by K. F. Breene
“What happened?” Scarlet’s voice was muffled through the door. “Open up.”
“We’re trying!” I stepped to the side, hoping Braiden’s muscles would be able to solve the problem. He yanked at the deadbolt with both hands. Rammed his shoulder into the door while pulling harder. It still wouldn’t budge.
The squeal grew louder. Something else was moving, and it had nothing to do with this door.
I turned around slowly, my heart ramping up and my stomach flip-flopping.
The deadbolt on the door to the solarium was moving on its own, peeling back from the lock that kept the door fastened.
“Braiden.” I tapped him. The wild knocking on Scarlet’s door suddenly ceased. Silence filled the room except for that horrible squeal. Stillness, except for that slow slide of metal. “Something is trying to come in. And I don’t have a good feeling about it.”
Braiden ran to the other door and jammed his hand against the end. “Work on Scarlet’s door,” he said, his face screwed up in determination.
I did as he instructed, but if he couldn’t get it open, and with his body weight wouldn’t slam it open, there wasn’t much hope I could do any better.
“Scarlet,” I yelled through the door, fear drowning me. The knocking hadn’t resumed. “Scarlet?”
“I’m not having any effect.” Braiden stepped back and shook his head. “It’s almost open. Hurry! We’ll just have to try and work around to find Scarlet. Hopefully she stays put.”
Eyes fixed on the moving deadbolt, he yanked open the third door without a problem. The metal latch of the deadbolt had nearly cleared the hoop. Soon, whoever was on the other side would join us.
Without another thought, I ran through the opened door, tearing my eyes away from the danger only as I crossed the threshold. My feet hit empty space. Gravity reached up its greedy hands and grabbed hold of me.
Like the stairs on the first floor, this door led to nowhere.
On instinct, I spun and reached for the lip of the floor behind me. Braiden had turned, ready to run after me, and I grabbed his leg with one hand, barely managing to catch hold of the edge of the floor with the other. The jolt of his sudden stop almost pulled my hands loose, but panic and sheer will kept me holding on. The other drop had not been steep, but I couldn’t see the floor this time. For all I knew, this door dumped out onto the first floor.
“Oh crap!” Movements as fast as lightning, Braiden knelt and grabbed my forearms. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Ella.”
“And we meet again,” came the charming voice from the secret hallway, slithering into every corner of the séance room. “How lucky.”
Braiden’s jaw clenched. Instead of pulling me up, he pulled me away from the side and lowered to his belly.
“What are you doing?” I said, panic ringing through my voice.
His eyes were intense. “He wants to kill you. Don’t ask me how I know…I just do. I will not let that happen.” He licked his lips. “Don’t worry. The drop isn’t that high. Your feet are about four feet off the ground. Bend your knees on impact and roll. Okay? You’ll be fine.”
“But—” And then I was airborne.
Chapter Thirty-Three
My feet hit the ground, and I did the whole stop, drop, and roll thing—the same strategy I used for jumping out of trees. The tile wasn’t so easy on the body as grass or dirt, and I slapped limbs as I rolled.
Sounds of fighting came from above. A thud and release of breath. A grunt and a howl of pain.
I scrambled up and looked through the open door. Braiden landed a solid punch. The Charming Man’s head snapped back and he staggered out of sight. A moment later, I saw a fist swing into view. Braiden ducked away with the ease and grace of someone who knew how to fight. He batted away a jab and threw an uppercut, stepping forward to deliver it.
I didn’t know much about boxing, but I knew when someone was good at it. Braiden was great.
He was at the door a moment later, looking down at the ground below. Before I could see what he was scouting out, he jumped.
“No!” I shouted, slapping my hand to my mouth. The drop hadn’t been so horrible for me, but I’d already been swinging from the ledge. He was about ten feet off the ground.
He hit the wall, which was when I spotted what he’d been aiming for: a pipe about two inches thick. His body hit off the wood and he scrabbled for purchase. Flakes of paint rained down, his feet scraping the sides, but his hands found purchase on the pipe.
