Happy tried the On button one more time, without any luck, then she slid the unresponsive phone back into her pocket, a sour cast to her face.
“Well, I guess you’re stuck with us for a little while longer,” Happy said as she and Agatha left the safety of the sidewalk and began the long climb up the icy set of rickety wooden steps leading to the Victorian mansion.
Callie—shivering, wet, and miserable to the core—took a deep breath and exhaled slowly before setting her foot on the first step and following the girls skyward. The steep, winding stairway would eventually deposit them on the Victorian’s large wraparound porch, but the climb to the summit was treacherous. With each successive step, Callie felt her legs shake harder, the heels she wore making it necessary for her to use the stair’s splintered handrail to keep herself upright, every handhold eliciting a small yelp of pain as the wood broke off and inserted itself into the skin of her palms.
“This sucks!” Callie yelled up at the girls, who were far ahead of her, having managed the wayward stairs with the ease of two little mountain goats.
Callie realized if she wanted to reach the porch sometime in that century, she was going to have to accept the possibility of frostbite and take her shoes off. Reaching down, she released one foot from its calfskin prison, then the other, stuffing both shoes under her left arm so she could continue the climb in splinter-free bliss, her ability to balance intact again.
Why am I even doing this? Callie asked herself. Why don’t I just open up a wormhole and get the hell outta here?
The answer was very simple. No matter how many times she closed her eyes and willed a wormhole into being, she just couldn’t seem to make anything happen. For some reason her Death abilities were limited here in this strange new world she’d unwittingly come to inhabit. She wasn’t capable of creating even a spark of magic—and she didn’t know if it was because she’d bumped her head on the ground when she’d been unceremoniously deposited in this alternate version of Queens or if her new environment was the culprit. Either way, she was kinda screwed, as far as making a quick getaway was concerned.
“Hurry up!” Agatha called down to her.
Callie wanted to say something snarky in return, but she was too out of breath from the climb to do anything but clamber up the last few remaining stairs and heave her tired self onto the porch.
“I hate . . . this house . . . already,” Callie wheezed, as, barefoot, she leaned her forehead against the wooden railing.
“Are you okay?” Happy asked, touching Callie’s shoulder.
“Just. Out. Of. Breath.”
Callie continued to lean against the railing while somewhere in her unconscious awareness, she heard Agatha knock on the front door, heard it open, and then, to her utter relief, found the three of them being shepherded into the light of the house’s front foyer.
“Thank God,” Callie breathed, as warmth enfolded her like a blanket.
The room was small and cramped; red velvet Victorian print wallpaper covered the otherwise bare walls while a red shag runner bisected the polished dark-wood floor, splitting the space in two. There was only one other exit, a dark-wood door cut into the wall directly opposite the front entrance.
A tall woman in a camel pantsuit, her long blond hair piled haphazardly on top of her head, stood in front of this other door, a hand placed delicately on either hip. To her right sat two fawn-colored spindle chairs wedged between a drop-leaf side table with a dying potted plant on its top and an antique coatrack, but she didn’t offer anyone a seat. In fact, she didn’t look too happy to see them at all.
“You’re late . . . and you’ve brought an uninvited guest,” the woman said, her voice a growl.
Agatha, not one to be intimidated by anyone, mirrored the woman’s stance.
“We found this poor girl wandering in the woods. We couldn’t just leave her there, could we?” she replied, incredulous.
The woman backed down immediately.
“Well, I’m sure you couldn’t just leave her out there . . . Miss Averson, is it?”
Agatha nodded, pleased the woman had recognized her.
“I’m Fiona O’Flagnahan, Count Orlov’s associate. And my daughter, Heather, is a huge fan of your television show.”
This pleased Agatha even more.
“It’s so exciting to meet a fan of the show,” she purred, totally ignoring the fact that it was the woman’s daughter, and not the woman, herself, who liked her work.
Angelic features lit from within, she reached out and took the woman’s arm, squeezing it.
“Would you like an autograph? I can do that for you, no problem,” Agatha continued, turning to Happy and snapping her fingers.
“Can we get this woman an autographed photo?”
“I left my bag in the car. Count Orlov’s orders,” Happy said, shrugging helplessly.
Agatha turned back to the woman.
“Give my untouchable assistant your name and address and we’ll get publicity to pop one in the mail pronto.”
The woman smiled, impressed that Agatha possessed an “untouchable” assistant—whatever that meant, Callie thought—and gave Happy her address, spelling out her daughter’s name twice, so Agatha would be sure to write it correctly. When she was finally done, the woman turned her attention back to Callie.
