The Lie (The Skyy Huntington Series) (16 page)

I nodded, and we made our way to the front door. It was still locked with no signs of any forced entry thankfully. I unlocked it and flicked on the foyer lights. We walked through to the living room, turning on lights as we went. “Nobody has been here since we last left,” he said, sure of it.

“How do you know?” I replied.

“I can smell it, I would be able to tell if anyone had entered here,” Aiden answered.

Well that was good to know, I guess. Didn’t help the fact that a creepy ass vampire was hunting me down.

He put his jacket on the couch and grabbed a few of the folded boxes, the marker, and the boxing tape. “Let's pick another room and get started.” He didn’t waste any time.

We went to the tiny spare room on the bottom floor. Nobody had ever used this room from the looks of it. There were a few boxes in the closet that we pulled out and started combing through. More of the same. Old books, useless knick knacks. A few old photo albums. I re-boxed the items I wanted to keep and put the rest in the donate pile that we still had going from the night before. Aiden was walking into the closet to turn off the light when he stopped and had an odd look on his face. He kept swaying back and forth shifting his weight between his left and right leg.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him. Bending down, he started looking at the hardwood floor inside the closet.

“Do you have a hammer?” he asked, without answering my question.

I nodded yes, and turned to walk out of the room to get it. Faster than I could blink, he was at my side. “Not going anywhere alone, remember?” he said smiling at me.

We walked down into the tiny basement and I rummaged through the lame excuse of a tool box that I kept down there, and produced a hammer. Once we were back upstairs he went to work prying up the edges of the hardwood floor. I sat on the guest bed watching him in silence as he worked.

After about fifteen minutes, he waved me over to him. I walked into the closet and saw, to my amazement, a latch door down in the middle of the closet floor. He stuck his fingers into the latch and pulled up with what looked like the greatest of ease. Dust and the smell of old must and mold assaulted my nostrils. A brief glance down into the door, I saw a tiny staircase leading down much farther than a normal basement would. We were already on the first floor, so this must be like a second basement.

“What the hell?” I said, in almost a whisper. Aiden shrugged, and began to step down onto the first rickety step in the staircase. At the bottom was a heavy duty door we opened. There was a switch on the wall that he flicked and I could see light flood into the room.

We entered into what looked like a small workshop. There were a couple of desks, with filing cabinets stacked along every wall and in every corner. What parts didn’t have filing cabinets had bookshelves. Not just any kind of bookshelves, but these were sealed airtight, to keep any air, acid or bugs out. The kind that keeps important documents safe. I noticed there was also another door, so we opened it and flicked the light on in there. My mouth hung open. Along three of the walls were more of those glass cases, with pictures,
old
pictures, more books, documents, and even some clothing, stored in them. There was a desk along the fourth wall, and it was covered in all kinds of vials and beakers and odd looking items. It honestly looked like something you’d see in a medieval wizard lab.

Aiden turned to me, with a grim look on his face, “This is exactly what I was hoping we wouldn’t find.” Those words sure didn’t do much to comfort me. He started walking along glancing into the glass cases. “This room is also sound proof, and fire/bomb proof. I am not sure what your Grandpa was involved with yet, but I think you can safely say the man you thought you knew isn’t who you thought he was at all.”

Chapter 9

I was in a daze. I stood staring around at the rooms with my head spinning. I walked over to a chair at the desk and sat down. Aiden continued to scan some of the items. He walked over and put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you ok?” he asked, with general concern. I nodded, and smiled up at him. I was so glad he was here with me. “Do you have any kind of gloves? We can’t touch these items with our bare hands, the acid and oils will ruin them,” he said.

“There is a box of disposable gloves under the kitchen counter, I use them for cleaning,” I replied. He held his hand out to me to help me out of the chair. We walked up to the main level of the house, and I was happy to breathe in the fresh air.

