The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2)

by A. K. Caggiano

  “Now’s our chance,” Lorelei said, ready to head back into the crowd and check that all the guests were meant to be there.

  But Conrad grabbed her around the waist and pulled her close. She supposed he thought they were taking a different kind of chance, and she was already annoyed with herself for what she was about to do.

  “Hey, don’t get distracted.” She snapped her fingers in his face, but he just trapped her hand and moved it from between the two, slipping it skillfully into his own. His other arm slid all the way around her, and he started to sway. “Conrad.” She meant to chastise him like she did so often when irritated, but it came out like a sigh instead.

  “They’ll take care of things,” he said, bending his head down to hers. “Just stay here with me for a little while.”

  Rigid at first, Lorelei slowly relented, leaning into him and letting her free hand glide up his arm. The sounds of the fountain beside them muffled the music as they drifted closer to the shadows on the outskirts of the ballroom. He brought her hand to rest against his chest.

  Lorelei took in a full breath, the scent of him and the sweetness in the room mingling, making her drowsy and chasing away the unease. She blinked up into his eyes as they shuffled into a pall of blue light from the stained-glass windows. There was movement off near the door as some of the guests meandered out of the white room and filed back into the manor, but she was too wrapped up in him to really notice. He was right, the others could take care of things just fine.

  The rush of danger and the guilt of touching him were quelled by how his hand pressed against her back, fingers curling just above her hip, and how synchronously they moved. Philomena’s darts made the others crazy, and they had certainly made Conrad act like a fool for a bit, but he was composed now, tender even, and she wondered if it was the cupid’s magic mixed with the succubus’s charm or if, possibly, some of it was actually him.

  There was a way to know, she supposed, and she spoke past the lump that had formed in her throat. “You’re still under the influence of those darts.” She ran a finger over his collar, guilt rising up from her belly. “You’re not yourself.”

  They turned in a slow circle. “How do you know that?”

  “Well, we’re dancing, and that doesn’t seem like a very Conrad-type thing.” She gazed out the blue glass of the windows, the view hazy and dark. “You shouldn’t be holding me, you should be…I don’t know, irritating me.”

  He bent his head down even closer, voice a low hum. “Those aren’t both things you do to someone you want?”

  She chuckled. “You think irritating someone is how you show affection?”

  “I just like how frustrated you get.” He laughed deep in his throat. “I keep waiting for you to take that frustration out on me.”

  “Oh, there’s the horny teenager,” she groaned, tipping her head back to frown at him. “See, I told you, it’s the cupid’s spell making you act different.”

  He lifted her hand held by his own and entwined their fingers. “Blame whatever you want, but it’s really you, tangling yourself up in my life.”

  She swallowed, looking away from him. “Philomena says you might not even remember all of this tomorrow. It’s like you’re drunk.”

  “You’ve seen me drunk, Lorelei,” he breathed into her ear. “This isn’t that.”

  He sounded so sure that the doubt lifted away, and she rested her head on his chest. At that, his grip around her only tightened. Lorelei shut her eyes and said quietly up against him, “I wish that were true.”

  “I’ve heard fae auras are naturally enchanting.” His voice was just above a rumble on the top of her head. “If how I’m feeling is caused by magic, then that’s the spell I’ve been under, and it started long before tonight.”

  Lorelei fell still. She was the fool and, worse, a liar. If she told him the truth now, that she was human, she bet she could snap him out of that damn love dart in a second. But—she looked up into phthalo emerald eyes that confirmed everything he’d just said—ruining the moment, even if it was all just because of some enchantment, would surely rip her to shreds. “I’m sorry,” she said, slipping her fingers out of his and pulling back.

  “For what?” His brow knit, hands refusing to let her go.

  She couldn’t be with him, not in the way she wanted, but it was probably possible to salvage a friendship through a lie. And that was where things would have to stay. She blinked away from his eyes, no longer able to look into them when they were so sincere, knowing she had deceived him for so long.

  There was movement over his shoulder then, a flash of two, beady lights gleaming out on the terrace. She gasped, looking around Conrad to try and find it again.

