Chapter 17
What was Theo doing here? He was supposed to stay behind.
Didn’t the Witherbornes ever listen? And now he’d been caught, giving Jeremy exactly what he needed to open some kind of gateway that would bring all his unidentified supernatural family members through for a big party.
It seemed unlikely those family members were placid, peace-loving beings who’d be good neighbors.
They’d probably all be like Jeremy, who now looked like an evil Groot in a turtleneck sweater.
As the only human in the room, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about all of this. One vampire had been pinned to the wall and the other was being manhandled by security.
“Bring him to the pool,” Jeremy ordered the guards. He turned his elongated timber-skinned head to fix his hollow eye sockets on me. “Come along, Owen. You won’t want to miss this.”
He slammed Bentley into the floor hard enough it made a crater. Bentley wasn’t moving after that. It was so brutal and so fast, all I could do was stare at his body in the pit.
Theo bucked, fighting against the guards. The two big men couldn’t be human, or Theo would have been able to fight free. They had the same dull eyes as the rest of the housekeeping staff and grounds people.
This was all very alarming.
I should probably have been sobbing on my knees by now, but the wine was in my veins, keeping my nervous system eerily calm. I watched it all like watching a movie. Sure, it was terrifying, but it couldn’t be real, could it? All I needed was a bucket of popcorn.
“Come, human!” Jeremy barked.
I got to my feet and casually followed Jeremy outside, walking on autopilot.
Theo kept glancing over, his wide eyes begging me to do something, anything. He clearly had no idea why I was going along with all of this. That made two of us.
I’d just seen Jeremy skewer a vampire through the chest with root arms. What could I do that wouldn’t get me instantly unalived?
As we moved across the back patio, the ominous topiaries shaped like people began to creak and rustle, and slowly, they turned to watch us pass.
What had Jeremy said, something about rooting here?
And Geraldine had said he was something to do with the earth.
That all tracked with moving gardens and living bushes shaped like people.
He was clearly connected to the land around his house, but not in a touchy-feely, green-fingered kind of way, more of a controlling, manipulative way.
He made the staff and the gardens move to his will.
He was a bully, I realized, thinking hard with every step.
I had experience with those types of men.
The pool glowed ahead, lit from below. Rippling water made the light dance along the box house’s walls. Where the light played, shadows moved too, so the house and the gardens seemed to ripple, making all of it seem ethereal and unreal.
Part of me was still convinced this was all a weird dream. I’d wake up soon.
Anytime now.
One of the guards shoved Theo to his knees by the pool, and he went down hard, wincing.
Jeremy moved behind him, and as the guys stepped away, Theo looked over his shoulder at Jeremy’s approach.
More weird woody arms sprouted from Jeremy’s sides, hideously jointed tentacle things, turning him into some kind of splintery spider that was only vaguely man-shaped now.
He looked like the kind of thing you’d wash down a drain hole and hope it never came back to haunt your dreams.
Theo’s gaze swung back to me. Pleading.
Bentley was probably dead, and Theo’s parents didn’t seem willing or likely to arrive anytime soon.
He only had me. The pool boy.
I was going to have to make myself useful. Which meant making my body move and my brain think outside the fuzzy, disassociation fog.
C’mon brain, we can do this.
The pool began to simmer. I could feel its restlessness in my chest. It didn’t want this either, whatever this was.
I had to get Theo away from the water.
Jeremy’s root-leg things snicked outward, joints clicking, then came around and latched onto Theo’s arms, locking him still.
Theo breathed hard through his nose. His chest heaved.
He stared at me, eyes silently begging for help.
I wasn’t just going to stand there, was I?
Think, brain. Do what you’ve been doing for twenty-three years but do it better. I gave my head a shake and blinked away the fogginess.
I could do this. The fuzzy was going, fading, washing away.
What did I know?
The pool was a gateway. Check.
Jeremy needed to open the gateway to bring his family through. Check.
He needed Theo’s blood to do it. Check.
But things hadn’t gone smoothly. Jay had clearly intervened somehow, and I’d stopped his creatures from kidnapping Theo before, using the chlorine to burn them out of existence. The pool was the gate. And I was the gatekeeper.
That’s right . . . I’m the gatekeeper.
“Uh, so, I have a suggestion?” I croaked out and raised my hand.
