Jaxson's Song (14 page)

What had just happened,
though, was…different. Unease pooled in his gut and he swore again,
hands on his hips as he studied Kate’s house. The next thing he
knew, he was clomping down the stairs, green-gel sandals awkwardly
crossing the patch of lawn that separated the two
properties.

“
Might as well get it over with and check on her now. If I
don’t, she’ll just be banging on my door again in the middle of the
night,” he muttered under his breath as he jogged up her porch
steps. The worn boards creaked a protest under his weight as he
strode across them to her front door.

Chapter
Twelve

Glass House

T
he
bottle of wine tipped
precariously close to the rug as Kate went for another swig,
decided propping herself to a sitting position was way too much
effort, and set it down with a thunk. It connected with the coffee
table, wobbled for half a second before righting itself. Kate
flopped back against the floor and stared up at the crystal
chandelier.
Somebody ought to dust that
thing
…

She
ought
to dust that thing. Yeah,
that’s it. She would dust. Where had Aunt Viola kept the furniture
polish? Kate began to giggle. What was she thinking? Aunt Viola
didn’t have furniture polish. She squinted through her lashes at
the thick layer of gray fuzz that clung to the chandelier. Clearly
this was a polish-free house.

“
Oh, well.” She gestured with one half-limp arm. “Who’s gonna
see it all the way up there, anyway?” Then she frowned as another
thought occurred to her. “Hey, wait—I’m selling the house.” She
laughed. “It’s not my problem anymore. Let the next person deal
with it. Bon voyage!” she sang out loftily.

A chill caressed the side
of her face, raced along the bare arm closest to the table,
invisible fingers that were gentle but left ice in their wake. Kate
shivered, and even in her inebriated state she registered the
sudden drop in temperature.

“
What…” She froze, gripped by the sense that the air
surrounding her was suddenly too thick, too quiet. Her breath
misted in front of her face and she blinked, but in the next
instant the temperature rose. The room was back to normal, so
quickly that Kate was sure she must have imagined the entire thing.
Her eyes swung first left, then right.

From her vantage point on
the floor, all she could see of the immediate vicinity was the
living room’s gold-and-eggplant Fleur-de-lis patterned sofa and the
two matching chairs. The legs of the three round,
knick-knack-covered tables were ornately carved. She reached out
one finger and traced it along the scarred wood of the coffee
table; this close, it was easy to spot the small pits and grooves
in the dark mahogany wood. The braided rug beneath her back was
threadbare and scratchy where it brushed against the skin left bare
by her tank-top.

The clock chimed nine
times and Kate jumped, startled out of her slow perusal of the
furniture, and the dust motes that drifted down to swirl around her
face.
What
? Her eyes flashed to the ceiling above her head. The
fragile-looking glass teardrops were swaying gently back and forth,
just enough to dislodge some of the dust on the surface and send it
fluttering down in minuscule tufts.

Kate rubbed at her face as
a thin rope of dust landed beneath her nose. When her gaze returned
to the light fixture high above her head, she frowned. It wasn’t
moving now.

“
Wow…yeah, time to call it a night,” she said under her
breath.

The room tilted and spun
as she rose, using various parts of the coffee table to anchor her
swaying body and assist her on the way up. First she gripped the
solid pine legs, then slid one cautious hand to the upper rungs of
the table. Finally, on her knees now, she gripped the top and sides
of the—thankfully heavy—piece of furniture, and climbed unsteadily
to her feet.

“
Gotta get my sea legs,” she muttered, arms akimbo as the room
dipped and swayed around her. The blood rushed to her head, and
with it, a terrible pounding. But she continued on, reaching out to
snag the bottle of wine.

The pounding in her head
subsided, and Kate concentrated on putting one bare foot in front
of the other, determined to make it to the stairs. Past the
entryway and down the hall she wobbled, a woman on a mission—to
stay upright. Gollum—as she’d chosen to call him—wove in and out
around her ankles, his ploy for attention nearly tripping her as
she poured all her concentration into making it up the stairs. The
bottle tipped forward as she stumbled, its contents sloshing over
the narrow rim and raining down onto the cat.

“
Oh sorry, kitty…” Kate crooned as the cat danced away from
her, shaking its head with all the vigor of a German Sheppard fresh
from a bath. The vague amusement Kate was riding high on died a
slow death, though, when her new pet went absolutely
still.

“
Gollum?” she murmured, leaning heavily on the smooth, dark
wooden railing, her eyes switching back and forth between the
suddenly defensive cat and the ordinary looking second floor
hallway. Something had made the cat go on high alert, but Kate
didn’t have the first clue of what that “something” could possibly
be.

The light was on, and from
her sort-of-halfway-up-the-stairs vantage point, she could see the
empty, silent hallway; all of the doors were closed, just as they
had been earlier. Or had they been? She frowned, goosebumps raising
on her bare arms as the cat hunched its shoulders forward and gave
a feral sounding hiss at…nothing.

The bottle began to grow
heavy in her grasp, and Kate decided she’d hung out on the
stairwell long enough. With one final, teeth-baring hiss, Gollum
turned tail and fled back down the stairs, leaving a trail of
wine-colored paw prints in his wake. The pounding had resumed and
Kate touched a hand to her head, wanting nothing more than to get
somewhere—preferably a bed—and lay down. Tightening her grip on
both banister and bottle, she half walked, half dragged herself the
rest of the way up the stairs.

She took two steps away
from the staircase, until her toes grazed the edge of the ancient
runner that lined the entire hallway, its tea-rose and stem pattern
badly aged. She’d thought a good vacuum would put some life back
into the rug but it hadn’t made much of a difference at all, she
mused. The light fixture above her head flickered but went
unnoticed. Instead, her gaze followed the faded rose pattern to the
end of the hall, to the very last door; this one was open a crack.
The glass room.

