Illuminate (23 page)

“Do you know why we call it the Vault?”

I did actually. I’d done my reading. “Sure. When Capone lived here he was thought to have kept money and other treasures in a vault in the basement.”

“You’re good,” he said. “You know they opened it up years ago and it turned out there was nothing there but empty bottles and a bunch of bullet holes.” The music got louder as we walked down an empty hallway, coming at the club from the opposite direction I was used to.

“That’s too bad.”

“I know.”

“So shouldn’t this place look like the inside of a bank vault or something?”

“No.” He laughed. “Who wants to hang out there? It needs to feel like another world, like somewhere where dangerous things are locked away and you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.” Music rushed out at us now, swirling.

“Ohhh. Well. Mission accomplished then.” A dangerous feeling washed over me, as though I would do anything to spend more time with him. The magnetic pull was almost too much.

“The point is,” he said, his hand on my back again, leading me through as the gatekeepers opened that giant door for us on cue, “you never know what people have hidden away. It can be so much more or less than it seems on the surface.”

We were in the tunnel now, pitch-black save for the occasional flashing light. There were people ahead of us in the club and some behind us waiting to get in, but for a blissful, heady moment, Lucian and I were alone. He stopped and looked at me again. I felt for the wall for support.

“What do you have locked away, Haven Terra?” He leaned into me. Even in the near darkness, the blue lacing his gray eyes lit up.

I opened my mouth to speak but it took a few seconds for sound to actually come out. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.” I felt like he was speaking to me in a language I desperately wished to be fluent in but wasn’t.

“Everyone’s hiding something. I know you are too.”

“Oh, well, I mean . . .” What was he trying to say? Did he know something about that book of mine? He looked at me with fierce electricity, drinking me in, my whole life force spilling out into his piercing gray-blue pools. I wanted to say whatever the magic words might be to keep him looking at me this way.

And then, everything stopped.

The lights went out, complete blinding blackness enveloping us; the music hushed, quick and sharp. The shock of it all left the place encased in such pin-drop silence it made my ears tingle. Suddenly, his lips were on mine—urgent, warm, hitting me so fast, so firm, that I lost my breath. He tasted like peppermint. The camera, in its case, dropped from my hand to the ground and I didn’t care. One of his arms wound around my waist, squeezing me so tightly to him I gasped. His other hand shot up my neck gripping my hair. Everything went liquid. I melted into the wall behind me and into him. I wasn’t sure if my feet were still on the ground. I didn’t think they were—he was so tall, and he clutched me so close he lifted me up. He held me there in this perfect, wild, alive kiss. And somehow my lips knew what to do, like I’d been doing this all my life, having these mysterious sudden kisses in dark places. My hand, acting on its own, rose up finding his neck, and I pulled him closer to me, surprising myself. My skin, every single nerve, fluttered; my heart beat so loudly, throbbing inside my ears, I wondered if he could hear it too, as it galloped, unbridled.

He kissed my neck once, hard, my pulse rising to meet his lips. And then, just as fast as he had enveloped me, he was gone—extricating himself from me so swiftly that I stumbled, no strength left, finding the wall and leaning back against it. The volume suddenly came up on the rest of the world. I heard voices in the club, asking each other what had happened to the lights and the music and the power. I could see the flickering of the fire wall out through the end of the tunnel. I imagined the ring of fire continued to flame too. I didn’t care to look more closely. Where had he gone? I was feeling greedy now. I wanted another kiss, an endless one, and I wanted the lights to never come back up. I just wanted to relive that again and again. Just thinking about it made my stomach flip and my head spin.

Around me, footsteps tapped closer; people muttered and slapped against the wall feeling their way. Someone hit me in the arm as they walked by. “Sorry,” came a woman’s voice. I couldn’t move yet—even if I got trampled, I couldn’t move. People had begun to get restless. They wanted out and began to flow into the tunnel, smacking against one another and against the wall. Jostled, I took a couple steps and tripped over something. I ducked, feeling around, and found the camera bag. I picked it up, cradling it in my hands. Just then, the lights blazed on at full power. Collectively, everyone paused to adjust to the blinding light and then began to flee, flowing out of the club en masse. They all seemed to accept this as a signal that the party was over. I broke off from the crowd as soon as I could and stole away to that stairwell, walking up in my heels, which, now that I was on my own, had begun to terrorize my feet to such a degree, digging in so deep, that it felt like they had clawed themselves onto me and would need to be removed with pliers. But everything about this night was worth it.

