Nebekah lifted her head from the dirty pillow, swallowing a groan. Pain spiked across the corners of her brain, and dizziness curled her up again. She heaved but did not vomit, and slowly the darkness receded. She didn’t know what had struck her, as she’d leapt up to chase Vivienne, but she thought she hadn’t been unconscious for many minutes.

  Her sword and gun were gone, of course. She’d expected that. Unfor-tu-nately, her attacker had also taken her pellet explosives, knives, compass, and everything else she would have found useful . . . and it had left some-thing in their place. She touched her chest, next to the protruding black vein. It had attached itself over her heart and ran through the bed, into the floor, and out of view. Her fingers pinched uselessly at it, unable to get a grip. She had never learned to use silver gloves, let alone to manipulate threads without them. There had never seemed to be a point.

  Panic hissed at her, and she ground her heel into its skull. She sat on a dingy bed in a dingy bedroom—the same bedroom as before, only a layer deeper. The window’s oval clearing had gone misty and mostly opaque, and she could see nothing beyond it but dim gray. The room itself was lit by a wall sconce, the smell of gaslight filling the air. Next to the no-longer-broken bedframe stood a side table on spindly legs. Doll bodies sat along the floor in threadbare gray-brown dresses; their heads rested on the side table. The walls were, as before, stripped and crumbling, dirty and decayed.

  Uneasily watching the glass-eyed heads, Nebekah wondered how she’d progressed into the scenario. The house had certainly made efforts to sepa-rate them, which was interesting on its own. But what had triggered the layer change? Vivienne—

  Vivienne. Was she dead, drawn by that false voice? Or was she free and even now racing to report her version of events to the Skeleton in that same defiant, righteous tone with which she had announced her betrayal of Lise?

  All the victims, the brief had indicated, were rejected by their guardians. One had been the child of an affair; one had been autistic; one had wanted atten-tion; one had been, in her mother’s words, a waste of time and money and not even pretty enough to show off.

  Nebekah swiped her hands through her hair. They came back filthy but unbloodied. There was, she thought, no way for Vivienne to join her on this layer; Vivienne didn’t have a guardian, and she wasn’t a child. There might be another trigger, but she couldn’t expect Vivienne to find it. It wouldn’t be nice enough.

  Nebekah considered that last thought and, with an effort, discarded it. Vivienne’s emotions weren’t the only ones that might alert the Heart, and better the Heart remained as somnolent as possi-ble when she confronted it.

  She had no thought of retreat. Not because she was unwilling, but because this sort of scenario always sealed its exits. There would be no way out while the Heart ruled. As to whether she could survive its defeat, with this vein attached to her chest—

  Either way, it would never take another victim.

  Someone had carved pentagrams into the doll heads. Nebekah chose a blushing brunette and tossed the head gently onto the area rug. No spikes impaled the doll head, nothing dragged it under the bed, and it did not jerk to life. Fitting, as she was only one level deep. Returning to this room after she’d progressed would be unwise.

  The sagging bedroom door drifted inward at her touch. Nebekah held her breath, listening intently and keeping an eye on her finely fluttering vein. Then she pulled the door fully open.

  The short hallway joining the suite remained narrow and empty, a claus-tro-phobic space with nowhere to hide and nowhere to retreat unseen. She glanced into the bathroom as she passed. Dirt encrusted the drain, and more dirt filled cracks splintering the sink and bleeding up the tiled back-splash. A bathtub had appeared, claw-footed, its chain plug dangling over the side. Hiding in there would be suicidal, but the cabinet under the sink might work. If only she hadn’t grown so big.

  The outer bedroom followed; Nebekah would have to cross it to get out. It had acquired a bed, and dark shapes decorated the floor. What they were, she couldn’t have said; the room had no light of its own. There were the remains of the sconce light from the back bedroom, and there was light from the landing beyond, leaking in both under the door and above, through the open circula-tion window.

  Nebekah slowed again, quieting her breathing and her pulse, straining her senses. The vein in her chest streamed calmly down-ward, toward the Heart. She calculated the distance to the far door, backed up a step, and leapt: once, twice, a third time, and she was at the door. It opened easily, and she stepped out and closed it softly behind her. Then she listened again; and though the slithering sound that followed was not her imagination, the door stayed shut.