  “What is it?” He read the fear on her face and turned around.

  “Something’s on the balcony.” Loosed of his grip, she started toward the open archways, the room nearly empty of guests, the band just breaking down their instruments. A silhouette moved in the darkness by the railing. She crossed the room swiftly, Conrad just behind her, passing Ziah who was whispering to Mr. Carr and the scaled woman, and Ren and Ando who were in a deep discussion near the stage.

  When she reached the archway and crossed out from the light of the ballroom, she could finally see it. Like a wild cat, the thing’s muscles rippled under white and grey spotted skin. Lorelei had never seen a leopard without a moat and several layers of very thick glass between them, but she would have never guessed they were so big. But then this thing was no normal leopard.

  Its jaw unhinged, swinging down wide and unnaturally, ears falling back, and it screamed like a human being gutted alive. The stragglers in the ballroom snapped to life, shouting from behind her. Namtar’s Daughter dropped their instruments, speaker feedback and sour chords filling up the space. Conrad once again grabbed Lorelei and pulled her away. She couldn’t look away from the animal even as she felt herself stumbling backward, its voice echoing in her head and around the room like an entire pack, indecipherable words of anger and pain.

  Again, the voice was made up of so many and coming from everywhere. How was it here too? And how was it the same as Atax and Zyr and whatever was bound up in the attic?

  “What is that thing?” Ziah’s voice called into the ballroom.

  The leopard rose up then, and it was so large it looked as if it should have broken the ledge right off the balcony. Claws dug into the railing, and it pounced down onto the terrace, but as it did, the body contorted, and what landed was no longer a leopard, not even a hulking beast in the shape of a leopard, but a man. He came to stand, slowly, eyes cast forward.

  “Halt.” Ren’s voice was startling, the elf never so loud or dominating before, but the shapeshifting man did not heed. Ren pushed past the last, fleeing guests and dropped down at the edge of one of the long troughs of water. He dipped a hand in and gripped onto the head of a lily. Vines shot out, slick and spraying water over the ballroom as they went for the approaching form.

  Caught in the archway, the vines crawled around the strange being’s wrists and ankles, and he tugged, surprised that they were there at all. He snarled, cast a glance at Ren, and flared his nostrils. A bolt of lightning cracked out of the sky and straight down onto the terrace, severing the vines from his right arm and leg. Ren pulled back out of the water just as the burst of electricity flowed back along the lilies and into the trough. The water jumped, and the plants inside immediately turned to blackened ash.

  Conrad had pulled Lorelei back across the ballroom, just passing Ziah as she whispered, “Gods.” She clenched her fists in front of her then pulled them apart as they alighted, encircled in deep, red flames. Lorelei could feel the heat off them as they passed, the color shifting to a gas-like blue.

  “Gods,” Lorelei repeated, grabbing Conrad’s arm and trying to hold him still. “You have to bind him. He’s the same as Atax, as Zyr.”

  Ziah raised her arms. She called up fire around the man, and the flames rose, covering his form and trapping him again
in his slow stride forward.

  “It’s just like the others,” Lorelei said, shaking his arm. “They want Hana or the manor or something inside it. I don’t know, but they won’t stop until they get it.”

  “If that’s what this is, it’s too dangerous for you here.” Conrad continued to pull her toward the door leading out of the white room.

  The man burst through the ring of fire Ziah had made. His skin and clothes blackened and raw. Ziah gasped, her arms dropping and the ring swallowing itself up back into the ground, a burnt mess where it had been.

  “He escaped a nether circle!” Ziah shouted, looking down at her own hands as Ren ran to her side. “How?”

  The air in the space changed then, dry and light, and two of Ando’s arms shot out as his staff appeared in them. The water rose up from both sides of the room, suspended in midair, and another bolt of lightning crackled out over the balcony.

  Conrad had managed to pull Lorelei all the way to the door, her awe at what was happening too much of a distraction to struggle against him. “We have to help them,” she could barely say, eyes glassy and pinging between each of them in the middle of the ballroom looking so small in the nearly empty space.

