Undeadly: The Case Files of Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist (The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist Book 6) Read online

  UNDEADLY

  The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist

  By

  Cynthia St. Aubin

  UNDEADLY

  Copyright © 2014 Cynthia St. Aubin

  All Rights Reserved

  The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, or stored in or introduced into an information storage and retrieval system in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Cover designed by Scarlett Rugers Design, www.scarlettrugers.com

  Illustration by Stephen Richards

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  Other Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist Novellas:

  Unlovable

  Unlucky

  Unhoppy

  Unbearable

  Unassailable

  Coming soon:

  Unexpecting

  Dedication

  To the lovely Kerrigan Byrne—partner in crime, cheerleader, and dearest friend. Your rising star casts light upon all those fortunate enough to know you. I’m glad to count myself among them.

  “You’ll never believe what’s in your office.”

  Generally, the use of what instead of who when referring to the clients that came to me for forty-five minute therapy sessions was not a good sign.

  Once upon a time, a bad day at the office meant back-to-back bipolar disorders or getting hit on by a baby boomer whose wife had shuffled him my way in hopes of yanking him out of a midlife crisis.

  Not anymore.

  Not since Crixus—demigod, supernatural bounty hunter, and would-be lover—

  had dragged Cupid kicking and swearing into my office eight months ago, insisting he needed my help to save the world. Since then, a steady parade of everything from suicidal Easter bunnies to pants-less ghost pirates had come tearing through my life and once-routine practice.

  Standing in front of my assistant’s desk, I tried making my breaths more and more shallow until my chest ceased to rise and the edges of my vision dimmed. My idea of drawing the shades against life’s terrible glare.

  It also helped to quiet the ghostly voices—the only souvenir I managed to bring back from my first vacation in years.

  My attempt to discuss this new development with my schizophrenic mother—herself a veteran of sharing her head with unwelcome tenants—had been nothing short of disastrous. The evening ended with her in four-point restraints and me in the hallway in tears.

  “Did you hear me, Dr. Schmidt?” Julie Harrison, blond, bubbly, and an inveterate leaner across horizontal surfaces, gave me the full benefit of her cleavage in a scooped-necked, hot pink sweater as she bent over the desk to hand me a similarly-hued sticky note.

  Hear, yes. Process, no.

  I set my leather laptop bag down at the pointed tips of my red leather stilettos—my answer to combat boots for a day in the trenches. “I give. What’s in my office?”

  “A vampire!” Julie’s cheeks flushed scarlet within their frame of golden curls. She had pinned them up in a romantically disheveled bun today, tendrils escaping to tumble down her slim neck.

  My own thick, shoulder-length chestnut hair was twisted into a tight chignon. I felt businesslike, in control, less distracted with it out of the way.

  “A vampire? As in bloodsucking undead fiend? As in…” I found myself baring my front teeth and holding up two fingers bent at the knuckle like a snake’s fangs, which I poked at Julie for effect.

  “As in Byron Alexander Davenport.”

  I whirled around to find myself face-to-face with a tall, pale man in a gray pinstriped suit that probably cost more than my Prius.

  His hand was cold when it clasped mine, as were the lips he pressed against my knuckles. His coal-black hair caught hints of blue, even in the warm lamplight of my office’s wood-paneled waiting area.

  “You must be the famous Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist,” he said, still hovering over my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last.”

  His crisp, English-accented speech held the somber, melodic timbre of cellos.

  “Just a regular psychologist. The paranormal came later.” I slid my numb fingers from his grip and resisted the urge to inch the black frames of my cat-eye glasses to the end of my nose so I could better examine his broad shoulders. This gesture did little to dispel the awareness of my perpetual spinsterhood, having arrived at age thirty with a goldfish as my only progeny. “I’m sorry Mr. Davenport,” I said. “I didn’t hear you come out.”

  “Please, call me Byron.” He looked beyond me to Julie, who appeared a hairsbreadth from ripping her panties off and sling-shotting them at his patrician nose. “Your charming assistant was kind enough to let me wait in your office.”

  “If you’d like to go in, I’ll be with you in just a moment, Byron.” I took the manila folder Julie presented with the same flourish she might have applied to a silver tea service.

  Byron nodded, and was gone. No eardrum-slamming pop announced his departure as it did when Crixus chose to materialize into or out of my life. For the last six weeks, it had been the latter. I had seen neither abs nor biker boots of him since the evening I had left him hard up—so to speak—while I went to bail my self-appointed protector, Liam Whatshisface, out of jail.

  Crixus’s contention that a Las Vegas mob hit man whose drug-addicted mother couldn’t be bothered to come up with a last name for his birth certificate made a pretty lousy savior wasn’t entirely without basis.

  But in Liam’s defense, he had been attempting to help me resolve the unfinished business of a pants-less ghost pirate at the time, while Crixus was more interested in getting me pants-less.