“Why don’t we get your friend to the sitting room where we have the fire going?” the woman said. “That ought to warm her up a bit.”
“I just want to call a taxi,” Callie said, her lips beginning to fade from a garish eggplant to a healthier pale peach now that she was inside.
The woman crooked an eyebrow and shook her head.
“But that’s not possible. There are no electronic devices in this house. Not even a microwave or a computer.” She finished with a flourish of her hand as if she were Vanna White flipping a vowel.
Callie turned to glare at Happy.
“Hey,” she said, “don’t look at me. I’m just the assistant.”
After that pronouncement, it didn’t appear there was anything else left to say on the subject.
“This way,” Fiona intoned, as she opened the door behind her and led them out into a long hallway, which, at first glance, seemed to go on forever, but as they followed Fiona down its path, shortened so Callie could see the end.
“Wow, this place is huge,” Callie said, bare feet padding on the soft, crimson shag runner that had continued with them from the foyer into the hallway.
“It once belonged to the painter Edgar Allan Poe—” Fiona said as she led them deeper into the belly of the house.
“I think you’re mistaken. Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t a painter, he was a poet and writer,” Callie said, interrupting the flow of Fiona’s discourse, so that the older woman turned around to glare at her.
“Um, painter,” Agatha said, dropping a little vocal fry at the end of the word painter.
“I may have hit my head back there, but not hard enough to change the fact that Edgar Allan Poe was a writer.”
Callie looked to Happy, who was quickly becoming her touchstone in a world where she felt totally alien and out of place, but Happy merely shook her head.
Okay, Callie thought, so apparently Edgar Allan Poe is a painter now. Great.
It was beginning to feel like Callie had stumbled into a play that no one had given her a copy of the script to read beforehand—and since she wasn’t too keen on improv, she was having a really hard time keeping up. From now on, she was just gonna keep her mouth shut and work on figuring out a way to call up a wormhole so she could get home.
“Fine, whatever,” Callie said, dropping the subject.
Fiona took this as a cue to resume her monologue.
“As I was saying,” she continued, brushing a strand of blond, strawlike hair off her forehead, “Edgar Allan Poe and his child bride, Virginia, moved into this house in 1846, along with her mother and one servant. . . .”
As Fiona droned on, she led them still farther into the interior of the house. The hallway was clearly the mansion’s main artery from which doors, like capillaries, branched off into hidden rooms and other unseen spaces—and, though it was a two-story dwelling, there didn’t seem to be a stairway anywhere on the premises, which was definitely odd.
There’s way more to this house than meets the eye, Callie mused, but kept the thought to herself.
As they continued onward, it got darker, the flickering of the candlelight sconces that lined the walls—the only light source in the house—making it hard to see what might be lurking in the shadowy corners or even underfoot.
“This place is spooky,” Callie whispered to Happy while, ahead of them, Agatha happily chattered away at Fiona.
“I didn’t want Agatha to accept the count’s invitation,” Happy whispered back, “but she was adamant.”
“Are you sure this guy is on the up-and-up?” Callie asked, pausing midstride to slide her shoes back on. The darkness was giving her the creeps and she did not want to step on something crunchy or slimy in bare feet.
“I did some research—” Happy began, but was cut off when Fiona came to an abrupt stop in front of a locked door—one that looked no different from any of the other ten doors they’d passed on their way to this one.
“Here we are,” Fiona said, pulling a small bronze key from a chain around her neck and inserting it into the door’s lock. “Count Orlov is waiting for you inside.”
This she directed at Agatha, who clapped her hands together, then turned back and gave Happy and Callie a big, sloppy wink.
“Yippee! I’ll see you guys later!”
And then she was pushing past Fiona, her feet dancing with excitement as she crossed the threshold and disappeared into the darkness of the room. Happy, who didn’t look at all like her name at that moment, started to protest, but Agatha was already gone, Fiona slamming the door shut on her retreating back.
“There we go,” Fiona said, slipping the key back into the lock and turning it twice. “Now, let’s get the two of you settled.”
She gestured for Happy and Callie to follow her as she continued down the hall, and though neither of the girls wanted to go with her, neither could figure out a way to refuse the invitation.
As they walked, the darkness inside the house became as pervasive as the cold and wet outside the house, and Callie couldn’t help wishing she was lying back in the snow making snow angels or freezing to quasi-death (she was immortal, so it would be Popsicle City, not Death Town) instead of traipsing through the creepy old Victorian mansion.
