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“I’d have thought he’d start adjusting by now,” she said.
I gave her a wry grin. “The trouble is, there’s no way he can save face. He looks like an idiot, and he knows it.”
The door to the mystery room was still locked. I rattled the knob again and wondered if I was strong enough to kick it in. That always worked so well in the movies, right? “Maybe there’s an ax in the toolshed,” I said.
“May I try?” Grant stepped forward, holding a couple of small, thin tools. Lock picks. The magician had everything.
“Be my guest,” I said, stepping aside. I liked having Grant on my team, which made me even crankier when Anastasia whispered to me, “He has us all where he wants us.”
I didn’t want to have that argument right now. I didn’t want to have that argument at all.
Grant got to work on the lock, using the pick smoothly, making minute adjustments. In a moment, the lock clicked and the door cracked open. Grant pushed inside the room.
I could see pretty well in the dark. So could Anastasia, and she was at my shoulder, looking in. The room had been cleared of furniture, and a dozen or so plastic storage crates were shoved up against walls, among other random bits of equipment. A storage room, as I’d suspected. I took a deep breath and tried to sort out the tangle of smells. Lots of metal, plastic, rubber, along with the smells inherent in the lodge. Familiar smells of technology and civilization. It didn’t mean anything.
Grant was studying the room by the glow from a cigarette lighter. Tina and Jeffrey carried flashlights and pa
One held a few extra remote cameras nestled among coils of coaxial cable. Microphones, wire, electrical tape, packing foam, forms listing inventory. All the odds and ends I’d have expected to find tucked away on a film production like this.
Then I found the box with stuff in it I couldn’t identify.
“Grant?” I said. He and Anastasia came to look over my shoulder.
In this box we found coils of very thin wire, an almost clear filament that certainly wasn’t meant for anything electrical. Sleek black boxes with tiny lenses. Batteries. Gun cases—empty.
“Trip wire,” Grant said. “Motion detectors.”
“Stuff you’d use for a security system?” I said.
“Or for a trap,” he said.
I was almost afraid to dig looking for more, but I did, and found the canisters, steel and heavy, the size of grenades. Not that I’d ever seen a grenade. But I could tell. My skin was prickling. When I lifted it, my hand seemed to tingle at the feel of it. The sheer sinister aura leaking from it. I smelled it, a quick sniff, and quickly turned away because it smelled sour, chemical. Just a faint odor, suggestive of pain. My eyes watered from it.
“Tear gas,” Grant said.
“Are you kidding?” I said, quickly setting the thing down. “What’s a film crew need with tear gas?” And I knew. Cormac’s voice whispering. All I had to do was think of what he would do with tear gas. “They could get us to panic. To scatter, if they wanted to separate us.”
Jeffrey stared at the box, encompassed by his flashlight beam. “What does this mean? That Provost and the production company are in on it?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “I’d love to find out who owns the lodge. It might be that someone was able to get in here ahead of time and set up shop. We still don’t know enough to go pointing fingers.”
“But we can assume there may be some kind of booby trap out there rigged with tear gas?” Lee said. “This is fucked up.”
“Yeah,” I breathed.
“We need to check over the house. Carefully,” Grant said.
“I’ll search with you,” Anastasia said to Grant.
“Don’t want to let me out of your sight?” he said.
“That’s right.”
We scoured the house top to bottom. I wasn’t even sure what we were looking for, but we brainstormed and made up a list: wires, cameras, or other bits of electronics in odd places. Places where recent construction might have been done: odd seams in the walls, sawdust on the floor. Any trace of anything that didn’t belong. We checked windows, doors, roof beams, vents. Lee and I hunted by smell, though he said that out of the water he wasn’t much good.
Just because we didn’t find anything didn’t mean nothing was there. That was the worst part. It felt futile.
I slumped into the kitchen, looking for something to eat and drink, and found Ariel. She’d taken a drawer full of butter knives and was lashing them together with a coil of wire from the secret stash upstairs. She’d made a half-dozen crosses.
“It’s curandera magic,” she said. “I was never very good at it. I tried, but I didn’t have the patience like I should have. Grandma was always telling me to slow down, not to try to learn everything at once, that there’d be time. Then she was gone, and I wished I’d learned better. I don’t have her talent, but this should work.”
“I know,” I said softly. “I’ve seen something like this work before.”
“I had to do something,” she said. “It’s not much. But… it’s something.”
I helped her start hanging them above the doors and windows. It was protective magic, supposed to keep evil outside. It certainly couldn’t hurt, could it?
Except when Anastasia and Gemma returned from searching the basement. Anastasia stopped in the doorway and glared. Not looking scared, but angry.
“Kitty?” she called. “What are those?”
I was standing on a chair, using duct tape to secure one of the impromptu crosses above the kitchen window. Crosses. Vampires. Oops.
“Crosses. Protective magic,” I explained. Ariel held another cross to her chest and looked stricken.
“Was this Grant’s idea?” she said. If I’d looked at her eyes, they would be flashing with rage, but I knew better than to look at her eyes. Grant wasn’t around at the moment—Anastasia wouldn’t let him accompany her into their basement lair.
“No,” Ariel said, quickly—bravely—stepping forward. “It was my idea. It’s something my grandmother did. I thought—I thought it might help. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking, we’ll take them down.”
Anastasia couldn’t say anything to that, and my estimation of her went up a bit when she didn’t try. She could see that Ariel was only trying to help.
“Can I ask a stupid question?” I said to Anastasia.
“I don’t know why you bother asking permission,” she said.
I ignored that. “What were vampires afraid of before Christianity and crosses and all that?”
“Crosses have been around in one form or another since before Christianity. It’s a powerful symbol.”
“And?”
She didn’t continue. Ah well.
The vampires waited in the doorway until we’d removed the several crosses we’d put up. Ariel kept them, though, stashing them out of sight in an old grocery bag.
“They may not have worked anyway,” I told her. “They’re magical. I’m afraid we may be up against something entirely mundane.”
“It’s okay,” Ariel said. Out of the blue, she gave me a hug. Quick, spontaneous. More comfort. “I’m glad you’re here. I mean, I’m not glad you’re stuck. But I’m glad you’re here, because I know you’ll figure this out.”
“I elect you morale officer,” I said. That got her to smile. My work here is done.
Lee and Grant collected weapons. They went through the kitchen, the closets, the utility shed, equipment left behind from the show, and the attic, gathering an arsenal that they spread on the living room floor. Along with the tear gas and motion detectors from the secret stash, we had a set of mean-looking carving knives from the kitchen; vinegar, ammonia, bleach, and other chemicals we could turn into some wicked cocktails; and from the toolshed, a shovel, an ax, and a set of surveying stakes.
Every minute they spent outside collecting the stuff, I had my heart in my throat, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. However much I’d have loved to entertain the thought that maybe this was over, and that what happened to Dorian and Jerome were isolated and unrelated events and nothing else was going to happen, I couldn’t.