Secret Santa Page 13

  Lussi had been right about the ringleader. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it. She couldn’t believe it. There was no question, though. No question at all. The identities of the other participants in this sham were still unknown to her, but Lussi guessed there was at least one side-ponytail underneath those cloaks.

  The Raven, standing tall, fit her mask back over her chin. She raised the bowie knife in front of her, locking her elbows. The business end of the knife pointed down at Lussi’s heart. Lussi sucked in a great gulp of air and held it, as if doing so could somehow stretch out the moment, her final moment among the living.

  The Raven cocked her head to the side. What was she waiting on?

  Suddenly, the knife slipped through The Raven’s hands, dropping to the floor. The Raven pressed a hand to her own neck, her eyes widening. She waved around frantically for help. All of this happened in silence, like some bizarre pantomime. By the time the others in the room caught on that their de facto leader was choking, The Raven was already dead. Her body tipped forward in slow motion. Her forehead bounced off the edge of the table with a wet smack, and she crumpled to a cloaked heap on the floor.

  “The iron,” someone said. “It didn’t work. What does that mean?”

  That’s when the Christmas lights cut out, and Lussi’s world once again plunged into darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Lussi’s tormentors fumbled around in the darkness. She heard them bumping heads and elbowing each other. They were running in circles, blind as Stevie Wonder. The pandemonium wouldn’t last forever—if they couldn’t find the light switch for the wall sconces, somebody would draw the shades up. Lussi had to take advantage of their temporary confusion and escape.

  With a snap, the strands of Christmas lights holding Lussi down went slack. She could move again. Somebody had cut her loose. Something was pressed into her right hand. The knife. Someone curled her fingers around the handle for her. So she had an ally in the room after all.

  No time for questions. She secured the knife and rolled off the table, landing hard on her hip. She held the knife blade down like she’d seen Special Forces do in the movies. Less likely to accidentally stab someone. She wanted to defend herself, not add to her (alleged) body count.

  Lussi felt along the wall for the door. Her fingers met the windowpane. In all the confusion, she’d rolled off the wrong side of the table. Someone bumped into her, sending her stumbling. She landed on top of The Raven’s corpse, causing a pulpy liquid to ooze out of the former editor in chief’s mouth.

  Lussi detected notes of cardamom and brandy.

  Oma’s fruitcake?

  How is this even possible? she asked herself. Someone—or something—had caused Blackwood-Patterson’s editor in chief to choke on a fruitcake that had to have passed through her digestive tract a week ago. Lussi was no witch, but maybe some supernatural force really was working in her favor.

  She needed to get out of here. She needed time to think. But also, she was forgetting something…

  The cat carrier! Of course. Had there really been glowing red eyes emanating from within? She couldn’t leave without taking another look. Maybe it was a raccoon after all—“Cyndi Lauper,” as Digby had called the pest running loose in the building. But maybe it was something else.

  She army-crawled under the table, searching blindly with her hands until her fingers met the cold, hard plastic. The carrier was tipped on its side. Somebody must have accidentally booted it. She felt for the door. It was unlatched. She reached inside, ready to withdraw her fingers if something snapped at her. The last thing she wanted was a series of rabies shots. Not with the month she was having.

  Empty. Whatever it was had taken off.

  A light was flickering in the hallway. Somebody had found a candle. Time was running out. She wanted to prove her innocence, but now wasn’t the time. Especially since she was beginning to question her role in what was happening herself.

  Lussi lunged for the door, hurtling herself through several of her coworkers and sending them flying like bowling pins. She made it to the hallway and ran through another cloaked coworker, knocking them over, then flew down the stairs, taking the steps two, three at a time, ignoring the shouts behind her. The lobby was dimly lit by the streetlights filtering in. She skidded to a stop on the linoleum before reaching the door, her Keds squeaking.

  Footsteps on the stairs behind her.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” she muttered, fumbling with the locks.

  Footsteps on tile, getting closer.

  She turned the final deadbolt and pulled the door open. A great gust swept into the building, along with a dusting of snow. A yellow cab was parked directly out front. The light on top indicated it was available. The likelihood of a cab picking up a fare in this neighborhood after dark was remote. This was the most compelling evidence of a supernatural force at work so far.

  Lussi pulled the heavy door shut behind her. She skated across the ice-covered sidewalk toward the curb. Just as she reached the taxi, the rear passenger door swung open. Behind her, she heard the building’s great iron door do the same.

  No time for pleasantries. Lussi dumped herself into the backseat ass-first, pushing a bundled-up passenger across the ripped vinyl bench seat, and pulled the door closed. “Drive,” she said, banging on the bullet-proof partition to get the cabbie’s attention. “Anywhere, I don’t care, just drive!”

  The cabbie, who’d been fiddling with his meter, glanced at her in the rearview mirror. He looked like the kid in Indiana Jones. He might have just gotten his cab medallion yesterday. Hell, he might have just gotten his license yesterday.

  “She’s with me,” an unmistakably familiar British voice said. Fabien carefully disarmed her of the knife, which she hadn’t realized she still had clutched in her hand. “Hundred Fourteenth and Broadway,” he told the driver. “Five bucks for every red light you run…and another twenty to not ask any questions.”

