“I do know,” I said, my voice low, steady. The talking-down-a-hostage-situation voice. “And I think that if he wanted to act against any of us, he’d do it a lot more elegantly and discreetly.”
Grant was near the top of my “people never to piss off” list. Because if he ever decided he had it in for me, I would just… vanish.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Grant said.
Anastasia scowled at me. “Then what do you think is happening here?”
I didn’t snap back like I wanted to, because I was still thinking like Cormac, and Anastasia didn’t have that benefit. Hell, for all her experience she might never have met anyone like Cormac. I explained carefully, thinking out loud, formulating my own hypothesis. “I think it’s pretty simple. There are people out there—bounty hunters, hit men, assassins—who want people like us dead. I think maybe one or more of them got wind of what was happening here. That they’d have a whole group of juicy targets in one place, just waiting to be picked off. They made plans, they camped out—maybe at that campsite Jerome and I found during the treasure hunt. They waited for the chance, got rid of witnesses. Now they can pick us off one by one, and that’s all they want to do. I think they hit Dorian first because they knew it would weaken you and Gemma. That means they’re smart. They know our weaknesses. So we have to pay attention. And I think we have to go after them before they get to us.”
The others took time absorbing all that. I studied them in turn, sizing them up, guessing how they’d do under pressure—assessing my pack, I realized. Most of them probably had never been hunted before. They might never have been in danger like this. Grant and Tina had, I knew. They could fight. Anastasia, probably. The old vampires didn’t survive so long without developing a few survival skills. Lee was a hunter, but he was used to being top of the food chain. Jeffrey, Ariel—I had no idea. I hated this, because Jeffrey and Ariel at least were too darned nice to be stuck in a situation like this.
That was why I was starting to throw down the alpha attitude: I felt like I had to protect them.
Lee finally broke the silence. “How do you do that? How do you just put yourself inside their heads like that?”
I looked away, trying not to laugh, because this wasn’t funny. But God, I wished Cormac could hear this.
“I have this friend,” I said. “He’s good at this sort of thing.”
“Any chance you could get him to come out here and help?”
My throat tightened, and I shook my head. “No chance at all, even if we had a working phone.”
“Too bad,” he said.
Yeah. Too bad.
Straightening, I pulled from the window. Reminded myself I was supposed to be badass. “Tell you what. There’s a locked room upstairs. Anyone else want to check it out? See what Provost decided to keep out of sight?”
I trooped upstairs, leading the others.
“Maybe this is all some kind of mistake,” Lee said. “Dorian was an accident, Jerome was the only target—he had enemies, right? Maybe from his boxing days?”
“Except there’s still that prickling on the back of my neck,” I said.
“What do you think we’ll find in there?” Tina said.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to look.”
Ariel split off to knock on Conrad’s door. “Hey, Conrad. You okay?”
“I’m not coming out, so don’t ask,” came the muffled voice from within. Ariel stepped back, a startled look on her face.
“I’d have thought he’d start adjusting by now,” she said.
I gave her a wry grin. “The trouble is, there’s no way he can save face. He looks like an idiot, and he knows it.”
The door to the mystery room was still locked. I rattled the knob again and wondered if I was strong enough to kick it in. That always worked so well in the movies, right? “Maybe there’s an ax in the toolshed,” I said.
“May I try?” Grant stepped forward, holding a couple of small, thin tools. Lock picks. The magician had everything.
“Be my guest,” I said, stepping aside. I liked having Grant on my team, which made me even crankier when Anastasia whispered to me, “He has us all where he wants us.”
I didn’t want to have that argument right now. I didn’t want to have that argument at all.
Grant got to work on the lock, using the pick smoothly, making minute adjustments. In a moment, the lock clicked and the door cracked open. Grant pushed inside the room.
I could see pretty well in the dark. So could Anastasia, and she was at my shoulder, looking in. The room had been cleared of furniture, and a dozen or so plastic storage crates were shoved up against walls, among other random bits of equipment. A storage room, as I’d suspected. I took a deep breath and tried to sort out the tangle of smells. Lots of metal, plastic, rubber, along with the smells inherent in the lodge. Familiar smells of technology and civilization. It didn’t mean anything.
Grant was studying the room by the glow from a cigarette lighter. Tina and Jeffrey carried flashlights and panned the beams over the interior. I started looking in boxes.
One held a few extra remote cameras nestled among coils of coaxial cable. Microphones, wire, electrical tape, packing foam, forms listing inventory. All the odds and ends I’d have expected to find tucked away on a film production like this.
Then I found the box with stuff in it I couldn’t identify.
“Grant?” I said. He and Anastasia came to look over my shoulder.
In this box we found coils of very thin wire, an almost clear filament that certainly wasn’t meant for anything electrical. Sleek black boxes with tiny lenses. Batteries. Gun cases—empty.
“Trip wire,” Grant said. “Motion detectors.”
“Stuff you’d use for a security system?” I said.
“Or for a trap,” he said.
I was almost afraid to dig looking for more, but I did, and found the canisters, steel and heavy, the size of grenades. Not that I’d ever seen a grenade. But I could tell. My skin was prickling. When I lifted it, my hand seemed to tingle at the feel of it. The sheer sinister aura leaking from it. I smelled it, a quick sniff, and quickly turned away because it smelled sour, chemical. Just a faint odor, suggestive of pain. My eyes watered from it.
“Tear gas,” Grant said.
“Are you kidding?” I said, quickly setting the thing down. “What’s a film crew need with tear gas?” And I knew. Cormac’s voice whispering. All I had to do was think of what
Jeffrey stared at the box, encompassed by his flashlight beam. “What does this mean? That Provost and the production company are in on it?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “I’d love to find out who owns the lodge. It might be that someone was able to get in here ahead of time and set up shop. We still don’t know enough to go pointing fingers.”
“But we can assume there may be some kind of booby trap out there rigged with tear gas?” Lee said. “This is fucked up.”
“Yeah,” I breathed.
“We need to check over the house. Carefully,” Grant said.
“I’ll search with you,” Anastasia said to Grant.
“Don’t want to let me out of your sight?” he said.
“That’s right.”
We scoured the house top to bottom. I wasn’t even sure what we were looking for, but we brainstormed and made up a list: wires, cameras, or other bits of electronics in odd places. Places where recent construction might have been done: odd seams in the walls, sawdust on the floor. Any trace of anything that didn’t belong. We checked windows, doors, roof beams, vents. Lee and I hunted by smell, though he said that out of the water he wasn’t much good.
Just because we didn’t find anything didn’t mean nothing was there. That was the worst part. It felt futile.
I slumped into the kitchen, looking for something to eat and drink, and found Ariel. She’d taken a drawer full of butter knives and was lashing them together with a coil of wire from the secret stash upstairs. She’d made a