As soon as we stepped onto the main floor, Aiden became alert. “He’s outside,” he said. By ‘he’ I knew he meant the other vampire. “He’s just waiting outside for us. Odd, I didn’t peg him for one with manners.” He pointed down to the staircase we just came out of and shook his head no, putting his finger to his lips. Which, I could only assume, meant don’t spill the beans on the secret room. He took my hand in his and led me to the front door.

Aiden opened the door a small way, enough to see out of. He began talking in a language I had never heard before. It certainly didn’t sound like any language on earth anyway. The tone of his voice though, was calm and collected. I heard the other vampire respond in a tone that sounded like taunting. I was standing behind Aiden and the door, still holding his hand, shaking like a leaf.

The talking went on for what seemed like an eternity, but in reality only a few moments had passed. Aiden finally shut the door and locked it. He turned to me and gathered me up in his arms in a hug. “What happened? What did he say?” I asked, though my voice was muffled into his shirt.

“Everything is fine, he’s gone. Don’t worry anymore,” he said, in a very generic voice. He pulled me back from his embrace and looked at me, pointed to his ear and then outside, meaning that the vampire could hear what he was saying. “We’re safe now, he won’t bother you anymore,” he added. Yeah…right, I thought.

Aiden went into the kitchen to get me a drink. He grabbed a bottle of water and then we went to sit on the couch. He knew the second that the vampire had left. We then went back down into the little room, which just so happened to be sound-proof and I realized that was a good thing around these vampires. He closed the heavy solid metal door that was at the bottom of the steps.

I took a sip of my water and looked at him, anxiously, waiting for whatever it was he had to say. “Well, I have some good news and I have some bad news. The vampire is most definitely looking for a book. He wouldn’t go into detail, but it’s a book of sorcery, demonology, and witchcraft. The person who employs our dear vampire friend is quite possibly the craziest person to ever walk the face of the earth. I know of her, very well, though I have never met her in person, nor would I want to,” he paused as he led me to a chair. Apparently whatever else was coming was big enough I had to sit down for.

“Ok, so sorcery, witchcraft, and crazy people. This gets better and better,” I said with sarcasm. “What is the lowdown?” I looked up at Aiden, sipping my water again, nervously looking for something to do with my hands.

He went into the other room to grab a chair and brought it back out, put it down facing me, and then sat down. His green eyes were faintly glowing again I noticed.

“I convinced the vampire that you didn’t have the book. I told him we searched the whole house, and that you had no knowledge at all of it. Had you not been under my protection, I can assure you that you’d already be dead. He has agreed to go away and leave you alone, though I don’t believe his words. His employer has been looking for this book for centuries, killing anyone who stands in her path.”

I swallowed hard. I was picking the label off the bottle of water now, and was still shaking like a leaf. “Who is his employer?” I asked. Did I even want to know?

Aiden took both of my hands into his. “Well, I’d like to downplay this for you, but there really isn’t any way to do it. I don’t know if you ever heard of Elizabeth Bathory?”

My eyes widened in shock. Yeah I knew who Elizabeth Bathory was. And I knew she supposedly died in the 1600s. “Yes, I have heard of her. Crazy psycho lady who tortured and killed a whole bunch of people? Didn’t she die in the 1600s?” I asked, hoping for confirmation.

He shook his head no. Great. “No, she was turned, long story I can tell you at another time, but the bottom line is, she is who sent the vampire,” Aiden paused, looking down at my hands that he held in his. I could tell he had more to add, and from the looks of it, it wasn’t good.

“And…? What happens now?” I asked, starting to panic.

He looked back up at me. It was a look I had never seen on his face before. He was scared. “I can protect you from the vampire she sent, I can protect you from most vampires out there, but I can’t protect you from her if she comes. She is, more than just a vampire…she is very old, very powerful, and she has used many forms of magic both in her human life and her immortal life. Bad magic, the kind nobody should ever have the right to use. Her body and what’s left of any soul she may have had is so twisted it’s beyond even my comprehension.”

So, now I had a serial killing vampire who used black magic after a book that was supposedly in my possession. Super.

