Hellbent (35 page)

“I’m not suggesting it. I’m telling you outright, the man offed himself from our roof. It was embarrassing for everyone, and if anyone should feel any modicum of obligation or uncertainty, it should be the San Francisco people who allowed him to travel so far without assistance. The poor man was clearly in an unrested state of mind.”

“Unrested?” What a stupid word. I could’ve sworn she’d made it up on the spot.

“You know what I mean.” She gave a lazy hand-flap. “He wasn’t himself the entire time he visited, and when we found what was left of him on the roof one night, it’d be an exaggeration to say that anyone was surprised.”

“Surely you aren’t suggesting that the San Francisco head of House came all this way merely to ‘off himself’ on your premises? If he was feeling that fragile, he could’ve done an easier job at home—and he wouldn’t have left his son in a fraction of his present turmoil.”

Paul said drolly, “Suicide is selfish.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said, struggling to keep my disbelief in
check. “It also feels …” I started to say “unlikely,” but checked myself before I wrecked myself, as the kids are putting it these days.

“It feels sudden, I imagine.” So said Raleigh, I believe.

He was a smallish man with cold eyes and a pinched shape to his face that would’ve implied nearsightedness if he’d been alive. As it was, he just looked like the kind of guy who’d shoplift for kicks.

I seized the word. “Sudden, yes. There was no indication in San Francisco that he was unwell in any manner, much less—” I stopped. I was about to ask if anyone else heard what I was hearing—a thin, high-pitched beep coming from deeper within the house.

I didn’t have to ask it. Everyone sat up straight at the first chime, rigid with varying states of alarm and discomfort. Odo immediately vanished, with Raleigh and Gibson dashing off in different directions—all but bouncing off each other in their haste to vacate the premises.

Marie cringed and clutched at her “mother.” “Not again,” she gasped. “Mother, do something!”

Theresa’s response was swift and direct. She rose up off the couch and backhanded the girl hard enough to have broken the neck of an ordinary mortal.

Marie grasped at her face in shock. Blood oozed from between her fingers, via a crushed nose or busted lips, I assumed. To my surprise, her eyes hardened above those bloody hands, and in an instant she was on her feet and lunging at Theresa—who shoved her back onto the couch. Honestly, I wouldn’t have thought the little milquetoast thing had it in her.

“You’re too fucking
weak
, dearest. Get in the safe room if all you’re going to do is cry!”

“I won’t!” she burbled, and when she removed her hands I
could see that yes, her nose was tweaked in a bad direction and there was blood on her teeth. “I won’t hide with you, not anymore!”

Theresa bent forward and hit her again, hard enough to engage the girl’s rage or defensive mechanisms—and within the batting of an eye, they were tumbling together on the floor, wrestling and biting like kindergartners, flinging blood all over the weird white furnishings. Paul finally left the fireplace, where he’d been standing with one foot on the slate frontispiece like it was first base, dove into the spinning pile, and kicked them apart. “Not now, you dumb bitches! Get up—get moving! And you.” He directed one long, waxy finger at me. “Do your fucking job.”

“My … my fucking job?” Pleasantries at an end already?

“Seneschals keep the peace, and you’re here under our auspices. Go keep some goddamn peace.” He swung out a leg to clip his wife but she caught it and threw him—hard—right up against a window on the other side of the room. He crashed into the curtain-covered portal. It didn’t smash, but it crunched strangely.

Shatterproof glass, as I could’ve predicted.

“Keep the peace?” I damn near shouted at all the melee’s participants. “I don’t even know what’s breaking it!”

“You’re an investigator.
Investigate
,” Theresa sneered, and now there was blood all over her face, too, and on her hands. It was also all over the couch and the carpet, and since this brawl didn’t look like it was excessively out of the ordinary, I shuddered to consider their cleaning bills.

Paul crawled out of the curtains in time to chase the two women from the room, leaving me alone and very confused about what had just happened. The tweeting, pinging chime of the alarm still dinged through the premises undaunted by the scattering of all the occupants. I didn’t know what had tripped it, and I didn’t know where to turn it off.