  I lived in the tableau of our last heated moments together until Julie’s wistful sigh dumped me into the present.

  “He’s like something out of a Jane Austen novel, isn’t he? All refined. Remote. Elegant...”

  “Undead…”

  “Immortal,” she corrected.

  “Mr. Willoughby didn’t eat people,” I pointed out.

  “Neither does he.” Julie’s wide chocolate brown eyes softened. “That’s his problem.”

  I flipped open the folder she had provided to scan Byron Alexander Davenport’s paperwork. “Hematophobia,” I pronounced. “A vampire who’s afraid of blood?”

  Julie nodded. “Isn’t that awful? He must be starving.” The way she pronounced this word spoke more vividly to her hunger than to his.

  “Julie, I don’t think it’s wise to romanticize a creature whose survival depends on murdering innocent people.” I glanced down at her desk where a copy of The Vampire’s Lost Love—a far cry from any subtle drawing room romance Miss Austen ever penned—sat face up next to the phone. My own taste in smutty novels tended to see bodices ripped more often than throats.

  “Right now his survival depends on murdering organic fruit and tak
ing iron supplements,” Julie said. “He’s been living off orange juice. He said he finds the consistency is most…satisfying.” Her pink-lacquered nails absently trailed down the length of her throat.

  “And my goal as his therapist would be what?” I asked her. “I’m not sure I feel comfortable applying cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to someone with the express goal of helping them regain a passion for sucking the lifeblood out of the general populace.”

  “But you have to.” Julie turned her pleading gaze in my direction. “He’ll die without it.”

  “Isn’t he sort of dead already?”

  “But he’s so kind,” Julie protested. “So sad. Can’t you feel it?”

  I felt something. Ever since returning from my weekend on Hilton Head, I’d been subject to many feelings. Most of them the psychic backwash from spirits who had discovered my ability to see and feel them. Sometimes they came to me as shades. Sometimes as strange reflections of whatever selves they had been while they still drew breath, not yet aware their part in the grand drama had long ago finished.

  “Feel what?” a voice neither Julie’s nor mine asked.

  I turned to find the rectangular doorway filled with the round figure of Rolly Boggs. A perpetual comfort eater with self-defeating tendencies, Rolly was a security guard for the building where I practiced and the owner of a king-sized crush when it came to me.

  His pale blue eyes darted artlessly over me, making quick grabby glances at my tight pencil skirt, the hint of cleavage above my button-up blouse, my matte red lips and hazel eyes behind their glass barriers.

  “Hi, Rolly,” I said. “Aren’t you on duty today?”

  “I’m on a break,” he announced. “I just wanted to drop off something I was going to give you this morning. I didn’t see you come in.”

  I managed to avoid him on the way in by sliding through a back door just off the lobby, using a badge I wheedled from the building’s super for after-hours access. This method of entry proved to be especially handy after our one ill-fated date—the result of his thousandth request and my first acceptance.

  The reasons for my acquiescence were as simple as they were despicable: someone wanted the alleged fortune Rolly’s dimpled butt was perched on, and had decided that the easiest way to get at it was through me.

  Over the past months, their tactics had ranged from blackmailing me to threatening my mother—now safely tucked away in a Connecticut residential facility where mental health professionals specialized in her kind of issues.

  The kind I couldn’t solve in my one-hour sessions.

  The mysterious perpetrators had been quiet since their plans to force me into serving up Rolly by kidnapping my mother had fallen through, but a lingering oily feeling told me it wasn’t over for good.

  “Look, Rolly,” I began, ready to launch into my well-practiced speech of gentle discouragement, “you know I can’t accept gifts.”

  “It’s not a gift,” Rolly said, withdrawing a black envelope from the pocket of his rumpled khaki shirt. “It’s an invitation.”

  I took the envelope and turned it over in my hands. “An invitation? To what?”

  “A costume party.” Rolly handed an identical envelope to Julie.

  “Costume party?” Julie squealed. “OMG. I love costume parties!” She tore it open and pulled out what looked to be a handmade invitation.

  Staring at its labored text, I pictured Rolly alone at his kitchen table, working over each of the components with paste and scissors.

  A wave of sorrow washed over me.

  “It’s this weekend,” Rolly said. “At my house. I’ve had like seven RSVPs already, so it’s gonna be off the chain. I’m going to make my mom’s famous ambrosia and my cousin Eddie agreed to be the DJ, and he was in the AV club in high school and has all his own speakers. We’re gonna bob for apples and Eddie said he may even bring a limbo stick!”

  My hand had started to sweat, wrinkling the paper beneath my thumb. I stared at my name, methodically penned in gold marker with little stars and hearts drawn around the border. “I’d love to Rolly. But—”

  “It’s my birthday.” Rolly glanced up from his scuffed black work shoes, his eyes meeting mine only for a second before diving back to the floor. “I’d really love it if you could come.”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding long enough to make my chest ache. “Okay. I’ll try to stop by.”

