The Skeleton Key Read online

  I scurried out of the room and down the stairs, heading for the front door before Skye could catch me and tear strips off me.

  ‘Have you enjoyed your time at Rockwell Mansion?’ the butler asked politely as I walked out, making a beeline for Celia’s, making chauffeured car, which pulled up as soon as I hit the top step.

  Rockwell. Mansion.

  Oh, God. This was the Rockwell family home.

  ‘Wait! You forgot your coat,’ I heard the butler call out as I pulled the car door closed.

  On Sunday I woke to a golden beam of spring sunshine blinding me. I rubbed my heavy eyelids and sat up. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and the late morning light was coming in through a gap in the heavy curtains and hitting me with the accuracy of the gnomon on a sundial. My eyelids weren’t the only part of me that felt heavy, despite the solid stretch of sleep: my body was leaden and my lower lip sat forward in a dissatisfied pout.

  Jay.

  Luke.

  It’s all a mess.

  I found I had no desire to rise, preferring instead the safety and comfort of the old Victorian four-poster bed – the warm covers, the cocoon of the high canopy and heavy drapes Celia had recently had fitted. I propped some lace-edged pillows behind my head and barely moved for a long time, thinking. What had I done? My performance at the party at Rockwell Mansion had been an utter embarrassment. I’d arrived unprepared and made a fool of myself in front of the host – my evidently quite wealthy amnesiac ex-boyfriend. I had not asked enough questions of Pepper before attending and I had no one to blame but myself for that. Worst of all, I’d humiliated myself and my boss during an intimate moment. The young man she was with had been unharmed by her, though his ego – and hers – were likely bruised by my rude, ill-thought-out intervention. It had been red lipstick on his throat, not blood. What if I was completely wrong about Skye, anyway? What if she hadn’t been counting that rice like I’d thought and she was in no risk of being Sanguine at all? What if I’d simply let my crazy life in Spektor spill over into my work life, clouding my judgment? Not everyone turned after contact with the undead. I’d even drunk Deus’s blood and was assured it would have little effect on me – apart from a bit of a tan and that frustrating lack of resistance to his ancient, predatory pull.

  I sighed and pulled the covers up to my neck.

  And my friend Lieutenant Luke was . . . well, what was he? Having him missing was bad enough, but now that I’d found him again those horrible green eyes of his haunted me. I missed him terribly, and the fact was, I didn’t know what to do. Rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me that I’d had unrealistic expectations of him and the possibilities of our relationship. I’d pushed Luke into going outside the house. That had evidently been a serious mistake. Had we crossed boundaries we weren’t supposed to? Broken some key supernatural rule? Was it all my fault?

  On days like this I really didn’t feel up to being ‘the Seventh’, not that I really understood what it meant anyway. (Why wouldn’t anyone give me a straight answer? Why was there no course I could take? No proper textbook to explain it?) But one thing I knew for sure was that being the Seventh – whatever that was – would not pay my bills. A girl has to look after herself, always. My mom had taught me that. I needed financial independence, regardless of my great-aunt’s generosity, but now I would probably lose my job, thanks to my own foolishness. Where would I find employment in Manhattan if I could not use Skye as a reference? Bettina and Ben’s Book Barn in Gretchenville was the only other place I’d worked, and work experience like that was unlikely to dazzle New York’s publishing types. What would I end up doing to make ends meet? I couldn’t go back to having no lunch money and no mobile phone. I just couldn’t let that happen.

  Oh, Pandora, what have you done?

  No, I was not feeling terribly impressed with myself. Not at all.

