Which was when he seemed to understand why my heart was beating so fast.
He lowered me back to the floor and took several steps away, raking his fingers through his hair and looking completely disgusted with himself. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
“You didn’t hurt me. I wouldn’t have let it get out of hand. And you’re right…I did say I wanted it. Just not here. Not like this.”
He sat on the bed, the blackness fading from his eyes as he continued to stare at me. I tried to smile, but I wasn’t feeling very smiley right then.
Maxime had a hell of a sense of timing, because he knocked quietly and opened the door, giving Holden and me a much-needed reprieve from the tension.
“Is it a bad time?” Max asked.
“No. Couldn’t be better,” I replied.
Chapter Fifteen
The West Coast vampires were more forward thinking than their East Coast counterparts in that they opted for a technologically advanced approach to collecting information. Back in New York I was convinced the council still thought computers were a passing fancy because very few of the wardens or sentries used them, and I doubted Sig or Juan Carlos had ever tried.
Maxime was carrying a sleek MacBook when he came into my room and took a seat in the center of the big leather couch. I sat on his right and beckoned for Holden to join us. Perhaps with his brother in the middle we might stop being so weird and he could potentially relax.
I wasn’t mad at Holden for what he’d done. I knew with absolute certainty he never would have forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. There was a strong likelihood he hadn’t taken blood since his arrival in Los Angeles, and he’d been drinking. Vampires didn’t drink often because our metabolisms processed the alcohol too quickly, creating a near-instant buzz.
He was hungry and a bit drunk, and I’d sat on his lap after depriving him of sex for three months. I wasn’t trying to make excuses for his actions, but I wasn’t upset with him. My clothes were still intact, and he hadn’t done anything except pick me up and listen to my heartbeat.
Maybe I was making excuses.
I sighed and directed my attention back to Maxime and his laptop. I had to admit, I wasn’t terribly good with technology myself. My smartphone made me feel stupid, and the laptop I had at home was about three times thicker than this one and existed solely so I could update my iPod.
The couch sagged under Holden’s weight, and he looked at the screen with us.
Maxime had pulled up a black-and-white photo of a beautiful mansion surrounded by a copse of palm trees. He continued to flip through photos on the computer, showing the mansion getting larger and larger as more rooms and wings seemed to be added in each new photo. The color photos showed it to be a lovely near-yellow cream with burgundy accent tones.
“Nice house,” I said, still not sure why we were looking at it. “What does it have to do with Sutherland?”
“This is the Winchester Mansion in San Jose,” Maxime informed us.
“Winchester, like the rifles?” I asked.
“Precisely. It was constructed after the death of Mr. Winchester by his widow Sarah. She carried an incredible burden of guilt because she believed the ghosts of those killed by her husband’s rifles were haunting her. When she spoke to a psychic, the woman informed Sarah the only way to escape the spirits was to build a house and never stop.”
“Never stop building?” I stared at the thumbnail images on the screen of the ever-growing house, wondering what kind of madness would drive someone to do that.
“Yes. She had a construction team working on it night and day for over thirty years, until the time of her death.”
He opened a new folder, this one showing the house’s interior. Dozens of pictures went by, and at first the house seemed like a normal early-twentieth-century mansion, but as they went on, I began to question Sarah Winchester’s mental stability. It was one thing to take life advice from a psychic, but the house this woman had built was completely nuts.There were staircases running into nothing, windows stuck into the middle of the floor, doors opening to flat walls, secret rooms with three doors in but only one door out. The house was crazy. Each wing appeared to have its own color theme, and Sarah had a peculiar penchant for the number thirteen, hiding it in the details almost everywhere.
Maxime began to show us detailed color photos of all the gorgeous stained glass, and while it was an interesting history lesson I finally had to ask again, “What does this have to do with Sutherland?”
My vampire valet continued to flip through photos of the windows. “Almost all the stained glass in Mrs. Winchester’s house was custom designed by Charles Tiffany himself.” He showed us pictures of lovely daisy designs and windows that would make a gothic church green with envy. “What most people don’t know about Tiffany is his passion for constructing stained glass has a very…unique history.”
Great. More history.
