by Sierra Dean
“Maxime, start at the end of the hall and work your way back towards us. Check every door to see if you recognize anything that might suggest Sutherland was using the space.” I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a barely used lipstick tube, handing it to Holden. “Mark all the doors occupied by humans so we don’t waste our time with those.”
Holden palmed the lipstick tube, inspecting it. “Harlot Red?” He raised an eyebrow at me. Bless his twisted vampire heart that he could make even a facial gesture seem sarcastic.
“Shush. Just mark the doors.”
He set to work, and Maxime followed my directions. There were fifteen doors on either side of the hallway, meaning we had to find one room in thirty. It didn’t seem like such a tall order, but when we started looking, the cool reality of it sank in. We were able to eliminate ten rooms right away because of their human occupants, but that still left twenty. We couldn’t just bust down twenty doors and hope one of the rooms seemed to belong to my father.
I couldn’t ask myself which space I would have selected, because the rooms would have been assigned randomly. Wouldn’t they?
I stopped—my ear pressed against a rough wooden door—and stared down the length of the hallway. Maxime was on his knees in front of another door, peering underneath it, while Holden drew flashy red Xs across two other entryways.
If I did have the option, which room would I pick?
A vampire who wanted to hide himself from others of his kind wasn’t going to go for the obvious spot. The rooms at the very back—as far from others as possible—would have been the most instinctual place for a vampire to hide if he was forced to use this warehouse.
Which would make it the first place other vampires would look for him. I took a few steps backwards and assessed the units from the center of the hall, trying to imagine this place as my father would have. He wanted to hide something, and maybe the best place to do that was in plain sight.
Where was the scent and distraction the most dense?
Taking another step backwards, I stopped in front of the room where a jazz quartet was at work. Trumpet bleats and drum snares made my ears throb. Across the hall was the room with the meth smell coming from it. Next to the meth lab Holden had already marked the door with an X, but the room beside the jazz space had an untouched door. It was protected by only the most basic padlock, with nothing fancy to distinguish it from the other rooms.
I pressed my ear against the door and listened. I’d already checked this door once but dismissed it in a rush due to all the distraction surrounding it. Maybe that was the point though. Perhaps it was my father’s gene pool I inherited the smarts from, because this would have been the perfect room to choose if he wanted someone to pass him quickly by.
I longed for my sword, since it would have sliced through the lock like it was made of butter. But my weapon choice had been vetoed by Holden at the hotel. We were on a simple informational scouting mission. A sword would just draw unwanted attention. Unfortunately he was right, so I’d agreed to leave it behind, opting for my favorite gun instead.
I couldn’t shoot the lock off, that would be too much noise in the small space and would definitely bring us an unwanted audience. Hoping no one would come out of their rooms at that moment, I braced my back against the wall and kicked the door.
The particleboard gave no resistance, practically crumbling around my foot. It swung wide, slamming against an interior wall before swinging back towards me. Holden and Maxime were drawn by the sound and came to join me in the dark mouth of the room.
“This one?” Holden asked, giving a repulsed glance into the rooms surrounding it.
“They’re all equally bad,” I reminded him. “This one felt right.”
“No vampire in his right mind would hide so close to that…smell.”
“Wouldn’t that be what he’d expect another vampire to think, though? I mean, this is the last place I’d want to hide too, but that makes it perfect.”
We stole into the room, shutting the broken door behind us to cut down on the chances of someone noticing it and calling the police. Cloaked in darkness, I became less capable than the others. I could see, but not as well as a full-blooded vampire, and I didn’t want to risk missing an important clue.
Fumbling along the wall, my hand found the light switch and a fat spider at the same time. I flicked on the light and recoiled. The spider—now exposed and irritated—raised its front legs in a challenging gesture, then scuttled down the wall and out of sight.
Fucking spiders. I’d fought a lot of scary monsters in my time, and still spiders gave me the creeps. Keaty, my PI partner, had once told me he’d been sent to recover something stolen by a fae. Turned out the fae spent his days in spider form, guarding a webbed nest of jewels and money that would make Smaug weep with jealousy.
I got a wicked case of the heebie-jeebies whenever Keaty told that story. He’d obviously survived, and knowing Keaty, the fae had not. But learning there was a type of fae who took the form of a giant spider? That was the kind of knowledge human beings were lucky not to have.
Wiping my hand on my pants to rid myself of the tactile memory of the spider, I gave the room a glance now that I could see it better. Holden and Maxime were doing the same, and I wondered if they saw anything I was missing.
The space was clean, much tidier than I’d expected given how disgusting the building itself was. A plain, scarred wood table sat in the center of the room. There was a set of pliers and a roll of soldering wire on it, but nothing to indicate what they were for. A simple chair—wood, but not matching the table—was tucked underneath. All the walls had orange carpet stapled to them, likely as a buffer from the sound in neighboring rooms. It seemed to work, because the jazz was an almost enjoyable volume from in here, the too-sharp high notes blotted down or muted out entirely.
Yellowing flyers and handbills for long-ago concerts in local bars were tacked into the carpet, and someone had spray-painted a lime-green penis beside the door so it would appear to be ejaculating on whoever was walking into the room.