“The sitting room is just beyond this door. There’s a fire already in the grate,” Fiona said, her voice sending the silence skittering away into the corners. “All you have to do is go inside.”
They had come to the end of the hallway and only one more door remained to be opened—and a narrow, sickly looking doorway it was. The whole bottom right side of the molding appeared to have been shredded into pieces, like someone, or something, had clawed unsuccessfully at it for days or weeks—or even years—until finally they, or it, had just given up and faded away.
Fiona continued to beckon them forward, her blond updo and camel-colored suit looking oddly sinister in the candlelight—and that was when Callie decided she wasn’t going to go anywhere near the door, regardless of who she offended.
She knew that there was something terribly wrong with the mansion and with Fiona and with everything else they’d experienced since they’d stepped inside the house. If she and Happy were foolish enough to open the decrepit door at the end of the hallway, then any negative outcome that occurred would be of their own doing. She didn’t know if Happy was going to appreciate where her thoughts were leading her, but she hoped so . . . because Callie had been hoodwinked too many times in her life not to recognize a setup when she saw one.
“Nope. Not gonna happen,” Callie said, holding her ground in a pair of dirty Jimmy Choos. “I think we’re gonna go back down this hall and you’re gonna use that little key of yours to open the door to the room you stashed Agatha in—”
The words had no sooner left Callie’s mouth than Fiona was scrambling for the doorknob, using the element of surprise to try to open the door before Callie and Happy realized what she was doing.
“Not in this lifetime!” Callie cried as she dove for Fiona’s waist, wrapping her arms around the older woman’s middle and toppling them both onto the red shag runner.
Fiona was a spitfire, almost bending in half in order to dig her French-manicured nails into Callie’s throat, cutting long crimson gashes into the girl’s otherwise pristine flesh. The “Girl Who Would Be Death” cried out in pain, losing her grip on her opponent as she tried to stanch the flow of blood from her wounded neck.
“Don’t you dare!” Callie heard Happy scream, then she watched as the tall brunette launched herself at the wily woman in the camel-colored suit, the two of them rolling across the floor.
The blood was flowing fast and loose from Callie’s throat, but she ignored it. Dropping her hand from her throat—it was useless there; her body would heal of its own accord without any external help—she flipped herself onto her belly, slip-sliding in the puddle of blood that’d gathered underneath her, while a few feet away from her, she saw Happy punching Fiona, hard, in the solar plexus.
“I see . . . that you . . . don’t need . . . my help,” Callie wheezed, finally managing to pull herself up alongside the brunette, who seemed to be rather enjoying the pummeling she was giving the older woman.
“I think she’s incapacitated now,” Happy said, as Fiona’s green eyes rolled up behind her eyelids and she stopped struggling.
“I think so,” Callie said, appreciating the quick work Happy had made of Count Orlov’s associate. “Let’s grab the key and get out of here.”
Happy nodded, grasping the chain around Fiona’s neck and giving it a good yank.
“The bitch tried to bite me,” Happy said, as she pocketed the key, then looked down at her hoodie, which was streaked with Callie’s blood and Fiona’s saliva.
“That’s disgusting,” Callie said, reaching into the pocket of her dress and pulling out a moist towelette. “Moist towelette?”
Happy stared at the neat white package, disbelief in her eyes.
“You gotta be kidding me.”
Callie shook her head.
“I never kid about hygiene. Here, take one.”
Happy accepted the packet, tearing it open and fishing the moist towelette from its innards.
“What about you? You’re losing a lot of blood,” Happy said, pointing at Callie’s throat.
“I’m . . .” She paused, not sure what to say—a last-minute impulse brought out the truth.
“I’m immortal and I’m pretty sure I come from an alternate universe. Just FYI.”
Happy snorted. “Of course you are and of course you do.”
“Now I’ve told you all about me so we’re even-steven,” Callie said, starting to laugh a little hysterically.
“It’s not funny,” Happy continued, helping Callie to her feet. “I think there’s a powerful telepathic illusionist running this show—someone we’ve dealt with in the past. And if that’s the case, then Agatha’s in a whole heap of trouble.”
“A telepathic what?” Callie asked as she followed Happy back down the hallway.
“Illusionist. Someone who can manipulate matter, affect people’s minds,” Happy replied. “And they can wreak all kinds of havoc if left unchallenged. Especially this guy. He’s obsessed with Agatha and has a serious bad attitude to boot.”