  The driver looked to the Blackwood Building. Lussi didn’t see anyone but she knew her cloaked coworkers were lurking behind the cracked door, dark forms of shifting shape and mass. Either they were afraid to test the outside steps—slick-bottomed dress shoes and heels weren’t exactly all-terrain footwear—or they didn’t want to expose themselves to potential witnesses.

  “Ten bucks a red,” the cabbie said, starting the meter, “and keep the twenty. I don’t want to know a damn thing.” He pulled a wide U-turn across four lanes of honking traffic, and just like that Lussi and Fabien Nightingale were headed uptown.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Fabien’s Harlem apartment was small but resplendent with old-world charm. In his fireplace, a fire roared, which he occasionally tended to. Lussi was wrapped up in a cocoon of half a dozen fleece blankets in a tall-backed reading chair. A pretty, doe-eyed woman brought in two cups of floral tea and then left without a word.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” Lussi said, blowing on her tea. In all the years they’d known each other, they’d never actually met at his house. Always at her office, or a nearby bar. Usually a bar. “Was that your housekeeper?”

  “My mother,” he said.

  “She staying with you over the holidays?”

  “And beyond,” he said wearily. “It’s her apartment.”

  Lussi raised a brow. “Is this a Norman Bates situation?”

  He scoffed. “You’ve seen my royalty statements. Do you really think I could live in the city—even across One Hundred and Tenth Street—on what I make?”

  “I suppose not,” she said, feeling guilty for having broached the subject. She didn’t like to make inquiries into her authors’ lives. She preferred to think they were independently wealthy. An inheritance, maybe. Either that, or involved in some sort of top-dollar sex work.

  Lussi caught him up on everything—not just what had happened tonight, but everything from the
past week she’d been holding off on telling him. It felt good to get it all out in the open, even if some of it felt silly once she’d said it aloud. He listened without interjection, hands clasped, tap-tap-tapping his index fingers together. “If you hadn’t come looking for me, they might have chased me down,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here right now; I’d be a chalk outline in the East Village. If they can make chalk outlines on ice.”

  He nodded. “I waited for an hour and a half at the library. You never struck me as the type to ditch without a word, so I called your offices from a pay phone. The main number, whatever’s in the phone book. No answer, not even a machine to leave messages.” He looked over the red indentations on her wrists. “We should get pictures of these before they fade.”

  “What good would it do? I didn’t see anyone’s face, except for Alan’s.” She sunk into the chair. “We can’t involve the police. They’re liable to toss me in the loony bin with Frederick, regardless of the evidence.”

  Fabien set down his tea. “Here’s the good news: you’re most definitely not a murderer. You can’t be convicted in a court of law for a few tossed-off comments. How were you to know somebody would take them as literal orders? You’re also not a witch. I’ve known many witches, and they all smelled like patchouli.”

  “What do I smell like?” she asked.

  “At the moment? I’d rather not say.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence. I think.”

  “As far as this Bible you were given…”

  Lussi could only shake her head. “They took it from me. I’d kept it at the office because Frederick warned me not to take it home. That it was ‘detestable.’ ”

  “ ‘Do not bring detestable things into your home, for then you will be destroyed, just like them,’ ” Fabien said, reciting what Frederick had said word for word. “Deuteronomy 7:26.”

  A Bible verse. If only she’d ever cracked the Bible her mother had given her, she might have recognized it. “He wasn’t warning me not to take it home,” she said, realization dawning on her. “He was warning me about…something else. Something already in the building. Something detestable. The source of this ‘evil’ he felt.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “If what they told you about Frederick checks out, we can rent a car. Head upstate to this mental facility. Talk our way in, compare notes with him. I do have to warn you, the bit about him being bonkers? It may be true.”

  “If he’s nuts, then so am I. I saw something move in that cat carrier. It could’ve been a raccoon, or even some benign house pet, but the birds—the birds flying into the window to their deaths—were real. Whatever is at work here, it’s evil.”

  “I’m not dismissing anything outright, I’m simply urging caution,” he said. “Have you heard of the Meowing Nuns?”

  “Is that a punk band?”

  Fabien crossed the living room to the fireplace. “This happened in the Middle Ages. France.” He lifted a white-tailed deer head off its hook on the wall. “A single nun began meowing like a cat one day, apparently having lost her ability to speak. Other nuns joined her, one by one, until the entire convent was infected. They meowed for hours on end, unable to stop.”

  “Sounds annoying,” Lussi said.

  “Indeed. Soldiers were called in to quell the outbreak.” There was a safe inside the wall where the deer head had been. Fabien spun the dial. “During the Middle Ages, cats were seen as emissaries of the devil. The nuns believed themselves to be possessed by Satan.”

  Fabien withdrew a plastic bag from the safe. “Today, we recognize it as a case of mass hysteria,” he continued, speaking over the crackling fire. “Delusions are as contagious as viruses. They can replicate in populations in a similar manner.”

  Lussi stared at him in silence. He didn’t believe her. And why should he? Even she was beginning to doubt herself. With every passing minute, what had happened in the Blackwood Building seemed more like a bad dream.

