Deadly Visions Boxset

by Alexandria Clarke

  “Then we told him we had him on video,” Ari added.

  “He flipped out,” Imani continued. “We were in the café after hours. He started throwing chairs and turning the tables over.”

  “Broke my favorite mug,” Ari grumbled.

  “Full on rage fit,” Imani said. “It was nuts. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “We threatened to call the police if he didn’t stop, and he calmed down pretty quickly after that,” Ari added.

  “So you came to an impasse?” I guessed. “Made a deal with him, right? If he didn’t tell anyone about you two, you wouldn’t tell anyone about his drug dealing habits?”

  “Exactly,” Ari said.

  “Except it didn’t go down like that for long,” Imani said. “Tyler started messing with us again, right before his mom died. Said he had something else on us, and he was going to use it to get us all fired.”

  “Did you ever figure out what it was?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Imani said. “He forgot about it for a while after his mom died, but maybe that was because he was too busy being extra awful to Karli.”

  “And Liam.” Ari tapped Imani’s knee as if to remind her of something. “He started acting really weird after Mrs. Watson died. When I asked him about it, he told me Tyler wouldn’t get off his back about something.”

  “Sounds like Tyler had something on everyone here,” I said. “Do you think that was what got him killed?”

  Imani shrugged, tugging the fluffy white robe up to her neck. The heat hadn’t kicked on in the chilly room. “I don’t doubt it. It was probably some client he ripped off.”

  “Yeah, but none of his clients were staying at the hotel when he was murdered,” I pointed out. Imani and Ari exchanged a look with each other, eyebrows raised. “Were they?”

  “Tyler sold to a lot different people, not just his friends,” Imani said. “We can’t be sure that none of his clients stopped by that night, can we?”

  “King and Queens was already snowed in by then.”

  “There are plenty of people desperate enough for a hook-up to walk through that,” Imani said. “My bet’s on Johnny Salvatore. That dude from the gas station in town? Guy’s a walking time bomb.”

  “Forget about about Johnny Salvatore,” I said, getting frustrated. “I need to know about the people in this hotel. Where were the two of you the night Tyler was murdered? You said you weren’t involved, and I already know your big secret, so you might as well tell me.”

  Ari leaned into Imani. “We were right here. Sleeping.”

  “And you’d swear that on the Bible in the bedside table?”

  Imani laughed. “I don’t do anything by the Bible. Look, if you don’t believe us, go ask Liam. He’s been staying in the adjoining room. He would’ve heard if we got up and left.”

  “I think Liam needs some time to cool off,” I said. “He had a run-in with Mr. Watson earlier.”

  “Is he okay?” Ari asked.

  “Just upset,” I assured her. I hopped off the dresser. “Thanks for talking to me. This could’ve gone a whole lot worse.”

  Imani followed me to the door. “Is it true? What you did to Matisse?”

  “Word travels quickly around here.”

  “The employee break room is basically a gossip mill,” Imani agreed. “So is it true? Did you sick a ghost on him?”

  I let myself out of their room without answering.

  6

  I woke up screaming. The nightmare had already faded from my head, but Odette’s face, mere inches from mine, didn’t. She hovered above the bed, her pale ghostly visage even creepier as the moonlight filtered through it like pearly smoke. Next to me, Jazmin jumped out of her slumber and reached across Riley to comfort me. Riley, God love her, stayed dead asleep.

  “What is it?” Jazmin mumbled, eyes half shut as she pulled herself into the waking world. “What’s wrong, Lucia?”

  Between the nightmare, Jazmin, and Odette, my energy was all over the place. I writhed against the pillows, biting my lip as the familiar sting poked and prodded my body. I tasted blood, saw Jazmin’s eyes switch to solid worry.

  “Where’s the key?” Odette hissed over Jazmin’s shoulder.

  “What key?” I gasped.

  Jazmin looked behind her, staring through Odette. “You’re not talking to me, are you?”