  For much of Sunday I wallowed in icky self-loathing, the same negative thoughts cycling through my brain – Jay, Luke, Skye, repeat – as unhelpful as a broken record. I felt antisocial and I ate my meals in my room, though I didn’t even hear Celia in the penthouse. The only company I enjoyed was that of Freyja, who curled up in my lap, furry, warm and purring, while I finished the last two hundred pages of the paperback novel I’d been enjoying. Unfortunately the ending featured the heroine running off with a romantic, blood-sucking vampire. Can you imagine? In my current state, that left me pretty disturbed, I can tell you. (He’s a killer! I wanted to scream at her. A predator! You can’t trust him!) I shoved the book under a stack of vintage Vogue magazines Celia had put in my room, as if not being able to see it would somehow make my very real paranormal problems go away. What I needed was escapism, but since moving to Spektor the tales that had once so delighted me cut too close to the bone. I couldn’t even re-read Bram Stoker’s Dracula without focusing on the obvious inaccuracies, and hearing Celia’s frequent lament, ‘That Bram Stoker has a lot to answer for.’

  When the sun went down I did not seek out Celia. I feared she would ask me about the party. And most of all, I did not dare call on my once-close friend Lieutenant Luke.

  In a very real way, I was more alone in Spektor than I’d ever been.

  By Monday morning I was resigned to my fate. There would be no more pity parties from me. This was the day I would get fired from Pandora, but that was fine. Just fine. I would survive the humiliation as I’d survived so many other things. I’d worried about it long enough and there was nothing left to do but face the music, as they say. (What does that even mean? What music?)

  I took the subway from Spanish Harlem, flicked a few coins into the upturned top hat of an industrious magician busking on Spring Street, and arrived at the office on time, wondering how Skye would do it. Would she scream at me in front of the rest of the staff? As she had before? Would I just get a letter? Would she take me into her private office and try to neck me, like she had that poor young man? Or rather, like I’d thought she was doing to him.

  I held my head high and waved mutely to Morticia as I passed the big white reception desk. She was on the phone, but her big eyes followed me.

  When I reached my tiny cubicle outside Skye’s office, I took my coat off, placed the satchel at my feet, sat down and did a quick inventory of my three months there. The changes in my life since moving to Manhattan had been profound and I’d managed for this long. I could get through this. Skye was not in yet, but I was sure to hear from her.

  ‘Where are the photographs?’

  Pepper Smith had arrived at my cubicle with her palm out.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ I said, and fished her camera out of my satchel. ‘I took loads of shots. I haven’t downloaded them. Would you like me to—’

  ‘I’ll take those. Thanks,’ Pepper said. She snatched her camera from me and turned away. ‘Oh, and there will be a group meeting at noon,’ she told me as an afterthought before walking away.

  ‘Oh. Okay. I’ll be here,’ I replied. Till then, anyway.

  So I was going to be fired in front of everyone. Great.

  The next three hours ticked by more slowly than perhaps any of my life. I sorted emails with little enthusiasm. Calls came through. I took messages for Skye. I made a cup of tea. All the while, Skye DeVille’s office remained empty and I felt a heavy silence hanging over the whole of the Pandora office, as if we were all waiting for a ticking bomb to go off. Just before noon, the bell finally chimed at the front door. I peered over the wall of my cubicle, heart pounding, but it was only a delivery man carrying a big cardboard box. He exchanged a few words with Morticia, and then the deputy editor, and made his way to the little kitchenette. When he’d finished unpacking and installing it, we had a fancy-looking bright red coffee machine.

  Pepper wandered over to me, perhaps ready to fire me.

  ‘Have you used one of these before?’ she said, and gestured to the new machine.

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Not really,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m a quick learner.’

  ‘Good. Read this,�
� she said, and handed me the instruction booklet. It was written in sixteen languages and it appeared much more complicated than the push-button thing that we’d had before. You had to warm the cups, grind the coffee, froth the milk . . . I had a look at the machine and the accessories it came with and, before I knew it, it was just past noon – the hour of detonation – and I realised that Pepper had given me new instructions to learn, so . . . Well, was I going to get fired or not?

  I left the coffee machine and instructions in the little kitchenette and joined everyone around Skye’s office. Most of the staff were taller than me, so I stood next to Morticia at the back of the small crowd, hoping to be invisible until the big moment came. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed a lot of us were tense.

  ‘I’ve asked you all to gather here because I have an announcement,’ the deputy editor said, and I thought, Ah, here we go.

