The Last Beautiful Girl

by Nina Laurin

  “Get out of the way, Emma,” Nick says. Well, that answers her question. Emma looks indifferent.

  “Oh, Nicky. You’ve never been good at dealing with rejection. Isabella doesn’t want you. Take a hint.”

  “If anyone here has to take a hint, it’s you,” Nick says with a sneer. “You’re only here because Ines screwed up. But, as soon as you displease Isabella, you’ll end up just like Ines, if not worse. Get out while you still can.”

  Emma raises her chin. The glint in her eyes is frightening. “Isabella rewards loyalty,” she says. Her voice crackles, notes of an almost animal-like growl breaking through. “Not exactly your biggest strength, Nick Swain.”

  “At least I’m not a brainwashed bootlicker like you.”

  Emma screams. Before Eve can react or even close her eyes, the girl lunges at them and wraps her hands around Nick’s throat. She’s much smaller than him, and skinny, but, somehow, she manages to knock him off his feet. They roll across the floor as she claws at his face and he frantically tries to throw her off.

  Eve blinks out of her stupor. In a few bounds she crosses the kitchen to the ancient, unused hearth at the other end. It’s boarded up, but, next to it, a few heavy-looking metal pokers still hang on the wall. Without thinking too much, she grabs one. It’s covered in many years’ worth of dust, but it feels slick in her sweaty hand, and so heavy she can barely lift it.

  Nick screams. Eve swings the poker and hits Emma square on the side of the head, the impact so much more powerful than Eve intended that she squeezes her eyes shut, horrified. The poker slips from her grasp and clatters to the floor.

  When she opens her eyes, Nick is struggling to get back on his feet, still grasping at his throat. Crimson scratches crisscross his face. “Damn,” he chokes out.

  Emma is sprawled on the kitchen floor, motionless. Eve doesn’t dare look at her face.

  “Is she—dead?” she stammers.

  Nick spits on the floor. “I can only hope.”

  “Nick, this isn’t just a mindless drone of Isabella’s. This is a girl, just like me, and—and Isa. And I might have killed her.”

  “Look, if we don’t get you to that mirror room soon enough, it won’t matter,” he says. “So let’s go.”

  Eve quickly scans the kitchen and picks up a marble rolling pin, which she tucks under her armpit.

  She follows him out into the hall.

  The fresco overhead is static once again, Isabella’s face frozen in a smirk.

  “Where do I go?” she asks Nick. “I bet they’re waiting for me at the top of the staircase.”

  He shrugs, his expression grim. “We’ll just have to fight our way through.”

  Eve draws a shuddering breath.

  “Thank you,” he says suddenly, out of nowhere. “For saving my life. And for coming here to save Isa. You’re a real friend.”

  To her shock, she manages a small giggle. “You know what, Nick Swain? I’m starting to understand why Isa had such a crush on you.”

  He breaks into a grin, and, for a moment, Eve has time to wonder if she’s spilled a secret.

  Something moves behind him. Eve only has time to see a shadowy blur and to shout out a warning.

  A moment later, the chimney poker slices through the air inches from Nick’s face. He spins around and barely has time to block it with his forearm. There’s a sickening crunch, and he cries out in pain, nearly losing his balance.

  Behind him, Eve recognizes the skinny silhouette of Emma. Half her face is crushed inward like a broken doll, but, somehow, she’s grinning with broken, bloodied teeth.

  “You didn’t think it was that easy, did you? Isabella rewards loyalty.”

  Her words are as mangled as her face, but Eve understands everything.

  “And now it’s your turn.”

  Nick takes a swing at her with his good arm and hits her in the stomach. Eve can see that this doesn’t really hurt her, but still, she stumbles back, loses her focus for a crucial second.

  “Eve!” Nick yells. “Run! I’ll hold her off. Save Isa.”

  With a low growl, Emma charges him, poker aloft.

  Eve turns around and runs. She pauses for only a fraction of a moment, turning around just long enough to see Nick on the floor, Emma standing over him. She raises the poker, its pointed end aimed into the dead center of his chest.

