Chapter Thirty-Five
“Rose is the daughter of a serial killer?” Alice asked, stunned.
“Talk about bad bloodlines.” Kelbrook grimaced. “Now you see why I couldn’t allow her son’s genes into the family.”
“You should have gotten rid of her years ago,” Twitchell muttered. “Fuck. Why didn’t you tell me to do the job?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Owen said. “Rose probably has proof not only of his sexual tastes but, more crucially, that he murdered Alice’s mother.
I’m guessing she threatened to give the information to the police and the media if he didn’t agree to take care of her.
She’s smart, so she probably took out some insurance, too. ”
“If anything happened to her, a certain video featuring her confession would be automatically released to the media,” Kelbrook bit out.
Alice looked at him. “What did she confess?”
“Who the fuck do you think gave me the drugs I fed to your mother?” Kelbrook shot back. “If you want to waste time talking about the past, go right ahead. I’m getting out of here while there’s still a chance, because the hotel will kill us if we don’t escape before dawn.”
“He’s got a point,” Owen said.
That was too much, Alice decided. Rage exploded through her. She did not want logic; she wanted answers. She focused on Kelbrook.
“You murdered my mother,” she whispered.
“I had no choice, you stupid woman,” Kelbrook said. “She was threatening to divorce me. I did what I had to do to protect the family and the business.”
Alice rezzed her talent and flung herself on him, fingers extended like claws.
The sudden move took him by surprise. He lost his balance and fell to the floor.
She went down on top of him, tightened her grip on one of his arms, focused on the dreamlight currents of his aura, and drew hard on her talent.
“Don’t touch me,” he screamed. “Take your hands off me. You can’t touch me.”
“Too late,” she said.
She told herself she was not savoring his fear. That would violate Core Principle Number Six: Negative energy attracts negative energy. She wanted justice, not revenge. There was a difference.
Wasn’t there?
She decided she would worry about the nuances of the Core Principles some other time.
Kelbrook’s eyes widened in horror as he realized what was happening, but it was too late.
She concentrated on the wellspring of his primal fears, dissolving the barriers between the dreamstate and the waking state.
When she did this for therapeutic reasons, it was so that she could help someone rewrite the script. But therapy was not her goal now.
The dark forces of his nightmares stormed out of the pit. She could not see what he saw, for which she was truly grateful, but she was blazingly aware of the raw vibe of his personal horrors. And the razor-sharp edge of his terror.
She tightened her psychic hold on him.
“Tell me how you murdered my mother and I will close the door on your worst nightmares,” she promised.
“I told you, drugs,” Kelbrook panted. “It was painless, I swear. She never felt a thing. She went to sleep. I put her in the pool.”
“Monster.”
“I had no choice.”
She held on for a moment longer, waiting for the cold satisfaction of revenge or a rush of triumph or…something. Anything.
Nothing.
Shivering, she released both her psychic and physical grip on Kelbrook, scrambled to her feet, and picked up Sebastian. He huddled close, offering comfort. She took a deep breath and crossed the room to where Owen waited, mag-rez in hand.
“Are you okay?” he asked quietly.
“No, but I will be.”
Kelbrook pushed himself to his feet. He was no longer trapped in a waking nightmare, but she knew the storm of primal fears that she had summoned to the surface would not be forgotten. You never escaped the clutches of a truly bad dream.
He wasn’t the only one who would be unable to forget the encounter with his nightmare energy. So be it, she thought. It was the price she paid for learning the truth. She would deal with it.
Aware that Owen was keeping an eye on her as he held the pistol on a visibly unnerved Twitchell, she took a few beats to run through a couple of rebalancing mantras.
I seek harmony.
I am the calm eye of the storm.
I will grasp the anchor current and hold it fast.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” Owen asked.
“Yes, but I have more questions,” she said, relieved because the simple words sounded relatively normal.
At least she thought they did. The mantras wouldn’t provide a permanent fix—that would take more focused work—but they enabled her to steady herself.
She looked at Kelbrook. “Why did your brother leave those shares to me?”
“Because he hated me,” Kelbrook spat out, no longer trying to deploy his mirror talent. “He was furious because Dad put me in charge of the company. He had no choice. Hampton was a drunk and a loser. But he and Lillian latched onto each other from the start.”
“You used your talent to convince my mother to marry you, didn’t you?” Alice said.
“I didn’t have to,” Kelbrook said. “She was depressed. Didn’t care about anything, including her own future.
Her grandmother pushed her into marriage.