Adrian?
I sent it as hard as I could.
Adrian?

What’s going on?

No idea. Can you get back up here?

His answer was a garbled negative, and no matter how hard I listened or pushed, I couldn’t get anything more. I told myself that he’d sounded fine—concerned, but not threatened—and I should leave him wherever he was, in Ghoultown downstairs. Whatever wanted inside (assuming something
was
attempting to get inside) was trying it at night. This meant that it (a) was willing to take on real, live, awake, and pissed-off vampires, so therefore it (b) probably didn’t have much interest in the staff.

Why was he/she/it trying to get inside now, anyway? I wondered it in a flash, and then jumped to a conclusion that was not at all reassuring, but somewhat logical: The intruder had seen us come in, and welcomed us as convenient distractions.

Well, I had to tell myself something. Otherwise I’d barge downstairs (providing I could find it) and rip the doors off the hinges to get Adrian out, while swearing about how this was all a preposterously bad idea in the first place and vowing never to let him out of my sight again.

Hey, the Barringtons wanted to act crazy?

I would give them crazy.

But not yet. I tried to be logical and treat this like any other case of me being inside a place with an alarm going off.

Mind you, it’s not often that I’m sloppy enough to set off any alarms during my acquisitive activities. It’s happened a few times, I confess, but only a few. And there are protocols in place, things you do to minimize the damage and regain control over the situation.

First things first. An alarm was going off. Something or someone had set it off. What or who? Couldn’t say.

No sign of any assault on the grounds, not yet. I mean, no
firebombs were going off and no windows were breaking. If anything, the place was eerily dead except for that beep, beep, beeping of the distant alarm.

So, all right. The alarm.

Where was it coming from, and how did I shut it off?

Both of these questions could likely be answered if I could track my way to a central control room. There had to be one. Anyplace as huge and guarded as this most assuredly had some command central deep in the house, likely in—or close by—this “safe room” … into which I had not been invited, not that I was crying about it.

Frankly, I’d rather be running free with an alarm going off and someone trying to get inside than trapped in a room with that loopy bunch. Again I felt a pang of concern for Adrian, but I talked myself off that ledge by recalling that the ghouls were bunked elsewhere, segregated as a class.

No self-respecting vampire in his or her right mind would hide with a bunch of ghouls. They’re worthless, except during the daytime when there’s nobody else to watch you. At night, we’re better off watching our own backs. Only the most desperate and feeble of vampires would use ghouls as pawns or cannon fodder.

And just like that, I was back to being worried sick.

But it wouldn’t do me any good. Finding a control room, that would do me some good. It might even have cameras showing me what was going on in the basement’s Ghoultown, if I was lucky. All I had to do was find it.

Unaware if I was now effectively all by myself in this ludicrous McMansion’s tacky corridors, I dashed through them with all my wimpy psychic sensors thrown open like a net, trawling the place for signs of previously undisclosed inhabitants. I didn’t find any. I found overturned tables and chairs that had been knocked askew; I saw a kitchen with gleaming steel pots and pans hanging
from a center rack, and these pans were swaying gently like they’d been recently touched. I found two spare bedrooms that were furnished as lightly as a hotel room, and I breezed past a home gymnasium proving that yes, these people would do anything to look like regular … um,
people
.

Then I snared the sense that someone was close, up ahead, to the right.

I veered that way and nearly collided with Clifford O’Donnell, whom I was determined not to call “Odo” anymore. His wide, square face was set in grim lines, but he didn’t look particularly frightened. It was something else I saw in him, and something else I felt radiating off him. Not fear, and not protectiveness. Not even a grudging awareness that self-defense might be called for at any moment.

No.

When I drew up short to keep from face-planting into his collarbone, I saw his face very clearly, very closely, and I realized that it was
contempt
. Not for me, I didn’t think—for his expression changed when he realized I was the one who’d nearly smacked into him.

“Ms. Pendle,” he said. “They abandoned you up here with me, did they?”

“Up here? Their safe room is underground?”

“It’s more of a safe compound, really.”

“What about my ghoul?” I asked, not even caring if it gave too much away for me to be so concerned.