Jeremy’s hollow gaze locked onto me. “Speak, but do so quickly.” His voice had warped now too, turning into a gravelly growl.
“Well, it seems like you’ve been planning this for a while, but you’ve had some trouble. You’ve been trying to get this door—gate open for a while with some success, but it’s not perfect, am I right?”
Jeremy tilted his head. “There have been some technical issues.”
“Your family is important to you, else you wouldn’t be going to all this trouble. You don’t want this procedure going wrong halfway through.” I started to walk around the pool, toward Jeremy and Theo. “Well, I’m the pool guy. I know pools. I know this pool.”
“Stop stalling,” Jeremy snarled. “What do you know that can help me?”
Theo bucked some more, but the spindly leg things clamped down harder.
“Okay, so . . . here’s the problem as I see it.
” I sounded clearer now, more confident.
Pools were my thing. “Your chemical balance is off. I’ve been trying to correct it, because I thought it was an error.
But I didn’t know what was going on, or I would have been able to help you sooner.
You want a pool that’s friendly to your kind, right?
Not toxic. So your buddies can come through without exploding into tiny splinters?
But the Miami water keeps going bad on you. ”
“That is what this young vampire’s blood will do, haven’t you been listening?” Jeremy said, sounding oddly reasonable for a talking murder tree.
“Alright, but isn’t it too late by then?
You want his blood to hit the water when it’s primed, not before it’s ready, or the toxicity in the water will spoil his blood before it’s even had a chance to work.
If it goes wrong, you could kill your people.
And unless you’re like the Witherbornes, who seem to take pride in trying to kill each other, your family’s untimely death would be a bad thing. ”
“That is . . . insightful.” Jeremy blinked. “Go on. Do you have a solution that can make their passage safer?”
“You need a buffer. Something in the system to soften the water, to calm it down, so it doesn’t fight back. This is what you were trying to get Jay to do? I saw his notes, and they didn’t make sense then, but now they do. He didn’t know how to help you, he tried but failed, so you killed him.”
“Jay Green was a terrible pool boy,” Jeremy said. “He had no idea. But you appear to. This . . . buffer. Is it something you can put in place now?”
“Sure. I just need to grab some things from the pump house over there.”
“You had better not be stalling.” Jeremy narrowed his hollow eyes.
“I’m a professional pool maintenance person.” Had I said that with the right kind of professional weight behind it? “Pools are my passion. I’ll help you, but you let Theo go after.”
Jeremy wasn’t going to let Theo go, we all knew it. But I had to play along.
Theo bucked and mumbled through his gag. Probably something along the lines of, “What the holy heck are you doing, Owen?!” I was wondering that myself. My buffer explanation was good, and also complete nonsense. I had no idea what was going on, but I could sure sell it like I did.
“Do it,” Jeremy snapped. “And hurry!”
I scooted behind him, hurried down the slope, and yanked open the pump-house doors.
Inside, everything was as it had been previously.
All the chemicals were here. I eyed the chlorine.
It would work if Jeremy was in the pool, but he wasn’t, and it didn’t look as though he planned to go swimming anytime soon. I needed something else.
Theo moaned.
I looked up. One of Jeremy’s root limbs had shifted into a jagged point and was poised in front of his chest. Over his heart.
Cold, visceral rage burned the wine from my veins, briefly turning my vision white. No. That was my one single thought. No. This wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t about to watch Theo die when I could do something to stop it, and stop Jeremy.
I grabbed the chemicals in their little buckets and boxes, scooped them up into my arms, and hobbled back to Jeremy. One bucket fell from my grip and clattered onto the tiled pool edge.
“Oops.”
I let another one go, and it clattered on the ground.
“Get on with it!” Jeremy snapped. “Make the water friendly.”
“Sure, right, yeah.”
“Now, Witherborne, prepare to bleed,” Jeremy said, in a climactic villain voice.
Right one cue, Theo’s eyes rolled, and his head lolled. Theo passed out, because there was no way he’d be able to stay conscious knowing he was about to bleed all over the place.
I dropped all the pots and buckets at once, creating a huge cacophony of irritating noise and chaos, as though I had no idea what I was doing. Which was accurate.
“The fool! He must be awake for this!” Jeremy grabbed Theo by the shoulders and rattled him.