Panes of glass gleamed darkly in the poorly-lit room. The main source of light came from two antique floor lamps. The weak beams caught and illuminated beads of condensation forming on the windows, and made them glow like silvery-hot metal. It was starting to mist.
Lisa, who was hidden behind a plant, did not notice the weather at all. She would have been hard-pressed to describe the room she was in, either, except that it had windows and plants, and a lack of a thermostat. Her knees and ankles were sore from remaining in a hunched position for so long in heels. At this rate, I'm going to develop a hump.
The fact that the room was bitingly cold did nothing to ease her cramping muscles. She regretted lending Val her sweater; low-cut or no, at least her shirt had sleeves!
Had I known that I was going to be crawling around on the dusty floors, I wouldn't have wasted forty bucks on this spectacle of a dress—which doesn't even look that good at me.
So much for showing Thomas.
The leaves nearest to Lisa's face rustled as she let out her breath in a huff. Rubber plant, she thought. She recognized the large, pod-shaped leaves; her mother had one like it at home. There were various other potted plants in the nearby vicinity, making it seem as though a jungle had somehow managed to creep into what was otherwise a perfectly innocuous room. Like that movie, she mused absently. The one with the elephants and the killer flowers.
Except these were fake, thank God. The leaves had the scratchy texture of rough, woven fabric sealed with plastic to prevent must and mildew. Plants that stayed green and never had to be watered. She snorted. How tacky. Surely, if he could afford this house, he could afford real plants and a real gardener? And some real entertainment, for that matter, instead of stupid old hide and seek.
She could almost hear her anger crackling, kindling like the fiery cinders of a fireplace. 'Hunt and capture' was quickly becoming a total bore. At first she had been mildly intrigued—thinking it was going to be a 'grown-up' game like seven minutes in heaven, or spin the bottle—and then she'd found out that, no, he really did intend to have them running around like scared kids in the dark.
This was just so…so stupid. She was eighteen, not eight, and far too old for these sorts of games!
A sudden creak drew her attention back toward the sole door in the room: a massive slab of solid oak with a shining brass handle. Heavy, too. Lisa had barely managed to open it, and when the damn thing slammed closed behind her with a heavy thud she'd nearly shit herself.
Thrills shot through her, eclipsing the annoyance. She became engaged, in spite of herself, as the adrenaline flooded her veins. For several seconds, she was still, poised on the balls of her feet in those tortuous heels, scarcely daring to breathe for fear that the slightest sound or movement would command the attention of…no, not James. Someone else. Someone far more terrifying.
James is the hunter, she reminded herself impatiently. You're hardly afraid of James.
No. She was not afraid of James. Because, beneath his hard exterior, he wanted to be dominated by a woman; she knew because he'd told her as much when he said Val wasn't the girl he'd thought she was, wah, wah, wah, this wasn't what he'd bargained for when he asked her out, and was she doing this to spite him? The jury weeps for you, James, she thought, unsympathetically.
Val's issues weren't easy on her, either, but she certainly wasn't going to complain about it. You could blame the victim and say that she shouldn't have gotten involved with that guy in the first place, but Val had always been a little too quick to trust. When people inevitably ended up hurting her, she'd stare at them with the wounded eyes of a kicked puppy. Lisa had decided that this regression was a result of all that lack of suspicion and cynicism catching up to her at once.
Really, when you thought about it, it was a wonder that Val wasn't even more neurotic than she already was.
But James didn't see it that way; he saw it as a personal affront. He couldn't forget that Val had originally cast him aside for someone else. Despite the fact that Gavin had terrified the silly girl out of her mind, he'd left a lasting impression, far more lasting than any James could hope to leave, and James resented her for that, too: for making him feel inadequate at all. Yes, Lisa knew far more than she would have liked to know about what was happening between James and Val.