Being surrounded by those who had lived through historical events firsthand and could relate them back to me with more vivid detail than any book had made me less inclined to pay attention during a standard history lesson. But Maxime was trying to tell us something important, even if it was taking him forever to get to the point.
He continued. “Tiffany had a mistress. Not uncommon for his time.”
“Or ours,” Holden noted.
“True. But Tiffany’s mistress was special. She was a vampire.”
I raised an eyebrow and looked across Maxime to Holden. He shrugged, but he too appeared interested in this development.
“It seems his vampire mistress had a special longing for the sun. She missed it more than anything else from her human life, and she begged him to find a way to bring the sun back to her. They both knew she wasn’t able to see real sunlight again, so Tiffany tried to find a way to capture the sun for her. He started by designing lamps, hoping to convey the essence of sunlight through different colors and shapes.”
I thought of the lamps in Calliope’s mansion. My half-fairy/half-god guardian had an impressive collection of original Tiffany works lighting her waiting room, and I loved those lamps. I could see now how their creator had been inspired, and loved their jewellike glow all the more for it.
Artificial sunlight. What a genius idea. He must have loved his vampire mistress a great deal to set about making art like that for her. Judging by the expression on Holden’s face, he too was impressed by the lengths a human man had gone to for his vampire lover.
“While she loved the lamps, she still craved more. They were such a small offering compared to the greatness of day. So Tiffany began constructing work on a larger scale.”
Maxime opened the web browser and typed Tiffany ceiling into the Google search. An astonishing blue-green circular dome ceiling was the first thing he showed us, and it was so beautiful I wanted to reach out and touch it.
“This one is in a library in Chicago. Or, from what I gather, a former library, which is now a tourism office.” He shrugged as if it was hard to keep track of how buildings changed purpose over the years. Going back to the image search, he showed us literally hundreds of ceilings and windows Tiffany had designed.
“His vampire mistress loved them all, but nothing seemed to achieve his goal of bringing her the sunlight she desperately wanted. She grew sullen and dark as time went on. Meanwhile, Tiffany’s star was on the rise, and his designs became coveted by elite families across America. Including Sarah Winchester.”
Maxime went back to the files with images of the Winchester Mansion. He showed us several we’d already seen, but stopped on a small one set into an interior wall. It was patterned in pink and green, with thirteen crystals of various size mounted in it, appearing like dew drops caught in a spider web. It was incredible.
“This window was designed specifically for Sarah Winchester. Tiffany agonized over its construction, setting those crystals—which are actually prisms—in such a way they would take the sun’s light and cover the entire floor of a room with rainbows. He considered it one of his greatest achievements.”
“But…it’s inside the house.”
“Yes. It is. It was the single most expensive window in the Winchester Mansion, and Sarah had it installed in a place where the sun would never reach it. When Tiffany’s mistress found out what Sarah had done to the window, she was furious. She believed this window might have been the one to finally achieve what she’d asked Tiffany to do for her, and to discover it was being squandered made her livid. She begged Tiffany to buy it back, but he refused. After his death, she attempted to get it from the Winchester estate, but they were unwilling to sell it. Since then she has spent decades trying to get it back, and after so many failed tries at going through official channels, she got tired of waiting.”
“It’s Eilidh, isn’t it?” I asked. Only a vampire in her position would be able to send a warden out to steal a window.
“Yes. After we left San Francisco she has spent a great deal of time and energy working to retrieve the window. She’s made generous offers to the restoration team, as well as to the museum that now exists there.” The way he said museum was so dismissive he seemed offended to be using the phrase.
He opened the web browser again and pulled up a website for Winchester Mystery House. I could tell what had made him sneer. Sarah Winchester’s house had been turned into a bizarre hybrid of museum and amusement park. Guided tours were offered through specific areas of the house, while others were off-limits to tourists because of structural damage from multiple earthquakes.
The place even offered moonlight ghost tours.
“Is it actually haunted?” I’d had some run-ins with ghosts. Enough exposure to believe in them without a shadow of a doubt. I wasn’t worried my expedition might be hindered by spirits, but it was better to know when a transparent specter might jump out at you. Kept the girly screaming to a minimum.
“Who knows. A house that old, with so many people dedicating their lives to working there. Work that never, ever ended? I’d wager one or two spirits are lurking in the halls. Sarah died there.”