It dawned on me that I hadn’t taken a single picture. At this moment, I didn’t quite care. I knew I would probably feel differently tomorrow in the harsh light of morning, seated in Aurelia’s office trying to defend myself. But for the time being, it just didn’t rank as a concern. I was too blissed out, navigating all of this in a dreamy state I wanted to live in forever.

As I slowly ascended, step by step, I replayed that scene in my mind on a loop over and over and over, only bringing myself back to the present as I neared the top of the steps, just before entering the lobby, to do a quick spot check. I could only imagine that, after all of that, I was something of a rumpled mess. I smoothed my dress, setting it in place where it had shifted when he grabbed me and held me so tight. My hair was now a loose nest, having come almost entirely out of its artfully secured style. Since I certainly didn’t know how to restore it myself, I just pulled out the pins and shook it out, letting it fall around my shoulders.

I slipped into the gallery and found it empty—everyone must’ve flooded out of here, just as they had downstairs, when the lights went back on. The lobby was packed and the crowd all atwitter about what had happened. I returned the camera to the back room, locking it up in a drawer, then grabbed my evening bag, which I had stashed in the office. Since it was so peaceful in the gallery, I decided to stay a few minutes, catching my breath, collecting my thoughts, and trying to preserve this rapture that had swept me up so completely. I felt it would fade every minute away from him and that nothing would snuff it out more swiftly than a roomful of loud people.

I wandered, beginning at the back of the gallery. That mural, which I hadn’t gotten a chance to look at yet tonight, had turned out so much better than had seemed imaginable. It looked more passionate, more expertly done than it had when Lance and I had finally retired our paintbrushes and declared it complete. There was such life—and, I suppose, death—in it. It didn’t seem possible that our contributions had fit so seamlessly with Calliope’s work. So I meandered through this space, enjoying my time alone with it, but as I did, my mind still flashed back to that interlude in the tunnel. Where had Lucian gone? And then I came upon that spot where he had leaned into me saying all those curious things and inviting himself downstairs with me. Had he known then that he would kiss me later?

I realized I had been staring into the blank air for a while now, pleasantly dazed. I could see a hint of my reflection in the glass of Aurelia’s photo. I saw my features in the black dress of her picture, and from what I could tell my lipstick wasn’t so bad. Another of the night’s miracles. My vision readjusted to take in her image, bracing myself to be reminded of how much more beautiful she was than me. But something else caught my eye. There, on her cheek, was a darkened blotch. What was it? It looked almost like a splatter of sauce from one of Dante and Etan’s precious canapés. I had been concerned when I heard they were going to allow food and drink in the gallery, but it wasn’t really my place to say anything, was it? I leaned in for a closer look, my finger poised to brush away the offending mark—and then I froze.

It was worse than I imagined. This thing, this splotch, wasn’t something on the surface to be wiped away: it was actually
on
her face. Roughly the size of a quarter, it had a depth to it and a spectrum of red and yellow shadings; it was some sort of festering lesion. I had never seen this on her face in real life—I certainly would have noticed—and I hadn’t seen it on the picture either, but then again, I hadn’t bothered looking at her photo all that closely since every one of her shots had been so perfect. But the picture was so large. Had Aurelia even failed to see this blight? It was ugly. I don’t know how we all could have missed this. And now that I really studied it, the picture was far worse than I remembered. Her eyes were bloodshot and weighted with dark circles, with crow’s-feet poking out around the corners.

Suddenly my picture didn’t seem so bad. I checked it again. The scars didn’t bother me so much now—maybe it had just been the element of surprise earlier. I had failed to notice that my skin had kind of a nice glow to it, as though light were shining through my pores. My expression was softer than I realized too. I looked comfortable. Not bad at all. Maybe this was just what it was like to have a little confidence; maybe this was all still that heady post-kiss afterglow.

