3.0 - Shadows In The Garden Hotel

by Krista Walsh

  Her gaze fell on Courtney, who stood on the edge of the crew and offered a tight smile that Allegra didn’t bother to return.

  “It’s surprising to find these flowers so healthy,” Allegra said, in the hopes of covering any symptom of discomfort she might have given away. The feverish heat writhed beneath her skin, but a final scan of the garden showed no one else paying attention to her.

  It must be the new surroundings. I’m simply adjusting to being around so many strangers again.

  She had gone from frequent travel for most of her career to living stagnant in New Haven for the last four months. She used to love traveling, but maybe she’d grown too comfortable in her rut. Tonight would be the first time since she’d settled into her apartment that she hadn’t slept in her own bed.

  The excuse sounded weak in her mind, but it was the best she could come up with to explain her inability to relax. She breathed deeply to keep her instincts subdued, her demon vision sharpening as she searched for any potential threat.

  “I can’t begin to explain it myself,” Courtney said, “but while we have the opportunity, we’re going to take advantage of it. Are you ready?”

  Allegra shrugged off her jacket and handed it to one of the camera men. He raised an eyebrow at Courtney, and the production manager rolled her eyes and waved for him to set it down somewhere. Allegra smirked and turned away without catching the man’s response.

  The afternoon passed quickly. Although she didn’t think much of their idolatry for the job, at least the crew knew what they were doing. Allegra listened to their complaints about the cold between takes and did her best to throw in an occasional comment about how she wouldn’t have suffered such indignity in Greece, but in actual fact, she didn’t feel much of the cold.

  What raised the goosebumps on her skin was the unshakable sense of that malicious presence lurking nearby. More than once, Allegra wandered away from the shoot to peer behind the trimmed hedges to see if she could catch whoever was following her, but the space remained empty.

  She remembered what the young concierge had said about the hotel being haunted. She hadn’t had reason to give it much thought while she was preparing for the shoot, but as she stood to the side and waited for Courtney’s direction, her thoughts traveled to the other strange events that had occurred around New Haven in recent weeks.

  She had no reason to believe the Garden Hotel was connected to the rise in otherworldly activity — or to the nightmares that had haunted her for the last two months — but from her reaction in the courtyard, it didn’t strike her as much of a leap.

  She considered what she knew about the Garden from conversations that had popped up after Courtney had announced the venue of the shoot. Some of the rumors she’d heard revolved around how the hotel had acquired a soiled reputation over the past decade or so through a string of bad luck. According to one of the personal assistants, more than one guest had suffered an unusual and fatal accident in the small hours of the morning.

  Allegra had assumed the stories were exaggerated, an attempt to spook the new models and watch them squirm. No one had mentioned ghosts.

  And if the concierge hadn’t mentioned it, she wouldn’t have suspected a haunting as the reason for her discomfort. Ghosts were rare, and a haunting typically required a long history of negative energy in a single place to prevent the spirits from passing into the afterworld. Even more negative energy would be required to cause the deaths of other guests. It wasn’t that Allegra doubted such tragedies could have happened; it was more that the press would have picked up on them if they had.

  Then again, the Garden was likely a magnet for heartbreak. She imagined how many people staying here right now were trying to escape the eyes of an unknowing spouse with a lover or two. Or how many minor celebrities had come to drink their failures away.

  Wealth did not always mean happiness.

  Although in her case, the two were closely linked.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, Courtney released them for a break to warm up and change for their next shoot. The other models ran inside, but Allegra took her time, exploring the various paths to find the cause of the fever creeping through her veins. She passed an empty gazebo and a small pond that showed signs of frost where the water met the earth, but found no trace of anyone.

  After three turns through the gardens, her shoes were damp and spattered with dirt without any hidden stalker to show for it. The prickles under her skin had ebbed. Whoever had been watching her had clearly left. She rubbed her eyes to brush away the lingering tickle and tried to shake off her unease.

  Probably one of the concierges ogling over the women, she told herself, without conviction. Allegra was used to people watching her. Thanks to her succubus genes, her shapely figure was designed to draw the eye — her body was her greatest lure. But she somehow knew that whoever was following her through the hotel was not simply appreciating. They were hunting. The bitterness of the threat coated her tongue and slid down her throat, pooling in her stomach.

  The untraceable gaze returned as she stepped through the side door into the hotel. Allegra closed her eyes and tried to mentally follow the itch in the small of her back toward the source. She turned slowly and opened her eyes to check the staircase. Nothing on or beside them, and no hideaway underneath where someone might be lurking.

  But something had been there. She swore it had been.

  Her demon mind growled, and as she worked to calm herself down, she wondered if the cause was simply stress. Cody had mentioned ghosts at the same time she’d been struggling with her darker desires. Was it possible she was imagining the whole thing? That the eyes watching her were coming from her own subconscious?

  Allegra threw up her hands in surrender as she realized that was likely the case. She headed upstairs to her room and turned on the kettle for a cup of tea. While she didn’t feel the cold the same way the others did, the idea of a warm, comforting drink called to her.

