Deceptions
Page 40

Legend had it that when Mills discovered his bride’s body in the pool, he’d walked up the stairs, through the house, out the front door . . . and never returned. He’d ordered everything to stay exactly as it was, allowing priceless antiques to rot. My father had told me a different version. He’d heard that Mills had ordered his men to sneak in and spirit off the most valuable of the furnishings, so he could maintain the romantic fiction while recouping the most significant losses.
Judging by the wall of broken windows, I’d just entered the conservatory. Brisk lake air blasted through. I jogged to the next room, but I could see no sign of Gabriel. I called, “Gabriel? I’m apologizing, okay? I was being bullheaded, and while I don’t think I’m the only one, I want to talk about this.”
No answer. As I walked to the far doorway, I made tracks in the dust on the floor. One set crossing the room. None at the doorway, meaning Gabriel hadn’t come this way.
Was there another exit from the conservatory? I took three steps back the way I’d come and then heard an impatient, “Olivia,” from the opposite direction. I hurried into a long, narrow room with two fireplaces . . . and a half-dozen doors.
“Shit,” I said.
“Where am I?” a voice demanded. “What the hell is going on?”
The voice seemed to come from all corners, booming, oddly distorted, like speakers turned up too loud. Not Gabriel. Yet it seemed familiar.
“I know you’re here,” the voice continued. “Damn you, come out and face me.”
I turned and there was Nathaniel Mills. He was older, bloated and unkempt, a flask in one hand as he staggered toward me.
“Do you think I can’t hear you?” he shouted at the empty room. “Whispering, laughing, taunting? Do you think I don’t know what you did, you ungodly sons of bitches? Come out and face me!”
He stormed around the room, kicking at invisible debris, shoving aside invisible furniture. Then he stopped dead. He seemed to move around something, carefully, and then let out a cry as he dropped to his knees.
“Letty! It can’t be. You’re wet. So wet. And your poor face. Your beautiful face. What have they—?”
He stopped abruptly again and staggered up. “No, you’re not real. You’re dead and buried.” He wheeled, shouting, “Damn you all back to the hell you came from. You—”
His gaze lit on me. “You.”
I took a slow step back.
“Do you think I can’t see you?” His figure pulsed, shimmering as he moved, and then it wasn’t Mills coming at me. It was James. He stopped short and wavered there, his eyes wide. “Liv? What’s going on? Where am I?”
“James?”
I reached for him, but he vanished. The little girl’s voice whispered at my ear, “Gabriel was right. You need to go.”
“But Gabriel’s here,” I said.
As if on cue, I heard his voice, snapping with impatience.
“Olivia? I do not have time for this.”
I took one step his way and then stopped.
That’s not Gabriel.
It sounded like his impatience, his diction. But if Gabriel thought I was in danger, would he really storm off? I might lose my temper and do such a thing. Gabriel was ice, exact and calculated. He’d freeze me out, but he would never walk away if he thought I was in trouble.
That’s why I hadn’t seen his footprints. Because he hadn’t really gone into the house. It was like that alley near the prison when we tried to follow the Huntsman. I’d turned my back and then stumbled into a vision that I mistook for reality.
I jogged back the way I’d come and ended up in an unfamiliar room. I retreated, and tried the door to the left of it, then the one on the right. Neither returned me to anyplace vaguely familiar.
Okay, I’m hallucinating. No big deal.
I sputtered a laugh at that. I suppose it was a sign of progress that the thought I was going crazy didn’t even cross my mind.
The question was: Which was the hallucination? The house now, as I tried to get out, or earlier, as I was coming in? Either way, there were plenty of exits—both doors and broken windows.
In the next room, I found the younger Nathaniel Mills, at a desk, telling his foreman his plans for burning out the fae.
They both looked up as I stepped in.
“Yes?” Mills snapped. “What do you want?”
“Nothing. Sorry.”
I backed away . . . and tripped over Letitia, lying in her soaked party dress, tributaries of bloody water creeping across the floor. When I retreated, she lifted her head. Her face was crushed—nose smashed flat, blood streaming from her mouth, one eye bulging, the other a dark pit.
“You didn’t save me,” she rasped through broken teeth.
“I couldn’t.”
“You can’t save anyone. You ruin everything you touch. Mallt-y-Nos?” She spat blood and broken teeth. “They should have left you as you were. Crippled and useless.”
Her cold hand wrapped around my ankle. I broke free and raced through the next doorway. It was a library.
“Liv?”
James stood at a shelf, fingering the moldering books. When he saw me, his face lit up. He started my way and then faltered, his smile evaporating in a look of despair.
“I—I don’t know what happened, Liv,” he said. “All I wanted was to get you back. He said he’d help and then . . . it went wrong, and I don’t understand how. I know I hurt you, frightened you, and I don’t understand that, either. It seemed so simple. You were in danger, and I had to save you, and nothing else mattered.”