A Temptation of Angels (2 page)

Whatever was happening was going to get worse before the night was over.

Feeling along the floor for the key, Helen tried to ignore the noise from the rest of the house. Her hiding place was not large, and it only took a few moments for her fingers to close around the chain attached to the key. She grasped it carefully in one hand and felt again for the keyhole. This time, it didn’t take long.

Using both hands, she lined the key up with the hole in a couple of tries, turning it quickly and scooting away from the hidden door until her back stopped against a solid block of wood. She had only a few moments, a few precious moments of silence, before she heard the thud of boot steps.

At first the footfalls were distant. Helen thought they would pass her chamber completely, but it wasn’t long before they grew louder and louder and she knew they were inside her room. She had a flash of hope. Hope that it was Father coming to get her. To tell her that whatever danger had been in the house had gone. But she knew it wasn’t him when the boot steps slowed. There was no rush to the door of her tiny room to free her from its darkness.

Instead, the footsteps made a slow pass of her chamber before stopping suddenly in front of the hiding place.
Helen tried to slow her shallow breathing as she waited for the footsteps to move away, but they didn’t. Whoever had entered her chamber was still there. She held as still as possible, attempting to calm her mind with the knowledge that she had spent many hours in the room, and there had never been any hint of the secret door, even during times of bright sunlight. Surely this stranger would not be able to see the opening in the dark of night and with her great dressing mirror pushed in front of it.

For a few seconds, it worked. She began to breathe a little easier in the silence.

But that was before the room outside exploded into riotous noise. Before she heard the dressing table cleared of its bottles and jars, the glass thudding against the carpets and shattering against the wood floorboards. Before she heard the bureau overturned, the armoire pushed over. And yes, before she heard the heavy carved mirror guarding her hiding place tipped to the floor, the glass shattering into a million pieces.

I
n her mind’s eye, Helen could see her pursuer surveying the newly destroyed room, scanning the floors and walls for the hiding place that was hers. She heard the breathing, raspy but unlabored, even through the wall.

Somehow, she knew it was a man, though she could not have said why. Perhaps it was the heavy boot steps, which had now fallen silent. Or the aggressive energy probing the space between her chamber and the inside of the wall, where she hid, crouched and still.

Whatever it was, she
felt
the man searching on the other side.

She cursed her stupidity for not having located the staircase before he arrived, if only to give her some hope of escape. Now she had no choice but to be quiet. To wait as Mother had instructed her to do.

She remembered the game she played with Father when she was small. It was called Find the Way Out, and on any given outing, be it to the park, a museum, or a restaurant for tea, Helen’s father would command her to locate both the nearest and least obvious of exits. She had enjoyed the challenge in the safety of Father’s company.

There was no such safety here.

Something scraped the outside of the wall, and Helen’s head jerked up in response to the sound. It seemed impossible that the man on the other side of the door could not hear her breathing. That he could not feel her cowering as she felt him seeking.

The sound became fainter, and she imagined him circling her chamber, running his hands over the walls. He was completing his circle, the sound coming back around, when the footfalls of another interrupted his progress.

“Where is she?” The voice was garbled, but Helen could still make out the words. She tried to place their direction, deciding that whoever spoke them was likely standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

She held her breath in the pause that followed, waiting for her pursuer to answer. The seconds stretched, and she could not help wondering if perhaps the man knew exactly where
she was hidden. If he was simply toying with her for his own amusement.

His voice, when it came, was younger and clearer than Helen expected, even muffled as it was from outside her hiding place. “She’s not here. They must have moved her before we arrived. What of the others?”

She held her breath, waiting to hear the fate of her parents and their colleagues.

“Taken care of.” The breath caught in Helen’s throat as she frantically tried to decipher the meaning of so simple a phrase. She did not have long to ponder the matter before the other man asked a question of his own. “What should I do now?”

Helen’s whole life was suspended in the pause that followed. It crashed to the floor with the answer.

“Burn it.”

The words were almost impossible to comprehend. Surely they did not mean to burn the house in its entirety. Surely she would not be trapped in the wall as the house fell in flames around her.

It was a comforting brand of denial, and she clutched the valise more tightly to her chest as the boot steps on the other side of the wall turned and made their way from the room. The house grew silent, and her brain settled into an oblivious
lethargy. She remained very still even after the first tendrils of smoke drifted up through the floorboards and her forehead began to bead with sweat, the temperature slowly rising within the walls.

It was not until something crashed beneath her, followed by the unmistakable crackle of flames from her chamber, that she was shaken from her stupor. Her mother’s words drifted on the smoke that seeped with ever-increasing thickness through the floor and walls.

There is a stair that will lead you beneath the house and back up again farther down the road.…

She had told Helen to wait until the house was silent, but Helen knew it would never be silent again. Not until it was ashes. She was already fighting the urge to cough and gasp, the smoke filling the small room as her nightdress stuck to her skin in the heat of the fire.

Letting go of the valise with one hand, she reached around her neck for the pendant that had been hers since her tenth birthday. She had a flash of her parents, their smiles tinged with something like awe as she had removed the pendant from its elaborately wrapped gift box. Her mother had knelt beside her, leaning in for a bone-crushing embrace.

It’s an important heirloom, Helen. Never remove it. Never.

Her eyes shone in the candlelight from the elaborately set dinner table, and Helen had nodded with a lump in her throat, though she did not know if it was from worry or affection. She had placed the strange object—a rod with a translucent prism glittering at one end and a filigree metal crown at the other—around her neck.

As her mother had instructed, she had not taken it off since.

She reached for it now, unable to contain her retching as a cough burst forth from her throat. She had no idea how the pendant could help her. As far as she knew, it was nothing more than an exotic piece of jewelry. But her mother had told her to light the way with it, and she had nothing else to trust save those instructions.

