Atone: A Fairytale (Fairytale Trilogy) (4 page)

Alex giggled nervously. “It’s hard for me to imagine Nicholas skulking.”

Becca grinned. “That’s because you always had a hard time seeing past his general hotness to the smarminess underneath.”

“In my defense, he was—I mean
is
—pretty hot.”

The room next to the master bedroom was an office, complete with a large desk and tall bookshelves filled with scientific texts. Nicholas may have been kind of a jerk as an advisor, but Becca had never once doubted his ability and knowledge. Though, having seen his house, she was wondering why he’d chosen to work at GeMMLA at all. Not that Becca was interested in delving into Nicholas’s motivations. She was more interested in the laptop sitting in the middle of the desk.

“Bingo,” she flipped it open. It was charged, still plugged into the wall even, but password protected.

“Are you planning to hack into Nicholas’s laptop?” Alex asked.

“Possibly. I’m definitely planning to take it with me,” Becca answered as she started sliding desk drawers open and rifling through them.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I want to know what kind of information he has about Lilia, and about you or me on this thing. Especially if we’re going to end up having to call the police and report him missing. I don’t want anyone looking into Lilia’s past too closely.”

“You do not think my documents will hold up? We paid a lot of money for them.” Lilia’s forehead creased in concern.

“Yeah, we did.” Becca agreed. “The birth certificate and all that are probably fine. I’m more worried about no one knowing anything about you before you turned up two years ago. I mean, what if they started digging deeper? Actually looking at yearbooks from the high school we said you went to or something? I just don’t know how much Nicholas has found out…” her voice trailed off as she saw a picture of Lilia that was peeking out from a large file folder in one of the drawers. She pulled out the folder and opened it.

“Apparently a lot.” Alex’s voice was quiet but deadly. “Take the file folder and the computer.”

Becca swallowed dryly and nodded. She’d been afraid that Nicholas had been compiling information on Lilia, but seeing the evidence in front of her made her feel sick. She slapped the file shut, unplugged the laptop, and followed the other girls out of the room as a foreign feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. Becca had always snarked at Nicholas, she’d even been extremely mad at him a few times, but she’d never felt rage like this.

~ Chapter Three ~

B
ECCA SAT ON
her bed with the file folder from Nicholas’s house open in front of her. Most of the pages were notes, not all of them coherent. There were several printouts of maps, most of them from the general area where the dig he’d been a part of had been located. There was a page with information about her and Alex, including their phone numbers—he must have sent something similar to Dr. Gagnon. There was quite a bit of information about Lilia, including where she went to fashion school.

The picture was what freaked Becca out the most. It was a printout of a page of the school’s website showing students presenting projects at a show the month before. Lilia was standing next to the model wearing one of her creations and smiling her dazzling smile. Next to Lilia the poor model looked like a drab little mouse. But then, the fairy tale wasn’t called “
Sleeping Beauty
” for no reason.

Two can play at the creepy stalker game.
Becca did an internet search using Nicholas’s full name. She’d committed his birthday to memory when she’d looked at his license earlier. There was less information readily available than she’d anticipated. Most of what came up was about Nicholas’s father. It turned out his parents were wealthy and successful enough to be mentioned in several articles. It somehow didn’t surprise her that he’d grown up with money. He may have never flaunted it at the museum, but he had the attitude of someone who expected good things to come to him instead of having to work for them.

“All right, let’s see if we can figure you out.” She pulled Nicholas’s laptop out of her backpack and opened it. She looked at the mini-report on Nicholas she’d been compiling in a spiral notebook during her search and started at the top. The password didn’t seem to be any variation of his name or birth date or address, or his parents names, company names, or any permutations of the names of the schools Nicholas had gone to.

“I suck as a hacker,” she muttered after she’d run through everything that made sense. She typed in a few random number sequences, hoping against hope that she’d get lucky. Nothing.

Becca glared at the blinking cursor. It felt like it was taunting her.

iamajerk

Incorrect password.

Becca giggled in spite of herself.

Nicholasisacreep

Incorrect password.

While it was funny, it wasn’t really getting her anywhere. On a whim she tried Alex’s name, her own, the full name of the museum, the date Lilia had knocked him out and then...

Arraine

Becca watched, more in horror than in triumph, as Nicholas’s profile loaded on the laptop.

Arraine, the name of Lilia’s kingdom. The last place on earth that had welcomed the fae with open arms. The kingdom that had been so forgotten that only a few references to it remained.

“No, no, no,” she muttered. Apparently Nicholas hadn’t forgotten as much as she’d hoped. The three sisters—Lilia’s fae aunts—had helped muddle Nicholas’s mind after he’d awoken from Lilia’s spell, and had sent him to work with his former mentor Professor Gagnon in order to separate him from Lilia and the other girls.

The one major flaw in that plan was that Dr. Gagnon was the same professor the three sisters had used to get Lilia’s bed from the area that used to be Arraine to Los Angeles in the first place. They’d sent Nicholas to the one place where he would be constantly reminded of what had happened to him in Los Angeles—the one place where he might actually be able to find out more about Lilia’s family…that is, if he could remember what had happened before he’d been knocked out.

Becca closed her eyes in frustration as she remembered Lilia coldly informing Nicholas that she was “the Princess Lilia de la Foret of Arraine” in the hallway at GeMMLA on the fateful day they’d found the enchanted Luke and had knocked out Nicholas. That was the only place he could’ve heard the name of the kingdom, unless he’d somehow discovered it on his own.