“You think that is all it will take?” The Charming Man filled the doorway, his lip split and his cheek swollen. Blood dribbled down from a cut in his brow. He took a white pocket square from the breast pocket of his suit and dabbed the liquid away. “Running?” His easy smile held an edge. “Running won’t get you far. Not in this house.”
Braiden slid down the pipe with obvious effort, his toes finding purchase on the braces. He looked beyond his feet, the distance about six feet.
“Here.” I ran to him with my arms held up. “I can catch you. Or at least help break your fall.”
“Get out of the way, Ella. This isn’t my first rodeo.”
It was only the sheer confidence of his voice that convinced me to move aside.
He jumped, swinging his feet out enough to miss the braces before tucking them back around the pipe. He slid, his hands going one over the other, alternating. Another couple of feet and the train derailed. He slipped and fell, pushing himself away from the wall at the last second, and hit the ground with his feet. He fell back onto the side of his butt and half rolled, half tumbled onto the tile.
I was at his side a moment later, ready to face my hatred of blood to attempt damage control.
“I’ll see you soon,” the Charming Man said. A door slammed upstairs. Silence descended, fragmented by our harried breathing.
Braiden sat up, grimacing with the movement.
“Are you okay?” I touched his handsome face, unmarred by his tussle.
He brought his hands up, scraped from the climb-fall.
“I’m fine.” He winced as he shifted. “I’ll have a nice bruise on my butt cheek, but at least I didn’t fall on my tailbone.”
I stroked his hair, not sure what else to do.
His eyes met mine in the half-light, their color lost to the darkness but not their intensity. He grabbed my face in his hands and pulled me closer, meeting my lips with his. Warmth rushed through me, flipping my belly and sending tingles deep into my middle. I wrapped my arms around his neck, sinking into the comforting feel of him. Soaking up the confidence and courage with which he faced every situation.
“We should go,” he murmured against my lips.
He paused when my face was inches from his, his eyes roaming my face. “I’ve wanted to do that since you stared me down through your window.”
“My… When?”
A smile graced his lips. “When I was walking Bowzer. You stared at me through your window with this…tough face—”
“I can’t help that face. My mother tells me I could scare Satan with it.”
“—and something about you…called to me. But then you ducked out of sight, randomly, without even waving, and I couldn’t stop laughing. I wanted to knock on your door and meet you right then. I chickened out, though. Then everything got confusing with the candle, and the ghost in the street…” He tucked a flyaway strand of hair behind my ear. “I guess it doesn’t matter how I got to know you. The important thing is that I did.”
He kissed me again, so full of passion and longing that I momentarily forgot that we were stuck in McKinley Mansion. That we needed to find Scarlet and possibly run for our lives. My brain went fuzzy and my body went tingly, and I just held on for dear life.
When he pulled away, my sigh of regret was audible.
“We’ll have plenty of time for that,” he said in a teasing tone. “First, I have to get you out of here.”
Reality slapped me in the face, and I sat back and surveyed our surroundings
. We were in the kitchen again, at the end of the laundry area. The door to nowhere dropped people into a working area of the house. That seemed awfully dangerous for guests.
“We’re going to have to work our way back upstairs to find Scarlet.” A shiver of fear wormed through me, but I pushed it away. I couldn’t worry about her. I had to trust her intelligence and survival instinct. So far she’d been integral in keeping everyone out of danger. I had to trust that she would have an even easier time doing it by herself.
Braiden rose stiffly and rubbed his butt. “Okay. Do you know the way?”
“Not even remotely. My directional sense is somewhat limited in huge and strange houses with a seemingly endless number of rooms and doors and staircases that lead nowhere.”
He nodded and took my hand. “Agreed. I have a similar problem. Which is why we need Scarlet.”
“And we’re going to find her, if I have to yell her name through every room in this mansion.”