  Pepper had eschewed her usual skinny jeans and funky T-shirts and blouses for a smart green shift dress today, and she addressed the gathering of staff with one hand on her narrow hip. ‘I have come on board as the new editor in chief of Pandora,’ she announced. ‘Our previous editor Skye DeVille is moving on to pursue another path. Pandora, you will now work as my editorial assistant. Ben, you are our new deputy editor. These changes are effective immediately.’

  I blinked.

  ‘Wow,’ Morticia muttered under her breath.

  I could not have been more surprised if she’d told us she was an evil fairy.

  Come to think of it, with everything else I’d seen lately, that would probably have surprised me less.

  It was nearing the end of The Day I Was Not Fired when the office door opened and the little bell chimed to tell us a visitor had arrived. Though it was probably a courier, I immediately sat up in my cubicle to check that it wasn’t Skye DeVille, back to rip all our throats out for taking over the magazine she’d helmed. Skye would have extra fang for me after I’d pulled her off that young man at Rockwell Mansion. (That’s if I was right about her being Sanguine, which I couldn’t make up my mind about.)

  But no. It wasn’t Skye. It was someone equally familiar and infinitely more welcome.

  What’s he doing here?

  Jay Rockwell strolled in, looking awfully good in his leather jacket and jeans, something folded under one arm. He leaned over the reception desk and spoke to Morticia, who seemed a little dazzled by his presence. They exchanged a few words before he spotted Pepper near the lightbox at the window and made his way straight over to her.

  ‘Hey, how are you?’ I heard him say.

  Pepper seemed surprised at first to see him. She whipped her head around and when she saw who it was, her distracted auto-frown adjusted itself into something of a sultry smile. ‘Oh, hi. I’m good. Great party on Saturday,’ she said, and leaned one hip against a desk. She absent-mindedly toyed with a short lock of her fashionable white-blonde hair.

  I ducked my head and buried myself in the papers on my desk, wondering what to do. I was Pepper’s assistant. She was my boss. Did they have a history? Pepper and Jay? I’d suspected it before. But whatever was going on, I needed to keep out of it. It didn’t matter if my budding relationship with Jay had been wiped away thanks to supernatural amnesia. It didn’t matter that he’d taken me on my first ever real date, that he’d been so nice to kiss, that I’d basically saved his life. It didn’t matter anymore. That was months ago and so much had happened in the meantime.

  Keep your head down.

  ‘Maybe we can get together again sometime?’ I heard the newly minted Pandora editor say, and a little part of my stomach twisted.

  Stop listening. Stop. It’s none of your business anymore. None.

  Though it was time for me to think about packing up, I found some more emails of Skye’s to sort and then I felt a hand on my shoulder and I knew it was Jay. I knew it before I even looked.

  I took a breath and turned my head.

  ‘Hi, Pandora,’ he said, and smiled down at me.

  He remembers my name, I thought, and pushed my chair back from my desk. ‘Hi, Jay.’

  Jay Rockwell had something camel-coloured folded under one arm and now he lifted it up and let it unfold.

  My coat. The coat Celia had given me. I’d been so flustered I’d raced off without retrieving it.

  ‘Kingsley told me that this was left behind by a very beautiful young woman in a black and white dress.’

  Kingsley. The butler.

  ‘Oh, I . . . um. Yes. Thank you. I forgot it,’ I said, trying not to let his flattery get to me. My cheeks felt a touch warm and I worried I was blushing.

  ‘I’m glad you came to our little party,’ he said, with what must have been false modesty. The soiree had been anything but minor. ‘It was good to see you again. Did the photos come up well?’

  ‘Yup. No problems there,’ I said. Pepper hadn’t made any complaints.

  I stayed seated, as if Pepper would somehow fail to notice that Jay and I were talking if I stayed in my chair. She did seem a little possessive of Jay, for whatever reason, and I really didn’t want to get on her bad side, especially now that she was my boss.

  Jay sat down on the edge of my desk, his proximity making me nervous. ‘The party seemed like a great success,’ I said, filling the silence with talk, though I did not care to mention that I hadn’t realised it was his party, or his dad’s, when I’d made those stupid comments. He must have thought I was a real card, coming to Rockwell Mansion and asking if Jay Rockwell came there often.

