and her husband. Simple, right?

  No. Not by a long shot.

  Her mother lost it with the waterworks as if Alynia had died rather than just gotten married without her. Maybe in Heather Caprice Rozhenkos’s opinion, it was one and the same. Her father, a bear of a Russian if there ever was one, had literally threatened to make her a widow if she didn’t get home ASAP and explain herself. Everyone in the little town of Autumn Falls, NY, knew that if Miss Heather cried, Mr. Antoly did anything to make it stop. Anything. There were a few whispered jokes that the men who went missing back in the seventies were men who made Ms. Heather cry.

  There were a few who didn’t joke about that, even in whispers.

  That pretty much steered the course of their travels.

  The bond of magic between them, which saved them during Sean’s attack, was the only thing that saved them from Papa Antoly’s wrath. It wasn’t their fault they’d accidentally merged their souls together in a night of unregretted incredible sex. Well, they did let the man fill that part in for himself. Regardless, the act was committed, done, and sealed with a magical kiss.

  The promise of a real wedding in front of the whole family sometime soon mollified her mother, and soothed her father. By
near future, they meant in the next year. With her mother planning everything. Alynia shuddered, nightmares of fluffy bridesmaid dresses dancing like anti-sugarplums across her gray matter. “We’re lost.”

  Iowin sighed through gritted teeth, the playfulness of before gone. “For the last time, Nia, we aren’t lost. I know where we are.”

  She lifted one coal black eyebrow. “Really? There are that many oak trees in upstate New York which happen to have a bus stop beneath them?”

  It was his turn to lift an eyebrow at her. “Can you think of a better place for one?”

  “Hrm,” she squinted out the windshield as the road curved to the left—yet again. “I suppose they all have a mother in a bright yellow sweater, three kids, and an orange pumpkin-themed stroller exactly three inches to the right of said bench. Stars above, Iowin, you’re right. How can we be lost?”

  The emerald gaze hitting her this time had heat to it, and not the type spurned by impromptu slushy painting.

  She smirked. “Admit it.”

  Iowin puffed up his chest, taking a deep breath and—

  —exhaling it in a slow sigh of defeat.

  “Fine. We’re lost. Are you happy?”

  Alynia stomped hard on the budding smugness rising inside her, hoping that he couldn’t sense it through the bond. The way his face hardened slightly let her know she failed.

  “You’re so cute when you pout.”

  “And you’re going to pay for that when I’m able to take both hands off the wheel.”

  “Oh, promises, promises,” she teased.

  The full weight of that jade stare hit her, and the tightening of her body let her know he’d keep his word. She’d pay for taunting him. Oh, she’d pay… in so many delicious ways. Her cheeks flushed at the very thought of it, her lips parting of their own accord, tongue begging to slip between them in hopes of tasting some lingering bit of what they’d done earlier that morning before setting out on this trip.

  Smugness boiled through the bond all right, glittering with the sharp-edged laughter in his eyes. He knew what his stare did to her, and he made no qualms about showing it. The chuckle that left his lips was infuriating and endearing all at once.

  “You’re a right bastard sometimes, Iowin Tintreach,” she grinned around her straw.

  “Aye, you love me for it.”

  “Forever,” she leaned over and kissed his cheek before fishing her tablet out from between the seat and the door, jabbing the thing to life. A map loaded on the glowing surface, a scan of one so old she barely made it out. But that was the bad that went with the good of ‘getting away from it all.’ No cell signals this deep into the wilds of New York. No people. No bother. No modern GPS locator. “So earn that love and get us out of this loop. We’re coming up on that mother and kids again. For what, the eighth time?”

  Iowin frowned at that. “Don’t you think that a trite odd?”

  Alynia glanced back up from the map. “What’s odd?”

  “That we’re passing this mother and her children for the eighth time.”

  She rolled her eyes and smirked anew. “Well, that’s what happens when one is looping the same road over and over again. The road isn’t infinite, love. We’re going to circle around until we—”

  “That’s my point,” he interrupted, his frown deepening to a scowl. “How long does it take us to make the loop?”

  She grimaced, glancing down at her watch. He did have a point. It took a good thirty minutes to circle back around to Mom Stop Number 27 as she’d started to call it. If they’d passed it more than six times—honestly she hadn’t started to count until recently—then…

  “It shouldn’t take more than twenty for a bus to get to the stop, right?” she murmured. “There’s no snow on the ground yet. But, I mean, the bus could have been delayed, right?”

