Secret Unleashed: Secret McQueen, Book 6 (14 page)

No matter how badly I wanted to end my three sexless months and put Holden and me out of our misery, it wasn’t the right moment.

“I’m sorry. I want to, but it’s not—”

He lifted me off the floor and backed me into the wall, rattling the large mirror beside us. With barely any effort he hoisted me up with one hand so I was once again positioned over his hardness. Briefly his eyes fluttered closed, and he stilled the hand that had gone to my throat.

“Holden.”

His fingers grazed the thin skin of my neck, and when he reopened his eyes, they’d gone black. For a fleeting moment I wondered if I should be afraid of him. Years of training to kill vampires made me wary of their black-eyed state because it usually meant they were about to rip your carotid artery out.

Holden wasn’t interested in a traditional feed though. He might want to bite me—hell, I wanted him to bite me too—but his interest was carnal in a different way.

“You want to,” he said, his voice harsh and raspy. “You said you wanted to.” He kissed my collarbone, and he must have heard the loud thump of my heartbeat because he lowered his ear to my chest and listened for a long time.

Which was when he seemed to understand
why
my heart was beating so fast.

He lowered me back to the floor and took several steps away, raking his fingers through his hair and looking completely disgusted with himself. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

“You didn’t hurt me. I wouldn’t have let it get out of hand. And you’re right…I did say I wanted it. Just not here. Not like this.”

He sat on the bed, the blackness fading from his eyes as he continued to stare at me. I tried to smile, but I wasn’t feeling very smiley right then.

Maxime had a hell of a sense of timing, because he knocked quietly and opened the door, giving Holden and me a much-needed reprieve from the tension.

“Is it a bad time?” Max asked.

“No. Couldn’t be better,” I replied.

Chapter Fifteen

The West Coast vampires were more forward thinking than their East Coast counterparts in that they opted for a technologically advanced approach to collecting information. Back in New York I was convinced the council still thought computers were a passing fancy because very few of the wardens or sentries used them, and I doubted Sig or Juan Carlos had ever
tried
.

Maxime was carrying a sleek MacBook when he came into my room and took a seat in the center of the big leather couch. I sat on his right and beckoned for Holden to join us. Perhaps with his brother in the middle we might stop being so weird and he could potentially relax.

I wasn’t mad at Holden for what he’d done. I knew with absolute certainty he never would have forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. There was a strong likelihood he hadn’t taken blood since his arrival in Los Angeles, and he’d been drinking. Vampires didn’t drink often because our metabolisms processed the alcohol too quickly, creating a near-instant buzz.

He was hungry and a bit drunk, and I’d sat on his lap after depriving him of sex for three months. I wasn’t trying to make excuses for his actions, but I wasn’t upset with him. My clothes were still intact, and he hadn’t done anything except pick me up and listen to my heartbeat.

Maybe I
was
making excuses.

I sighed and directed my attention back to Maxime and his laptop. I had to admit, I wasn’t terribly good with technology myself. My smartphone made me feel stupid, and the laptop I had at home was about three times thicker than this one and existed solely so I could update my iPod.

The couch sagged under Holden’s weight, and he looked at the screen with us.

Maxime had pulled up a black-and-white photo of a beautiful mansion surrounded by a copse of palm trees. He continued to flip through photos on the computer, showing the mansion getting larger and larger as more rooms and wings seemed to be added in each new photo. The color photos showed it to be a lovely near-yellow cream with burgundy accent tones.

“Nice house,” I said, still not sure why we were looking at it. “What does it have to do with Sutherland?”

“This is the Winchester Mansion in San Jose,” Maxime informed us.

“Winchester, like the rifles?” I asked.

“Precisely. It was constructed after the death of Mr. Winchester by his widow Sarah. She carried an incredible burden of guilt because she believed the ghosts of those killed by her husband’s rifles were haunting her. When she spoke to a psychic, the woman informed Sarah the only way to escape the spirits was to build a house and never stop.”

“Never stop
building
?” I stared at the thumbnail images on the screen of the ever-growing house, wondering what kind of madness would drive someone to do that.

“Yes. She had a construction team working on it night and day for over thirty years, until the time of her death.”

He opened a new folder, this one showing the house’s interior. Dozens of pictures went by, and at first the house seemed like a normal early-twentieth-century mansion, but as they went on, I began to question Sarah Winchester’s mental stability. It was one thing to take life advice from a psychic, but the house this woman had built was completely nuts.

There were staircases running into nothing, windows stuck into the middle of the floor, doors opening to flat walls, secret rooms with three doors in but only one door out. The house was crazy. Each wing appeared to have its own color theme, and Sarah had a peculiar penchant for the number thirteen, hiding it in the details almost everywhere.

Maxime began to show us detailed color photos of all the gorgeous stained glass, and while it was an interesting history lesson I finally had to ask again, “What does this have to do with Sutherland?”

My vampire valet continued to flip through photos of the windows. “Almost all the stained glass in Mrs. Winchester’s house was custom designed by Charles Tiffany himself.” He showed us pictures of lovely daisy designs and windows that would make a gothic church green with envy. “What most people don’t know about Tiffany is his passion for constructing stained glass has a very…unique history.”

Great. More history.

Being surrounded by those who had lived through historical events firsthand and could relate them back to me with more vivid detail than any book had made me less inclined to pay attention during a standard history lesson. But Maxime was trying to tell us something important, even if it was taking him forever to get to the point.

He continued. “Tiffany had a mistress. Not uncommon for his time.”