  “No, I do.” Conrad grabbed the door with his free hand. “I don’t know when we’ll be back, but you have to watch over the others. Just don’t get hurt. Stay safe.”

  When his eyes flicked to the switch and timer beside the door, she grabbed onto him. “Conrad, no!”

  “You said it, I have to bind him, and I have to do it here, away from home, and away from you.”

  She opened her mouth to shout back at him that it was too dangerous, there was definitely another way, but he pulled her to him. Before she could plead her case, before she could tell him how insane it was to trap himself and the others out in the middle of gods knew where with some evil, electrified entity, before she could even tell him any bit of her truth, he was kissing her.

  The noises in the ballroom stopped, the echoed screams of the guests and the creature fell out of her memory, even the blood rushing past her own ears didn’t make a sound. There was nothing in that moment but his hand on the back of her neck, pulling her into him so easily, and his lips pressed against hers like they were made to do just that.

  And then he was pushing her away, out into the brightness of the manor hall so that she stumbled back into the wall, and the door to the white room was shut in her face. She threw herself against it, the flash of magic, the monstrous man, her friends, all shut off from her with the slamming of a door.

  She grabbed the knob and twisted, but it would not budge. “Conrad!” she screamed, pounding her fist against it, something metal biting into her hand. “Ziah!”

  Then the door gave way, and she fell forward. From her hand, a key tumbled, tinkling across the cement. Her eyes followed it, bone white against the even whiter floor. She grabbed the skeleton key, choking back a gasp. Conrad had slipped it to her during the distraction of the kiss. And then he’d shoved her right out of the room.

  Lorelei blinked up into the light of the single, swaying bulb above. The white room was small again, and silent, and empty.

  CHAPTER 34

  INTO THE BLIZZARD

  Lorelei pulled the door to the white room shut behind her, staring at her feet as they dragged themselves over the plain threshold into the hall. It was too quiet for what had just occurred, yet she couldn’t focus on a single one of the thoughts bouncing all around her head. They were gone—Ziah, Ren, Ando, Conrad—they were with that servant, that monster, that whatever-it-was, trapped in some mountainside temple gods knew where. She was completely alone, and she had no idea what to do. And then she saw him.

  “You!” Lorelei flung herself across the hall before she knew what she was doing and pinned Jordan Carr up against the wall. She shook him, knuckles white as she clenched his shirt, and he looked back at her utterly terrified. Anger swelled in her chest that he would play at being scared of her, a human, when he was a god damned wizard cop. “I don’t know how, but I know you have something to do with this,” she spat. “I don’t care what happens to me, but you need to do everything in your power to bring my friends back here right now!”

  Mr. Carr was pressing himself against the wall even as she held him there. The candlelight of the sconce next to his head flickered across the look of terror drawn on his face. “I don’t, I-I can’t!” he stammered.

  “Bullshit!” She heaved him forward and slammed him back against the wall again though her arms were shaking. He was significantly taller than her, but he was like a doll in her grip, feigning weakness and infuriating her even more. She pushed herself onto her toes to get as close to his face as possible. He could have gotten away at any moment, but instead he just flailed against the wall, quivering like a—had it not been her own arms shaking this whole time? “Stop pretending, Carr. Tell me the truth about who you are.”

  “F-fine!” He gulped, his hands up on either side of him, palms forward in surrender. Trembling under her grasp, he sunk down on wobbly knees—he certainly was a good actor. “I’ll tell you the truth, just, please, don’t hurt me.”

  “Hurt you?” Lorelei’s brow was so furrowed it hurt. She relaxed her grip, but didn’t let him go. “Just spit it out.”

  “I’m human,” he whispered so low she almost thought she heard wrong, not that even if he had screamed from the rooftop of Moonlit Shores Manor itself she would have believed it. “I know I don’t belong here, but he told me I could buy my way in, that it’d be safe and wonderful and magical. I didn’t know it’d be like this though. Please. I just want to go home.”