I floated over to Lucian’s image. Stunning, of course, but now that I looked more closely, his eyes looked maybe a little tired—or were they just heavy-lidded in a seductive way? My mind felt jumbled, but I didn’t have much chance for internal debate on this matter.

A scream pierced the air, instantly shattering the dream-like feeling of the night, making my skin crawl. It wasn’t so unlike the one I’d heard unleashed outside the drugstore that awful evening: a woman, screeching, her shrill cry pealing, an alert.

My legs took off before I could even tell them where to go or what to do. And instead of running
away
—as I would have guessed they would, a survivalist impulse taking over—they ran
toward
that painful wail, careening toward this unknown horror. I pushed my way through the jabbering crowd in the lobby and straight out the revolving door until I stood under the awning and at the front of the pack of gawkers, barely feeling the arctic chill on my exposed skin. On the red carpet outside the hotel was a body. If you could even call it that.

I knew it was a woman only by the mess of long dark hair and high-heeled boots. Even at the hospital, I had never seen someone so disfigured. She looked scarcely human. Her skin was gray, and every inch of it, from what I could tell, was riddled with bumps and festering sores and gashes. Parts of her looked charred and singed. The worst of it: a hole was burned straight through the right shoulder of her shirt, baring bone and raw flesh and tissue. It looked like something at the meat counter of the supermarket. I had to look away, suppressing the urge to faint.

No one seemed to be doing anything, myself included. In these few long minutes since that scream, everyone just stood back, huddling and silent and terrified. But then from the back of this mass of people came the sound of one person clapping. Aurelia strode straight through the doors, a path clearing for her, her delicate hands clapping precisely, creating a wave of applause, everyone slowly joining in. She took a place directly under the heat lamp in front of the revolving door—the body crumpled behind her—and addressed the group with her smile.

“We hope you’ve enjoyed the night and the show,” her voice rang out, and she gestured with an outstretched arm toward the figure on the ground. On cue, four men in hotel uniforms—members of the Outfit, Beckett among them—swirled through the revolving doors and fanned out around the body, lifting it up, each taking a brittle limb, and carrying it—her—off through the side doorway.

Aurelia continued, commanding the crowd: “Thank you for celebrating our opening with us. We look forward to serving you. Good night, all!” Wild cheers erupted from the group. She charged through the merry masses.

With that, everyone went their separate directions, either up to their posh rooms or out to claim their valet-parked cars or off to swoop into waiting cabs and limos. Smiles returned to faces, chatter resumed with snippets of conversation wafting here and there praising the night. “A shootout would’ve been more appropriate, but this is certainly bold and artistic,” said one stuffy society type in an emerald evening gown.

“That looked so real!” gushed a flapper-costumed girl.

“Performance art: very edgy,” concurred an older gentleman in incredibly baggy, suspendered plaid pants, which I recognized from one of my books as the clownish “Oxford bags” of the 1920s.

I just stood there as the crowd began to dissipate, trying to quietly wrest control of my wild emotions, which had shot from one extreme (bliss) to the other (fear) and back to somewhere in the middle (so everything’s okay after all?) in such a short span of time that I felt wholly spent.

When the bristling cold became too much, I went back inside. Some people were still sipping nightcaps in the Parlor and taking midnight snacks at Capone. I waded through the sea of people, adrift, looking for signs of anyone I knew—Dante, Lance, Lucian—hoping to not have to be alone. But after a good half hour of searching, as men loosened their ties and women let their hair down and took their shoes off and more and more guests drifted wearily off to their rooms, I finally did the same.

Part Two

15. Be Cool, Please

The hotel felt different the next morning. Even though I was up much earlier than many of the guests, a current pulsed in the air, a sense that there were people everywhere, whether you saw them or not. I was putting on a show, playing the role of the perfect, helpful staffer. But the place would have felt different even if it wasn’t our first full day open—because
I
felt different. I hadn’t quite done my hair just right, and without Aurelia’s supplies, my makeup regimen was back to being nonexistent, and I didn’t fill out the uniform any more than I had the day before. What had changed was I felt
wanted.
Even if last night had been a fluke, even if that was the first and last kiss I would have with Lucian, for those minutes I had been desired, and there was a power in that. I just wanted any sign that last night had actually happened.