Twisted Fate: A Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy (The Harlequin's Harem Book 1) Read online

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The EnSite bathroom in my room was half the size of my entire apartment. The tub was huge and ornately decorated, there were beautiful gold faucets on the sinks, and there was enough walking distance from the door to the toilet that it felt like a walk and not an awkward squeeze like it was in my apartment.

  The bathroom at my place was so cramped, the door wouldn’t even open the whole way.

  I realized only after I’d had a shower, because I didn’t think there would be time for a bath, that I didn’t have any clothes to immediately slip into. Damon hadn’t come back yet from wherever it was he had gone to pick up some clothes for me to wear, and I had been so ready to get clean and wash the tension out of my muscles, I hadn’t been able to wait before jumping in the shower.

  Luckily, this bathroom provided robes. I saw two hanging off the back of the bathroom door; each of them white, and light, and fluffy, perfect to snuggle in. I stepped into one after drying off, and then took a moment to check myself out in the mirror above the sink.

  There was a knock at the bedroom door, and I jumped at the sound. Taking a breath, I stepped out of the bathroom and crossed the length of the bedroom to get to the door. I fastened the cord on my robe, making sure it was closed enough around my body that none of me would be visible beneath it, and then I opened the bedroom door expecting to find Damon, but fining Eli there instead. In his hand he was holding a small pile of clothes.

  “Glad you found the bathroom okay,” he said, smiling.

  “It’s pretty hard to miss. That shower is amazing, by the way.”

  “Good. Here, take these. Damon couldn’t find an open store to buy you some clothes from, so I figured you could just use some of my sisters’. You’re probably about the same size.”

  I took the small heap of clothes. “Wow, thank you so much.”

  “You’re welcome. Are you hungry?”

  My stomach rumbled, as if the question had been directed at it instead of at me. “I wasn’t going to ask… you guys have done so much for me already, but I’m starving.”

  Eli smiled. “Alright, I’ll get some food and something to drink brought up to you. Try not to fall asleep too quickly.”

  “I won’t,” I said, allowing a genuine smile a little time on my face.

  He eyed me up and down then, and my heart started to beat a little faster, a little harder, than it had been. I swallowed and stared at him, watched him lick his lips in a very subtle way, maybe thinking I hadn’t noticed. It was all so fast, the way he’d checked me out and licked his lips. Another person wouldn’t have noticed, but I spent most of my nights getting checked out at the restaurant, so I was pretty familiar with the body language, and in this case, I was usually entirely repulsed by the idea, but with Eli, I kinda liked it.

  “Well, uh, thanks again,” I said.

  “Yeah, totally. Alright, I’ll get you that food.”

  I nodded and retreated into the room, shutting the door once Eli had started walking away. I then walked over to the king-size bed, slipped into a simple, pastel green dress, and then crawled into bed, letting myself sink into the pile of pillows and allowing what was left of the tension after that shower leave my body in one, satisfying rush. But I couldn’t get comfortable here, not entirely, not while Lucia was still out there somewhere.

  Thoughts of her invaded the peaceful quiet of the room I was in, and encouraged me to pick up my phone, open my Facebook, and click through to Lucia’s profile, ignoring the twenty-seven notifications I had waiting for me. A couple of seconds of wait later, and Lucia’s profile showed up, her bubbly smile beaming out at me from my phone screen. She was wearing a light green dress with white polka dots on it. I remembered when she took that selfie.

  That night, she had taken a date on a cruise of the Mississippi on board the Steamboat Natchez. Her date hadn’t bought tickets for her to join him, she had liked him enough that she wanted to make the gesture of taking him on the river, having dinner inside—and, of course, maybe finding a quiet closet to have sex in.

  I clicked on her photo album and started scrolling through pictures. This one taken in Jackson Square, that one a pensive shot of her with the Crescent City Connection, blurry in the background, another one of her with an insane number of noodles in her mouth. I had taken that picture. I’d dared her to stuff as many noodles into her mouth as she could; it wasn’t many, Lucia had—has—a tiny mouth, but it was hilarious to watch her try.

