TWENTY-FOUR
We approached the house from the back, staying under the cover of the woods for as long as we could. I tensed as we broke through the trees and onto the back lawn, but no gunshots shattered the darkness, and there was no one lurking nearby to jump us.
My twisted ankle had healed already, but Anderson was still walking fast enough that it was hard to keep up. I wished I had longer legs, and bit my tongue on a request that he slow down. He’d made it clear he was through waiting for me.
To get to the back door of the house, we had to walk by the pond that had been Emma’s personal torture chamber for the better part of a decade. It was completely frozen over, its surface hidden under a layer of snow. Someone not familiar with the house might not even have realized it was there, though if you looked carefully you could see the outline of its banks under the snow.
I’m sure it cost him something, but Anderson resisted looking at the pond as we made our way past it. There was no way he wasn’t aware of its presence, wasn’t thinking about what Emma had gone through, wasn’t thinking about what Konstantin had manipulated him into doing, but he was in a painfully single-minded state, so focused on his revenge his footsteps didn’t falter.
There were no lights on in any of the windows that looked out over the back of the house, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone on the lookout for intruders. I wanted to maybe do the kind of crouching run you often see people doing in action movies, but that only worked if there was cover to hide behind. Anderson and I were two moving dark blotches in a sea of pristine white snow, and if anyone was watching for us, there was no way in hell they could miss us.
The thought made me utter a few more curses under my breath. Anderson could make himself invisible. If he’d been willing to take the time to formulate a plan, perhaps we’d have been able to figure out a way to take advantage of his ability. But no, he’d rather charge in immediately, too impatient for his revenge to waste time on such trivialities as trying to figure out how to get at Konstantin as safely and easily as possible.
We reached the back door without any alarms sounding or traps springing, but that didn’t make me feel any better. If Konstantin had set a trap of some sort, it made sense that it would be inside the house.
Anderson tried the door. Surprise, surprise, it was locked, but there was no way that was going to slow down a death god, much less actually stop him.
Anderson walked right through the door, and I had a momentary fear that he was going to leave me outside to find my own way in while he continued on without me. Before the worry took on a life of its own, I heard the locks turning, and Anderson considerately opened the door for me. I had the guilty thought that I’d probably have been better off if he’d stranded me outside, but that didn’t stop me from stepping through the doorway.
“What now?” I asked in a bare whisper.
“Take me to him,” Anderson responded. The edge of impatience in his voice made me bristle.
“I’m not a bloodhound!” I held up my wrist and pointed to my watch. “The moon set three minutes ago. I have no idea where he is.” There was a flash of white light in Anderson’s eyes again. “And getting angry at me isn’t going to make my powers suddenly come back.”
He blinked a couple of times, and the light went away. “The moon may help you, but you aren’t powerless without it. You should be able to track Konstantin when he’s so close.”
He was right, and I knew it. But my pulse was tripping, and my chest was tight with anxiety, and I wasn’t in any state to pick up the subtle nuances of my subconscious. My conscious mind was fully in control—telling me I should get the hell out of the house while there was still time—and any subconscious cues I might be getting were drowned out by the yammering.
I made a helpless gesture and shook my head. At this point, I almost hoped Konstantin changed his mind about whatever he was planning and decided to run instead. I was too frazzled to follow him, and it meant I would probably never be able to find him again, but I suspected that might be the lesser of two evils.
Anderson grunted. “Guess we’ll just have to search the whole house then.”
And what a joy that was going to be. The damned house must have been fifteen thousand square feet at a minimum. Searching it was going to take forever. Maybe it would be boring enough that I’d be able to hear my subconscious eventually. Or maybe Konstantin’s trap would be in the first room we checked.
Anderson reached out and took my left hand. I wasn’t expecting it, and I was jumpy enough that I tried to snatch my hand away. Anderson kept a firm hold, but disappeared from my view. I could still feel him there, still feel the pressure of his fingers against mine, but though I was looking straight at him, all I saw was the wall behind him.
