by Tasha Black
She pushed the thought aside. Her heart thundered in her ears and there was a bitter taste in her mouth, like old pennies.
She worked her way around another corner to the back wall of the room.
A single stone moved under her hand and she nearly cried with relief. But when she slipped the phone out again, the wall was still in place.
Turning around, she saw that the back wall of the room had opened into a narrow corridor.
The stones were sweating, and she could only see a foot or two ahead in the weak light of the phone screen.
She turned on the flashlight feature, though she was afraid she would drain the battery.
There was still just a narrow tunnel as far as she could see.
The idea of squeezing into an even tighter space threatened to overwhelm her.
But what choice did she have?
Out of the frying pan, into the fire, she thought to herself as she set off down the tunnel.
At least the body was on the other side of the wall now.
She was pretty sure zombies couldn’t activate secret doors.
10
Dru walked on and on through the dark, damp tunnel.
She had the sense that she was walking up an incline, but it could have been an illusion brought on by exhaustion and terror.
Surely, the hotel wasn’t big enough for her to have been walking as far as it seemed she had.
But she had lost her sense of time and direction almost immediately. Her whole focus was on assuring herself that that walls weren’t closing in, and she wasn’t going to get stuck.
Dru dragged herself onward. There had to be a door soon.
She had put the phone in her pocket, and was tracing the walls with her fingertips to stay on track. The idea of running out of battery life while she was still in the tunnels was too terrifying to risk.
When her foot hit a stone wall in the darkness in front of her, she cried out.
The sound echoed eerily through the space and she clenched her hands into fists to stop herself from breaking apart.
I’m trapped. I’m trapped. I’m trapped.
But while her mind was melting, her hands explored the wall.
Something was there, something wooden.
She pulled out the phone and took a look.
A rickety wooden ladder had been built into the wall directly in front of her. It clung to the stone surface and led up into the darkness.
I can’t climb that…
But she knew that she would climb it.
“I feel like fucking Alice in Wonderland,” she murmured to herself. “Except I’m going in the wrong direction.”
The rungs wobbled a little, but it held up. She climbed on and on.
Suddenly, there was no more ladder when she reached up.
The wall above her ended, taking a ninety-degree turn and becoming more stone floor. Somewhere ahead, she spotted a sliver of light, and her heart rejoiced.
“At least I wasn’t coming from the other direction,” she told herself, shuddering at the idea of stepping over the edge and falling in the darkness.
She pulled herself all the way up to the floor above and turned the phone flashlight on.
Whatever came next, she wasn’t going to stumble into it.
The corridor narrowed dramatically, until it scraped her shoulders and she had to turn sideways to keep going.
Breathe, Dru, breathe…
She turned off the flashlight and put it back in her pocket. If she dropped it at this point, she wouldn’t be able to lower herself down to pick it up again.
The walls seemed to press in tighter as she inched along.
She wondered how tightly she would press herself in to get to that sliver of light. Would she wedge herself into the walls so tightly that she couldn’t get out again?
Just as the terrifying thought threatened to consume her, the corridor widened again.
She moved faster, eager to get to the light and out of the tunnel.
Hopefully out.
Something crackled under her foot, but she didn’t bother to investigate it.
She moved closer to the light that she could now see was clearly coming from under a door-shaped opening made of thick wood.
Thank God.
But when she pushed, she found the door was sealed.
“No,” she moaned to herself.
Once again, she began pressing stones all over the walls. Nothing opened, so she went to the bottom stones and then finally the ones up higher than her head.
Her hand caught on a jagged piece of stone and there was a groaning sound.
Dru held her breath and watched the light.
Slowly, slowly the ancient wood slid sideways, revealing light so bright she had to cover her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them, the door was gone.
And she was standing in a stone tunnel that opened into her own bedroom.
Dru stood, gaping and horrified, until she heard a creak and another groan.
The wooden door was moving back into place.
Desperately, she flung herself to the floor of her room.
She turned to see one of the built-in bookcases slide back to cover the entrance to the tunnels.
As she clung to the floor, panting, she couldn’t help thinking about her nightmare about someone being in her room.
She pulled herself up to a sitting position and pulled her knees up to her chest.
Had someone really been in her room?
Dru noticed a stray piece of paper stuck to her boot. It must have been the crinkly thing she’d stepped on a moment ago.
She retrieved it and smoothed it out to find that it was a receipt from the little coffee shop in town - a slice of lemon cake and an iced soy peppermint mocha, dated two days ago.
It hadn’t been a dream after all.
Someone had been in her room.
11
Dru pulled herself to her feet and stood in the center of her room.
The once-familiar sloped walls were no longer cozy, the space didn’t feel like home.
It felt like a trap.
Everything here was a trap.
