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“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?
Or had someone gotten to him before he had a chance?
What was it we were hunting that was important enough he was willing to risk being declared a rogue for it? And if he hadn’t run, what was so special it warranted abducting a vampire?
I had no idea what kind of man my father had been, but my mother had loved him, and my grandfather had allowed them to be together. For a werewolf king to like a human teenager, there must have been something good about Sutherland, something decent.
All of my mother’s goodness had faded the day Sutherland died, but was the same true of my father? I wanted to believe whatever once made him worthy of being loved still existed. I wanted to meet him and find out I wasn’t made up of entirely bad DNA.
“We go tomorrow. ” I finished off my blood with a scowl. “If we don’t find Sutherland, we’re damn well going to find something. ” I was sick of coming up short on answers. The last thing I wanted to find was more questions.
If I wanted questions going unanswered, I could just watch Lost.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Stop looking. ”
I was alone in the dark, unable to see anything. My nighttime eyesight worked a lot like night-vision goggles in that I could see but only if there was some small spark of light to begin with. If the darkness was complete, I was blind.
I stood still, unwilling to move in case I ran into anything unpleasant or accidentally found myself on the edge of a bottomless pit. Who knew what lurked in the darkness?
Nothing moved or gave me any indication someone was with me, but still the voice said, “Stop looking. ”
Shivers rocked me hard, like I’d been plunged into a vat of icy water and quickly removed. “Hello?” Holding my hand out in front of me, I hoped to feel something, but my fingers grasped at empty space.
“You won’t find what you’re after. ” The voice was masculine, not a common thing for my dreams, unless you counted the ones where I was naked with Holden. But this wasn’t a fun dream. I wasn’t totally sure it was a dream.