We started forward, retracing our steps from our previous visit to the kitchen. Light dimmed the farther away we got from the backside of the solarium.
I looked at my empty hand, our clasped hands, and finally Braiden’s other empty hand. “Where’s the flashlight?”
Braiden repeated my scan. “I don’t know.”
I couldn’t even remember who had held it last. All my memories were hazy after our encounter with the younger Old Woman. Almost like I had drifted through a dense fog.
“We’ll look for one along the way,” he said, and didn’t elaborate, for which I was grateful. Any flashlight we found would be the property of someone who, unfortunately, didn’t need it anymore.
“You’re good at fighting,” I said as we walked.
“Yes. After losing a couple fights in school, my dad thought I should get some lessons.”
“Is that the reason you came out here? Because you were getting into trouble all the time?”
Braiden tensed. His glance back at me was guarded and uncomfortable. He set his jaw firmly. “Not entirely. No.”
Curiosity tugged at me, but the need to know what he was hiding was momentarily forgotten when we passed a large alcove and I halted. My mouth dropped open and I stepped closer, just to see. “Is that…?”
“A huge block of ice, yes.” He stepped closer and gingerly touched it. “That’s how they used to keep their food cold. Icebox. That’s what my grandmother called a freezer. This is why. They’d use a real block of ice.”
“This isn’t a box, though.” I looked around the alcove, bigger than the séance room. It’s an entire pantry.”
“I guess rich people had an ice room.” He backed out. “And the fact that ice is here means this part of the house is going active. Let’s get a move on.”
As we reached the servants’ dining room, lights flared all around us, brighter than the other times. Singing drifted down from the direction of the formal dining room, a man’s voice. Despite the pleasant melody, icy tendrils pierced me. It was him. The Charming Man.
“Not that way.” I pulled on Braiden’s hand as something flickered in the servants’ dining room. Not a light but a person, wispy at first and almost translucent until she solidified. A plain brown dress, badly torn, draped her body. Tear stains made tracks down her dirty face.
She started toward us, and though she didn’t have a weapon, her vengeful expression was enough to make me back away.
“The servants must’ve had stairs,” I said, turning down the hall Scarlet had identified as the path servants would use to roam the house out of sight. “We can get up that way.”
“Yes. But where are those?”
“We’re in the servants’ area. Surely it would have to be around here somewhere, right?” I turned down a hall I didn’t recognize, jogging through the narrowing corridor. Lights flared from the direction we’d come. More from just up the way.
A strange sort of haziness filled the air, billowing out from the walls and drifting through the air like mist. We turned right, entering a room with a modest table and some benches hugging the walls. An old-style water jug and a chipped tea set sat in the corner.
“A break room, maybe?” Braiden asked, continuing through it. “Maybe a place for deliveries to…”
His voice trailed away as we heard, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
The Charming Man.
We picked up the pace as the mist thickened. After turning left, we finally found the staircase through a low doorway without an actual door. Heavy footsteps clunked down, one after the other, until an older man emerged. One eye had been gouged out, the socket oozing a blackened sort of pus. His shirt was half torn away, and bleeding slices marred his bare skin.
He reached for us with a three-fingered hand. Blood dripped onto the wooden steps.
“I can get through him,” Braiden said, bracing himself in that now-familiar way. “No problem.”
More footsteps echoed behind him, just as heavy, lumbering down the steps. We couldn’t see anyone approaching through the mist.
I turned wildly, seeing a dark area through the hall opposite us. “There, look!”
“Ready or not, here I come…” the Charming Man called.
We jogged in that direction. I glanced back and saw him. Sleek in his suit and completely healed from his fight with Braiden, the Charming Man sauntered up the hall with a sly smile and one hand in his pocket.
Adrenaline dumped into me as we raced for the darkened area. Around a bend, we met yet another set of stairs, this one reaching down into the bowels of the house. My mind hazed over and the pull from the younger Old Woman wrapped around me, begging me to descend the stairs. To seek solace with her.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Braiden stepped forward. “Come on.” He tugged on my hand. “This way.”
