The Touch Of Twilight (12 page)

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
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, which, as far as I knew, Xavier had never even cracked open, but the objects that really attracted one’s eye was the vertical phalanx of prayer wheels leading to a red-carpeted dais. A giant, overly ornate throne had been added since I was last here, solidifying my suspicion that Xavier wasn’t just egomaniacal…he was psychotic.

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.

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 prayer wheels in the stupa outside. Its handle was wooden, but there was an ornate metal cylinder at its apex, with a ballasted chain helping the cylinder whirl around with a deft flick of the wrist. His mouth moved as he repeated his mantra over and over, but it didn’t sound like Xavier’s voice. It was too low and respectfully resolute.

“Praying?” Chandra asked, so lightly only I could hear.

I shook my head. Xavier didn’t pray. “No. It’s more like…”

“Worshipping.”

Centered on a colorful rug, he leaned over in a practiced move to pick up a mallet, striking the side of a bronze bowl without losing beat with his prayer wheel. A warm bell tone overtook the tinny chiming in the room and resonated through my body, making the spot on my chest where the doppelgänger had nearly rent me open pulse lightly. I lifted my hand, wanting to rub the feeling away.

I also wanted to back out of the room, ponder what this could mean far from the compelling smell and sound of ritualistic Eastern prayer, but Chandra was inching closer to Xavier. I caught up with her as the even spin of the wheel stopped and the tonal notes died in the air. The room fell to complete silence. We didn’t dare breathe in the unearthly stillness, and even Xavier’s mouth moved soundlessly as he set aside the first singing bowl and mallet, and picked up a second, larger one, placing it directly in front of him on the carpet.

He held the hollowed disk with straight arms, as if proffering it to someone, and I had just enough time to think:
No, not a bowl. A mask
.

Bending his elbows, he drew the mask toward his face in an exaggerated motion. It was too small for his bullish mien, its bowl delicate and shallow, and obviously a totem meant for ritual ceremonies, clearly not intended to be worn. Yet as Xavier drew the plain wooden artifact parallel to his features, the ancient wood startled and sprang to life. He cupped it to his face as the wood pushed against itself and began to flatten, grain thinning with a high-pitched noise. It attached itself to Xavier’s skin, caressing his cheeks in a jagged slide, seeping like wax beneath his hairline to add Xavier’s coiffure—down to his cowlick—to its inanimate features.

It went fast after that, like the wood was once again living and vital, anchored in the earth, and not merely a hollowed out husk. Xavier was already statue-still, but once the mask encompassed the whole of his face, I heard a sharp click—the animate wood meeting and fastening at the nape of his neck—and he went absolutely rigid.

Ash flew from his mouth to thicken the air in a blackening haze. I leaned forward, waving a hand before me, but the effect was temporary; the air was too heavy, molecules pressed so tightly together they were almost sticky. The whole scene took on a dreamlike aspect, as if what I was seeing was taking place inside of my lids. I took another step forward, and with a second I spotted the candle burning like a focal point in haze. A third step and Xavier became visible again.

Smoke billowed from the mask now, soot coating and darkening the walls of the room. If the smoky mixture had been cloying before, it was oppressive now, and it coated my mouth in wafer-thin layers with every inhalation.

“Only one thing tastes like toasted anise,” Chandra murmured, her face scrunched in disgust.

“What?”

“Parfum de personne.” She waved her hand in the air to look me in the eye. “It’s his soul essence.”

“But what’s he doing with it?”

She squinted, returning her gaze to Xavier. “It looks like he’s giving it away.”

• • • *
      

“Well, that was a tad freaky.”

Chandra and I backed from the office, shutting the door silently behind us, and I made a face as I tried to clear the cloying sweetness from the back of my throat. Was I going to have to walk around all day with Xavier’s soul essence clinging to my clothes? “Let’s get back to the drawing room. We’ll wait for Deluca there.”

We started back through the giant stupa, neither of us seeing it this time, still mesmerized by what we’d just witnessed. I was so lost in thought, it wasn’t until Chandra called out to me that I noticed she’d fallen behind.

I walked back to her while she continued to stare into a sunken alcove, so taken by what she saw there that she actually touched me when I reached her side. We both jerked away out of habit, but her eyes stayed fixed on the wall across from her. “Do you see what I see?”

I turned my head, and though I’d passed by it hundreds of times before, my gasp was real, and immediately smothered. Of course! I did a mental head slap. “More masks.”

Half a dozen more. And they’d been hanging on these walls so long, they’d only ever registered as creepy, not significant. But they were. Clearly antique, and bearing a freakish resemblance to the one Xavier had donned, the one in front of me looked frighteningly like the mask the Tulpa had been wearing when he’d tried to microwave me only days earlier. I looked around, pointed to another, and we crossed the room in implicit silence, standing before it like it was a caged animal. It was simply, even primitively carved, and painted entirely red, like it’d been shellacked with fresh blood, but for the black line painted down the bridge of the wide nose. I’d just reached out to remove it from its wall peg when a voice behind me went off like a firecracker.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

I whirled, hand falling like it’d been slapped. Recovering quickly, I performed the eye roll I’d perfected in front of the mirror last month, and crossed my arms, tapping my fingers impatiently.

“Buffy,” I said, quickly thinking up the name for Chandra’s socialite alias. It was cute, and it’d piss her off. “This is Helen, our long-time housekeeper.”

And if Xavier had been the devil when I was young, Helen Maguire had been his succubus. Her looks were ordinary enough; she was mousy, in fact, with hair that was neither curly nor straight, and a long, sallow face framing eyes that were slightly hooded. But beneath the lids that made her look like she was dozing on her feet were sparrow-bright eyes. Apropos, as I’d always had the feeling she stored away the dramas of the Archer dynasty like shiny baubles to line her own emotional nest. She gleaned information about other powerful families as well, and after every party Xavier threw she could be found in the camera room, eyes devouring the video as she replayed recorded conversations.

And what did she do with those tiny bits of gossip she scavenged and studied? She marked them as experience, and counted them as her own.

If bothered by the way I’d pointed out her position in the household, Helen didn’t show it. Probably because she considered it a title, like mistress or duchess or queen. After my mother had left, I thought wryly, she’d certainly acted like it.

“I asked what you think you’re doing?” She took a step toward me, a laundry basket with crisply folded sheets resting snugly between an arm and one flaring hip.

“Dusting, Helen,” I retorted before I could stop myself. “Someone has to.”

She reddened under the implied criticism, and for what may have been the first time, really looked at the woman she thought was Olivia. The look softened after a moment; she’d never treated Olivia as anything but a fluffy piece of lint and was obviously still unimpressed.

“Don’t touch the artifacts, Olivia.”

“Don’t tell me what to do in my own home, Helen.” I glared at her. She took a step forward.

“What’s going on here?”

For a moment neither of us acknowledged Xavier’s presence. Then duty overcame Helen and she started babbling. “Sir, Olivia is manhandling the relics. I just want to be sure they don’t come to harm.”

“Daddy!” I said, and raced to throw my arms around him. His clothes reeked of charred spice, and I jolted upon realizing he didn’t fill out the custom-made suit as well as he used to. Pulling away, I saw dark smudges circling his eyes, and though a two-hundred-pound man couldn’t be considered gaunt, his cheeks were sunken and his skin sallow. I pretended not to notice, and shot him a blinding smile. “I was telling Buffy about your world travels, and how there’s a story to the way you acquired each of these masks.” I reached out and stroked the one nearest his office and heard a quickly indrawn breath behind me. Interesting. “But the hired help told me to leave.”