  She stood, as she had expected, on the third-floor landing. The gas chan-de-lier burned steadily, casting shadows into the hollows of crumbled plas-ter. Look-ing over the railing, Nebekah could see where the stairs passed second and ground floors and ended on a yellow-lit concrete rectangle. A trash can sat incongruously upon the rectangle, lined with black plastic and brimming with crushed soda cans. The vein streamed happily through solid wood.

  Nebekah descended without touching the railing and stopped on the second-floor landing. A silver grandmother clock hung next to her, minute hand trem-bling frailly. The next flight down was brightly lit, as bright as if a spotlight flooded it, without a hint of shadow. The fastest way to the Heart would be to continue down these stairs.

  No movement ruffled the standing hairs on Nebekah’s face, but the house had changed as she had descended. It was damper here, the water heavy within the air. The smell of it lurked like a living being, warm breaths from the stairwell. A living being, but there was nothing animal in it; only wood and plaster, metal and plastic, rot and gas.

  She did not want to step upon those brightly lit stairs. There was no specific reason, other than that they were too bright and too inviting and too convenient. Yet if she did not take them, she would have to trek to the main stairs, descend there, and then return to these stairs to reach the basement. A long detour, in a house like this.

  Nebekah leaned against the archway frame leading to the second-floor hall-way and looked down the hall. The chandeliers were spread apart and burned low; darkness gathered in the gravity wells between them. Water beaded on the flow-ing plaster, and a fallen chunk was more paste than pow-der. To the right, the hallway curved toward the back of the house. The air shimmered worry-ingly, but she wasn’t going that way; the grand staircase was to the left. The air was clearer too, and Nebekah had begun stepping out into it when she spotted the silvery sliver of a mirror.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  When Nebekah had explored the house with Vivienne, that mirror had been retained a few shards of dirty glass. That the frame itself remained when there were only bare hooks and wires elsewhere was explained obviously by the inch-wide bolts attaching it to the wall in several locations. Beyond that, it stood at least eight feet tall, six feet wide, and seven inches deep. It had been crafted out of some sort of metal, darkened by time and dirt, and it must have weighed several hundred pounds. How anyone had gotten it up here, and why they’d wanted a massive mirror watching them walk up and down the hall, was a mystery—for there was no way to reach the main stairs without passing fully before it.

  As Nebekah hesitated between brightly lit stairs and reflected hallway, a sound sighed into her ears. It made a simple tune, one Nebekah had heard a thousand times before, always in Vivienne’s voice. The subcon-scious notes she hummed when she was concentrating, when she was happy, when she was frightened. A frag-ment of a song from her childhood. She’d for-gotten all but the first seven notes.

  Nebekah shrank into the arch frame next to the unsteady clock, breaking her silhouette into one more gray shadow. She strained her ears for those notes, for the shuffle of feet on carpet, for the opening creak of a door. The hum had seemed to come from the rooms above, but sound could deceive. It might be an attempt to flush her out.

  It was certainly not Vivienne.

  The sound did not repeat itself. The atmosphere loosened, dispersing the worst of the damp. Nebekah’s fear receded with it, and only then did she realize how badly it had scared her, that familiar voice, that voice that always accom-pa-nied her into Horrors, that always comforted her.

  The house had learned too much about them; they had been careless. She needed to hurry to the basement and deal with the Heart by the quickest possible route, but . . .

  But she did not like the look of those stairs. She didn’t like how clean they were, how brightly lit. She didn’t like how new the crimson carpet looked; how the railing shone, gleaming and undamaged; how the plaster swirled in perfect spirals.

  Was passing in front of the mirror any better?

  The hum came again. Seven notes of a tune, the same tune. She had not been mistaken before: the voice was Vivienne’s exactly, its origin the third floor.

  The displacement of air—an opening door. Vivienne’s voice, her into-nation exactly like when she poked her head into the suite to look for her partner: “Nebekah?”

  Nebekah slid around the arch frame and ran down the hallway with-out making eye contact with the mirror, without glancing into the beckoning open doorways, and without breathing. She would have liked to stay along the wooden edge of the floor where the carpet runner didn’t reach, but bookcases crammed them-selves along the wall at random intervals. Some held books, their spines worn to undecipherability; others showcased figurines, clocks, and antique miscellanea that Nebekah didn’t stop to examine. She flung herself around the corner and onto the broad stairs.

