The endearment was making me blush far too much, not to mention entertain the idea of the orc being attractive. “If you’d rather I call you by your name, you’ll have to give me your name,” he teased.
“Oh, we skipped introductions,” Bennett said with a curse. Going around the room, he pointed at everyone and said their name. I nodded along, though I’d already figured it out.
“Nice to meet everyone. Well, the initial meeting wasn’t nice, but my view of you has improved slightly since then. I’m Hadley.”
I wasn’t sure how they were going to react, so I slipped through the double doors and into the hallway before they did. The anxiety would kill me if I waited and watched. It took a few seconds, but Kirin’s heavy footsteps followed me out of the living room.
Chapter 4
UncleFelix’sofficeendedup being the locked room I’d noted on my way into the house the previous night. I tried every key on the ring the lawyer had given me, but none of them worked for the padlock. My repertoire of unlocking spells was vast, but I didn’t have the magic to do half of them. By my third try, I was beginning to worry I’d never get it open.
“I can break the lock for you.”
Startling, I glanced over my shoulder. I’d thought Kirin had left after escorting me the three steps down the hall. He was eerily quiet when he wasn’t walking around with those giant feet. “Are you sure? It’s a heavy padlock.”
He snorted and gestured at himself. “If I’d wanted to get into this office, I could have. The only reason I didn’t is out of respect for Felix. Now that he’s dead, he doesn’t really need to be respected anymore, does he?”
I shrugged, stroking my fingers through my tangled hair. I still needed to change and run a brush through it, the locks a chaotic mess from all the sweating and fainting and sleeping in bathtubs. Unfortunately, my driving need to figure out what the fuck my uncle had been thinking was overriding the discomfort I was feeling.
Kirin still looked at me like I was a straight up snack, so I couldn’t look that horrid.
Or, more likely, his attention was because he hadn’t seen a woman in years.
“Princess, you’re going to have to move if you want me to break the lock and keep up your request of being a metre away at all times.”
Blinking, I flushed bright red and darted off to the side until I was standing down the hall by the front door. Almost exactly where he’d cornered me first thing in the morning. “Hadley,” I said. “Not princess.”
“Sorry, Hadley. Not princess.”
He smirked at me. His flirting was unstoppable. I’d be correcting him on calling me princess plenty more times, and I doubted I would continue heckling him for long. I liked it too much.
With one firm tug the wood of the door creaked and cracked, and the entire locking mechanism ended up in his hand. The padlock was still intact. I’d forgotten wood wasn’t quite as durable and he hadn’t needed to break the metal to ‘undo’ the latch. “Thank you,” I said, waiting for him to step off in the other direction before going to the door and turning the knob.
The door swung inward, no further locks keeping it shut. I was surprised no magic stopped unwanted visitors, but it was possible Uncle Felix was as weak as I was and couldn’t do robust magic. Even my parents hadn’t been good at wards. “I’ll give you a full tour when you’re done looking through his things. Come to the living room.”
“Will the ghost be there?” I asked. Mainly to be prepared, knowing my body would go into flight mode and shut down if he popped up in an unexpected place.
“No need for you to worry about Zan. He’ll avoid you from now on.”
A wave of guilt washed over me, but relief was mixed in. Everyone here thought he was sweet. He seemed sweet. But I couldn’t function around him. “I’m going to change after I’m done here. Is there hot water? I’m covered in blood.”
“And you look like a sexy murderess with the blood all over you, but yes. The bathtub you slept in is fully functional.”
I blushed again and hurried into the room without answering, closing the door behind me. There was no way I looked like a murderess. I’d bled all over myself; this wasn’t the blood of my enemies. If I’d fallen wrong when I fainted, the only one who would have died was me.
The office was dark and dreary, windows covered in blackout curtains. I tapped a rune on the side of a lamp and it flared to life. Not all runic magic was crippled, apparently. A quick check of my aristerite marbles confirmed they still weren’t working, though. Having them go out last night should have been a red flag. It took a lot of effort to ward a place against the goddesses’ communication device.
With the light to guide me, I stepped farther inside. Another closed door was off to the right, but didn’t have a padlock. Every wall had a bookcase or set of shelves, and every inch of the shelves were covered. Books, trinkets, rolled maps. A few shelves were for potion supplies, tucked away in airtight jars or preserved in a liquid solution. In the middle of the room sat a desk, big and covered in papers and notebooks. The place was cluttered. Nothing screamed, “Hadley! This is for you!”
Sighing softly, I opted to look in the desk first. A high-backed chair sat behind it, and I pulled the heavy wood out to sit while I searched. It wasn’t the most comfortable place to sit, that was for sure. On top of the desk were notes on the residents of Hadley House. Nothing in depth like psychological evaluations, but simple facts. Height, weight, age, type of magical being. How long they’d been in residence. No detail on why they’d been placed in residence in the first place, or by whom. None of the men appeared miffed to be here, but I had to doubt they’d put themselves into custody.
Apparently, Zan had been here for over a hundred years, and was about a thousand years old.
I shivered. All my research into ghosts said they grew angrier the older they got, furious they hadn’t been able to finish their business and move on from the world. A thousand years was an old ghost. How was he so easy going?
Abraxas was a half-basilisk, which I’d suspected but not fully believed. Bennett was a wolfman, different from a shifter because he had less control over his shifts, and he didn’t turn fully into a wolf. Waylon was a pixie-demon and the youngest, at twenty-seven, but he didn’t have a date of entry into Hadley House.
Calling it Hadley House felt strange, but Felix had emblazoned the coat of arms and name on every piece of paper in the office. I couldn’t ignore my uncle naming this prison after me. “I can’t believe he sent me here,” I muttered under my breath. “The one time I do something risky…”