  Jesus, she’s not dead.

  I opened the messaging App Luci and I used to text on my phone, the App taking me directly to our conversation page seeing as she was the last person I had texted today. We had been talking about random bullshit before starting our shift at work, making plans to buy tickets for a Rhianna concert that was going to be hitting the city in a couple of weeks. I was more of an All-American Rejects kind of woman but seeing as how Lucia was a good enough sport to come with me to my shows, I agreed to go with her to watch hers. We both always ended up having a good time, anyway.

  I smiled at the messages at first, but my smile soon faded when the flash of her getting into that unknown car hit me. It was like a sucker punch to the gut, I hadn’t been expecting it, maybe because tonight had been so surreal, I hadn’t wanted to believe any of this had really happened. Never mind that I was lounging on a bed, several thousand dollars above my price range, in a house in the middle of the Garden District.

  Last seen 3 hours ago.

  I took a breath and wrote “Where are you?”, hesitating for a good moment before tapping send.

  The message appeared in our chat history with a white badge beneath it. I waited, hoping it would change at any second; a white badge meant the message had reached the messaging App’s servers, but hadn’t yet been delivered to the recipient’s phone—likely because they were out of reception range or their phone was switched off. A blue badge meant the message had been delivered to the recipient’s phone, and unless she had muted my conversation on her end, it would flash up on her phone’s screen even if it was locked.

  The badge turned blue after a few seconds, which meant her phone wasn’t only turned on; it was receiving messages.

  Immediately I tried calling. One ring, two rings, three rings—voicemail. I hung up and tried again but got the same result. I went in a third time, mumbling c’mon, pick up under my breath, getting more and more frustrated by the second, but again, the call went through to voicemail. She was either ignoring her phone, couldn’t answer her phone, or her phone had been ditched and was ringing and flashing in a gutter somewhere in the French Quarter. I wanted to yell at her for not setting her phone up so I could check on her location; that would have made it easy for us to locate her phone, if not her. But she’d called me crazy for thinking anything would happen to either of us.

  That hadn’t stopped me from sharing my phone’s location with her, though.

  I shut my eyes and threw my head back into the pillow, groaning, eyes stinging a little. She was gone, and I had no idea where she was, or who she was with. I didn’t even know if she was safe, or if she had been murdered by the guy who had run after me all the way to the park; the guy who looked like he wanted to murder me.

  There was a knock at the door and I sat up, setting my phone down on the bed and hopping off it. Again, I fastened the robe around myself, making sure the strap was tied tightly around my midsection as I approached. Then I went to open the door, but I hesitated. I wasn’t sure why I had hesitated—maybe it was because I had no idea who was on the other side. Eli had said he would send food up; did that mean he would bring food up himself, or…?

  I opened the door, and there was Damon, wearing the same shirt and blazer he had been wearing before, holding a silver tray with a matching domed cover. I smiled at the dish and turned my eyes up at him… then I noticed the venetian eye-mask he was wearing. It was beautiful; red, with black trimmings, and seeming almost to sparkle as if it were coated with diamonds. Sticking up from one side w
as a single black feather, maybe a crow’s or a raven’s—no, a peacock’s, shimmering with all of the colors of the rainbow. From behind the mask, his beautiful, clear blue eyes shone with bright, sharp, dangerous intelligence.

  “Damon?” I asked, “What’s with the mask?”

  But Damon didn’t reply; instead he nodded courteously toward the dish he was holding, as if he wanted me to reveal what was under it.

  Curious, I reached for the handle on the plate and pulled it off, setting it to one side. I’d been expecting food, something to fill my stomach after everything that had happened, but there was no food on the plate; there was another mask, and this one was different to the one Damon was wearing. His was the kind of mask you might see at Carnival, or during Mardi Gras; the kind of mask people think about when someone says Masquerade Ball.