“Be ready to shoot at a moment’s notice,” his disembodied voice said. “And try not to shoot me, even though you can’t see me.”
“I’ll do my best.”
There was a noise behind me. I jumped and gasped, whirling in that direction before logic caught up with me and informed me it was just the heater switching on. Luckily, I resisted the urge to pull the trigger.
Anderson made a sound that could have been a snort of disdain or a muffled laugh. Without being able to see his face, I couldn’t tell. My hand was sweating in his. I did one more quick scan of the entryway, and that was when I noticed Anderson wasn’t completely invisible, as I’d thought. I could sort of see him as a vague shadow, a deep black against the predawn darkness, but only out of my peripheral vision. If I looked straight at him, it was as if he wasn’t there.
“I’ll go first around every corner,” Anderson told me, giving my hand a little tug and leading me through a laundry room that was to the right of the entry.
That sounded almost like the beginnings of a plan. Emphasis on almost. Being mostly invisible, Anderson wasn’t likely to get shot or otherwise attacked when he walked into a room, so it made sense for him to go first. It would have made more sense if we’d had some idea of what we’d do if he rounded a corner and found Konstantin waiting. The way Anderson was acting, I thought it more than likely he’d dispense with any hint of caution and rush into mortal combat. The best I could do in that case was zip in after him and hope I could get a shot at Konstantin before he sprang whatever surprise he had waiting for us.
To say I wasn’t happy with our “plan” was an understatement, but I followed Anderson into the belly of the beast anyway.
The house was as huge as I’d expected, and I couldn’t help wondering what a single guy needed with all that. My dearly departed condo had been a little over two thousand square feet, and I’d thought that was more than enough. The floors, when they weren’t covered with Persian rugs, were all marble or hardwood, and my rubber-soled boots made squeaking noises when I walked no matter how carefully I stepped. Anderson and I both ended up taking off our shoes and leaving them in the hallway for the sake of stealth. I left my parka as well.
There was a faint musty smell in the air, and even in the darkness, I could see that some of the furniture was collecting dust. The aura of genteel neglect made me feel like I was picking my way through a haunted house. The unsettling half glimpses I kept getting of Anderson out of the corner of my eye weren’t helping any, nor was the feeling of his invisible hand on me. It wasn’t just my hand that was sweaty anymore. The heat was turned on too high for my tastes, but it was the nerves that were making me perspire. Whatever was about to happen, I wished it would just happen already.
A thorough search of the first floor failed to reveal Konstantin. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or disappointed. Anderson tugged me toward the staircase leading up to the second floor. I was still taut as a guitar string about to break, but as soon as I’d walked up those first few steps, I felt a strange reluctance to go any farther. Maybe it was just because it was so dark at the head of the stairs that I couldn’t see where we were going.
No . . .
“Wait,” I whispered, giving Anderson’s hand a little tug for emphasis. I tried to sort through what I was feeling, tried to isolate whatever sense made me reluctant to go up the stairs, but the more I tried to focus on it, the vaguer it became, until I wasn’t sure it wasn’t all my imagination.
“What is it?” Anderson asked when I just stood there.
“It might not mean anything,” I hedged. “But for some reason I didn’t want to go up the stairs. The feeling is gone now.”
I heard a sigh that echoed how I felt. I wished my damn powers would provide blinking neon signs instead of subtle, ephemeral hunches.
“It means something,” Anderson said, and I felt him changing direction and starting down the stairs.
When hunting monsters, even those in human form, the last thing I want to do is go exploring dark basements, but it looked like that was what I was going to have to do.
“I don’t like this,” I muttered.
“Just stay behind me,” was Anderson’s only reply.
During our search, we’d found two doors that opened on stairs leading down. Whether they led to two separate basements, or were two ways to the same basement, was yet to be determined. I didn’t feel any strong preference for one stairway or another, so Anderson and I chose the one closest to us.