  She darts behind the door frame just as Emma brings it down.

  Thirty-Six

  If she wants to save Isa, Eve needs to get to the heart of the house, to destroy whatever it is that allows Isabella to control everyone.

  The mirror room.

  As if on cue, the scratchy music starts up again. Only now it’s not jazz, it’s a pompous, overwrought classical piece.

  Eve darts into the next room, away from Emma. She finds herself in the living room, and it’s immediately clear the Brixtons didn’t use it much. The floor is covered with an undisturbed coating of gray dust, and some of the furniture is still covered in tarp. And no wonder: it’s hard to feel at home in a room like this. At least for a normal person who doesn’t think she’s a turn-of-the-century socialite. It’s enormous, and way too ornate for anyone’s taste in the current year. There’s just too much of everything: too many moldings, too much gilt, the wallpaper is too busy with its pattern of flowers and peacocks and swans. It’s obvious to Eve she won’t find anything useful here, so she moves on.

  The next room is a dining room, even less used than the previous one. Eve supposes everyone’s been eating in the kitchen lately. The table is big enough for at least thirty people. It’s uncovered, and the little place mats Taylor must have bought, with a pattern of fruit on them, look silly and out of place at the farthest end. Three of the chairs are also uncovered, the rest sitting under tarps. They’re upholstered in velvet, Louis XV–style, and tacky as hell. There are more gas lamps on the wall. Eve approaches one. It’s a pretty, Art Deco-style design: the lamp itself must have been made to look like a flower. But, since the glass lampshade is gone, all that’s left is the stem. Eve turns the switch, but nothing happens—at least at first. A moment later, she gets a strong whiff of gas that makes her eyes water, and she quickly turns off the switch. These would probably have needed to be individually ignited by servants. Not too convenient.

  She circles the room. There are no paintings here. A couple of rectangles on the walls, but the paintings that once occupied the spot are nowhere to be seen. Up in the portrait room, Eve guesses.

  As she looks closer at the squares of wainscoting, the last panel catches her eye. She knocks tentatively, and the sound is hollow. She presses gently on the door, and an unseen spring opens it with a creak.

  Eve peers inside with a feeling of dread. But all she sees is a flight of stairs going up. No ornaments, for once. Just plain wooden stairs and blank walls.

  It’s the servants’ staircase, she realizes. The one they’d use when called by the mistress of the house, to keep themselves discreet. Because god forbid a lowly servant tread on those beautiful marble stairs the guests can see.

  This means that Isabella probably had little idea it even existed.

  Eve races up the stairs. They’re so steep that, by the time she reaches the first landing, she’s breathless. But, when she peers out the door, she sees the second-floor hallway stretching out into semidarkness.

  Her heart beats excitedly. For the first time, she feels something like hope. She jumps over two stairs at a time to get to the last floor and peers out into the fourth-floor hallway.

  The music is loud. She slips out and shuts the door behind her. The portrait room is open, but she can’t see Isabella anywhere.

  Eve advances toward the open double doors, then peers in. The room looks empty. Except for the portraits that smirk at her from the walls.

  “There you are,” says a cheerful voice. Eve turns aroun
d to find herself face-to-face with the other girl, Sara.

  The best I can do is play dumb, she thinks. She gives Sara her best theater smile. “Hi!” she says brightly. “I’m looking for Isa. This place is so huge I have no idea where I am.”

  “Good,” says Sara. Eve can’t tell if she’s buying it or not. “Because Isabella’s been looking for you.”

  Well, that bodes well.

  Sara hands her a glass. Damn, Eve had forgotten about it. The green beverage still looks nauseating, a rainbow-colored film floating on top. “Drink,” she says.

  “I kind of don’t want to. I already had too much.” Eve tries to make it sound lighthearted, but Sara’s soulless eyes stare right into her soul.

  “Drink.”

  Eve knocks the glass out of her hand. It flies across the room, the liquid making a wide green arch in the air, and crashes to the floor, shattering.

