Secret Unleashed: Secret McQueen, Book 6 (20 page)

I thought of the pictures Maxime had shown us of the mansion, and all the doors and secret passages, all the hundreds and hundreds of locks this key might belong to, and I sighed. The problem was, he was likely spot-on. The key didn’t belong here, and the most probable place to find the lock it fit to was to take it to the Winchester Mansion.

All roads led to a big haunted house in San Jose.

I’d been hoping to find answers here, but all I’d gotten was another mystery.

When we left the building, a pair of men hung back in the shadows, whispering to one another while exchanging a series of small packages for a large wad of bills. They kept an eye on us but did nothing to mask their transaction.

A shopping cart full of cans and bottles sat in the middle of the alley, no sign of the homeless man who’d formerly attended it. Something about his absence rankled me, giving me the same uneasy feeling in my gut as I’d had before we went in.

I was starting to get paranoid, imagining everyone was a potential threat. These men, the dark-alley dwellers, they weren’t dangerous to me. They might pose problems for others, but I had no reason to fear them. I reminded myself of that over and over while staring at the abandoned cart.

Blueprints confused the hell out of me.

I couldn’t tell the difference between a wall and a window, and looking at the layout of Winchester Mansion didn’t make things any easier for me. As far as I could tell the whole thing was written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Clutching a wineglass full of warm blood, I sat cross-legged on a huge wood table in the council warehouse. Galen had found someone who’d meticulously mapped out the interior of the mansion, and the blueprints had been couriered to us. Holden was perched on a stool, his chin resting on one fisted hand, while he took in the layout with a serious expression.

“What a mess,” he muttered.

I thought I was the only one thinking it looked like a shaken jigsaw puzzle.

Just as in the photos we’d seen, the blueprint showed an endless number of rooms and stairwells—all switchback steps due to Sarah Winchester’s poor mobility in later years—and what seemed like a million doors. Some rooms had been labeled—the Grand Ballroom, the Daisy Bedroom—but others were nameless, and every single one of them had at least two entrances. Not to mention the closets.

I was overwhelmed by the number of places our key could potentially go.

“Where’s the window Eilidh wanted?”

Maxime pulled back the page we were looking at and showed me the next one, a grid of the second floor. “Here.” It was located on a staircase, if I was reading it correctly.

“How many doors are in nearby proximity?” I was mostly asking myself, but the other two leaned over it as well. There was a door beside it, jutting off from the stairwell, and a half-dozen rooms were in easy access to the stairs. From those rooms hallways fanned out and staircases went up and down to the different levels. Basically it narrowed our search to about forty-eight doors.

“There’s also a linen room here.” Maxime pointed to a narrow hall. “I understand there are a dozen or more drawers in there. Any of them could have been outfitted with a lock.”

I sipped my blood, grimacing because it had gotten cool while I inspected the map, and let my gaze tour over the blue-and-white maze before me.

“It would help if we knew what we were looking for.” I sighed.

“Our best bet is to start at the window. The tour follows this route.” Maxime walked his fingers like tiny legs over the path we’d be following on our haunted tour the next night. “When the group goes this way, we’ll hang back. By the time they make their next stop we’ll be out of earshot, and that gives us at least ten minutes before they can call another guide in to come searching for us.”

The distance between the window and the place he said the group would stop didn’t seem all that wide, but if Max believed we’d have ten minutes, I was willing to believe him.

“So…ten minutes to check almost fifty possible doors. Not counting the linen room.”

“Right.”

“And we can’t split up,” Holden pointed out. “Only one key.”

“We’ll work in a sweeping grid,” I suggested. “Start closest to the window and move back and forth in a semicircle. Check as many locks as we can before they find us.”

Again, I wished we had some better idea what it was we were hoping to find, if anything. Sutherland had hidden the key, which implied he’d left the item in the house to retrieve later. But if that was the case, where was he? What if he’d gone back already and found a way to get the item without the key?

Or had someone gotten to him before he had a chance?

What was it we were hunting that was important enough he was willing to risk being declared a rogue for it? And if he hadn’t run, what was so special it warranted abducting a vampire?

I had no idea what kind of man my father had been, but my mother had loved him, and my grandfather had allowed them to be together. For a werewolf king to like a human teenager, there must have been something
good
about Sutherland, something decent.

All of my mother’s goodness had faded the day Sutherland died, but was the same true of my father? I wanted to believe whatever once made him worthy of being loved still existed. I wanted to meet him and find out I wasn’t made up of entirely bad DNA.

“We go tomorrow.” I finished off my blood with a scowl. “If we don’t find Sutherland, we’re damn well going to find
something
.” I was sick of coming up short on answers. The last thing I wanted to find was more questions.

If I wanted questions going unanswered, I could just watch
Lost
.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Stop looking.”

I was alone in the dark, unable to see anything. My nighttime eyesight worked a lot like night-vision goggles in that I could see but only if there was some small spark of light to begin with. If the darkness was complete, I was blind.

I stood still, unwilling to move in case I ran into anything unpleasant or accidentally found myself on the edge of a bottomless pit. Who knew what lurked in the darkness?

Nothing moved or gave me any indication someone was with me, but still the voice said, “Stop looking.”

Shivers rocked me hard, like I’d been plunged into a vat of icy water and quickly removed. “Hello?” Holding my hand out in front of me, I hoped to feel something, but my fingers grasped at empty space.

“You won’t find what you’re after.” The voice was masculine, not a common thing for my dreams, unless you counted the ones where I was naked with Holden. But this wasn’t a fun dream. I wasn’t totally sure it
was
a dream.

