I missed last week because it was the anniversary of my life-changing injury. The state of my head isn’t much better but at this point is anyone’s with the state of the world?
I’m continuing with These Haunted Hills. Josh and Brendan are back at the murder hotel talking about the possibility it’s not haunted by a ghost but rather something more demonic.
“I don’t know. Anything is possible. Great horror happened here. Maybe Diana had been possessed. I can’t see it hanging around in the middle of an abandoned hotel for a century though, unless it’s somehow bound here. No one really knows what shadow men are or if they are evil or neutral.”
“I listened to some of the Coast to Coast AM talk shows about them. I noticed that they said some people even think they’re from another dimension or extra-terrestrial.” Brendan grimaced. While he was willing to accept there was life on other planets, he couldn’t think of a single reason they’d appear in doorways and in abandoned asylums in shadow form.
“I’ve read some neuroscience articles on shadow men. It’s not exactly my field of biology but I could follow it. Something about sleep paralysis, Hypnogogic hallucinations and functional disturbances in the right parietal cortex and the mirror neuron system.”
Brendan widened his eyes. Josh’s enthusiasm for ghost hunting made it easy to forget sometimes that he was a scientist.
Missed last week because of work. Almost missed today because I had hand surgery yesterday (minor stuff, no worries). I decided I could find time to put up a little more of These Haunted Hills. Brendan and Josh are talking strategies to tackle the haunted murder hotel.
“Do you really think it could be a demon?” Brendan was prepared to say yes ghosts were probably real. He didn’t think he had it in him to leap all the way to demon which when he considered his Irish Catholic background made little sense. Demons should be easy to buy into, but he had a failure of imagination when it came to believing a demon had made him nearly wet himself and run for the truck. Then again, the sheer malevolence he’d felt, deep to his bones, could a mere ghost have done that to him? He had no basis for any of this.
I almost forgot to do this because I’m unmoored in time and space with the ice storm. I kept my power luckily and oddly it’s been restive knowing I’m expected to go nowhere or do anything (even discounting yesterday’s zoom meeting). It’s been the recharge I’ve needed.
Still rolling on with These Haunted Hills. The guys are rolling up on the murder hotel with Josh’s ghost hunting team.
Brendan turned slightly on the seat, staring out the side window. “Josh, do you think that whatever it was that made us high tail it out of here last time will be around? Do these things have memories?”
“As for memories, there’s no agreement about that. I haven’t seen much in the way of that kind of intelligence. Most of what I’ve seen are often residual hauntings, which means they’re more like players on a screen. However, there’s an almost poltergeist like quality to the thing here, at least the one that was with us in the hotel room. What happened when we were outside.” Josh bit off his response.
“That was weird.”
“It’s never happened to me before. I know the twins have experienced things like that. I’m just hoping it was a ghost.”
Brendan wet his lips. “Do you mean shadow men or a demon or something?”
Genre: Science Fiction, LGBTQIA+, New adult, MM romance, humorous, postapocalypse, transgender, religious order, anxiety, dark, blackmail, undercover DEA agent
DEA Agent Hector Ramirez is on his first undercover mission. He’s been sent to a Buddhist monastery deep in the woods of Maine, where he’s investigating a confusing web of connections between a Peruvian drug gang, a prominent Mormon family and the monastery’s leaders.
Dallin Rigby, the young son of a prominent Mormon family, has been sent on a year-long retreat while the scandal associated with his mission to Peru dies down. The men, the sex, the blackmail tape—there’s a lot to get past. He’s not looking forward to a year in the middle of nowhere, but the presence of the attractive Brother Hector might make his time in exile more bearable.
No one at the isolated monastery is aware of the disaster unfolding outside its walls, as a man-made virus sweeps the globe, killing nearly everyone. Cut off from his contacts, and with dwindling supplies, Hector sets out with Dallin to learn what has happened. As the attraction between the two men grows, Hector begins to question the necessity of remaining undercover. But is it too late for him to finally be honest with Dallin, about his job and about himself?
Excerpt
My boss pressed his fingers onto the top of my desk and leaned well into my personal space.
“I just sent you an email,” he said with a suspicious grin. “Open it, Special Agent.” I hated how he sneered at my new title. Until last week, I’d been Hector Ramirez, New Agent Trainee, the lowest of the DEA’s investigative ranks. I liked Special Agent better.
He stood there looming over me. So, I guessed we were doing this right now. I closed my expense report and clicked on his email. There was no title and no text. Just a link to what looked like an encrypted video. Was this a test? I hovered my mouse pointer over the link; nothing looked suspicious. I glanced up at him, a question on my face.
“Go ahead; it’s not a trick.” He paused for a moment. I could tell there was something else, so I waited. “It’s definitely NSFW, though.”