  Her footsteps, noiseless on the hall floor, echoed hugely on the steps. Nebekah leapt at the sound and slid down the railing instead, but the dam-age had been done. No sooner had she touched the ground floor than she heard her name again, curious and far too close: “Nebekah?”

  The stairs let out in the entry hall: entry room catercorner, public room across, hall continuing to the left. Around the side of the stairs to the right was the curtained alcove; around the side to the left were three doors: to a pool room, to understairs storage, and again to the alcove. Nebekah ducked around the stairs in that direction, and stood in the shadow of the staircase, between the three doors.

  The nausea sitting in her stomach stuck icy spears into her lungs. It means nothing, she told herself. The creature calling for her was surely the same one that had lured Vivienne out with its little boy voice. It was an expert mimic. It meant nothing, that it used Vivienne’s voice exactly as she would have used it.

  Nebekah opened the alcove door and stepped into the narrow space running behind the stairs. It was entirely unlit, but entry hall light seeped in both sides, through open door and under curtain. She could see the faint outline of a desk and chair, both stacked high with soggy papers. More papers rested upon the windowsills, beneath opaque windows, and on the floor. To avoid them, she had to edge sideways, which she did until she reached the center of the narrow space.

  She heard the humming before the footsteps: at the top of the stairs, a single delighted string. Then footsteps, ordinary footsteps down the stair-case, except who strolled casually through a decrepit haunted house? Nebekah’s fingers twitched for her sword, for her knife, for anything; but there was only stationery back here, and a creature like the Mimic would not fall to ordinary violence. Her fingers slid a pencil into her hand and began peeling off the eraser.

  The footsteps paused on the bottom stair. The Mimic would not pause, if it knew her location. It must be unable to sense the vein rooting ever deeper in her chest.

  The Mimic moved again, crossing the floor. A door rattled. To the entry room? That would be locked to prevent escape. The public room? It stopped at the threshold but did not enter, though the door stood wide open, and there were corners in which to hide.

  Another hum, a contemplative pair of notes. A decision, the swift pattering of feet around the side of the stairs.

  Nebekah began to move, sliding toward the curtained exit. The Mimic pulled open the understairs storage door with a, “Nebekah!” followed by a hum of disappointment. Nebekah pushed past the curtain as the door to the alcove opened behind her. The curtain fluttered unavoidably at her passage, and the Mimic cried out in triumph. It rushed into the cramped space and then juddered to a stop and chuckled to itself; it had heard a small noise.

  The pencil eraser Nebekah had thrown bounced down the hallway and under a door. Nebekah herself sat folded on the third stair, next to the railing, an arm’s length from the settling curtain. Her figure curved to disguise her frame, and she no more moved than the crumbling cherubs beside her. She became one with the bars of the rail, with the uncertain gaslight and the climb-ing stairs. Her breath vanished into nothingness, and her presence faded with it—as it had twice faded in the Skeleton’s office, when she had sat listening to Vivienne without Vivienne noticing her.

  The curtain rustled aside, and soft footsteps hurried out. The Mimic giggled to itself as it passed before her, but Nebekah didn’t see it go. Her eyes remained lightly cast upon the floor, where the Mimic would not feel her gaze—but where she would see its feet before it fell upon her.

  She listened closely, tracking its progress. It zigzagged to each door and peered in, calling for her. Pool room—dining room—piano room—front kitchen. It entered and explored the first three, but left the kitchen alone; and then it moved further away.

  Nebekah unfolded herself, wary of creaks. The Mimic would be passing the back stairs now. She had to get to those stairs herself, but that couldn’t be her only priority. Before she got any closer to the Heart, she needed a weapon.

  The Agency’s recommendations for dealing with ghostly inhabi-tants were salt, iron, and fire. In a pinch, alternatives like silver could be used, and there was certainly room for holy water, lavender, rice, and whatever folk remedies proved relevant for any particular haunt-ing. Whatever she was looking for, the kitchen was Nebekah’s best bet of finding it, but she suspected that in a house like this, the kitchen would be bad news. She concluded this partly from expe-ri-ence and instinct, but mainly from reading the case files of other agents. Besides, anything capable of haunting in close proximity to salt and iron had a fair chance of immunity to them . . .

  And the kitchen had been one of the rooms the Mimic had avoided.