Destined for a Vampire (Blood Like Poison 2)

Just the thought of the book and all the wonders (and possibly answers) that it held made my feet itch to go inside. But I resisted.

Moving on through the house, I opened doors and looked into all sorts of rooms that I probably had no business looking in. It was as I was passing through to the den again that I heard the noise.

It sounded like someone dropping something onto the floor in one of the rooms above me. Only there wasn’t supposed to be anyone here besides me and Lilly.

A little niggle of trepidation worked its way down my back and legs, bringing every fine hair follicle on my body to attention. Setting my untouched drink down, I backtracked until I came to the steps that led to the second story.

The gently turning sweep of the dark wood staircase looked fairly benign, as did the beautiful red and gold runner that streaked up the middle of the tread. I reached out and laid my hand on the rich, elegantly curved banister. It was cool beneath my palm.

With one foot on the first step, I hesitated. I’d never been to the second story.

I’d never bothered exploring it and Lilly had never even so much as mentioned it.

Her room, as well as Sebastian’s, was on the first floor, so I hadn’t really had a reason to go up there. Until now.

My fingers twitched. I wished they were gripping my cell phone. Not that it would matter. Bo hadn’t had a cell phone since his supposed disappearance. His mother (who apparently was not his mother at all) had dropped his plan. And it wouldn’t do me any good to call the police. The things I was afraid of were not things the police could help me with.

I had just about talked myself out of going upstairs when I heard the noise again. I looked around nervously. It was when my eyes lit on Lilly’s door that I realized that I owed it to her, to her safety, to check it out.

Keeping my tread as light as possible, I mounted the steps to the next story.

The air smelled stale and musty, as if the entire floor was rarely ever used. It being only Sebastian and Lilly, I didn’t doubt that at all.

From where I landed, the hall split left and right with only one door straight ahead. I stopped and held my breath to listen before venturing in either direction.

When I heard nothing, I walked slowly forward and twisted the knob for the first door. Inside it was a room full of furniture, every piece covered in a protective plastic drape. The hardwoods were dull, lying beneath a generous layer of dust that was very obviously undisturbed. Quietly, I shut the door and turned to proceed down the hall.

I chose the left side of the second level first, as it would contain the rooms that were directly over the kitchen and den, which is where I was when I’d first heard the noise.

I followed the runner until I came to the first of three doors. I leaned in, pressing my ear lightly to the door, listening for sounds. But it was quiet, so I turned the knob and eased the wood panel open. Inside, I found much the same thing as I had in the other room.

Closing it, I made my way to door number two, which proved to be another repeat, a large room full of plastic-covered furniture and a ton of dust. It was behind door number three that I noticed a change.

The hinges creaked as I opened the third door. I poked my head in and saw the familiar lumps of covered furniture. The departure from the scenes in the other two rooms occurred on the floor. The thick layer of dust that covered the hardwoods had been disturbed in this room. By the looks of the clean prints, I guessed that the tracks had been laid fairly recently.

The footprints appeared to be in the shape of a man’s dress shoe, and the foot was not at all small. For a second, I wondered if maybe Sebastian had been in the room recently. That would account for the disturbance in the dust as well as the type of print it looked to be.

That thought made me feel a bit better for all of about ten seconds, as long as it took my eyes to track the footprints to where they disappeared against the wall on the other side of the room. It wasn’t until then that I noticed that there were no returning foot steps; only those going toward the wall, away from the door.

My heart rate picked up as I mulled over the wisdom of crossing the room to follow the prints. Part of my brain remained calm, reminding me that there was likely a rational explanation for what I was seeing. But then there was the other half of my brain, the portion that had seen horrible things, witnessed horrible things, knew of too many horrible things—it suggested that I turn tail and run. Fast.

Steeling myself against the fear and unease that was quickly surfacing inside me, I opened the door wider and stepped inside. I stopped and listened. Still, there was silence. I wondered for a second if I could’ve imagined hearing something. But deep down, I knew. I knew I’d heard something.

I tiptoed across the room, careful to step exactly where the person before me had stepped. I had to stretch to get from print to print, which further supported my theory that the tracks belonged to a man, probably Sebastian’s. The stride was long, a lot longer than mine.

When I’d reached the other side of the room, I could see a faint scrape mark where something had brushed the dust away in an arch, similar to that of a door opening. And yet there was no door, only a blank wall.

The footprints clearly disappeared into that wall, so I began feeling around, rubbing my hands across the floral wallpaper, hoping to find…something.

Considering the age and type of house this was, a hidden passageway wouldn’t really surprise me.

I jumped when I heard another noise. My heart filled with dread when I realized that it had, in fact, come from the other side of the wall, the one I was standing in front of. I also noticed that the noise had caused a puff of dust to leak out around a crack in the wallpaper.

I ran my fingertip along the seam. At about waist level, my finger slipped into a dip. I bent down to look at it and realized that the paper was peeled away right in the center of a flower, making the dark crescent underneath nearly invisible.

Hooking my finger into the indentation, I pulled.

And a door popped open.

It only opened a tiny crack, but my pulse started fluttering wildly in my chest.

I listened for any sounds of movement, like someone might have heard me and turned to come after me. But there was absolute, eerie stillness. All I could hear was the shallow pant of my breathing against the backdrop of my pulse pounding away in my ears.

Carefully, I pulled the door until it was open wide enough for me to slide inside. I left it ajar in case I had to make a hasty escape, which gave me cold chills just to think about.

The first thing I noticed was that I smelled roses. For some reason, that gave me pause, but I couldn’t figure out why. The only smell I associated with roses was Lucius’s luxurious basement.