  Lorelei eased back down onto her heels, still holding his shirt and his gaze. His eyes—she knew that look if she’d only experienced it herself: the amazement at the world around her, the wonder at how things could be this way, and the fear. Jordan Carr was telling her the truth.

  She pulled back, hands going limp, eyes gazing up and down the hall but seeing nothing. It was empty and silent, but her heartbeat nearly drowned the nothing out. “Human,” she repeated. “Oh, my gods.”

  Lorelei backed into the opposing wall and slid down it. She’d been so wrong about so many things, held onto so many secrets, and now she had no one to admit any of it to. Her mind screamed back at her, worse than all the maligned whispers from every dark being she’d encountered, that she was unquestionably the most foolish being on this and every other plane.

  “Please,” Mr. Carr’s voice whispered. “How can I get home?”

  “Home.” She could barely raise her head up. “How the hell did you even get here?”

  His face was pale, his body lax against the wall. “It was an elite spot to be the first. We’d go in on it together,” he said, eyes staring blankly ahead. “I was the guinea pig, hiding in this world as a human, and it worked. But then things changed after Christmas. The plans to turn it into a business were put on hold, and he got a new partner. I want out, I just don’t know how.”

  Lorelei’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you talking about? And his partner?”

  “I don’t know their names. I’ve never even seen their faces. They only sent that woman to talk to me, and she even put an end to those meetings. But he sent me messages in my mind, and he told me about his partner and those things. He said not to fear them, that they were looking for something powerful they wouldn’t find in me, but how could you not?”

  Legs shaking, Lorelei pushed herself back up the wall. “You mean the thing in the white room? Someone told you about it?”

  He was nodding. “That thing was nothing like he said it would be. He called them faery tales, little things with wings that collected pieces of lost magic. But that wasn’t some little, winged thing. That was a monster.”

  “Faery tales,” Lorelei scoffed. Then a vision popped into her head: a fireplace, a rocking chair, a book.

  Lorelei took off down the hall and through the back entrance to the sitting room. Mr. Carr was just behind her, but s
he didn’t care. She jumped over the couch, nearly taking out a lamp as she lost a heel. She bounced onto the cushions to propel herself over to the fireplace where Mr. Ecknees was rocking, sound asleep.

  The book was still beside him, his teacup half full beside it. She grabbed Gilded Faery Tales and flipped through the pages frantically. There were drawings, beautiful and intricate, of a massive spider suspended from a web, a sneaking fox in its den, a coiled snake amongst jagged rocks, a sinewy leopard prowling from the canopy of a tree, and in the background of each, sets of hundreds of eyes staring back at her from the pages.

  When she reached the page that was marked with the old, folded place holder, she stopped and read the words at the top of the page, “The eldest of the faeries in the material plane, the four bearers of the source and mothers and fathers of the fae, were fated to walk this earth for eternity only to leave many discordant prints.” She looked up at Mr. Carr standing in the doorway. “What did your boss say about them? The faery creatures?”

  “They just wanted what I wanted,” he said plainly. “To be like you.”

  She squinted at him. Of course, he didn’t know that she was human too.

  “To be powerful. Magical. He said this place could give them that, just like it’s giving it to me. But I don’t want it anymore, do you understand?” Mr. Carr staggered further into the room toward her, holding out his burnt palm. “Take it away.”

  She huffed. “I can’t do that.”

  In the quiet of the room, Lorelei glanced back down at the page, running her fingers over the words and then over the old, crumpled place marker. There was a snap from the marker to her fingertip, a shock of blue static electricity in the dark. The corner of the folded paper was torn off, revealing some writing on the other side and a bit of fancy scroll work along its edge.

  With shaking hands, she took up the paper, dropping the book at her feet. Unfolding it, she saw its bottom first, a circle with geometric shapes all around, glowing beside a signature. The writing on the paper was in a greying ink, and the parchment was yellowed, difficult to read, but she knew she had seen this page before, albeit only a copy. At the top loomed the most important word, bold and clear: Deed.