  Odette pushed in, her shoulder crossing paths with Jazmin’s. Though she wasn’t on fire, her anger was just as hot. I hadn’t seen her like this before, terrifying on her own terms. The whites of her eyes shimmered in the darkness. “The key you stole from the old wing this morning. Where is it?”

  Jazmin shuddered as she made accidental contact with Odette. She waved a hand in front of my face. “Lucia, nod or shake your head. Is this like before? Do you need me to go?”

  Jaw locked, all I could do was give her one curt nod.

  “Are you sure? You’ll be okay?”

  Another nod. Odette watched my every move.

  Jazmin slid off the bed. “I’ll be in the living room. Ten minutes, Odette. That’s all you get. I’ve had enough of you hurting my friend.”

  Odette glared at Jazmin as she left the bedroom. “Like this is my fault. You got yourself into this mess, Lucia, or didn’t you tell her that?”

  Without Jazmin’s energy around and Riley asleep, I managed to relax my jaw muscles. “What do you want? I’m doing my best.”

  “The key,” she said again, spitting like a feral cat. She hovered horizontally above the bed. Her patience to appear as a normal human was gone. “You enormous idiot. I told you not to touch anything!”

  The humiliation of having a dead twelve-year-old yell at me for something I didn’t know not to do gave me the motivation I needed to sit up and confront Odette like someone with an ounce of control over their body.

  “You didn’t tell me that,” I said. “You told me not to go to the old wing.”

  “Exactly!” she said. “Don’t go there. Don’t touch anything. Don’t mess this up for me.”

  “I don’t know what you expect from me.”

  “Better. That’s what I expect. For the hundredth time, where’s the key?” she asked.

  I tossed off the covers and got out of bed to fetch the key from the drawer in the bathroom. It looked smaller and dirtier than it did earlier, but maybe that was because a bit of my blood had dried dark-brown on it.

  “Here,” I said, offering it to Odette. “Take it. I don’t know why I brought it with me anyway. It’s probably just some old guest room key, right?”

  “I can’t take it, you idiot. I’m dead.”

  “Okay, first of all” —I held up a warning finger— “Stop calling me an idiot. That is not how this partnership is going to go. Second, what am I supposed to do with the key if you don’t want it?”

  Odette rested one hand on her hip and pouted. “Are you kidding me? Find out what it unlocks, idio—Lucia.”

  “I sense your patience is waning.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “It’s only been three days.”

  “It’s been thirty years for me.”

  “It’s not my fault you haven’t been able to find a chosen one until me,” I shot back. “Can I get any hints about what the key might go to, or is this something else I have to figure out on my own?”

  “You’ll have to go back to the old wing.”

  I stopped in the middle of scrubbing dried blood off the key. “You literally just said I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Now you want me to go back?”

  “You have to.”

  “No way!” I peeled the bandage off my arm to show her the burn underneath. “Your buddies almost singed me to a crisp the last time I went in there. I’m not risking that again.”

  Odette grabbed my hand. I didn’t know she could do that. We weren’t touching exactly, but her skin—or essence—existed in the same place as mine, like I was walking through dry ice. She leaned down and blew cool air across the red blist
ers on my forearm. At once, the wound faded and disappeared. I marveled at the fresh skin. There wasn’t even a scar.

  “How on earth did you do that?” I asked. “How did you touch me?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “It’s an illusion. A mirage of sorts.”

  “You moved my hand.”

  “With the same energy I use to move inanimate objects,” she explained. “Like the vase. It’s a lot harder manipulating living things, but it can be done.”

  I brushed my fingers across my arm, but no lasting sting from the burn popped up. “And your random healing abilities?”

  “Also not a thing,” Odette said. “The fire in the old wing you saw wasn’t real. The ghosts used their collective energy to make you think it was. Together, they can be pretty powerful. The burn on your arm was an illusion too.”

  “But Jazmin saw it too.”

  “The human mind isn’t particularly difficult to fool,” she replied with a sardonic smirk.