Okay. He wanted me to open a not-safe-for-work link. Now. At work.
I looked around the open space. My newly installed desk was wedged into a corner of the large operations room. There was no one nearby.
“You’ll like it. He’s just your type too,” he added.
What an asshole. He had no idea what my type was, although he knew I was gay, of course, and trans. I’d had to be up front about that; the extortion risk in my line of work was just too high to try to keep that type of thing private.
Besides, it was one of the reasons I was here. I’d been brought on during a push to expand diversity in the ranks, and I knew for a fact most of the other agents thought that was the only reason I was here, which wasn’t true at all. I was as qualified—more qualified—than many of the other guys. Being gay and trans just gave me a shot at being considered for the job.
Behind my back, and sometimes just within range of my hearing, they’d call me a two-for. Two for one. Gay and Latino.
Or sometimes it meant trans and Latino. But never a three-for. The whole gay and trans thing really confused these guys. Sometimes I heard them whispering, “Why would you become a gay dude when you could already get guys as a chick?”
I shook my head to clear it and refocused on the possible trap my boss had set. “This is work-related, right? You’re ordering me to play this video, and it’s necessary for my job?” I was asking for the benefit of any cameras, official or unofficial, that might be capturing this moment.
“Very good, Ramirez. A healthy dose of skepticism and mistrust is necessary for a DEA agent, especially a new one.”
I waited.
“And, yes,” he said with a sigh, “I am ordering you to play this video.”
Good enough. I launched the video.
A naked young man walked past an expanse of windows, the view outside hidden by the closed drapes. He carried two bottles of water, and as the camera tracked his movement, it became apparent he was in a hotel room, possibly a suite, given the furniture and size of the space.
And, ha, ha, I get it. My type. He looked just like me—short and wiry with light coffee-colored skin and straight jet-black hair. I felt uncomfortably exposed sitting at my desk with Director Ferguson leaning in behind me. On the monitor, the man who looked like me took a few steps toward another naked man of similar build and color. The second man held a remote control and stood by a low table. A flat-screen TV mounted to the wall above displayed its own collection of naked men.
The first guy handed a bottle of water to the second, then ran his hand down the other man’s back. Great, the director and I were going to watch gay porn together at work. My parents would be so proud. The two men were speaking, but I couldn’t hear anything. I toggled the volume.
“Don’t bother. There’s no sound,” Ferguson said. “It gets better,” he added, a disturbingly gleeful tone to his voice. I had a bad feeling about this.
The two men turned together and walked to a bed, where they playfully tugged on the foot of yet a third man, lying on the oversized bed, just coming into view as the camera tracked their movements.
Now that the initial shock had faded, I began to pay attention to what I was seeing. First, the camera—it was too steady for a handheld, and it panned smoothly across the room following the men. I guessed it was positioned, possibly hidden, somewhere across the room and was being operated remotely. Second—the surroundings. It was a party room for sure. Empty bottles of alcohol, room service trays, and plates were scattered on desktops; dropped clothes and towels lay next to the bed.
The third man—the one on the bed—was coming fully into view. He looked very much like the others, which is to say like me, and he was laughing as the other two clambered onto the bed on top of him.
Why are we watching this?
“And, now, for something completely different…” my boss murmured.
The camera continued to pan across the bed and revealed, wow…a massive mountain of a blond-haired guy, young, early twenties maybe, and as naked as the others, with light, golden hair dusting his chest, belly, and thighs. I swallowed and tried not to react. He was on his back, his left arm holding the guy on the bed in a tight embrace. He looked…blissful. Maybe on drugs, but certainly in control of himself, so not drugged, exactly. Just…happy?
And, yeah, just my type. Like, exactly my type. But Director Ferguson couldn’t possibly know that. He must have been referring to the Latinos. I paused the video and swiveled my chair to look up at Ferguson. “Why are we watching this?” I asked.
“This is the Peruvian drug gang we’ve been tracking out of Bangor.”
Really? I reversed the video to get a better shot of the faces of the first two, grateful to move the young man with the golden hair off-screen. I studied them for a moment. I’d seen all the surveillance pictures we had of the Bangor gang. “They don’t look familiar,” I said.
“This was filmed in Peru.”
“Oh.” I was feeling lost. “So, who is—”
“Dallin Rigby,” Ferguson interrupted. “Twenty-two years old now. Twenty-one when the film was made. He’s a Mormon…”
Of course he is.
“But he’s about to attend a yearlong retreat in a Buddhist monastery. In Maine. Northern Maine.” He let that sink in.
John Patrick lives in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, where he is supported in his writing by his husband and their terrier, who is convinced he could do battle with the bears that come through the woods on occasion (the terrier, that is, not the husband).