The handle of the door, which she had been watching hawkishly this whole time, did not move. The sound, along with whatever had caused it, had vanished. Slowly, Lisa released her breath. The leaves nearest to her face quivered, releasing pockets of dust. She sneezed and flinched involuntarily, then subsided into a nervous laugh. Hunt and capture, really. It led the mind to conjure up all kinds of weird imagery.
And GM, its so-called inventor, was more than a little strange, himself…. He could get away with it, too, looking the way he did. Nice shoulders. Big hands. Gorgeous eyes. He had a nice body beneath that ridiculous white-ensemble of his too, she could tell. This was a man who wouldn't need to constantly assess others to gauge his own self-worth.
Charming, too. She was still grateful that he'd bothered to rescue her from that creep Jason—and after Val flaked out on her pleas for help, too. That girl. She was acting so cagey. When GM had started chatting with her casually at the food table she looked like she'd seen a ghost.
Her own conversation with him had seemed innocent enough. He'd asked her about the game, her friends, where they went to school—the usual. She couldn't really remember much more than that; her relief at escaping Jason had eclipsed her awareness of their conversation, so her recollection of the words exchanged was hazy at best. She did remember that he had remained extraordinarily detached, revealing only the thinnest veneer of polite interest in what she had to say.
And GM had sidestepped each and every one of her attempts to turn the conversation back towards him with a non-sequitur that kept the ball placed firmly in her court. That had been a little strange. The first time, she'd thought it was an accident, or courteousness. After the third time, however, Lisa began to wonder if perhaps their charming host was hiding something.
Maybe Val's right to be wary of him, after all.
As attractive and charming and cavalier as he appeared, GM obviously enjoyed manipulating people. The vague and mysterious invitations were evidence enough of that. Oh, he seemed nice and harmless enough—she didn't think he was dangerous, in spite of the way Val responded to him—but he was definitely very, very strange. Eccentric.
Controlling.
I wonder what it would be like to sleep with him.
Lisa started at that, half-expecting to see him lurking in a shadowy corner somewhere as she cursorily inspected the room. The thought had popped into her head unbidden like a scene from bad porn. Or good porn. She laughed again, and sounded a bit less panicked than she had before.
He probably likes it kinky and rough.
She giggled again at how bad she was being and then looked around guiltily. She feared that someone would come running and when nobody did, she got angry instead.
Why hadn't somebody found her yet, goddammit?
▪▫▪▫▪▫▪
The bedroom door led to a second hallway, presumably into another wing of the house. Val thought it was odd that a bedroom would open up into not one but two hallways, though she didn't dwell on it. She had other concerns. The lights were off in here, too, and she had to press herself firmly against the wall to keep from getting lost or, worse, falling down a flight of stairs.
The air was colder in this part of the house. Maybe it was the part that faced away from the sun all day—not that there had been much of that, what with the rain and the heavy dark clouds. Beneath her fingertips, the wallpaper was peeling and dusty and slightly bloated with moisture and old glue. Touching it gave her skin a swollen, itchy feel.
It's like dead skin, she thought. Like a corpse.
Val yanked her hand away from the wall to wipe it on her jeans and her foot caught on something hard. She hit the floorboards with a heavy thud that mad
e her palms and knees sting. She reached out, running her hand over the wooden panels, but there was no trace of the object that had caused her to fall. I felt something—didn't I?
“Great,” Val muttered, slamming her hand against the boards. “Now I'm delusional as well as lost.” She imagined she could hear faint laughter in the dark.
“Is someone there?”
Stupid. Your therapist was right. You really are crazy. You're hallucinating your very own laugh-track.
Val got up from the floor with more force than necessary and promptly lost her balance. She fell against the disgusting wall and felt a hard object collide against her right hip with bruising force. She let out a hiss of surprised pain. A doorknob. She'd literally stumbled upon another door. A neon line of yellow light glowed at the bottom, in the gap between door and floor.
I don't think that light was on a moment ago. I would have noticed.