  This one was different in many ways. For starters, the mask wasn’t symmetrical; the left side of the mask looked like it would cover my eye, my eyebrow, and the apple of my cheek, like most masquerade masks would. But the right side of the mask looked like a curved lightning bolt; if I were to put it on, the tip of the bolt would curve around my mouth and end at my jaw, and the top of the bolt, with its jagged edge, would push up to my forehead.

  The outside of the bolt-side was curved, too, the entire mask was white, and all around the smaller side of the mask were symbols I recognized from any deck of cards—black clubs, red hearts, black spades, and red diamonds. The lightning bolt side, however, was run through with a red and black, diagonal checkered pattern.

  I reached for the mask without thinking and picked it up. It was cool, almost icy to the touch, but it didn’t feel uncomfortable in my hand. “What is this?” I asked.

  “Put it on…” Damon said, though his voice seemed distant and echoed, as if heard through glass pane.

  I stared at the mask, then looked up at him, curious not only about the sound of his voice, but about this whole thing. I didn’t think to ask about it again, though; the strange desire to wear the mask overturned my curiosity about the strangeness of this all. Then again, hadn’t I been through a ton of weirdness tonight already? A little more probably wouldn’t hurt.

  Hesitating only a little, I pressed the cool mask against my face. Oddly, when I went to fasten the straps around the back of my head, they were already fastened; tied in a neat little bow. Damon then gestured to one side with his head and began moving down the hallway. Clearly, he wanted me to follow him, so I stepped cautiously out of the room and into the hallway but Damon was already halfway down it, almost at the stairs.

  I walked behind him, trying to catch up, but Damon, who would occasionally glance over his shoulder, kept his lead on me, walking as fast as I was even though it looked like he was strolling leisurely down a park on a sunny afternoon. I watched him walk beyond the stairs, which struck me as odd because I thought he would be heading downstairs instead of further along the first floor, but then, the stairs weren’t really there, were they?

  No, there were just walls, and maybe there hadn’t even been a staircase to begin with, because this wasn’t Eli’s house anymore. The walls were different, the colors were faded, muted, and the more I walked, the more the hall looked like it was falling into disrepair. Bits of the ceiling were chipping away and falling like dust, entire sections of the cream wallpaper were ripped to shreds revealing not white or grey underneath, but ruddy brown, giving the walls the impression of wounds torn open by jagged claws, and the further I walked, the darker everything seemed to get.

  Damon was so far ahead of me now that, as the darkness grew more intense, he was beginning to disappear, to become one with the abyss. I went to call out to him, but an inner instinct told me to be quiet—warned me to be quiet, be quiet or they’ll hear you, Andi; be as quiet as a mouse, for there are cats all around, and they are hungry.

  Then the darkness came rushing at me all at once, as if all the lights in this infinitely long, door-less hallway had decided to shut off one after the other. Panic took hold of me again, stilling my heart and freezing my muscles. I could hear nothing besides my own breathing, could see nothing whatsoever, could feel, taste, and smell nothing except perhaps the distant, impossibly faint odor of… death.

  I can’t see… I’m on my own, I can’t speak, and I can’t see.

  My breathing shortened, my heart rate quickened, and my palms became slick with sweat. These were all horrible sensations, but they were indeed sensations, and that was something to hold onto. A light then bloomed into existence, slowly at first and coming from… beside me? Turning my head, I noticed the light was in my hand—in fact, I was holding a lantern, inside of which was this tiny white light, growing with intensity as the second passed, dancing inside of its confined space.

  The world around me, however, didn’t take shape. I wasn’t in a hallway anymore, but in a black, open space where nothing lived, nothing could live. There was only me, the darkness, and my light… only, that wasn’t entirely true. There was something else, a sound, faint and distant, more like the memory of a sound as remembered by someone else. I couldn’t quite put a finger on what exactly it sounded like, not at first, but as the seconds passed, I started to identify a rhythm to the sound, almost like… breathing.