Nothing here told me about my father. The clues were all remnants of a previous tenant, one who’d possibly been in a band called Lady Killers and had an affinity for alien cock.
Either I’d picked the wrong room, or Sutherland was hiding his secrets better than I expected. I’d given myself too much credit as a detective. Over the years I’d learned a lot from Keaty, but I was still the student in so many ways. If he were here…
Of course.
I jerked my cellphone out of my pocket and pressed the speed-dial key for my mentor.
“McQueen,” he grumbled. “This had better be good. It’s two in the morning.” I’d forgotten about the time difference between California and New York.
“Oh don’t pretend like you were asleep.”
“As a matter of fact I was. Sometimes I do need to yield to my basic human needs.”
Hearing Keaty confess to having human needs was about as strange to me as a serial killer liking cuddles. It didn’t fit.
“I need your help with something.”
“Naturally. Come by the office.” The grogginess in his voice began to lift after he hefted a mighty yawn over the line. “Give me ten min—”
“Keaty, I’m in San Francisco.”
Without missing a beat, he said, “I’m not coming to you.”
“No, no. But do you think you can get to a computer?”
He sighed but didn’t protest, and given the rustling sounds, I was beginning to suspect I’d roused him from a nap at his desk. The familiar creak of leather was a dead giveaway. I wondered if he slept with his eyes open.
Windows announced its alertness from his laptop with its cheerful chimes, and he said, “What am I looking for?”
“I’m going to Skype you from my phone so you can see the room I’m in, okay?”
“Fine, but what am I looking for?”
Giving him a quick review of the situation, I left out the
part about Sutherland being my father. I’d tell Keaty eventually, but now didn’t seem like the right time. For years, Francis Keats had been a stand-in father figure for me. I knew our relationship had its issues because of what I was, but he loved me in his own sociopathic way, and I loved him. It didn’t seem right to tell him about my real father over the phone.
When he had the necessary backstory, I hung up and redialed using the phone’s Skype app. I might not be great with fancy-pants technology, but the video-calling feature had been forced on me by my younger sister Eugenia. Since she was all the way down in Louisiana with my uncle’s wolf pack, she liked to be able to see me.
Thinking of Genie, I felt a swell of joy in my stomach. I hadn’t known her long—we’d met for the first time that spring—but I enjoyed having at least one family member who liked me for me. My brother Ben—Genie’s twin—hadn’t yet warmed to me the way she had, but that was fine. I couldn’t expect a big Kumbaya-style hug-fest from my siblings when we’d gone eighteen years without meeting.
Genie and Ben didn’t know their father either. It seemed Mercy had trouble with commitment after Sutherland died, abandoning her twins the same way she’d abandoned me.
Keaty accepted the video invite, and his face filled the screen of my phone. He wore his simple wire-framed glasses, and his dark blond hair stuck up at the back. Instead of his usual pressed dress shirt and tie, he was wearing a rumpled white T-shirt. He really had been sleeping.
“You want me to tell you where you think this rogue hid something?”
“He’s not a rogue.”
“Oh, forgive me. You want me to tell you where this missing vampire might have stashed items he’s intentionally keeping from the council, ignoring strict order from his leaders? Better?”
“Whatever.” I didn’t want to waste time arguing with him. I’d never win, and we’d both end up irritated. Since irritation accomplished nothing, I moved on.
I pressed the option to flip my phone’s camera from the front to the back, so Keaty was now able to see the room as I did. The image of his face on my phone went from annoyed to zoned-in.
“Go slow,” he instructed. “I need to see everything from the floor up to the ceiling.”
I did as he asked, going around the room in a painstakingly slow circle, scanning the camera up and down as I went so he could get a glimpse at every nook and cranny, every visible inch of the place. As I approached the door again, my heart sank. He hadn’t stopped me once, made no comments that might suggest he’d seen something noteworthy.
“What’s that?” His voice was muffled by my hand.
“What?”
“Next to the door.”
“You mean the awful graffiti?”
“Yes, can you show me the floor?”
I pointed the phone down to my feet to let him see the ground beneath the big green wang on the wall.
“Can you see that?”
I stopped looking at his face and turned my attention to the floor. All I saw was a fine coating of dust.
“Dust.”
“Drywall dust,” he corrected.
I checked the floor in other areas, but the dust was only located in the one spot. When I looked up from my crouched position, I could see the faintest bubbling in the carpet where the graffiti was painted.
“How the hell did you see that?” I stood and aimed the phone at the gap.
“Isn’t that why you called me? Because I can see things like that?”
He was absolutely right. “Thank you. Do you want to see what it is?”
Yawning again, he smiled faintly at the screen, possibly unaware I could still see his face. It wasn’t like him to show any kind of emotion. Unless annoyance counted.
“No. You do your thing.” The screen went black before I had a chance to thank him a second time.
Chapter Twenty-One
I peeled back the carpet, exposing a panel of plain white drywall behind it. The drywall flaked more as I picked at it with my fingernail, sending a new rain of dust to the floor.