“Or ours,” Holden noted.

“True. But Tiffany’s mistress was special. She was a vampire.”

I raised an eyebrow and looked across Maxime to Holden. He shrugged, but he too appeared interested in this development.

“It seems his vampire mistress had a special longing for the sun. She missed it more than anything else from her human life, and she begged him to find a way to bring the sun back to her. They both knew she wasn’t able to see real sunlight again, so Tiffany tried to find a way to capture the sun for her. He started by designing lamps, hoping to convey the essence of sunlight through different colors and shapes.”

I thought of the lamps in Calliope’s mansion. My half-fairy/half-god guardian had an impressive collection of original Tiffany works lighting her waiting room, and I
loved
those lamps. I could see now how their creator had been inspired, and loved their jewellike glow all the more for it.

Artificial sunlight. What a genius idea. He must have loved his vampire mistress a great deal to set about making art like that for her. Judging by the expression on Holden’s face, he too was impressed by the lengths a human man had gone to for his vampire lover.

“While she loved the lamps, she still craved more. They were such a small offering compared to the greatness of day. So Tiffany began constructing work on a larger scale.”

Maxime opened the web browser and typed
Tiffany ceiling
into the Google search. An astonishing blue-green circular dome ceiling was the first thing he showed us, and it was so beautiful I wanted to reach out and touch it.

“This one is in a library in Chicago. Or, from what I gather, a former library, which is now a tourism office.” He shrugged as if it was hard to keep track of how buildings changed purpose over the years. Going back to the image search, he showed us literally hundreds of ceilings and windows Tiffany had designed.

“His vampire mistress loved them all, but nothing seemed to achieve his goal of bringing her the sunlight she desperately wanted. She grew sullen and dark as time went on. Meanwhile, Tiffany’s star was on the rise, and his designs became coveted by elite families across America. Including Sarah Winchester.”

Maxime went back to the files with images of the Winchester Mansion. He showed us several we’d already seen, but stopped on a small one set into an interior wall. It was patterned in pink and green, with thirteen crystals of various size mounted in it, appearing like dew drops caught in a spider web. It was incredible.

“This window was designed
specifically
for Sarah Winchester. Tiffany agonized over its construction, setting those crystals—which are actually prisms—in such a way they would take the sun’s light and cover the entire floor of a room with rainbows. He considered it one of his greatest achievements.”

“But…it’s inside the house.”

“Yes. It is. It was the single most expensive window in the Winchester Mansion, and Sarah had it installed in a place where the sun would never reach it. When Tiffany’s mistress found out what Sarah had done to the window, she was
furious
. She believed this window might have been the one to finally achieve what she’d asked Tiffany to do for her, and to discover it was being squandered made her livid. She begged Tiffany to buy it back, but he refused. After his death, she attempted to get it from the Winchester estate, but they were unwilling to sell it. Since then she has spent decades trying to get it back, and after so many failed tries at going through official channels, she got tired of waiting.”

“It’s Eilidh, isn’t it?” I asked. Only a vampire in her position would be able to send a warden out to steal a
window
.

“Yes. After we left San Francisco she has spent a great deal of time and energy working to retrieve the window. She’s made generous offers to the restoration team, as well as to the museum that now exists there.” The way he said
museum
was so dismissive he seemed offended to be using the phrase.

He opened the web browser again and pulled up a website for Winchester Mystery House. I could tell what had made him sneer. Sarah Winchester’s house had been turned into a bizarre hybrid of museum and amusement park. Guided tours were offered through specific areas of the house, while others were off-limits to tourists because of structural damage from multiple earthquakes.

The place even offered moonlight ghost tours.

“Is it actually haunted?” I’d had some run-ins with ghosts. Enough exposure to believe in them without a shadow of a doubt. I wasn’t worried my expedition might be hindered by spirits, but it was better to know when a transparent specter might jump out at you. Kept the girly screaming to a minimum.

“Who knows. A house that old, with so many people dedicating their lives to working there. Work that never, ever ended? I’d wager one or two spirits are lurking in the halls. Sarah died there.”

I looked at the website, which offered fewer photos and less history than I’d gotten from Maxime, and put it together with what I’d learned during my meeting with the Tribunal.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“What makes you say that?”

“If Eilidh sent Sutherland to get her the window, that’s all well and fine. But he didn’t get it. There would have been some news about it going missing if it’s as valuable as you say. So, there’s more to this. They told me they were afraid the item might fall into the wrong hands. Sutherland doesn’t
have
the window, which means they’re worried about something else entirely.”

Maxime and Holden both stared at me. I was a little offended by their shocked expressions. This was hardly the first time I’d made an astute observation.

“As far as I know, the window was the Tribunal’s endgame. Eilidh wanted it, and she sent Sutherland to get it.”

I shook my head. “Then we’re all being lied to. They want me to find Sutherland because he went to get the window and found something else. And whatever it is he found, that’s what they’re really after.”

Chapter Sixteen

I hated being lied to.

I liked being used even less. Having been a pawn to one council for most of my adult life, I didn’t appreciate another council treating me like one now. I was their equal, but they sought to use me in some master scheme.

They thought I was foolish enough to charge ahead without asking questions because the quarry was my father? How stupid did they think I was?

I didn’t want an answer to that.

I took the laptop from Maxime and asked him to leave Holden and me alone. I wasn’t sure why I needed the computer. It wasn’t as if I was going to be able to hack into the Tribunal’s master files and glean their secrets. I could barely file an online tax return.