“Ok, so what do we do then? If we find this book, can’t we just give it to her? Will she still try to hurt me? Isn’t that all she is after is the book?” I asked, hoping for the best.

“I don’t know Skyy. The vampire didn’t go into that much detail. But I know that this book has been kept away from her for a good reason. I know that she is beyond insane, and she wouldn’t think twice about killing you if she got her hands on you. I think our best course of action is to start going through these rooms, through all these items and see if we can find anything out.”

We walked back upstairs to get the box of gloves we had forgotten after the visit from the vampire messenger. I decided to start with some of the filing cabinets in the main room, while Aiden started going through the bookshelf.

The cabinets were very organized, each section was labeled with what I soon found out were years. The first cabinet I opened went back as far as 1920. There were letters in the folders, along with paperwork with some kind of foreign language on it. I showed one of the papers to Aiden, and he didn’t recognize the language.

As I kept going through the cabinets, I realized there was a pattern to this. It was communication between the same people and families over the decades, even centuries. Some of the filing cabinets went back really far, I found one that was the early 1700s. The papers in the older cabinets were yellowed and some of them were falling apart, but it looked like Grandpa had been trying to preserve all of it, filing it away in at least some kind of order.

I set a couple of the papers that contained the foreign language aside, figuring I could go to a translator page on the Internet to try to find out what language it was and see if we could get it translated.

Over five hours had passed since we set to work. It was after 5 a.m. by then and I was unknowingly yawning. “Are you sleepy?” Aiden asked. His voice almost startled me, we had both been working in silence for the most part while sorting through things.

“Sort of, the smell in here is getting to me, and the dust is making my eyes itchy and tired,” I said as I rubbed at my eyes with the back of my wrist.

“Let’s wrap it up for tonight then. Get you a shower and some sleep, we can continue tomorrow.” I nodded and started putting the papers back into the current folder I was working on and slid it back inside the filing cabinet. I pulled the plastic gloves off and tossed them onto the desk.

“I’m not sure we should leave your house unattended with these rooms being discovered. I am pretty sure that the vampire isn’t going away anytime soon, and I wouldn’t put it past him to break in here again once he thinks we are gone. We don’t need anyone finding these rooms or this information. I don’t like the idea of you being in this house for the long term but if I stay with you at all times you’ll be safe, he won’t come in here with me in the house.”

I didn’t really want to stay in my house either but I knew Aiden was right. If the bad vampire found the information in those rooms, who knows what could happen. We had only touched the surface of it in the few hours we put in tonight. “We need to go back to your house and get Cupcake, she’ll need to go outside and eat.”

Aiden nodded, “It’ll be safer for her to continue to stay at my house, and we can go back to feed her and let her out a few times a day.” I really missed my dog, but he was right again, the fewer people or potential victims involved in this, the better.

We drove over to his house and took care of Cupcake, I said my goodbyes and promised her I would make it up to her. Forty-five minutes later I was back in my house, standing in the shower very uncomfortably aware that Aiden was in the bathroom with me. I had undressed in the shower with the curtain closed before I turned the water on and he stood with his back facing me the entire time, but it was still weird.

“So, uhhh, how is this going to work when I need to go to the bathroom?” I asked. The last thing in the
world
I was going to do was make my business in front of a super sexy guy, human or not.

Apparently he didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, but soon got the hint I wasn’t going to go for it. “Well, the half bathroom downstairs has no windows so I guess you’d be safe enough in there if I stood outside the door. If you really prefer, we can drive down to my house so you can eliminate.”

Eliminate. What a nice way of putting it. I giggled, and he asked what was funny. “I’ll try to organize my eliminating around the schedule of feeding and letting Cupcake outside.” I finished up my shower and dried off inside the tub with the curtain still closed too. Once I was done I wrapped my towel around me and walked into my bedroom to find some PJ’s to sleep in. Aiden turned around while I changed too. This was going to take some getting used to.

“Hey before I go to sleep I want to try to find out what language those papers are written in online,” I said as I brushed out my wet hair. I walked to my computer and turned it on.