  The lack of confidence in her own words betrayed just how little she thought of that. Neither believed in coincidence and neither one liked the way the facts were stacking up. Alynia and Iowin both peered at the mother as they passed, Iowin downshifting to a lower gear to get a better look. Everything was just as she had described it before: mom in yellow, stroller in an eye-wrenching contrasting orange, three kids in various stages of reading a book, playing on a tablet, or being held in mom’s loving embrace.

  All the same.

  Exactly the same.

  Like they’d never moved at all.

  She didn’t need to tell him to do it. Iowin hit the brakes hard, tires squealing a protest to the sudden lack of momentum. But they weren’t the only things not moving.

  Alynia threw open the door, hand slapping at her chest until her fingers closed around the Caprice Family amulet she always wore tucked beneath her shirt. The bond with Iowin gave her access to his powers, true. But it didn’t grant her all his knowledge with them. She needed to learn and master all his spells. For now, she had to rely on her tried and true methods, and that wheelhouse included activating the stored power inside an artifact. Namely, her artifact.

  It was a gentle spell, a small one that let her shift events backwards in time just a few seconds. Like peeking into the past with one eye closed and the other squinting. Minutes rolled backwards in her mind’s eye, showing the arrival of the mother and her children. And then… stopping. Just stopping. Freezing in time, as if Lady Fate had taken a selfie with the fam and plastered it across her personal blog. Only in this case, the blog was reality and the fam in question hadn’t thanked her and walked away.

  They were still saying ‘cheese.’

  “They aren’t moving, Iowin,” she breathed. “They haven’t moved in hours near as I can tell.”

  Gravel crunched beneath his feet as he crossed over to her, the telltale click of a hand-held crossbow arming itself in one hand. She didn’t need the bond to know his other held her trusty glock out towards her. Instead of police issue, this one was an artifact all of its own, the trigger only pulling back for her finger. He passed it to her without having to glance away from the tree line, taking up position at her back.

  “Nothing’s moving here but us, love,” he whispered. “Look at the trees.”

  Focused, dispassionate cop eyes surveyed the roadside, her lips compressing in a thin line. Frozen. This entire swath of road was just… frozen. There was no other way to describe it. Branches displayed themselves in unnatural positions, leaves knocked free in what should have been a crisp autumn breeze hung suspended in the air. No birds sang, no crisp snapping of twigs as small woodland animals went about their business. This was a deserted stretch of state highway dotted here and there with deer crossing signs. Nature, by all rights, should have been alive and well and giving the proverbial finger to the urban encroachment of man.

  All she could hear was their own breathing, and all she could taste was her own heartbeat.

  Both hands locked around her weapon, bringing it up high and near her face. “Stunner,” she whispered, feeling the weapon vibrate in response, magic turning her 9mm rounds into mini-tasers. They wouldn’t kill, but they’d knock the fight out of anyone.

  Like, say, the son of a bitch responsible for the impromptu Thomas Kincaide painting they were now standing in?

  “Stunners won’t help,” Iowin shook his head, casting his senses about. “There’s no one here, Nia. There’s no life here that I can detect outside of us.”

  “I’m open for suggestions, then.”

  “Get in the car. Let’s go.”

  She hesitated, old cop instincts kicking in. “What about the mom and her kids?”

  “Either we’re standing in a frozen moment of time, in which case they are long gone to their safe destinations,” he shook his head. “Or they’re already dead.”

  She swallowed the curse before it left her lips and bolted back to the car, Iowin quick on her heels.

  “GO!” she called.

  He didn’t need the verbal recommendation to be elsewhere. His foot hammered the gas nearly before his ass was in the seat, tossing his weap
on to her and grasping the shifter with the same hand. She barely had time to catch it and plant her own behind into the soft leather before the car was squealing anew, this time much louder than before. Gravel flew behind them, obscuring the scene of mother and children in dust. Speed limit signs were outright ignored and Iowin worked the motor as hard and as fast as he could. Good German engineering all but flew down the secluded road, the time-frozen trees whipping past in a blur.

  “One trip,” she muttered, juggling both weapons and the shoulder strap until finally managing to click the seatbelt into place. “For once, I’d love for us to go on one single trip that didn’t end in some kind of a race for our lives.”

  “From your lips to God’s ear, Nia.”

  The trip around the frozen loop took less than three minutes. Mom Stop 27 loomed ahead of them once more, everything as eerily silent and empty as before. The road, she noted, bore no tire marks from their squealing attempted escape. No dust and debris marred the pristine bright yellow of the Mom’s sweater, either.

  “Jesus,” she breathed.

  Iowin downshifted, pulling the Jaguar out of the red. “Speed isn’t going to help us. I think we’re well and truly stuck.”

  Alynia gritted her teeth, raking fingers through her midnight hair. “Then let’s break the loop,” she glanced over at him. “Take us off this road.”