  I spun around, using my light to try and find the source of the sound, but I couldn’t see far in front of my own hand, maybe a foot or two. My entire body suddenly began to vibrate, to buzz as it had earlier—yesterday?—when I was being chased, and then the breathing started to sound louder, closer. Either the sound itself had gone louder, or my hearing had become more sensitive. I was thinking it was the latter.

  After a moment of listening, I pinned down the direction the sound was coming in, at least, and I took my first few steps into the shapeless dark, armed only with the little light in my hand. As I walked, the breathing seemed to get louder and more pronounced, to the point where it sounded exactly like a person in deep sleep, something I was used to hearing anytime Lucia decided to come over and spend the night.

  As I approached, I got the impression of a person laying on a bed, chest heaving gently, lips slightly parted, breaths slipping in and out creating a faint whistling sound. And then… the person spoke.

  “No, little boy.” The voice was low, smooth, and deep—not in the tone, but in the bass. Every word spoken caused my chest to tremble slightly, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn’t take another step. “Don’t go in there, or they’ll get you.”

  I swallowed hard, then again, and again, only I wasn’t getting any saliva or relief.

  “You must find the stones; otherwise how will we slay the witch?”

  Slay… the witch?

  I took a step closer, but as I did, the light in my lantern started to flutter, and suddenly it didn’t seem like there was as much light coming from it as there had been a second ago. Taking another step caused the light to flicker and dim further. What was worse, the mask around my face was turning colder than it had been when I had first put it on. I didn’t know what any of this meant, but I knew getting closer to this person, this dreaming person, wasn’t a good idea.

  Only problem was, when I tried to take a step back, I couldn’t.

  I swallowed again, aggravating my already dry, raw throat. “Come back, little boy,” the dreamer said, although this time his voice had taken on a second tone; a lighter, more feminine harmony to the masculine baritone I had been listening to this whole time. “Come back, don’t go—we aren’t done yet.”

  My heart started racing. I knew I needed to escape. This person, this dreamer, was starting to get agitated, and if there was one thing I knew about people who get restless while they’re dreaming; they wake up. But still, I couldn’t retreat, couldn’t take a step away from whatever this was; this dread-inspiring tableau of terror. I could only stand there and watch, and listen, and wait until—

  “—come back!” the dreamer yelled, its voice loud and deep enough it caused my chest to rattle inside of me. It wasn’
t a human voice at all anymore, but the voice of some kind of demon, outraged that a little boy had had the audacity to disobey it.

  It, not he.

  I gasped, slapped a hand to my mouth, and then waited, horrified, as the realization came to me after a few seconds of silence.

  The breathing’s stopped.

  I backed up a step, my legs responding this time, but my light had started to flicker even more rapidly, and I watched it, eyes wide, dread pumping through me like blood as it guttered out and plunged me into darkness once more. Then I heard it, a sound so innocuous and yet so out of place in this awful hellscape of nothingness, that it could have sent me straight into death’s cold embrace if I hadn’t had the sense, the clarity of mind, to understand that I wasn’t actually in this place—that I was dreaming too.

  It was a jingle; light and playful, the sound made by the balls at the end of a jester’s hat. And then whatever it was that made the sound came charging at me from deep within the darkness, breaths coming hard, lip smacking, tongue slavering. I screamed and shook my head rapidly this way and that, then when I opened my eyes I was in the bedroom again, screaming and gripping the bedsheets.

  Damon, who was halfway through coming into the room with a tray of food in his hands, dropped the tray and dashed toward the bed. “Andi!” he said, as he climbed on and held me, “Andi, are you okay?”

  I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak; I was crying, tears coming quickly, my chest tight, so tight I thought I was going to die. I gripped onto his shirt and stared at him, my mouth open but no words, no sounds forming, until finally I found the strength to take a single breath. That started a cascade of rapid, jagged breathing and tears. I couldn’t do anything else, couldn’t compose myself even if I had wanted to.

  Damon held me close to his chest, stroking my hair, speaking to me, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. It was all noise, just noise, and above that noise was the sound of that voice, that two-toned, demonic voice that had rooted me to the spot as if I had been run through with a spear and impaled into the ground.