Quickly, before common sense could rule her, she gave the knob a quick twist. The door swung open, and she reeled back as her eyes were assailed by a dazzling light. The culprit was actually a single naked bulb, swinging haphazardly from the draft she'd let in, but after the impenetrable darkness of the cold, shadowed corridor, the bulb seemed as bright as a blazing hot sun.
Val turned her face away, eyes watering, blinking rapidly as she waited for her vision to adjust. This “new room” actually seemed to be a medium-sized hall closet, just big enough to be called a “walk-in.” When she reached out, she could only just brush both sides with her fingertips. The walls felt strange, though—definitely papery, but far too slippery and sleek to be ordinary wallpaper. In fact, the smooth surface was more like the glossy pages in a magazine.
What? She lowered her hands. Wallpaper? In a closet?
She opened her eyes. There was a brief flash of searing pain, but she could make out the closet beyond the blur of her tears. She blinked, her eyes going wider, but the images before her didn't fade. Plastered over the walls were dozens and dozens of chessboards in miniature, each depicting a different position—openings, middlegames, and endgames.
She gasped and whirled around, only to hit the now-closed door as she saw the snarling maw of a wolf looming over her. The fact that it was a picture did nothing to calm her nerves He's trying to scare me, she thought sickly.
It was working.
My God. Predators. An entire wall of predators. Spiders. Snakes. Leopards. Lions. Sharks. Her skin crawled just look at them. She reached out a shaking hand, which she immediately drew back; she didn't want to touch them, lest some remote trace of their lethal nature rub off on her.
Val glanced at the other wall, dreading what she would see. Crude weapons and instruments of torture? Pornography? Some combination thereof?
No.
Flowers, this time. Red roses. Yellow roses. White jasmine. Orange lilies. A couple other varieties she couldn't hope to name. Beside the images of fierce teeth and forced mates, the flowers were disconcertingly incongruous. And yet…there was something sinister about these, too.
Slowly, she turned to face the final wall—the one at her back, the other side of the door. She turned…and she clapped a hand over her mouth to keep herself from screaming. She was staring at her own face.
Pictures of her covered the back of the door, riddled with dozens of tiny holes that went clean through the thin coating of varnish and deep into the heart of the knotted wood. He's killing me in effigy. She grew even more pale. The door opened outward—she could easily picture him, armed with arrows or darts, casually firing quarrel after quarrel as he used her image as a dartboard.
“Shit,” she whispered. The words tasted like acid in her suddenly too-dry mouth.
Above her head, the light went out.
A horrible sense of claustrophobia and vertigo swirled around her in the darkness, dragging her under the weight of her own panic with all the cataclysmic force of a tsunami. She tripped over her own feet in her haste to get out of that horrible room. She felt the eyes of the paper beasts boring caustic holes in her back. What if the door's locked?
She would go mad.
Val yanked the handle. The door opened, spilling her into the hallway with a rush of cold air that felt even colder against her feverish skin. He knows I'm here. Oh God.
She couldn't remember which way she'd come. In her fear and panic she had completely disoriented herself. She planted her hand against the wall, weeping silently.
He was playing with her, the bastard. Herding her. That probably had been him laughing earlier.
She gritted her teeth and took small, cautious steps through the shroud of dust and darkness, keeping her hand firmly pressed against the papered surface. Eventually she'd find the stairs. Then she could find her friends and show them that closet. Let's see them doubt me then.
(it would be a pity if any of said guests happened to have an accident, wouldn't it? That would be a terrible thing to have on one's conscience)
Or…not.
Beneath her groping hand, rough paper yielded to soft, pliant fabric. Her fingers twitched. For a moment, she could only stare unseeingly into the darkness, absorbing heat from the warm, breathing body beneath her palm.
Her brain paused, rewound, and spiraled out of control. The delayed shriek burst from her lips and she jerked her hand back as though she'd been burned—and in a way, she had; he'd seared her with a skewering burst of fear, shorting out nerve endings and inciting paralysis.
