“You didn’t say pretty please.” I scurried over to the shelf and grabbed the key, eyed it for a moment, then shoved it down the front of my red dress and into my bra.
“What are you doing?” A furious eyeball pressed up against one of the holes in the chest between two bands of silver. “Come over here with that!”
“Just sit tight for a while longer.”
“When I get out of here, you will be very sorry!”
“Understood. See you later.” I slipped out of the room, ignoring his hollering, and closed the door behind me.
It had made me uncomfortable to know the key was sitting out in the open and anyone could grab it. Now it was in my possession, and Atticus wouldn’t get out until I decided it was time.
He was definitely going to kill me.
It was a problem to deal with later—if there was a later.
I headed downstairs and scanned the deserted foyer. If I hadn’t known there were other people currently exploring this mansion, I’d have sworn I was totally alone in the universe at this exact moment.
“Hope you’re having better luck than me, Thierry,” I mumbled. He wouldn’t approve of my decision to search for the head’s body instead of the amulet, but I had to. If I was right about him, he was the key to everything.
Seven oh five attack.
Had Thomas woken up yet? If so, I could ask him face-to-face what he’d meant by that. Maybe it meant nothing at all, was simply the ravings of someone in the process of blacking out.
I quickened my steps as I moved toward the parlor where I’d last seen Thomas. Just before I got there, I heard a piercing shriek.
I started running.
Melanie was already in the parlor. She had her hand over her mouth and her eyes were wide with shock and horror.
My gaze moved to the sofa where Thomas had been earlier.
Instead of a vampire, it now had a very unpleasant black stain on it.
Chapter 19
Thomas was dead. And if I’d just inadvertently walked in on his murderer, I was next.
I tore my gaze away from the stain and looked at Melanie with alarm.
She was shaking her head. “I didn’t do it if that’s what you’re thinking.”
A witch, a murderer, and a mind reader. Triple threat.
I raised my hands and backed away from her. “I’m sure you had your reasons.”
She cut me off as I headed toward the exit. “I didn’t do it! I wanted to date him, not kill him.”
“Of course you didn’t do it.” I cleared my throat nervously. I had to get past her. I had to find Thierry and let him know that Anna wasn’t the only murderer under this roof.
“I know you want to think the worst of me because of what happened with your husband, but I’m not bad. Really. I’m sorry I had anything to do with that and if I could fix it I would. How can I get you to believe me?”
“You can start by admitting the truth.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“That you’re a witch, not a werewolf.”
Confusion clouded her expression. “But I am a werewolf.”
It would be so much easier if she’d just admit it. Still, I couldn’t get a good read on her. She did seem sincerely stunned by Thomas’s death.
But for all I knew, she was an accomplished actress just like Tasha. I mean, this was Hollywood. A cute blonde who didn’t have acting aspirations around here would be a miracle in itself.
However, if I tried to think rationally—which was difficult at the moment—why would she bother trying to fool me?
If she was a powerful witch with murderous intentions and I was in her way, she could do the exact same thing to me without even breaking a sweat.
“What do you want?” I asked her warily.
“For starters? I want to get out of this crazy mansion. I’m not being paid nearly enough tonight to deal with all of this insanity.”
That made two of us.
I watched her for any sign of deception. “You didn’t kill Thomas.”
“No! But somebody did. I don’t think he woke up and decided to stake himself. Do you?”
“No need for sarcasm.” I let out a shaky breath. “If you’d just admit that you’re a witch, we might be able to move on.”
She stared at me. “You’re going to make me do it, aren’t you?”
“Do what?”
She groaned with frustration. “Fine. Here you go.”
I watched with shock as she shifted form right in front of me and her clothes landed in a pile on the floor. One moment she was a blond drink server I suspected of being a devious witch, the next she was a medium-sized shaggy doglike creature with fur a few shades darker than her hair.
She glared up at me.
I glared back at her. “Fine. You’re a werewolf.”
“Ahh-roooo.”
It sounded a lot like “I know.”
She shifted back to human form and quickly got dressed again. “Satisfied?”
I shrugged. “Witches can also shape-shift. I mean, they can in Harry Potter.” I cringed at her sharp look. “Okay, okay. You’re a werewolf and you didn’t kill Thomas. Understood. So who did it?”
“No idea.” She glanced toward the sofa, her expression turning sad. “I liked him. He didn’t deserve that. Whatever I can do to find out who killed him, I’ll do it.”
I still had questions for Madame Werewolf. “How come you don’t smell like a werewolf? I smelled another one tonight—he was mostly fictional, but he smelled like wet dog.”
“Fictional?”
“Don’t ask.”
Melanie sighed. “It’s a perfume that masks the scent of a werewolf from vampires. Like I said, I wanted to date Thomas if he ever broke up with his current girlfriend, and I know vampires aren’t fond of the smell of wolf. Wolves have better noses than vampires, but this is one area where vamps excel: werewolf detection.”
I had to admit, that explained it neatly enough. A perfume to improve werewolf/vampire romantic relations.
