Sierra Dean - Secret Unleashed

“What’s that?” His voice was muffled by my hand.

“What?”

“Next to the door.”

“You mean the awful graffiti?”

“Yes, can you show me the floor?”

I pointed the phone down to my feet to let him see the ground beneath the big green wang on the wall.

“Can you see that?”

I stopped looking at his face and turned my attention to the floor. All I saw was a fine coating of dust.

“Dust.”

“Drywall dust,” he corrected.

I checked the floor in other areas, but the dust was only located in the one spot. When I looked up from my crouched position, I could see the faintest bubbling in the carpet where the graffiti was painted.

“How the hell did you see that?” I stood and aimed the phone at the gap.

“Isn’t that why you called me? Because I can see things like that?”

He was absolutely right. “Thank you. Do you want to see what it is?”

Yawning again, he smiled faintly at the screen, possibly unaware I could still see his face. It wasn’t like him to show any kind of emotion. Unless annoyance counted.

“No. You do your thing.” The screen went black before I had a chance to thank him a second time.

I peeled back the carpet, exposing a panel of plain white drywall behind it. The drywall flaked more as I picked at it with my fingernail, sending a new rain of dust to the floor.

“He hid something here,” I told Maxime and Holden, as if they hadn’t been listening to my entire discussion with Keaty.

Finding a notch in the drywall, I dug my finger in and tugged. The panel groaned forward an inch but was held in place by the carpeting. Remembering the spider, the last thing I wanted to do was stick my hand into a dark hole in the wall, but if I was going to find what Sutherland had hidden, I didn’t have much of a choice.

The hole felt endless. I got my arm in all the way up to my shoulder, and my fingers were groping at nothingness. There had to be something in there.

“For fuck’s sake,” I grumbled, trying to get a new angle. I pressed my palm against the inside of the panel for support, and my fingers grazed something metallic.

The vampires must have seen my eyes widen because Maxime asked, “Did you find something?”

“I-I don’t know. I think so?” I grasped at the object and tugged hard. It came free easily, causing me to almost drop it in my overeager attempt to wrench it loose.

Retrieving my arm from the wall, I dusted myself off and opened my hand up to see what I’d found.

“It’s a key,” Holden said, like we hadn’t been able to suss that out on our own.

The key wasn’t fancy by any means, a simple Victorian-style design which might have once been silver—not real silver though, or it would have burned me—but was now a tarnished brass color. I turned it over in my palm, trying to spot any engravings or mysterious signs that might indicate what it was for.

“Any ideas?” I held it level so they could get a better look.

“It’s old,” Maxime observed, since we were all in the habit of stating the obvious tonight. “If he was looking for something at the Winchester Mansion, perhaps the key belongs there.”

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?