The murder, the fallen tree, the snow, the hidden passage to her room, all of them kept her penned in and vulnerable.
And her feelings for Viktor were the biggest trap of all.
She closed her eyes, thinking of his intense blue gaze, the delirious pleasure of his body pressed to hers.
He’s a vampire.
And he was probably in here spying on me.
But if Viktor had wanted to murder her and drink her blood, he’d certainly had ample opportunity already without having to sneak around.
And if he wanted to kill her, why did he look at her like he cared about her, like the sight of her caused him pain, but he couldn’t look away?
It was time to get some answers.
Instinctively, she stepped out into the corridor, locking the door behind her.
Her feet carried her down to the second floor, toward Viktor’s rooms. She could hear the voices below and feel the soothing warmth of the lobby fireplace curling up the staircase.
She knocked on the door of the Sapphire Suite once, to be polite.
There was no answer.
Without overthinking it, she let herself in using the skeleton key and closed the door behind her, knowing that Gert wouldn’t be there to interrupt her search during the housekeeping rounds.
Dru walked slowly through the bedroom. The bed was made, the chair was empty.
The closet still held a modest array of Viktor’s clothing.
The giant trunk was still in the corner.
She headed into the sitting room and the bathroom.
There was no trace of Viktor anywhere. But she still had the Onyx and Quartz rooms to check.
On the way back through the bedroom, she felt herself inexplicably drawn to the antique trunk. It was massive, the metal corners dented and scratched from years of heavy use.
The leather strap was still unbound.
Dru crept closer to it and extended her hand to touch the soft leather.
There was a loud buzz and she pulled back, stumbling over her own feet and nearly falling.
But it was only the sound of Brian Thompson’s phone in her pocket.
She went from terror to elation in a heartbeat. The cell towers were up again.
But when she pulled out the phone, she saw it was only a low battery warning. There was still no signal.
Dammit.
She slid the phone back into her pocket and headed back to the corridor, locking the door behind her.
There was no point searching the other two rooms. She already knew she wouldn’t find Viktor in either of them.
But she went through the motions anyway, knocking on the door of Onyx and searching the empty space, then doing the same with Quartz.
The dressers looked like ghosts draped in their sheets in the shadowy rooms.
But as she suspected, there was no trace of Viktor anywhere.
Whatever Viktor was, he was not available to her right now. She would have to confront him after dark.
If that meant what she thought it did, she needed to get some sleep.
This might be the only safe time to let her guard down.
The thought of lying down in her bed in a room connected to the catacombs was terrifying, but the hotel was overbooked already. There wasn’t anywhere else to go.
She headed back to her room and surveyed the scene.
The bookcase needed to slide sideways to open. If she could shove something in its way, then no one could get in, and maybe she could get some sleep.
Unfortunately, it looked like the only thing in the room large enough and heavy enough to block it was her bed.
She locked the door behind her, then grabbed the thick wooden headboard and gave it a tug. The bed was heavier than she expected, the solid wood frame getting stuck on the rug and every loose or uneven floorboard - which was most of them.
A few minutes later, and after some noises that definitely would have made anyone passing by wonder exactly what was going on, Dru smiled with grim pleasure at her handiwork.
The bed was the perfect width to be wedged between the wall and the shelf.
This meant lying down with her back to the corridor. But she was so exhausted now that it felt imperative to lie down and rest her aching body, even if she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
She crawled under the covers once more and closed her eyes.
Don’t think about Viktor. Don’t think about the murderer or the snow or the tree or the tunnels…
Her body felt heavy. Her own warmth finally began to fill the blankets, draining the deep chill out of her bones.
She wondered how they would get Brian’s phone charged up to search it tomorrow if the generator wasn’t working. Maybe she could siphon power from someone’s laptop if anyone still had any juice.
It seemed like a small problem compared to the problem of unlocking the phone. And she’d managed that all by herself.
Before she could stop her wandering mind, she thought of Brian Thompson’s body again, grotesque and rotting in the rug down in the tunnels.
She rolled over, trying to erase the image and only thought of his body rolling inside the rug as she wrapped him back up again.
Think of something good instead, something that makes you happy.
But the image that came into her mind was a vision of Viktor’s beautiful face as he cupped her cheek.
His words rushed back to her.
I want to be where you are, always…
“Please don’t be a danger, Viktor,” she whispered into her pillow.
The wind rattled the windows and she thought of the snow and the tree blocking them from the rest of the world, leaving her trapped.
But sleep took her anyway.
12
Dru woke to the sound of someone knocking.
For a hair-raising instant, she swore the sounds was coming from the tunnel beyond the bookshelf.
Then she came to her senses and realized that of course the knock was coming from the hallway.
She slid out of bed and made her way to the door, feeling totally gross in the pajamas she’d worn while wandering the catacombs.