  Sara lunges for her with an angry shriek. Eve struggles, gives her a powerful shove, and sends her flying backward.

  As Eve watches, Sara crashes right into the largest painting, the one of Isabella in the burgundy dress. The frame falls from the wall and shatters when it hits the floor. Eve hears a sickening tearing sound as the canvas rips down the center, severing Isabella’s hand from her body and stopping halfway up the side of her face.

  Sara collapses to the floor and doesn’t get up. A horrible shrieking fills the room. It’s not coming from the painting or Sara but from everywhere at once. Sara begins to convulse on the floor like she’s having a seizure.

  There might not be another chance, Eve thinks. She crosses the room in a few leaps, ducks into the storage room, and throws open the door into the mirror room.

  Except these are no mirrors. In every reflective surface, Isabella is screaming. It’s the young Isabella, from the portraits, but her beautiful face is distorted in a grimace of all-consuming rage and hatred. Darkness ripples through the mirrors like billows of ink in water.

  Eve raises the rolling pin, which feels alarmingly loose in her sweat-slicked hands, and smashes the nearest mirror.

  Shards go flying in all directions, and she barely has time to shield her eyes. They shred the back of her hands, blood running into her sleeves. She raises the rolling pin again and smashes another mirror.

  Isabella’s face changes. It’s a deterioration so quick it all happens within seconds: the skin sags and turns crepey, the hair thins and grays, the hands turn skeletal.

  And then it accelerates.

  Half her skin melts off, leaving two holes where her nose should be, and her hair is gone on the burnt side, only tufts of gray and pale red sticking out haphazardly from the deformed flesh. Overcoming her terror, Eve smashes another mirror, then another.

  The screaming becomes deafening. Eve can no longer tell the difference between the inhuman screech and the sound of breaking glass. When she’s done, only a few pieces of mirror cling to some of the frames. She’s panting. She can feel the cuts on her face, which sting like hell.

  Time to get out of here.

  But, first, she has to find Isa.

  As she exits what used to be the mirror room, Isa is nowhere to be seen. Sara is still convulsing on the floor underneath the ruined painting. When Eve dares look, all she has time to glimpse is a flash of grayed hair and Sara’s face, withering away in front of Eve’s eyes, the flesh collapsing in on itself. The painting flaps around grotesquely, thin, ghostly threads of paint desperately trying to stitch themselves together.

  Too little, too late.

  Eve leaves Sara there and runs down the hall, stopping only at the gas lamps. She flips one switch, then another, and the soft hiss of escaping gas fills the air.

  “Isa!” Eve yells out. No answer. “Isa, where are you?”

  She makes it as far as the stairs when she sees a familiar silhouette and grinds to a halt. Emma has her back to Eve but Eve has no trouble recognizing her. At this angle, you almost can’t see the mangled half of her face. She turns around slowly, and Eve realizes she’s holding a large piece of a broken mirror in her hands. She holds it up, tilting her head as she examines her reflection.

  Eve doesn’t dare draw a breath, but Emma hardly seems to notice she’s there.

  “It’s all over,” she says, her voice perfectly normal and brimming with deep sadness. “It’s all gone.”

  Under Eve’s horrified gaze, she raises the piece of silvered glass and plunges it into her throat, grinding it in deeper and deeper.

  Eve snaps back to reality and races down the stairs, trips, and rolls all the way down to the third-floor landing where she collapses in a heap, panting, dazed by the pain in her sides. When her vision stops swimming, she looks up to see no trace of Emma except for a giant bloodstain at the top of the stairs.

  “Looking for me?”

  The voice comes from the hallway. Eve scrambles to her feet. She’s lost the rolling pin and has nothing to defend herself with. Isabella is standing in the middle of the hall, and one look tells Eve that it’s very much still Isabella. It’s Isa, yet it isn’t. She looks older, meaner, and her eyes are still that dazzling shade of green.

  “You’re wasting your time, Eve,” Isabella says smoothly. “You really thought you could hurt my house and get out alive? You won’t make it.”

  “But at least you’ll be dead too.”