“Oh, they don’t stay with the ghouls. Their hideaway is underneath the backyard, all the way back to the pool.”

“Wait. There’s a pool?”

“Behind the freestanding garage.”

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.

“I’ve never seen any of them swim in it, that’s for damn sure,” he said.

The beeping went on patiently, persistently … more loudly, now that I was closer to the home’s dense center. It called unceasingly from somewhere nearby.

I asked Clifford, “They must have a control room—someplace where the security cameras, feeds, and sensors converge.”

“Yes, it’s this way.” I got the impression he had just come from it, and this impression was verified when he said, “I was trying to figure out how to turn it off, but they’ve changed so much since the last time I was here … I have no idea how it works. I need a goddamn tutorial, I swear.”

“No you don’t. You just need
me
,” I said with a forced smile.

The room felt claustrophobic and rounded, stuffed as it was with control panels, keyboards, screens, wires, and buttons, but not a window in sight. It was the size of a huge closet or a small bedroom, take your pick, and its lights and signs were going bananas.

“You know how to deal with this kind of thing? Because I won’t lie, it’s well above my pay grade.”

“Oddly enough, it falls right within mine. At least, my
usual
pay grade.”

“San Francisco checkbooks must be more generous than Atlanta ones.”

I scanned the equipment, looking for the master panel and finding it. “I’m not a seneschal by trade, only for travel purposes.”

“And for your usual gig …?” He let the question hang as he watched me flip switches, press buttons, and turn things on, up, and off.

“I do something else.”

The system was an epic mess in every direction—a Frankensteined
work of artlessness combining at least four different security systems without a central mainframe. Whoever installed it ought to be dragged into the street and shot. I had a feeling the Barringtons thought they were being clever when they hired four different companies to do the installation.

It wasn’t clever. It was certifiably retarded.

“What are you doing?” Clifford asked, now genuinely interested.

“See those split screens over there?”

“The ones that go into four quadrants, or two?”

“Four,” I specified. “Something tripped the system that watches those areas—I can’t really tell what it was. I can see in the dark, but you need better infrared than this if you want to guard property without good exterior lights.”

He squinted at the monitor. “That’s the northern edge of the lawn.” He poked at one square. “That’s the southern edge, and these two are the property behind the garage. Did you park at the small lot by the back door?”

“Yeah.”

“Then if you tilted the camera a bit, you’d be able to see your car in this square.”

“That’s useful to know, thanks. You don’t see anything there now, do you?” I asked, my fingers still flying over the controls like they were Braille and I was reading the ever-living shit out of them. It sounds like hyperbole, I know—but I was very close to flying blind. I know what these systems look like and how they work, sure. However, that doesn’t mean I can magically parse a clusterfuck such as this without taking some time to get to know it first.

“No, I don’t see anything. Whatever set it off is gone now.”

Over to my left, something lit up with a squeal. A green light
flashed. I swatted it like a Whac-A-Mole. “Gone, but not far. What’s this monitor showing?” I pointed at a split-screen with one side lit up, and one side in near darkness. Who the hell puts a camera in the dark when it doesn’t have infrared? Idiots, that’s who.

These people weren’t crazy, they were morons. There’s strength in madness—I knew that better than anyone, and I was pretty sure my new tenant Elizabeth Creed would agree with me there. But this … this feigned insanity? It was a paper mask, a fragile thing worn for show.

But it didn’t fool
me
. Not anymore, now that I’d seen it up close.

Clifford indicated the dark half of the screen. “That’s the yard by the gate. And the front yard outside it, where the street is.”

“Got it.”

“What does that mean?”

I said, “Someone’s checking the perimeter—moving back to front, skirting the edges.”

“Dammit, I think you’re right. Look, there!” he said, jamming his finger at a screen so hard he nearly cracked it. “Did you see that?”

“No, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“A fast-moving sucker won’t show up for shit on these things.”

I grinned. “Oh, I know. Keep your eyes on them anyway, will you? All the monitors you can watch at once, just … watch. And don’t blink. We need to know how many intruders we’re dealing with.”