Did I remember falling asleep? No. Nothing felt real here, and I struggled to keep one foot planted in reality.

“How do you know what I’m looking for?” My voice echoed back at me, though what it had hit to create the echo, I didn’t know. The air was so heavy I wanted to sit down, but I didn’t dare. I still didn’t know where I was or what was around me. Dream or not, I didn’t feel like plunging to my death.

“You want what I was looking for. Stop.”

That male voice was unfamiliar, yet somehow I knew it. “Sutherland?”

“I know what you’re doing. You have to stop.”

“I’m looking for
you
.”

“Stop.”

“No.” I shook my head in case he could see me. “I have to find you.”

“Because they want me back? It’s not worth it, girl. I’m not worth it. What you find…just stop looking.” His voice grew distant for a moment and then loud again, the way a phone with a bad connection might.

“I found the key.”

“It unlocks a cabinet of horrors.” Again his voice faded out, only now he sounded tired. “Don’t go.”

Was this my dream or his? We shared blood, so it was possible for us to communicate this way, but it hadn’t happened before. In all my twenty-three years he’d never slipped into my head, nor me into his. What had changed? Was it proximity, or desperation? And whose need had made it happen?

“Where are you?”

“I’m with The Doctor. Stop looking. Stop.”

“What doctor?”

“
The
Doctor. Don’t unlock the door. He knows you’re looking. You have to go home.”

I stood still, frozen in place. What was he talking about? What doctor? This dream infuriated me in new ways because it wasn’t similar to any I’d ever had. It wasn’t vague in a symbolic way; it was just vague enough to be annoying.

“Sutherland, I need to find you.”

The darkness flickered and was replaced with a dimly lit corridor. On either side, illuminated by individual yellow lights, was a series of doors. The layout was like the warehouse in the Tenderloin, except these doors all looked old and expensive.

The key was in my hand.

We were in his subconscious, not mine. I’d never seen these doors before. If only I could manipulate what he was dreaming, he might show me the right door in spite of himself.

“If I start at the window, where do I go?”

A dozen doors vanished, their lights going dark with the audible sound of a bulb burning out. I took a step forward, able to see a path through the murky darkness.

“Stop,” he protested.

“Show me the door.”

Another set of lights went out—
pop, pop, pop
—and I ran forward to keep from being consumed by the dark.

“You’ll regret it,” he promised.

“I regret a lot of things. I won’t regret this. I have the key, now show me the door.”

All the lights around me went out in a shower of sparks, leaving one door lit, seemingly miles away. I walked towards it, drawn like a moth to the flame, the key held outstretched in my trembling palm.

“
Don’t,
” he shouted.

“It’s okay,” I said.

Two feet from the door the ground gave way beneath me, a darkness unlike any I’d known before opening up. I was swallowed into the vast, cold nothing, all light gone, and I fell, fell, fell. I fell for an eternity, the chasm was so endless. The pitch-blackness stopped being a mere cloud around me, and it transformed into emotion. I was drowning in fear and sorrow and regret, and I knew everything I was feeling was what my father was feeling.

I couldn’t recall ever having woken screaming before, but I did that night.

Bathed in cold sweat and reeking of fear so thick I could smell it on myself, I was dragged from my nightmare by the sound of my own screams. Even when my eyes opened, my throat continued to make hoarse, rasping shrieks, like I couldn’t believe I was awake.

Surely this was some sort of mocking limbo. A temporary reprieve to make it that much worse when I was dragged back into the abyss again.

“Secret.” Strong hands held my shoulders, shaking me.

My screams tapered off into hiccups as I struggled to catch my breath. Holden was lying over me, his arms braced on either side of my shoulders, and he looked terrified. “What the hell happened?” he asked when I caught my breath.

“I found him,” I whispered, my throat too raw to speak any louder. “I went inside his dream.”

“Sutherland?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know who you were?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so, but he knew I was looking for him. He knew what we were trying to do. He told me to stop, told me I’d regret it.”

“A threat?”

“I think it was a warning.” I remembered the fear, the terrible, terrible fear. “Definitely a warning.”

“Why wouldn’t he want you to look for him, unless he was worried you’d find something he didn’t want you to?”

I put my hands on Holden’s forearms, running my hands up and down them, feeling the hairs prickle against my palms. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, so I trailed my fingers over his shoulders and down his chest, the smooth, hard muscles of his stomach begging to be traced. I needed to feel something
good
, and he felt like a warm Sunday morning to me.

“Hold me.” It wasn’t a request, it was a raspy command. I
needed
him to put his arms around me, lest I be torn back into that dark place. “
Hold me.
” My nails scraped the skin of his back, urging him closer.

For a moment he hesitated. Had I been thinking logically I’d have understood why. One second I was screaming my lungs out, the next I had my hands all over him. But he hadn’t been in this dream with me. He hadn’t been the one to go for a midnight swim in Sutherland’s terror. I
had
to feel loved right then, or I might not be able to feel anything warm and good ever again in my life.

“Hold me.” I was practically crying from the need for it.

He sat back on his knees and tugged me up off the bed, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me tight against him. He wasn’t warm, but he seemed to absorb the frantic heat of my body, taking on my temperature as his own. I clung to him like a piece of flotsam in the midst of a stormy sea, the last thing floating when everything else was going down with the ship.

Holden stroked my hair with slow, soothing motions, whispering nonsense words into my ears. “Hush, hush, baby, nothing to fear, no worries, shhh.” He couldn’t know what there was to fear. I had
everything
to fear.