She took a slow step backwards, well aware that if she ran he would easily be able to follow the sound of her footsteps on the wooden floor. She silently cursed her own foolishness, even as her palms began to sweat and her heart pounded and she looked over her shoulder like a cornered animal that had found itself face-to-face with its hunter and left with nowhere else to run. It didn't really matter in any case; he caught her.
“No,” she said in a low moan, when his hand closed firmly around her wrist. His touch was like a brand against her skin. Val was reminded of the way he'd gripped her throat as he kissed her, with tightness only just below the threshold required for the sensation of pain.
“You're shaking. Don't like the dark, Val?”
“Take me back to my friends. I went through your stupid penalty round. I saw that horrible—” she broke off, faltering as she tried to come up with a suitable word to describe what she had seen in the closet; she found none. “What you b-brought me here to see. And guess what? I still think you're a monster.”
“That wasn't the penalty round.”
And before she could offer a retort or a refusal, she was in his arms and he was spinning her around, twirling her in the darkness and making her lose all sense of direction. She was painfully aware of his hand at her waist, toying with the hem of her shirt with a proprietary air that disturbed her. She started to squirm, and he integrated her pushes and struggles into the steps.
“What are you doing?” she yelped.
He dipped her back and held her there, poised for a fall.
“I believe it's a waltz.”
“No. You threw darts at pictures of me. You don't get to touch me.”
“Wrong again, dearest.” He yanked her upright, closing his other hand more firmly over hers. “If I wanted to hurt you, I would not need to do so by proxy.”
Val jerked her arm and felt the sharp kick of the wall against her heels.
“I thought perhaps some time in the dark, alone, would cool you off, but I don't believe you've quite learned the lesson.”
Her stomach flip-flopped at the sound of his voice, filling her with a deep humiliation that he could still make her feel this way. She could imagine that condescending smile slipping into place, and his eyes, which could shift from tranquil to turbulent, depending on the light. Val wondered what shade they were now. Dark, she thought, So dark that you had no hopes of gauging the depths—
Not until you were already half-drowned.
“What lesson?”
“That you can't win against me.”
“Lesson learned,” she said sharply, giving her arm another tug. He still wouldn't let go.
“I don't think so.”
“Then why? If you despise me this much—if you're so hellbent on destroying me—then why did you kiss me? What's with this whole elaborate facade?”
“A facade,” he repeated. “Is that what you think this is, Val? Some mere trifle I've put together to amuse myself?”
“It's always a game with you.”
“In every sense of the word.” There was a snarl in his voice now, and she flinched at the quality of his tone. Bitter as wormwood, deadly as hemlock. He sounded almost as if he were implying that this was all her fault.
“I've done nothing to you,” Val said, and without becoming any less fearful or confused, she started to grow angry as well. Who was he to accuse her, after pushing her, threatening her, singling her out? After ruining her life, and betraying her trust, and breaking her heart?
He had no right. None.
He dropped his hand from her waist, like an annoyed cat batting aside a toy being held in contempt. “Do you honestly believe that?” he inquired, and though his voice was calm, affable, even, she felt his hand on her wrist tighten, as if he thought she'd run away. “I think you've done plenty. I think you know exactly what you—”
His voice, which had been steadily rising, stopped completely. He'd made a mistake, Val realized. By raising his voice, he'd let the emotionless mask slip free, betraying his real face.
“What?” she whispered, shaking.
“Never you mind. So you consider yourself innocent, a tragic victim of circumstance. Does that make me the heartless villain? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. We always vilify what we don't understand. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Isn't that right, Valerian?”
“I…I don't know.”
“No, not yet. But you will. You will.”
And then they were running, tearing through the darkened hallways at breakneck speed. Val felt fear explode inside of her as the dry, cold air whipped past her face. Though a natural runner, she had to fight to keep up. She was so terrified—terrified that he'd lead her down a staircase or straight into a wall.
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