been remodeling a lot lately, taking the house apart piece by piece and putting it back together in a different, though unimproved, state. I think it was his equivalent of a sports car in a midlife crisis. The only thing that’d remained were the trio of oil portraits he’d commissioned of Olivia in different years of her life, but the portraits were glossy and posed-hardly personal-and the furnishings had been appointed by a decorator with a modern sensibility and a blank check. Still, Chandra was impressed.
“No wonder you don’t have a job,” she said, dropping onto the couch, sinking into the tangerine sea of pillows.
Actually, Xavier didn’t want Olivia to have an opinion, much less a job, and only barely tolerated her charitable activity. He was happiest when she was flitting mindlessly about town, a theory I’d recently tested by going on a shopping spree at Mandalay Place that made her credit card look as lethal as an Uzi. Despite the danger to his bank account, Xavier had all but applauded. It was sick.
But the twisted family dynamics that’d had Xavier shunning me, coddling Olivia, and forbidding anyone to mention my mother, ever, wasn’t even his worst offense. Nothing could top his ingratiating status as the Tulpa’s pet, which made him indirectly responsible for his own daughter’s death. If it were up to me, I’d have made sure he knew it. Why should I be the only one grieving over her daily, or shouldering the responsibility of having failed in my obligation to protect her?
Yet rubbing salt in that wound would accomplish nothing for the troop, so instead I’d sworn to make him pay for his spinelessness. From his pocket, I thought, staring up at the final and largest portrait of Olivia. From his soul.
But first he was going to make himself useful. We’d only get one sweep through the mansion, and it’d be a surface one at that, but a feeble mind wasn’t one of Chandra’s innumerable faults. It would be a start.
Deluca returned bearing a tray of tea and scones, and after he’d poured, he excused himself and backed out of the room. I remained where I was long enough to take an obligatory sip, then rose and motioned for Chandra to do the same. “Come on. I’ll take you on a tour.”
If the room was bugged, and I already knew it was, Olivia’s offer to show her new friend around wouldn’t attract suspicion.
I led Chandra through the upper levels-there were three-purposely skipping the rooms that used to be mine. It’d been years since I lived there, but residual emotion was a funny thing; someone with Chandra’s keen perception might be able to scent me in there. She mixed the compounds covering our natural scents, and had almost certainly memorized the hooks of my genetic makeup. One sniff and she’d figure out my secret.
More, I didn’t want to risk releasing more emotion into that room. The furnishings were different from when I’d lived there, but I knew the secrets it contained. The hidden compartment behind one floorboard, another tucked into the northeast corner of the crown molding. The vows I’d etched on the tops of the doorframes. If I walked in that room, my thoughts would flit to those things like heads turning toward a car accident, an unwilling act of compulsiveness. One Chandra would sense.
“Your fucking photo is everywhere.”
I glanced at Chandra, but she was gazing around, her words apparently sincere, momentarily forgetting that I wasn’t really Olivia Archer.
It was then that we hit the wing housing Olivia’s childhood bedroom, and even I had to wince in embarrassment. It would’ve been eerie even were she alive, but with her dead it was a virtual mausoleum. The three giant portraits downstairs were only Xavier’s favorites. The rotunda leading to her suites was lined with photos from every year of her life, the antique accent tables lining the hallway topped with the less formal snapshots.
“Come on,” I said, hurrying through the passageway and into the common areas before Chandra could sense my sorrow. “Xavier should be ready for us.”
We took the elevator back to the ground floor and Xavier’s private office. There was a time when Xavier Archer had been hounded by the press, so he’d had an office suite and conference room built at home so his associates could come to him. But all that was before, when he’d been the primary figurehead for his empire. Nowadays Olivia grabbed most of the headlines, and Xavier was content to let her. He still spent the bulk of his hours secluded at home, but fewer employees and investors were stopping by. He’d begun to prefer taking his meetings by conference call instead.
Chandra gasped when we stepped from the elevator. I gave her a moment to look around, not bothering to hide my matching awe. We hadn’t decamped into the most opulent room in the manor, but it sure did make a statement.
The room was floor-to-ceiling white marble, with three high unadorned windows letting in specific amounts of light. Its interior was supposed to resemble a Tibetan stupa-an elaborate mound built in ancient Tibet to house the remains of great lamas-which was a fancy name for tomb. The highlight of the room was a museum-worthy exhibit containing the first complete English translation of
When I’d been an angry teen living among this physical anomaly I’d only wondered what the hell a gaming mogul thought he had in common with Tibetan meditation masters, and merely decreed the whole thing creepy. Now that I knew the link, that this place of worship had probably been forced upon Xavier as a condition of the Tulpa’s patronage, the room sent chills up my spine. However, I still didn’t know exactly what the area was for, why there was a throne, and what the room’s only ornamentation-a half-dozen ancient masks; some wooden, some plain, some copper, some ornate-signified, if anything at all.
“Come on,” I said, gesturing to the opposite side of the stupa. “That’s his office.”
I knocked on the great oak door and waited for the familiar bellow to either welcome us inside or tell us to go away. The only response was a lengthening silence, so I knocked again, louder.
“Do you hear music?”
I wouldn’t have if I’d still possessed mortal hearing. But there was a thread of low and resonant drumbeats, and the faintest tinkling of chimes. I tilted my head and furrowed my brows. “Xavier always works in silence.”
Chandra stared at me for one long second before doing something no one else had ever dared. She turned the handle on the office door and let herself in.
I expected an explosion of fury and outrage to erupt from the other side of that threshold and was already scrambling for an Olivia-esque excuse…but the bellow didn’t come. There was just that steady, thrumming beat and the continued tinkle of chimes. The beautiful and unexpected scent of sandalwood had my eyes widening in wonder. If Chandra hadn’t pulled me inside the office and shut the door, I probably would’ve stood there, dumbstruck, until the music stopped to effectively break the spell.
The only thing familiar about the office was its layout. The desk was where it should be, and the floor-to-ceiling shelves lined one chocolate wall with their stiff-spined books, but even those familiar features were hard to distinguish in the cloying, curling smoke. Heavy burgundy drapes had been pulled tightly over the glinting windows of lead crystal, and the lamps had been extinguished in favor of one great corner candle. But it was neither the dimness that made me squint and strain to see around me, nor the incense, though that didn’t help. And smoke usually derived from flame, from heat, from the disintegration of something substantial, but this was more like the cool waves of mist that wound about a Scottish highland…except these tendrils weren’t rising from the ground to overtake the landscape in a heathered glen. They were coming from an opening in the far bookcase, where the steady flame of another candle called to us like a beacon.
“I take it he’s no longer on a conference call with Macau,” Chandra whispered, unable to take her eyes from the hole in the bookcase.
And together we stepped forward, through the faux barrier, and into a room I’d never known existed.
8
Xavier Archer was on his knees, chanting, which was probably why he didn’t hear our approach. He was holding something that reminded me of a child’s rattle, but when I inched closer I recognized it as a handheld version of the
