Secret Unleashed: Secret McQueen, Book 6 (22 page)

I wrapped my arms around his back, licking the wound at his neck to speed the healing.

“Thank you,” I whispered. Though there was so much more I wanted to say, I didn’t think there was a single human language that could tell him what he’d done for me. He’d saved me.

“I love you too,” was his reply.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Maxime wasn’t the best at keeping a straight face. His smirk when Holden and I emerged from our bedroom spoke volumes about how much he’d heard. At least he had the common sense not to make any cute remarks. I don’t think I could have handled that.

“You guys ready to go?”

As a kindness to Holden I hadn’t worn the Yankees shirt, even if it was the most comfortable thing I had in my current possession. It didn’t seem right to wear something that smelled like Desmond after having mind-altering sex with Holden.

Which left the leather bustier as the next best option for a top. There was no way I was wearing any of the skirts Holden had packed, so I was back in the leather pants and my knee-high boots. With the leather jacket thrown on, I looked like a dominatrix for a biker gang. The jacket wasn’t optional, though. I needed to wear it to cover my gun holster.

Since we’d be driving to the mansion, I’d
insisted
on bringing my sword, even though I’d need to leave it in the car. Between a silver knife in my boot, two 9mm handguns, seven spare clips—the only reason I’d ever carry a purse—and a magic fae katana, I felt
somewhat
protected. I hadn’t fully shaken off the tension from the nightmare. Once I’d admitted I couldn’t lie in bed with Holden for the rest of my life, the reality of the evening ahead had sunk in.

Yesterday this had seemed like a basic search mission. Go to a haunted mansion, try a key in a few doors and
maybe
find a clue about my father’s whereabouts.

Now it didn’t feel nearly as simple. If I had been in my father’s dream—which seemed more and more likely—this was no longer about finding a missing object. I had to find him and this doctor he’d spoken about, before it was too late. And something told me I didn’t have a lot of time left.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” I said. “Moonlight’s burning.” I was trying to make my tone light and cheery, but I didn’t have it in me to force emotions I wasn’t feeling. Holden—who had gotten to see the worst of it—placed a hand between my shoulders and rubbed up and down, giving me his support without saying a word.

According to Google Maps it was supposed to take about an hour to drive from downtown San Francisco to San Jose. Google Maps, as it turned out, was a filthy liar whose mother was a hamster and whose father smelled of elderberries. Close to two hours after we’d left our hotel, we pulled into the parking lot of the Winchester Mystery House. Between Google Maps, our GPS and Holden’s backseat driving, I was about ready to turn the car west and drive us all straight into the ocean. Adding insult to injury was the fact the parking lot was so crammed full of cars it took me an extra ten minutes to find parking.

I hadn’t expected moonlight tours through an old mansion to be so popular. Thankfully we’d given ourselves plenty of extra time for the trip, and had prepurchased our tickets online. That spark of genius belonged to Maxime, and seeing the snakelike line of tourists waiting at the ticket kiosk, I was glad I’d listened to him.

I’d have been a lot happier to bypass the tour altogether and just break into the place, but Maxime had shot my idea down in no time. Apparently the house was such a maze, many tourists a day would get lost in it, requiring retrieval. If we went in on our own without a tour guide to bring us to the Tiffany window, we’d end up spending hours going around in circles to find it. I had to admit once he’d explained it, it made more sense to do this the human way.

We queued up in the prepaid ticket line behind a family from Florida. I knew they were from Florida because they all wore identical yellow T-shirts that proclaimed,
Wilson Family Vacation Florida to California (or Bust!)
in giant black letters on the back.

“Man alive, what a
line
,” the mother said, laughing at herself like our wait time was hilarious. “Just lines
everywhere
.”

“Mmm,” I replied. I didn’t want to engage her in discussion. If we were going into the house to steal something, I didn’t want to stick out in anyone’s memory.

“Where y’all from?” Evidently I was wearing my
Please talk to me
hat today. I thought I’d burned that one.

“New York,” I said.

“Ohhhhh, New
York
. New York
City
? The Big Apple! City that never sleeps. Mad-hattan!” Again she laughed at herself as though any of what she’d said had been a joke. If she was angling for a prize because she knew eight thousand nicknames for the city I lived in, she’d be waiting for a while.

“Yup, that’s the one.”

Undeterred by my obvious disinterest in our conversation, she turned around to look at me. She had a sweet face, round cheeks and a short bobbed haircut that screamed
mom
. In her mid- or late-thirties, she wore the roundness of someone who no longer tried to be skinny but clearly stayed somewhat fit chasing the three rugrats at her side.

“Oh my, you look so young to have a son.” She gave Maxime a once-over.

We’d debated how best to sell Max to humans who might ask. I was twenty-three, but thanks to the blessings of my genetic makeup, I appeared younger. Young enough I’d still be getting ID’d at bars in ten years, and certainly too young to have a thirteen-year-old son.

“Younger brother,” I explained.

Her concerned expression faded. She gave Holden a cursory glance, and at first I thought she was going to ask what role he played in our weird family, but she got distracted by her cursory inspection and ended up not saying anything at all about him.

“Very nice of you to bring him out here.” Her cheeks were flushed red, and she looked from Holden to Maxime. “Do you do a lot with your sister?”

My
God
this woman was chatty.

“I go where she goes,” he said with a shrug, playing the part of a bored teenage boy to a T. Instead of meeting her gaze and compelling her to leave us alone, he stared at his shoes and shut down any further questions she might ask him.

“Have you been—?”

“Oh
good
, the line is moving.” Next time, I didn’t care how lost we got, I was going to break in instead of mingling with human tourists. They talked too much. How could people talk this much to absolute strangers? What about me invited conversation? I didn’t think I had a naturally sweet face—and had been told as much on a number of occasions—so why me?