But she pulled out of the depression and confided the truth about you to Hampton.
They kept the secret from me, but in his will, Hampton explained that Lillian had never believed you were dead.
She was determined to divorce me and look for you. After she drowned—”
“After you murdered her,” Alice said.
“—he hired a private security firm to track you down and found out you’d been sent to an orphanage. I didn’t know any of this until Hampton died and his will was opened.”
“You murdered my mother and then you arranged to have your own son killed,” Alice said. “How can you live with yourself?”
“I did what was necessary to protect the family.”
“I don’t want to hear any more.” She looked at Owen. “We can go now.”
“Good idea,” he said. “Because the walls are starting to close in on us.”
She shuddered. “I know what you mean. This lobby has a very claustrophobic vibe. The whole house does.”
“No,” Owen said. “I mean the walls are closing in.”
Sebastian growled.
Alice glanced around, bewildered. The lobby did seem a bit smaller than it had a few minutes ago. The ceiling was lower. Was it just her imagination, or were the antique sofa, lamps, and end tables a few inches closer?
And then she heard the muffled rumble of hidden gears.
“Oh, I see,” she whispered.
“Fuck,” Kelbrook rasped. “What’s happening?”
“The walls are moving,” Twitchell said, his voice rising with panic. “So is the ceiling. We’ll be crushed if we don’t get out of this room.”
“The basement,” Kelbrook said. He lurched toward the stairs. “There’s an exit into the tunnels. Rose showed it to me years ago.”
“It might be locked,” Twitchell said. “Odds are better on the roof. There’s a fire escape ladder. I saw it that first night when I—”
He abruptly stopped talking, evidently concluding this was not a good time to mention that he had pushed Travis Poole off the roof.
“The basement hole-in-the-wall door is open,” Kelbrook said, heading for the stairs. “I checked earlier today.”
Twitchell did not waste any time asking questions. He rushed to follow Kelbrook to the narrow staircase.
Alice looked at Owen and waited for his judgment. His eyes burned with a savage light. He shook his head.
“Bad plan,” he said.
“I agree. Too obvious. Remember what Rose Ash said. ‘Ignore the obvious. It will lead to your death.’ ”
“She’s a murderer,” Owen said. “We can’t believe anything she says.”
“In this case, I think we can. Call it another calculated risk.”
Twitchell and Kelbrook were already pounding down the steps to the basement. A moment later she heard the stairwell door open and close.
Muffled gears continued to grind. She looked up. The ceiling was several inches lower.
“We really do need to get out of this lobby,” she said. “What about the hidden passageways?”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Owen said. “I saw what looked like an entrance to them when I got the chairs out of the pantry.”
“I knew you had spotted something of interest while you were in there.”
“Let’s go.”
They started across the rapidly downsizing lobby, but directly in front of them a large section of the floor dropped away with only the squeak of hinges.
Alice shrieked and scrambled backward. She crashed into Owen. He wrapped a hand around her upper arm and pulled her farther away from the pit that stretched the width of the lobby. Sebastian wriggled free of her grasp and vaulted up onto her shoulder. He growled.
“There goes the option of escaping through the hidden hallways,” Owen said.
Alice stared into the abyss revealed by the missing floor. There was no way to get across the opening to reach the pantry.
The only exit left was a spiral staircase—human engineering, not Alien—that twisted down below the floor and into a sea of churning gray fog.
The notes of an old-fashioned ballroom dance floated up from the depths.
Alice recognized the piece—“The Underworld Waltz.” It had been written shortly after the end of the Era of Discord and had been composed to celebrate the triumph of the Guild forces over Vincent Lee Vance and his crazed followers.
It was invariably played with stirring spirit and a sweeping sense of optimism.
But the music emanating up out of the gray fog was the opposite of spirited and optimistic. This version of “The Underworld Waltz” was an ominous dirge that sent chills across her senses.
“The game has begun,” a disembodied voice said.
“There are three locked rooms. Each has a doorway to the next chamber. If you succeed in escaping all three rooms before dawn, the hotel will let you live. You have one minute to accept the invitation to the first game—the Midnight Ball. If you decline, the hotel will assume that you refuse to play the game.”
A hellish shriek infused with undiluted horror echoed up the basement stairs. Alice froze.
“That was Twitchell,” she whispered.
A second scream reverberated.
“Kelbrook,” Owen said. “I’m guessing the hole-in-the-wall was blocked or booby-trapped.” He slipped the mag-rez into the pocket of his jacket and took her hand. “That means we play the escape game.”