  Idiot.

  ‘What time do you get off?’ he asked, taking me by surprise.

  I swallowed.

  Automatically, I glanced at the wall clock. It was past five already. ‘Well, technically I’m off now,’ I responded, with a fair bit of steadiness in my voice. ‘But I have a real busy evening. Things are a bit complicated at the moment.’

  An understatement. I just didn’t feel like I could go on a date at the moment, if that’s what Jay was asking. Not with everything else going on.

  Though the idea was tempting.

  ‘Maybe another time?’ I offered.

  Jay seemed to take my refusal well. ‘No problem. I understand. If you want to catch up, give me a call,’ he said smoothly. He pulled out a business card and wrote his mobile number on it using the pen on my desk. I hoped to hell that Pepper wasn’t seeing this, though she probably was. ‘I’d like to take you out sometime. No pressure though.’

  Jay had asked me out before. Before taking me out for dinner in Little Italy. Before we got attacked by Elizabeth Bathory’s henchwomen and I saved his life just a little bit.

  ‘Thanks. That’s really kind,’ I said, and pocketed his card as quickly as I could.

  Jay cocked his head to one side. ‘We have met before, haven’t we?’ he said, squinting, some recollection seeming to come to him. ‘I mean, before the Empire State Building. Funny, I just can’t quite place it.’

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. I didn’t know where to begin with that.

  ‘Well, I hope you’ll take me up on my offer,’ he said quietly. He stood up and walked away, leaving me with Celia’s coat and his phone number.

  After work I rode the subway up to Spanish Harlem and took my usual route through Central Park. As I walked I admired the green gardens, passing alongside trees budding with tiny, bright flowers, and I found that I felt rather buoyed. I even thought I knew why.

  Yes, my life was complicated, but I had not been fired from my job (yay!) and, further more, I might even have a chance of a bit of normality.

  I had a chance at being someone of actual interest to a normal, living human being – wanted by someone human, instead of being constantly put down and underestimated. And the best parts of my life didn’t have to unfold strictly after dark, didn’t always have to involve amulets and dead men and the constant creeping pressure of frightening prophecies and this title of ‘the Seventh’. I could have something normal, too. A date in a crowded restaurant
. A picnic in the sunshine. The things normal girls did all the time. Yes, I was grateful for my great-aunt and my strange gifts, too, but a little bit of normal once in a while would be very nice.

  Perhaps Jay and I could even pick up where we’d left off? Or rather, where we would have left off had we not run into all that supernatural trouble. And Lieutenant Luke? Well, I didn’t know what to do about my ghost friend or my conflicted feelings about him. The situation troubled me, but what could I do? I couldn’t just sit around feeling sorry for myself. And he had suggested I see living men, before he became . . . possessed.

  Is it cheating to have one living boyfriend and one possessed dead one? And was I the only girl in the world who grappled with these sorts of ethical conundrums?

  Addams Avenue was quiet as I passed Harold’s Grocer, swinging my satchel and humming to myself, determined to be positive. Mist clung to the lit streetlamps and a few of the windows of the old brownstones glowed like rectangles in the thick darkness. As I approached Number One Addams Avenue I looked up at the tall building that I now called home, with its grand turrets and carved gargoyles, and I thought, My life isn’t so bad. Actually, it’s pretty great.

  I could handle this strange world I’d been thrust into. I could handle it.

  Grinning at the thought of Jay Rockwell, I put my key in the door and whispered, ‘Please let me in.’ The old door welcomed me by swinging open effortlessly. The lights in the lobby were off, and I absent-mindedly flicked on the light switch for the chandelier. It flickered on, the fixture askew. Its angle no longer surprised me. What had happened there was sad, I thought, but it was part of the Barrett family history, and history was important. Some people left an impact on the world. When they departed their spirits left a residue, or a physical presence of some kind. They leave behind something of themselves. And in my current state of mind that felt like a good thing.