  “You will?” His face brightened as dramatically as if someone had clicked on a light behind it. “Thank you, Dr. Schmidt! Thank you!”

  He nearly flattened a deliveryman as he bounded toward the door with exuberance more common to large dogs than to large men.

  “Sorry about that,” Rolly apologized, shoving another black envelope across the top of the box clutched in the man’s hands. “I’m having a party this weekend. You should come too!”

  The deliveryman looked down at the envelope from dark sunglasses, but said nothing, only allowed Rolly to pass before walking into the office and setting the box down on the chest-height counter at Julie’s desk.

  He certainly wasn’t dressed like any package deliveryman I had ever seen.

  In place of the usual courier’s uniform of shorts and a polo shirt, he wore black slacks, a black coat, a white shirt, and a black tie. His hard mouth didn’t move in greeting, nor betray the eerie lifelessness of his stony expression. Close-cropped dark hair topped a head that nearly scraped the doorframe when he’d marched into the room.

  Silence descended as he angled the sunglasses at Julie, then at me. The kind of airless quiet of funeral parlors and hospital rooms.

  “Sign.”

  I jumped at the force of the word and the bass rumble of his voice. The pad he held out was blank save for a hand-drawn line with the letter X scrawled next to it. I hesitated a minute before snagging a pen from Julie’s desk and hastily scribbling in my signature.

  He clapped the pad closed, tucked it into his coat pocket, and trained the eyeless gaze of his sunglasses toward me.

  He didn’t smile.

  Smile wasn’t the word for what was left on his face when the flat line of his mouth eroded to reveal a sinister rictus.

  Turning by degrees so slow he seemed almost to be moving underwater, he walked back out of the office.

  Silence remained for several breaths after he was gone.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Julie asked.

  The package seemed to pulse in my peripheral vision. “I have no idea.” My mind swam back to the whispery phone calls I had received from blackmailers bent on soaking Rolly, the sound of footfalls haunting my steps. Their list of tactics grew ever longer. Could this be a new one?

  “Wouldn’t open that if I were you,” Julie advised. “I could totally see there being a severed hand in there or something. You are dating a hit man.”

  “We’re not dating.”

  “That’s right, I forgot. You’re not dating. You’re married.” Julie’s perfectly-plucked eyebrows wiggled at me.

  She had found out the same day Crixus had—which is to say, a couple weeks after I did—that according to the Clark County bureau of records, I was officially Mrs. Liam Whatshisface. A little step he had taken to pilfer information about me back in the early days when I was his target instead of his project.

  “I am not married to him. He forged my signature, which makes it fraud, last time I checked.”

  “So you had the marriage annulled then?” For all her glitter and foofy accessories, Julie had a way of cutting to bare bones when it came to any topic I would rather avoid discussing.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Come on.” She slid me a conspiratorial wink. “Admit it. You kinda like being married to a dark and dangerous man with such a big…gun.”

  “Speaking of dark and dangerous,” I said, grabbing onto this opportunity to change the subject with both hands and a crowbar. “I better not keep our client waiting any longer.”

  “Byron,” Julie sighed. �
�Byron Alexander Davenport.”

  “If I catch you writing Julie Davenport all over that pad with your pink feather pen, I’m going to be very upset.”

  “Huh? Oh.” She waved me off. “You don’t have to worry about me. I can keep my professional distance.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her, earning myself a dramatic eye roll in return.

  “I end up in the supply closet with a demigod one time…”

  My eyes narrowed of their own volition.

  “Okay. Two times. But I still maintain that Crixus used mind control powers on me.”

  That, I could believe. Even without the spontaneous orgasms he liked to bestow, at six-foot I-could-climb-you-like-a-tree and still built like the Roman gladiator he had been in previous millennia, Crixus could send even the stuffiest librarian rocketing toward the nearest flat surface with flaming panties in her wake.

  “Haven’t seen him around lately,” Julie said casually. “Everything okay with you two?”

  “Peachy.” Aside from the fact that I haven’t heard a peep from him in over a month. Either there hadn’t been any world-threatening psychological mishaps in the paranormal realm lately, or Crixus had decided to handle things however he’d been handling them before he began bringing cases to me. My breakfast of oatmeal and rice milk shifted inside me at this thought. Not one I could afford to follow this morning.

  “You miss him, don’t you?”

  I didn’t want to look into Julie’s eyes. If I did, she would surely see pain written in mine. It radiated up from my chest, tightening my throat. I missed his cocky grin. I missed the way I felt small and safe beside his big, solid body. I missed the darkening of his eyes from ocean-blue to sapphire when the passion took him. I missed the savagery of his kiss and the gentleness of his touch. I even missed the rage and frustration on his painfully beautiful face when he began to make love to me, and was interrupted…always.

  I missed everything.

  I missed him.

  The ache inside me was too vast to be spoken and too deep for sharing to relieve, however much Julie might want me to unburden myself.