“He hid something here,” I told Maxime and Holden, as if they hadn’t been listening to my entire discussion with Keaty.
Finding a notch in the drywall, I dug my finger in and tugged. The panel groaned forward an inch but was held in place by the carpeting. Remembering the spider, the last thing I wanted to do was stick my hand into a dark hole in the wall, but if I was going to find what Sutherland had hidden, I didn’t have much of a choice.
The hole felt endless. I got my arm in all the way up to my shoulder, and my fingers were groping at nothingness. There had to be something in there.
“For fuck’s sake,” I grumbled, trying to get a new angle. I pressed my palm against the inside of the panel for support, and my fingers grazed something metallic.
The vampires must have seen my eyes widen because Maxime asked, “Did you find something?”
“I-I don’t know. I think so?” I grasped at the object and tugged hard. It came free easily, causing me to almost drop it in my overeager attempt to wrench it loose.
Retrieving my arm from the wall, I dusted myself off and opened my hand up to see what I’d found.
“It’s a key,” Holden said, like we hadn’t been able to suss that out on our own.
The key wasn’t fancy by any means, a simple Victorian-style design which might have once been silver—not real silver though, or it would have burned me—but was now a tarnished brass color. I turned it over in my palm, trying to spot any engravings or mysterious signs that might indicate what it was for.
“Any ideas?” I held it level so they could get a better look.
“It’s old,” Maxime observed, since we were all in the habit of stating the obvious tonight. “If he was looking for something at the Winchester Mansion, perhaps the key belongs there.”
I thought of the pictures Maxime had shown us of the mansion, and all the doors and secret passages, all the hundreds and hundreds of locks this key might belong to, and I sighed. The problem was, he was likely spot-on. The key didn’t belong here, and the most probable place to find the lock it fit to was to take it to the Winchester Mansion.
All roads led to a big haunted house in San Jose.
I’d been hoping to find answers here, but all I’d gotten was another mystery.
When we left the building, a pair of men hung back in the shadows, whispering to one another while exchanging a series of small packages for a large wad of bills. They kept an eye on us but did nothing to mask their transaction.
A shopping cart full of cans and bottles sat in the middle of the alley, no sign of the homeless man who’d formerly attended it. Something about his absence rankled me, giving me the same uneasy feeling in my gut as I’d had before we went in.
I was starting to get paranoid, imagining everyone was a potential threat. These men, the dark-alley dwellers, they weren’t dangerous to me. They might pose problems for others, but I had no reason to fear them. I reminded myself of that over and over while staring at the abandoned cart.
Blueprints confused the hell out of me.
I couldn’t tell the difference between a wall and a window, and looking at the layout of Winchester Mansion didn’t make things any easier for me. As far as I could tell the whole thing was written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Clutching a wineglass full of warm blood, I sat cross-legged on a huge wood table in the council warehouse. Galen had found someone who’d meticulously mapped out the interior of the mansion, and the blueprints had been couriered to us. Holden was perched on a stool, his chin resting on one fisted hand, while he took in the layout with a serious expression.
“What a mess,” he muttered.
I thought I was the only one thinking it looked like a shaken jigsaw puzzle.
Just as in the photos we’d seen, the blueprint showed an endless number of rooms and stairwells—all switchback steps due to Sarah Winchester’s poor mobility in later years—and what seemed like a million doors. Some rooms had been
labeled—the Grand Ballroom, the Daisy Bedroom—but others were nameless, and every single one of them had at least two entrances. Not to mention the closets.
I was overwhelmed by the number of places our key could potentially go.
“Where’s the window Eilidh wanted?”
Maxime pulled back the page we were looking at and showed me the next one, a grid of the second floor. “Here.” It was located on a staircase, if I was reading it correctly.
“How many doors are in nearby proximity?” I was mostly asking myself, but the other two leaned over it as well. There was a door beside it, jutting off from the stairwell, and a half-dozen rooms were in easy access to the stairs. From those rooms hallways fanned out and staircases went up and down to the different levels. Basically it narrowed our search to about forty-eight doors.
“There’s also a linen room here.” Maxime pointed to a narrow hall. “I understand there are a dozen or more drawers in there. Any of them could have been outfitted with a lock.”
I sipped my blood, grimacing because it had gotten cool while I inspected the map, and let my gaze tour over the blue-and-white maze before me.
“It would help if we knew what we were looking for.” I sighed.
“Our best bet is to start at the window. The tour follows this route.” Maxime walked his fingers like tiny legs over the path we’d be following on our haunted tour the next night. “When the group goes this way, we’ll hang back. By the time they make their next stop we’ll be out of earshot, and that gives us at least ten minutes before they can call another guide in to come searching for us.”
The distance between the window and the place he said the group would stop didn’t seem all that wide, but if Max believed we’d have ten minutes, I was willing to believe him.
“So…ten minutes to check almost fifty possible doors. Not counting the linen room.”
“Right.”
“And we can’t split up,” Holden pointed out. “Only one key.”
“We’ll work in a sweeping grid,” I suggested. “Start closest to the window and move back and forth in a semicircle. Check as many locks as we can before they find us.”