Grasping the necklace in her free hand, Helen waved it in the dark. There was no light, only a chilling cold that spread from her palm, up her arm, and to the outer reaches of her body, quelling even the heat from the quickly enclosing fire. Still, it was not the heat alone that was her enemy. The smoke stung her eyes and throat, and a series of hacking coughs burst too loudly into the small space around her. It was when she recovered her wits a moment later that she thought she could make out the floorboards beneath her feet and perhaps even the wall in front of her. Squinting into the darkness, she wondered if it was her
imagination. If perhaps she was simply becoming used to the dark. But no, the room
was
becoming lighter, and when her eyes followed the light to its source, she understood why.

She had been holding it wrong. The pendant glowed from the translucent crystal held inside her fist. Once she flipped it around, holding it by the metal crown, the other end glowed like a tiny beacon, an eerie green light illuminating the wall in front of her and the ones to her right and left. Now she could see the smoke filling the room. It dipped and swirled in the light. She scooted away from the wall at her back, gagging and choking as the smoke filled her lungs and knowing the space behind her was the only hope for the stairs Mother had promised.

At first, it seemed only a wall—a solid span of timber that had sheltered her back as she listened to the footsteps of the man stalking her from within the bedchamber. But when she followed it with her eyes to the place where it should meet the other wall, she realized it didn’t quite connect. Crawling toward the gap while clutching her bag in one hand and her pendant in the other was neither easy nor quiet, but she had long since given up remaining silent, despite her mother’s warning. If the creaking and crackling of the fire were any indication, her scuffling across the floor of the hidden room was the very least of her concerns.

It took only seconds to reach the break in the wooden wall. The gap was larger than she first thought, and she leaned forward, peering around to the blackness on the other side.

The stairs were just as Mother said they would be. They descended in a tightly packed spiral into utter darkness below, but the burning in Helen’s eyes and lungs was a reminder that she had no choice. Mother had said they would come and they had. She had said the stairs would be here and they were. She had said Helen would escape—and she would.

She hesitated at the top of the stairs as the groaning of the house grew stronger, the smoke thicker. She saw the fear in her mother’s eyes in the moment before they had been separated. Helen retched, her lungs burning, even as the resolve to return for her parents solidified.

Leaving her mother and father to this dark fate was impossible.

She started back for the door to her hiding place but stopped short when her mother’s voice echoed through her mind.

“You will get out of here alive… Otherwise, it’s all for nothing.”

Something fell with a crash somewhere below, and the floorboards quaked under Helen’s feet. She didn’t know what was happening or why, but one thing was certain: Her parents wanted her out of the house alive, and they had been willing
to sacrifice their own lives to see it done. If she went back now and was killed, her mother would be right: It would have been for nothing.

She would find Darius and Griffin and enlist their help. Then, she would come back for her parents.

Looping the valise’s handle over her shoulder, Helen scooted back to the stair, holding the pendant in front of her to illuminate the way. She wasted only seconds fumbling for a handrail before realizing that it was futile. There wasn’t one. The stairs were placed right up against the walls of the house. They would have to be her guide.

Wherever they led, it was the only way out, for the crashing of the house grew around her until she was certain the roof itself was falling. The heat and smoke was still overwhelming, and she was surprised every moment when the stairwell did not cave in on her completely.

Time lost all meaning in the blackness floating above, below, and around the staircase. She focused only on the next step, pushing aside the feeling that she was descending into hell itself. To a place where there was no comfort, no safety. A place where she would be alone, if she were to survive at all.

Then, all at once, a smooth expanse of floor stretched in front of her. She stepped onto it, relieved to find a stone wall
to one side and a tunnel heading in the other direction. Whoever had made her escape route had made certain there would be no doubt which way she should go.

She had not noticed a decrease in the smoke and heat on her way down the stairs, but as she made her way through the tunnel, her head began to clear. The air was cold and damp. She sucked it greedily into her lungs while trying to blink the soot away from her eyes. For a time, she walked into the dark without a thought as to where she was going, relieved simply to be away from the smoke of the house.

It was only when she fell against the stone wall that she realized her exhaustion. It was a sudden, bone-deep fatigue that settled not only into her body but also into her consciousness. Her very will to go on. The pendant’s green light flickered in the darkness, and she stood straighter, worrying suddenly about being stuck in the tunnel with no light. It had never occurred to her that the light of the pendant might be limited, and she pushed off against the wall, continuing down the tunnel with as much speed as she could muster in her weakened state.

She almost ran into the wall before seeing it.

The tunnel ended abruptly, and she felt a surge of claustrophobic panic in the moments before she noticed the rough-
hewn door set into the wall. Even with the pendant’s diminished light, she could see the simple iron handle, but tugging on it did no good. The door was locked.

Her legs buckled, and she slid to the ground, back against the cold stone of the wall. The light dimmed further and she clasped her hand more tightly around it, willing it to stay lit. As she tugged on the pendant, it was the chain, cool against her neck that reminded her of the key.

Forcing herself to stand, she reached inside her nightdress, pulling out the key her mother had used to open the hiding place in her wall. The key Helen had used to lock the door behind her.

However dim the remaining light of the pendant, it was enough to light the keyhole. She pushed the key into it and turned, feeling a bolt disengage from somewhere inside the door. Letting the key drop back against the bodice of her nightdress, she reached for the handle, then hesitated, wondering what was on the other side.

But she knew that she had no choice. She had to open the door and step through it. The only thing that awaited her at the other end of the tunnel was the surely burned ruins of her childhood home and the men who hunted her. She turned the handle and pushed.