  As the water boiled, she eyed the bathtub, wishing she had time to sink into a pool of bubbles and soak for an hour or three until some scrumptious young man delivering room service could be persuaded to join her. Heat spread through her body at the idea.

  The kettle clicked off and she released a quick sigh of disappointment.

  Allegra disliked the tedium of maintaining a steady career. She craved the adoration and glamor that her lifestyle provided, but loathed being under the power of someone else’s schedule while it happened.

  Her life had been on an upward trend before she’d moved to New Haven, and she’d almost reached a point where she could have afforded to create her own schedule, only taking the jobs she wanted. But then Jermaine, that pustule of a warlock, had ruined that for her. He’d trapped her in a room with six prime examples of mediocrity, including her lawyer brother, Antony, and set them against each other.

  Her brother had wound up dead, and she and the others had been free to go. Or so she’d thought. She’d promised herself she would never see any of them again.

  She’d left New Haven, believing it was for good, and had set off for Brazil. For the first three days, she had gloried in her freedom, not realizing that anything had changed. She’d walked the busy streets and soaked up the sun, working for one of her favorite designers. Life had been perfect.

  Then the nightmares had started. Every night had her waking in cold sweats from dreams of dark clouds forming in the distance, a brewing storm setting the world on fire with each lightning strike. A week later, a band had wrapped itself around her throat and started to squeeze, preventing her from relaxing in the beauty of her surroundings. At random moments, her thoughts were jerked toward New Haven. She was filled with a desire to go back, even though her mind knew she had no interest in returning. The small tourist town of New Haven offered her nothing like the luxuries of her European lifestyle.

  The symptoms got worse as the days passed, until she could think of nothing but New Haven. Two weeks after she’d left Jermaine’s
locked room, a joke of a job opportunity here — little money, no big names — had presented itself, and she’d accepted before she’d thought it through. While she’d been here, the incessant tug on her mind had eased, and she’d finally managed to sleep without her dark dreams. But as soon as she could, she’d rushed away again, once more intending to put New Haven behind her.

  Two days after she’d left, the dreams had returned, and the pull on her consciousness had stripped her attention and concentration from any other element of her life. The control she kept over herself at all times began to slip, and her temper, already short, grew worse. She couldn’t relax enough to feed. She’d felt herself slowly going mad.

  The next month, she’d found tourist brochures for New Haven in a hotel on the other side of the world, advertising its gardens and quaint shops. The photos had triggered a more visceral need to return, and her dreams became more vivid. Scary even for her, who didn’t believe she possessed the ability to be afraid of anything.

  When she’d returned again, the pull on her mind had released its hold, just as it had done before. She’d fallen asleep in her hotel room and hadn’t woken for thirty-six hours. That’s when she knew she couldn’t run the risk of leaving again. To lose control would put her life at risk, and she’d worked too hard to build it into something she wanted. So she had taken over Antony’s high-rise condo near the heart of downtown.

  She’d done what she’d promised herself she would never do.

  She’d settled down.

  Two months later, she’d secured her job with Grace and now, after four months of the same grating routine, she felt trapped — restless and irritable. The dreams that had ceased on her move to the city had returned two months ago: scenes of dead wastelands and dark clouds forming in the distance, growing thicker and coming closer. She was standing on a blighted field with the shadows of five other figures standing beside her. She knew rather than recognized them as her fellow prisoners from Jermaine’s locked room.

  Whatever he had set into motion by summoning them together had bound them more deeply than they had realized at the time. She wished she knew why, so she could break the connection and move on with her life. But to do so, she would need to involve the rest of them to help figure it out. That sort of action would only confirm that her cage was real — and possibly bring forward whatever threat her nightmares were warning her about.

  For now, she would wait and hope that someone else solved the problem. She couldn’t be the only one of the six survivors who had to travel. A journalist, a private investigator, a bookseller — many of them had jobs that could take them out of the city. They would experience the same effect that had kept her trapped within the city’s limits, and likely wouldn’t mind getting their hands dirty to resolve the issue.

  In the meantime, she would swallow her distaste for her new home. Not that New Haven made it easy to overlook its failings. For a tourist city with a population of around one hundred thousand, there was never anything to do. Of course, there was the theater, the museums, the walking trails by the river, but those pedestrian pastimes did nothing to set Allegra’s blood racing. Where were the extravagant parties? The world-famous ballet productions? Instead, the fashion was minimal, the entertainment passable, and the food selection barely to be appreciated. She missed her chocolate cake from Thierry’s bakery, and no restaurant in town offered as good a tiramisu as the one she’d found at her favorite café in Venice.

  She could accept all of those drawbacks as a result of her own high standards, but she could not overlook the quality of the city’s men. That was her only explanation for her need to feed more than she used to. Nearly twice as often as she did when she traveled.

