Redlisted (30 page)

I could feel
Mirabel’s aura on the corpse, as if her blood lay cold in the
woman’s veins. I covered my face with my hands, trying to make
sense of what I’d seen. How much of it had been a delusion?

I felt nauseated.
Everyone had tried to warn me about her, and I’d ignored them,
and made myself party to whatever happened to this woman.

I stood, opened
the door to the closet, and stooped to pick up the poor woman’s
corpse from the ground. I carried her out into the hallway and
started wandering in the general direction of the study. Only hours
ago I was running from that very same place, desperate to get away
from Julian, sure that he was about to murder me. Had Mirabel induced
that panic, or had I come to it of my own accord? Probably it was a
combination of the two.

Perhaps Julian was
a murderer. Perhaps he was even trying to kill me. I couldn’t
bring myself to care any longer. If that’s what he wanted, he’d
probably get it whether or not I ran.

Not a minute
passed before Aya rounded a corner and ran up to me, worry etched
into her face.

“Adam! Oh,
my God, where have you been? I’ve been looking for you for
almost a day!”

“I... I’m
not really sure.”

She looked down at
the corpse, horrified.
Oh,
God, it’s started already.
“Who is she? What happened?”

I gave her a blank
look.

“Adam, you
can tell me,” she said.
Lie
to me if you have to. Say it was just a botched feeding attempt or
something.

“It’s
not what you’re thinking.”

“I won’t
tell Julian if you ask me not to.”
Ask
me not to. If you don’t—

“Aya,
listen, I didn’t kill her! Not even by accident. I found her
like this.”

She forced herself
to stifle a dismissive laugh.
Sure
you did.
“I—I’m sorry. She works in the seraglio, so I
thought—“

“She does?
Who is she?”

“I’m
sorry. I don’t know her name. I don’t usually spend time
with the women.” She looked both ways. “We really
shouldn’t talk about this out in the open. If the staff hears
about it, they’ll panic. We’re close to your quarters. We
should take her there for the time being.”

I nodded and
followed her through a few quick turns of the maze to the door to my
suite. I carried the anonymous woman into the sitting room, set her
down as gently as possible on a couch, and pulled her eyelids shut.

“So,”
Aya said, closing the door behind her, “if you didn’t
kill her, what happened?”

I frowned. I
didn’t want to discuss the hallucination—it was too
personal, too strange. I rolled the corpse onto her stomach instead,
brushing her hair to the side to reveal the spiral brand at the nape
of her neck.

It was enough. Aya
grabbed my shoulders. “You didn’t drink her blood, did
you?”

“No. I
didn’t. At least I don’t think I did—“

“What do you
mean, 'you don’t think'? How can you not know?”

“Well, I,
uh, I got lost in the labyrinth, and I had this elaborate
hallucination, and then I passed out,” I said. “I have no
idea what really happened.”

Aya groaned.

“I didn’t
drink anyone’s blood in the hallucination,” I offered.

“You need to
go see Julian right now,” she said. “I’ll call
Haruko and tell her what Mirabel did.”

I followed her
into the office.

She rushed to the
desk and grabbed the phone off the cradle. “He’s waiting
for you out in the forest. Use the card with the stone doors—the
card with the archway in the trees. You’ll know it when you see
it,” she said, starting to dial.

I reached into my
pocket and shuffled through the deck, looking for the sepulcher card,
but I didn’t see it. Frowning, I threw the cards onto the desk
and spread them out with my hands, pawing through them, searching for
the stone archway. It was gone.

“I must have
dropped it,” I said, shaking my head, “or...”

Or Haruko stole
it, I thought to myself.

The expression
drained from Aya’s face. She hung up the phone.

///

I hurried outside
after Aya, both of us walking at a brisk clip. I was both furious and
mortified. In hindsight it was patently obvious that Haruko had
seduced me, and for no apparent reason. No wonder she’d been so
cold to me afterward. It was all to get the stupid card. But why?
What did the Wardens want out in the sepulcher? I didn’t know
enough about revenant politics to guess.

The night air was
unseasonably cold, and darker than usual; the moon was hiding behind
heavy clouds. When Aya and I reached the rolling hills beyond the
gardens, she broke out into a run. I followed, looking down at my
feet with every third step, afraid I’d trip and fall face-first
into the grass.

Soon we reached
the edge of the forest. The trees swirled frenetically with shadowy
patterns too erratic to be the result of the shifting clouds
overhead. Aya pulled out a card from a pocket in the seam of her
skirt, and the dancing shadows calmed for a moment, parting just
enough to reveal a narrow path in the dirt.

Aya didn’t
hesitate. She plunged immediately into the ocean of trees, and I
followed after her.

The overgrown
trail beneath our feet altered its form constantly, its paths
truncating, bifurcating and coupling with startling alacrity. I
worried that, even with the assistance of the card, we could become
lost, trapped out here waiting for the sun to claim us. Nevertheless,
after about a half hour of running though the shifting trails, we
arrived at the same stone doors I’d seen in my dream. They
stood slightly ajar, open just enough for us to squeeze through one
at a time.

I gestured for Aya
to enter first. She shook her head.

“I can’t,”
she said. “I’ll wait here.”

I felt another
pang of anxiety at the idea of being left alone with Julian. “Why
not?”