I’d heard of crazier things.
Then something occurred to me. “You have heightened werewolf senses.”
“I do.” She put her hands on her hips. “Not that they’re much of a help, like, ever.”
“They could be a help right now.”
“How?”
“I need you to find a corpse for me.”
She blinked. “Huh?”
I quickly explained about the ghost head, leaving out a lot of the gorier details. I didn’t tell her I suspected him of being the djinn, only that he’d asked for my help to find his body.
Melanie looked confused by the time I’d finished my spiel. “I thought we were looking for the amulet.”
“This is a secondary search. One I know is going to help us—and it could also lead to Thomas’s murderer.”
It wasn’t a lie. I mean, you never knew what a search for a headless body might uncover.
Maybe Thomas hadn’t been killed at all. He’d looked extremely ill when he’d staggered into the foyer earlier, before he passed out. Maybe he’d just . . . stopped living.
Although, with the track record we’d had so far this evening, it was much more likely that someone had strolled in here and put a stake through his heart.
But who?
“I’ll help you,” Melanie finally said with a determined nod. “And I think I know where we should start.”
It was nice to know she was both furry and industrious when needed. “Where?”
“Earlier, I sensed something by the stairs down to the basement. But the door was locked.”
“You sensed it?”
She shrugged. “Slightly psychic, remember?”
I hadn’t even thought about a basement. That sounded like somewhere a mur
derer might stash a headless body.
I nodded. “Okay. Let’s check it out.”
“But the locked door—”
I sent a last look at the stained sofa as we exited the parlor. “Believe me, Melanie, a locked door is the least of our problems.”
• • •
The door to the basement was indeed locked, but a firm kick from yours truly managed to break it open. I wasn’t as strong as a master vampire, but I could hold my own when it came to doors.
Melanie nodded with approval. “Nice.”
Then she shifted into wolf form, nudged her discarded clothes to the side of the doorway for safekeeping, and we descended the spiral staircase.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe another floor of rooms like the rest of the mansion. Maybe a storage area. Maybe a dungeon.
You never knew what someone might have in their basement.
My first clue to what was down there was a strong scent that even I could pick up on.
Chlorine.
The basement of the mansion from Hell was the location of a large indoor swimming pool. It was lit by a few lights set into the ceiling, but the area was mostly in shadow.
Still, color me impressed. On the ceiling was a beautiful and colorful mosaic of a sky with clouds and a sun with twisting beams that stretched and waved out in all directions. Grecian pillars stood like sentries around the Olympic-sized pool’s circumference. My high heels and Melanie’s claws clicked against the ceramic-tile floor as we drew closer to the edge of the water.
I watched as she padded around the pool, sniffing at the tiles and the water. She looked up and cocked her currently furry head to the side.
“Smell anything other than chlorine?” I asked.
She raised her muzzle and let out a long howl.
The sound was alarming. “What is it?”
Then a weird sensation went through me, shivering up my arms. It wasn’t the tingle of magic I’d felt before. It was something . . . creepier.
It felt like someone was watching me.
My breath caught and I stood very still and very silent as I peered into the shadows surrounding the pool.
“Somebody there?” I called out, my voice hoarse.
“Ruu-oouaoo?” Melanie replied.
“No, not you. Somebody else.”
I waited, hardly breathing, but nothing happened. Nobody emerged from the shadows with a silver stake ready to kill me. Nobody appeared suddenly in a Speedo ready to dive into the pool.
We were alone.
I was just being paranoid. Considering the night I’d had so far, this wasn’t a surprise.
Despite the attention to detail given to the basement pool by the millionaire owner of this mansion, I didn’t like it down here.
“Anything?” I asked Melanie.
She’d come to stand next to me and she pawed at the ground. “Roooh!”
“Sorry, I don’t speak werewolf.”
She turned and quickly moved around the edge of the pool toward the deep end. “Rooo-ruh-roooh!”
I followed her to where she now sat next to the diving board.
She pawed at the water.
I edged closer to the water and looked down with growing dismay. There was a body lying at the bottom of the pool. It was a body I recognized, even from up here.
“Damn,” I whispered.
It was Anna Dark.
A wooden stake stuck out of her chest.
I could barely believe my own eyes. “Another murder. And this time it’s our main suspect for the other murders. What is going on here?”
Jacob—bitten and neck broken.
Frederic—enchanted dagger through the heart.
Thomas—unknown cause of death.
Anna—good old-fashioned wooden stake.
But what did this mean? Did she murder the others as we thought she had and karma had finally caught up to her? Or was something else going on here?
All I knew for sure was that the list of suspects was getting smaller and smaller as we drew closer to dawn.
Melanie jumped into the pool and dog-paddled out a few feet. She dove down to the bottom and surfaced with Anna, pushing the body to the edge of the pool so I could haul it out.
I grimaced as I looked down at her. For a terrible moment I half expected her to lurch back to life like something out of a horror movie.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I told her bleakly. “But I swear to you I will figure out who did this.”