I pulled back. “That’s her, Braiden. Can’t you feel it? This is a trick. We can’t go that way.”
Frustration crossed his expression and his grip on my hand tightened. “This is the safest way. I can feel it, Ella. We have to go this way.”
“We’ll be trapped.” I tried to pull back. To reclaim my hand. “That’s where they want us to go. Where we can’t run. Where we can’t get out. It isn’t safe, Braiden. Use your head.”
He turned to me, his expression insistent and eyes pleading. “Ella, I feel the rightness in this. I feel it. This is our only chance at safety. You have to trust me.”
Time was draining away, our window of opportunity passing.
“No.” I shook my head. “Scarlet’s right. I’ve only made it this long by refusing her. I won’t give in now.”
“There you are.” The Charming Man filled the end of the hall, a hand still in his pocket and a lit cigarette between two fingers near his mouth. “Easy finding you, I have to say. You haven’t even tried to hide. I cannot tell if that is courageous, or simply stupid.”
“Ella,” Braiden insisted, pulling me toward the stairs, “come with me. I said I would protect you. Let me do my job.”
“Yes, Ella,” the Charming Man said, sauntering toward us. “Let him protect you, by all means. Let him drag you down to the crypt. With the magic in your blood, you’ll get to live in this house for all eternity. Like the others. Like me. Won’t that be fun?”
Braiden grabbed me around the waist and slung me over his shoulder. I sucked in a breath to scream as he jostled me down the steep wooden steps.
“We shall get to know each other very well, Miss Ella,” the Charming Man said, and I shivered in disgust, my scream trapped in my throat.
Braiden ran me around a corner before ducking under a thick metal pipe. The concrete ceiling pressed down on us. The rough concrete walls and uneven ground gave the area a haunted feeling. Oil lamps and candles rested on available flat surfaces, and I belatedly realized they were lit.
I beat on his broad back and bucked, trying to get loose. All the while, my heart surged, feeling the rightness of where we were going. Feeling the intense pull and the glory o
f finally succumbing to it.
“No, Braiden,” I forced out, gritting my teeth and squeezing my eyes shut for a moment, trying to block it out. “We have to resist.”
“Trust me, Ella,” Braiden said, his voice hollow and distant. “Trust me.”
He took a right at an ancient furnace-looking thing, then went up a cracked cement slope and down two uneven stairs to a rectangular raised area, the outsides of which were walls of cement brick. Wood seats lined the walls, a resting place for workers after doing…whatever it was that needed to be done.
Without hesitating, ignoring my attempts to get free, Braiden headed to a darkened corner, removed from the walkways and seating area and draped in shadow. He paused in front of it, and the light flickered on and off, one second enough to see and move around, and the next nearly pitch black, with a paltry beam fighting the dark from a couple of thin, horizontal windows at the very top of the walls.
In one of the lights-on moments, he slipped his hand around an edge I didn’t even notice, reached with his fingers, and pushed or flipped a switch that even Scarlet would have been hard-pressed to find.
Alarm bled into all the other horrific emotions running through me.
“How did you know about that?” I asked in a choked voice.
A hidden door sprang open within the shadow. Braiden bounced me into the air. I barely kept myself from squealing as he caught me in his arms and held me tightly against his chest. Before I could resume my struggle, he had ducked and walked through the door, shutting it behind him.
Inky blackness settled around us, so dense that I couldn’t see his face near mine.
“No!” I curled my hand into a fist and punched, hitting him in the jaw. Pain shot through my hand, but he didn’t release me. I rocked forward and then back, trying to break free while also cradling my throbbing hand.
“Here. Just through here.” He relaxed his grip on my back, moving the hand that supported me away from his body a little, forcing me to lean back. I grabbed his shoulders to stop from falling on my head and kicked out my legs.