  “Thanks for the info.”

  In the bedroom, Riley mumbled something in her sleep. I peeked around the bathroom door to check on her. She flopped over and spread her limbs out in every direction. For such a small girl, she took up way too much room on the enormous king-sized bed.

  “Let me get this straight,” I whispered to Odette. “You want me to go back to the old wing, even though the ghosts tried to kill me, to look for some unknown room or object that this key unlocks without any additional information? What happens if I don’t make it out alive?”

  “Drama queen,” Odette huffed, crossing her arms. “Last time, you went without my advice or protection. This time’s different. They already know you took the key, which means they’ll be expecting you back. You won’t be able to get in without them noticing.”

  “You’re really instilling a sense of confidence in me right now.”

  “I told you. I’ll have your back. Let’s go.”

  “Now?”

  “What did you think I woke you up for?” she demanded. “Or would you prefer to wait until the angry ghosts escape from the old wing and rampage through the rest of King and Queens?”

  “It’s the middle of the night. I’m wearing pajamas.”

  “Change your clothes. I’ll wait.”

  A few minutes later, I was dressed in a pair of winter running pants and Riley’s oversized King and Queens sweatshirt. It smelled like French toast, and the front sported a light dusting of powdered sugar, but it was warm and readily available. I snuck past Jazmin, who had fallen asleep on the sofa in the living room. When the door to the suite clicked shut, locking me away from the two people who mattered most in the entire hotel, my heart sank to the bottom of my rib cage.

  “Get over it,” muttered Odette. “We have things to do.”

  “What, you can read my mind now too? An iota of privacy would be nice.”

  “No, I can’t read minds. It’s all over your face.”

  “Great. Can we go?”

  She made a “right this way” gesture. “Living humans first.”

  I rolled my eyes and called for the elevator. The button blinked, and the shafts stayed silent. “Not again. Come on. There’s no way I’m walking down twenty flights of stairs.”

  I hammered the button, but nothing happened. Finally, Odette stuck her hand through the control panel. It sank up to the wrist, and when she pulled it free, the elevator shaft whirred to life. The doors opened and welcomed us inside.

  “Just so you know,” I said as I followed her into the glass cage. “Ghosts and elevators generally don’t mix. This is where I met your mother.”

  Odette gazed at the lobby floor as we rushed down to it. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t see the look on her face if I couldn’t see it straight on. She was wrong.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

  “It’s all bad memories,” she murmured as we alighted on the ground floor. “That’s what I’m trying to fix.”

  I kept quiet as we made our way to the abandoned ballroom. For all the similarities she shared with Riley—age, dead mom, et cetera—I couldn’t talk to Odette the way I did with my other pre-teen charge. She was closed off. Cold. Maybe that sort of emotional blockage came with thirty years of being trapped in a world that wasn’t yours. She deserved to move on. I hoped I could make it happen for her.

  “Are you sure about this?” I said, pausing outside the chained doors that led to the old lobby. I peeked through the gap. On the other side, the blackened room was quiet. No ghosts to be seen. “What makes you think you can keep them quiet?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I just said that to get you down here.”

  “You did what?” I hissed.

  “Too late now.” And with a bump of her hip—or her energy—she shoved me through the gap in the door before disappearing. Her voice whispered, “Quietly, Lucia. Don’t wake them.”

  I almost replied with another snarky remark but caught myself just in time, or rather, the familiar prickle reminded me I shouldn’t take any chances. Debris crunched under my shoe. I winced as the sound echoed, but the prickle remained subtle and no fiery ghosts appeared to harass me.

  I searched the lobby for anything with a keyhole. There were multiple options—private mail boxes behind the ruined check-in area, a safe once hidden by the thick wallpaper, and a locked drawer in what remained of the front desk—but my mystery key didn’t open any of the above. I was going to have to search the rest of the old wing too. At the thought, a sharp stab pricked the back of my neck like one hell of a mosquito bite.

  “Ow!” I rubbed the spot with my palm.