  Fabien’s mother returned, dutifully refilling their tea. “You must be so proud of your son,” Lussi said, ignoring Fabien’s scowl. “He’s quite the author.”

  The woman looked her son up and down. Her features softened. “He’s very talented,” she said, “but he’s no Stephen King.”

  Fabien waited for his mother to leave, then settled back into his chair. He turned to Lussi. “You know, I don’t think you’re the first one this has happened to.”

  “The first one to try to make conversation with your mother?”

  “The first new hire or intern Blackwood-Patterson has done this sort of thing to. Remember when I told you I’d heard stories about Xavier Blackwood? I’m beginning to think that wasn’t idle gossip.”

  “I assumed you meant he was just a typical creepy boss.”

  “That he may have been, but the rumors were of a more sinister variety. A friend of mine teaches at Columbia. Apparently, Blackwood-Patterson has been restricted from participating in their internship program. There were a number of…disappearances. From different universities, mind you. I’m not sure if police reports were ever filed—you know how flighty college students can be. They probably assumed the kids had returned home to Boise, Idaho.” He shuddered. “I’d rather disappear.”

  Lussi had never heard the rumors, but she could believe it. Her coworkers had seemed quite surprised to see Cal. It made sense now why Digby had pulled him from a film department—the whisper network didn’t extend outside the English and creative writing programs. This also meant the “accidents” inside the Blackwood Building pre-dated Lussi. Cold comfort, however. Especially for poor Cal. For all she knew, he could be trapped in the building with those psychopaths. Unless he was in on it. He’d been in the secret meeting…

  Fabien shook two round, pale blue pills out of the baggie. Knowing him, they weren’t ibuprofen. “What do you have there?” she asked.

  “You’re never going to get to sleep on your own,” he said. “And you’ll be totally useless tomorrow if you don’t get some shut-eye. I thought maybe you could use some friends, to help you count sheep. They’ll dissolve in your tea. No hangover, I promise.”

  “How long do they take to kick in? I don’t want to fall into a coma on the express train.”

  “Mum is making up the guest room for you right now. You can’t go back to your apartment until this is all resolved. They may be waiting there to finish what they started.”

  “I wasn’t talking about going to Staten Island,” she said. “I need to go back to the office. My handbag is there. Everything’s in it—my wallet, my ID. The last of my cash, until Friday.”

  “Your coworkers tried to cut out your still-beating heart.”

  “Only six of them. And one’s dead now.”

  “It’s a suicide mission,” Fabien said.

  She waved him off. “If I walk in through the front door, sure. But they’re always cracking the door to the fire escape and forgetting about it.”

  “The heating bill must be outrageous,” Fabien said, shaking his head in wonder. “You’re not thinking about retrieving anything else from the building, I hope?”

  The thought of grabbing the Percht had crossed her mind. Without it, she was vulnerable to evil spirits, which…she didn’t believe in? Her mind was split between two worlds. She looked away.

  He set the blue pills on the end table between them.

  The faint sound of a jazz trumpet reached them from a room down the hall. The Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. Fabien returned the plastic bag to the wall safe. “You’d better like Christmas jazz,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s all Mum plays this time of year. And the rest of the year, for that matter. Not the easiest conditions in which to write a horror novel.”

  His book. She’d completely forgotten about it. He hadn’t asked once for her thoughts on Transylvan
ian Dirt, though he’d surely been dying to. Authors were among God’s neediest creatures, eclipsed only by actors and puppies. His restraint and selflessness in the face of what she’d been through were the marks of true friendship. It made her realize she couldn’t ask him to follow her down this road. Setting foot inside the Blackwood Building again was a suicide mission. She knew Fabien was right—everything was replaceable—but she also knew whatever this was wasn’t over. The Raven was dead. Someone had killed her. And Lussi needed to know who—or what.

  While Fabien carefully remounted the deer head above the fireplace, Lussi leaned over the end table and dropped the pills into his tea.

  And then she waited.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Agnes Bailey answered the door after one ring of the bell, as if she’d been sitting close by, waiting for Lussi to arrive on her doorstep. Lussi was surprised—it was a quarter to midnight—but then checked herself. She was only a few hours removed from nearly having her heart cut out in a conference room. Nothing should have surprised her at this point.

  The old woman was dressed in a royal-purple terrycloth bathrobe. Smile lines tugged at the edges of her eyes. Her hair was stark white. It was difficult to believe this was the hussy who’d stolen Xavier Blackwood from Digby’s mother. Even more difficult to believe this was the woman who’d been in charge of the intern program…a program that had, either directly or indirectly, resulted in an untold number of missing coeds.

  Lussi introduced herself. Agnes only nodded, inviting her in without a word. No surprise, no what are you doing here. Mr. Blackwood’s former secretary was playing the part of a fugitive who’d been cornered, a woman tired of running. Apparently her guilty conscience wasn’t letting her sleep.

  The aroma of baking bread permeated the house. Lussi stomped the snow off her tennis shoes inside the entryway but kept her coat on. It was Fabien’s gray fur—gargantuan on her frame, but perfect for concealing the bowie knife she’d hidden in its inside pocket.