“This wasn’t
always a grave site. It used to be a locus of power for Mnemosyne,
back before Master Julian took control of your House. She used a
number of terrible rituals to enchant this place, to make sure
initiates of other Houses couldn’t try to invade. Some of them
have worn off over the years, but Master Julian says it’s still
not safe for outsiders to enter.”

I frowned,
swallowing hard.

“Go,”
she said. “We can’t waste any time.”

I slipped between
the doors and into the sepulcher.

The stone stairs
descended in slow increments counter-clockwise around the
circumference of the enormous pit. I ran my hand against the bare
earth of the wall as I climbed down the stairs, cold soil caking on
my palm. I could only barely make out Julian’s dim silhouette
hunched between the two twin pools; the center of the pit was nearly
pitch black.

As I stepped off
the final stair, he raised his head and acknowledged me with a
glance. His hair and clothing were soaked, as if he’d just gone
swimming fully-clothed, and he was carrying something in his left
hand, something concealed beneath a dripping shroud. He removed it,
revealing a woman’s head with pale skin and stringy
white-blonde hair. He walked to the central tomb along the far edge
of the pit and placed the head in the circular depression he’d
filled with his blood in my dream.

He drywashed his
hands. “Not exactly a scene which inspires one’s trust, I
imagine. My apologies.”

“What are
you doing with that?”

“This is the
head of Mnemosyne. The head of our mother. I came out here when you
went missing, thinking I’d seek her counsel. But here you are.”
He wrung out the hem of his shirt. “Where have you been?”

“I don’t
really know. I had a hallucination. I think Mirabel induced it—“

“What? What
on earth happened?”

“I...”
I didn’t want to talk about it with him. “I was walking
through the labyrinth in the basement and... I got stuck somehow,
closed off in a loop of four hallways with no doors. I was trapped
there for a while. Then a door appeared along one of the walls—the
door to the seraglio.”

He frowned,
pushing a dripping strand of hair out of his eyes. “Go on.”

“I went
inside,” I said, my chest tightening. “It was almost
completely empty. There was only one person inside. Someone I knew
from before.”

“Who?”

“It was a...
it was some vision of an ex-girlfriend of mine. She was terrified.
Her memory had been erased.” I took a breath and forced myself
to steady my voice. “I tried to talk to her. I told her I’d
help her escape.”

“Hold on. At
any point during this interaction, did you—“ Julian’s
mouth puckered in distaste—“bite her?”

“No,”
I said, disgusted. “I’m capable of controlling myself.”

“I don’t
mean any offense,” he said. “What happened next?”

“I passed
out,” I said, omitting the part with the spectral woman.
“Later, I woke up in a storage closet. There was a corpse next
to me on the floor—“

“Did it have
the mark? The spiral? Or didn’t you notice?”

“Yes. On the
back of her neck.” I shuddered, thinking about the dead woman,
how we’d just left her lying in the sitting room. “Aya
told me she worked in the seraglio.”

“That’s
terrible. Who was it?”

“I don’t
know. Aya didn’t know her name.”

Julian looked
away, clenching his hands into fists.

“Isn’t
there anything we can do?” I said. “Can’t we revive
her? You know, initiate her?”

He shook his head.
“I’ve resolved never to do it again.”

“But what
about Aya? Or me? Can’t one of us do it?”

“Aya can’t
use her blood. The Wardens have sealed her from doing so. It would be
up to you.” He sighed. “But you’re so young. You’d
have an extremely slim chance of reviving her.”

I grit my teeth.

“Adam...
this brings me to something I’ve been meaning to tell you,”
he said, looking down into the pool of water to my right. “I’m
afraid I’ve lied to you, and I’ve allowed you to suffer
under more than one misunderstanding. I may have inadvertently
enabled Mirabel to manipulate you in the way she did.”

“Lied to me
about what?”

“Well, to
begin with, I lied by omission while discussing how you died.”

“I know I
didn’t die in the car crash, but...”

“You didn’t
remember your death upon your revival. I wasn’t sure how to
tell you what really happened. I was afraid...” He paused,
bringing a hand to his mouth. “I was afraid you’d try to
kill yourself again.”

“I committed
suicide?”

“You hung
yourself.”

My eyes lost
focus. I brought a hand to my neck, ran my fingertips across my
throat.

“Believe me,
I understand the impulse,” he said, his tone bittersweet. “I
have more to tell you, unfortunately. You may want to have a seat.
It’s a long story.”

I sat down on the
last step of the spiral staircase. Julian began to speak, pacing back
and forth across the pit, his hands clasped behind his back.

“I never
wanted to initiate Mirabel. I only did so at the request of a
friend—the telepath I told you about, my mentor Lucien. He was
in love with her, you see, but our mother had forbidden him from
initiating her himself.

“I fully
intended to leave Mirabel in his care after I raised her from the
dead. I had no interest in tutoring her myself. But once Mnemosyne
discovered what we had done, she...” He took a breath. “Well,
I’ve already told you how she murdered him.

“I was left
with Mirabel as my charge. I didn’t want her, but I couldn’t
just abandon her. She wasn’t the same then as she is now. She
used to be a sweet girl, really, an actress and a singer with an
artist’s soul. While I can’t say I ever loved her—at
least, not in the way Lucien did—in the beginning I was quite
fond of her.