The narrow strip revealed
nothing but a thick, heavy darkness.

She didn’t want to go into
that room. Olivia and Lindsey had cracked jokes about the room—and
its many possible uses. And in the safe, secure light of day, Kate
had smiled and laughed along with them, but now she shivered,
peering through the partially open doorway. There was something
darkly foreboding about that room…and without realizing it, she
found herself standing close enough to reach out and touch the
scarred wooden door.

Viola had spent a small
fortune on the glass room—why hadn’t she replaced the door? Another
mystery, and one Kate knew she was unlikely to ever solve. Chill
fingers brushed across the back of her neck, setting off another
round of shivering through her shoulders and, the next thing she
knew, her outstretched hand pressed a little harder on the door. It
swung slowly open, the creak echoing through the hallway like a
shot. The glass walls reflected the light from the hallway, making
the room brighter than it would have otherwise been.

The bottle thunked loudly
against the glass as she set it on the mirrored floor.
Stop
.
Turn around
.
Leave
. Something—probably the more coherent part of her
alcohol-fogged brain—cautioned. But almost against her will, she
began to slowly move forward.

She advanced further into
the room at a halting pace, loath to leave the relative safety of
the doorway. Like the first time she had entered the room, the
floor took some getting used to; the seamless glass of the walls
and ceiling was strange enough, but there was something especially
disturbing about a glass floor.

The mirrored surface
reflected the bottoms of her feet back at her and somehow felt
insubstantial, like she was stepping forward into a void, like she
would fall through at any moment.

But the floor held, and
Kate continued to move deeper into the room. Even in her hindered
state, it was impossible not to wonder at the origins of the glass
room. What had it been before? Her brow furrowed; she couldn’t
recall what this room had looked like before. Probably like the
other bedrooms on this floor, she guessed, the memory a hazy, gauzy
film in the darkest corners of her mind.

She spun in a slow,
vertigo-inducing circle, stumbling once and reaching out to
grasp…herself. At least, that’s what it seemed like.

Her hand shot out and
connected with the mirrored wall at the back of the room, and she
pressed with her fingers until her palm was in full contact with
the glass, until it was flush with the reflection of her own hand.
The cool, smooth glass grew cold—icy—beneath her palm, and the
pounding in her head intensified. But, no…Kate frowned and listened
intently. Her fingers flexed against the glass, and some of the
alcohol-induced fog cleared. The pounding wasn’t in her head. It
was coming from downstairs. Someone was banging on the
door.

Her head swiveled toward
the sound—and she froze. Beyond the door, a shadow moved, spilling
over the carpet until the darkness slid across the threshold of the
room. Downstairs, the noise stopped, and her heart leapt as the
long shadow darkened the mirrored floor at the entrance of the
glass room. The woman glided into the room a second
later.

Kate gasped, certain she
was having a hallucination. She turned back to her own reflection,
putting her back to the room, squeezing her eyes shut and vowing to
never, ever, drink wine again.

Count to
three
…she opened her eyes, pupils
dilating when the hallucination kept coming toward her. Kate’s
breathing hitched painfully, audibly, as the translucent woman
advanced steadily across the room. She wore a filmy white sundress;
her blonde hair was the same shade as Kate’s own tawny mane, and
was smoothed over one shoulder. The two women were nearly
identical. Smooth, strong, toned frames, side swept bangs, lightly
tanned skin. Kate’s hand came up and unconsciously fingered her own
loosely waving hair; in contrast, the ghostly woman’s hair was
stick straight and looked smooth as satin.

Kate’s breath rasped out
to create a small circle of fog in the mirror, and the blonde
woman’s berry-colored lips curved into a tight, self-satisfied sort
of smile. The expression was clearly bitter,
resentful…cruel.
She’s not real. She’s
not real
…

Her feet slid over the
floor until she stood directly behind Kate, their eyes remaining
locked in the mirror.
Please
… Kate silently implored,
not certain what she was even praying for. Through the mirror, she
saw the light flickering crazily in the hallway, growing dim and
then too bright, power surging through the old house one second and
then teetering on the edge of a total blackout the next. Her eyes
became wide, terrified orbs, and fear made her vision gray around
the edges. She was going to pass out. The woman’s dark violet
eyes—moving faster than should have been possible—cut to the side,
then back again.

Kate shivered, afraid to
move. Afraid to breathe. The power winked out a moment later,
leaving the room dimly lit with an eerie silver light that defied
all logic and explanation.

The blade the blonde woman
produced, seemingly from the thin, frigid air, glinted lethal and
sharp. Kate’s mouth formed a round, horrified “o” a split second
before the woman slammed the blade into her side. The ghost-woman
may have looked wispy, but there was nothing insubstantial about
the cold steel blade as it pierced Kate’s skin. Pain lanced through
her, and she gasped as the woman pulled the now-dripping blade
away. Spider web cracks shot through the glass a foot in every
direction as the knife clattered to the floor. Drops of deep
crimson splattered the glass, and Kate doubled forward, staring in
the mirror in fixed horror at the blood stain spreading across her
midsection, soaking the soft fabric of her tank top in angry, vivid
red.

She collapsed, the wound
in her side pulsing painfully, pumping her blood—her life—onto the
floor around her. She tried scream, but couldn’t draw in a deep
breath. She tried to move, but managed only to turn over as the
light began to fade. The last thing she saw was the blonde woman’s
feet, dirty and bare as the apparition moved toward the door, black
dirt streaking the glass in her wake.

Chapter
Thirteen

Reflection

L
ight
filtered in from the hallway;
the sixty-watt glow reflecting off the mirrors of the glass room
and shining straight into Kate’s face the minute she cracked one
eye open.