Anna had obviously left a corpse behind, which meant she was much younger than her husband. She was a fledgling with an older master vampire as a husband.
I guessed we had something in common after all.
That weird sensation came over me again, as if someone or something was watching me from the shadows.
We couldn’t stay here any longer.
“Let’s go,” I told Melanie grimly, getting up and turning toward the staircase.
Melanie didn’t budge. “Ruuu-raaoo.”
I looked back at her over my shoulder. “Still not fluent in werewolf. What?”
She nudged Anna’s hand, which I now noticed was clenched in a fist. I drew closer again, crouching down next to the body so I could take a better look.
There were strands of hair clutched in Anna’s fist. I pulled them free and held them up to the meager light.
My heart started beating faster as I got to my feet. “Okay, I’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here. Now.”
The werewolf didn’t protest this time. I’d seen what she’d wanted me to see.
One might come to the conclusion that the hair in Anna’s grasp belonged to her killer, ripped out during a fight for her life.
The hair in question was long and red—a shade I recognized immediately.
It belonged to Tasha Evans.
Chapter 20
I needed a moment to make sense of this.
Maybe Anna had tried to kill Tasha and Tasha had turned the wooden stake on Anna in self-defense. However, I’d just spent some time with Tasha upstairs, and she hadn’t mentioned a single thing about that.
But why else would Anna be clutching Tasha’s hair?
“This is crazy,” I said under my breath as we went up the stairs. Melanie stayed in wolf form, sniffing each of the stairs as we ascended.
I kept thinking about Tasha and Anna. It had to have been self-defense. Maybe it had just happened, like, moments ago, and that was why Tasha hadn’t said anything to me.
“We need to go and check on something,” I said.
Melanie didn’t protest, so I led her up to the second floor, passing no one on the way, to the room Jacob’s body was in. We passed a grandfather clock on the way, and I grimaced at how quickly time was passing.
I moved toward Jacob’s body. Melanie pawed at the floor and growled.
“Yeah, I know. Dead body number two.” I crouched down at Jacob’s side and looked at him uneasily, specifically at the bite marks on his throat.
“Lip gloss,” I said, with a sinking feeling in my stomach. My hunch was right. “There’s a little lip gloss near the bite marks. See?”
Melanie’s werewolf eyes grew bigger. “Ruh-roh.”
“Exactly. If it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, and if there isn’t a man here who favors this shade, it was Anna or Tasha. Veronique wears bright red, not this subtle pink.”
But a bite wasn’t a broken neck, and there was no way of knowing for sure that the biter had been the neck breaker.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
I jumped to my feet at the sound of Sebastien’s voice at the doorway. Melanie stood by my side growling.
“Sneaking up on us, Sebastien?” I said. “Why am I not surprised?”
Sebastien sighed and rolled his eyes. “Y
es, sneaking up. That’s why I announced my presence before I entered the room. Paranoid, Sarah?”
“I’d say that’s a safe bet. We have an hour. Let me underline that for you. An hour before dawn.”
“And then what? You think if we don’t find the amulet we’ll all implode because she”—he nodded at Melanie—“said so?”
“First of all, I think it’s very possible that implosion is the very least that will happen to us. Second of all, you know Melanie’s a werewolf?”
He shrugged. “Of course.”
“How?”
“The wet-dog smell.”
Melanie’s wolf shoulders sagged and she whined.
“Sorry,” Sebastien said. “It’s subtle with that perfume you have over it, but it’s still there.”
His surprise entrance forgotten, I approached him and grabbed his arm so he’d look at me.
“Tell us where it is,” I said. “I know you’re mad. I know you’re hurting. But you can’t put everybody’s lives at risk due to your personal vendetta.”
Sebastien studied my face, frowning. “You really think it was me, don’t you?”
“Maybe you don’t feel like you have anything to live for, but you can’t mess with stuff like this and expect everything’s going to be okay. You have to stop dwelling on the past. Thierry didn’t trap you like that. I’m sorry you think that, but it’s not true.”
“You believe that because you love him.” Before I could protest, he shook his head. “I understand it. I had someone I loved like that in my life once. Do you know what I would have done for her, Sarah? Anything. I would have moved mountains. I would have waited a thousand years. I would have killed for her.”
“Funny you’d say that since we’re currently at four murders tonight.”
His brows drew together as he glanced down at Jacob, then back at me. “What do you mean, four?”
I counted them off on my fingers. “Jacob, Frederic, Thomas, and Anna. All dead.”
Sebastien paled. “What? Thomas and Anna?”
“Yes. And I really don’t want the list to get any longer if we can help it.”
“I don’t understand what’s happening.”
The anger that had been building for a while now threatened to spill over. “Are you serious? I’ll tell you what’s happening. Your misguided need for vengeance against Thierry is what’s happening—somebody who did nothing to you except, possibly, ignore you a little too much back in the day. Because of that you trapped a group of people in this place tonight and we’re dropping like well-dressed flies. Some better dressed than others. You’re responsible for those deaths.”
From Fear to Eternity: An Immortality Bites Mystery Page 20