  Isabella laughs. It’s no longer silvery but demented and demonic. “This is where you’re mistaken.”

  She raises her hand, and something glints in her clenched fist. A blade? Eve backs away as Isabella swings it at her head.

  “Isa!” she screams. “I know you’re in there. Stop her!”

  “Isa is gone,” Isabella snaps. Her voice warbles, distorted like a bad record. “She was weak. I’m something much better now.”

  She takes another swing at Eve’s face, but Eve grabs her wrist in midair. She twists with all her might, sinking her fingernails into Isabella’s skin.

  “You’re not worthy of doing Isa’s laundry,” Eve hisses. “You hideous bitch.”

  Isabella cries out, and her grip on the blade loosens. Eve wrestles it away from her—it’s not a knife but a silver letter opener with an ornate handle. Isabella snarls and tries to make a grab for it. Eve swings her arm and the blade connects with skin.

  It slices neatly right across Isabella’s cheek. The cut is shallow, Eve can see, but big droplets of blood well up immediately.

  A gasp escapes from Isabella, a truly horrifying sound like the last breath leaving a body. She clasps her hand over the injury, blood seeping through her fingers. Her knees buckle, and she sinks to the floor, her expression empty and blank. The green in her eyes falters and flickers, giving way to the normal pale blue.

  “Isa!” Eve dives to the floor and threads her arm around her friend. “Isa, can you hear me?”

  Isabella—Isa?—blinks slowly. “We have to hurry,” she says, and her voice is once again normal Isa’s voice. “The injury to her face—it only stunned her. She’s still traumatized by being burned in the fire. But she’ll be back.”

  “What do we do?” Eve asks.

  “You have to leave me and go.”

  She helps Isa get back on her feet. “Absolutely not.”

  “I—I think it’s the only way.” Isa’s voice is terribly small and full of sorrow.

  “No. I’ve released the gas from the stove and the lamps. The place is about to catch fire. We’re getting out.”

  “All the doors are locked,” Isa says.

  “But we have to try.”

  Eve drags Isa down the hall, back toward the stairs. Three floors down, and then she has to find a way to get the doors open and to haul them both out before the house explodes.

  Isa trembles. Eve glances at her, and, panicked, sees her eyes flicker to green once again. Isa gives a violent shake of her head.


  There’s a whiff of natural gas in the air.

  There’s no time.

  Eve drags her to the nearest room—Samuel’s studio—and shuts the door behind them. The safe door is half-closed.

  It’s a door, and a door can be many things.

  Eve lets Isa sink to the floor and throws her entire weight against the safe door. With a groan, it opens all the way.

  Inside, there’s no safe. There’s only a passage, dark and empty and seemingly endless.

  “Isa!” Eve yells. “Come on!”

  But Isa is shaking violently. Her face blurs, then regains focus, then blurs again.

  Isabella, Isa, Isabella.

  Eve’s fresh out of options. She grabs Isa and pulls her along into the safe that never was. The tunnel angles down, steep, and, within moments, Eve loses her balance. She and Isa tumble down, into the darkness—

  —and then there’s a rush of cold and fresh air. Eve collapses into a pristine expanse of glittering snow, headfirst, gasping. At first she’s disoriented, flailing around in the waist-deep snowbank as she struggles to regain her footing.

  Isa is in the snowbank next to her. She seems to be unconscious.

  “Isa!” Eve cries out, but all that gorgeous, fresh snow muffles her voice. “Isa! We did it!”

  Isa’s eyes open. She’s looking up, and at first, Eve isn’t sure if the blue is the color of her irises, or just the reflection of the dark sky.

  And, a moment later, the house goes up in flames.

  Fire, Explosion in Historic Mansion near Amory University

  A series of truly baffling, not-yet-explained events near Amory University culminated in an even more bizarre fire and explosion last week. The tragic event claimed the lives of several students from the local high school as well as several others who have not yet been identified.

  The house, the historic mansion that once belonged to socialite Isabella Granger, has been university property for decades and represented an important part of the city’s cultural heritage.