Hugh Channing gave her a look as the door swung open.
“What?” she asked.
“You can’t just open the door when someone knocks,” he scolded her. “What if it was the murderer?”
“Point taken,” she said. “Come in. Sorry I haven’t showered or anything.”
“I woke you,” Channing said. “Forgive me.”
“I needed to get up anyway,” she said. “And I have a surprise for you.”
“You do?” he asked.
She grabbed Brian’s phone from her desk and woke it.
“You unlocked it,” Channing breathed. “How did you work out the code?”
“I didn’t,” she said.
“You hacked into it?” he asked.
“I wish,” she said. “I, uh, did something a little crazy.”
Channing sat in her desk chair, setting his flashlight on the desk, as if he was ready to settle in for a good story.
And it hit her that she had a pretty good story.
But she didn’t like thinking about the tunnel leading to her room, let alone telling someone about it. It almost felt like talking about it out loud would make it more real, and more likely that others would find out about its existence.
Someone already knows…
“What did you do?” Channing asked.
“Well, I saw that it also responds to facial recognition,” she said. “And his body was right in the basement.”
“My God, that’s clever,” Channing said. “But please tell me you didn’t go into the basement by yourself.”
“I didn’t know who else to trust,” she admitted.
“Next time, wait for me,” he said.
“I was afraid the face would be all… that it might not work if I waited much longer,” she told him, trying to keep the gruesome image at bay. “And you were asleep.”
“Next time, wake me,” he said firmly. “Did you find anything on it?”
She shook her head.
“By the time I got back. I was too tired. Why don’t you have a look at it now? I need to shower and get dressed.”
He was already poking the screen and scrolling.
She grabbed some clothes and headed into the bathroom.
The water was freezing. Without the boiler running, there was nothing to heat it. Under other circumstances, she might have just skipped it. But after her trip through the catacombs, she felt like she needed ten showers to even begin to get clean.
Dru showered as quickly as possible, her whole body shuddering with the cold by the time she got out.
She was shaking too hard to dress, so instead she wrapped herself in a giant fluffy bathrobe, and hoped her hair would dry before it formed into icicles.
Back in her room, Channing hadn’t moved from the spot where she’d left him.
“Find anything?” she asked, climbing back into bed and wrapping blankets around herself so she could try to thaw out while they talked.
“I think he was here for the treasure,” Channing said, looking up at her with wide eyes.
“Really?” Dru asked.
It didn’t feel right. Brian Thompson gave off an air of having money, not the kind of guy who had to go on a goose chase for rumored lost treasure. And he didn’t seem like the amateur historian type either.
“There are tons of messages back and forth with a woman,” Channing said. “She must be the girlfriend. He writes to her constantly.”
“Poor girlfriend,” Dru said, thinking of the body in the basement.
“Maybe she dodged a bullet,” Channing said.
Dru thought of the night Brian had pinned her to the wall and tried to touch her.
“Right,” she agreed.
“But he’s also got several email messages here to a guy called Conner, who he calls Cuz in some of the emails,” Channing explained. “Brian keeps telling this Connor that he hasn’t found what he’s looking for yet.”
“So he was here for the treasure,” Dru said. “I guess a lot of people come here for that. It’s a fun idea.”
“It feels like he isn’t just here to look,” Channing told her. “He expected to actually find it. He was relying on it.”
“What do you mean?” Dru asked.
“When I go back further in these messages with Conner, I see him saying he’s tired of not having money. He’s unhappy, he doesn’t like this lifestyle, that kind of thing.”
“He didn’t look like he was hurting for anything,” Dru said thoughtfully.
“Everyone wants more than they have,” Channing said dismissively. “But you’re right, we shouldn’t be surprised that anyone visiting this hotel is interested in treasure. But there’s something else that is much more concerning.”
“What?” Dru asked, forgetting how cold she was and leaning forward.
“When he signs the messages to Conner, he signs them with a different name,” Channing told her.
“What name?” Dru asked.
“Nicky,” Channing said.
There was another loud knock on the door.
“Grand Central Station,” Dru said, sliding out from under the warm blankets and back into the frigid room to get the door.
Channing opened his mouth to say something, most likely to repeat his earlier warning about not blindly opening doors for murderers, but he was too late. The door was already open before she had time to consider.
And Viktor stood in the threshold.
His wide shoulders took up most of the frame as he stared down at her hungrily.
Dru stood before him, her shivering ceased as the heat between them threatened to combust her.
He could be a monster…
But whatever he was, she was drawn to him, pierced by his pale blue eyes and ready to submit to whatever hunger inspired his expression.
“Oh, hello there,” Channing said brightly.
Viktor blinked and looked up, his eyes moving back and forth between Channing and Dru.
