Page 76 of Salem's Fall
Not like this.
Lucky shifts, leaping from the chair to my lap, curling against me with a low purr. I scratch behind his ears, lost in my feelings of anger and helplessness, until he head-butts my hand sharply, startling me.
“Lucky? What is it?”
He stares up at me, eyes gleaming with an intensity I’ve never seen, before jumping down from my lap and trotting toward the doorway. He pauses, looking back at me expectantly.
“I don’t understand. You want me to follow you?” I ask, feeling ridiculous talking to my cat, but something in his steady, knowing gaze spurs me to my feet.
I walk over and he takes off again, tail shaking purposefully as he slinks around the corner. Every time I catch up to him, he runs farther away, making me chase him all through the manor’s labyrinthine hallways. I have no idea what Lucky is doing, or why, but for some strange reason I can’t explain, I feel compelled to follow.
Eventually, he leads me down a quiet, dim corridor and stops beside a small door. He scratches at the wood, letting out an insistent meow.
“Um… you want me to open this?” I ask, still feeling foolish as I turn the handle.
The door swings open to reveal a narrow, spiraling staircase. I take a slow, hesitant step downward, and then Luckybolts past me, a sleek shadow slipping between my legs. He races down the stairs, his paws barely making a sound, tail flicking once before he vanishes into the darkness. I follow after him, clinging to the rickety banister for support as the air turns cooler and mustier.
At the bottom, I’m met with an old, damp stone corridor. The place is dimly lit by torches that flicker like they’ve been burning for ages. It’s almost like I’m no longer in Blackthorn Manor but have wound up in another world entirely.
“What is this place?” I murmur, my voice echoing eerily in the silence.
Lucky keeps going, his little paws padding softly on the stone floor as he winds through the corridor with purpose. Finally, we reach a small, hidden room at the far end and Lucky leads me inside.
I gasp, a jolt of shock racing through me. Sitting on top of an old dresser, plugged into the wall, are my cell phone and laptop. Damien must have stashed them here, somewhere he assumed I’d never find them.
“How did… how did you know?” I ask Lucky, but the cat just curls around my ankles and stares at me with that mysterious twinkle in his bright eyes.
I lunge for the phone and turn it on. Over a dozen missed calls. Each notification blinks back at me. Most from Katie and Quinn… and one from the Massachusetts Correctional Institution.
Dad.
I stare at the screen, my breath catching. My father rarely calls, not unless it’s important.
My fingers shake as I click into the voicemail and the automated message plays: “You have a call from Massachusetts Correctional Institution. An inmate, Thomas Woodsen, attempted to contact you. To receive future calls, please ensure…”
The voice drones on, but I stop listening. My grip tightens on the phone as my gnawing sense of dread grows.
Why would my dad be calling today of all days?
Halloween and he’s reaching out from his prison cell?
The timing chills me to the bone, like he knows something I don’t. But what? I thought he’d told me everything about the Veil and the Blackhollows the last time I saw him.
Then something else catches my eye. A small robin’s egg blue Tiffany box sits on the dresser beside my laptop, the kind used for expensive rings. I don’t want to open it, but I know I have to, even if I already have a very bad feeling about what’s inside. With numb fingers, I reach out, open the lid?—
Vivienne Van Buren’s missing engagement ring.
A sharp breath hitches in my throat as I stare at the missing ring, the one the police believed was stolen from the murder scene when they were still chasing the botched robbery theory. Why is it here? In Blackthorn Manor, hidden away in Damien’s secret little underground room?
I rifle through the dresser shelves and drawers, frantically searching, because if Damien hid his fiancée’s ring here, then what else is he hiding? There has to be something.
I find old documents, yellowed with age. Stacks of photographs. Nothing that means anything. Until?—
A familiar-looking white plastic access card, edged in silver, peeks out from beneath the papers. Mark’s Whitehall & Rowe building ID. The same card every Whitehall & Rowe attorney carries to get in and out of the firm’s building. The same one that should’ve been in Mark’s wallet the night he died.
My pulse thrums so loudly, it drowns out everything else.
What the hell is going on?