  Across the lobby, waiting in the hallway that led to the deeper sectors of the resort, a pair of glowing eyes watched me from the dark. My teeth chattered. My body trembled. Not because of any residual energy, but because I was dead terrified. The eyes didn’t blink. I took one small step to the side. The pupils, hardly visible, tracked the placement of my feet.

  “Let me go,” I whispered. It was more prayer than request as I edged away from the front desk and toward the chained door. “Please let me get out of here.”

  The door shut itself before I could slip under the chain, almost catching my pinky finger in the process. I yanked at the handle. The chain links clinked feebly against each other, but the door didn’t budge. I was trapped.

  The floating eyes, level with my own line of sight, did not advance. However, they didn’t fall back either. They seemed to be waiting for me to come to a decision.

  “What do you want from me?” My voice couldn’t be classified as a whisper. The words were silent on my lips. Despite this, the eyes blinked. Finally, a reaction. Then, for the second time during my stay at King and Queens, a presence approached me from behind, one that left such a chill I dared not turn around and face it. Like it did before, it breathed a request into my ear, spreading goosebumps across every inch of my body.

  “Follow it.”

  Anything to get away from the terrifying aura at my back. I took a step toward the glowing eyes. They moved an equal distance into the corridor. Another step. And another one. Each one took me deeper into the old wing, but the presence seemed satisfied with my progress. It remained in place, and the closer I got to the eyes, the less I felt its hair-raising breath on the back of my neck.

  The disembodied eyes always remained several feet from me, the area around them shrouded in complete darkness. Even when we went into the library, where a floodlight outside the window illuminated the dusty shelves and ruined books, the cloud of darkness remained. It was like looking into a void, a window into the vacuum of space, its presence not meant for interpretation by the human brain. The eyes were twin moons, colorless and blurry, as if I looked at them through an unfocused telescope. They led me to the desk in the library. It was a massive oak beauty with a green felt top and intricate details hand-carved into the legs. It smelled faintly of cigar smoke and something else I couldn’t place. Though the eyes paused beside the desk and waited ex
pectantly, there was no place to fit the key.

  “What now?” I mouthed.

  They lowered, as if the person whose body they belonged to was kneeling. Slowly, I squatted and followed the apparent direction of their gaze to the floor beneath the desk.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  There was a door. Not a regular door. A trap door in the middle of the floor. At one point, it looked as though the library’s olive green carpet might have covered up the secret entrance. There was no keyhole though, just a rusty bolt that secured the door shut. I expected to have to fight to get it open, but it slid out of place without issue. Someone had been here recently. I flipped up the heavy door, revealing a dark tunnel with a rickety ladder that led into the murky gloom.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said to the eyes. I don’t know what I was expecting as a reply, considering the absence of a mouth, but the eyes glanced downward, into the tunnel. “Of course.”

  With a hesitant foot, I lowered myself into the tunnel. It was a tight fit. The rough walls scratched against Riley’s sweatshirt. A few feet down, the ladder was covered in green and brown muck, mold and dirt from lack of proper ventilation. I wiped the slime off on my pants, vowing to buy Riley a new sweatshirt after my excursion. I had a feeling she wouldn’t want this one back. As I descended, I looked up at the circle of moonlight above me. The eyes remained in the library.

  “You better not trap me down here,” I said to them.

  They blinked twice. Was that a yes or a no?

  I lost count of the ladder rungs, but the tunnel eventually widened, and my sneakers hit a slippery floor. I was in an underground hallway lined with crumbling brickwork. It appeared to be the basement of the old hotel, though half of it had caved in. Damage from the fire, I guessed. Three doors were available. The rest of the hallway was blocked by rubble. The first two doors labeled “laundry” and “boiler” were commonplace enough. The third, however, did not bear a plaque to identity its purpose. There was padlock affixed to it, attaching the door to its frame. I slipped the silver key out of my pocket, took hold of the padlock with a trembling hand, and fit the key into it. It popped open.