John is an introvert and can often be found doing introverted things like reading or writing, cooking, and thinking deep, contemplative thoughts (his husband might call this napping). He loves to spend time in nature—“forest bathing” is the Japanese term for it—feeling connected with the universe. But he also loathes heat and humidity, bugs of any sort, and unsteady footing in the form of rocks, mud, tree roots, snow, or ice. So, his love of nature is tempered; he’s complicated that way.
John and his husband enjoy traveling and have visited over a dozen countries, meeting new people, exploring new cultures, and—most importantly—discovering new foods. After such travels, John invariably comes down with a cold. During a trip to Japan in 2019, he was amazed by how many people wore surgical masks in public to protect both themselves and others from viruses. “Gosh,” John thought, “wouldn’t it be great if we’d do this in the US?” John sometimes regrets the wishes he makes.
An angry, dead spirit is useless – until it becomes the living Haint in your bed!
Warning: This is a Razor’s Edge Monster Erotica Story. Expect limited plot and character development, and lots of paranormal heat. If you’re looking for a lengthy plot driven erotic romance, this is not it!
JD Tolliver begins research for his thesis on paranormal phenomena as a nonbeliever. He believes now. A ghost or angry spirit, a true haint, follows JD from Appalachia. His finding a suitable body so he can leave poses a problem — $it has JD by the balls@!
Coll Collins spent over a hundred years locked in silence. Suddenly freed, he discovers that gay hate crimes are not a thing of the past. The stranger he attaches himself to is sassy and, to Coll, sexy as hell. Never had the pleasure of a soft young man, and Coll plans to take advantage every single night until he returns home.
Excerpt
Dropping his bag by the door, JD headed straight to the kitchen for a glass of milk. Bringing the glass with him, he collected his suitcase and pulled it to his bedroom. Couldn’t wait to check out a few scavenged treasures from his trip to the Appalachian area on the border of Tennessee and Virginia. He’d thought the area would be a good place to begin research for his thesis on paranormal phenomena.
Wished his father understood JD’s interest in experimental psychology. Heck, considering he couldn’t get the man to call him anything aside from James David, as if JD left some sort of unsavory tag on the Tolliver name, seemed highly unlikely the old man would ever change his mind about JD’s interests.
Opening his carryon, JD retrieved an item he hadn’t dared leave to baggage handlers. Discovered it in a dusty, trash strewn corner of a soon-to-be demolished old mansion in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee. The small cube-shaped box smelled of cedar, and JD had kept it safely on his person the remainder of his trip. It resided in a bag on his lap during the flight. Risky, considering he discovered every time the box was close he got a raging hard-on. Not a prude by a long shot, but his bookish looks led men to believe he was… well… virginal.
Turning it over and over in his hands, still couldn’t fathom how to open it. No key hole, no seams at all; just a tiny, plain wooden box slightly larger than a jewelry box that might hold a ring. Could darn near close it in the palm of his hand. “What treasure are you hiding?” He reached for his crotch to arrange the growing bulge into a more comfortable position. Lost in pleasure, he continued to massage his growing hardness until drops of cum dampened underwear. Yes, JD needed to get laid. “Um, feels good.”
He couldn’t stop. Shoved his hand inside pants, used pre-cum to facilitate jerking off. Sound of wet hand against skin sliding back and forth over his crown darn near had him coming full force in his pants.
His phone vibrating in his jacket pocket created a colossal mess. Jumping, JD knocked into the glass on his nightstand, sending milk everywhere and his precious box sailed through the air. “No!” When it hit the floor and broke, JD strangled on air caught in his throat as he glimpsed a shiny object roll beneath his chest of drawers. Thick, white smoke billowed into the room. Smelling like cedar, it swirled and swirled before floating over to envelop him. JD swore it was an attempt to molest his body. “Oh Lord!”
“Knew you’d have the cutest little ass.”
Tripping backward, JD hit the bed and watched the white cloud plummet downward. Substance felt weighty and JD nearly fainted.
A gruff voice murmured, “Thank you for freeing me.”
J. Hali Steele wishes she could grow fur, wings, or fangs, so she can stay warm, fly, or just plain bite the crap out of… Well, she can’t do those things but she wishes she could!
Multi-published and Amazon bestselling author of Romance in Paranormal, Fantasy, and Contemporary worlds which include ReligErotica and LGBTQ stories where humans, vampyres, shapeshifters and angels collide-they collide a lot! When J. Hali’s not writing or reading, she can be found snuggled in front of the TV with a cat in her lap, and a cup of coffee.
Growl and roar — it’s okay to let the beast out. — J. Hali Steele
Jana Denardo 