There’s nothing quite like looking down pitch-black stairs to raise the hairs on the back of your neck, especially when you’re stupid enough to be descending them into the darkness. We’d been making our way through the rest of the house with the aid of the predawn light that filtered through the various windows, but we would have no such help in the basement. I hated the idea of lighting a beacon to let anyone in visual range know we were coming, but we wouldn’t have much luck finding Konstantin if we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces.
The constant pinging of my nerves was making me punchy, and I almost laughed as I thought that Anderson couldn’t see his hand in front of his face regardless. I swallowed the laugh and tugged my hand out of Anderson’s grip. I was holding the gun in my right hand, and there was no way I was putting it away to get my cell phone out of my pocket. Anderson made a small sound of protest.
“Flashlight app,” I hissed in explanation. I had my phone set to airplane mode so it wouldn’t make any inconvenient sounds that might give us away, but I supposed if I was going to use it as a flashlight, that was a wasted effort.
I worried for a moment that Anderson would try to veto the flashlight, but he had to know fumbling around in the dark wasn’t going to do us any good. With another sigh, he became fully visible again.
“Don’t suppose there’s any point in hiding anymore,” he mumbled under his breath. “Stay behind me anyway.”
It seemed to me like the person with the flashlight should lead the way, but I didn’t think Anderson was going to let me take point. Mutely, I handed him my phone, and he took it without comment. We continued down the stairs.
The light from the phone wasn’t exactly powerful, and the darkness of the basement was oppressive as all hell, even once we made it safely out of the stairwell. The stairs opened onto a somewhat puny gym, with a small collection of free weights and an ancient-looking treadmill. However, I smelled chlorine in the air, and sure enough, when we made it through the gym, the next door opened onto an impressive lap pool. The pool was big enough that my light couldn’t illuminate the far end of it, but when Anderson and I made a circuit of the deck, we still saw no sign of Konstantin. We peeked behind a couple of closed doors that turned out to be changing rooms, and then we found yet another stairway, this one leading even farther down.
How many freaking floors did this mansion have?
The hairs on the back of my neck prickled yet again. This stairway was far narrower than the previous one, the steps nothing more than bare planks. We weren’t going to be finding any fancy exercise equipment down there.
Anderson looked at me, and I shrugged. My instincts weren’t talking to me, and I had no idea whether we should continue down these stairs or go back up to the ground floor and try the other stairway we’d seen up there. We hadn’t found any evidence of it opening onto this first basement anywhere.
“We might as well check it out while we’re here,” Anderson whispered, though why he was bothering to whisper when the flashlight was giving us away, I don’t know.
He went first down the stairs, and I followed reluctantly. It was so tight and claustrophobic, even with the flashlight, that I had a hard time forcing myself to take each step. The wooden steps seemed rickety, and they creaked, further removing any hope we might have of keeping the element of surprise. Not that I thought we had it in the first place.
I was about halfway down the stairs, and Anderson was about two thirds of the way down, when suddenly, the pitch-black staircase was flooded with blinding white light, so bright I couldn’t possibly keep my eyes open. I heard Anderson’s cry of dismay, and heard what I presumed was my cell phone thunking to the floor. I tried to force my eyes open in search of something to shoot, but the light was overpowering after the heavy darkness.
A step creaked behind me, and a gunshot nearly shattered my eardrums. Anderson made a strangled sound, which I could barely hear through the sudden ringing in my ears. I felt the vibration under my feet as he fell. The light hurt, stabbing through my head like ice picks, and there was no way I could open my eyes. I turned, meaning to shoot blindly up the staircase behind me. I didn’t know if my supernatural aim could work if I had no idea what my target was, but it was worth a try.
Whoever was behind me moved faster than I did, and something hard and heavy smashed into the side of my face. Pain short-circuited my brain, and I tried to take a step backward to steady myself. Not such a great idea on a staircase. My foot came down on empty air, and I plummeted downward. My reflexes tried to save me, but there was nothing to grab on to, and all I could do was drop the gun. The light dimmed, and I managed to squint my eyes open just a tiny bit.
Enough to see Cyrus, wearing wraparound sunglasses and holding a gun, standing on the stairs and watching me fall.