Her grandmother’s body lies in the foyer, dead. The old woman’s throat is torn open, those aqua-colored eyes of hers staring aimlessly up at the ceiling. Blood splatters the walls. “It’s not real,” I reassure Eloise, stepping over the illusion.
She sheathes one of her daggers and grabs my arm. Closing her eyes, she swallows repeatedly. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“I have you.” I guide her forward. In her real house, the foyer would lead to a hall. If we turned right, we’d reach the kitchen. Left, we’d reach the parlor. But this challenge doesn’t give me a fork in the road. It leads me directly to the parlor. I can’t continue wherever the path plans to take me without going straight through it.
Having recovered herself, Eloise releases my arm and draws her second dagger again.
“Ready?” I ask her.
“Yeah.” Her eyes meet mine. We step into the room together.
The scent of mold and fetid, rotting meat reaches me, even as the scene in front of us threatens to bring me to my knees. There, at the center of the room, I see myself in my battle form, blood covering my mouth, my chest.
Eloise is dead in my arms.
40
Escape Room
ELOISE
“Damien!” He’s gone catatonic at my side. I shake him by the shoulder. “It’s not real. Stay with me. That’s not you!”
Goddess, I thought I was the one who might puke up our last meal, but all color has left his face and he looks just as sick.
The grandfather clock ticks loudly from the corner of the room, a sound that reminds me so much of home, but also reminds me that the real clock back on Earth has stopped. This room, everything in here, is both familiar and terribly, terribly wrong. I glance at the time. Ten minutes to midnight.
“I called you at exactly midnight. I don’t want to know what happens when this clock strikes twelve. Let’s get out of here.” I tug on his elbow as I turn around to retrace my steps into the hall, but the opening through which we entered is gone. A wall blocks our way out, as if the entrance to the parlor never existed.
“No, no, no, no.” Damien punches the place that once was an entryway. His fist bounces off the wall as if it were made of stone. Damien could easily punch through my real walls, but we are not getting out the way we got in. “Not here. We can’t be trapped here,” he mutters.
I place a hand on his back. “It’s okay. I think this is like a puzzle. Like an escape room. We can’t break our way out. We have to solve our way out.”
He scowls at the wall, shaking his head. I look back at the scene. The monster version of Damien isn’t moving. He’s simply hunched over my fake dead body. It’s not even the current version of me. My hair is platinum blond and straight like Tony used to make me wear it. Like I was wearing it at the time this scene took place. “I know it’s awful, Damien, but it’s not real,” I say, sheathing my daggers. “I don’t think anything in this house of horrors can physically hurt us. It’s just an illusion.”
“It’s real,” he murmurs, and his voice is so low and gritty, I have to turn to look at him to make sure I caught what he is trying to say. His gaze trails down and away from me, like he’s ashamed.
“It’s not real,” I tell him. “If it were real, I wouldn’t be standing in front of you right now.”
He gives a long, low moan. “The night you called me,” he admits sadly, still staring at the wall. “I dreamed of this. I wanted to drain you dry. I fantasized about it, Eloise. This scenario came straight from my head.”
I turn back to the scene, my gaze tracing over where I’d drawn the chalk outline of a pentagram. It disappeared once the bargain was struck. The candle flickers in the middle of the floor, its flame as black as night. I am naked in Damien’s arms, my fluffy pink bathrobe pooled on the floor, my body limp and slightly gray. Definitely dead. This is a replay of the night I called Damien, but different. It’s what would have happened if everything had gone wrong.
I squint up at him. “You fantasized about draining my grandmother?”
He can’t look me in the eye. “I didn’t know you. I only knew that your blood sang in my veins, and likely, as your relative, hers would too. I could hear her heart beating in the next room.”
“Gross.”
He frowns.
“I’m glad you didn’t act on that fantasy.” I turn back to the room. The gallery wall is the same, but my Harcourt ancestors move within the photos, watching us with ghostly, judging eyes. Vines grow up the walls, between the frames, purple roses blooming at the corners of the ceiling, over the green velvet couch, up the walls, crisscrossing the darkened window.
Outside, the branches of the red oak wave in the moonlight. “We can go through the window.” I take his hand and tug him forward.
He balks. “Aren’t you mortified that I dreamed of killing you and your grandmother that night?”
I shrug. “Not really. You might have considered it, but you didn’t act on the urge. As a vampire, I can understand the lust for blood. It must have been hard for you to resist.”