  Her brothers and sisters wouldn’t see any trouble with the extra feeds. They would consider it practice or an easy way to amuse themselves. While Allegra enjoyed the hunt — inciting the lust and heat that lured her meal to bed, pleasuring herself with his touch and his fear — she disliked the way the process changed her. The demon part of her mind took over, releasing her unbridled power, and she hated it as much as she loved it. She hated the ugliness of it, the messiness. She hated the effort it took to keep that side of her leashed as it struggled for freedom. And the more often she fed, the harder it was to keep that control. The longer she remained in New Haven, the faster she was losing herself, and she didn’t know how much longer she would last before her feral nature took over for good.

  Between feeds, she picked up flings to pass the time, but without the excuse of leaving town for business, the drain of ending these passing relationships and coping with the human emotions of hurt and betrayal exhausted her and took the pleasure out of the indulgence.

  What was the point of life without pleasure?

  Allegra sank down in the chair beside the window and drank her tea. She was prepared to grimace at the bitterness of cheap hotel tea leaves, but was surprised to find the quality surpassed her expectations. The warmth spread from her stomach and infused her limbs. For a brief moment, she felt the sort of peace she usually experienced only in the comfort of her own apartment — the one place in the city she had made her own and where she could relax with some contentment.

  Then her alarm beeped on her cellphone. She released a groan and dropped her head against the back of the chair.

  Through the window, she watched the crew trickle back to their posts, ready for the second half of the day. They milled around the equipment, resetting the props in the background, finding their angles and focus. Courtney wove through them, shouting orders and double-checking their shots. Allegra guessed she had downed another cup of coffee or two while inside. Possibly a hit of cocaine as well.

  Shaking her head, Allegra finished her tea, checked her makeup in the mirror, and went downstairs to face the afternoon’s work.

  She bumped into Courtney entering through the side door. The woman appeared frazzled, her hair sticking up in all directions.

  “There you are,” she said. “You’re late.”

  “I believe I am right on time,” Allegra said, without a glance at her watch. She knew she’d taken her time coming downstairs.

  “Then you can go right back up and grab Monique as well. Everyone else is capable of wrangling themselves, but you two are like cats. Impossible to pin down.”

  Allegra arched an eyebrow. “If I am a cat, then do not ask me to play fetch.”

  She took a step toward the door, but Courtney said with a touch of desperation, “Please, can you just go get her? I’m not trying to give orders, Allegra, but I have a million and one things to do and she’s nowhere to be found.”

  Allegra eyed her for another few seconds, prepared to turn her down and stick with the work she was paid to do, but the lines around Courtney’s mouth, the way the corner of her eye twitched, pushed her to change her mind. If the production manager burned out on the first day of the shoot, Allegra would be out of money for the rest of the week.

  With a frown, she flicked her fingers in the air. “Very well, I’ll go. I suggest you not drink any more coffee while I’m gone.”

  Courtney released a breath, and for a moment, Allegra thought she might cry. “Thank you. She’s only a few doors down from you. 210. Now I have to go track down one of the cameramen.”

  She disappeared down another hallway, and Allegra climbed the stairs back to the second floor. She turned left at the landing and sauntered down the hall until she stopped in front of Monique’s room. The door was slightly ajar and a radio blared within, playing some kind of screeching sentimental trifle. Allegra rapped her knuckles against the door jamb hard enough to be heard over the music.

  When Monique didn’t answer, Allegra knocked again. “Monique, you’re setting us all behind schedule. Whatever you’re doing in there, I am sure it can wait.”

  There was no response. Allegra knocked a third time. “Monique.” She pushed the door open and poked her head around the corner, not wanting to shock the woman in the middle of whatever she’d cho
sen to fill her time.

  “Monique, are you here? We’re wanted in the garden before Courtney suffers a stroke.”

  There was still no answer, and the radio cut to static as the wind rose outside.

  The pit of Allegra’s stomach hardened, and she stepped into the room. Monique was lying across the width of the bed, her open eyes staring at the ceiling. She was still wearing her outfit from the earlier shoot, though one teal sleeve had slipped down her shoulder, suggesting she had unzipped it during her break. One arm lay across her stomach, the other above her head, her hand dangling over the side of the bedframe.

  “Monique?” Allegra called.

  She approached, and her mouth went dry. She switched off the radio, hating the way the static cut into her already buzzing thoughts.

  A foot away from the bed, she stopped, seeing no need to go closer. She didn’t need to touch the woman to know that her skin would feel cool beneath her fingers, or that even if she shouted her name at the top of her lungs, Monique wouldn’t respond.

  Allegra had caused enough death to recognize it when she saw it. But that didn’t prevent the shock from falling over her at finding her old lover was nothing more than a corpse.

  3

  Six hours later, Allegra closed herself into her room for the night. Her head ached and her thoughts sloshed with fatigue. Ever since she’d walked in on Monique, all she’d wanted was to be alone, but necessity had required she suffer through the aftermath of discovering her.

  Despite the number of men whose lives she’d taken, she’d never had to go through the slog of calling the police and waiting to be questioned. She preferred to go to a hotel or her target’s home, enjoy a few hours in bed, devour his soul, and leave him to be someone else’s problem. Now that she’d experienced the other side, she would make even more certain to avoid having to go through it again.