We were ushered into a courtyard where I intentionally angled my “family” away from hers.

“Secret made a new friend,” Holden teased.

“Shhh, you’ll make her come over here. That’s the last thing we need. If Ma Florida latches on to us, we’ll never be able to break away from the tour.”

That quieted him down.

Thankfully my line buddy had two sons who were desperate to annoy the ever-loving bejesus out of our poor tour guide. We were handed flashlights, and most of the sensible adults tested them once to be sure they worked, then left them off until the tour began. The Wilson boys from Florida, though, managed to have a full-on lightsaber battle with theirs, complete with poorly conceived sound effects.

Once their mother relieved them of the flashlights, they started in on a barrage of questions, only some of which related to the house.

I wasn’t a big fan of kids, and these ones were the type so annoying they might convince non-parents never to conceive, but they were a blessing in disguise. If our guide was busy dealing with their nattering for the whole tour, we might get more time before they realized we were missing.

Point one for the Wilson family from Florida.

The tour commenced, and the guide—a chubby, curly-haired kid who was about seventeen—began his monotone, memorized speech about the house’s history. Since we were on the moonlight tour, I gathered we’d be given a few spooky bonus facts along the way, but in the initial few rooms we relearned all the stuff I’d read on the website.

The guide led us into an old storage room where all the guests wedged in together to hear him tell us about the cost of carpeting and how many different kinds of wood were ordered to make the parquet floors. The back wall of the room was floor-to-ceiling glass, and behind it were several backlit Tiffany windows.

I caught Maxime’s attention and jutted my chin towards them, wondering if the window we were looking for might have been moved among them. I didn’t see it, but I wasn’t as familiar with it as the young vampire was. He might be able to see something I was missing.

He shook his head.

The group followed our guide up a set of switchback stairs—the Wilson boys stomping loudly and making ghost noises as they went—and we remained towards the back, letting everyone else get ahead of us.

The house was just as bizarre as I’d imagined from Maxime’s history lesson, but seeing it in person made me a little sad. It lacked a lot of the color and polish I’d seen in the older pictures. Maybe it was because I was seeing it at night, but I felt as if some of what made the house special had slipped away over the years.

For a house to have life, someone needed to live in it. And though hundreds of people visited the Winchester Mansion daily, everything had the gray, dismal feeling of abandonment. No one lived here, no one
loved
the place the way only a homeowner can. I was sad for the house, and sad for Sarah Winchester that her legacy was these depressing walls and weird corridors.

In one of the upper parlors a vignette had been staged with actors portraying Winchester and her psychic. They’d gone overboard on the clichés, dressing the psychic in full gypsy gear with giant hoop earrings and a glowing crystal ball. Her long fingernails clicked on the glass, making the small bulb inside vibrate. The employee they had playing Sarah Winchester wore a terrible wig and gasped at everything the gypsy said.

In the back of the room, beyond a velvet rope meant to keep guests out, I saw a weak blue-white light. It drifted, barely visible beyond the old glass doors, and I couldn’t make out a face. I knew a ghost when I saw one, and there was no mistaking that glow. It seemed to be watching the playacting with the same attention as the tour guests were. When the show was over, the light bobbed slightly, then drifted out of sight.

In a house this old any number of spirits could have gathered, but I had my suspicions I was seeing the former owner herself.

Poor Sarah. In life she’d wanted so badly to avoid being haunted she’d moved here to build this place. Now she was forced to roam the halls of her unfinished monstrosity forever.

We followed slowly, not wanting the acting employees to notice us lagging behind. They were an element we hadn’t considered, and I had to hope they’d go back the way we’d come in, rather than trailing after the tour.

Now that we were on the second floor my heart had begun to beat quicker. Every door teased me because it wasn’t the door in my dream. I wasn’t sure that door existed, but since it was the only clue I had to go on, I was going to follow my gut.

“And here we have the most expensive window and the
least
expensive window in the house installed side by side.” The guide’s delivery suggested this was meant to be a punch line, but I’d missed the joke if there had been one. The group’s forced laughter told me I hadn’t missed anything.

We were wedged into a corridor near a flight of stairs, our guide leaning against the wooden balustrade. He told us about how much the Winchester fortune had been worth, and how much Sarah had siphoned into the house on a weekly basis.

“The window to my right…” he pointed to his left, “…cost a thousand dollars at the time of purchase. For perspective, that was about the same amount Sarah earned in a week from her husband’s fortune. It was designed by Charles Tiffany for Sarah, in the hope he’d created the most beautiful stained-glass window to ever be touched by the sun.” Whoever wrote their speeches had a flair for the dramatic. “Unfortunately, when the window was installed, it was placed on this interior wall and has tragically never seen the light of day. Now if you’ll follow me…”

This was it. We were at the window. Part of me had expected our answer to leap out and bite me in the tush as soon as we arrived, but nothing happened. It was just a window—a pretty one—but nothing about it suggested it was worth killing or dying for.

I wondered why Eilidh wanted it so badly. Did she honestly think if she stood in the light as it passed through this window she’d be able to bear it? That seemed crazy to me.

But now that I’d walked in sunlight, even for a couple short days, I could see the obsession. I’d chased daylight too, because unlike vampires I’d never had an opportunity to experience it before. Now that I’d had it warm my skin without burning, would I give anything to have the feeling back? Almost.

I’d given it up willingly, but still dreamed of it some days, and those dreams were more of a vicious tease than anything soothing.

We weren’t here for the window though. Eilidh and the other Tribunal seats might have assumed I’d bring it back for them, but I knew how to abuse loopholes in vampire requests. They’d sent me to get Sutherland because he had something of value to them. Since the window was still safely mounted in the wall, it couldn’t be what they were after.