She’d been hoping against hope that he wouldn’t have remembered this much. She’d chosen to believe that when the three sisters had said the memories would slip through his mind like sand through fingers, it meant he would eventually just forget. Not that he’d keep tightening his fist until no more grains escaped.

Becca didn’t have to look through the computer for very long. Nicholas had conveniently saved most of his files to his desktop. There was one titled “The Mirror.” Becca clicked it open eagerly.

If his journal entries had been vaguely coherent, this spiraled into incomprehensible. There were dated entries, some of them paragraphs long, some of them only a few words. All of them obsessed with the mirror, talking about the claws, talking about the reflections that he saw—none of it made sense. And it made less and less sense the later the entries got. But they became more frightening. That Nicholas had been obsessed with the mirror and that he’d known it was magic was evident.

The last few entries were very short. Mostly just quick phrases about terrifying dreams and feeling sick when he wasn’t near the mirror.

The last entry was dated almost two weeks before.

Pain. Something wrong. Changing. Pain.

Becca slammed the laptop shut, shoved it and the folder back into her backpack, and ran out the door.

~

Becca knew someone had been in Nicholas’s house the moment she opened the front door and the cold air hit her like a blast in the face. The front door had been locked. She had locked it on their way out knowing she could easily unlock it again if they needed back in. It took her only a few seconds to open it this time as the metal seemed to remember the touch of her magic.

They had left the temperature control at seventy, yet it was so cold that goosebumps broke out on her arms as she walked into the house.

“Nicholas?” she called. “Are you here? It’s Becca Ward. I need to talk to you.”

No response. Becca took a step forward and then froze. She’d heard something. It sounded like a door closing softly. It had come from the direction of the kitchen. She quietly unzipped the front pocket of her backpack and took out the key ring with her pepper spray—a gift from her safety-conscious father, and held it out in front of her.

She knew someone was here. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did. And somehow she knew it was Nicholas. She should have been scared, but she just felt angry. He was obviously hiding from her, otherwise why wouldn’t he just come out and say, “I’m fine, get out of my house.”

“Nicholas, I’m here because Dr. Gagnon called me. Are you here? I just need to let him know you’re okay.”

Still no response.

When she got to the kitchen she clicked the temperature control back up to seventy-five where she knew Lilia had left it. It was back down to fifty-five.

“Much colder and it will start snowing in here,” she muttered.

She looked around the kitchen. Nothing seemed out of place…

Except…

“What the hell?” One entire wall of cupboards was sticking out strangely. Becca walked toward it realizing it wasn’t individual cupboards at all, but a door—a door that was slightly ajar. If it had been closed the wall would have looked just like the other modern kitchen cupboards.

“Nicholas Hunt has a hidden room in his house,” Becca said out loud in disbelief. “Nothing surprises me at this point.”

Becca knew the smart thing to do would be to leave and call Alex and Lilia. Or call Dr. Gagnon and tell him she was out of her depth. Or maybe go upstairs, haul the mirror down the steps using magic if she had to, strap it on the top of her Jetta, drive away, and forget Nicholas Hunt had ever existed.

But then she heard what she thought sounded like a heavy footstep from behind the door and she forgot all about being rational. She swung the wall open and started down the stairs that she found behind it. They went down about half a level, as if the house had suddenly decided it was a split level ranch instead of an eccentric copy of an English Tudor.

This level had several rooms, from what she could tell, almost as if it were an entire apartment unto itself. It was dark, there weren’t any windows to let the late afternoon sunlight in. She searched along the wall for a light switch, finally finding one and flicking it up. The room remained dark and she cursed under her breath.

“Nicholas are you down here?” The room was filled with large shapes, definitely some kind of furniture. The tall thing in one corner looked like it could be a lamp. Becca made her way toward it and found the knob. It let out a weak yellow glow. She could see that there were several larger pieces: a couch, a few huge bookshelves, an armoire. The dim light stretched even bigger shadows out behind the furniture.

One of the shadows moved.

Becca ran her thumb over the ring on her right hand, feeling the reservoir of power inside her chest flare to life. As it did, so did her irritation.

She knew Nicholas was there. And she was pissed about it.

“Nicholas, what in the hell is going on? I get that you don’t want me here, the skulking and hiding has made that clear. But I’m here, so why don’t you just come out and tell me you’re fine so I can let Dr. Gagnon know.”

She thought for a moment he wasn’t going to respond.

“That’s not why you’re here.”

She narrowed her eyes at the back of the room where the coward was hiding. What was really going on here? His voice sounded slightly different than she remembered it. Deeper and rougher somehow.

“No, you’re right. I took all your files on Lilia,” she said matter-of-factly. “I don’t want you making life any more difficult for her.”

A deep, angry sound came from the shadows—it sounded almost like a growl. Becca had a sudden flash of the golden claws curling around the mirror upstairs, and so she was, strangely, not all that surprised when Nicholas jumped into the light.

Except it wasn’t Nicholas. It was a large, hairy beast with brown fur and a savage face. He strode into the middle of the room on all fours, a long tail twitching behind him. Easily three times Becca’s size and weight, he moved with a disturbing grace. Even through the long, almost curly fur, she could see the beast’s muscles coiling and bunching as he moved. His brilliant blue eyes glared at her.

That was probably the most surreal part-those eyes. She knew those eyes.

And then it got even more surreal. The beast’s mouth opened, Becca got a vague impression of teeth—lots and lots of teeth—and out of it came a voice she remembered well: “If you won’t take a hint, maybe you can be scared into leaving.”

Becca laced her fingers together, running her thumb over her protection ring once more as she willed her racing heart to slow to a normal pace. “Hello, Nicholas.”