I smirked. “She means his bedroom.”
Felix turned on his heel. “I’ll be with the cookies and tea.”
Clown, I thought, letting my smile show. But what a clever clown. While I kept Xavier busy, he could take care of Helen. “Divide and conquer” I could practically hear him thinking as he kicked up his Pumas.
So I blew Felix an air kiss, and Helen guided me to the elevator reserved for Xavier’s personal staff. Except there was no one bustling about, changing linens or dusting or vacuuming, and the secretary’s wing was eerily quiet. What the hell was going on?
“Helen,” I said, peering into one of the kitchens.
She kept walking.
“Helen!” I ran to keep up, my heels clacking off the Italian marble. “What’s going on around here?”
“Mr. Archer is making changes.” She punched the elevator button. The doors slid open silently. “These reductions in staff are just…preparations.”
“For what?” I asked, joining her inside the steel box.
She spared me a glance through the mirrored doors as they closed. “For his death,” she said, and the emotion of my genuine shock perfumed the air.
7
After the attack on my life when I was a teen, my mother’s subsequent abandonment, and long after my early adolescent irreverence dried up into an ashy ball of hate and bitterness, the household staff of the Archer estate continued to treat me like one of the valuable antiques, to be looked at and cared for, but not touched. If the gardener or one of the maids asked how I was, it was done in that tone of disinterest reserved for strangers. I think it actually startled some of them when I moved.
And then there was Lindy.
I’d done some research since discovering my lifelong housekeeper was also a Shadow agent. At first I was merely awed that my mother had been able to live with a woman who could scent out the tiniest aberration in emotion. But then I realized that if Lindy had been here back then, my mother would have found a way to let Warren know, and get him to take care of her long ago. So somehow Lindy had taken over the life and identity of the original Helen, who had been a mortal…and was probably now dead.
One thing I knew for certain. Lindy McGuire loathed Zoe Archer, and the hate that could fuel two women for decades could only have one thing at its molten core: a man.
Because in contrast to the apathy the Tulpa showed Lindy, he’d fallen for my mother like a felled oak. Twice. The first time had been twenty-seven years ago, when Zoe got close enough to ferret out the identity of his creator, then killed that man in the hopes that it would kill the Tulpa as well. This “closeness” had also led to my conception, another reason Zoe fled. As I grew in her womb, her body had begun recklessly kicking out the pheromones that would mark her as Light.
The second time she’d conned him was after giving up her near-immortal state in order to save me. I’d survived the attack on my life…and so had my baby. Premature, the infant clung to life like she knew herself the successor in a long line of stubborn women, but then she’d been abducted from her adoptive parents on the day she was born, almost lost to the Shadows. Zoe Archer-having given all her power to me, and more vulnerable to the Tulpa than she’d ever been before-went after her granddaughter, and reclaimed the child despite her mortal flesh, embarrassing the Tulpa in the process. Again.
This, I thought, was what burned the Tulpa the most. Not only did Zoe betray and dupe him, she’d done it as one of the mortals he scorned.
Yet in between those bookend betrayals, when my mother had lived under this roof, she’d been seen as nothing more than the trophy wife of a mortal casino magnate, with two daughters and an unbreakable Wednesday morning tennis mixer at the Las Vegas Country Club. This proved that most people saw only what they expected to see. Even archvillains.
As for Xavier, after she disappeared he gutted the rooms they’d shared and built a new wing with all new furnishings, one dramatically devoid of any feminine presence. Helen wasn’t even allowed to put fresh flowers in the sitting area, which was why the half-dozen bouquets perfuming the foyer shocked me. I slowed, eyes lingering on the get-well cards sent by employees and acquaintances as we moved into the main bedroom’s sitting area. There, a foursome of club chairs sat unimaginatively before a crackling fire, a peculiar scent rising from the flames, like herbs had been baked in with the kindling.
“Try not to upset him, Olivia,” Helen said, ever imperious. “He needs his strength. Just nod and agree to everything he says.”
“Don’t I always?”
I let my placating expression fall as she led me into the recessed darkness, and hadn’t taken three steps when the scent of sickness washed over me like a viscous wave. I fought not to gag, which would certainly give me away. Were I mortal, I wouldn’t have smelled a thing beyond the scented fireplace and the battery of flowers fading outside this room. Helen, though, pulled a surgical mask over her mouth, explaining that it was to decrease the risk of additional illness.
I’d have asked why I didn’t get one too, but it was too sharp a question to come from Olivia. My sister would be more concerned about her father, so I merely popped some chewing gum into my mouth to help manage the scent and quickly crossed the knee-deep carpet to the poster bed, where privacy screens were raised and a lamp was dimmed to low. I steeled myself to the task of having to suck up the hatred I felt for Xavier long enough to kiss him alongside his jutting jaw. It was one of the hardest parts of being Olivia.
Good thing Helen had allowed me to take the lead, because if she’d seen my face as I rounded that privacy screen, she would have noted not an ounce of love in the horror and shock and revulsion that swept through me. I put one hand to my mouth and another to my heart, consciously trying to still its pounding as Helen slipped up close beside me. Quickly, I bent closer to the rank, and yes, rotting, human being instead.
“Daddy?” His chest was bird-bone frail, and rattling with the effort of wakefulness. I jerked my hand away, covering the movement by straightening the covers over shoulders gone gaunt.
“Helen,” he rasped, making even that sole word seem laborious. “The lights, if you please.”
Helen wordlessly twisted the knob on the table lamp and I steeled myself…but even anticipating it couldn’t prepare me for the carnage that could be wracked upon the flesh of someone still living. He was all bony protrusions and cutting angles, concave where he should have been convex, and vice versa, with a sunken chest, a distended belly, and eyes that bulged within disappearing sockets. He was, I realized with a start, a Shadow clothed in mortality. A human unable to escape his flesh, even while rotting inside.
I swallowed hard and set my jaw. That’s what happened when you siphoned off your soul to fuel unadulterated evil.
Unbeknownst to Xavier, I had walked in on him twice when he was performing a ritual that fed the Tulpa parts of his soul, an exchange for the paranormal leader’s patronage-money and power, a network of allies, and a surprisingly diminished pool of rivals-so that they could each continue to rule their respective worlds. At first I’d thought it a willing exchange, and it probably was in the beginning. But the second time, I’d watched the woman beside me force Xavier to his knees, and the scent of his soul mingled with fear-burnt anise and rancid vanilla-so cloying and white-hot it cauterized the lining in my nose.
I returned my gaze to his, still locked on mine. When he caught sight of me chewing gum, I thought he was going to start in again about pedigree and class and the way even the tiniest public action was a direct reflection upon him. But the zeal that had always fired this particular tirade only sparked for a second before dying off in a sigh. He simply didn’t have the energy.
“Daddy?” I said again, letting uncertainty coat my throat. It wasn’t hard.